Plasma Pool

When traditional media—texts, still images, moving images, sound, spatial constructions, and so on—are digitized, they become what Lev Manovich calls “new media objects”—each object consisting “of one or more interfaces to the database” of the computer that generates or represents it. Because new media objects rely on the “meta-medium” of the digital computer, the language and logic of the computer becomes enmeshed with our own language and logic. (Take “cut and paste”: although this set of verbs clearly tells us to do certain things with paper and gluesticks, it now belongs primarily, for the bulk of the computer-literate, to a digital lexicon.) Our interaction with new media objects changes the way we think about all objects, and thus, inevitably if imprecisely, changes the subject himself into what I will call the “new media subject.” For many, this imprecise transformation of the subject by new media is a threatening one—much, it must be said, as the imprecise transformation of the subject by the transition from manuscript-culture to print-culture threatened as those whose lifespans coincided with it. Such imprecise transformations, especially those with effects as sweeping as those of digitization, are properly seen not as threats, but as potentials for the redefinition of the subject as such along new lines.

In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, we encounter three such subjects. The digital pervades both the environment through which these subjects move and the subjects themselves—turning them into a sort of new media by consistently placing them at the interstices of the digital and the corporeal. Each of them anticipates in one way or another Manovich’s conception of the relation between database and interface in new media objects.  “Historically,” as Manovich says, “the artist made a unique work within a particular medium.  Therefore the interface and the work were the same; in other words, the level of an interface did not exist.  With new media,” however,” the content of the work and the interface are separated.”  “The new media object,” then, “consists of one or more interfaces to a database.” Each of our subjects is in one way or another an interface or a database, components of evolving new media ecologies that are rendered continuous with these ecologies by their own relative digitization. While they are very much an inextricable part of the evolving new media ecology into which they are progressively being plugged—they are, often, aware of it, able to “hear noise on the line”—our three subjects all have distinct, if limited, agency within their ecology, and two of them are aware to some extent of their ecology and their role as new media subjects within it. They cannot hope to comprehend or break out of this system, but their awareness of it and agency within it make them a new and apt model for theorizing the subject in new media ecologies.

Oedipa Mass, Pynchon’s protagonist, encounters our first new media subject, an old, homeless sailor in San Francisco, while wandering the city after leaving The Greek Way, the gay bar she had been swept into earlier that night by a throng of gawking tourists.  She sees the mattress on which he sleeps and fantasies the sailor’s departure and return to the mattress day in and day out, conceptualizing him as a receiver and transmitter of information—his daily activities, knowledge, visions—and the mattress on which he sleeps as the “stuffed memory” to which this information is uploaded via salty discharge—perspiration, urine, tears, semen—and stored there with discharges of the mattress’s previous owners:

“[c]ammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric plants uncovered?  What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed along the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he […] must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? […] So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned.  She stared at it in wonder.  It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process.  It astonished her to think that so much could be lost […].

This mattress-database stores the life of the sailor and those of its previous sleepers.  The sailor himself is part medium, part interface: he carries information in his own right, information that he uploads daily; but he is also the means by which Oedipa accesses stored information, he is what provokes her fantasy.  And sometime in the future, if the sailor-interface is compromised by exhaustion or alcohol, its malfunction will not only destroy itself, but will render all data in its database permanently inaccessible. The sailor is embedded in his evolving new media ecology, downloading and interfacing and uploading daily; but he also has agency within this ecology—even if, as in the future Oedipa imagines, this agency eventually leads to his demise.

Our first new media subject anticipates the instability of interface; our second, Wendell “Mucho” Maas, does this as well, but he also anticipates the potential for information, once digitized, to become detached from its initial meaning and associations.  When Oedipa returns to her hometown and visits Mucho at the radio station where he is a disk jockey, his boss, Funch, pulls her aside, saying,

“Frankly, […] since you left, Wendell hasn’t been himself.”
“And who,” said Oedipa, working herself into a rage because Funch was right, “pray, has he been, Ringo Starr?” Funch cowered.  “Chubby Checker?” she pursued him toward the lobby, “the Righteous Brothers?” […]
“All of the above,” said Funch, seeking to hide his head, “Mrs Maas.” […]  “He’s losing his identity […].  Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic.  He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people, you know?  He’s a walking assembly of a man.”

