Narrating consciousness: Language, media and embodiment

N. Katherine Hayles Duke University, Durham, USA James J. Pulizzi University of California, Los Angeles, USA

History of the Human Sciences 23(3) 131148 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0952695110363646 hhs.sagepub.com

Abstract Although there has long been a division in studies of consciousness between a focus on neuronal processes or conversely an emphasis on the ruminations of a conscious self, the long-standing split between mechanism and meaning within the brain was mirrored by a split without, between information as a technical term and the meanings that messages are commonly thought to convey. How to heal this breach has posed formidable problems to researchers. Working through the history of cybernetics, one of the historical sites where Claude Shannons information theory quickly became received doctrine, we argue that the cybernetic program as it developed through second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory remains incomplete. In this article, we return to fundamental questions about pattern and noise, context and meaning, to forge connections between consciousness, narrative and media. The thrust of our project is to reintroduce context and narrative as crucial factors in the processes of meaning-making. The project proceeds along two fronts: advancing a theoretical framework within which context plays its properly central role; and demonstrating the importance of context by analyzing two fictions, Stanislaw Lems His Masters Voice and Joseph McElroys Plus, in which context has been deformed by being wrenched away from normal human environments, with radical consequences for processes of meaning-making. Keywords autopoiesis, consciousness, cybernetics, media theory, narrative theory, posthumanism

Corresponding author: N. Katherine Hayles, Literature Program, Box 90670, Duke University, Durham NC 27708, USA. Email: katherine.hayles@duke.edu

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The history of consciousness took a swerve when Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1998[1948]) proclaimed that information had nothing to do with meaning. Although there has long been a division in studies of consciousness between a focus on neuronal processes (e.g. Dennett, 1992) or conversely an emphasis on the ruminations of a conscious self (e.g. Bruner, 1992), the wedge driven by Shannon cut differently, separating the human world of meaning-making from the information-processing of technical media. The long-standing split between mechanism and meaning within the brain was now mirrored by a split without, between information as a technical term and the meanings that messages are commonly thought to convey. The symmetry had far-reaching consequences, for contemporary theories of mind are deeply bound up with imagining the brain as an information-processing machine. If the brain operates like a computer in having semi-autonomous agents running individual programs (e.g. Minsky, 1988, 2007), where and how does meaning-making arise? The separation of information from meaning inaugurated by Shannon and Weaver, far from being a historical curiosity, continues to haunt us. How to heal this breach has posed formidable problems to researchers in a wide variety of fields, including information theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, systems theory and a host of others. Working through the history of cybernetics, one of the historical sites where Shannons information theory quickly became received doctrine, we argue that the cybernetic program as it developed through second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory remains incomplete. In this article, we return to fundamental questions about pattern and noise, context and meaning, to forge connections between consciousness, narrative and media. The thrust of our project is to reintroduce context and narrative as crucial factors in the processes of meaning-making. The project proceeds along two fronts: advancing a theoretical framework within which context plays its properly central role; and demonstrating the importance of context by analyzing two fictions, Stanislaw Lems His Masters Voice (1999[1968]) and Joseph McElroys Plus (1976), in which context has been deformed by being wrenched away from normal human environments, with radical consequences for processes of meaning-making. Context or, more precisely, the lack of it is at the center of our inquiry because it is crucially tied in with the separation of information from meaning. If information in one context acquires a different meaning when imported into another context, arriving at reliable quantification becomes a nightmare. Shannons solution was to strip away context by conceptualizing information as a function that depends only on the probability of message elements and not on the environment in which the information is sent or received.1 As a necessary consequence, his solution divorced information from meaning, for meaningmaking sensitively depends on the operative context: one persons noise is anothers music (a phenomenon John Cage delighted in engaging). We begin our exploration, therefore, by interrogating how context might be reintegrated with information, thereby opening the possibility that meaning can re-enter the picture. The implications expand beyond the embedded brain/body and environment to the crucial role that narrative plays in the construction of a conscious self. Consciousness creates narrative, and narrative creates context. Is context limited, however, to being a latecomer that crashes the party only when consciousness is fully formed? We reject this notion in favor of seeing context as important at every level, including pre-conscious and indeed pre-cognitive processes.
