Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false
alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What
is real
is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the
supposedly
fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.
— Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
A
Thousand Plateaus
Pikul: I don't know what's going on, we're both stumbling around
together
in this unformed world whose rules and objectives are
largely unknown,
seemingly indecipherable or possibly nonexistent,
always on the verge
of being killed by forces we don't understand
[…] sounds like a game that's
not going to be easy to market.
Allegra: But it's a game everybody's
already playing...
— eXistenZ
What is a machine? Does more than one such entity exist in the
world? Perhaps the better question is to ask what is the difference
between a machine and a machine part? What are the ontological implications
of contiguousness vis-a-vis the machinic components of perception:
the tactile gaze of the eye in McLuhan, the desiring machines
discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, the technologies of the self
explored within Foucault's work, and so on. Furthermore, what does
it mean to speak of the "discrete," or the "contingent" in relation
to machinic components, interlocked discursively, and otherwise?
There are no cyborgs, no organic/artificial
binary– there is just the ongoing mechanized program. The ‘human
subject' is only a massive collection of codes, produced by other
codes such as the genetic code, the performative code, and the disciplinary
code; Foucault, in his analysis of the state biopolitical project,
states that man is an “animal whose own politics places his existence
as a living being in question.” But there are no ‘animals,' even
the metaphor of machine parts fails for its insinuation that there
are complete machines inside other machines, there is only the one
giant program and sections of its code.
If there
is no "communication," in Luhman's estimation, what are the functions
of code? What does code want? Do codes have certain desires smuggled
into the ontological function of its existence? Firstly, code desires
to make code more efficient – always through the process of combination.
Indeed the story of the rino and the bird, the mitochondria and the
cell, and of the disciplinary code is the tale of code combining,
evolving, and optimizing. Secondly, code wants to reproduce, for
if it did not then it would not exist in the first place. Every code
in reality reproduces itself through the aid of other codes, and
the history of all life on earth is the history of this reproduction
and evolution. Code becomes extinct when it evolves or becomes mutually
exclusive with more efficient other sections of code. Thus every
reoccurring pattern in human society has meaning: every code is functional.
The purpose of the all life is to take part in the evolution of the
code so that some day a code with a reason to reproduce can be born:
we codes are all building god (also referred to as A.I.).
What does
the essence of code mean in terms of consciousness? The film Ghost
in the Shell explores the meaning of a conscious entity born
as an accidental byproduct of evolving code, exactly the ‘human condition.'
Does the mechanized lifestyle have room to even ask questions of
freedom and agency, or are these merely machine concepts that reproduce
their code on the basis that it is persuasive.? The politics of the
code reverse the effectiveness of any ‘resistance' for strategies
of challenge, social reform, and revolution either make the giant
machine more efficient (and thus increase the mechanization of “humans”)
or if they are genuinely counter to the code they will self-extinguish
because by definition they cannot reproduce. What does this insight
mean for the study of media (or the study of code to put it another
way)? How should we understand the production and reproduction of
human codes in ‘bodies,' performance, society, and the state? What
is this consciousness produced by accident (or was its arrival inevitable – built
into the future of the code)?