When Oedipa queries Mucho about Funch’s warning—“Is this what Funch means when he says you’re coming on like a whole roomful of people?”—he wholeheartedly confirms it, and goes further:

“That’s what I am,” said Mucho, “right.  Everybody is.” […] “Whenever I put the headset on now […] I really do understand what I find there.  When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves.  And the ‘you’ is everybody.  And herself.  You’re an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they’re your lives, too.”

Mucho not only thinks of himself as a number of people at once, he has also ceased to see a difference among people other than himself.  When someone speaks or sings, all that Mucho recognizes and assimilates, “[n]o matter who’s talking,” are pure data, “the different power spectra,” which are ultimately all “the same”—“Everybody who says the same words,” for Mucho, “is the same person.”  The interfaces that differentiate individuals from one another, chiefly their voices, have disappeared for him, leaving only fungible information coming from a variety of indistinguishable sources.  As an individual who interacts with other individuals, Mucho has lost the ability to recognize one interface from another (echoing Friedrich Kittler’s anxiety about the erasure of media—for Mucho an interface is an interface is an interface); as himself an interface to the database of his experience, he fails to make any coherent meaning of the information he processes—all is the same: unmoored, abstract information.  Mucho is not only aware of this condition, he can control it and he desires it.  The cause of his newfound universality is LSD, which operates on him as “orgasms” on others: it makes everything “good,” makes him “hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could,” makes “the world so abundant” to “[n]o end,” makes his face “smooth, amiable, at peace.”  So confident is he in his joyful situation that in explaining it to Oedipa he adopts a “patient, motherly look” and then leaves her, “all of them” within him kissing “all of them” within her goodbye. The sailor and Mucho are, as new media subjects, interfaces rather than databases—the sailor interfaces with his own history and the histories of others but will probably manage, in the future, to corrupt his database; Mucho as an interface cannot make meaning, and, encountering other interfaces, cannot distinguish one from another.

Oedipa, our third new media subject and the only one with a womb, operates as a database for some sort of hybrid information that may or may not have originated with, but certainly has something to do with, Emory Bortz, fictional literary scholar of the equally fictional English Renaissance playwright Richard Wharfinger.  This information is invisible and unverifiable; its constitution is ambiguous.  At times it appears to be genetic, the material for making a child; at times it appears to be historical, concerning Trystero’s operations in the United States over the previous century; at times it appears to be technological, metal inserted into Oedipa’s body.  Although we ultimately have no idea what it is, it is probably described best as some combination of these three.  Whatever it is, she’s pregnant with it.

The first indication that something’s been uploaded to Oedipa comes in her first visit to Bortz, near the end of which they are pondering the escape of two British subjects from a Trystero ambush during the English Renaissance, an escape which “surprised Oedipa, in view of what seemed to be Trystero’s passion for security.”  Then we’re given this: “‘Was Trystero trying to set up shop in England?’ Bortz suggested, days later.”

Days later?  After this disorienting bit of information, the conversation between them proceeds as though it weren’t there at all. What, we must ask, happens during those days? In light of the novella’s extreme kinkiness, one natural assumption is that Oedipa and Bortz, despite being under the same roof as Bortz’s wife Grace, have begun a sexual tryst, the secrecy of which is respected by even the inadequately circumspect narrator.  This assumption is supported by physical indications of Oedipa’s being pregnant—“Waves of nausea, lasting five to ten minutes, would strike her at random, cause her deep misery [; t]here were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains”—and by her deciding one day to drive to Los Angeles, where she “picked a doctor at random from the phone book, went to her, told her she thought she was pregnant. They arranged for tests.” These tests are never run, as Oedipa doesn’t “show up for her next appointment,” but, startlingly and indicatively, when registering with the doctor, she “gave her name as Grace Bortz.”  Whether Bortz has literally impregnated Oedipa or not, she thinks of herself, or at least wants others to think of her, as his impregnated mate. (With this realization, Grace’s comment when she and Oedipa first meet that Oedipa has about her “a certain harassed style” that she thinks “only kids caus[e]” takes on new significance.) Oedipa also seems to have acquired something new from the technological realm, for around the time we begin to get indications that something that has been uploaded to her, “[o]ld fillings in her teeth beg[i]n to bother her.” Later, after she has returned to Bortz’s home to show him a historical article on Trystero given to her by professional philatelist Genghis Cohen, and after Bortz has given her his thoughts, they share a brief, suggestive exchange that merges the historical article with the (unverified) genetic material within Oedipa: “Well, that’s interesting,” Oedipa says, “if the article’s legitimate.”  “That ought to be easy enough to check out” “Bortz [replies,] gazing straight into her eyes,” and then asks: “Why don’t you?” Given the indications that Oedipa is pregnant and that the child may be Bortz’s, “legitimate” clearly refers to more than a historical article. And immediately after Bortz tells Oedipa to check out the legitimacy of whatever she’s downloaded—the metal fillings, as if insulted, become more irritated and her “toothaches g[e]t worse.” Genetic information in the form of a potential child, technological information in the form of pain radiating from implanted metal, historical information in the form of a questionable (perhaps illegitimate) history—all of these have been uploaded to Oedipa and have formed an indivisible composite that cannot be categorized.  “Your gynecologist,” the narrator tells us, “has no test for what she’s pregnant with.”

