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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 19 2008, 3:53 PM EDT (current) | LitPeejster | 1 word added, 1 word deleted |
| Mar 19 2008, 3:52 PM EDT | LitPeejster |
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| SPOILER WARNING: Significant story details below. |
"These are difficult times, sir."
"All the more reason to assure some stability during the new Administration's transition period."
"I fully concur," Oscar riposted at once. "Continuity, and a firm hand in the lab's administration, would be extremely helpful now. Prudence. Nothing hasty."
Nakamura nodded reflexively, then frowned. For a moment, Oscar thought he had overdone it. Nakamura had twenty years of recorded public appearances in the federal files. Oscar had taken the trouble to have the man's speech patterns analyzed, ranked, and sorted. Nakamura was especially fond of the terms "prudence" and "continuity," with "helpful" and "a firm hand" on strong upward trends lately. Verbally mimicking Nakamura was a cheap net-trick, but like most such tricks, it usually worked.[1]
One of the main endeavors of this project is to observe the results of deploying technologies referenced in Distraction. Of course, a certain reflexivity already arises from the awareness that the very act of tracing a recurring word like "doable" - even with pre-computer technologies - evokes the same sense of alternating curiosity and embarrassment associated with the "cheap net-trick" Oscar Valparaiso uses to "read" his interlocutor, a longtime Senate Science Committee staffer known only as "Mr. Nakamura" (160-175).
Whatever controversies attend the use of literary computing for data mining of the rarefied aesthetic literary work, they ultimately cannot squelch a critic's curiosity over whatever kernel of insight might emerge from this "cheap computational trick," particularly in a theoretical environment already open to the idea of the "technohuman hybrid" reader who, as a human immersed in computer technologies, cannot help but read with a fraught, yet synergistic biological/computational intellect (Hayles 59).[2]
While an analysis of the full text ofDistraction offers a wealth of possibilities, in the interest of time and fair use our data mining has focused on one episode from the novel, where Oscar Valparaiso visits Senate Science Committee staff in-person in Washington, DC - during which Oscar performs his "cheap net-trick" (160-175). Originally plans included analysis and presentation through the Valence script developed from processing by Ben Fry; time constraints have temporarily diverted the analysis through the freeware version of analysis application Tropes. Salient and surprising observations from the texual analysis appear below:
The Tropes analysis of text style returns "style rather enunciative," "setting: in the real," "setting, involving with I" and "some notions of doubt has [sic] been detected" [fig 1]. "Enunciative" style, according to the support documentation, involves "setting some influence, or revealing a point of view." The verbal settings "in the real" (use of simple past tense), the use of "I," and the expression of doubt all reveal an intriguing rhetorical stance - an attempt to persuade from the appearance of shared recognition of an "objective" reality. But because this analysis includes the entire text of the section - the character dialogue has not been isolated for analysis - description and narration inform this analysis as well. While not performed, a breakdown of style along the lines of narrative and dialogue - or even the isolated speech patterns of individual characters - may offer useful information about levels of free indirect discourse, or other concordance/discordance between and among these polyvocal strands.It may also yield compelling insights about the rhetorical function of the novel as a whole.
- The relationships that Tropes establishes between words that occur together frequently offer (not altogether surprising) multiple connections between Oscar and "telephone," "id" and "nakamura," reflecting Oscar's characteristic multiple engagements of attention [fig 2]. Significantly, Tropes returns two instances where "nakamura" is associated with "face," and selection of this item returns the two moments in the text where the narrator offers Nakamura's affective response through this facial "reading" [fig 3], offering further evidence of Oscar's own reading practice.
Over the course of the novel, Oscar keeps an ever-vigilant eye on streams of virtualized data from multiple interfaces and adeptly synthesizes the data in his ambitious efforts to take over the Buna Collaboratory, representing a "dual-brain" distributed cognition already profoundly evocative of the "technohuman hybrid" that - setting aside the material metaphor of his "personal background problem" - literary critics may more easily embody with the maturation of literary computing. Not that his virtuosity is sufficient: with his increasing involvement in the political intrigues of Gulf Coast neuro-politics, he too approaches a state of complete overwhelming, one instance of which sends him into a hyperanxious "fugue state" where his thoughts randomly bounce:It was all just too much. It was chaos, madness, a writhing nest of eels. It was just too complex. It was utterly unmanageable. Unless . . unless somehow the process was automated. With more specific goals. Some reengineering. Critical path analysis. Decentralization. Co-optation. Thinking outside the box. But then there were so many other people. They all depended on him. He had to deputize. . . .This seeming disruption of functionality in Oscar's current system of distributed cognition is ultimately "hacked" by Green Huey, who chemically splits the brains of Oscar and scientist Greta Penninger - offering a new way of thinking (as it were) of distributed cognition within the same body, and an oddly naturalized response to the psychotic split of the United States into distinct administrative loci separating unidentifiedundocumented proles from the rest of the citizenry. These extreme representations of the reading and interpretive practice we already engage with this exercise may arise from print anxieties, or they may simply suggest that the future of reading, and of literature, may simply require more than one brain - although it remains to be proven that these practices have not always already informed literary study.
He was stymied. He was surrounded. He was through, finished, crushed. There was no possibility of coherent accomplishment. Nothing was ever going to move. (194-195)
Works Cited:
1 ^ Sterling, Bruce. Distraction, a Novel. New York: Bantam-Spectra, 1998. All subsequent references are to this work unless otherwise specified.
2 ^ Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002.
