I want to talk about Guyau. I want to ask what exactly his position is on consciousness and the phonograph/brain memory analogy. If I could ask this, and get a suitable answer, then I feel like this might be the foundation for which I would be able to ask Kittler, who definitely doesn’t agree with Guyau, what his position is on consciousness and the phonograph/brain memory analogy. Which is all a coy way to say that I am attempting to “specify what I don’t understand.” Here’s a quote that got my attention: “A memory consists in the awareness, first, of the diminished intensity of an impression, second, of its increased ease, and third, of the connections it entertains with other impressions. Just as a trained eye can see the difference between a copy and the original, we learn to distinguish memories from impressions and are thus able to recognize a memory even before it has been located in time and space.” Is Gutau saying that human memory is similar to phonograpic memory except that we’re aware of the fact that we are seeing a copy of the master whereas a phonograph doesn’t give any damns if it’s the master or the copy? That doesn’t seem right since it seems a bit obvious, no? Or is it? The phonograph emits a different noise with the poor copy, scratches and pops, than it does with the master. What if our “consciousness,” our ability to differentiate master from copy is just an illusion and all we’re doing is reacting to the stimuli of copies with different “sounds” than we do to other copies?

That sounds kind of crazy when I write it out like that.

I guess what I’m saying is that perhaps I’m a closet positivist. Maybe I don’t believe in agency. (This isn’t lessening the craziness of what I’m saying.) Maybe what we see as discerning between various memories (which I might add is an imperfect skill of ours considering the propensity to have false memories) is only some more programming on top of the phonograph. Diana asks if Guyau and Kittler aren’t actually more intellectually similar than Kittler believes, pointing out that the grounds that Kittler positions himself against are that Guyau “observed the brain simply as a technical apparatus.” Joseph suggests that the less charitable of us might call Kittler a technological determinist. I would suggest that, if Kittler is a technological determinist, then he must believe that the brain is simply a technical apparatus because, if “media determine our situation,” then we are programmed by media, which means we are just another layer of technological apparatus.

I’m not sure at this point if I’ve steered into or out of craziness-sounding at this point.

I’m interested in where this will take me when we get to posthumanists like Donna Haraway. What makes the human so significant and special and separate from the machine and from the animal? Especially when we consider how many animals we think of as mechanistic, specifically insects. Sometimes I wonder if the thing that we fear most about the insect is that, when we look at the ant and how it simply follows basic instructions of pheromones so as to know its role in its society, that we wonder if we aren’t the same, but with more moving parts. The ant is Casio and we’re a Rolex, but both of us just tell time.