the gap between the symbolic and the real

I would like to address the question, what is at stake in the disembodiment of information, especially with reference to Godel's and Turing's incompleteness results? In particular, I'd like to talk about reflexivity and the decontextualized idea of communication introduced by Derrida, as it relates to the methodology and consequences of the incompleteness result. I'll address the idea of symbolic machines driving symbolic systems and physical machines operating in the physical world and the discrepancies introduced by imagining one as perfectly explained by the other.

Using the structures opened up by this question, I'd like to question the cultural archetype of the hacker, persons supposed to possess deep control over symbolic systems. I will show that hackers as mythologized (as sorcerers and gods, in particular) are impossible outside of a world determined by symbolic rather than physical systems. With reference to Sadie Plant I'd like to examine the hacker as a fundamentally feminine figure and demonstrate that the only hackers who might approach the godlike mythologized power are those who manipulate the physical machine of reality by creating in the real world and giving birth. I will then reframe Derrida's move to decontextualize discourse as a reembodiment rather disembodiment of discourse.

I want to show that the distance between the symbolic and the real is as great as the difference between the cardinality of the integers and the cardinality of the real numbers, and to show that the incompleteness of mathematics directly reflects the incompleteness all symbolic discourse.

I also would like to talk about the way communication networks amplify the approximations made by each of their nodes. In other words, if all nodes are embodied but imagining themselves as disembodied symbolic systems, the feedback created by the amplified slippage between real and symbolic works to remove the discourse proliferating through the network from the realm of embodiment.

I could point out efforts by situationists, dadaists, zen buddhism, and other movements to react to the slowly self-removing discourse of the network by anchoring themselves in the real through spontaneity and refusal to self-encode. I could trace the idea of the hacker/god as enlightened and removed from the physicality of the world as a fantasy about reconnecting the symbolic with the real, as a fantasy that explains the symbol-ward drift as a quest for control of the physical machine by humans. I could address the crises throughout fields of thought as they discovered unknowability and the inconsistencies that arise through symbolification.