UCLA

Media theorists as far back as Marshall McLuhan and as recent as Friedrich Kittler and Jonathan Crary have asserted that since the photograph's and gramophone's invention in the nineteenth century, technical apparatuses have increasingly come to extend and simulate the humans senses. My dissertation argues that the convergence of these technical media with automated technical apparatuses begins a recursive cycle. The technical apparatus encodes itself through various technical media, and as a result, produces new technical media. This cycle of encoding and re-encoding is cognitive, and constitutes what I call a nonhuman cognitive system. I trace this evolution of this nonhuman cognition from early cybernetic devices like Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer to the contemporary digital computer.

This evolution of technical bodies is still closely intertwined with human ones, because the technical media enabling the nonhuman cognition's evolution also encode images, sounds, and narratives for human cognitions. The so-called realism that technical media enable (i.e., a greater degree of verisimilitude to what humans actually see, hear, feel, etc.) is actually what I call fractal realism. It is fractal because humans and nonhumans use different cognitive schemes for mediating or encoding their reality, and so fracture their world as both cognitions work on it. It is fractal as well, because the nonhuman cognitions rely on statistical measures rather than narrative chains of cause-and-effect to order their encodings, just as fractal sets are defined by their statistical self-similarity. Under fractal realism, mediation is not a means of conveying information between parties but rather the conversion of one medium into the pattern of another medium. I argue that we understand mediation as, what Gilbert Simondon calls, a transductive process.

Given the tight link of cognition and mediation, I parallel the account of the nonhuman cognition's evolution with an examination of how its statistical mode infiltrates and affects media as humans understand them. We can then see fractal realism as a new genre that cuts across realism and postmodernist literature and cinema. Some of the works considered include Joseph McElroy's Plus (1977), Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000).