Other sections of the thesis

Other students have also put their theses on the web. Among them are:

Truth and Politics - Mass Media in Independent Ukraine 1991 - 2001

Private TV in Palestine

This chapter aims to outline the theoretical basis for the rest of this thesis, outlining the key aspects of the work of N. Katherine Hayles, Pierre Bourdieu and Regis Debray that will be used to imagine the wired world. These three writers approach their social analysis from three entirely different directions. Hayles is a professor of English in the United States, with advanced degrees in both that subject and chemistry. She considers issues of machine/human interfaces through a critical examination of information and cybernetic theory. Bourdieu's complex philosophy has been developed out of, and still has a strong grounding in, sociology, and his intellectual lineage can be traced through Durkheim, Levi-Strauss and Wittgenstein (Cashmore and Rojek; 1999, 76). It has been described as a "subtle structuralism" (Margolis; 1999, 70). Debray has spent much of his life as professional revolutionary. His work still owes much to the historical materialism of Marx, yet he also adds an unexpected debt to McLuhan (Szeman; 1996).

The author against whom this text most often finds itself arrayed is Jean Baudrillard, in particular his claim that the world has entered a new order of reality, which he terms the "hyper-real". He says that following a period in which constructed realities, Disneylands, became more "real" than that to which they referred, we have now entered a social life in which no reference back is possible, since the simulcra have replaced the real. We now have only simulcra or simulcra (Poster; 1995, 64). Through a stress on Baudrillard's simulcra, Nichols suggests, for example, that the computer removes all reality, so that "a Grenadian and Libyan 'threat' appears on the videoscreens of America's political leadership ? Ronny [President Reagan] pulls the trigger" (Nichols; 2000, 104). This is perhaps the most extreme position of disembodiment possible, since not only human bodies and tests lose their embodiment, but also all other aspects of the material world. Quite how any being breathes in this world is difficult to imagine.

Hayles (1999b, 202) acknowledges the usefulness of Bourdieu, who she says "illustrates how embodied knowledge can be structurally elaborate, conceptually coherent, and durably installed without ever having been cognitively recognized as such". She uses the concept of "incorporating practice, an action that is encoded into bodily memory by repeated performances until it becomes habitual" (Hayles; 1999b, 198), that bears some resemblance to the concept of habitus. That concept lacks, however, the explanation of the impossibility of "the rule" contained within his concept of habitus, which I therefore prefer. There is otherwise no obvious dialogue between the three authors, yet from their very different points of approach they achieve similar understandings of the embodied agent, although only Hayles seriously attempts to situate that agent in the wired world.

(a) Restoring Embodiment

One defining aspect of Hayles's work is her determination to resist what she describes as a "defining characteristic of the present cultural moment ? the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrate" (1999b, 1). This she terms as disembodiment, which is exercised both on human bodies and on the "bodies", the material substrate, of texts. Human embodiment, as a contrast to a focus on human bodies, recognises the heterogenous nature of human experience, splitting along "lines of class, gender, race, and privilege" (1999b, 195).

Hayles (1999b, 1) points back to the 1950s, when cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener suggested that it was theoretically possible to telegraph a human being. She says this privileging of information over material instantiation is one characteristic of a cultural belief in the "posthuman". Other include that the body is the original prosthesis - so additions and changes is merely a continuation of an operation begun at birth; and, that the human can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines (1999b, 2-3). The erasure of embodiment, Hayles believes is also seen in the traditional liberal humanist subject (1999b, 4). Her aim is to "keep disembodiment from being rewritten, one again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity" (1999b, 5). She imagines, instead of the disembodied posthuman, an embracing of technologies that also "recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival" (1999b, 5).

Hayles traces in some detail the historical development of disembodied information theories after the Second World War. She explains how Shannon's theory defined information "as a probability function with no dimensions, no materiality and no necessary connection with meaning ? a pattern, not a presence". A competing theory that linked information to a change in the receiver's mindset was rejected because it required that psychological states be quantifiable and measurable - something barely imaginable even now (1999b, 18). Shannon himself cautioned that his theory was meant to apply only in certain technical situations, not to communications in general, but the cultural environment "was ripe for theories that reified information into a free-floating, decontextualized, quantifiable entity that could serve as the master key unlocking secrets of life and death" (1999b, 19). Hayles describes how postmodern critical theory has supported this understanding of the body as information. She suggests that future generations will be stupefied by the "postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construct" (1999b, 192). She points to Baudrillard as one of the chief offenders, but notes that some authors have gones even further than he, noting particularly Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, who write of "second-order simulcra" and "floating body parts" heralding the disappearance of the body into a changing display of signs (1999b, 192).

Seeking to restore embodiment to its proper place in cultural understanding, Hayles begins from Elizabeth Grosz's observation that "there is no body as such: there are only bodies -- male or female, black, brown, white, large or small" (1999b, 196). The concept of embodiment thus seeks to avoid normative concepts. In contrast, "embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment ? whereas the body is an idealized form that gestures towards a Platonic reality, embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference." (1999b, 196) While the situations of the different instantiations are not the topic of this book, understanding of this point is important to avoid essentialising embodiment in the same way in which the body has been essentialised.

Hayles (1999b, 288) adds to this concept of embodiment a profound criticism of the liberal humanist subject, grounded in a vision of conscious control as the essence of human identity. She says that "mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures." Hayles applauds Edwin Hutchin's interpretation of John Searle's Chinese room , which concluded that the room in fact does know Chinese, and that modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen because they have constructed smarter environments. Hayles says "every day we participate in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge" (1999b, 289).

Understanding the genuine nature of the subject is, Hayles says, vital, to avoid a panic, evident in both theoretical and fictional works, that "if the boundaries are breached at all, there will be nothing to stop the self's complete dissolution" (1999b, 290). Hayles uses the term "posthuman" to describe the embodied, socially embedded subject. This term, I would however suggest, contains within it some (unintended by Hayles) unhelpful implications of disembodiment - of "vritual" bodies. The term subject, with its long connections with the liberal project, is similarly unhelpful. Instead I wish to refer throughout this work to "embodied agents", referring to a being that is created from, learns from, and acts upon, its environment (Hayles; 1999b, 236). This is also the term used by Bourdieu (1990, 37) as a term for the actor "playing the game". The agent is seen "not primarily as the locus of representations, but as engaged in practices, as a being who acts in and on a world" (Taylor; 1999, 33).

(b) The habitus of embodiment

The key concept that Bourdieu provides for this study is given in the following passage: "The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposing to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them." (Bourdieu; 1990, 53) In the increasingly wired world, the conditions of existence are changing, and since we have some awareness of the nature and direction of that change, we can imagine the way in which the structuring structures will also change.

The concept of habitus is so valuable because it insists on a social ground for meaning, language and all signifiers and signifieds (Shusterman; 1999, 4-5; 16-17); and because Bourdieu recognises how "our bodily know-how and the way we act and move can encode components of our understanding of self and world" (Taylor; 1999, 34) Bringing these together, commenting on Bourdieu, Taylor suggests that he explains a couple dancing. "Every apt, coordinated gesture has a certain flow. When this is lost ? one falls into confusion" (1999; 35). That is an apt analogy the operation of an embodied agent interacting in a wired world.

Bourdieu highlights the importance of the sense of the "feel for the game [a sporting metaphor] ? the almost miraculous encounter between the habitus and a field, between incorporated history and an objectified history, which makes possible the near-perfect anticipation of the future inscribed in all concrete configurations on the pitch or board" (1990, 66). Belief, he says, is not a state of mind, or the adherence to a set of doctrines, but a state of the body. "Practical sense, social necessity turned into nature, converted into motor schemes and body automatism, is what causes practices ? to be sensible, that is, informed by a common sense. It is because agents never know completely what they are doing that why they do has more sense than they know" (1990, 69). Bourdieu stresses that while there is nothing wrong with an observer developing models of "the game", they are "fake and dangerous as soon as they are treated as the real principles of practices" (1990, 11). Gestures or actions are made, he says, not to express something, but because they make sense at the time (1990, 37).

Habitus effectively explains why GOFAI could never work. Traditional artificial intelligence relies on reducing all social action to rules, but habitus explains that this is an entirely inadequate explanation of the real social environment. Hutchins (1997, 364), without explicitly using the concept of habitus, takes this further, in explaining that computers were modelled on one particular "highly elaborated and culturally specific world of human activity [habitus]: that of formal systems". Attempts to make "intelligent" computers on this model (or indeed to attempt to explain human actions by reference to computer models) fall down because it is only a relatively small and limited part (and a culturally specific one) of the many human habitus.

The concept of habitus is also useful for the consideration of the wired world in understanding the persistence of practices that appear ill-adapted to current circumstances. Groups tend to maintain practices because "they are composed of individuals with durable dispositions that can outline the economic and social conditions in which they were produced" (Bourdieu; 1990, 62). Equally, objects may be adapted for a variety of purposes. Bourdieu (1990, 201) cites Laoust's account of the use of the spoon among the Mtouggas as "an instrument ideally suited to the gesture indicating the desire to see rain fall. The opposite gesture ? is what the wife of a fqih does ? to ward off imminent rainfall". New inventions may change the habitus, but the habitus also changes the inventions (and directs which will succeed or fail). One of the latest commercial developments is an MP3 "wristwatch" (which records around an hour of music in computer format and allows its playback through small earplugs linked to the watch by a cord). The parallels to the wildly successful Song Walkman are obvious. The question, however, that habitus might prompt us to ask include: Is that cord and earplug likely to be considered uncool? Is the watch too heavy to be comfortable? Does it take too long to download? Is it too expensive compared to its competitors? How will it be promoted? The inherent usefulness of the technology, its "cleverness" or "innovativeness", its "power", are not what will determine its success or failure, but its ability to fit within, and change, existing habitus.

For Bourdieu, a collective habitus is constituted in things and minds (1990, 147). Coming from a different perspective, Debray shares a similar view. He suggests that it is useful to consider not to say "I have an environment", but instead "I am my environment" (Debray; 1996, 111). Because this particular approach presents a danger of embodiment disappearing, however, I prefer Bourdieu's.

(c) Historically situating the embodied agent

Debray maintains much of the traditional un-reflexive attitude of French academe to what he perceives as a dumbed-down "wired world", offering a "prophecy of doom with an excessive grandiloquence" (Biro; 1996). In his criticism of semiotics and communications studies, and his attempt to establish the alternative of mediology, he offers however an important corrective to their key faults, arguing, more strongly and clearly than do Hayles or Bourdieu (although both would agree with his claim) that their study of texts has been ahistorical. Like Hayles, he is also determined to see that the material nature of texts is recognised. He sees the ultimate materiality of the message in the role of the physical materiality of Christ in the rise of Christianity: "The Word cannot transmit itself without becoming Flesh, and Flesh cannot be all love and glory; it is blood sweat and tears. Transmission is never seraphic because incarnate." (1996, 5)

Debray (1996, 53) argues that all communication must be understood in a "historical continuum that had found its start in the Neolithic". He sees the original Marathon runner as the carrier of the first "scoop" (and its first victim), and says studying television requires considering it in perspective "against the light surrounding the Byzantine icon" (1996, 12). He takes this determinedly historical perspective into consideration of the texts, and authors. The latter concept, he maintains, is very much historically situated, or at least standardised in, "industrial modernity". " 'Author' and 'text' are results and not givens." (1996, 73)