Boundaries: Mathematics, Alienation, and the Metaphysics of Cyberspace

Abstract

Boundaries: Mathematics, Alienation, and the Metaphysics of Cyberspace Robert Markley (bio) I To listen to its proponents, one would think that cyberspace has no past. Since William Gibson coined the term in Neuromancer, his “consensual hallucination” has become almost a brand name for life in the postmodern, postindustrial age—a cyborg existence irrevocably dependent on technological interventions in and augmentations of our bodies. 1 Most descriptions of cyberspace emphasize that it is, in Michael Benedikt’s words, “a new stage, a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology.” 2 For Benedikt and for many others, the role of breakthrough technologies in restructuring human nature is axiomatic. 3 Those involved in developing virtual technologies—our ports of entry to cyberspace—are usually upbeat about this reconstruction of the self and society. Throughout the growing literature on cyberspace, as discussed in my introduction to this special issue, cybernauts present the integrative technologies of Virtual Reality as an almost phenomenological means to heal the ruptures within our postmodern, postindustrial identities. 4 [End Page 485] Paradoxically, they contend, accepting our fate as cyborgs will allow us to become more fully human, to free our inherently creative natures from the belatedness, the alienation, of representation. 5 If many cyberpunk writers (and critics) regard our electronically mediated future with suspicion, those involved in developing virtual systems characteristically promote cyberspace as a technological panacea for our postmodern malaise. I want to begin my critique of this view by suggesting a more guarded approach to virtual technologies—and a different definition of cyberspace. Cyberspace is a consensual cliché, a dumping ground for repackaged philosophies about space, subjectivity, and culture; it does not offer a breakthrough in human, or cyborgian, evolution, but merely (though admittedly) a seductive means to reinscribe fundamental tensions within Western concepts of identity and reality. I remain skeptical of the notion that a technologically mediated existence offers a radical break with our “modernist” past, and suspicious of the leaps of faith we are asked to make from experimental, jury-rigged, and often gremlin-ridden virtual technologies to the nearly mystical unity of human and machine in cyberspace. In my mind, there is nothing necessarily “irresistible” about the development of cyberspace; rather than a consensual hallucination, it represents a contested and irrevocably political terrain that is unlikely to determine the future “elaboration of human culture.” My critique of cyberspace, then, is concerned less with the problems of access to new technologies (though an analysis of the ideology of informatics, as Donna Haraway, Anne Balsamo, and Gary Chapman have demonstrated, is crucial to a democratic politics in the age of information) than with the largely unchallenged discourses of the metaphysics of cyberspace—the philosophizing that ignores or mystifies the theoretical and historical underpinnings of this hallucinatory realm and that consequently downplays the technological and political difficulties involved in creating and disseminating virtual worlds. 6 My purpose, I would emphasize, is [End Page 486] not to attack the development of virtual technologies, but to suggest that their usefulness in education, medicine, architecture, art, engineering, and other fields depends precisely on our resistance to their being collapsed into “cyberspace”—the naive, totalizing incarnation of Western tendencies to privilege mind over materiality. 7 Many of the people involved in developing the software and hardware for virtual technologies are deeply, often vocally, suspicious of the motives and expertise of cultural critics intent on colonizing cyberspace. Like other scientists, many have retreated to the bulwarks of technological literacy to defend their positive, even utopian, views of what virtual technologies will mean for humankind. 8 Significantly, however, the scientific and technical literature on cyberspace is framed consistently, often unapologetically, in a millenarian rhetoric that, recasting the legacy of the 1960s counterculture, celebrates a technology that promises rewards exceeding the expenditures of labor and capital required to bring it into being. Cyberspace, in effect, is a metaphysical construct, shot through with the assumptions and values of an idealist philosophy. Its proponents, from Michael Benedikt to Timothy Leary, favor rhetorical jump cuts between technological jargon and mystical incantations: these leaps of faith from the still-primitive technologies of virtual reality to the fictional realm of...