SANDY STONE INTERVIEW
(c) 1993, Paco Xander Nathan and Jon Lebkowsky Originally appeared in Mondo 2000 #11
Allucquere Rosanne Stone: I notice the expression 'multiplicity' being kicked around at one conference or another, so multiplicity is apparently a happening thing all of a sudden. That's nice to see, because the advantage of multiplicity as a political strategy is that it's a way of disrupting the idea that people are single personalities, which is a method of political control. Stephen Hawking is the beginning of that, because you're not sure where Hawking's edges are. Multiplicity is another way of not being sure where people's edges are, because there are a lot of them in the same physical envelope, and you're never really sure which one you've got. Politically it's a complete no-no. When you name a person you've named all of them. There's only one identity. All the others are bogus, and that's a specific political strategy. It's a way of nailing people down, and controlling them. The idea of creating the illusion that everybody is singular is a way of producing a particularly manageable, tractable kind of identity. Because nobody is really singular.Dave Demaris: The amazing thing to me is that people refer to obvious collectivities,
large organizations, as persons....
Jon Lebkowsky: The way it struck me was that most people just can't handle that
multiplicity. People who can handle multiplicity are aware of it, and they just sort of
deal with it that way. But the average everyday guy, if you start talking to him about how
"I'm a multiplicity of cells" or "the government is a multiplicity of organizations," or
whatever, he just gets lost.
Paco Xander Nathan: Is that because of too many reality filters?
JL: Yeah, I think that most people only handle one perspective at a time. They can't
take a whole rainbow of possibilities and grasp 'em all at once...
ARS: Ambiguity or multiplicity are anathema. It's like walking up to somebody and
saying "Hey, you're not really a guy, you're just trained to think you're a guy, you
actually wander around, you're a boat at anchor in a sea of possibilities, all you have to
do is pull up the anchor...and you can drift around in this field..." And they don't get
it.
JL: When you say not really a guy, do mean like in the sense of...just gender? Gender
programming?
ARS: Gender programming, yes. I look around the table and I see three guys, and you
know...however you see me...and that's all a consensual hallucination that we whip up for
each other, but it's not just us, it's a whole structure of power that constrains us to do
that.
JL: There's an essential difference there, and we've added a layer and layer of
bullshit onto that...
ARS: Culturally...
JL: And what I see now in the gender-bender thing is that people are trying to strip
those layers away and see what's really there.
ARS: Uh-huh. And that's really dangerous. It's dangerous because,
the way power structures work, it really scares people.
PXN: The analogy is with LSD two decades ago. It seems directly connected, because
again you're stripping away the reality filters, and the whole power structure is coming
down, and realizing that people won't necessarily kowtow...is that a conscious idea or
movement now? Something that people ought to look out for? Learning from the mistakes of
the past?
ARS: Yeah, well acid was much more dangerous, first of all, because it really
stripped you down to the bone.
JL: You were hacking perception there, and you were hacking reality.
PXN: Yours or everybody else's?
JL: Well, maybe everybody else's, too. We're all one, and when you start hacking your
own reality, you're hacking everybody's reality, in a sense, at least. One thing about the
hacker spirit that makes it dangerous is that it doesn't always think about consequences
or it doesn't alway know to be careful.
ARS: Tim Leary was onto this very early, and doing it with chemicals was very very
dangerous. People are now starting to do minority discourse and queer theory from the same
standpoint as what Tim Leary was doing. It's like looking to Marshall McLuhan for the
origin of multimedia, and looking to Tim Leary for the origin of minority discourse, a
parallel thing. Except I can't imagine Woody Allen pulling Tim Leary out of a line at a
movie theatre....
JL: I don't know, I could. To buy a tab of acid from him. <Laughter.>
PXN: People online are talking about multiplicity, and it strikes me that the issue
of interface is something we really have to struggle with. Are people looking beyond
interface now, and getting into inner experience? Is that why you started talking about
multiplicity?
ARS: I think that people are beginning to realize that the definition of interface
that we grew up with, like a GUI, is way too narrow to contain what's actually going on.
You can look at interface, first of all, as anything across which agency changes form, and
that's a better way to look at it. An even better way to look at it is that an interface
is that thing that mediates between a body and an associated subjectivity, an associated
person. But it doesn't have to be THIS body and THIS person, it can be this body and SOME
OTHER person. The thing which provides some link between those two things, wherever they
are, which is the definition of interface that you use when you're in the Internet, you
know, when you have a body and your self is actually pouring out through your fingers to
somewhere else in the world. And the interface is the thing that mediates between
them.
PXN: Or your image when you're dancing with somebody at the Electronic Cafe.
ARS: Yes. That is exactly the same thing that's going on. So that's a new way of
thinking about it.
JL: So where is the interface? In so-called cyberspace?
