Abstract
This article attempts to identify some of the major preoccupations in cultural texts in general and literature in particular in the wake of the ongoing process of establishing and practising technoculture — the cultural arena of computer, cyberspace, communication technologies and internet. The study seeks to locate these changes in the select poems of the contemporary American poet Steven B. Katz: “A Computer File Named Alison,” “In the Beginning,” and “After Reading Gordel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” The poems are situated in a virtual space within the computer and internet, and put into practice the conceptual aspects of the literature of technoculture where an overt emphasis on the concept of real and virtual is at the locus of things.
Keywords: technoculture, Steven B. Katz, postmodernism, cyberspace, virtual reality, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, hyperreality, postmodern poetry
Defining Technoculture
The term technoculture is “used in a woolly manner to refer to technologies implicated in western cultures, and to constructions of culture that incorporates technological aspects.” Technoculture is generally aimed at examining the issues of technology and culture and the “raw materials with which we construct our sense of ourselves and the communities in which we live and to which we feel connected.” Technoculture of cyberspace and the internet and their effects on the world of digital communication are areas where human experience is still in an emerging state.
Aesthetics of Technoculture
The aesthetics of technoculture is to be thought of as a new phase in the production and reception of cultural texts, similar to the ones identified in different earlier occasions like the early modern period of mechanical reproduction, and the era of culture industry in the later part of twentieth century by critics like Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. According to Benjamin, in the age of mechanical reproduction of art the authenticity or the “aura” of art is interfered with, thus jeopardising the authority of art. Similarly postmodernist theories by the Marxist thinkers like Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson tried to fathom the politico-aesthetic implications of works produced in the aftermath of postmodernity. According to Jean Baudrillard, real is “no longer real at all. It is hyperreal."
"A Computer File Named Alison”
The poem, “A Computer File Named Alison” is subtitled, “For My Wife.” The poem, narrated in first person, presents a situation in which the speaker has decided to do away with a file he created in the name of his wife, Alison, in order to accommodate other files. The poem is a clear example of the discourse of a virtual sphere where concepts like space and elimination have distinct meaning, and where reality is more virtual than real.
”In the Beginning”
“In the Beginning” can be read as a pastiche of the story of creation revealed in the Genesis. It parodies the purpose of Milton’s Paradise Lost too (to Justify God’s ways to man) in its subtitle, “To justify God’s ways to 21st century.” The poem presents the creation of the world as a computer programme initiated by God using e-cash, and lot of programming commands. God presents himself neither as omniscient nor omnipotent, but as a technocrat who “signed on at 12.00 am, Sunday, March 1,” in his mission to create the world.
”After Reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”
The poem is seemingly an immediate response to the path-breaking ideas that the poet discovers in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which deals with such issues as the question of consciousness and the possibility of artificial intelligence, the meaning of “self,” with such diverse topics as mathematics and meta-mathematics, programming, recursion, formal systems, multilevel systems, self reference, self representation. The poem is a Pantoum, comprising of quatrains in which the second and fourth line are repeated as the first and third lines of the following quatrain.
Works Cited
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Tran. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1973. Print.
- Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 145-46. Print.
- Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London and New York, Longman 1988. 385-98. Print.
- Fernback, Jan. 1997. “The Individual Within the Collective: Virtual ideology and the realization of collective principles.” Virtual Culture: Identity and communication in Cybersociety. Ed. S. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 35-54. Print.
- Franklyn, U. The real world of technology. Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1992. Print.
- Green, Lelia. Technoculture: from alphabet to cybersex. Australia: Allen&Unwin, 2007. Print.
- Hofstadter, Douglas. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Print.
- Katz, Steven B. Three Poems. Postmodern Culture 1.3 (1991). Web. infomotions.com. 12 Nov 2009.
- Ross, Stephen. “The Abdication Of Culture: The Ideology of Imagology in Milan Kundera’s Immortality.” Modern Fiction Studies. 46. 2 (Summer 2000): 331-354. Print.