Matt Kriz's List: Vurt

• I  had never thought about this before, so I literally went  home that night, turned the computer on, and started  writing. And it just came out. So it was improvised.  It was very closely worked with Steve, the other guy, who  was the editor and publisher--so it was almost like I was  a musician, improvising--just making it up as I  went along, and then he was kind of every so often saying  'let's take this bit' and 'let's go back to beginning  now', and 'let's push it in this direction' and so on.
• I  especially like music that sounds like its going to collapse  at any minute-
• It's the underground made flesh, almost. What I've  noticed going around America is all these different  tribes; they've all got different beliefs, but they're  all slightly out of it somehow and they're all on The  Internet, and I think its going to be really important
• I  personally see Vurt as a transitional novel, between  cyberpunk and something else--I don't know what it is  yet. One of the things about Vurt is there's no  technology in it. It's organic--it's almost like magic.  That was one of the things I wanted to do is to envisage  a society where machines had become natural things. I  think there's a lot of writing going on--people you could  place into the mediatory phase of things.
• That's what this whole thing about "pure is  poor" is about, you know, the Nazis have this thing  about purity of race, and all that--in Vurt they  celebrate the exact opposite: the impurity of race, or  the impurity of being; the more mixed-up you are the  better it is! The authorities try and fight this--clamp  down on it
• So yeah, Scribble's journey is the acceptance of the Vurt  within him. He starts out thinking he's pure--that's the  overall arc of the novel--and he accepts it finally.

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• We are now living in the future. How disappointing this period seems compared with the world we promised ourselves. With the Dome, the millennial celebrations and the general feeling of "Was that it?" behind us, we have become slaves to cynicism, artificial passions and desperately forced excitements. It is not a time for great art. However, if it is fuelled by world-weariness alone, the future may not last long. Perhaps, in our imaginations, we could bypass this period entirely. I would like to discuss a possible literature, the kind of writing that will take place in the post-future age
• Yet we live daily in a web of connections, all of us becoming adept at riding the multiple layers of information. This is the fluid society. Tracing pathways through this intricate landscape needs a different kind of narrative art. It is in this spirit of adventure that I envisage the post-future novel.
• As writers, we need to open ourselves up to this fluidity.

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• Not content with merely replacing lost body functions, humankind has developed orthoses that supplement and extend human capabilities. Simple examples of 'exo-orthoses' include walking sticks, cricket bats

• It is also a fitting description of the apparent technology-induced paradigm shift in our contemporary perception of the world. Increasingly, solid, material structures are viewed in immaterial, informational terms and the boundaries between previously distinct categories are blurring
• In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles it seems to me have been reversed ... the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads
• The notion that biopunk's imaginative excesses can provide potentially useful insights into the contemporary condition is backed by the sense that the traditional boundary between the real and imagined worlds has become irretrievably blurred
• Biopunk's fictional emphasis upon disorienting levels of fluidity reflects non-fictional concerns about the potential information overloading tendencies of digital technologie
• were actually allowed to breed with each other, to produce new number
• In the real world, the process of technological change causes flux and confusion. Cyberpunk fiction represents this by describing dystopian social environment
• Biopunk's distinctive quality stems from its own peculiar perspective on such confusion, manifested in a distinctive attention to bodily substance and a whole bestiary of new hybrid life-forms
• Perhaps as we leap-frog the mechanical technologies of modernity into a postindustrial world where information attains the status of the fourth element, biopunk is performing an idiosyncratic eulogy at the funeral of physicality

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• government-produced
• everything's an addiction
• a]nd what if the passage to a new level of humanity actually meant abolishing indeed the natural one, or at least some part of it
• the waning or death of the foundation of Western notions of transcendence. In this tradition, transcendence commences with the penetration of the self by a supra-enlivened Other, whether that other be a king, a god, nature, the voice of logos, the Law, or an abstracted version of vitality itself
• ranscendental teleology of logocentrism achieves reproduction in VR discourses in part because the attribution "life" is shifting from the realm of the biological (DNA) and natural language to the postvital and code. Code is coming to function as the transcendental, unifying, and ideal substance of life--for the nonreferential, the unmediated--while at the same time, it retains attributes, or the trace if you will, of writing, replacing the body with a less mortal letter.

