We are all created by machines...

It turns out that our discussion of how the novel created the individual (in Nancy Armstrong’s book) has several more recent parallels. N. Katherine Hayles mentions two things that struck me as perfect examples of how technology not only affects, but also in a way creates, its users/readers.

The first example is the computer itself. Hayles writes: “In their general form, computers are simulation machines producting environments, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. To construct an environment is, of course, to anticipate and structure the user’s interaction with it and in this sense to construct the user as well as the interface” (48). This makes a lot of sense to me. Computers require that users act in a certain way, and they condition users to expect certain things from computers (note our own dumbfoundedness when network connections on campus are temporarily disabled for a few hours…)

But it’s not just computers, or the first novels back in the 18th century, that create their readers. Hayles argues that House of Leaves does so in a big way, too. It’s a novel—but it’s creating a different kind of reader than early novels did. House of Leaves is obsessed with mediation; according to the novel, it is not thinking thoughts, or performing actions, but recording one’s thoughts or actions through some sort of medium that makes one exist. As Hayles puts it, “in House of Leaves consciousness is never seen apart from mediating inscription devices. The text emphasizes that people within the represented world—Will Navidson and Karen Green on one level, Zampanó on another, and Johnny Truant on yet another—exist only because they have been recorded” (116).

She goes even further in this argument—in a direction that is not surprising, given her focus on materiality, but that somewhat frightens me, although maybe that’s just because I think of technology as alien, even though I have a lot of affection for some of it (i.e. books, handwritten letters, emails, etc.) Anyway, she concludes: “The UNRELIABLE NARRATOR, a literary invention foregrounding the role of consciousness in constructing reality, has here given way to the REMEDIATED NARRATOR, a literary invention foregrounding a proliferation of inscription technologies that evacuate consciousness as the source of production and recover in its place a mediated subjectivity that cannot be conceived of as an independent entity. Consciousness alone is no longer the relevant frame but rather consciousness fused with technologies of inscription” (116-117). In a certain sense, Hayles is absolutely right—we have no way of knowing the content of someone’s consciousness unless she records it in some medium. Yet inscribing one’s consciousness in a medium inevitably alters what is being inscribed—so this is not really a new phenomenon, but something that happens whenever we write (or even speak? Does speech count as a medium?)