rejecting binaries

For my post, I wanted to focus on Hayles’ writing about the Flickering Signifier and the historical trend to move away from presence/absence to pattern/randomness.

I really liked Hayles’ skeuomorph in bringing code and cybernetics into the realm of structural and psychoanalytic linguistics by distinguishing Lacan’s floating signifiers to today’s more appropriate “flickering” signifiers. The fact that a signifier “can no longer be understood as a single marker” is incredibly impacting, and not just to the realm of informatics.

However, I believe that her argument that flickering signifiers is an example of how we are progressing from presence/absence to pattern/randomness is very problematic.

The argument that we cannot know information without uncertainty, presence with absence, and pattern without randomness is a binary teleology that, I believe, is regressive when dealing with the multiplicity and complexities of “third-wave” cybernetics and code as language. The fact that we are still using negative relationships (pattern is pattern because it is not randomness) entrenches Hayles’ argument in a geminated world. I find it hard to see then where multiple levels and parallels, which are necessary for this flickering signifier, can exist if everything is still being reduced to a yin and a yang.

I do believe that she tries to flesh out her ideas more by introducing the concepts of “mutation” for presence/randomness and “castration” for presence/absence. I wish she would have expanded more on this as I found her attempts to correlate mutation to castration very hard to follow/problematic and the way she described mutation often sounded like it was the same thing as randomness. I do believe that it is this third factor, not the noise entering the system, but the actual entrance of noise into the system where these multiplicities are created. I think that instead of trying to understand something by seeing what it is not, we she focus in on where the 1 and 0 converge and enter into each other- that is the “catastrophe” where signifiers become signifieds and randomness evolves into pattern.