The Texts of Tech: Technology and Authorial Control in Geek Love and Galatea 2.2
Marjorie Worthington · Journal of Narrative Theory · 2009
The Texts of Tech: Technology and Authorial Control in Geek Love and Galatea 2.2 Marjorie Worthington (bio) The attempt has often been made, by scientists, researchers, authors, even fictional characters, to draw a parallel between new innovations in technology and traditional textual and narrative elements. Examples abound, both in genetic engineering and in computerized artificial intelligence, where integrating a subject with technology has been equated with integrating that subject with text. An examination of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 suggests that this connection of tech to text, although often forced and untenable, serves an important purpose to those making that connection: the maintenance and reinforcement of patriarchal control. Characters who employ technological innovations simultaneously integrate those innovations into traditional, inherently heteronormative, narrative structures. These narrative structures imbue those who wield technology with procreative power and reinforce the position of the technologized subjects as subordinate to their creators. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick says, “This is not to suggest that the technologies inherently uphold white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, or heteronormativity, but rather that many of their implementations—and . . . their representations—do” (540). The ways in which technologies are narrativized serve to establish the wielders of technology as the authors of their technological creations or discoveries. However, while on one hand the application of technology makes literary [End Page 109] characters out of people and makes authors out of parents or creators, this technology simultaneously serves as these characters’ mode of resistance. Hence, this tech/text amalgam is not sufficient to encapsulate fully the created technological characters. Two primary modes have emerged by which technology and humanity interact. In one mode, modern technology is introduced to or integrated within the human body, resulting in that body being affected by or connected to technology in some fashion. The second mode represents the attempt to construct computer technology that is ever more intelligent and ever more capable of “human” thoughts and responses: to construct an Artificial Intelligence contained in a computer. Technologized entities from either category have traditionally been conceptualized in textual or narrative terms and therefore point directly to their creators as authorial figures. For example, the connection to text was made quite overtly in the scientific and media rhetoric surrounding the charting of the human genome breakthrough hailed as the ability to read the “Book of Life” or “decode the Language of God.”1 Lily E. Kay has argued that this metaphorical connection between genes and text stems from the combination, during the inception of the study of the genome, of genetics, linguistics, and information discourse developed in the 1950s: “It is within this information discourse that the genetic code was constituted as an object of study and a scriptural technology, and the genome textualized as a latter-day Book of Life” (5). Implicit in the notion of viewing the human genome as a textualized “Book” or a “Language” is, of course, the suggestion that one might own it, edit it, perhaps even write it oneself. Judith Roof goes further than McKay to suggest that the conceptualization of genetic codes in terms of narrative has political implications. Roof argues, “Thinking of DNA as a language, for example, implies that DNA is readable, translatable, writable, editable, and copyrightable, analogies that make DNA seem far more transparent, malleable, accessible, and ownable than it is” (15–16). In other words, now that the human genome has been mapped, the next vistas to explore involve the possibilities for altering that genome according to personal specifications. I will argue here that the rhetorical equation of the genetic code to a text foments questions about the extent to which, in addition to “playing God,” scientists and others might be able to “play author” to the Book of Life. The increasing encroachment of technology on the human subject reifies [End Page 110] the conceptualization of the human subject as a text ripe for editing, altering, even constructing through the narratives of technology. As N. Katherine Hayles puts it, in genetics, “[t]exts are spliced, rearranged, modified; innovations are undertaken with breathtaking rapidity; information is a quantity to be manipulated, not a value to be preserved” (“Postmodern Parataxis” 405).2 Furthermore, because the presence...