The Perspectival Limits of Computation: Researching the Present in Satin Island

Abstract

This paper examines a search for perspective amid globally networked computational systems that defy the individual's desire for complete access and understanding. It also illuminates how science invokes literary forms to conceive and explain new concepts. Concretely, the paper is oriented around Tom McCarthy's novel Satin Island and twentieth century computer scientist John Von Neumann's early research on the modern computer. In Satin Island, the search for an almost objective perspective or revelation runs up against the incomprehensibility of the information age. I consider two perspectives—an elevated, unmediated view as well as a more local, constrained, and mediated view—to relate perspectival limits in the novel to larger considerations about the limits of knowledge in the context of technological mediation. My approach also looks to the history of computing for both cultural attitudes and architectural paradigms that prefigure the current state of information technology. For instance, I read pioneering computer scientist Von Neumann's lectures on his early theoretical work on the modern computer to illuminate how he conceptualized computational forms of knowledge in relation to the human brain. Additionally, I consider a model called "cellular automata" popularized by the research program of Stephen Wolfram to explain the perspectival limits of computational methods adopted by the narrator of McCarthy's novel Satin Island. Finally, to think about the unique status of the novel and narrative in our time, I engage with the narrative theory and recent critical conversations about the status of "the contemporary" in the field of contemporary literature. All of this is my effort to understand the rationales, methods, and consequences of a research ethos committed to the idea that computation should supplant other ways of knowing.