Posted by Josh Hubanks, Research Assistant

Recently, I began my last-ever semester of graduate school. Soon, my formal education will be complete; my time in the academy, over. Don’t get me wrong—I’m excited about it; but, being the total, unrepentant geek that I am, I can’t help but be a little sad, too.

So, I’ve made the abundantly conscious decision this term to indulge myself academically. (Carpe diem, right?) Most directly, this has resulted in my registration for a class on film theory—a subject about which I’m deeply passionate but know little.

Already, the course’s readings are opening my mind. One piece, How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles, considers the idea held by some that information can exist in a state of abstract disembodiment--separated from mind, from body, from flesh, from circuit--with no natural connection to physical reality. It’s deep stuff, to be sure.

According to Hayles, information cannot, in fact, exist independently of medium: “[I]t can be a shock,” she says, “to remember that for information to exist it must always be instantiated in a medium, whether that medium is [a] page from the Bell Laboratories Journal..., the computer-generated topological maps used by the Human Genome Project, or the cathode ray tube on which virtual worlds are imagined.” She continues: “Abstraction is of course an essential component in all theorizing, for no theory can account for the infinite multiplicity of our interactions with the real. But when we make moves that erase the world’s multiplicity, we risk losing sight of the variegated leaves, fractal branchings, and particular bark textures that make up the forest.”

I empathize with Hayles’ view, specifically her belief that the reduction of something whole and fluid into something approximate and binary is both crude and unattractive. Indeed, the conversion of something actual into something digital necessarily involves a disconnection from reality–a dumbing-down of the infinite into something finite and quantifiable. Such is the nature of analog-to-digital encoding. With this fact in mind, Hayles poses a fundamental question: What do we lose when we distill something actual into something synthetic and virtual?

While I appreciate the poignancy of Hayles’ question, her skepticism of virtuality per se distracts me. I’m moreover unconvinced that whatever is lost through such distillation always matters—at least on an experiential level.

Hayles’ impressive theoretical inquiry notwithstanding, the human body–bound as it is to the limits of its five senses and their respective capacities–is incapable of infinite perception. At certain extremes, for example, digital representations of sight and sound contain so much detail that, to our eyes and ears, they are not discernibly different from reality. In excess of certain frame rates, certain audio frequencies, certain degrees of chromatic intensity, we are rendered perceptually oblivious.

There is one passage toward which I feel an unflinching sense of agreement with Hayles, though. She says: “In the face of such a powerful dream [that information is constructable and its immortality thus achievable], [information] must always be instantiated….”

I believe this to be completely true. When I am moved by a film, neither its disconnection from actuality nor the medium through which I experience it matter. In those rare and precious moments, and in countless remembrances thenceforth, its materiality is and shall remain manifest. It is “instantiated,” as Hayles is fond of saying, in my memory; it is made actual, having become part of me.

The class is a joy—a rare act of indulgence for which I feel no regret. What better way to bring my studies to a close?

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Josh Hubanks is one of k-global’s spring 2012 interns. He is presently finishing his Master of Arts degree at Georgetown University, where he studies the interrelationship between media, politics and persuasive communication. He will graduate in May and is searching—sedulously—for a job in field of public affairs.