Final Part 3: Invocation

"The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. 'Explain yourself!'
'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
'I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
'I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, 'for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'"

Question 3. The Small: this class focused on the small—at least it was supposed to at this point—that is here at the end—what does “the small” mean to you? Draw upon our readings, discussions, random websites, to develop your position.

I feel I have almost already written this essay as a blog post earlier in the quarter. However, at that point we had only just started on The Invention of Morel, so it was really supposed to be preliminary questions to keep in mind as we progressed through the texts. I will try to summarize some of my points from that post that I feel still apply here:

• Small is a relation. When we say something is small, we are comparing it to at least one other thing.
• Things can be small in many different ways, including spatially, temporally, through a lack of energy or force, through the amount of information they contain, through being simple (possessing few proper parts, which also tends to mean they are a more fundamental or basic kind of thing).
• Small things affect big things in important ways.
• Small things compose big things (that is, big things are made out of small things). Similarly, simple things (e.g. neurons) acting in simple ways cause the emergence of complex things (e.g. consciousness).
• We understand big things in terms of small things (we have a reductivist approach to learning).

There are a few things that I’d like to add to this list now that we have spent all quarter reading and discussing the small. While I discussed in this earlier post how we can be both big and small depending on the scale you are using, I somehow did not grasp the obvious and important consequences of the fact that we are composed of small things. I was thinking of it in terms of “our bodies are composed of small things,” but really it’s more than that. Our identities are composed of small things. More specifically, our identities are composed of things that are small in many different ways. This is the one theme that I have found to be common to all of our texts this quarter and we can see how the consequences of this fact are explored in different ways in each.

In The Invention of Morel our identities are the conglomeration of all of the light and sound we give off; that is, every bit of information about ourselves that we give off to the world can be captured by a video camera and microphone. I have already discussed Baudrillard’s thoughts on such a perfect copy.

Burroughs also worries about recordings, but his idea of the small is less to do with photons and waves and more to do with sentences and words. The physical universe is composed of small things on many different levels, subatomic, atomic, cellular, biological, geological, astronomical, interstellar, etc. Literature is composed in much the same way; you have books, which are composed of many chapters, which are composed of many paragraphs, which are composed of many sentences, which are composed of many words, which are composed of many symbols. Our symbols are a lot like Baudrillard’s second-order simulacra in that they do not refer to anything by themselves. We may learn them in terms of other things (“C is for Cookie,” etc.) but it is not until they are combined in certain ways that they form a unit of meaning. Words are composed of one or more units of meaning, with the end result that even a simple sentence can convey quite a lot of meaning; even your simplest subject-verb-object construction postulates the existence of two different things (sometimes with properties built-in to the definition) and an action or event that explains a certain relation the two objects stand in with respect to one another. Units of meaning can take the form of cultural ideas, gestures, rituals, and other imitable phenomena. In being expressed to others through speech or writing they are spread much like viruses in that a successfully “infected” host will spread it to others and some people are more susceptible to certain thoughts and ideas than others because of the way they think. These infectious units of meaning are commonly known as memes today, but Burroughs calls them word viruses. Rational thought is considered by Burroughs and others to be a particularly dangerous word virus as it is both limiting and has a propensity for leading to fundamentalism (at least, this is part of the Dadaist mindset). To break out of these kinds of thought patterns and inoculate ourselves from word viruses, Burroughs explores his aleatory cut-up technique extensively in The Ticket That Exploded. The cut-up essentially involves taking some text, breaking it up into its component parts (the words/units of meaning/memes in a sentence) and randomly rearranging them to form sentences with new, often nonsensical meanings that force the reader to engage in lateral thinking and become aware of how the text is affecting his or her subconscious. Find the small things that compose big things and rearrange them to form new big things; this is exactly the sort of principle nanotechnology and genetic engineering operates by. To return to the topic of identity, information is another essential feature of one’s identity; if information can be reworked in this way it can be made to compose an entirely new identity, one perhaps free from the tyranny of a deterministic universe.

Moving from memes to genes is an easy step; after all the term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene as a way to explain how evolutionary principles like natural selection could be responsible for the propagation of social ideas and phenomena. DNA is encoded genetic information: a molecular string of chemical information is produced from protein molecules that is then “read” in much the same way a Turing machine would “read” its input. This string of information provides the cell with a blueprint of its own structure and is used to grow, replicate and replace parts of itself with exact copies. Thus, genes are our (and almost everything else on the planet) biological identity, our identity at the cellular level. Like every other aspect of our identities, it is composed of small things, which can be changed to change our identity. This is one of the things Ribofunk and Life Extreme explore, but more specifically, they explore how our ability to change our identities at the cellular level makes species distinction useless as a method of determining identity. For example, in Ribofunk we have subservient people who are less than 50% human and their overseers who are more than 50% human, yet there is very little difference between them as people. We might consider this a sort of rehashing of the old slave arguments: whether or not it was okay to be inhumane to black people because they were seen as belonging to a “lower” species than whites.

Speaking of rehashing old themes, I would like to add another thing to the list: the small is magical. The power people have as a result of new, amazing technology in science fiction such as Postsingular and The Diamond Age and the problems that result from this are not new considerations; in fact, I would argue they are among the oldest of humanity's moral dilemmas. Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and I would further argue that science fiction itself has a history firmly rooted in magic, particularly alchemy. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley is often considered one of the first works of science fiction literature and, as you can tell by the full title, it is establishing itself as a new take on the ancient Greek myth. Gothic literature like Shelley’s is also closely associated with earlier romantic literature such as Beowulf, the fantastical elements being suitably adjusted for a more modern time. There is also The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, the protagonist of which practically embodies the trope of the unethical scientist. We might also look at alchemical texts and themes directly: the Jewish Golem, the homunculus, the search for the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s stone. One of my favorites is called the Visions of Zosimos, a set of dreams described by the Greek-Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis. In his second dream (the first better fits the doppelganger theme) he meets several homunculi named the copper man, the man of lead, etc. who submit themselves to unendurable torment in order to go through alchemical transformations. I could write a whole essay on this topic alone, but in order to get back to the point of this essay I will finish with a couple of book recommendations.

To summarize, here are the bullet points I would add to that list:

• We are small.
• We are also big and composed of small things.
• Our identities (biological, temporal, informational, etc.) are composed of small things.
• Small things can be changed.
• We can be changed.
• Small things cannot be deterministic.
• Small things can make us free.
• Small things can destroy borders (species borders, temporal borders, spatial borders, etc.).
• Small things are magical.