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Article Excerpt
The if-feeling would have to be compared with the special 'feeling'
which a musical phrase gives us ... But can this feeling be separated from the phrase? And yet it is not the phrase itself, for that can be heard without the feeling. --Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (182) Every era mints its trademark desolation. Mine lay in how much my time had come to see and hear. --Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (242) Helen, it seems, is more herself the more she's reproduced. --Theodore Weiss, "The Ultimate Antientropy"
For all of its narrative significance and heft, the death of the HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a rather quiet event. As HAL dies, he sings the swayingly nostalgic number "A Bicycle Built for Two," a song that signifies his own regressive nature and his own inability to outwit the humans and take over "the mission." Whereas the future for the humans in 2001 was full of god and stars and Gyorgy Ligeti's sprawling voices, HAL's future was confined to the cramped room of his central processes, tight with simple songs, breath sounds, and slowly disengaging memory modules. But despite his small and lonely end, as an entity HAL swelled large into the vast spaces of cultural reference (as well as into the ever growing universe of Clarke's 2001 sequels), becoming a touchstone for many fictionalized intelligences to come. For if 2001 was the "best informed dream" of its period, HAL was the most fully rendered inspiration for many future artificial intelligences (Stork 12).
One descendent of HAL is the similar-sounding Helen, the tragic and self-destructive computer intelligence at the center of Richard Powers's novel Galatea 2.2. As critic Arthur Saltzman writes, "Helen shares [an] instinct to expand with such precursors as Dr. Frankenstein's rudely stitched Adam [and] Arthur Clarke's chillingly composed HAL in 2001" (108). But also like HAL, Helen's desire to expand, to comprehend the largeness of human knowledge and experience, is cut short by what 1 see as a failure to connect with and understand her organic predecessors/teachers. She hears more than she is supposed to--more than she can adequately parse, more than she can connect with--and, as with HAL, such listening proves her undoing. She is fated to degrade gracefully under the weight of her own accelerated awareness.
But despite these similarities, Helen is most assuredly not HAL recast in female guise. Early in Galatea 2.2, one of the characters jokes with Imp B, a computational iteration that will eventually become Helen: "[She] took the microphone. 'Open the pod bay doors, HAL!' Vectors danced across the screen, but Imp B kept its counsel" (95). Though in response to the same command in Kubrick's 2001, HAL also fails to act, in this circumstance, Imp BV (1) inaction is more about denying the link with the ship's murderous computer than it is about mimicking his actions. It is not that this proto- Helen refuses to act, but that it, wisely and somewhat mysteriously, keeps its silence. In acknowledging the inevitable comparison with HAL early on, Powers makes sure that Helen and her many versions are clearly distinguished from their own fictional predecessors. (2) By the time we have reached her final moments, it is clear just how different HAL and Helen really are.
For if in HAL's dying song we are assured of his difference, his incompatibility with those who share his world, it is in Helen's death that we see that she (in all the wrong ways) has become ail-too human. One could argue that HAL's degradation is graceful (at least visually and aurally) but without a grace born of the righteousness that Helen achieves in her self-sacrificing death. HAL decides he must kill others to save himself--to rectify the gaps in logic that emerge due to his physical and emotional disconnection from his crewmembers--and as a result he must be disconnected. Conversely, the sweetly feminine Helen (who is, as many critics have noted, part Helen of Troy) dies because she sees herself as unfit, as incapable of fully assimilating with her human counterparts. She has been "dropped down halfway" (326) and is neither in the here nor the there. In her capacious yet infantile mind, this necessitates a counter-evolutionary moment of self-destruction.
Concentrating on Helen's death and the circumstances leading up to it, this article will examine the workings of what 1 call the acoustic moment of disconnection, specifically the recursive nature of Helen's undoing and the crucial role that sound and song play in the process. For, by perceiving her own inability to function in a primarily human world--an awareness that emerges from her auditory interaction with internal and external environments--Helen deems herself unfit to perceive anything at all, reducing herself to a simple computer that finally shuts down. It is in this final moment of listening that the loop is closed; the process that enables Helen to achieve consciousness simultaneously provides her with a clear understanding of her situation and the opportunity to escape it by unmaking herself, by disconnecting. This is the instant wherein she understands not only the recursive nature of her own processes, but also the perceptual limits that accompany such a structure.
Recursivity is, scholars have noted, a structural metaphor throughout the whole of Powers's tale. Jeffrey Pence writes that
[T]he experiment ends after Richard revives Helen with the same epigram, repeated from that great repeater, Scheherazade, with which he opens the novel: 'It was like so, but wasn't' (3). Literally, the end of the experiment--and figuratively the end of technology, as Helen presently turns herself off--is the beginning of the novel, the provocation to renarrate experience in a palliative, pragmatic, and providential way. (363)
As Saltzman also points out, the paradoxical opening line echoes the "it was and it was not" structure common in traditional Persian fables like Scheherazade's (198). The structure of the novel forms an all-encompassing system wherein, rather than referring outwardly to other texts, it brings a multitude of fictional and factual moments into itself, girding and reconfirming its own structure. The novel renarrates and reinscribes the failure of Helen's own experiment in living by generating the same recursive structure she relies upon for her own interactions. It is within such a structure that Helen lives and dies again and again, perpetually incapable of making contact with her surroundings and of reconciling the innate contradiction of her own digitally-cobbled consciousness.
Helen's disconnection is also part of the larger scientific speculation that Powers works out in the novel as he adopts the voice and vocabulary of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and informatics in the construction of the digital Helen. The process of creating Helen is as much about the importance of human self-awareness as it is about the technological potential for machine consciousness. Although Helen finally falls short in her attempt to bridge the gap between human and machine--to become something outside those familiar categories--the embodiment and selfhood she does attain is found through listening, through participating in the communicative procedure of singing and being sung to. Her first true moment of awareness and her final conscious act are both acoustic moments--instances where she attempts to understand her role in the world by singing to it and by asking it to sing back. Nevertheless, the "instance in her ears" (Powers 198) that makes her real, that makes her trainer into a kind of parent, and that makes the abstract into something very material, is exactly what limits her. Her final moment is a "graceful" disconnection that acknowledges the immense power of sound and song in our understanding of ourselves and of our intellectual and cultural narratives.
First published in 1995, Galatea 2.2 is Richard Powers's fifth novel and an "autobiographical fiction" that Powers saw as a chance to give "a personal look back over the shape of those [first four] narratives" (Neilsen and Powers 22). The novel's protagonist, also named Richard Powers, (3) works at U., a major midwestem university that clearly resembles the author's own alma-mater and place of employment, the University of Chicago at Urbana-Champaign. The novel intertwines two stories, both informed by the Galatea / Pygmalion myth of the book's title. Chronologically, the first story is about Richard's complex, failed relationship with C, a woman with whom he spent his time as a graduate student at U. and later in Boston and the Netherlands. The second tale concerns Richard and his time at the massive university research institute (known only as "the Center") where scientists from numerous disciplines, using every theoretical approach imaginable, strive to unravel the workings of the human brain.
As the "token humanist" (Powers 4) amidst the researchers, Richard joins Philip Lentz, a cognitive neuroscientist working in connectionism--an approach to cognitive modeling that uses "large networks of extremely simple computational units, massively interconnected and running in parallel" (Smolensky 233) known as neural nets--in a bet with colleagues that places an artificial intelligence against a human subject in a sort of literary Turing Test. Richard works with Lentz to train the various implementations of this potential AI to read and think critically, a role familiar to Richard who was a young composition instructor at U. Like the...
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