Projectories

But your question was: ‘What can I do with ANT’? I answered it:
no structuralist explanation. The two are completely incompatible. Either you
have actors who realize potentialities and they are not actors at all, or you
describe actors who are making virtualities actual (this is Deleuze’s
parlance by the way), and that requires very specific texts, and your connection
with those you study requires very specific protocols to work — I guess
this is what you would call ‘critical edge’ and ‘political
relevance’.

Bruno
Latour: A prologue in form of a dialog between a Student and his (somewhat) Socratic
Professor

[Via: infosophy:
Socio-technological Rendering of Information]

Hayles uses the concept flickering signifiers to define the disembodiment
of digital texts: “technologies of inscription
are media when they are perceived as mediating, inserting themselves into the
chain of textual production.”

The relation between signifier and signified are directly correlated in a
material text-production. “… emphasis on
spatially fixed and geomatrically arranged letters is significant, for it points
to the physicality of the processes involved.” Changes with electronic
media: we percieve text differently – more fluid – “no simple
one-to – no correspondence exists between signifier and signified.”

When I coined the phrase "flickering signifier," I had in mind
a reconfigured relation between the signifier and signified than that which
had been previously articulated in critical and literary theory. As I have
argued elsewhere, the signifier as conceptualized by Saussure
and others was conceived as unitary in its composition and flat its
structure. It had no internal structure, whether seen as oral articulation
or written mark, that could properly enter into
the discourse of semiotics.

When signifiers appear on the computer screen, however, they are only the
top layer of a complex system of interrelated processes. Marks on screen
may manifest themselves as simple inscriptions to a user, but properly understood
they are the visible, tangible results of coding instructions executed by
the machine in a series of interrelated processes, from a high-level programming
language like Java all the way down to assembly language and binary code.

I hoped to convey this processural quality by the gerund "flickering," to
distinguish the screenic image from the flat durable mark of print or the
blast of air associated with oral speech. The signifier on screen is, as
you know, a light image produced by a scanning electron beam. The screen
image is deeply layered rather than flat, constantly replenished rather than
durable, and highly mutable depending on processes mobilized by the layered
code, as for example when a writer uses Flash to create animation or layers
that move. These qualities are not merely ornamental but enter profoundly
into what the marks signifier and, more importantly, how they signify. We
need a theory of semiotics that can account for all the qualities connoted
by "flickering."

Materiality Has
Always Been In Play

Information theory stresses the dichotomy between pattern and presence. Where
pattern means information and absence means non-information. But developments
in information theory countered this argument: it seemed that randomness and
pattern were both related to information – “each helps to define
the other; each contributes to the flow of information through the system.”

Determining what counts as the materiality of a given work is thus both
a creative act by the writer and an interpretive act by the user, as well
as an engagement of the cognitive properties of an intelligent machine for
texts written and implemented on a computer. I don’t see this as a cause
for anxiety. Materiality has always been in play, even when it was relatively
suppressed within literary criticism by considering the work an immaterial
verbal construction. In works that foreground their interaction with materiality
–"technotexts" is the term I have coined for such works–the material
properties are actively constructed by the text and made resonant with significance,
becoming semiotically important components of the text’s meaning-making processes.

Materiality
Has Always Been In Play

Hayles relates this line of reasoning to the transformation of biology and
meaning into information, and one might argue that our bodies increasingly
can be seen as embodied DNA information.

Virtual reality: full body mediation. “Virtual reality puts the user’s
sensory system into a direct feedback loop with a computer.”

Relevant boundaries change: “relevant boundaries for interaction are
defined less by the skin than by the feedback loops connecting body and simulation
in a technobio-integrated circuit.”