ARS: "Where is the interface?" is an unanswerable question.
JL: Or "What is the interface?"
JL: I witnessed a conversation on an Internet mailing list. Someone was saying that
the cyberspace metaphor is very misleading, using a space metaphor for something that is
so unlike space.
ARS: As soon as people start talking about space they start thinking in cartesian
terms, and none of this stuff is really cartesian, so it is an unfortunate metaphor but
nobody has come up with any other one that's stuck, thanks to Bill Gibson. And let's face
it, it's become an object of discourse that we're not going to dislodge, so we might as
well get used to it.
DD: In the terms of our sensory modalities, you can see space in the way that, as a
baby born to touch, we immediately try to separate things into objects. I don't think
there's as much of an immediate impulse to reduce a field to a collection of objects as
there is in vision, so if that has anything to do with interfaces...you have to construct
objects before you pump them out ...
ARS: Yes, yes, you have to do that mentally.
DD: You have to do that mentally, so you can't make the field as easily, I
guess.
ARS: Yeah. Well, socially, we are raised to think of things in terms of objects, and
we think of definitions where we can put down some things and give them some attributes,
in other words, define them. We're not going to get out of that very easily, because of
the way this particular reality happens to work.
PXN: But people know how to play with the reality very naturally without thinking
about it. You were talking about play being very essential to what you're accomplishing
here at the media lab.
PXN: Something about the MUDs just really bugs the hell out of me, though. I can't
quite put my finger on it, but there are so many people that I know that are very
comfortable with computers, and express that same feeling of disturbance. I haven't pinned
it down yet, but if I had to try, I would probably invoke The Robot Group as a
counter-example, because to be on a MUD, you have to have this thing, it's still an
object. And even though you can use it to get into this land of play, you still have to
basically bow and pray before an object with type on it. But to look at it like the Robot
Group...they've set up the premise of play, and the things they've created are nominally
computers, but they don't look like it, and they don't play like it...they feel they're
being played with. Have you been studying that?
ARS: Yeah, but MUDs are not the future of Computer Supported Cooperative Play. MUDs
happen as a kind of primitive instantiation that's done by people who think in the old
paradigm. The new paradigm, which has to do with things like wearable technology, and
ubiquitous technology...
PXN: The triceratop's transition into a small furry mammal.
ARS: Right. The hardware is still there, we still work with this big box. But we're
moving toward a period of ubiquitous technology.
PXN: Right, warm-blooded computers! I love it.
ARS: It truly is warm-blooded computers, because the barrier between you and the
machine goes away. And it becomes a true prosthetic, which is to say, an invisible,
impalpable and unconscious extension of your own agency, where you no longer struggle with
the keyboard, and you no longer think about this barrier between you and what it is that's
going on. It becomes invisible, that's what ubiquity is all about. And it becomes
invisible by changing shape, not being a box on the desk, just the way mainframes stopped
being these big things, they shrank to the box on the desk. That took many many
years...IBM only saw the writing on the wall this year! And now we've got the little boxes
to contend with, and some people, very fortunately, are getting beyond the box to the hand
held computer, and then beyond the handheld computer to the wearable computer, and beyond
the wearable computer to the ubiquitous computer.
PXN: Is this credible in academia? Is this something that the academic world
understands and groks, and pretty much agrees on, or is this still a matter of
contention.
ARS: Well, this depends on who you're talking to, and what their agendas are. This is
something that Media Lab at MIT fooled around with for a very long while. They did very
good things with it, but they're also oriented in the direction of producing marketable
products. And that was not the time for that commercial product, so now they're onto other
things. It's hard to figure out just what the various academic nodes that are doing stuff
like this are into. A lot of them are still thinking of high tech interactive multimedia
in terms of hypercard stacks, and this is a real problem. They're thinking of interactive
tv in terms of touch tone, where you get different views of a football game. And this is
so sad, because this is what we're going to get for interactive tv, it's not even truly
seeking interaction anymore.
PXN: Yeah, in the current issue of Mondo, we're talking about a guy in Philadelphia
who gets laptops and makes wearables, and sells them to people out of his garage. If he
can do it, certainly Apple can do it.
ARS: Garage wearability. Yeah, but I think Apple's gonna do it a few years later in a
little bit more sophisticated way.
PXN: It seems like Silicon Valley and everybody else is running to the beat of this
drummer that has trendlike projections coming out of laptops.
ARS: It's not going to come from there. It might come from Sega, and it might come
from Nintendo.
JL: There's a golden age science fiction story, I can't remember the name of the
story, where the protagonist lands on a plantet that seems to be totally primitive,
there's no sign of technology anywhere. And the bottom line is that the technology is so
advanced that it's invisible.
DD: Stanislaw Lem writes that story over and over again...
ARS: But there was a wonderful one called A Martian Odyssey which sort of
touched on that, which was about the same period, I think.
