speedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeed speed speed speed speed speed SPEED 1.1 speed speed ----------------------------------- speed speed Spring 1994 speed speed speed speed speed speedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeed _SPEED_ is a new electronic journal, published three times a year, providing a forum for the critical investigation of technology, media, and society. The intention of this and all following "transmissions" will be to contribute toward a real democratic discourse of technology and media, one that is always focused upon the variety of material conditions of life that technologies and media constitute and demand, and yet does not lose sight of the power of ideas to course changes in those conditions. We feel that as media of various kinds become more ubiquitous, what it means to live with and talk about a "medium" changes and expands. The critical vocabularies of interpreting what those transformations indicate, therefore, need to keep pace. Our primary goal in that effort is to foster a cross-fertilization of ideas between communities of people, people in the "academy" and in "industry," too often separated, not by interest or common concern, but by artificially imposed disciplinary and organizational boundaries. We think that the first transmission of _SPEED_ is a promising step toward making these institutional boundaries more permeable, and a critical politics of "mediated sociality" more powerful. VERSION 1.1 "MYTHS OF ELECTRONIC LIVING" INCLUDES: * BENJAMIN BRATTON (U.C.S.B.) "INTRODUCTION: CODE AND MYTH" * "TECHNICALLY SPEAKING" A CONVERSATION WITH MARK LEYNER * "APPARATUS AND MEMORY" A CONVERSATION WITH KATHY ACKER * MARK JENKINS (U.C.S.D.) "THE PLEASURES & TERRORS OF IDENTITY" * MARK PESCE (NETWORK ZERO, S.F.) "FINAL AMPUTATION" * ROBERT NIDEFFER (U.C.S.B.) "IMAG(IN)ED GULFS" * WILL KRETH (_WIRED_ MAGAZINE) "DIGITAL FALL GUYS" ----------------------------------- EDITORIAL BOARD FOR _SPEED_ 1.1 * Benjamin Bratton * Robert Nideffer * Julie Palsmeier * TECHNICAL ADVISOR * Mark Schildhauer * ----------------------------------- STAY TUNED FOR TRANSMISSION TWO: "SCIENCE AND RE-ENCHANTMENT" We are currently reviewing abstracts and papers which explore the emergence and/or convergence of new "scientific" forms, and the real and imagined impact they might have on how we live our lives. It has been a long-held assumption that as "scientific" means of ordering social and cultural institutions become more pervasive, everyday life will become increasingly "disenchanted." Currently, however, various developments in the field of "science" have worked to confuse and complicate the relationships between scientific discourses, and the horizons of an everyday life that seems, for better and/or for worse, open to what might be called "the politics of appropriation and improvisation." We are interested in submissions that explore the ways that "science" (broadly conceived) works as a means for making claims about a world--a world that *because* of "scientific" developments is now, perhaps more than ever before--open to question. From bio-medical imaging technologies to the resurgence of "Creationism," from sports medicine to the history of the UPC bar-code, from "on-line sex" services in France to the poetics of prosthetic limbs, from mythologies of artificial intelligence to a re- thinking of the Golem; we feel that there are limitless possibilities for the exploration of "scientific re-enchantment." Please send abstracts and papers to one of the addresses below: e-mail Please send all submissions, criticisms, praise, suggestions, or anything else you have on your mind to _SPEED_@alishaw.ucsb.edu (addressed exactly as you see it). We want to hear from you! snail-mail If for whatever reason you need to communicate with us via the U.S. Postal Service, please send your correspondence to: _SPEED_ Department of Sociology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA. 93106-9430 ** NOTE: Future issues will also be made available via NCSA Mosaic on the World Wide Web, which will allow point and click retrieval of audio, video, text, graphics, and animation files. We'll keep you informed. ----------------------------------- HOW TO GET _SPEED_ _SPEED_ can be accessed and/or downloaded two ways: 1) Anonymous ftp; or 2) Gopher. 1. To get _SPEED_ via Anonymous ftp just type the following at your local prompt: ftp alishaw.ucsb.edu --when asked for a login name type: anonymous --when asked for a password type the first part of your e-mail address. For example: myname@ --change directories by typing: cd /pub/_SPEED_ --at the ftp> prompt you can type the normal "get" and "put" commands. For example: get _SPEED_1.1 (or: mget* to get the whole directory) 2. To get _SPEED_ via Gopher just type the following at your local prompt: gopher alishaw.ucsb.edu (you can also type in the IP address directly as follows: gopher 128.111.222.10) Once there, you will see the familiar Gopher menu structure with _SPEED_ being one of your options. At that point you can choose to browse individual items, or mail them to yourself and/or others. (You have to Gopher directly to us because the Social Science Computing Facility at U.C.S.B. where _SPEED_ is archived is not a registered Gopher server. That's why if you happen to be looking for _SPEED_ over your regular Gopher server you won't have much luck finding it.) ** To subscribe to _SPEED_, send e-mail to _SPEED_@alishaw.ucsb.edu with "subscribe" in the subject header. In addition to receiving all future issues, you will be kept up to date on developments regarding the journal. ** NOTE: _SPEED_ text is stored as ASCII only (the text character-code common to ALL personal computers). This means the contents of _SPEED_ can be downloaded (via Anonymous ftp or Gopher) and imported into any word- processing program on the market. The journal's text uses roughly a 65- character line, so your margins should be set accordingly. Set your font type to Courier, 9pt if you want to retain formatting after downloading. ----------------------------------- SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Submissions to the journal can be made by electronic mail (preferred), on disk (please indicate the program and operating system used), or in hard- copy (not preferred). No matter what form your submission takes, please: --do not use any special characters --do not use smart quotes (you know, the curly-Q ones) --start all paragraphs flush with the left-hand margin and separate them with two hard-returns --do not use tabs to indent --use endnotes instead of footnotes. To indicate an endnote in the body of your text set it off like this: "blah, blah, blah."[1] --use the MLA (Modern Language Association) format for references --use _For Titles_ --use *for emphasis* ----------------------------------- INTRODUCTION TO TRANSMISSION ONE: "MYTHS OF ELECTRONIC LIVING" CODE AND MYTH BENJAMIN BRATTON "Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity." --W. Benjamin. "And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing." --J. Derrida. "Myths of Electronic Living," begins what we hope will be a different kind of conversation about contemporary life and politics, a forum composed of many different voices that in the past have not often been heard along side one another. This first "transmission" of _SPEED_ includes articles both by members of the "academy" and "industry"; people too often separated, not by interest or conviction, but by impersonal structures of various kinds. Part of what we hope to accomplish in this, and in future issues, is to circumvent these structures toward the discovery of new objectives, languages and understandings that might produce better and more public ways of thinking about technology, media and society. This first collection grew out of one such coming together. Last August, at the annual SIGGRAPH meetings in Anaheim, CA, _SPEED_ sponsored two panels entitled "Technology, Representation, Politics," made up of people from the academy and the business community, professionals interested in theorizing questions of technology. The contrast between our panel participants' marginal (within the context of the SIGGRAPH setting), but earnest attempt to demand a dialogic relationship with technology, and the beyond-overwhelming razzle-dazzle of the nation's largest computer graphics industry hoe-down, was, to say the least, severe. Nevertheless, the sometimes confusing but surprisingly successful communicative relationship that we were able to construct amongst ourselves demonstrated an avenue of hope. It is in the spirit of each participant's attempt to make sense of the various "local