*Gosh, dead media, atemporality, stuffed animals, culture-industry, ancient analog computers, this latest thing from CTHEORY is like a catalog of BEYOND THE BEYOND riffs.
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 32, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
RT 008 09/16/2009 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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RESETTING THEORY
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~Paul Hegarty and Gary Genosko~
Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, north of London, is an Ur-site of
modern computing. The BP or War Station X of legend began
contributing intelligence (called 'Ultra') derived from decrypted
Axis signals (named 'Enigma' after the encipher machines used by the
German armed forces) in 1941.
Among the most celebrated BP
codebreakers were brilliant mathematicians Alan Turing, who had
already demonstrated the Universal Turing Machine as proto-computer
in the mid-30s, and Jack Good, both of whom were instrumental in
building the Colossus computer – a British precursor to the American
ENIAC – and later stars in Manchester University's post-war
computing projects; Stanley Kubrick consulted Good on the basis of
his writings on AI when conceiving of the HAL 9000 computer in
~2001:A Space Odyssey~.
Largely dismantled after the war, what
remained of BP stood idle for decades, still shrouded in secrecy,
until the historic property was redeveloped by a 'Friends of' trust
as a National Codes Centre and Museum of Computing. BP remains
exemplary of the unity of war and computing, well before the ARPANET
of the 1970s, and as evidence of how hacking, both hardware and
software, won the war.
Inspired by legends of machine history spun in the annals of modern
computing and science fiction, together we visited BP for two
reasons: first, to confront a troubling disjuncture between
mechanical tradition and the silicon simulacra of our time; and
second, to look for traces that augured another trajectory for this
place, not so much a dead end of embalmed techno-history, but another
future for cryptanalysis. In short, is another BP possible?
William Gibson's brilliantly evocative descriptions of cyberspace
have educated our imaginings of worlds of code; he has been so
successful in this that typical login/out commands pale in relation
to the dazzle of jack-in/out scenarios. The same may be said of the
effect of the visualization of tumbling data in ~The Matrix~ – a
graphic convention of code so powerfully hieroglyphic that beside it
everyday interfaces seem dull and distracting. Indeed, Jeff Noon's
efforts to describe the insertion of parasitical noise into images as
unstable crackling and cloudiness hovering over photographic surfaces
elevates sensory erosion to new heights, leaving behind the modest
glories of decay.
We are so attuned to the vividness of the virtual that the encounter
with the crumbling 'National Code Centre' at Bletchley Park seems to
accelerate the aging process. The phantasms of Baudrillard's code,
the ecstasy of digitality and the caress of the tactical and tactile,
violently recede when faced with the dinge and despair of an English
suburb and abandoned telecom buildings overrun by weeds and
vandalism.
That is how Bletchley Park is approached from the train
station. ipods and Blackberries go quiet at the sight of boarded-up
'huts' and unimpressive heaps of industrial waste. A vision from Neal
Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ appears: Alan Turing hunched over
reading the _RCA Radio Tube Manual_ exclaiming: forget sprockets,
valves (tubes) are the future! Welcome to yesterday.
Steampunk has of course imagined worlds where defunct technologies
turned out to not become obsolete, and so altered the world picture
around them. Parallel universes run on steam, cogs and gears, and
travel is by airship. From Gibson and Sterling to Stephenson,
Mieville, through numerous graphic novels, and elements of recent
blockbuster films, the past is re-imagined as an errant future that
should have been. Steampunk is in love with a past that was not to
become (our) present. It is more than a device to set up an
alternative history/future – it is a machine for reading time. It is
a way of reading causality critically, and ties in to a love of
technology that is not about buying it and buying into it.
What if Bletchley Park could be made into a future that never was,
rather than the future it was apparently destined to be? What is the
world like where the computer is mechanised, largely electrical
rather than electronic? A monstrous heat exuding tube set like
grandfather's radio. Baudrillard's code becomes the lost future, as
the digitality of the decoding machines is never revealed, as they
are never surpassed. The febrile birthing of 'information technology'
on show here becomes so much less, and therefore, much more –
regaining potential instead of being some sort of lumpy precursor.
This is not a utopian dream of a lost real, but a hope that a
branching universe would have been differently creative, and, say,
developed colossal new technologies in order to allow the use of
mechanical computers in giant spaceships, in a very different space
program, rather than strapping a huge amount of fuel onto a missile.
