by
Alan Shapiro
The
seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher G.W. Leibniz is credited both
with assembling a protocomputer arithmetic machine which performed
multiplication and division as well as addition and subtraction, and with
devising a new branch of mathematics in his essay De Arte Combinatorica
(1666). Leibniz followed René Descartes in wanting to deduce a complete
knowledge system starting from a few basic tabula rasa principles of certainty.
Leibniz believed in a "universal character" or universal logical
language which someday would be inferentially constructed step by step on the
heels of the establishing of the correct first propositions. For Leibniz, the
selection of the quintessential grounding axioms for the lingua franca system
entailed the contriving of a few absolutely requisite representational symbols
for the prime concepts, and a few absolutely requisite rules for combining
these symbols. Once the general system was successfully set up, all existing or
new scientific and cultural questions could then be solved, according to
Leibniz, by invoking the dictum "let us calculate." This dream of
applied mathematical certainty was reinvigorated and pursued anew in the
mid-nineteenth century by the formal logician George Boole (the calculus of
finite differences, the algebra of logical reasoning), and in the early
twentieth century by logical positivist philosophers like Bertrand Russell (the
logical conclusions of first principle theorems for all of mathematics, the
logical conclusions of first principle atheism for all of human beliefs).
Leibniz's vision of an unrestricted method of automatic ratiocination by
calculation was then actualized in the mid-twentieth century invention of the
high speed digital computer, which was first conceived in 1936 by Alan Turing
and Emil Post (in separate descriptions of code-driven, finite state automata),
and then built by John von Neumann and his University of Pennsylvania Moore
School Group colleagues during and immediately after World War II.(1)
Since
any specialized automaton (precursor of the software application) could be
delineated with a finite set of binary instructions, argued Turing in his 1936
paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem," therefore a universal automaton (precursor of
computer hardware) could be imagined which would exactly mimic the desired
behavior of any specialized automaton simply by cycling through those same
instructions.(2)
In his book Turing's Man, J. David Bolter characterized the information
processing technique of a Universal Turing Machine as the replacement of
"discrete symbols one at a time according to a finite set of rules."
This "original" logic of computing was firmly rooted in the dualism
of the "is" and the "is not" (the long strings of binary
digits or 0s and 1s, the perfect "existential" weight of the discrete
identifiers). It still had rather strong ties to the old physical model of
reality (the substantiality of numbers, the switching of registers and signals
in both storage and processing), and to the "certainty" - or identity
with itself - of the old scientific object.
Prior
to the compelling appearance of "object technology" in recent
decades, computers were deeply and intricately associated with the triumph and
concretization of mathematical, symbolic logic. As recently as 1984, the
computer science and Classics professor J. David Bolter was able to write - in
apparent obliviousness to the rise of object-orientation - that "every
computer program is the ... realization, the tangible proof, of a theorem in
logic ... every programmer ... is a logician with a theorem to prove." If
anything was certain concerning the status of electronic digital thinking in
the history of ideas, Bolter asserted, it was that the land of the CPU and the
fetch-and-execute cycle is a kingdom from which God and religion are, without
shadow of doubt, excluded. "The unification envisioned by Plato" -
the ideal world of the Platonic Forms and Ideas, the "series of perfect
patterns from which the imperfect objects of the material world" are
derived - "has no counterpart in computerized thought."(3)
In
the section of The Republic entitled "How Representation in Art is
Related to Truth", Socrates sounds uncannily like a guru of
object-oriented design when he says: "Let us take any common instance
[!!]; there are beds and tables in the world - plenty of them. But there are
only two ideas or forms of them - one the idea of a bed, the other of a table.
And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our use, in
accordance with the idea." Primary reality, for Plato, is not to be sought
in the empirical world of everyday things (ordinary instances of beds or
tables), but rather in the general, abstract Forms (the divine idea of the bed
or table) from which "concrete" things are derived or fashioned.
Socrates goes on in this passage to say that there are three philosophical
categories of beds: the idea of the bed (made by God), the instance of the bed
(made by a carpenter), and the imitation of the bed (made by a painter).
Concerning the question of how near or far each of the three categories of beds
is to the Ideal Forms of Beauty, Truth, and Excellence, it is clear for
Socrates that the idea of the bed is the closest to these exalted virtues, the
instance of the bed comes in as a respectable second closest, and the imitation
of the bed runs a pitiful last - far removed from anything valuated as either
noble or good.
Object-oriented
software engineering and multimedia design (in their prevalent forms) are
languages for the streamlining, administration, control, and substitution of
human experience. As a cybernetic, "artificial language" (human
languages were always artificial, of course), object-orientation has profited a
great deal from its in-depth familiarity with "so-called natural languages."