PXN: Atlantis and Lemuria, First Foundation and Second Foundation, and that kind of
story over and over again. Getting back to mind techniques, I get the sense that you're
seeing mind over body...
JL: It wasn't just mind, they did it with machine technologies, but they were just so
integrated, so totally integrated, that you couldn't see them anyhwere.
JL: One of the things I see wrong with computer games is exemplified in Castle
Wolfenstein.
ARS: Yes, it's been around for a long, long time.
JL: And the thing about it...it's kind of an interesting three-dimensional, virtual
reality sort of environment, but what the guy does, and this is somewhat controversial, is
shoot people. He runs through a castle where there's pictures of Hitler and swastikas on
the wall, and he shoots people.
PXN: Identifiable icons that will motivate people to violence, right?
ARS: Yeah, these guys are making millions and millions of dollars on essentially
making bang-bang shootemup games, but at the same time they are putting into place an
incredible technology. These guys are developing the tools for imagination, for play, and
for VR and putting those things in place in a way that hasn't yet been used or noticed by
the people who are doing educational texts.
JL: Have you read issue #10 of bOING bOING? The thing that I wrote about the VR
arcade? You have tokens, you're in the arcade, you have a full-body VR suit on, and you're
having a series of sexual experiences, and you can push the button like you can in a
contemporary arcade. You change the image, and there's a sense of a completely detached
sexual experience, jumping from one to another. I was interested in talking about that,
and about gender switch, which I was trying to explain so someone from China. It's not
easy to explain gender bender stuff to someone from China.
PXN: One third of the planet.
JL: Yeah, and I think they're pretty rigidly structured, where gender is concerned.
I'm not sure she was getting it.
ARS: I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do about that. Two transsexuals making
love is an interesting situation, because nobody is really sure what they are, and there
is a continuous sort of shifting of sexuality during the course of it. Sometimes it's
homosexual love, and sometimes it's heterosexual love, sometimes it's reverse homosexual
love, or reverse heterosexual love, sometimes none of those, and you can't figure out what
the hell the categories are, or if there's really supposed to be categories. And just
start feeling the sensation.
PXN: That would be perfect for VR...
ARS: Yes, I think that transsexuals invented VR...
JL: We were talking about a man experiencing sex as a woman experiences it, or vice
versa, which is something that....
ARS: No! No! You can't.... When you say a man experiences sex differently from a
woman experiencing sex, people are trained and socialized to experience sex differently,
and that means that as a man you can never experience sex as a woman, even if you could
put on a woman's body, you could never understand what it was like to have sex as a woman
unless you were socialized as a woman.
JL: But this is the whole gender switch thing that they keep talking about doing in
VR, about how now you're a man, but you can be a woman...
ARS: It's bullshit! All bullshit, folks!
PXN: Don't you think it's more a matter of social tension...I mean, sex adds tension,
rather than sex as a mechanical act?
ARS: If you want sex as a mechanical act, you want to put on a clitoris, then you
could get some idea what that was like. But a clitoris is not at all the same sensation as
having a penis. So as long as you've got a penis that reacts sexually when you imagine
that you have a clitoris, something's wrong. You can't figure out what it's like to have a
clitoris unless you can get rid of the penis and have a clitoris, or vice versa. And
that's the physical problem...what we're talking about with VR is, you get a woman's body.
Well, you don't get a woman's body. Or if you're a woman, you don't get a man's body. You
get this simulacrum which replicates certain sensations, and doesn't replicate other
sensations.
PXN: Still too damn cold-blooded.
you in that way on the net.
If you could explain that, if you could actually get inside a woman's head, and understand what it's like to be a woman, 90% of the time it would not be an erotic thing, because you would understand from the other side about the defenses, and about the structures that women keep in place all the time in order to survive as an object of desire. If you want to be black for a while, that's great, if you seriously want to take on an oppression to find out what it's like to become an exotic other, great, do it! And if you want to become a woman, if you really want to take on the serious oppression that you have to take on in order to be a woman, in order to find out what that's like, then great, do it!
PXN: It's like somebody who's marginally famous. They have to deal with the desire of
people to talk to them, but that also conflicts with...
ARS: ...their desire to be themselves.
JL: I knew a couple, briefly, who were both at different stages of sex change, both
guys who were becoming women, perhaps not a couple, just two people who were living
together. And one was much farther along than the other. There was something that was
never quite right, especially the one who was much farther along. She was so much like a
woman, yet not a woman, I could sense that. This supports what you were saying....
ARS: There's a whole spectrum within the field of transgender, there are transgender
people who feel like cross-dressing is what they want to do, and there are people who like
going back and forth across the boundaries. There are people who need surgery because that
makes them happy, and there is everything in between. But what is the socialization
element involved in transgender, in going across those genders and getting to the other
side?
