As a senior undergraduate in college, I had the nutty idea to morph my fascincation with representations of technology through gender, and representations of gender through technology into a thesis, of all things. Following is an excerpt from
"I May Be Synthetic, But I'm Not Stupid": Technicity, Artifice and Repetition in Cyberville
In William Gibson's Neuromancer, cyberspace is a sophisticated cartesian map, an abstract manifestation in architectural space of a multinational economy. Accessed through an Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, coordinates reveal corporate geometries, massive pyramids that echo the urbanscapes lit by blossoming flares in the opening scenes of Blade Runner. Impossibly dense quantities of information circulate, linked everywhere by a web of communications lines.Cyberspace is an extrapolation of the current state of affairs in the technological world. In Islands of the Net, a cyberpunk novel by Bruce Sterling, this process of electronic expansion is described as the amalgamation of existing technologies, through a series of links that leave no artifact untouched:
...[T]he Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disc. Broadcast towers linked to microwave dish to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber optic cords hissing out words and pictures.... All netted together, a global nervous system. It was easy to make it sound transcendentally incredible. (Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net, 17.)The experience of this "global nervous system" in Neuromancer, "jacking into the matrix," is a perceptual immersion. The "bodiless exultation" of cyberspace is conveyed as the pleasure of the interface, a stimulated suspension of corporeal reality in exchange for simulation. Gibson's verbal concoction, cyberspace, has subsequently been enthusiastically appropriated by those who are designing the technology to make virtuality a reality.
The appropriation of cyberspace is also occurring beyond the engineering lab. The metaphor of cyberspace, the conceptual model of disembodiement, delineates a new relation of identity to the body. The linguistic representation of cyberspace technology, in Neuromancer as well as in the industry, suggests a correlation between the use of drugs and technology. In Crack Wars, Avital Ronell interprets this bond between the electronic and drug culture as a seminal illustration of the identity, as described previously by Judith Butler, as perpetually unstable, permanently in crisis. The repetitions incurred by addictive substances contribute to a fleeting sense of containment, brief moments of respite from the incomplete identities constructed around the body.
The act of representation in cyberspace suggests a radical break from identities determined by the body. The possibility of truly performative identity resonates with Butler's model of identity as acts of repetition. The significant break from the body poses a new question altogether, to which Butler and Gilles Deleuze seem to speak in similar ways, concerning reality of the "body" itself as yet another construct of representation. In cyberspace, theoretically and literally, issues of identity engender new possibilities.
The most visible impact of the metaphor of cyberspace has been in the field of virtual reality, computer generated simulated environments. The sensorial immersion that VR engineers seek to emulate would constitute an aural, visual, tactile embodiment in a fabricated non-space, a locus for social interaction completely mediated through binary codes of digital data. Neuromancer gave form and integrity to the emerging technology and its engineers, the "technologically literate and socially disaffected," in effect providing a tangible cultural location, a consolidated image of social interaction.
...[T]he existence of Gibson's novel and the technological and social imaginary that it articulated enabled the researchers in virtual reality--or, under the new dispensation, cyberspace--to recognize and organize themselves differently.(Allucqure Rosanne Stone, "Will The Real Body Please Stand Up?:Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures." In Cyberspace: The First Steps, 99.) In response to the popularity of his texts and the critical acclaim emanating from the engineers and technicians of cyberspace technology, Gibson describes the technology with which he is adept, that of language. In "Academy Leader," he reveals the arbitrary origins of this word with a detached ambivalence, as if to divest himself of responsibility for its existence:
...Just a chance operator...The trips others have taken, trailing the angle in the luminescent glow of Gibson's "pop poetics," determine the cutting edge of burgeoning technologies and redefine old ones. Cyberspace is, in a sense, no longer Gibson's word at all. "Awaiting meaning," as he claims, it has been given meaning from diverse social locations. Although virtual reality more closely approximates the neuromantic conception of cyberspace, the domesticated, public access version of cyberspace is already a daily component of practical living for those who use computers. An understanding of the disembodied conceptual spaces mediated by communications technology begins there, in international and local networks, like Usenet, Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve and the Well. These networks host countless conferences and e-mail deliveries, facilitating communication on a scale previously unimaginable.
Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language.... Slick and hollow--awaiting meaning.
All I did: folded words as taught.
"Gentlemen, that is not now nor will it ever be my concern..."