The data within Oedipa has become, like that which Mucho intercepts, fungible.  We can make no more sense of it—we can definitively parse it out no better—than we can of a string of digits.  Oedipa is a database without an interface.  Oedipa appears to know all that we know: she is well aware of her role as database.  And although she doesn’t act decisively on this knowledge, she has options that would allow her to: keep the appointment with the random doctor in Los Angeles and abort the fetus or even give birth; investigate the article further or simply throw it out; visit a dentist to have her pain alleviated or her fillings removed.  Oedipa, our final new media subject is aware of her place within her proto-new media ecology and has the agency to redefine herself with respect to it.  She is put-upon, but she is not powerless.  She is caught in an information flow and in some ways subject to it, but she can also, to some extent, control it.

The Crying of Lot 49 is both an anticipation of new media ecologies and a blueprint for figuring the subject within these ecologies.  The novella is steeped in a digitality that is not fully emerged but nonetheless emergent and ineludible, and the digital systems that establish this proto-new media ecology are intertwined with and composed by subjects—of human beings who are continuous with it, both as integrated parts of digital systems and as new media subjects.  The subject in the novella is swayed by the data flows that swirl through his environment, but he also creates, completes, and can arrest those data flows.  In presenting us with such a subject as a fundamental, inextricable component of a proto-new media ecology that will evolve into a new media ecology, Pynchon suggests a new way to figure the subject within the contemporary new media ecologies we inhabit today: as aware but not omniscient, as embedded but not oppressed, as effective but not emancipated; as an elemental, potentially compelling, actantal force.

A hyperbolically tangible model for this newly imagined subject is found on the cutting edge of the architectural field.  In 2002, American architects Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio installed Blur Building, a structure “with no walls and no interior—only a walkway and hundreds of nozzles spewing water vapor into the air, creating an artificial cloud,” as part of the Swiss Expo 2001 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. (See Liz Diller discuss Blur Building in her TED talk.)  Within Blur Building—named for the obscurity in which its subjects, unable to see in the dense fog surrounding them, find themselves—each subject is outfitted with a “braincoat,” a heavy translucent jacket that is programmed with his personal profile, based on a questionnaire completed before entering the building.  As the subject maneuvers his way along the winding walkway, his coat emits glows of various hues and pings of various pitches—dependent on the degree of affinity between the profiles of those around the subject and that of the subject himself—illuminating and resonating within the fog and altering the perceivable space around him.

Diller and Scofidio’s aim, as Mark Hansen says, is to explore our cultural moment’s “historically unprecedented interpenetration of body and media” and express the “massive infiltration of digital media into the contemporary lifeworld.” Their subject has agency in his environment, but he is also disoriented—his personality first rendered digitally, and then interpreted and projected by color and sound over which he has little immediate control. As with the new media subjects in The Crying of Lot 49, the atmosphere through which the Diller and Scofidio’s subject moves is invested with digital information and thus also invested with the subject from whom that information originated, and who is, in Blur Building, inextricably, phenomenologically linked to the digital environment. The “impact of the digital revolution,” as Hansen says, “is rendered experientially salient”: the subject expresses himself by projecting digital information that then interacts with the digital information of others to dictate the substance of his environment; and, with the capturing of his personality by a digital profile, the subject becomes, for both himself and his fellow subjects, digitized. Like Pynchon, Diller and Scofidio create a digital media ecology in which subjects are both necessary for the existence of the digital and are themselves rendered new media.  This model of the subject as both potent and disoriented, as both impactful and inhibited—the model shared by Pynchon, Diller and Scofidio—is one well suited to negotiating and theorizing the new media ecologies of the 20th century.