  • I noticed Joel's post about high-lighting, so I apologize for going over big blocks here - I'm highlighting things for myself but as I've already bookmarked this to the group page it includes all the highlights (or at least I think it does).
  Add Sticky Note
• Consider that materially, VR barely exists: there are few "objects," much  [End Page 78] writing.

  • This essay is dated, but, as far as I can tell, VR still barely exists, while there seems to be plenty of theory about it... reminds me of hypertext novels.
• I'm forty-one now. I feel about twenty-five or so. Look it too. Living in Vurt really slows down the rate of change

  • So when you read Vurt, and if you read this, ask yourself if, at this point in the novel, you would call Scribble an addict. I don't really agree with this reading.
• Thus, writing enables the writer to assume a simulacrum of transcendent powers by representing the authoritative speech of the father
• What we hold against the drug addict, Derrida claims, is that "he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction" ["Rhetoric of Drugs" 7]. The addict body is an irresponsible, irrational body
• cybernetic code can never provide an adequate model for the metaphoricity, the nontotalizability of human consciousness. Postmodern literature, "the enduring attempt to model in words the activities of the mind in all its irrationality" ["Frothing" 259], provides more promising maps for evolving technology and ourselves

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• Perhaps it is time for a Copernican revolution in our thinking about textuality, a revolution achieved by going back and rethinking fundamental assumptions.
• Here the comparison of editing with translation is especially apt, for the editor, like the translator, makes innumerable decisions that can never be fully covered by an explicit statement of principles. As McGann points out, these decisions inevitably function as interpretations, for they literally construct the text in ways that foreground some interpretive possibilities and suppress others.
• My interest in this controversy points in a different direction, for what strikes me is the extent to which all three positions—Platonist, pluralist, and antirealist—focus almost exclusively on linguistic codes, and how this focus allows them to leave the document as a physical artifact out of consideration
• To demonstrate that print is indeed unstable even at the level of a document, he performs experiments scanning a document with an optical character reader and reports that on different scans, the machine gives different readings. This does not demonstrate that print is not self-identical, however, only that the translation between print and electronic text is unstable. In other arguments he conflates the instability of a text—for example, variations in different copies of an edition or between different editions—with the instability of a print document, again to argue that print, like electronic text, is fluid and unstable.
• The specter haunting textual criticism is the nightmare that one cannot then define a "text" at all, for every manifestation will qualify as a different text.
• Tower of Babel

  • Find out how many texts in this course make reference to this - and see how it corresponds with the Yeats poem.
• "Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected over a common foundation. When they try to communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower. It is difficult to make the sound penetrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very poorly indeed. But, when an individual goes down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to all towers. Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have also descended from their towers." ⁵³ In context, Weaver believed the "great open  [End Page 282]  basement" would be a universal substratum common to all language

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• The idea that music represents something of God is common, both   in literature and the wider community
• I can’t help feeling   slightly uncomfortable with some of his descriptions of black musicians   where, one feels, he is as impressed with the idea of blackness   as a force that might subvert middle-class white America as with   the music.

  • Remember this for when you're doing your Baldwin/Mailer research much, much later.
• Nobody has difficulty recognising that jazz, with its sweat, energy   and risk, is properly human. However there are many detractors from   the art of the DJ. Jeff Noon (File under SciFi/Manchester) in his   cult favourite Vurt, presents us with his hero as DJ making   similarly divine claims for music.
• working   the decks like a pilgrim, searching for God
• There’s something Protestant about both Kerouac’s   jazzers and Vurt’s DJ; both are engaged in hard work   in their questing for God.

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• A fifth phenomenon of the modern age is the loss of the gods. [5]  This expression does not mean the mere doing away with the gods, gross atheism.  The loss of the gods is a twofold process.  On the one hand, the world picture is Christianized inasmuch as the cause of the world is posited as infinite, unconditional
• The loss of the gods is the situation of indecision regarding God and the gods
• But one thing, surely, anthropology cannot do.  It cannot overcome Descartes, nor even rise up against him, for how shall the consequence ever attack the ground on which it stands?
• Where the world becomes picture, the system, and not only in thinking, comes to dominance.  However, where the system is in the ascendancy, the possibility always exists also of its degenerating into the superficiality of a system that has merely been fabricated and pieced together.

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