I work the angle of transit.A modified extension cord from the telephone, the modem converts the computer into a portal as well as a tablet, the terminal a window into a vast universe that is nowhere. The face reflected in the screen is that of the cyborg.
Situated within the discourse of cyborgs, cyberspace engenders individuals "cerebrally cyberpsychic as opposed to materially technic." In his essay, "The Technophilic Body: On Technicity in William Gibson's Cyborg Culture", David Thomas refers to this as the "post-classic" cyborg, interfaced with software, in contrast to the hardware interface of the "classic" cyborg, like Molly Millions or the Terminator. This cerebral cyborg, relieved of bodily dimensions "meets" others on spatially neutral ground; the capacity for identity seems virtually endless.
As undifferentiated voices -- vox on the Vax, as agencies void of visually recognizable characteristics, members of computer networks construe puppets, masks with which to "face" others. Allucqure Rosanne Stone, who studies virtual communities, has noted the potential and enactment of fabricated identities, "computer cross-dressing." Operators can represent themselves without any reference to physical reality, performing identity freely through artifice. According to the tenets of compulsory identity, every body on the line is in biological drag. The social construction of the body becomes clear in cyberspace, where every identity is represented, rather than "real." The consensus of cyberspace is a precarious one; identification is entirely contingent, based on a consensual agreement to take one's word for it.
The hypothetical emancipation of consensual communications in the matrix is socially regulated. The current stage of most digitalized dialogues through the collective Nets reduces participants to representation in language. Lingo, dialect and syntax are the key identifiers in this rudimentary cyberspace, organized by a name and a position locator, an "address" where one can be reached in the space that is not. Communications in their present mode are perhaps an interesting instance of the subject constituted through language, projected and received through language. Even those in digital drag, must draw from familiar symbols to identify, and in doing so, conform to categorically established social identities.
Performances of "passing" as a presence divergent from the body succeed precisely because they are credible representations of socially accepted and recognizable roles, coded metaphors of internalized cultural norms. The manipulation of such codes to unconventional combinations is nonetheless an operation that occurs within the overall schema of cultural representation. Which is to say that a white male middle aged psychiatrist in biological drag as an older white disabled woman is able to enter discourse because "she" is using codes which render "her" familiar. The coded signifiers of identity, race, gender, nationality, still signify, even when invisible, and in fact must do so to maintain the social fabric of the Net.
Any representation in cyberspace, however, regardless of "authenticity," is an instance of "passing." The peculiarity of "Net" identities is the potential and relative ease with which disposable personas can be manufactured. No trace remains in cyberspace once the user has logged off; the arbitrary articulation, reiteration or rejection of an identity or even identities on the Net need have no tangible connection with the social and environmental reality before the screen. This is identity taken for what it may well be, an utterance, an act, an unstable entity that is lost in the blink of the cursor-prompt. An understanding of identity as an act, performed on the screen or the street, could perhaps ultimately undermine the stability of identity constructs. This resonates with Butler's conception of gender identity:
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or a locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 140.)The representation of identities through the technological artifice of cyberspaces is necessarily an act of repetition; the identity exists at no time other than the performance. The contingency of cyborg communications in virtual communities is ostensibly a source of liberated concepts of identity, as described by Butler:
This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the right to claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 138.)Unfortunately, however, the proliferation of virtual identities seems less bound to parody than to profit. Even in virtual reality, the conceptual interzone of visual, audio, tactile extravaganza of fantasy and imagination does not really transcend the consensus of hegemonic social interaction.
When Jaron Lanier, media darling of the virtual reality movement, the dreadlocked prodigy who co-founded VPL espouses the possibilities of virtual reality representation--"Why be a human? Why not be...a giant lobster?"--no radical rupture in representation occurs. According to the consensual pact of communication, the persona of virtual reality is understood as precisely that -- a "persona" -- which disguises the other, "real" identity of the operator. The halloween masquerade in the looney tune reality of cyberspace assumes the identity of the operator. An oft-used demonstration of virtual reality consists of a screen which displays the VR representation of a body or body part which situates the user in the environment for both self-reference and audience observation. Frequently, the signifier is one or both hands, the movement of which corresponds to the user's manual manipulations inside the data glove. For instance, in one demonstration, the user "flies" through the environment, arms extended forward, "hands" visible preceding the "body." Every installation I have seen, both on site, and through various media, displays a matched set of masculine, pinky-beige hands with which the typical virtual reality engineer identifies.
