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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?
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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.)
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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).
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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.
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