tongues" that s/he had to work with in Anaheim, that this first transmission is dedicated. This process of learning to hear across our technically afforded languages, and the producing of better (if temporary) "hybrid languages" is a skill that we can only learn from each other. It is my hope then, that the informal, introductory essay below is written in such a way that certain arguments central to the different approaches we wish to bring together will be accessible to a (relatively) wide audience. The reader therefore, may find many things already known in a re-stated form, but, s/he will also hopefully find some ideas (even if they weren't intentionally included) that work to establish useful if temporary "links" between present and potential concerns. It is meant as an initial gesture, not a call for ground-rules, in what we hope will be a fruitful conversation between those who are paid to think and those who are paid to construct the tools with which we think. Since we all do both, we anticipate an exciting exchange. We would also like to thank the participants at the SIGGRAPH panels whose work does not appear in this collection: Steve Kurzman of U. C. Santa Cruz, Department of Anthropology; Alan Barnum-Scrivener of Advanced Digital Systems; Garth Gillespie of U. C. Santa Barbara, Department of German; and David Frerichs of Future Vision Technologies, Inc. Myths of Electronic Living This issue is about "myth"--myth as a language with which we make sense of life in the midst of electronically mediated social reality, myths as stories that we tell ourselves and each other about what that reality *is*, and myths as stories that we are *told* about where that reality is going and what we should be doing in that course. We hope to put forward the term as a mode of critical political discourse, one that will make the inherent reflexivity of "electronic living" a useful political priority. In effort to do this, a re-orienting of what the term "myth" means is necessary in order to ask it to do what we suggest. First, instead of being "inherited stories" whose authority depends upon their age, these myths are present and future-oriented operations. Second, a particular contingent understanding of language as being now "infinitely rearrangeable," dependent only upon its internal structures and not an external symbolic order that would precede it, is necessary to make myth, as Roland Barthes wrote almost forty years ago, "... a type of speech." (1957, 109) How then does "myth" operate for and through electronic speech, especially the kind of speech we all make back through the electronic information that surrounds each of us and yet does not seem to want our replies? The question of language, how and what it "represents," and how and what it can be forced to "represent', is one that works through and across each of the articles in this current issue of _SPEED_. From strikingly different "angles," and with an *approximate* variety of "native tongues," the authors work the question of "myth" and what it can do (and already does) in our different "electronic lives." But as suggested above, what lies behind this question is a particular notion of language's structure, a "digital" structure which has for better or worse asked us to translate all experience into its particular form. This structure has been commonly called the "code." A number of theorists of electronic subjectivity, Jean Baudrillard and Arthur Kroker perhaps most severely, have approached the "code" as an apocalyptic monolith; not so much as a social structure but, rather, as the end what we could take the "social" to be. It is seen as instituting a terminal seriality of meaning by disembedding the sign, not only from its referent, but also (perhaps therefore) instating any and all conceivable action into a synchronic and implosive mechanism of sign circulation. *Our* purpose is to address something quite different. The "code" works in different ways at different times and in different spaces for different people; it is not, therefore, external to the particular social circumstances of those who must organize their lives through its limits and affordances. The "code" is rather, in its peculiar "structure," an imagined linguistic space whose properties are always a matter of the location from where one is able to enter its demands. By pushing its traces through the widest variety of experiences, back onto itself and out into other locations, we hope to, in whatever small way, indicate a suspension of the "code" as a "total" and paradigmatic logic, and point towards its democratic possibilities as an avenue of practical, if unpredictable, politics. CODE First, however, in order to find our way back to that address of "something different," we need a more specific explanation of what the "code" *is*. As already said, as "code," language seems to become infinitely re-arrangeable. Computer "code," for example, allows "any" speech as sequential combinations of zeroes and ones. Keep in mind that the relationship between the social "code" and machine language is a crucial conjunction. In both cases, by re-organizing the basic blocks, or "grams," anything can be produced, since virtually anything and everything is composed of these serial, digital units. This is not only the basis of computer languages, but now also according to some notions, of the process of thinking itself. The character, Bryce, from the _Max Headroom_ TV show seems to have a handle on this; he says that "the human mind is nothing but a binary computer ....you know, lots of on/off switches." This basic machinic "understanding" of cognitive processes has, however, taken hold in more arenas than science-fiction television. In many Psychology departments for instance, mental health is losing ground to artificial intelligence. Here the "code" pushes in and offers a new model of the mind as machine. A mathematical theory of information, the amplification of "information" as source and as solution, over and beyond the flimsiness of the dream and the story, has made possible the marriage between neural-network cognitive psychology and the theoretical wings of computer science. The consideration of the computer as a mind is congratulated by the consideration of the mind as a computer. What brings the two together is the common language of the code, the binary "digital." Computers speak a language of these infinite binaries, zeros and ones in particular but re- assemblable patterns of repetition and variation, as do, in this popular manner of speaking, human social machines. As the uncanny abilities of some machines to give the "feeling" of human sentience and the empathetic interaction of intelligence is seen as ultimately reducible to the seemingly unromantic flow of zeros and ones, what becomes clear to researchers in artificial intelligence is that thought itself, or what can count as thought, is an equation, an effect of flows, intensities and networks of numbers and number theory. Outside of the laboratory, however, what becomes difficult is the totalizing character of such a linguistic structure. Though, it is then now possible to "say" anything, there is (according to Kroker's principle) nothing much left to say, or no new ways to say anything, since all utterances would be simply variations of this closed gaming. This problem of "replication" has been central to the theory and philosophy of language long before the invention of the computer, but that should be expected, as in many ways the computer is a synthetic moment of a longer and broader trajectory of technical translation and production of "universal languages." The reader should be cautioned at this point that our concern is not with the "scientific" validity of neural network modeling, we assume that within the range of its own questioning, it has plenty. Our concern is with what is now popularly understood as the "paradigmatic" operations of the code: the notion of a "code," whether semiotic as for Baudrillard, machinic as for the computer scientist, biological as for the geneticist, constructable as for the neural-network psychologist, or repeatable and beautiful as for the enthusiast of fractal equations, which has, in many ways emerged as the dominant logic of our period. This grand pronouncement is, of course, part of that emergence, and as such should be read as a question, as part of what we wish to complicate and what we invite the reader to help us complicate, and not as the deadly end-game envisioned by Baudrillard. The "code," broadly conceived as "universal language," has been a haunting vision within the specifically Western story of media for quite some time. It is part of its genealogical evolution. Marshall McLuhan's spiritualization of globalization was based in an ecumenical imagination of transcending difference through the device and toward a universal orality of culture, community and presence. The reception of his thought benefited from the existence of digital language and the location of that language in the external, yet extensional, device, whether the computer, the car or the phone line. His predecessors were focused on language itself as the device through which to work both the science and spirituality of media. Attempts have been made throughout modernity to construct a "global" language capable of indicating any idea or truth to and by anyone through the artificial device. A sketched history includes Francis Bacon's bilateral alphabet, Pascal and Leibniz' calculating alphabets and machines, Charles Babbage's "difference engine," Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener's mathematical theories of communication, as well as later productions of computer languages as the basis of working artificial intelligence and the neural-network cognitive models of the mind. This history of total languages parallels the historical development of mathematics, machines, ciphers and philosophies of "mind," and as I have drawn it here, continues to perform an ordering role in the techniques of scientific knowledge. In attention to the limited space afforded by an introductory essay, we will consider only two of the above moments in the social and mythological history of "global language" and allow them to contextualize the others as well as the trajectory of such projects in general: (1) Jorge Luis Borges" story/essay "Analytical Language of John Wilkins," and (2) the social philosophy of "code" as the basis of artificial intelligence and "interpreting machines." This, hopefully, will indicate the character of our framing the works included in this first transmission as also "interpreting machines" of a sort. According to Borges' short story, Wilkins, taking his cue from Descartes' proposition for a "general language that could organize and contain all human thought" began to undertake that task and conceive such a device. Again quoting Borges directly: "Wilkins divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were then subdivisible into differences, subdivisible in turn into species. To each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example, de means element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame." (This system, as Borges notes, is similar to Leibniz' numerical alphabet wherein zero is written as 0, one 1, two 10, three 11, four 100, five 101, six 110, seven 111, eight 1000... such a device is, of course, the basis for digital computer language.) Since such a language is based on the "universal" principles of mathematics and infinite serial sequentially, it would then be assumed that Wilkins had indeed produced, as Descartes intoned, a language that could express any and all concepts and things, by and to anyone, regardless of their native tongue. Problems arise, however, in the schematics by which hierarchies of the "order of things" are arranged, and subsequently quantified in letters. Such apparently arbitrary classifications and subdivisions are presented; the ninth category: metals as "imperfect," "artificial," "recremental" and "natural." Ultimately, these, and all categories, mimic the "Chinese Encyclopedia" also here discussed, in which animals are divided into: "(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs..."--*stop me if you've heard this one before*. The ultimate inability to close the machinings of language has not, however, deterred anyone from continuing the attempt to construct devices of "pure knowledge." (see Borges, ibid) The computer chips that are fast becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives, whether or not we recognize the chip in our coffee makers to be a computer, are built upon the mathematical alphabets briefly discussed above: combinations of zeros and ones in specific sequences, ordered by higher "linguistic" functions, and producing the effect of a picture, a word, a voice-- "knowledge" of any and all sorts, or so it may seem. Here, a brief sketch of the procedure's modern history is useful. The attempt to construct artificial linguistic devices that could say and think all things was made somewhat more modest by attempts to construct physical devices that could "think" specific, limited ("mathematical") things. Leibniz, Pascal and Babbage (among others, see Goldstone) built cumbersome but elegant "calculators" that could (taken as a group) perform basic mathematical functions by manipulating zeros and ones in accordance to a language of their correspondence to complex integers. Wiener and Shannon, as a project for the U.S. military during World War II, constructed firing tables and mechanisms that would allow surface-to- air missiles to "track" and fire upon moving targets in the sky. The steam-rolling complexification of such machines soon resulted in the development of vacuum tube based "supercomputers," such as the Eniac. These machines could process (what seemed at the time to be) massive amounts of information, in the form of zeros and ones, in order to provide ("translated") information more quickly than previously possible. Especially after the advent of the silicon chip, the sub- discipline of artificial intelligence began to attract more and more interest; here, again, the vision of a "linguistic device" that could "think" all things, was resumed. The excitement over constructing artificial thinking devices based on conceived parameters of human cognition, memory and judgment, resulted in a peculiar discursive switch: as models of the computer became increasingly based upon models of the brain, models of the brain became increasingly based upon models of the computer. The neural-network or Connectionist discourses of cognitive psychology assume similar models of thought-- decentralized, information-routing, pattern-building and electro-stimulus based processing--as do those in Computer Science who attempt to build "learning networks," artificial systems that can learn to route information and solve unexpected problems without immediate human assistance. Present day phone call routing networks, for example, are based on paradigmatic knowledges gleaned from Connectionist cognitive psychology. These developments hold tremendous interest not only for the study of social knowledge, but also for the practical, reflexive production of social speech. They indicate a shift toward (or successful radicalization of) the quantification of the social self, a self now conceived as a "node" through which social information might pass, and thereby force the spiritual character of citizenship in the "global village" (sic) to re-focus its sites. MYTH As the model of the mind, however fashioned, is conversant with the model of the machine, the model of the self is fashioned in a manner conversant with the model of that mind. This is the crucial insight afforded by our truncated readings of Baudrillard and Kroker. But as suggested above, we wish to activate the term "myth" in order to map not simply routes of escape from these models, but to indicate better mutations of those codes, to orient the seriousness of electronic subjectivity toward its own terms. A general, synthetic model of how the works included in _SPEED_ 1.0 might do this is probably not what is required. Mutation is always specific in character, even if "global" in purpose and potential ramification. As such, this introduction will couch each piece in its own terms and thereby, with a little luck, the reader will be able to formulate a glimpse, even if by negative definition, of what each affords toward these ends. After stating this, allow me to contradict myself somewhat by suggesting, if not a model for "myth," at least some moments of overlap between the works below. Myth, as it is formulated here, is understood as the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about what the social reality of electronic life "is," as well as the capacity of those stories to subsequently circulate themselves in the terrain from which future stories are formulated. That is, in a circumstance in which nothing can be granted unconditional belief, as nothing can be confidently assumed to have veracity, the procedure of establishing meaning in contemporary context is definitely "risky business." Instead of performing the concluding actions of past stories, thereby extending the security of those stories to order and give meaning to present circumstances, each of us is forced to improvise --re-code-- meaning from incomplete clues. Contradictory information from equally "valid" sources comprises the landscape from which we formulate the stories that allow us to continue living in the social world. These "fragments" make claims for us and ask us to make claims for them. Two possible reactions to this situation might be opposed for our purposes. One is to assume a real veracity of a particular combination of these seemingly infinite fragments (like the scholars in Borges' library of Babel who searched in vain amongst an infinity of texts for the single "true" combination of graphs and letters); that is, to confront the incompleteness of the social sign as one would confront a broken device--the imperative is then to put it back together in the form already known and understood, to make it do what it once did. Another possible approach is to accept the challenge of the incomplete sign as a source of constructive (not re- constructive) power and knowledge (and not necessarily only power/knowledge.) To do so is to actively re-arrange found texts in order to produce new meanings and to imagine and to speak new social organization through them. In this sense, there is no such thing as a pure cultural producer and no such thing as a pure cultural receiver. To produce is, especially in the moment of the "code," a matter of creative re-arrangement and active dissemination of potential maps, combinations, based on that re-arrangement. Focusing on the fact that the "myths" I create from incomplete codes might in some way find their way into the myths you subsequently disperse, might seem a needlessly "Idealist" (in the sense of concepts leading the change of material circumstances) way to imagine a political electronic language, but it remains true that the guarantees afforded by clear distinctions between what is substantial and what is un-substantial are no longer available, except as potential contingencies of electronic negotiation. This first transmission begins with conversations with two contemporary "fiction" writers: (1) "Technically Speaking" with Mark Leyner and, (2) "Apparatus and Memory" with Kathy Acker. Both authors have, as we have arranged it here, taken the position of cultural producer, myth-maker, to be always an of interpreter of fragments. Leyner's novels, fast-forward romps through the debris of the consumer collective consciousness, force to the surface the sublime delinquency of what hopes to "succeed" the "public sphere." His literary characters can be read in a manner similar to the way one reads the competitors in a video game; the ability to "inhabit" their pre- determined intentions is directly proportional to their two-dimensionality-- it's very easy. Somewhere between Trivial Pursuit and Pat Sajak's rewriting of _Mein Kampf_ --if the ingredients in "Twinkies" were to serve as the basis of a sequel to _Easy Rider_-- Leyner dissects the imagined and lived metaphysical contradictions and epiphanies of the channel-surfing consciousness. Kathy Acker's procedure of constructing her texts can be (and often is) seen as a distillation, of sorts, of life lived without guaranteed social signs. For those less familiar with her work, Acker's novels, short- stories and plays are constructed primarily from bits and pieces of already written works. Acker "re-writes" works that have "written her," in order to make them say what she needs to say back at them and through them. A passage from Conrad might be made to condemn the condescending and disciplining gaze of the colonial cop. A passage from Burroughs might be made to implicate the reader in (his) own desire for the "climax of the text." Some lines from Rimbaud might be made into cyberpunk science- fiction. Everything is made into something else, made to say what Acker hears in it; and primarily what they are made into is a "throwing" of Acker's desires into the text, at the reader and therefore out into the world where they might come back to her on better terms. Even though her texts are constructed from precedent bits and pieces of literature, Acker's "voice" is so loud in her re-workings that it sometimes deafens the reader. One cannot "read" her works in the distanciated manner of an eavesdropper, they are too demanding. They demand, not empathy, but a response. The procedure of reading her works is quite like the procedure by which they are created: the text sits before the reader, and like few others, Acker's work requires an interjection of the reader's desires into the text by "listening" to the text, thereby allowing it to do what the reader needs from it. In this sense, her's is perhaps archetypal of what "myth" can now be. It is a re-arrangement of a precedent reservoir of incomplete signs, one that injects that reservoir with subjective desires, and as disseminated, demands its host to re-inject the text with its own reactions and re-formulations. Mark Jenkins, in his piece entitled: "The "Pleasures & Terrors" of Identity: Language & Subjectivity in Kathy Acker's _Empire of the Senseless_," explores the nuts and bolts of a particular myth, Acker's re-created, post-patriarchal Paris. He explores the parameters of Acker's specific invocations of the horizons of transgression, at the level of the body and at the level of language, as a political juncture or axis around which the literature of life can be thought to function. The circumstance of contemporary political writing is one in which "the stable identity of mythic self-hood becomes a wavering mirage, causing the subject the immense pain and confusion of desire infinitely deferred. But amidst this infinite mortgaging of self, Acker argues that the very ex-centricity of our regime of dislocation and absolute difference presents new opportunities for the construction of previously impossible narratives of new desires and, therefore, new kinds of subjectivities." In "Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace," Mark Pesce hopes to complicate the conceptual distinction between what has unfortunately been bifurcated as the "meat world" and the "virtual" worlds of lived and potential cyberspace. Even as a conduit of electronic information, the fleshly hardware through which we make any meaningful connection has its thresholds, its breaking points. It not only can get drunk on its own code, it can be made ill by inappropriate enterings into the inertial spaces of electronically- immersed sociality. His is neither a single-track warning against the "unnatural" dangers of VR, nor a repetition of some inherent difference between a reality "out here" and a quadriplegic falling "in there." It is rather, a complication of the overlaps. Pesce's warning assumes the concretely physical character of the electronic image. The lighted image induces specific physiological changes in its "host," indeed, this is how we even see it. With this re- organized vision of cybernetic connection, he initiates a conceptual groundwork for the ambulances that will undoubtedly patrol the "information super-highway" some time in the not-too-distant future. Robert Nideffer's piece: "Imag(in)ed Gulfs," examines the role of myth in the reception, by both intellectuals and "consumers," of the Persian Gulf War. He suggests that fundamental mis-negotiations of "myth" made critical understandings of "postmodern" death and destruction, not only limited, but in many ways impossible. Framing much of the critical work on the Persian Gulf War was what might be seen as a panic over a loss of "reality" in the midst of the incredible technologization of its operation. At one extreme is Baudrillard's famous statements that the war "will not," "is not," and "did not" happen, but was rather circulated un- tethered in the "unreal" spaces of irreferential media. At the other end are complaints from many on the oppositional Left who, disappointed in the ineffectuality of traditional means of protest, demanded a recovery of the "real" spaces of war's violence. Nideffer suggests that this "myth," the verifiable and desirable differentiation between "natural" war and "artificial" war (a notion reproduced in critical commentary from both the Left and the Right), served to obsfuscate the always cybernetic character of social-conflict-at-a-distance, and thereby left oppositional voices without the explanatory tools necessary for undoing the effectiveness of the nationalist, racist, nostalgic and spectacular "myths" that ordered the war's participation for the world audience. In "Digital Fall Guys," Will Kreth examines the various potential ramifications of being lead by a particular myth, the "information super- highway," and what that will mean for the future development of tomorrow's common sense of what "one" can do with what should be very public technologies. Present throughout the text is a warning concerning the direct application of older social and legislative precedents to the emerging arenas of media law. Without anything approaching consensual or even hegemonic understandings of where "we" are going with new mechanisms of communication, we are left *entirely* at the level of metaphor, presently a metaphorical "highway." The awkward, "futurist" tones of these "debates" have not invited an outpouring of serious, critical commentary. Kreth, however, demonstrates the potential danger of remaining disengaged from these issues. It will be fatal if we underestimate the intentions of corporate and governmental interests for control over and access to new media, simply because others are overestimating what is frequently seen as the media's inherently democratic capacities. The "myths" that are leading the cornerstone legal decisions currently being debated in congress and the courts will become tomorrow's unchallenged precedent as to how electronic sociality will function. Kreth's work is an intervention in that procedure, one that hopes to orient thought toward the elaboration of better "leading myths" by tracing the dystopian and utopian imaginations from different blocs of legal realities and possibilities. We hope you enjoy... REFERENCES Babbage, Charles. _The Analytical Engine and Mechanical Notation_. New York: New York University Press. 1989. Bacon, Francis. _The Advancement of Learning_. Ed. William Aldis Wright. 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1891. Barthes, Roland. "Myth Today." _Mythologies_. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Paladin. (1972): 109-159. Baudrillard, Jean. "Or, the End of the Social." _In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities--Or the End of the Social: and Other Essays_. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). (1983): 65-94. Benjamin, Walter. _Illuminations_. Ed. Hannah Arendt; Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. 1968. Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Library of Babel." _Ficciones_. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press. (1962): 79-88. Borges. "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." _Other Inquisitions_. Trans. Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin, (1964): 101-105. Derrida, Jacques. _Of Grammatology_. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university Press. 1976. Dreyfus, Hubert L. _What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence_. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row. 1979. Goldstine, Herman H. _The Computer: From Pascal to von Neumann_. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1972. Kroker, Arthur and David Cook. "Baudrillard's Marx's." _The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics_. New York: St. Martin's Press. (1986): 170-188. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. _The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings_. Trans. Robert Latta. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1898. Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver. _The Mathematical Theory Of Communication_. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1962, [c1949]. Wiener, Norbert. _Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine_ . Cambridge: Technology Press [c1948]. ----------------------------------- TECHNICALLY SPEAKING A CONVERSATION WITH MARK LEYNER _SPEED_ (Benjamin Bratton): You were just out in L.A. for some meetings about various TV and movie projects. How do you find L.A., as someone being schmoozed? MARK LEYNER: L.A. is always sort of amazing to me. When I go I make these business forays, and I get involved in all sorts of meetings and go to studios and have breakfast trysts in my hotel. It's fascinating, at the very least on an anthropological level. The TV and movie projects are pretty exciting. BB: Can you tell me about them? ML: I'm not really supposed to talk about them, but one of the potential TV projects is a piece someone bought an option on. It's about a work of mine that was in the _New Republic_ a couple of weeks ago which was about the Menendez brothers...an inversion of the Menendez brothers. BB: Was the Menendez trial something that you kept close track of? ML: Not obsessively. I was aware of it. When I was in L.A., (not this trip, but the trip before) I watched a lot of it on Court TV, but I came up with a very funny way to manipulate it into something else. There is some talk about making a TV version of it. I also have a couple of other projects in the works, one's a sit-com, and the other is a movie treatment that I wrote about a family that has a terrarium of tiny people. BB: Is Mark Leyner a character in any of these projects? ML: No, amazingly. I'm a slight character in the inversion of the Menendez brothers...it's about these two boys called the "--" twins. I'm in that, but I'm sort of a nameless, faceless journalist. All these pieces that have been in magazines over the past year are going to comprise my next book, and there's a bunch of other things that are happening, including a play that I'm writing now. It's not like Et Tu, Babe, not like "Et Tu, II." It's a relief not to be the megalomaniacal center of everything. I appear in these things in a much more relaxed way. It's not such a big deal when I pop in and out, and my family gets to be in them. One of the things that I've always been very fascinated with, particularly in this new book, is being a kind of hybrid between non-fiction and fiction. So, most of the pieces appear as if they're non- fiction, and yet their subject matter is fabricated in all of them, so sometimes they're only non-fiction in the most nominal way. This is something that has always really interested me, because, especially lately, I think we're living in a culture where its becoming more and more difficult to verify information. I think *that* is one of the overarching themes of this new book. BB: Because there is such a large quantity of information out there? ML: Well, not only is there a large quantity, it's coming from unverifiable sources. There's been a kind of leveling of information, so that it's difficult to determine its veracity. Even the very notion of veracity is in question. I think it's a very weird time. BB: It requires negotiating a lot of risk. ML: Yeah. Yeah. We're all sort of out there floating in a way. Epistemologically, we're without any further navigational guides...more than we've ever been. There are good things about that and terrible things about that. It kind of changes what it means to be a writer. BB: In addition to the other re-workings of genre, you said you're doing a play... ML: Yeah, it's going to be part of this new book. As I'm doing it, I'm not really thinking of it as a performance. But now I really like that form and I never did before. One of the things that got me enthused about it is writing the "transcripts" for the testimony in this _New Republic_ piece on the Menendez trial. I really enjoyed it. This play is an adaptation, in the loosest possible way of a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called "Young Goodman Brown." My piece is called "Young Burgdorf Goodman Brown." Burgdorf Goodman is a posh department store in New York where the story takes place. I think it will be pretty funny. BB: You seemed to have tried to tackle almost every mode of writing. You started off doing technical writing, and ad-copy writing, and things like that. Those kinds of "genres" make very different demands. ML: I had a great time doing that, and in a certain sense it was more instructive to me than any courses I took in writing. BB: It was good training then. ML: It was good training, but not in the sense that it affected my style, per se. I've always had a pretty clear notion of what I wanted to do. I don't always do it as well as I'd hoped, but I've always had a very clear conceptual notion of each piece as I'm involved in it. The experience of working for advertising has made me more comfortable with writing quickly, for deadlines. It enabled me not to be such a prima-donna. BB: About the work. ML: Yeah, I mean I still am a prima donna. I am a very exacting task master with myself when I'm doing a book. Now, getting involved in TV and movies, you can't be that way to the same degree because it's a much more collaborative effort. I make the transition from my own work to the more collaborative efforts much easier because of my experience working in advertising. I really enjoyed all of that office business, all the office politics...going to get coffee every ten minutes, being in rush hour traffic...there are things about that I really liked, and that I miss to a certain extent, because you feel as if you're in the heart of the machinery, of the culture of commerce. When you're away from that, when you're just an artist, or worst of all when you're an academic, you're completely divorced from it and I think there is a great deal that you miss. Commerce is the heart of American culture to a large extent. There is something exciting about being in that machinery. It's very simple things I'm talking about, like being in rush hour traffic with everyone in the morning. You realize there a trillion other Americans in their cars at that same moment listening to various things on the radio. You're exposed to this barrage of information beaming into people's cars determining what they're going to talk about at lunch...all that, and the great theater of office politics, it's so wonderful. So now that I'm not doing that, and I spend most of my time by myself, writing, I long for it again. Not so seriously that I would want to have to work like that again, to have that kind of job. I mean I don't get ridiculous about it. BB: On that level, these trips to L.A. must provide for some of that... ML: Yeah, definitely. I enjoy that aspect of it very much, and I really love the culture of business. Being in a hotel, having meetings with people where there is money at stake, a certain amount of tension involved in how you handle the meeting, or as they say "take" the meeting...it's still kinda cool to me and it enables me to deal with other people. Writing is so insular an activity, it's a nice break from it. Even working with magazines over the past year has been more collaborative than just writing a novel, and I really enjoy it. BB: You're writing for TV as well. Do you watch a lot of television? ML: I don't really watch "shows." Some people watch "Seinfeld" regularly or "Blossom," or whatever, I don't watch things like that. I sort of end up scanning. I'm very much aware of what's on, and I'm particularly interested in what's on in what I call the periphery of television, which is cable non-fiction television, like talk shows and CNN, ESPN, shopping networks, all that sort of thing. BB: And Christian TV? ML: Yeah, all the periphery. It's very fascinating. Actually, the sit-com that I'm doing involves some of the forms that I'm talking about. BB: Is it structured a little bit like channel-surfing? ML: It partakes of some of that surfing. I can't really talk about it right now. You know, "contract" stuff. I have a huge interest in television, in the formal sense, the forms of it, and the myriad of social ramifications. I don't have an interest in specific programs, but I do find myself getting hooked on various things, like "Melrose." But the last couple of shows haven't been as good. I'm a very loyal viewer of television news, sports, and any big extravaganza. Olympics are great. BB: How does this procedure of watching TV play into your writing process, in terms of deriving some sort of meaning from the bits and pieces of information? ML: I hope that my work is instructive in how people apprehend the world around them. I think the world can be deciphered, metabolized, in the same way that I put it together. I've trained myself to be acutely open to connections between disparate things, different spheres of knowledge, different discourses, etc. I think it would probably be helpful to people to be more like that. In that sense, the way I watch TV is absolutely parallel to the way I put my work together. But it's not just television, it's anything. It's rare that I just sit and watch television, I'm usually doing something else while it's on, reading things, playing with my kid, etc. It's really reveling in the multiplicity of things. BB: Because it's difficult or maybe impossible to corner the truth, that kind of reveling, or risk-taking becomes mandatory. ML: It represents new challenges. There is a tremendous challenge now inherent in all of this seemingly wonderful multiplicity, seeing what is useful and what isn't, what has value and what doesn't, what is a malicious lie. There are so many different ways to evaluate information. I think people are having a terrifically hard time with it. Someone can come along and say such and such a thing didn't happen, that we know did. It could be anything from the Holocaust to the moon landing to... BB: Last week. ML: Yeah, and if we're not there, we're dependent upon others' accounts. Most things that we've become concerned with politically, right now, are not things we have a biological, sentient awareness of. They're things that happen very far away. We're dependent upon television coverage of Sarajevo, and we don't really know what we're being shown every night. And we don't really know if we're being shown everything, but we make as though we are, and the country gets all worked up about it, you know, rightfully so. It's very difficult to see carnage on the screen and not want to stop it. Then we become aware that this is probably going on in many other places where there aren't television cameras. We're going to have to really understand that what we're responding to is very selective, and then do something about that, and not be lulled into thinking that everything that's going on is being shown to us. I don't think this is some sort of evil plot. We certainly know more than we used to. I think pre-technology we knew what we could see and hear, and that's it basically. BB: This has changed how we *produce* accounts, as well as how we receive them. Could you tell me something about the mechanics of your writing process, your ritual? ML: In a way they've changed, and in a way they haven't. When I was writing _My cousin, My Gastroenterologist_ or even _Et Tu, Babe_, I would just write everyday about anything. The more I could do to encourage the randomness, the better. One of things I did to optimize the random production of material was to put whatever I had worked on one day away and start from nothing. The next day I'd write from nothing and then put that away, generating completely varied material every day. At a certain point, I'd look at it all and begin swimming around it, seeing what sorts of connections and what sorts of characters were there, and what sort of scenes, and then I'd write on top of that. But, it's changed, especially in the past year. I've had pieces assigned to me, or I've suggested a certain topic to a magazine, or someone will come to me with something, so that each piece will have a specific subject matter to it. BB: That you can't just put away. ML: Right, but the only reason that I've done a new book like this is because I've found that I could really apply the same procedure to it. It was an amazing discovery to me that I could just do what I did before. I think what's interesting about the pieces is to see how I could manipulate the seemingly random chunks of writing into specific subject matter, which I've done with every one of these pieces. People would be amazed to see how foreign some of these things were originally. BB: To what they ended up. ML: Exactly. And that's really always been my procedure. I've always been really fascinated in seeing how to manipulate material that's completely unrelated into what appears to be natural logical inevitableness. But that's really what our lives are about so I'm not doing this to be avant- garde in any way. BB: No, it's a kind of Neo-Realism... ML: Yeah, and it produces work that really is part of the world, with a much less artificial feeling than approaching either fiction or non- fiction with such tunnel-vision. BB: In terms of the actual mechanics of your writing, I imagine that you would not be a writer that requires solitude and silence, but that the information would need to be around. ML: You would think that, but it's not really the case. I think the kind of thing you're talking about, where I'm just walking around like a satellite dish taking everything in, does go on. I take lots of notes and jot things down and cut trillions of things out of papers. My actual environment when I'm working is quiet and monastic, and I can't even listen to music. It's too distracting. What I was talking about before, being able to see very disparate pieces of material and analyze how they could get used in a narrative requires a tremendous amount of attention, and it's hard to pull it off well. It's like looking at a position on a chess board for hours and hours. Sometimes I'm just thinking about these ideas for two or three days without really writing anything. Chess is a good analogy. It's like analyzing a position in a chess game and sort of trying to hold all possible moves in my head at once, shuffling and reshuffling them, and then seeing what I can come up with. BB: Well, I've got to ask you about Letterman. What happened? (Leyner was recently "bumped" from the scheduled line-up after Dave spent too much time flirting with Geena Davis.) ML: They ran out of time. I've been on once, before they moved to CBS. It's really wonderful for them to ask me on. They don't typically have writers on, especially since they've moved to a really hot time-slot. The producers there like my work. It's very nice. I like the people involved in that show a lot. This last time, towards the end of the hour they said "look, you can come out for a couple of minutes, or you can come back and have a whole segment." I said I'd come back. But I still had a great time. It was a lot of fun hanging out with Aerosmith and Geena Davis. I was supposed to be on soon after that, but then that got moved back a couple of weeks. They're very careful about their mix of guests. I'm having dinner with one of the producers soon, so we may have another date before long. It should be a pretty fun. ----------------------------------- APPARATUS AND MEMORY A CONVERSATION WITH KATHY ACKER SPEED (Benjamin Bratton): I have always found that part of what makes your texts so engaging is the way they are always about there own construction, as well as the way that the literary apparatus produces myths about itself. How do you see "myth" operating in your work? Kathy Acker: The way I talk about myth is in terms of narratives. I was never interested in narratives until fairly recently when I started writing _Empire of the Senseless_ and I realized I could come to an end. I think that I see not only writing, but all that is presented to us, in terms of text. Until _Empire of the Senseless_ I was basically interested (except in my very early stuff), in taking texts apart to see how they worked when meshed together with other bits and pieces of writing. I had come to the end of certain areas of what's called "Postmodernist theory." I began thinking that there is enough taking apart already. The society in which I grew up, the very hypocritical society of the 50's, is over with, and now everything is very surface, knowable. So, there's no reason to have to constantly take things apart and investigate them to see how they work. What we really need is some kind of instruction. I greatly distrust the usual bourgeois linear narrative of the 19th century, where the reader identifies with the character and the character goes through various moral crises. So I was searching structurally for a new kind of narrative, and that's when I became very interested in myths. Myths were narratives that were presented prior to that whole bourgeois structure. BB: But it's part of it as well. KA: Well, not really... BB: There are bourgeois myths. One of them is some kind of notion of the transparency of narrative depiction that you were talking about. KA: I'm using myth in another sense. I was trained as a Classicist and I was brought up on the old Greek stuff. In the tradition I was taught--the classical Greek drama--the way myth operated bordered on "community." The play started with the sun coming up and ended with the sun going down, and it worked with the natural time of the whole collective, who would all come out to partake of the event. Even the slaves were allowed in to go through a catharsis, which was something that was not true in bourgeois society. There were very different relationships between art and community. I've always seen art as being something active (or hopefully so, god knows we're marginalized out of existence these days). Ideally, art and the political processes of the community should be interwoven. Of course, it's not, but I was looking for models where it was, and one was where you had certain narrative structures called myths. I don't think you can say the same thing about bourgeois society. In my mind the great bourgeois heroes are in a lineage that starts with Rimbaud, which is about the alienation of the artist from the political processes. That's what Baudelaire was announcing in a very loud voice. This is also, of course, based on the patriarchy of the society. So I was looking for these kinds of narrative structures, what do they look like? Could I use them? I mean obviously I'm living in a bourgeois or post- bourgeois world. It seemed to me this was about daily life. I'm not just some "me" that's separate from the community. Myths need to be a way that we can all talk to each other, that makes sense, and yet don't reek of total nihilism. BB: Because communities, or what pass as communities, are composed of people who face the similar problem of trying to organize meaning from fragmented bits of texts? You said that in the move back to narrative, or myth, you didn't want to begin where the bourgeois narrative left off, with a certain kind of connection between the reader's intentions and the text's intentions for that reader. But at the same time, more and more of us live amongst those fragments and are forced to put them together, to find models. What then are the possibilities of the reader identifying with your characters' mechanics of constructing meaning, as part of that search for a model? KA: I think it's more radical than that, and it is easy when you have other theoretical discourses, because I don't talk through theory, I talk through fictional process. There's a different sort of language. I think any text works on a triangular relation between writer, reader and text. I simply think the triangular relationship in a bourgeois narrative is very different from the triangular relationship in a non-bourgeois narrative. In a bourgeois narrative the text is supposedly a mirror of that which is outside the text, so the reason that you identify with the character is that you believe the character goes in this mirror version of your life, and comes out with some bit of knowledge. This idea, which is basically impossible after Roland Barthes, is that you can know, that you can read a text, that you can learn something, that you can in a way possess knowledge: you are a centralized identity, and you as this centralized "I" are capable of knowing it. I mean it's based on Descartes. I don't live in that kind of world, so I would never go to a piece of art thinking that I can get a moral message from it, and that I'm in that much control. I think the real relations are very different. BB: And yet perhaps beyond that kind of mythical and aesthetic discourse of art, your texts do demonstrate a kind of strategy of being-in-the- world. KA: Some of us are trying to find other identities besides the centralized "I." It's the old thing of seeing something, and emerging from the process of seeing as another "you." So there's not a relationship of going to text and emerging a better "you." There's no singular "you" that's going to the text that could emerge as "better." So then, another "you" comes out after the reading of any text and the relation between text and reader is much more elaborate than two separate identities called "text" and "reader." And then there's the question of where the writer comes in. I suppose we're dealing far more with mythical magic than we ever thought. BB: Well, part of where the writer comes into that process is the choosing of texts that will be appropriated, the moving of them from the past into the future. How do you chose the passages to include in your work? I mean this in the sense that each passage, being familiar to a previous context, functions for the new text, and for the writing apparatus itself, as what might be understood as "memory." KA: First, there is no one "way." It's what my intention is at any moment. Sometimes I take texts that I know very well. The more I write the more I think that writing is really about time, and so it's a play between chance and what we think of as clock-time, or between chance and intention, where chance meets some morally ordered universe. Sometimes I like to take passages that I have very little idea about how to use. Something will be operating in me, informing my choices, but I don't have a rational clue what it is, or why I'm doing it, like "ooh, it looks pretty" or "I want that one." I don't know. Other times, I know full well what I'm doing, and I have a whole theoretical rational scheme. Often it's a matter of circumstance. For instance, Rimbaud was sorted out. I was living in England at the time, and there had been talk about there being no government support of any art institution, or any institution that supported pro-homosexual work. A lot of us were protesting. I decided