Digital Humanity: The Novel and the Computer In the Information Age

This dissertation charts the intersections of science and fiction in the early cybernetic period, from the late 1950s through the mid 1970s. Science, I show, reveals in this period the indelible influence of the history of text, of print and writing. The novels that this project investigates constitute interventions into the contemporary scientific discourse, but those interventions also recognize the shared textual ground on which the discourses of literature and science are situated. Indeed, the discourses of literature and science of this period are mutually intelligible because of this shared ground, what science historian Lily E. Kay denominated a "scriptural" discourse.;Each chapter investigates a particular novel, and each novel represents an engagement with a different aspect of cybernetic-inflected science. These engagements include the binary code and packet switching technologies of early computer networks, the discourse of the computer virus and its indebtedness to preceding discourses of biological and technological contagion, and finally, arguments in the late 1960s and early 1970s about the influences and effects of technologically mediated images.;Each chapter includes close analysis of a central literary text as well as close reading of contemporary cultural texts. Yet while the methodology of this project is relatively straightforward, its intervention is unique. Digital Humanity constitutes an account of both postmodernist fiction and the history of technology. This project's reading of three key novels of the postmodern period identifies a unique constitution of the human within the developing digital media landscape. Each novel recognizes the ways in which the human is constituted materially by permeations of labor, property, and material exchange. They therefore correct both a dominant cybernetic discourse that minimizes material considerations of life, whether human or technological, in favor of attention to the emergence of digital life and a discourse in literature that imagines the cybernetic as something to be resisted.;Enthusiasm for such emergent digital life, I argue, effaces and obscures the material conditions necessary for the construction of the technological networks on which fantasies of digital emergence depend. These novels, however, locate the human within the digital, embracing technology, but always representing technologies as products of a great deal of human labor.;Chapter one explores the "rise" of the computer as a technology and an image. Each subsequent chapter then investigates a particular iteration of that image. Chapter two traces the invention of networked computer communication and the ways in which the computer network overlays existing communication networks. This extension of computer networks includes the ways in which networked computer technology permeates literary language, offering a wellspring of metaphor, image, and device. The Crying of Lot 49 historicizes such networks, as well as the speculative economics such networks enable. Chapter three considers the computer virus, a phrase coined first in 1969. This coinage invoked discourses of both technology and infection, and this novel mobilizes the racialized discourses of contagion and disease. Mumbo Jumbo situates the virus, both biological and technological, in a present permeated with political urgency. Chapter four takes up the technological mediation of images and the ways in which such mediation has been mistakenly represented as spontaneous. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, the chapter's primary text, insists on the labor necessary for such mediation. This dissertation concludes with a coda, a short comment locating the unique usage of the human within this project and within the novels it considers.