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A key concept in framing context as multi-leveled has been articulated by Edward Fredkin (2007): the meaning of information is given by the processes that interpret it. In his example, an MP3 player gives a digital file meaning by interpreting it to produce music. We can extend the example by noting that this music (say, Beethovens Fifth Symphony) acquires new meanings when the complex sensory, perceptual and cognitive processes of a human listener interpret it. The example makes clear that specifying the contexts in which interpretation occurs poses a formidable problem. A neurophysiologist may concentrate on metabolic rates indicating which areas of the brain are active in processing the music; another researcher may focus on the sensory pathways by which neural messages reach the brain; a musicologist may evoke the conceptual, historical and technological contexts in which Beethoven composed his masterpiece. Rather than embracing this complexity, many influential theorists of meaning-making have simplified the problem by ignoring, for instance, that the contexts for different scales (say, the neuron or the history of European music) may not explain higher levels or reduce to lower ones. How are the different levels connected? One proposal is the autopoietic approach pioneered by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1991) as an alternative to Shannons theory. Autopoiesis gives a rich account of how a living system engages in processes that both create its organization and are created by it. The approach pays the price, however, of a correspondingly impoverished account of the systems interaction with the environment. In autopoietic theory, the living system is claimed to be informationally closed. Energy and matter can flow from the environment to the system and vice versa, but the environment merely triggers change within the organism; actual causal effects are determined solely by the systems organization, not by external events. The theory has its roots in a seminal article Maturana co-authored, What the Frogs Eye tells the Frogs Brain (Lettvin et al., 1959). Now a classic, the article demonstrated experimentally that sensory inputs are interpreted through the frogs neural structures, not through direct transmission of information from the environment to the frogs brain. Autopoietic theory thus emerged in the context of perception and cognitive processing, and here it makes sense. The assumption that systems are informationally closed, however, has been extended (notably by Niklas Luhmann) far beyond the original context of neural processing into situations where the founding premise is questionable. The shakiness of the closure assumption can easily be demonstrated. The assumption formulates a sharp distinction between matter and information (matter can interact directly with the system, information cannot). But in the case of a retrovirus that invades a cell and hijacks its replicating machinery to turn out copies of itself, the intrusion of matter/energy cannot be separated from the intrusion of information. Another example is Lynn Marguliss endosymbiotic theory (1970), according to which the symbiotic union of multiple prokaryotic cells resulted in the emergence of eukaryotic cells, with the symbionts becoming mitochondria. Here too the entry of matter into a system is inseparable from its informational machinery. While autopoietic theory reconnects context and information, then, the informational insularity of the system within the environment forestalls a nuanced account of the recursive embedding of contexts within contexts or the circulation of information among contexts. In his later work Varela, in collaboration with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, proposed a modified version of autopoietic theory called the enactive approach that
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unites autopoiesis, phenomenology and embodied dynamicism (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1992: 1415). This approach, while able to give a rich account of embodied cognition in action, assumes that each of the dynamically interacting systems already exists and does not explain how they evolve together. In our view the co-evolutionary dynamics of interacting systems is a crucial component of a theoretical framework capable of reuniting information and meaning, so the enactive approach is not adequate for this purpose. Recently Thompson (2007) has extended this work into a fruitful effort to connect more closely the phenomenological approach to the sciences of mind. Especially promising is his turn toward mind as embedded, noting it is embodied, requiring perception and motor action, and embedded in a sociocultural environment of symbolic cognition and technology. It is not bounded by the skull or skin but extends into the environment (Thompson, 2007: 7). To set the stage for a fuller consideration of the embedded model, we return therefore to Fredkins formulation that the meaning of information is given by the processes that interpret it, seeking to move outward from this formulation toward a framework that would allow contexts to be flexibly combined and embedded while simultaneously reintroducing meaning into the picture. Michel Serres in The Parasite (1982) provides a clue in his triad of sender, receiver and noise, which he parses as host, guest and parasite. The host provides an informational meal for the guest, but the parasite is always there to intervene and feed itself at their expense. Anthropomorphizing Shannons famous communication, Serres emphasizes the fluid transformation of one function into another. In another context, the host can become a guest, and the parasite can be hyper-parasited by another who converts what is noise for the parasite into a meal for itself. Serres summarizes: In the system, noise and message exchange roles according to the position of the observer and the action of the actor, but they are transformed into one another as well as a function of time and of the system. They make order and disorder (Serres, 1982: 66). Combining Serress insight with Fredkins formulation, we arrive at our first major point. Flexible, embedded, and constantly changing contexts of observers, actions, temporalities, and systems carry with them processes of interpretation that create meaning. Contexts are therefore essential in transforming the noise of the world into the ordered structures necessary for meaning-making. What constitutes a context? Contexts in our sense consist of embedded, heterarchical and interacting networks that mutually influence one another through recursive feedback loops.2 Embedded denotes that one context (or several) may be nestled inside another; heterarchical implies that feedback and feedforward loops may go from a larger to a smaller context as well as from a smaller to a larger; and interacting denotes that feedback loops carrying information circulate through the networks, constituting them as informational entities. Contexts therefore imply structure or rather multiple structures loosely coupled so that each network is distinguishable from others through its structural operations. At the same time, each network communicates with others through coupling mechanisms that translate between networks. A computer network, for example, operates through a protocol that determines when a message starts and ends, a feature enabling processes within the network to know how to interpret the information contained within the packet.3 In the case of a human plus a computer, the two systems connect through their coupled contexts. The computer, enacting commands embedded in
