Tofts, McKeich

In his book Memory Trade Tofts tries to show that in cyberdiscourse – the discussion of computer technology's influence on communication and culture – there is nothing new under the sun. According to him, the technologisation of the word was not brought into being just by the arrival of the computer (as is sometimes short-sightedly claimed in cyberdiscourse); the word was always already technologised. The subjects Tofts handles in Memory Trade make this clear: alphabet, writing and language as technology; the origins of cyberthought in mnemonics; Finnegans Wake as the original media theory book. These form Tofts' (pre)history of cyberdiscourse.

For Tofts, who is strongly influenced by poststructuralism, technology is not a transparent means, but that which shapes and structures experience, makes meaning fan out, draws attention to itself. Tofts argues for technology: Technology shapes the human way of seeing and experience and the meaning we give to the world. This vision could be called posthumanist. According to Tofts, then, the posthuman era began not just with the computer, but long ago with the invention of writing. In Tofts' vision, a new technology leads to fundamental innovation in art and literature: What was unthinkable or impossible before can now be realised.

Tofts focuses on aspects of cybernetics and the computer, which can be found in writing and the use of it. (T)hese cybernetic features (information processing, feedback loop), however, are not unique to the age of computers and artificial intelligence. They are, in fact, endemic to the book apparatus, conceived as a closed system of technological space, capable of indeterminate significance (p. 110). Tofts finds things in the past that are often seen as characteristic of the present. In the process he forgets that the idea of writing as technology only came about thanks to things like cybernetics. This is not to say that the idea is less true, but it doesn't make finding the similarities too surprising.

Tofts engages in memory trade. Through a tour of theorists, writers and philosophers he sketches a picture of the technologisation of the word. He summarises ideas from Bergson, Kant, Yates, Borges, Derrida, Ong, Socrates, McLuhan, Wiener, Haraway, Nelson (etc.) and strings them together. The links between the memory fragments should thereby make up his vision, but this does not happen enough. In Tofts' hands Memory Trade leads to a good, simple overview of a possible prehistory of cyberdiscourse, without much that is new.
Memory Trade is also an irritating book. Tofts defends the notion that 'language is technology' with the enthusiasm of an idealist who must convince his congregation and opponents of revolutionary insights. For an audience of readers who have been through thirty years of (post)structuralism, McLuhan and Havelock, Tofts writes that to think of writing as a technology is... a defamiliarizing gesture. He preaches as if he is operating in the margin but represents a widely known point of view.

Tofts surely has opponents, but they are not the naive cyber-theorists but the scientists who come from cognitive psychology armed with evolutionary-biological arguments and carrying the poststructuralists as their stock-in-trade and more and more successfully claim that the word, and writing too, why not, are biological givens. Tofts looks backward where he could have looked forward.

What is most lacking in Memory Trade, however, is 'the real world'. Tofts tries to make his construction current by linking it to early- and mid-nineties cyberdiscourse, with its celebration of a digital future when everything would be different. Seen in the rear-view mirror, that cyberdiscourse was a remarkable interlude in the development of the twentieth century when overstrained expectations, technodeterminism and mirrored sunglasses, Baudrillard brand, determined the view of developments. Tofts argues in the context of this (outdated) cyberutopia and in this finds a good connection with fellow surfers on the sea of cyber- and postmodernism, but unfortunately he misses the connection with the actual state of things.

Meanwhile, prompted by the developments of the last few years - such as the commercialisation of the www - a much more realistic view of new media holds sway. Reality and discussion have overtaken Tofts. Tragically, he is too late. Thus embarrassing are the speculations founded on a technological state of affairs that has become passé, the blindness to political and economic questions and the apolitical view that was still tolerated a couple of years ago but is now reprimanded with irritated criticisms (see Jamie King, Mute 12).

If only Memory Trade was nothing more than a well-informed explanation of the transition from a literate culture to a digital one, on the model of the transition from oral to literate culture as described by Ong, McLuhan and Havelock...

Fortunately, there is the chapter about Finnegans Wake, which ultimately makes Memory Trade worth the trouble. Tofts manages to set out in twenty pages why Finnegans Wake – the first literary text in which tv plays an important role – is the central text for the digital age. He shapes this conclusion, which is shared by Donald Theall and Marshall McLuhan, with the help of the usual suspects, like Deleuze and Derrida.

Finnegans Wake: the original media theory book, the moment at which print literacy converges with electronic digitization. The method of Finnegans Wake offers a hint of the ecology of meaning which will characterise the digital age, a glimpse ahead. It embodies the new ecology of sense implicit in the electronic, immersive experience of telematic cspace (Tofts’ 'metasignifier', in my opinion superfluous, which stands for 'cyberspace' as well as for 'space'), it is central to the aesthetics of the computer age.

Like many others, Tofts holds the opinion that hypertext is already present in written literature and certainly in Joyce: writing is an orphan without a father, every sentence always already means something different, and reading Joyce is never a linear question. Instead of Janet Murray’s cognitivist model of narrativity, in which the classical story is the best form to represent experience, a form that is canonised because it connects to the world of the reader's experience, we find here a leap forward into the unknown. No Hollywood of believable characters, but multiplexing words.

As every word in Finnegans Wake brings together different languages and codes in one signal, and thus makes possible a production of meaning more flexible than ever before, so will the computer networks humanity is plugged into allow us to multiplex like never before. In this way a new, broader and more flexible experience of reality will become possible. Tofts is extremely receptive to illusions and delusions that can bring forth speculation about possibilities of non-linearity and multiplexing minds. He allows himself to be swept away by a utopia, a Wakean picture of the future in which the technique of word play will be radicalised into a new manner of drawing connections between world and word.

Tofts is sometimes inclined to go one step further than common sense would allow. With reference to Arjen Mulder, he comes unpleasantly close to formulating the argument that Finnegans Wake in fact is something that goes 'beyond the media', exceeds technology, which the computer networks should also be able to make possible. In this dream there would no longer be a sender, a receiver and a sent message; to be immersed in information is to be information, not a sender or receiver of it. There can be no mediation when everything, including addressers and addressees, occupy the same multiplex channel. That sounds like a mystical experience, and Tofts surely doesn't think the networks will make us all mystics? One more step in the evolution of homo sapiens?

The question is whether many people share Tofts' optimistic belief that Finnegans Wake makes networked culture readable because it embodies the meaning-ecology of the electronic world. In any case, Memory Trade contains a good introduction to Finnegans Wake for the reader whose literary home is cyberpunk and cyberculture.

translation laura martz

see also: Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck