Shreds and Patches: The Morphogenesis of Cyberspace

Abstract

Shreds and Patches: The Morphogenesis of Cyberspace Robert Markley (bio) One of the ironies of our culture’s fascination with cyberspace is that our material and psychic investments in Virtual Reality suggest that the death of print culture—or its disappearance into the matrix—has been greatly exaggerated. If cyberspace is, as William Gibson tells us, a “consensual hallucination,” its means of generating that consent are technologies at least five hundred, if not three thousand, years old. 1 The era of Virtuality has been heralded by articles in mainstream news magazines (Time); special issues of scholarly journals, such as South Atlantic Quarterly and Genders; collections of essays from programmers and self-styled visionaries (Cyberspace: First Steps) as well as from—who else?—literary and cultural critics (Storming the Reality Studio; Fiction 2000); popularizations by journalists such as Howard Rheingold and Benjamin Woolley; and its own user’s guide, Mondo 2000, something of a cross between Rolling Stone and Mad magazine. 2 Cyberspace is unthinkable, literally inconceivable, without the print culture it claims to [End Page 433] transcend. It is, in part, a by-product of a tradition of metaphysics that, boats against the current, bears us back relentlessly to our past. In an important sense, the indebtedness of cyberspace to its logocentric past is one of the threads that ties together the essays in this special issue of Configurations. This awareness of the historical and cultural implication of virtual technologies in the dreamscape of Western thought sets Katherine Hayles, David Brande, Richard Grusin, David Porush, and myself apart from those writers who characterize cyberspace as a new, if not always brave, world. The more visionary proponents and analysts of cyberspace (many of whom are discussed in the essays below) come to virtual technologies from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, but they share the belief that cyberspace marks a revolutionary expansion—and liberation—of our senses of identity and reality. In contrast, the contributors to this issue of Configurations remain skeptical of a cyberspatial metaphysics that assumes, rather than questions, the revolutionary nature of virtual worlds and the electronically mediated experience on which they depend. The essays that follow ignore the injunction to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and focus instead on challenging some of the powerful myths that inform postmodernism’s consensual hallucinations. Hence the title of this issue, drawn from Gibson, “Dreaming Real: Cyberspace and Its Discontents.” Writers on cyberspace, whether proponents or skeptics, face the problem of definition: what, after all, counts as a virtual reality? Increasingly, cyberspace has become a catch-all term for everything from e-mail to GameBoy cartridges, as though each computer screen were a portal to a shadow universe of infinite, electronically accessible, space. But in this sense, it tends to lose the specificity that supposedly distinguishes it as a breakthrough technology in human and cultural evolution. Michael Benedikt defines cyberspace as “a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality.” 3 Marcos Novak draws together a composite definition: “Cyberspace is a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing systems, along pathways provided by present and future communication networks, enabling full copresence and interaction of multiple users, allowing input and output from and to the full human sensorium, permitting simulations of real and virtual realities, remote data collection [End Page 434] and control through telepresence, and total integration and intercommunication with a full range of intelligent products and environments in real space.” This hardwired universe of simulated experience, though, is more than the sum of its parts: “Cyberspace is a habitat of the imagination, a habitat for the imagination . . . the place where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming, a landscape of rational magic, of mystical reason, the locus and triumph of poetry over poverty, of ‘it-can-be-so’ over ‘it-should- be-so.’” 4 The transition from the rhetoric of corporate hype to a romanticism filtered through popular science fiction is less abrupt than it seems. The rhetoric of cyberspace characteristically invokes the pleasure and power of an imaginative world made whole, as Novak’s emphasis (drawn in part form cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling) on fullness, plenitude, and mystical...