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layers of code, displays information on the screen; the humans processes interpret the screen display and create a different kind of meaning than the information had for the computer. This view of context has the advantage of acknowledging more specificity in the role of the observer than is the case with autopoietic theory. Many theorists who propose that living systems are informationally closed rely on an implicit or explicit observer to connect system and environment, a fact highlighted by Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana and others in the movement from first- to second-order cybernetics.4 The observer-centric models of second-order cybernetics presuppose that the observer creates a context in which the systems operation can be correlated with effects in the environment; for example, an observer notices that a cat jumps at a loud noise and inferentially constructs a causal connection. This observer, however, is himself or herself dislocated from context, functioning as an uninflected observer-function similar to the observer-function in the special theory of relativity, where the function could be carried out by a video camera or a clock as well as by a person. Whereas the observer in secondorder cybernetics simply knows, we offer a model that accounts for the linguistic, historical, cultural and technological contexts that make such knowing possible. The observer, in our model, does more than float in a sea of bits in need of sorting. The specificity of the observer is important because the observer is never just a function but an embodied person with a history, a biology and a particular way of seeing the world.5 If we were to attempt the impossible task of trying to imagine what the world would look like before patterns are constructed by living beings, it would certainly not have the order we normally perceive. To convey its indescribable richness, we have coined the term unmediated flux (Hayles, 1993), although this is only a gesture toward what by definition precedes and exceeds the realm of the symbolic. An analogy with mathematical theorist Gregory Chaitins work on pseudo-random numbers (2001) illuminates the relationship of the unmediated flux to embodied observers. Chaitin proved that as numbers draw closer to true randomness, the information they convey becomes more and more incompressible (by information here is meant the pattern that the numbers obey). For example, a data compression algorithm might reduce the size of a binary file by searching for redundancies or other patterns and replacing them with shorthand. However, a limit is reached when the number or in the case of our example, a binary file cannot be represented except by a copy of itself. At this point, pattern and noise become indistinguishable, for the pattern is so complex that it approaches noise, which signifies the absence of pattern. As a whole, the unmediated flux exceeds any pattern and chaos reigns. But from that fecund chaos one can extract an infinite number of patterns; precisely for this reason, no one pattern can represent the whole. For living beings, the contexts enabling the chaos of the unmediated flux to be perceived as patterns are constituted by embodied sensory-perceptual-cognitive network systems flexibly interacting with each other. Our interest here, however, is focused not on understanding these sensoryperceptualcognitive systems as such but rather on their interactions with the exterior interfaces through which biological networks (e.g. eyes and ears) are extended out into the world (an idea Marshall McLuhan [1964] pioneered when he called media extensions of man). Andy Clark (2008) expands on the concept by contrasting the view that cognition takes
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place only in the brain (a model he calls brainbound) with his proposal that human cognition extends throughout the body and into the environment, the extended model. He writes: According to extended, the actual local operations that realize certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feedforward, and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body, and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world (2008: xxxviii). He is careful to distinguish this view from a perspective that sees the external world as scaffolding for human cognition (as represented, for example, in the work of Edwin Hutchins). In a series of carefully constructed arguments, he justifies the extended model by showing what it allows us to see that competing models occlude. The shift of perspective implies that the boundaries between self and world are flexible, shifting and contingent, with the embodied brain/body less a clearly delineated entity than a component in a cognitive assemblage working across the inside/outside boundary.6 This view is compatible with the idea of heterarchical embedded contexts flexibly networked together. These networks can be located within the brain, between brain and body, and between brain/body and world. Like Clarks extended, the embedded context model allows us to see that boundaries are contingent, changing according to which contexts are referenced. In contrast to autopoietic theory, this model does not rely on a system/environment distinction to explain cognitive functioning. We can now state our next major point: contexts are not objects with properties or containers for information but rather complexly cross-linked frameworks of relations that loosely structure experience and knowledge. Patterns and meaning-making do not exist only inside individual brains but rather arise from the participation of embodied sensoryperceptual-cognitive biological systems in wider social and technical networks. As Katherine Nelson notes, the individual and the social world form an interdependent transactional system that is constantly in the process of self-organization. We can consider the elements of the system at any point in time, but only with the caveat that they are not in practice separable, that the context, especially the social context, is always part of the picture (Nelson, 2007: 41; emphases added). We now consider the roles of language and consciousness in meaning-making as they interact with contexts. As Keith Oatley observes, If our species is predominately social and depends for its being on mutuality and joint planning, we need to consider . . . the interface of language along with its conscious access to what we take to be our goals and plans, by which we arrange our lives with others (Oatley, 2007: 386). Terrence Deacons model (1998) for explaining the coevolution of language and the brain provides a productive entry into the issues. According to Deacons model, asking how linguistic contexts are formed and how they interact with embodied human sensoryperceptual-cognitive systems would be like asking how the basketball came to be and why it so perfectly fits the game. A misleading dichotomy is created when researchers ask whether the brain contains some special apparatus for language-processing (a univer` sal grammar a la Chomsky) or whether language imprints itself on the brain. Rather, language and the brain co-evolved together, each modifying and being modified by the other (Deacon, 1998: 10211). Language, in Deacons personification, took advantage of certain capacities of the early human brain, much as Serress parasite feeds on the meal provided by the host. The
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cortical host and language parasite then began a co-adapting process in which each modified the other to better suit itself. Grammar and syntax, Deacon writes, can be understood as the products of convergent social evolutionary trends, as spontaneous parallel adaptations of language structure to the unavoidable and ubiquitous limitations and biases provided by human brains. . . . Languages have adapted to human brains and human brains have adapted to language (Deacon, 1998: 122). We slightly modify this formulation by pointing out that the co-adaptive process does not exclude other influences from interacting with brain and language. Language as a medium of communication need not have been determined solely by structures in the brain or by the desire to transmit pre-existing ideas. Similarly, the brain was not completely rewired to make it suitable for language and symbolic thinking. Rather, the biological structures that make symbolic content possible co-evolved with content, with both interacting to help codetermine each other while remaining open to the influences of other contexts. Integrated with our previous comments, this model brings us to our next major point: consciousness and language are coupled together in spiraling co-evolutionary processes. Consequently, consciousness should be understood as processes enacted within flexible and changing networks of relations created by internal and external contexts coupled together rather than as distinct, autonomous system with their own structures