Lexia to Perplexia
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lexia to perplexia>
In Lexia to Perplexia, Talan Memmott creates a creole of English and computer code to express the metaphor of morphing with machine. The website interface becomes gradually more and more immersed in the computer language and computer control, which could not have been expressed in any other medium; in this case, the medium really is the message.
This closely resembles the idea of the cyborg/human metaphor in Baudrillard’s essay, “Requiem for the Media” and is what Virilio cautions against in Negative Horizon. As we move faster and faster in creating new technologies and the potential to morph with machines, what aspects of humanness are we compromising? This is also similar to A Cyborg Manifesto, although from a feminist perspective. Haraway says, "The Cyborg skips the step of original unity, of indentification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars" and "The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity" (517). Virilio definitely sees a danger in the human/cyborg metaphor.
There are other metaphors present in Lexia to Perplexia that can contribute to these ideas—that of the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus, for example. Katherine Hayles spends a chapter of Writing Machines discussing Memmott’s composition, and in her conclusion states:
Lexia to Perplexia intervenes at beginnings and boundaries to tell new stories about how texts and bodies entwine. The shift in materiality that Lexia to Perplexia instantiates creates new connections between screen and eye, cursor and hand, computer coding and natural language, space in front of the screen and behind it. Scary and exhilarating, these connections perform human subjects who cannot be thought without the intelligent machines that produce us as we produce them. (63)
The last line is perhaps a bit frightening and certainly reminiscent of Virilio’s stance—about the point at whcih we cease controlling the machines and become controlled by them. But, as Nichols states in the introduction to "The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems":
The computer is more than an object: it is also an icon and a metaphor that suggests new ways of thinking about ourselves and our environment, new ways of constructing images of what it means to be human and to live in a humanoid world. (627)