Bletchley seems to offer so much less, but it offers more, and is the
carrier of unexpected gifts: it organizes time and time streams
through its persistence, through its *fixing* of data, its *fixing*
machines, always to be what they once were. A once that travels
through time, at standard clock pace, nothing escaping by nearing the
speed of light. In _Cryptonomicon_, Stephenson maps two more or less
actual worlds (one of which is Bletchley Park itself) expanding the
standard idea of a parallel universe being a bit like this one, but
separate. His Bletchleys operate in parallel – so Bletchley Park
retains potential for spawning branching universes (and ties in to
his 'Baroque' cycle).
The Bletchley Park on show now is, again, so much less. Today
Bletchley Park is a playground for ~le troisieme age~. Buses disgorge
the ex-army, navy, air force and 'Wrens' hungry with memories, and
they are met by the same guiding tours. Without going sociological on
anyone, the average age is 70 plus. The jokes of the tour guides are
as stale as war rations, and the renovated sections of the site are
punctuated with strange collecting cultures: vintage autos and train
sets.
The key here is not the age of guides or visitors as such, it
is *the age* from which they come, in which they stay, in visiting
this other Bletchley, so much like itself. The gravity that holds
this Bletchley together is the co-presence of so many actors and
objects from 'the original', as well as those who have grown up in
its shadow (one of the guides was born in the park itself).
It would have been more moving, you would think, to leave the site
completely unrepaired, unthematised. This is to misread the purpose:
Bletchley Park is a peculiar experiment in live steampunk: slowpunk.
Like Ian Watson's 'Very Slow Time Machine' that can only travel
backwards in time, whilst taking the exact amount of time travelled
to make the journey, this park is the past brought into a parallel
future, where it is always 1943.
At the same time, the inhabitants of
this slow space are the real marker of time whilst still as close to
inhabiting the 1940s as possible. Nobody imagined that steampunk in
the real world would be so odd – that it would be exactly the same
people, living the same moment, seemingly for ever.
The shop is full of 1940s re-issues. Over at the canteen hut (the
same as used in WWII), there is only soft food – no culture sector
treats, as scones and tea sit in for organic salads and chai lattes.
The culture sector is never born, in this world. This is a place
outside of global trends, other than those already in place by 1941.
This is a world of huts brimming with rambling anecdotes and
nationalist pride in a job well done. No glass walls. Not a hint of
stainless steel and titanium surfaces. The steamseniors of BP have
become code, one that resists decoding, as in this world, the
computer (or anything else) never left the glorious moment the
universe branched. This theme park is a nature reserve, preserving a
moment so a static universe can come to be, and all futures are
removed. Hidden again.
And perhaps rightly so, for the very existence of the fruits of the
codebreaking labours at Bletchley Park – 'Ultra' – from spring 1941
to the war's end remained more or less hidden from view well into the
1970s until F.H. Hinsley's monumental official history of British
intelligence and the brilliant exploits of decrypting German Enigma
codes during the war filled out many details.
Still, Bletchley continues to be perfused with the legacy of secrecy
and suffers from residuality and state neglect – it remains standing
only because of the ongoing efforts of the 'Friends of' benevolent
society. In his popular writing, Hinsley's approach runs against the
grain of facts – he writes in a counter-factual mode in order to
grasp the impact of Ultra on events in the war. This practice of
wondering how things might have been without Ultra is dubious,
Hinsley admits, but it is the only way to backfill existing war
histories.
One of the most intractable problems about telling
Bletchley Park's story and assessing its impact is that the knowledge
it gained of German war plans could not be translated into decisive
action without revealing that the Enigma keys had been broken. The
superior intelligence enjoyed without a doubt by the Allies needed to
be supplemented by other sources and knowledge attributable to them.
Further issues plague this approach: deductions from intercepted
messages were sometimes too aggressive and at other times too
restrained. Unlike hindsight which is always perfect. On the tour
that draws you in to the 'proper', fully institutionalized reading of
Bletchley, the guide is reticent on a key point: it cannot have been
possible to invent other sources for every part of information
decoded, so German missions must, on occasion, have been let through.
Sacrifices must have been made, knowingly. There is no place for
this, in this storytelling, enough cunning would always be found to
prevent that Axis from its evil acts, in this place, at this time.
This time being now, but also 1943. Morale will be kept high. The
purity of that time cannot be threatened, especially not by facts
that might interrupt the storyline. This doubled time of Bletchley
and another Bletchley must hold firm.