The probable path of virtual reality will be determined by economic prerogatives and commercial possibilities. The bulk of financial support for virtual reality technologies was originally provided to university research labs by the treasury of the defense department. Now, in addition to the virtual reality video games which are finding their way into theme parks and arcades, the lucrative market of virtual "adult entertainment," converts the notion of a joystick to a power glove that can cop a feel. A feature on VR in Details, the urban contemporary "Magazine for Men", underlines the potential of VR as a tool for what Howard Reingold calls "teledildonics" ; the one picture of VR presents a hand in a power glove, represented on the screen by a virtual white hand reaching towards the breasts of a naked white female torso.
The eventual manifestations of virtual reality seem very likely to reflect the cultural and political institutions which financially foster their growth. Representations which reinforce stereotypes will probably prevail. Although Lanier's representation remains explicitly connected to a "real" body, this image is preferable to other, derogatory ones; overgrown lobsters are unlikely to incite consumers to an enthusiasm equal to that generated by high speed pursuits, weapon play and buxom virtual bodies. Communication technologies do not evolve autonomously from cultural context; they are designed to function in a certain capacity, to satisfy the desires of commercial interests.
The consensus of cybernetic embodiment is one version of virtual reality. However commercially viable, the schizophrenia of commodity bodies in cyberspace, in which prefabricated anatomies can be adorned or manipulated, is unsatisfying for the cyborg seeking new possibilities. In fact, the representation of "real" bodies in VR is perhaps the most banal interface that cyberspace offers. Analysis of the "consensual loci" of interaction in the Net and "real" life risks forgetting the mode of transition, "the angle of transit," the relationships of users to their friendly machines, the "bodiless exultation" of "jacking in."
Neural trode technology in Neuromancer enables a condition of disembodiment, sensorial immersion into the electric field of the matrix, or, for recreation, into simstim -- simulated stimulation -- a futuristic media in which the "viewer" experiences the body of a character on a show through sensorium--"the world -- all the interesting parts, at least, as perceived by Tally Isham" (BC, 183). The experience of disembodiment is not a new innovation; altered states of being, the sensation of bodilessness, is historically associated with signifiers of artifice: drugs, religion and fiction, for instance. Technological interface creates the illusion of concealing, or effacing the body. This technology is depicted in Neuromancer in the rhetoric of drugs. The pleasure of the interface is addictive. The console cowboy Case experienced the "consensual hallucination" of the matrix as an ecstatic state of exhilaration. Deprived access by means of a chemical alteration that inflicted neural damage -- a punishment for stealing from his employers -- he is confined to his flesh. In withdrawal, drenched in sweat he wakes nightly, "reaching for the console that isn't there" (5), and subverts his need in the abuse of other, more tangible substances. His body merely "meat," his need for the experience of cyberspace leaves him internalized and suicidal. He is desperate.
This desperation demands further interrogation. Gibson's equation of technology and drugs under the sign of need suggests that perhaps the lure of cyberspace can best be understood through an elaboration of the metaphor, the semiotic appropriation of an addiction that involves literature, drugs and technology:
If the literature of electronic culture can be located in the works of Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, in the imaginings of cyberpunk projection, or a reserve of virtual reality, then it is probable that electronic culture shares a crucial project with drug culture. This project should be understood in Jean-Luc Nancy's and Blanchot's sense of dŽsoeuvrement -- a project without an end or a program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs, and whose contours we can begin to read. (Avital Ronell, Crack Wars, 68.)The texture of this technologized euphoria is difficult to trace. How might reading the literature of electronic culture foster an understanding of the "project" shared by electronic and drug culture? How might this project be situated in the mechanics of identity?
He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberdeck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. (William Gibson, Neuromancer, 5.)Technology functions in this instance as a node of amplification, an externalizing agent, perhaps, through which Case can "jack in." The insinuation of autoerotic excitement, augmented by an internally induced high, enacts a narcissistic engagement of dis- and subsequent re-embodiment. We might say that cyberspace makes the body possible. Virtual reality becomes a useful resource for confirming that "real" reality exists by providing something which is clearly not real. The technology of a drug serves a similar function: "Being-on-drugs indicates that a structure is already in place, prior to the production we call drugs, including virtual reality or cyberprojections" (Ronell, 33).