DD: There are irreversible processes that you can't get across, even if you make
those physical changes, right?
PXN: One thing I'd really like to talk about is multiculturalism, which is very
fashionable...
ARS: Politicallly correct.
PXN: Yeah, it 's a good thing that this has come so far, but is multiculturalism a
gateway into deeper issues of transgenderism that should be discussed?
ARS: Yes, because multiculturalism is an aspect of multiplicity, and a
fragmentation....
PXN: Is that an agenda item, then, for a lot of people? Is that something that's
being pushed that standard college freshmen don't see?
ARS: Yeah, it definitely is. And it leads to some interesting problems. Inside the
academy, you get people celebrating multiculturalism, and the idea of the wonders of
difference and the need to perpetuate cultural enclaves so that everyone can have a voice
and an individuality. Then you go out in the world, and instead of finding people arguing
over whether they should call themselves latinos or whether they should call themselves
mexicanos, or indios, what you find instead is just a lot of people rushing as fast as
they can to be assimilated into the mainstream white culture. So who's for
multiculturalism? It depends on who you're talking to. Some people don't want shit to do
with multiculturalism. They want to get in there with the oppressor, and just have a good
time!
PXN: Let's discuss your works, what you've been publishing.
PXN: How about being able to pass this body of wisdom etc. on to the next generation,
does that work through performance?
ARS: Did Genet pass on a body of wisdom? <laughter>
PXN: Yeah, yeah...
ARS: Yeah, I am inclined to think so. It's a different body of wisdom, it's not
something that you can articulate in terms of words and phrases that you can parse. It's
passed on in a different way. It's a way that there's a place in a particular academic
area, a particular academic discourse, and not in others. But if you're getting to the
point, as I may be, where you begin to think that theory has exhausted itself, then you
have to start looking for new ways to do the same thing.
PXN: It sounds like you're re-innoculating the culture with storytelling, and with
the great traditions that may have been lost, may have been subdued.
JL: Yeah, how does that work in the academic political context.
ARS: In the academic political context, it's shit, you know...it's anathema, it's
dangerous. But in some areas, it's not so dangerous. One of the things that I hope to see
come out of a center for the arts and technology is the possibility of getting these two
frames of reference together in one place, and in one arena, where you can have the arts
and technology produce things that are beneficial to both. But technology in the
Radio/Television/Film frame also means theory. It means cultural theory, it means cultural
criticism, it means minority discourse, it means queer theory, and if we can find some way
to get those things together in the field of art, and still have it be academic, then
we're taking a jump into a new area where there's real promise.
JL: You're blowing the myth of the two cultures away.
ARS: Yeah...seriously!
PXN: On the other side of it, people like Stelarc seem already to have jumped some
boundaries. People doing that kind of performance art, but very high tech, seem very sexy
to the people who are also high tech, and ensconced in theory.
ARS: Yes.
PXN: Yet you're coming from the other side...can you leapfrog off them?
PXN: I was thinking how "The Crying Game" is the pop movie of 1993, the timing just
couldn't be better.
idity of play in the sadomasochistic framework. That's a fuck of a problem. I don't have any easy answers, I don't have any answers at all. Does that make any sense?
PXN: Yeah, it does. I'm not coming off the angle of torture as much as the angle of
terror, I think that we have to learn to validate terror a lot more...
JL: That's just another kind of pain, psychological pain...
PXN: We've had our first terrorist bombing in the U.S., as you know. We have to come
to grips with terror. It keeps us in check-and-balance, but we've been denying it for a
couple of hundred years here...
ARS: Oh, boy, is the net alive with that argument right now, have you been following
any of this? There's a tremendous amount of discussion of terror right now, and some of
the people who live in countries where terror is the order of the day are saying "It's
about time you guys got on the program!" <laughter>
JL: I was thinking about those millenialists in Waco, too...
PXN: I was hanging out with the PLO in the early 80s, and I guess a lot of my
mind-set comes out of the fact that I personally validate terror in that sense,
intellectually, not in terms of going out and doing random car bombings, but I recognize
it as a means of political action.
JL: Poetic terrorism.
PXN: Yeah....
ARS: That's the Hakim Bey approach to terrorism. There's a real problem with the
word. People are being very careful about talking about poetic terrorism and real
terrorism.
JL: What Hakim Bey's talking about is subversion rather than real
terrorism....
PXN: In summary, I've got this question for you. People ask, "I wanna major in
cyberspace in college, what kind of book should I read now?" It just strikes me that
telling someone to go program in C is not enough...they ought to be developing a different
conceptual, intellectual structure...where can a person go?
ARS: Study improv. Read Marshall McLuhan.
PXN: Really?
ARS: Yeah, that's the first two things that come to my mind. And then read certain
selected articles, which is going to sound awfully egocentric...
PXN: Go for it.