The Cry of The Machine: Sonic Technology, Postmodern Fiction, and the Analog Humanities

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes postmodern fiction in terms of the analog technologies that defined the mid-twentieth century. It argues for a mode of reading that attends to the paralinguistic artifacts that subtend linguistic meaning, connecting texts to both biological and technological history. It develops an analogical method that merges semiotics, sound studies, and complexity theory in order to perform readings of two postmodern texts: J. G. Ballard’s “The Voices of Time” and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In chapter one I argue that analogical processes set the limit for what can even be considered experience, in the form of circuits that balance the conscious and the subliminal. I show, using paradigms explicated by Gregory Bateson and Charles Sanders Peirce, that technology is a crucial part of mediating the boundaries between knowledge and intuition. Technology intervenes in human action prior to the codifications of symbolism and convention, and restores the animal grace to human life by reminding us of the continuities of bodily substrata that furnish experience. In chapter two, “The Unseen Powers,” I show that symbolically-focused criticism of J. G. Ballard’s “The Voice of Time,” a central text in the history of postmodern science fiction, has missed the analogical diagram within the text, and I argue that this diagram points us to a consideration of how technology mediates power, entropy, and human progress. I show how the moment of improvised radiological saturation in the story’s climax mirrors the discovery of sonic saturation that changed the course of music history. I read these two phenomena through each other to argue that the exacerbation of sensation that they both represent indicates a primordial capacity for living beings to grow into semiotically unintelligible conditions by relying on the basic sense of hearing analog icons. In chapter three, “Filthy Machines,” I read Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 as an analog of early delay machines to show how information that is caught in feedback loops can not only become life-like, it can become part of the indeterminate nature of life, hybridizing it. At the same time, the indeterminacy is filtered and formed by mechanisms that remember. I argue that, while there is no solution to the mysteries of the text, there is the possibility of being drawn into the same circuit as its mysterious entities, which is its own solution. Moreover, I show a potential historical source for Pynchon’s engagement with sonic technology, the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a connection that both substantiates the sonic reading of Lot 49 and shows the relevance of the concepts of aleatoric sequencing and feedback within his work. To conclude, I connect the consideration of analog techniques in literature and music to a wider social, cultural, and historical context that includes the competing semiotic paradigm of poststructuralism. I explain the historical benefits that digitalism represents for the advancement of Western modernity. Finally, I offer Robert Johnson and H. P. Lovecraft as examples of artists that deploy techniques that contradict the digitalist trend of modernity, and use Bruno Latour’s theory of hybrids to show how the subsequent forms of science fiction and rock music produce and maintain postmodern subjectivity.