ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Posting from Tralfamadore

I know I've been flogging the blog a lot lately, but I can't help but feel compassion for hungry blogs.

A couple things.

1. I'd like to plug a new media object, namely a film: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's about an outfit that erases memories, focusing particularly on two characters in a failed love affair who decide to erase their memories of each other. The reason I plug it here is that the film basically depicts the brain--or perhaps more specifically, the memory--as a database that can be manipulated by means of a computer interface. It also depicts the memory as a virtual space, as one of the characters undergoing the memory replacement therapy races through his memory database, dragging along his memory of his ex--who he decides he doesn't want to erase after all--trying to find a memory from his childhood where he can hide her (great scene).

I also think it's significant that this film is more-or-less billed as a "Charlie Kaufman" film, who is the screenwriter, not the director (he also wrote Being John Malkovich and Adaptation). Could it be that the ascendancy of this particular scribbler--an auteur in the original sense of the word, though in the past fifty years the word has become associated almost exclusively with movie directors, not writers per se--is due to the closer synergy of verbal and visual in new media productions?

2. As a probably-not-the-last word on transhumanity, I would like to offer this mordant cautionary tale from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., from The Sirens of Titan:

"Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren't anything like machines. They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient. They weren't predictable. They weren't durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.

"These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.

"And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn't high enough.

"So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.

"And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn't really be said to have any purpose at all.

"The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.

"And they discovered that they weren't even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, 'Tralfamodore'" (274-275).

Works Cited:

Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell Publishing, 1959.

Posted by Joseph at March 25, 2004 01:21 PM