and procedures. Consciousness can function effectively as a maker of patterns from the noise of the unmediated flux because it has been intimately involved in the creation of language and other mechanisms by which that task is accomplished. We introduce media into this picture by noting Bernard Siegerts (2008) suggestion that media are apparatuses that convert noise into (human-recognizable) patterns. In this view, media amplify and extend the operations of biological networks on the unmediated flux. Language, the brains co-evolutionary partner in developing cognitive capacities, operates like media in that it too operates to convert noise into pattern. We have already seen that the extended model subverts clear delineations between inside and outside and renders contingent the distinction between brain/body and world. Following a similar train of thought, media theorists Bernadette Wegenstein (2006) and Mark Hansen (2006) have argued that the distinctions between media as technologies external to the embodied brain/body are similarly flexible and contingent. As Wegenstein points out, the body has a long history of being constructed either as fragments (the body in pieces) or as a holistic unity. In the 20th century, she argues, these two views have in a sense converged in the realization that both views of the body require media for their persuasive force. The deconstruction of a natural body, fragmented or holistic, gave way to a view of the body as a product of mediation. The next step is to see the body itself as media, both in the sense that it mediates the world through its sensory-perceptual inputs, and that it cannot be accessed except through mediation. Like the extended model, this perspective deconstructs the boundary between internal cognition and external world, now specifically by seeing both as produced by media. In conversation with these philosophic and discursive contexts, we propose the view that language is the most naturalized of media technologies. It may seem odd to place language in a category that typically includes radio and television, but, like them, language participates in creating patterns from noise. The long time span during which language and the brain have been co-evolving makes language seem more natural and
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less artificial than other media technologies, which have been around only long enough to affect human brains on an ontogenic rather than a phylogenetic basis (Hayles, 2007). Computers, for example, are not integrated into human physiology in the same way that the larynx is (there is, however, compelling evidence that implants and explants may affect the neural structures of individual people7). Language, like technologies conventionally considered media, operates within the networks linking body/brain to the environment, while simultaneously making the body/environment distinction operational through its discursive formations. Language is thus paradoxically positioned as the naturalized technology crucial to constructing an inside/outside distinction, deeply influencing the brains interior processing while itself operating across this binary. Implicated in brain morphology and function, language also performs the media function of extending into the environment the embodied brains/bodys capacity to convert noise into pattern. This paradoxical position is everywhere apparent in theories about languages effects. Philosophers of mind often equate language with thought and wonder if thought is possible without it. Discourse analysts, by contrast, focus on language as an external medium of communication. Deacon appears to split the difference. While establishing language and brain as co-evolving interlinked entities, he still imagines them as distinct objects and does not concern himself with language as a process that connects the brain with the external world. He asks the reader to imagine language as an independent life form that colonizes and parasitizes human brains, using them to reproduce (Deacon, 1998: 111). Though he admits the conceit of the metaphor, he wants to underscore that language has its own structure and so positions it as an external entity (a parasite) that has invaded the brain. Our perspective is not to resolve or deny the paradox but rather to use it to position language as a liminal case of media technology. This view is consistent with the media theories of McLuhan and Serres, who consider the medium as an active shaper rather than a passive transmitter of messages. Media construct and embody structural relations through which patterns emerge; in essence, they are transducers of noise. Now, however, we can see these structural relations as operating through co-evolved feedback loops circulating between language and embodied sensory-perceptual-cognitive processes, so that language, brain/body and extra-organismic media participate in flexible networks that contingently shape the local contexts in which meaning-making occurs. In sum, then, media evolve along a spectrum in which they are more or less tightly integrated with the embodied processes that create patterns from the unmediated flux, with language at the more end and technical media such as the scanning tunneling microscope at the less end. This framework allows us to explain variations in media complexity and visibility by categorizing them according to the ways in which they cooperate with embodied human sensory-perceptual-cognitive networks. Moreover, the feedback loops circulating within and between media and embodied observers are highly recursive; for example, between print media and the tightly integrated operations of language, as when a reader is hallucinating (Kittler, 1997: 40) the voice of a text inside her head. The recursive loops set up in media-rich environments join external objects with internal processes, while also allowing objects to be named as such and thus figured as external entities. This situation appears paradoxical precisely to the degree that one adheres to the conceit that things are stable objects communicating with each other
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through a similarly distinct medium. Conversely, when a framework of recursive interactions is understood as the context for meaning-making, the paradox disappears, replaced by a view of multiple processes of interpretation dynamically interacting within and without the embodied brain/body. Serres tackles a similar problem toward the end of The Parasite when he has reached the point that the triad of guest, host and parasite ceases to be productive in the absence of one or two of its members. Serress quasi-object and quasisubject spill across the strict boundaries distinguishing object from subject. The basketball and the game previously mentioned in our discussion of Deacon have not only co-evolved together but also exist as such because human subjects have created and named them. Through a recursive feedback loop, the basketball and the game redefine the human subject as a player in the game. As Serres comments, The quasi-object is not an object, but it is nevertheless, since it is not a subject, since it is in the world; it is also a subject, since it marks or designates a subject who without it would not be a subject (Serres, 1982: 225). Turning to narrative, we focus here on its ability to catalyze feedback loops between inside and outside, both within the diegetic level of the text and between text and reader. As Joseph Tabbi argues in Cognitive Fictions (2002), narrative can initiate a recursive re-entry of a symbolic structure into itself, allowing the structure to be subsumed within another structure: the self-aware, conscious observer who is trying to expand the symbolic structure. The belief in isolated objects and subjects, reinforced by abstract formal structures such as the grammatical cases of the nominative and objective, fails to capture the richness of the recursive processes through which such categories are generated and maintained. The theoretical framework of flexibly coupled networks recursively embedded in heterarchical contexts and operating to construct patterns from noise allows for a more inclusive understanding of how embodied brain/body, language and media dynamically co-evolve and co-determine each other. Meaning-making is constituted through these synergies.