With respect to bodies, the creation of a dichotomy between the "hallucination" of the matrix and the "prison" of the flesh renders both "inner" and "outer" space possible: "The effect of a structuring inner space is produced through the signification of the body as a vital and sacred enclosure."(Butler, 135) Jacking-in is a technology which liberates one from the "sacred enclosure," the prison, of the body, "And somewhere he was laughing, in a white painted loft, tears of release streaking his face" (Gibson, 52). In this case, the matrix creates the body, a provocative notion for the destabilization of identity categories assigned to specific bodies.
Judith Butler's task of rethinking gender leads her to question the concept of the "body" itself as a construct, an interrogation that perhaps shares concerns with the "crucial project" of electronic and drug culture to which Ronell refers:
The "body" often appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a cultural source figured as "external" to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed body, however, ought to question the "body" as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse. (Butler, 129)In Butler's theory, the "body" is inscribed by technologies of representation, external cultural forces which not merely encrypt, but by that act of encryption create the very text, the "body", which is to be read. And yet the phrase in theory contains the promise of that which is external, outside of theory. Beyond the sanctity of academicizing the body, of learning the "body" in cyberspace, through discourse as well as social intercourse, is it possible to evade the seemingly inevitable recuperation and maintenance of inside/out on an a priori body?
In contrast to the narcissistic concern "How can I `know' myself," Ronell suggests that the project of drugs, chemical prostheses for the cyborgs, is excessive: "drugs open up the gulf of extra-erotic, extra-epistemic desire" (33). The "algebra of need" that is addiction is out of control. For this reason, "we" hold something against the addict:
We do not object to the drug user's pleasure, per se, but we cannot abide the fact that his [sic?] is a pleasure taken in an experience without truth. Pleasure and play are not in themselves condemned unless they are inauthentic and void of truth. (Jacques Derrida, "The Rhetoric of Drugs: An Interview with Jacques Derrida", interview by Jean Michel Herpieu, et al., in 1-800, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1991):66)
The absence of truth, the withdrawal from consensus that is unproductive, is intolerable to "reality". Pleasure and play with technology, as suggested by Neuromancer, and, as we recall, by the technological subcultures introduced in the previous chapter, is often actively and symbolically concurrent with the use of drugs.
"...I got really interested in these obsessive things. I hadn't heard anybody talk about anything with that intensity since the 60's. It was like listening to people talk about drugs. (William Gibson, "Eye to Eye with William Gibson," interview by Tom Maddox, in Science Fiction Eye, 26.)
Gibson learned technology through analogy. He knew technology, in a sense, through a previous knowledge of drugs. Technology and drugs became somehow synonymous, related through their respective intensities. Gibson's association is meaningful with respect to this question concerning "obsessive things"; for people to talk about technology like they talk about drugs suggests that the experience of these intensities is similar. Tracing these intensities through the metaphors of technologized drugs and technology as drugs may allow a closer reading of this excessive project.
Prior to Neuromancer, these metaphors were already in circulation. Before the development of contemporary technologies people were already getting wired on a more mundane stimulant, caffeine. The language of drugs includes a technological vocabulary. In certain places, these metaphors draw from and map onto cultural identities and experiences, exposing a system of exchange through representations.
...The social experience of technology on Nets, at raves, in Neuromancer, ensures that subjects are not merely audiences for technological texts, merely textual identities. In tracing the instance of cyberspace, spawned from a literary text and mapped onto cultural experiences, we may begin to describe the flow of meaning between the texts and the lived experience of technology. The study of the act of representation and identification through fiber optics is an opportunity to investigate the process of identity in crisis in terms of both flow and relation. The perspective from cyberspace of identity-in-culture reflects the cultural model articulated by Angela McRobbie:On the one hand, it is fluid, never completely secured and continually being remade, reconstructed afresh. On the other hand, it only exists in relation to what is not, to the other identities which are its other.In her post-script to the Cultural Studies anthology, McRobbie expresses the desire to:
find the right theoretical vocabulary to understand everyday life in its fleeting, fluid and volatile formations. (McRobbie, 730)The metaphor of technology, specifically in reference to cyberspace, thus offers a provocative model through which to consider the process of identity. The electric flow of identity, the technologized construction of identities, begin to converge under the sign of technology. My pressing questions for these new manifestations concern the effective reproduction of hegemonic social categories in technologically articulated identities. Should these repetitions merely reconstitute the