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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.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Details
Darren Tofts, Murray McKeich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. North Ryde, N.S.W.: Interface, 1998.
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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]).
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