Context and Narrative

We now consider the medium of print texts, which provides a rich testing ground for seeing how the framework developed above may account for processes of meaningmaking in general, and narrative texts in particular. Compelling evidence indicates that narrative plays a crucial role in early childhood development and continues to be centrally important in the complex tasks of socialization through adulthood, as Jerome Bruner (1992) among others has persuasively demonstrated. Katherine Nelson, working from a complex systems perspective that treats consciousness as an ongoing selforganizing developing system (Nelson, 2003: 18; original emphases), argues that narrative is the stimulus catalyzing a new emergent phase of consciousness in early childhood. While a sense of self typically develops between 1 and 3 years old, Nelson argues that at this point the young childs view is singular there is only one perspective on the world, his or her own. There is only one reality, that of the directly experienced world (ibid.: 27). Similarly, time exists as a simple dichotomy between the present and the nonpresent (ibid.: 29). Consequently, the very young child lives in isolation from other
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times and other worlds of experience (ibid.). She continues: Piaget calls this egocentrism, but it is an egocentrism that simply lacks perspective because there is no possible alternative view but ones own. There are no insights into anothers life because there is no vehicle except shared actions through which experience can be shared (ibid.). Narrative, with its complex treatment of temporalities and perspectives, is a primary means by which the childs developing consciousness reorganizes at a higher level of complexity, resulting in the awareness that there are different perspectives on the world, different specific pasts, and different specific futures (ibid.: 32). Although the role of complex temporality is underdeveloped in Nelsons analysis, a simple extrapolation shows how it relates to the emerging awareness of different perspectives. Envisioning others as different from oneself is a first step toward seeing oneself as having the possibility of developing in different directions, that is, of becoming different people depending on how future events unfold. When narratives are constructed in print texts, they typically make extensive use of not only different perspectives but also embedded, differentially related chronologies. When past is enfolded into future, future into present, and present into past through such typical narrative techniques as prolepsis (foreshadowing), analepsis (flashback), and other figures of complex temporalities, subjectivity ceases to be singular and proliferates into dynamically evolving interrelated possibilities. Although narrative is frequently treated in linguistic analysis through made-up sentences and isolated fragments, in literary fiction narrative generally comprises a complete story, not merely single or paired sentences. Catherine Emmott observes that a full-length text is not just longer, it often has additional layers of structure which merit study in their own right, emphasizing that narrative [should be] seen not just as a sequence of events but as events in context. . . . [I]t is not simply a question of readers establishing a causal link between two adjacent sentences, but of connecting each new sentence with the global representation of the text (Emmott, 1997: 18). She cites research in psychology experiments that show readers not only draw on general knowledge to interpret texts but frequently do not distinguish sharply between what is actually printed in the text and what they have inferred (ibid.: 26). The interplay between stored knowledge and the text seems . . . to be a natural part of reading, Emmott observes (ibid.). The blurring between inference and textual representation can easily occur, we conjecture, because the reader constructs and navigates globalized representations of the fictional world complete with places, events, characters, and other information just as he or she would integrate and interpret the experiences of daily life. This model of reading presumes that embodied sensory-perceptual-cognitive processes of interpretation can be coupled in complex fashion with linguistic contexts created by decoding the text, with multiple recursive loops operating between memory, experience and the mental construction of an imagined fictional world. As Emmott observes, responding to language is not just a matter of decoding individual words and applying rules to understand syntactic structures. Just as speech involves relating utterances to a real-world context, so narrative sentences need to be viewed in relation to mentally represented contexts created from the texts themselves (ibid.: 58). Often these contexts are recursive, as we have seen. Recursive processes also play a central role in cognitive science; for example, in P. D. Zelazos proposal (2001; Zelazo
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and Summerville, 2004) that successive levels of recursion correlate with the development of successive levels of consciousness. From this perspective, novels both create and express the complex feedback loops characteristic of fully developed adult consciousness. Moreover, the ways in which these recursive cycles are represented vary through epochs and cultures. As is widely recognized in anthropological studies, stories and narratives are culturally important practices through which the subjects self-knowing becomes formed in culturally and historically specific ways. Print literary narratives are especially well suited to study how embedded and flexibly coupled contexts work together with processes of interpretation to create meaning because these recursive couplings are often represented within the texts themselves. In a lovely phrase, Keith Oatley calls literary narrative a workshop of the mind (Oatley, 2007: 397). A literary work may show the processes at work within the characters, and we understand them because similar processes are at work in the contexts that couple our sensory-perceptual-cognitive processes with the book. The recursive loops that bind together internal and external processes may also be represented within the texts. Thus a mise en abyme is created in which the characters knowing that he knows (that he knows . . . ) mirrors similar processes in the readers mind as she decodes the text and comes to see in the characters recursive thoughts a mirror of her own. Literary narratives do more than mirror cultural narratives, however; they also contest them. One technique is to break the transparency of received views by disrupting the deep connections between recursive loops and textual contexts. These connections normally operate so smoothly that we do not notice them. However, in texts where the represented contexts are wrenched from normal environments and consequently distanced from the recursive loops connecting internal processes to external media through the naturalized technology of language, the ongoing project of creating pattern from noise becomes especially problematic and hence highly visible. In Stanislaw Lems His Masters Voice (1999), the disconnect takes the form of a message sent by an alien civilization, of unknown origin, intent and materiality. Because all assumptions about the message are necessarily tentative, normal contexts for interpretive processes are disrupted and then painfully reconstructed along a string of increasingly tenuous hypotheses. In Joseph McElroys Plus (1977), the narrative voice issues from a brain that has been excised from the body and put into a space capsule, where the brain begins mutating and merging with the chloroplasts that provide energy for the system. The result is an estranged language that is only partially legible. As the reader struggles to imagine and reconstruct a context for the narrative utterances, she becomes acutely aware of how important assumed contexts are to the normal meaning-making process. The two texts create an interesting juxtaposition because of the parallel ways in which they perform disruptions. In His Masters Voice, patterns are difficult to construct because the environment from which the messages emanate is unknown; in Plus, a parallel difficulty occurs because the internal sensory-perceptual-cognitive processes have been transformed radically. Whether the disturbance comes from an estranged environment or estranged biology, the texts converge in their representations of consciousnesss dependence on flexibly coupled networks that engage in meaningmaking through embodied processes operating within multiply embedded contexts.