Bletchley Park remains suspended over the gap between information and
action. It is uncanny – that is, the enormous influence of Allied
intelligence on the war's outcome is accepted but in order to tell
its history it is made into something alien. Bletchley or just plain
BP is familiar to most through the roles it has played in spy
thrillers and science fiction novels; it is a site known through
literature and cinema. So, the difficult approach made to Bletchley
Park today through the derelict and disused, through rubbish and
neglect, is at odds with the Bletchley of lore. In a sense actually
visiting Bletchley produces an uncanny feeling in reality that is
already there in literature and, for that matter, reading a
counter-factual history of the place serves to heighten this feeling,
by making science fiction seem more vivid and to the point. The clash
is between fiction and reality but also between the virtual and the
actuality of the village of code. No longer the haunt of Oxbridge
graduates and professors and computer geniuses, but of aged, shaking
men and leaky, damp buildings, renovated well below the standards of
the culture sector which creeps over almost all places labelled
'sites'.
What is even more interesting is that almost none of the machines
function; only the reconstructed Colossus computer, first switched on
in 1943, bears witness to that machine heritage. Unlike Freud who
experienced the uncanny wandering in the red light district from
which he could not escape, for us the machine is the thing that
creates unease, not by producing dissatisfaction, but by the real's
taking such license with the virtual. The cunning of history keeps us
in an artificial darkness. What exactly are we supposed to surmount:
reality and history or virtuality and fiction?
Bletchley as it really is has become a new precursor: of theme parks
that ply nostalgia but subtly bend time around collecting, futurology
and the machine. In the not too distant future we will visit parks
that recreate social networking sites, others where Second Life is
made 'real'; imagine a cordoned off area in a nearby mall consisting
of Sims hacks. ~The Matrix~ shows us this: concocted from an easy
meld between 1970s Baudrillard and 1980s Gibson, it also builds its
aesthetic from the 1980s, a time as ripe as the 1960s for futurology.
Leather coats, shades, black, black and more black; industrial music
that might have been 'way out' 10 years or more before the film...
while the 2000s remake of ~Battlestar Galactica~ is specifically a
return to the 1980s future of the show in the technology on the
ships.
The secret of Bletchley is not found in its official histories and
proliferating testimonials. Rather, its history is not of secrecy but
of what it has, we think, become: a site that secretes another
universe where computing remained at the valve stage with punched
cards and paper strips and manual, labour-intensive information
management froze in a glorious moment of sociality in standard dress.
Let's imagine another Bletchley based on an alternative destiny of
secrecy and follow the line of codebreaking. The historical
convergence of information theory and secrecy, two concepts that
Claude E. Shannon once remarked could not be kept apart, did not
result in the surveillance society characterized today by deep packet
inspection for the purposes of monitoring and censorship of Internet
traffic and manipulation of message content by governments around the
world including China, US, and Iran. Instead of a burgeoning
cybersurveillance of data intercepts, traffic intelligence gathering,
rerouting, rewriting for disinformation, disrupting peer-to-peer
communication, and control of encryption resistant to widespread
inspection, the hackers really did win the war and full packet
encryption became available to and free for all. Codebreaking, then,
as an anti-fascist practice and staple of resistant technocultures.
The doubled Bletchley we see now will remain a permanent precursor,
persisting. The 'other Bletchley' (of now) that mirrors the first
(and vice-versa) are a lesson in breaking code through further
encoding. Another Bletchley Park is needed now more than ever.
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Paul Hegarty teaches philosophy and visual culture at University
College Cork, Ireland, and makes noises with the bands Safe and La
Societe des Amis du Crime. His most recent books are Noise/Music
(Continuum, 2007) and, edited with Danny Kennedy, Dennis Cooper:
Writing at the Edge (Sussex, 2008).
Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead
University. His most recent books are Felix Guattari: A Critical
Introduction (Pluto, 2009) and, with Scott Thompson, Punched Drunk:
Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO, 1927-75 (Fernwood, 2009).
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* CTHEORY is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory,
* technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book
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* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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* Editorial Board: Paul Virilio (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Turin),
* Siegfried Zielinski (Academy of Media Arts, Cologne), Stelarc
* (Nottingham Trent University), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (New
* York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl
* (Boston College), Andrew Ross (New York University), Timothy
* Murray (Cornell University), Eugene Thacker (Georgia Institute of
* Technology), Steve Dixon (Brunel University), Anna Munster
* (University of New South Wales), Warren Magnusson (University of
* Victoria), Paul Hegarty (University College Cork), Joan Hawkins
* (Indiana University), Frances Dyson (University of California
* Davis), Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia), William
* Bogard (Whitman College) Andrew Wernick (Trent University),
* Maurice Charland (Concordia University).
*
* In Memoriam: Jean Baudrillard and Kathy Acker
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* Editorial Assistant: Aya Walraven
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