| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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When I probe the language by which my computer tells me that the information it can offer is unstable, I notice that, unlike most people, it is content with whatever it currently knows. There are no “programmes” for (“self ”) improvement in its significational universe. Its idea of heaven seems to be the status quo.
When its arcane writ begins to degrade and it tells me that certain blocks or gaps of information are repairable to some degree, I am not to be told what will be lost, but must follow those prompts it pre-selects for me if I am to remain connected. Obedience is presented as its own reward. Nothing is to be offered beyond the satisfaction of toeing some gnomic electronic line. If I want those damaged goods my machine is able to deliver, I must surrender my freedom to choose what information I keep, and what, by a fiat whose processes are hidden from me, I must resign.
These instructions handed down as though from some virtual Sinai strip me of a crucial aspect of my power to imagine solutions apart from those provided. Insofar as I comply with its strictures, a mere heap of silicon chips and flashing lights renders me less than the self I feel I am when selecting freely from a range of options not limited by someone else’s design.
There are questions about our reading of texts which parallel those raised by the software’s dictates. Are my anticipations of discovery also to some degree limited by decisions already made for me? To what extent are the meanings I find in a text directed by programmes, opinions, and discussions already implanted? What assurance can I find that I am not essentially a being over-written, homo inscriptus? Perhaps I only imagine I am a man and not a series of responses moving over a mouse pad.
A measure of confidence returns with reflection on these matters. Subsequently, I begin to see a value in the irritation provoked by the machine’s pre-programmed dogmatism. I observe that I draw back up into some more secure requirement that the self take possession of the territory which belongs to it when I question the status and availability of the information offered to me. I am persuaded that just asking this question puts me outside the frame of options represented by any given language, whatever form this might take, whether it be computer or bureaucratic or literary-critical.