also in Leonardo
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Opening Up the Categories: 'Memory Trade'
By David Cox
Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture, by Darren Tofts & Murray
McKeich.
10 Sep. 99
As we come to
the final curtain call of the Millennium it is no surprise that works are
appearing
which seek to
frame the current debate about 'cyberculture' into contexts which foreground
the
role of memory,
iteration, inscription, and the relationship between orality and textuality.
Memory Trade
is a deliberately cross-disciplinary work, seeking to define a new type
of
discourse in
which definitions of technology include domains once considered distinctly
separate:
cybernetics
and English literature sit quite easily with punk rock, fine art and typography.
Part
coffee table
book, part academic essay, Memory Trade deliberately blurs some boundaries,
with
impressive results.
Like Greil Marcus's
book on punk, situationism and dada -- Lipstick Traces -- Memory Trade
bills
itself as a
"Secret History". In Marcus's work this history was that of the promiscuous
exchange
of ideas between
participants in culture who shared a burning passion to "live one's life
as if
outcomes did
not matter". The gleefully energetic and playful iconoclasts were separated
in time
and space. The
Dadaists never met the Situationists and the Ranters of medieval England
never
met Johnny Rotten
from the Sex Pistols. But they all shared something of a passion for
disruption,
found a common and deadly enemy in boredom, and seemed united by the power
of
juxtaposing
images and ideas through collage, dance, music and other radical gestures.
Lipstick
Traces was a
work which sought both to define this untold story, and to frame it in
the context
of the function
of art in general. When you get the mix right a work of art can reveal
the
bankruptcy of
official authority, and even end up opening the doors of awareness to the
population at
large.
Memory Trade
forges a similar history of writing and knowledge exchange. Connections
between
different types
of thinking about memory and knowledge come together like the objects in
a
surrealist Joseph
Cornell box. The book is as much a poem to its own process, as it is a
cultural
studies textbook
on the origins of the currency of ideas.
When collage
works it is always a shock. Memory Trade resembles a Burroughsian 'cut
up',
where secret
meanings appear to reveal themselves when unlikely accidents with meaning
and
texts are made
to happen. This is the classic culture jammer gesture, the avant-pop strategy
of
defamiliarisation;
what the Situationists called 'detournement'.
Memory Trade
posits the notion that writing was not only the original "cyberspace" but
that
"cyberspace"
itself, as an idea, stems from the processes of human memory of which writing,
as
a technology,
is itself an expression. That particular type of consensual shared imagination
space which
textuality makes possible, Tofts argues, long predates the cyberspaces
of the cold
war and the
space race.
The book is
lavishly illustrated with photocollage work by Murray McKeich resembling,
in finely
detailed monochrome,
the Gothic horror biomechanics of H.R. Giger and forming a nicely worked
counterpoint
to Tofts's text. Dolls' heads and bones and industrial piping, domestic
objects and
fish, are melded
seamlessly in these often rather disturbing, nightmare-like images. They
look like
antique photographs
of a demented Victorian occultist antique collector on opium. The overall
effect of the
text and images is one of entering a new kind of realm, in which familiar
notions
have been stripped
of their original contexts and made to counterpoint arguments with which
they are seldom
traditionally associated. For example Vannevar Bush's ideas about building
the
Memex device
find expression in the book as evidence of the ways in which the technology
of
writing has
long relied upon mechanisms of recall and storage. In this they bear resemblance
to
Sigmund Freud's
use of the 'mystical writing pad' -- the child's toy which leaves a faint
trace of
the original
text after it is erased -- as a metaphor for the working of the mind itself.
We store
some things
and erase others, but all the time a trace is left behind. It's the traces
of the
erased which
matter as much as what is stored. This non-space otherzone between the
form
and utterance
is the metaphysical domain for which Tofts, at one point, coins his own
term:
"cspace", where
the 'c', for 'cyber', is not pronounced so that it might better illustrate
just how
virtual a text's
role in shaping an idea in our heads really is.
The book begs
the question, to what extent does any technology based on stored, but primarily
written or spoken
information, result in new types of thinking about the process of human
communication?
How has the technology of writing itself affected writers or thinkers?
And how in
turn have the
debates about writing had an affect upon how we now view the role of stored
knowledge of
all sorts in our culture?
The hardware
and software of NASA nerds and hacker hippies alike, computers, networks,
satellites,
VR and military-industrial culture are framed in the book as almost incidental
latecomers in
the history of human engagement with the process of sharing and navigating
ideas.
This nihilistic
techno-iconoclasm bears some similarity to the kind ambivalence about technology
which cyberpunk
author Bruce Sterling has expressed. Sterling's Dead Media Project (an
ever
growing Internet
mailing list of media forms no longer in use) discredits technological
determinism
with every new
example of obsolete media added to the ever growing list. Sterling and
Tofts
share a probably
healthy suspicion about all the hype surrounding the official technoculture
of
the boardroom,
the R&D facility and the developments seized upon by Wired magazine
and the
stock market.
Both authors posit writing as the ultimate proof of a media form which
has no
vested interest
in buttressing the corporate imagination's aggressive claims to machinic
Darwinism.
A lengthy section
on James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake contextualises that writer's embrace
of
cinema and television,
exploring how this love of early audiovisual time-based media in turn
influenced his
discovery of the utter malleability of language in the service of fiction.
Tofts
outlines how
Joycean puns, like the principles of montage with which their creator was
certainly
familiar, he
knew Eisenstein, rely on the clash of the visual and the sonic. Joyce with
his original
written verbal
sight gags, and Norbert Wiener with his cybernetic experiments in feedback
mechanisms of
artificial intelligence, end up finding each other in Memory Trade. Tofts
hyperlinks
them via the
new abstraction which his book is at pains to both describe historically
and self
referentially
exemplify.
There is a kind
of palpable glee at work in the book also -- Tofts has embraced the playful
relish
of the idea-hacker
who has stumbled onto a cache of good info, breathlessly linking theorist
to
theorist, idea
to idea. The classical and the contemporary meet head on here -- Socrates,
please meet
Ted Nelson, and perhaps Brenda Laurel you already know Norbert Wiener and
James
Joyce? This
wax museum-like festival of memory hackers has the appeal of any sideshow,
only
here the many
and varied figures are luminaries in fields often kept discreetly pigeonholed
by the
Realpolitik
of academia and the narrow-mindedness of publishers and book-sellers. I
can imagine
the latter having
a hard time knowing what shelf to put this book on: Literature? Technology?
Cultural Criticism?
It opens up categories we have not known about until now.
Details
Darren Tofts,
Murray McKeich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. North Ryde,
N.S.W.: Interface,
1998.
Citation reference
for this article
MLA style:
David Cox. "Opening
Up the Categories: 'Memory Trade'." M/C Reviews 10 Sep. 1999. [your date
of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/memory.html>.
Chicago style:
David Cox, "Opening
Up the Categories: 'Memory Trade'," M/C Reviews 10 Sep. 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/memory.html>
([your date of access]).
APA style:
David Cox. (1999)
Opening up the Categories: 'Memory trade'. M/C Reviews 10 Sep. 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/memory.html>
([your date of access]).