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His Masters Voice: Message as Noise

Stanislaw Lems novel His Masters Voice (Gos pana) places mathematician protagonist Peter E. Hogarth, (and the reader) at the receiving end of a letter from the stars that has no grounding in any human experience. Transmitted through neutrino radiation and only accidentally discovered, the letter reveals itself as a message rather than noise because it repeats after a fixed length of time. Scientists and the military scrupulously examine the message, dubbed His Masters Voice (HMV), translating the letter into binary code and commencing with a decryption program. Hogarth, a gifted mathematician, plays a key role in discerning constraints in the message. Despite his contributions, every attempt by the researchers to filter the message through familiar media and methods partially fails, so that the goal eventually becomes trying to push beyond the limits of the given symbolic system. Paralleling the inscrutability of the letter, the novel makes the reader intensely aware of the various frames through which Hogarths narrative passes: first through his autobiographical recounting, and then through the posthumous editor of the manuscript. These multiple frames make the novel similar to the letter from the stars by introducing indeterminable uncertainties. Whereas the noisy text we read introduces uncertainty by a proliferation of networked contexts, the letter catalyzes uncertainty by having no known context, a mystery that in turn leads to proliferating hypotheses about its origin. The opening Editors Note announces the works mediated nature; he presents, he says, an edited version of the autobiography Hogarth wrote and suppressed at the end of his life. The reader does not begin, then, by delving into the unmediated manuscript of the mathematician as he writes his recollection; rather, the illusion of such direct apprehension is shattered at the outset. Yet another mediated context is created by Hogarths preface. He advises the reader that in speaking of himself he must begin with some context; I must choose some frame of reference; let this be the recent biography of me (Lem, 1999[1968]: 3). The frames then multiply like the layers of a Russian doll. From the beginning, then, Lems novel reminds the reader that Hogarths struggle to represent himself and the editors struggle to offer that representation rely on contexts that are partial and non-congruent with one another. Recursive cycling between and through these multiple frames is used not to connect a knowing subject (character and reader) with his or her culture but rather to problematize the feedback loops connecting self to other. Central to the disruptive effect is the complete lack of knowledge about the context from which the message was sent. Without an assumption of an Other more or less like the self, the recursive loops cannot connect inside to outside but rather become an extreme form of self-reflexivity, as when someone finds herself or himself reproduced to infinity by facing mirrors. Appropriately, the letter from the stars was first declared noise. Astronomers using a new radio telescope to scan the heavens for neutrino radiation record what they believe to be pure noise (Lem, 1999[1968]: 37), interspersed with occasional silences. A hack physicist named Swanson disreputably acquires the tapes and uses them to generate random number tables on the cheap. To complicate matters further, a statistician conducting market research notices that a large section of allegedly pure noise exactly repeats a portion of another volume and sues Swanson. Reading a newspaper article about the
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ensuing legal battle, Dr Rappaport, a scientist familiar with information theory, wonders if the repetitions imply a pattern. This is precisely the essence of noise, that the order of appearance of its elements . . . is unforeseeable. If, however, the series repeats itself, it proves that the noise quality of the phenomenon is superficial, that in fact we have before us a transmitter acting as a channel of information (ibid.: 40). The neutrino radiation, then, is a message and not simply random static. It could be mistaken for such because it is so densely coded that it has close to zero redundancy. Like Chaitins pseudo-random numbers and the chaotic fecundity of the unmediated flux, the transmissions very dense patterns approach the limit of noise. Faced with a context of no context, the scientists of HMV must confront their utter lack of any rubric or grammar for this alien cipher system. Since the Senders have not sent an introduction, a grammar, or a dictionary, the letter does not fit any existing theories about communicating with an alien civilization (Lem, 1999[1968]: 734). Hogarth concedes that the only way to confront such a message is with trial and error, because unlike trying to translate a simple telegram message such as GRANDMOTHER DEAD FUNERAL WEDNESDAY (Lem, 1999[1968]: 74), there is no existing symbolic structure to signify what the terms mean. The telegram would be intelligible across a range of cultures because nearly all human communities reproduce sexually, experience death and practise burial rituals. The species sending the letter might have none of these attributes; even the supposition that the Senders are a biological species is a mere assumption. One of the few facts determined about the letter is the discovery of its biophilic properties. The radiation transmitting the message catalyzes the production of large protein molecules and therefore increases the probability that life will evolve. The transmission thus promotes the development of the very life-forms that may eventually discover the message and endeavor to understand it. The transmission, itself a medium of communication, performs like language in straddling the inside/outside binary, and operates through evolution to catalyze cognitive properties while at the same time serving as an exterior object of knowledge for such highly evolved cognizers as humans. This deconstruction of the inside/outside binary does not, however, settle the questions raised by the letters profound ambiguities. The quest to determine objectively whether the message from the stars is indeed a message and to decode its contents must fail, for the attempts will yield only what our symbolic systems can comprehend. By implication, the elaborate layers of textual conventions and embedded contexts of discovery reveal not the meaning of the message but rather the importance of contexts to meaning-making. In this sense, the text acts as a test case for the model we have proposed, showing both its usefulness as an interpretive framework and the ultimate undecidability of meaning when contexts are unknowable.

