Üstün, Berkay
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Ustun, Berkay
Job Title
Doktor Öğretim
Email Address
berkay.ustun@fbu.edu.tr
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Scholarly Output
2
Articles
2
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0
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0
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Article Citation Count: 0A Micrology of Pattern Recognition in Philip K. Dick's a Scanner Darkly(Istanbul Univ, Fac Letters, 2023) Üstün, Berkay; İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı BölümüThis article is a conjointly formal and thematic inquiry dedicated to unpacking the internal coherence of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly (1976). Organized around the unifying problem of pattern recognition, the article clarifies the deep congruence that exists between the seemingly unrelated imaginary technologies of the novel, used on both sides of the central demarcation that divides the identity of its protagonist: law enforcement and the trade in controlled substances. While it benefits from concepts designed to investigate science fiction as a genre, it also brings in discourses developed to make sense of media technologies in the real world. Guarding against the danger of eclipsing the text under information about the media historical context, this article allies media theory with narrative analysis and relies on "micrology" as a strategy of selective close reading following the logic of detection, recognition, and the failures thereof in the novel. This manner of inquiry allows me to specify the nature of pattern recognition as a lost capacity in the narrative arc, tracking the problems of information theory and the decline of cognitive capacities, as well as demonstrating their immanence to a single complex of ideas. In this sense, what belongs to intellectual history in the following discussion, is subject to the requirement that it makes the technological and psychological aspects of the narrative more intelligible and respond to the unique challenges of its combination of estranging world-building and all too familiar countercultural tropes.Article Citation Count: 0Speculative Fiction and Pattern Recognition: Narrative Models for a Retrained Intuition(Rector Ciu Cyprus int Univ, 2023) Üstün, Berkay; İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı BölümüThe notion of pattern recognition emerged in the late 1950s as an extension of advances in cybernetics and information theory. From the start, authors of science fiction and speculative fiction narratives made their own explorations of the concept, taking it to fields and extremes not predicted by the state of development of pattern recognition technologies. I argue that a pair of these narratives provide opportunities to observe the development of a public understanding of, and imaginaries deriving from, a vision of perception geared toward patterns, arrangements, and configurations that involve historical change. More specifically, these narratives stage questions of historical meaning and intuitive grasp of patterns of consumer behavior by modifying the notion they borrow from computational research through the intermediary of media theory. A second goal of the article is to examine literary history by taking the relevant works of Brunner and Gibson as favorable cases for observing the beginnings and transformations of the reception of pattern recognition concept by speculative fiction. The common reference they make to historical concretion serves as a constant across their differences here. Both fictions seem to stage the possibilities of pattern literacy as a human capacity that includes but is not reducible to one of its most famous and problematic avatars, which is that of a sense of conspiracy, belief gone awry, and/or paranoia (which, according to Fredric Jameson, is the "poor person's cognitive mapping''). Methodologically relying on a combination of media theory and close readings, the goal here is to ascertain whether such fictions constitute viable cases for a "pattern recognition from below", as distinct from a data-intensive pursuit. In this sense, this study neither constitutes an intellectual history of pattern recognition that reduces the object of its study to mere accouterments of context nor simply a close reading of each of the texts on their own terms. It is a comparative exercise that aims to gain surplus of historical and textual intelligibility through the juxtaposition of its chronologically distant narratives. From different angles, the two close readings treat the same core problem of the possibility to retain an affirmative approach to the historical-morphological possibilities inherent in pattern recognition and not consign it to an "ideology" of the information society. Keywords: Concrete, abstract, pattern recognition,
