representations

I, like many of you, appreciated the relief from Deleuze and Guattari this week with Langlois’ somewhat clearer dissertation. The text helped me understand the implications of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory, especially in terms of the layers of transmission and representation that Langlois discusses in a section some of you have pointed to. She writes, “The question of layers,
then, concerns not only the protocols that are used for ensuring communication between computers, but also requires a consideration of the ways in which technical elements participate in the construction of representations, that is, the ways in which they enable specific practices of meaning-making” (47). I try to bear this project in mind when going through her engagement with D&G.

Langlois echoes many of the difficult distinctions between terms that D&G offer throughout A Thousand Plateaus and I find her overview of Glossematics almost as tough as their text to parse, but this quote from ATP is an avenue into her content/expression discussion: “Precisely because content, like expression, has form of its own, one can never assign the form of expression the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corresponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity” (86). Overly simply, it seems to me that this distinction forms the crux of Langlois’ argument for the irreducibility of the layer of representation, which combats the supposed transparency of the layer of transmission.

I also read Langlois through N. Katherine Hayles’ emphasis on embodiment in understandings of information technologies. I think that Langlois stakes out a wary position between the excessive application of that principle of embodiment and a disregard for the materiality of transmission. She avoids, for instance, Kittler’s reduction of software to “signifiers of voltage differences” (43) as well as cybernetics’ black box conception of information transmission. She takes a self-conscious position against both “technological determinism [and] social constructionism” (20). These ideas are somewhat general and I appreciate Langlois’ application of her theory to specific examples.