Beyond Flickering Signifiers: Frissonic Value and Shifting Boundaries in the Context of Contemporary Embodiment

OUTLINE

Intro

In Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers, N. Katherine Hayles proposes the term flickering signifier to refer to the linguistic and psychodynamic experience of 

Explain Hayles' Concept of Flickering Signifiers

"Foregrounding pattern and randomness, information technologies operate within a realm in which the signifier is opened to a rich internal play of difference."

Flickering signifiers signal an important shift in the plate tectonics of language. Much of contemporary fiction is directly influenced by information technologies; cyberpunk, for example, takes informatics as its central theme. Even narratives without this focus can hardly avoid the rippling effects of informatics, for the changing modes of signification affect the codes as well as the subjects of representation.

Lacan denied a one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and the signified, and, therefore, stated that "Language is not a code."(11)

Hayles, who sees pattern and randomness being the contemporary replacement of 
presence and absence.

Lacan, operating within a view of language that was primarily print-based rather than electronically mediated, not surprisingly focused on presence and absence as the dialectic of interest.

Foregrounding pattern and randomness, information technologies operate within a realm in which the signifier is opened to a rich internal play of difference. In informatics the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes.

The operative transition is not from male to female-as-castrated-male, but from human to something radically other than human (see Figure 3). Flickering signification brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman.

proposes pattern/randomness as opposed to presence/absence.

man as tool-user
man as tool-maker
first order cybernetics: reflexivity of man

flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine

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Dynamics of Flickering Signification - What is exactly happening, and how does it work?

dynamics of signified to signifier

Define Information - Information is not pattern/randomness, it is a change in a receiver's mindset (MacKay)

Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world; and embodiment is always instantiated, local, and specific.

Frissonic Value and the Uncanny Valley within the Context of Flickering Signification

On Embodiment: Shifting Boundaries, Virtual Bodies (debunked) and the Cyborg

The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate) and a change in the message (the codes of representation).

Conclusions: Flickering signifiers, as presented by Hayles, are not completely explained within the context of their complex dynamics: the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman

language and psychodynamics of 

Flickering signification brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman.

articulated through the dynamics

QUOTES AND NOTES

11 Jacques Lacan, "Radiophonies," Scilicet 2/3 (1970),55, 68. For floating signifiers, see Le Séminaire XX: Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 22, 35. 

Unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions.

Lacan and Saussure state that signifiers are defined by networks of relational differences between themselves rather than in relation to signifieds.

"Flickering signification brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman."
N. Katherine Hayles, P.~9

reflexivity - in which the person is part of the systems they observe
may be considered within the context of cybernetics

Haraway: disrupting categories and boundaries

As discussed by Hayles, first order cybernetics proclaimed that the boundaries of the human subject are constructed rather than given.*
* N. Katherine Hayles, P.84

"AL can contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be."
Langton, "Artificial Life" p.1

"By positing AL as a second instance of life, researchers affect the definition of biological life as well, for now it is the juxtaposition that determines what counts as fundamental, not carbon-based forms by themselves."
N. Katherine Hayles, P.235

"In the AL paradigm, the machine becomes the model for understanding the human.  Thus the human is transfigured into the posthuman."
N. Katherine Hayles, P.239

"In The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Varela and is coauthors take the Buddhist-inspired point of view that the "self" is a story consciousness tells itself to block out hte fear and panic that would ensue if human beings realized there is no essential self."
N. Katherine Hayles, P.156

"The closer one comes to the flux of embodiment, Varela and his coauthors believe, the more one is aware that the coherent self is a fiction invented out of panic and fear."
N. Katherine Hayles, P.201

Mark Johnson, "The Body in the Mind"
downer, upright, on top, upscale, get high

"Although Johnson does not develop this implication, his analysis suggests that when people begin using their bodies in significantly different ways, either because of technological innovations or cultural shifts, changing experiences of embodiment bubble up into language, affecting the metaphoric networks at play within the culture."
N. Katherine Hayles, P.206-7

If we can jump to the conclusion, as Donald MacKay has, that information is linked to a change in a reciever's mindset and thus with meaning - as opposed to meaning as pattern (Shannon)
Macy Conferences 
NKH 18

"As Donna Haraway has pointed out, cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions."
N. Katherine Hayles, P.114