Plus: Noise as Message

The narrator of Joseph McElroys experimental fiction speaks a language only partially of the human world. The narrative voice issues from a brain that has been extracted from a fatally ill body, enmeshed with a life-support system that includes chloroplasts for photosynthesis, and blasted into space encased in a capsule to become Imp Plus, the
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Interplanetary Monitoring Platform Plus what? At first a brain, and eventually a knowing subject, Cap Com communicates with the brain through implanted electrodes and monitors its activities through telemetry devices. Unbeknown to Cap Com, however, the brain begins mutating and growing, eventually achieving the ability to control its own growth, metabolism and motion. The narrative prose, a combination of indirect and free indirect discourse from inside Imp Pluss mind, as Christine Brooke-Rose (1981) has shown, is full of questions the voice asks itself, words or phrases whose denotations it can no longer remember. Conversely, it also invents words with denotations at which we can only guess. The divergence between the narrative prose and ordinary language usage hints at a more profound disjunction. Dim Echo, which Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint (2007) interpret as the limbic monitoring system, has been coopted by Cap Com to serve as a respondent surveilling and reporting on the brains state. By contrast, the narrative voice appears to emerge directly from the language capacities of the brain (Bould and Vint identify this voice with the thalamocortical system, but it functions in the novel as an emergent consciousness). The voice can monitor the Dim Echo and eventually achieves control over it, but it is not itself a fully enculturated subjectivity. Rather, it draws on memories of previous experiences to create analogies with present reality. Its acts of naming alternate between observations of what is happening in the estranged circumstances of the capsule and memory flashes that do not so much narrate the back-story as gesture toward it. A beloved woman whose laughter caused shivers down the spine; an anonymous woman with whom the brain donor is allowed a last weekend by the sea; a child skipping away while the donor talks with a blind news vendor from such glimpses we construct a back-story of a terminally ill man who chooses to become the brain in the capsule rather than undergo the simpler fate of dying. The narrating voice emerges, then, between two contexts one the human world of love, choices and death; the other a posthuman existence in which acts of naming have a necessarily estranged relation to the putative reality in which the brain lives. Shearows, morphogen-knobs, faldoreams and Sunbraids name structures (or perhaps experiences) alien to embodied humans. The contrast between a normal human worldview and a brains evolving sense of itself is dramatized in communications between Cap Com and the narrating voice. A Concentration Loop has been installed that allows the Dim Echo to talk with Ground, but the narrating voice has learned to appropriate the loop to create its own interior monologue. The concentration loop gradually becomes the narrative center through which the emerging consciousness routes its thoughts and words. According to Keith Oatleys theory of narrative and consciousness, normal consciousness also emerges through a narrative center, but its extensions differ radically from the contexts that surround the brain in Plus. Plus can thus be understood as an experiment in thinking how subjectivity would change if its cognitive networks were utterly changed. Whereas the brainbound model might assume that the legendary brain-in-a-vat would be largely unaffected by such disruptions, the opposing extended models assumptions imply that if the networks connecting inside and outside change, so too would cognitive processing. Plus takes this premise to the extreme, implicating brain morphology as well as language. Unlike conventionally conscious subjects, the brain called Imp Plus senses its neural and metabolic actions in more direct ways than embodied humans can, and its internal
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monologue articulates these evolving processes, creating a kind of posthuman Bildungsroman. As Salvatore Proietti (2004) puts it, the novel tries to enact what being posthuman might be like. The narrative development is not toward a more self-aware subjectivity in a conventional sense, however, but rather focuses on the brains growing sense of its power to act. A breakthrough comes when the brain, having grown to the limits of the capsules small space and in danger of crowding itself to death, realizes that not only could he think his own growth, he must (Proietti, 2004: 138). Evolution is now not simply something that happens to it but something it controls. In a final burst of self-controlled evolution, the brain transforms into a hybrid self-organizing bio-system that vaults beyond language, sensing simultaneities too dense to be expressed in languages sequential linearity. More than brain, more than body, other than either (ibid.: 211) is its selfarticulation as it names itself the lattice (ibid.: 212). At this point the reader realizes that the texts linguistic representations are only a small portion of the bio-systems information flow. Beyond the messages we read lies an ocean of unrepresentable noise, too excessive to be captured in our symbolic system. Notwithstanding its control of its evolution and the simultaneity of its multiple parallel thoughts, the lattices power to interact with the outside world is severely circumscribed, limited to the space of the capsules interior and its communications with Ground. What possible future can it have? The options are to bounce off the earths atmosphere and plunge back into outer space; to reenter the atmosphere and be captured by Ground, where it would presumably astonish its interlocutors and endure endless testing; or to burn up on reentry, in effect committing suicide. As for the lattice, it conceptualizes its communication with the one human who can understand and sympathize with its desire as a final obstacle to self-knowledge: The lattice dipped pale and still and contained what it yet might not wholly have: an idea of itself: itself not wholly selfpossessed, for a power of it beamed to and fro from Earth, a line-thin loop of particles so fine they gave back sight to the Sun (Proietti, 2004: 215). Breaking this contact at the moment of its death, the lattice presumably comes to know itself as a (posthuman) subject only when its context no longer is tethered to the contexts in which human meaning-making takes place. The final