It is keenly aware of the (negative) différance which Derrida in some sense
claims to be a force or quality possessed by all languages which is subversive
of metaphysics. The paradigm shift from procedural to object-oriented technologies, which
has been completely ignored by critical theory and radical explorations of
cyberculture, is as significant and full of weighty consequences as the
earlier turn from the analog to the digital (the introduction of the
computer itself), a passé event which continues to cast its imposing shadow
over nearly all cyber-theoretical discussions.
The
special and technical speed-effects of the broadcasting electronic medium overwhelm
the content or real events which the medium is naively believed to beneficently
bring into relief or report on. This inversion of message and medium brings
about the most non-obvious, yet most insidious, kind of manufacturing of
pseudo-event. "Substitution of a 'neo-real' for 'the real' is occurring
everywhere, produced as a whole based on the combination of the elements of the
code. In the wide spectrum of daily life, an immense simulation process is
taking place, in the image of the 'simulation models' on which the operational
and cybernetic sciences are working." The generalized code - now
understood in the sense of a flexible re-combinatorics of the broken down,
unraveled, most elementary particles or units of something real, as well as in
the "anti-semiological" sense - takes the place of the fading
signified or referent (in its classic form).(4)
In L'Échange symbolique et la mort (1976), this insight into the
workings of what Baudrillard calls the "third-order simulacra"
develops into a full-scale commentary on "the metaphysics of the
code" - the obsession with genetic information (DNA) and its affiliated,
"micro-molecular" command and control sequence-transcription dialects
as the new definitional matrices of life and reality.
The
reconstitution of a thing based only on its information is just what the doctor
ordered for a society bent on cultivating its ability to allow individuals to
live alone in ostensible safety, while simulating a life of rich experiences
(interactions with the enchanting, technical twins of other people and the
world). History (which was perhaps always a simulation model), for example, is
shattered to bits by the celluloid, tape recorder, and document stockpiling
apperception of events (L'illusion de la fin). From within a culture of
simulation, as is our situation, claims of cognitive or hermeneutical access to
antecedent "real history" can no longer be verified or sustained.
Memories of the Vietnam War are replaced by memories of Hollywood movies about
the Vietnam War. Referential substance and "truth" are everywhere
replaced by a superabundance of information and data. Ordinary reality is
replaced by the permanent buzz of "entertainment" - the eternally
recurrent, stereotypical hyperreality of television and of all the Disneylands.
Simulation
of the body in plastic surgery, bodybuilding, cosmetics, and "beam me up,
Scotty." Simulation of thinking in artificial intelligence. Simulation of
sexuality and desire in pornography. The end of war in the Pentagon's video
game virtual war machine. The end of linear time in the no-time of real time,
and in the retroactivity and turbulence of time travel. The end of aesthetic
illusion in the holodeck, and in neural-direct and helmet-and-glove VR systems.
The end of communication in the over-proximity and ubiquitous connections of
telecommunications. The end of fiction (and its opposite, reality) in
"science fiction" films which only publicize and disseminate the
newly arriving digital technologies and their prescribed living conditions. The
end of the referent of human beings in the will to build a technical, immortal
replacement species. These simulation systems are assemblages belonging to the
"third-order simulacra" - mongrel, duplex contraptions where the
signified (catalyzed by a dose of "fatal theory") has absorbed all of
the energy of its signifier into itself, thus generating a parodic and bloated
"exorbitant" version of what it already was. But compartmentalized
American thought sees nothing to be troubled by in any of this. Plastic surgery
is a signifier of the body or of social success. An inner ear cellular phone
implant is a signifier of connectivity. A nano-cartridge memory implant is a
signifier of my freedom to lie (to myself). Campbell's Soup cans are a
signifier of soup - and that's that.
Since software development has become much less about technical
implementation (executable systems can now be automatically generated
starting from the modeling diagrams as their input) and much more about
analysis, design, process, and modeling-as-code (this new stress is what
reduces the quantity of bugs and makes for more robust, maintainable, and
extensible systems and applications), it now openly invites more
participation and scrutiny from creative individuals with a humanities or
fine arts background, rather than from those with a strictly technical
education. I identify
the post-1968 dominant cultural strategy of object-oriented cyberspace as the
construction of a new signification system, erected on the scaffolding of the
previous one.
Notes
1 - Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer: from Pascal to
von Neumann (Princeton University Press, 1972).
2 - The Computer: from Pascal to von Neumann;
pp.274-75.
3 - J. David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in
the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984);
pp.22, 47, 77-79.
4 - Baudrillard, La Société de consommation: ses
mythes, ses structures (Paris: DenoÎl, 1970); pp.194-96.
This is an abridged version of an article which appeared under the title "Society of the Instance" at NOEMA