ambiguity turns on whether this non-human Other had self-knowledge, agency and desire. When the Acrid Voice the character who comes closest to grasping what the lattice might have become finds himself unable to decide if Imp Plus has committed suicide, the text suggests that the only way in which the noise of the lattices message can be brought into human meaning is as a question, a wondering, and thereby as an implicit urge to circumscribe the noise of an alien context within the limitations of human symbolic systems. In Plus and His Masters Voice, the alien contexts remain largely outside the realm of representation, gestured toward rather than articulated by the linear sequentiality of the texts language. Meanings of the letter and the lattices thoughts remain elusive, for their contexts lie outside normal human communication. The framework we have proposed here, of sensory-perceptual-cognitive networks flexibly coupled together and extended into the environment through linguistic and media networks, functions at many scales and locations through processes that give meaning to information by their interpretive activities. Each of these loci implies a context that makes interpretation meaningful. Information and meaning are not joined homogeneously or all at one place;
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rather, meaning-making is fractally complex, occurring at cellular and sub-cellular locations all the way up to consciousness and beyond. Information may have the patterns that Shannon theorized as probability functions, but patterns alone do not create meaning. For that, human (and non-human) embodied processes and local contexts are necessary. Narratives are sometimes used to convey morals, but complex literary narratives such as those discussed here are not easily recuperated back into a cultures received views. They do not so much articulate meaning as go in search of it. Through their multiple recursivities and disrupted contexts, they reveal that our theories of consciousness are historically and culturally specific. Their contribution to the history of consciousness is not to duplicate what researchers already know or to take sides with one theory against another. Rather, in their workshops of the mind, they challenge us to stretch toward an outside as yet unthought, figuring human consciousness as a contextually dependent island floating in a sea of noise, which may nevertheless be indistinguishable from the densest possible meanings. Notes
1. See Weavers introductory essay, Some Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, particularly pp. 810, and Shannons introduction (Shannon, 1998: 31) to The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon and Weaver, 1998). 2. For a more extensive explanation of these concepts, see Hayles (2005). 3. Alexander Galloway in Protocol (2004) puts the emphasis on the protocols necessary for the circulation of information through networks. 4. See, for example, H. von Foerster (1981). 5. This point has been made by Donna Haraway (1988) and Sandra Harding (1986), among others. 6. The phrasing here alludes to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). There is considerable overlap between Clarks model and their idea of the rhizomatic assemblage. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari employ a performative rhetoric difficult (or impossible) to reconcile with scientific knowledge formations about biological life, Clarks arguments are much more empirically grounded. 7. The literature on implants that change neural function is substantial. See, for example, Leigh Hochberg et al. (2006).

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Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dennett, D. (1992) Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA: Back Bay Books. Emmott, C. (1997) Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Fredkin, E. (2007) Informatics and Information Processing vs. Mathematics and Physics, presentation at the Institute for Creative Technologies, Marina Del Ray, CA, 25 May. Galloway, A. R. (2004) Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hansen, M. B. N. (2006) Foreword, in B. Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. ixxvii. Haraway, D. (1988) The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies 14(3): 57599. Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hayles, N. K. (1993[1991]) Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation, in G. Levine (ed.) Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 2743. Hayles, N. K. (2005) My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2007) Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes, Profession 2007: 1827. Hochberg, L., Serruya, M. D., Friehs, G. M., Mukand, J. A., Saleh, M., Caplan, A. H., Banner, A., Chen, D., Penn, R. D. and Donoghue, J. P. (2006) Neuronal Ensemble Control of Prosthetic Devices by a Human with Tetraplegia, Nature 442 (13 July): 16471. Kittler, F. A. (1997) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, in J. Johnston (ed.) Literature, Media, Information Systems. Amsterdam: G B Arts International. Lem, S. (1999[1968]) His Masters Voice, trans. M. Kandel. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Lettvin, J. Y., Maturana, H. R., McCulloch, W. S. and Pitts, W. H. (1959) What the Frogs Eye tells the Frogs Brain, Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 47(11): 194059. Margulis, L. (1970) Origin of Eukaryotic Cells. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. J. (1991) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. New York and Berlin: Springer. McElroy, J. (1976) Plus. New York: Knopf. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill. Minsky, M. (1988) Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Minsky, M. (2007) The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Nelson, K. (2003) Narrative and the Emergence of a Consciousness, in G. D. Fireman, T. E. McVay Jr and O. J. Flanagan (eds) Narrative and Conciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1736. Nelson, K. (2007) Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 147

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Biographical Notes
N. Katherine Hayles is Professor of Literature at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Her research focuses on the relations between science, technology and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her most recent book is Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). James J. Pulizzi is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. His research focuses on the implications of new media, media theory and narrative theory for theories of consciousness.

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