that I wanted to deal with it, and also in a perverse way with some of the feminism that was in England at the time, Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, to write only about gay men. And so I decided I was going to write a fictional bio of Rimbaud. So is that taking from a fictional text? A lot of people do fictional biographies. BB: They do, and that is always a means of approaching problems of time. KA: Think of pornography and porn writing. The sex sections have a very very limited vocabulary. In fact, it's almost saying nothing. You read "ooh" and "aah." It's at the edge of sense. What it's really doing is working the reader rhythmically, and that fascinates me, and I think that writing, the way phrase works with sentence, the way rhythm works, the way sound works, is about music. BB: Memories work as rhythm too. The passages that you take, since they're familiar to another context as a memory, are familiar to another context as personal experience. How would the passages function for the text and, perhaps, for the writing apparatus itself as something that might be understood as "memories" that work rhythmically? KA: When you're writing, you're working rhythmically. When I take different texts, my memory of those texts is really different than yours is. We haven't read the same things. So there's no way I can plan for a reader what is going to be the play between the text and the reader's ability to understand. People read my books and they recognize different stuff. There's no way in hell that I can really play with that, because we don't live in a culture where everyone has the same culture. When I teach a class, my students come in and I don't think there's one single book that I can pick that every student has read. We don't have a common culture anymore. BB: In terms of your working with mythologies, are you interested in imagining a something like a "common" language? KA: The way I think of it now, yeah. But I wouldn't think of it as common. I don't think my stuff is that open to people. What I'm doing in my new work is making stories for girls, and that's the truth. I think I'm writing far more for women than for men right now. That's what's in my mind, to make stories for girls. To make the real stories you grow up on. BB: Elsewhere you've talked about tattooing in ways that are not dissimilar to how you've described myth--as a kind of myth-writing that obviously has a very different relationship to publicity than a book does, at least at the level of ownership. That process of writing of body-as-text suggests two points: the process of writing as marking, and the process of remarking, remaking the text and the re-mythologizing, not in a reactive mode but as coursing alternatives. KA: Tattooing fascinated me because it was a way that one person would do his or her art work on another person's body, which seems to me totally rad and totally interesting. When you're dealing with tattooing, you're remaking the body. On the other hand, you're going in and listening to the body, and it's not so much remaking the body as it is finding out about the body, finding out what's there, and the two processes come together in the same process called tattooing. If some tattooist just goes in and does whatever, it's not going to work. Ed Hardy is one of the best tattooists in the world and the way Ed works is to really get interested in the person, to ask a lot of questions, to try to find out what they're about. A good part of the body is the imaginary. He tries to find out what the body looks like as a whole, how's the whole tattoo going to fit into the body as a whole. He's in there trying to learn about the body. The process of tattooing for him is learning about someone's body, which is learning about someone. He's not going in there to re-make the body in terms of some model that's outside that body. It's the difference between listening and making. When you listen to something you're not imposing your shtick on whatever you're making. For me, it's like writing, using other texts the way I do now. It's changed over the years. To learn to work a text is partly to learn to listen, so that it's not just me having my little autobiographical story, and stamping it on everything that comes along, but it's me going into to Faulkner or Rimbaud and trying to listen to them. When I emerge, I'm some kind of conglomeration between them and me. It only works as kind of a challenge. BB: That's interesting because I think that cuts across two different paths that form a renewed interest in the body as a text which can be remade. That is, this interest seems to be working in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, the borders of the body and the functions of the body are changing quite a bit, so there seems to be a need to rediscipline the body in order to rediscover an older kind of stasis for it. On the other hand, there seems to be an embrace of the revealing of important avenues for freedom that the transformation itself might ultimately entail. Both of these also work different desires to find some kind of freedom *through* the body, and desires to find a very different kind of "freedom" *from* the body. KA: Those desires are very complicated too. I'm not just remaking the body as text. I'm fascinated about what they're doing with cloning experiments, etc., but I'm not really interested in saying, "bad body, I'm going to remake you." I'm really fascinated with what's there. Like when I do body-building. I'm fascinated with the capacity, and what can I do with *this*. I'm interested in going in and learning what is there. That's the fascination. Why would I want to sit there and totally remake myself with some idea that I'm never going to die, that I'm going to be forever beautiful? That's ridiculous. I am going to die, I am getting towards old age, I'm not going to be forever beautiful if I am now. I don't *have* a text outside of the body that I want to impose on the body in some kind of fascistic way. I grew up in a society where the body was excluded, and in a very major way women's bodies were and are excluded from the society. Women are only allowed in the society if (and this goes back to de Sade) women become substitute men, and then they are libertines, or if they are there as organs for men. Yet, the body is always connected to the imaginary, and whatever that is for women's bodies, that imaginary does not exist in our society. That is *major* to me, especially as I grow older, to try to find out what that imaginary is--try to locate the body, get in there, listen to it and find out how it could possibly exist in the world. A lot of women now are working around the question of "what's our sexuality," "what's our imaginary," "what's our body?" It's coming from theorists, people like Susie Bright, it's coming from all over the place. So why is the body central? Because our bodies have been denied, because maybe Gloria Steinem is allowed to say that we should be equal to men, but when it comes to menstruation it's "hide that dirty pad!" BB: Right, sure. You've always foregrounded literary theory as part of the language that might help reveal that imaginary. How do you see the hybridization of theory and fiction as part of that future imaginary, and also the future imaginary of "writing?" KA: I find most fictions writers in this country don't foreground theory at all. I find that there are few fiction writers in this country who talk theory. Well, when people ask me about the future I usually go "well, it's good and it's bad. The world's going to die, so fuck you!" But there's all this cool stuff around! Were getting better and better about people wanting to write to find out about themselves. I guess I'd say that about writing in general. People are always saying that people aren't going to read anymore, but people are reading more than ever, but they may be reading different things. Pictures, images and words are going to come together even more. There's going to be a breakdown of genre, there will be an overlapping of genres like essay and fiction, with fanzines getting it all mushed up. It goes on. I think that old 19th century thing of Samuel Richardson, with the women reading audience--you know, (of course, middle- or upper-class women) curled up with a big, fat novel and lulling away the day reading--is over with. None of us lead those sorts of lives. There aren't going to be these huge numbers of middle- and upper-class women (huge comparatively in terms of the reading audience), who are going to curl up with books. 600 page novels are only for those who take airplanes. Society changes, form changes, what people want changes. I just see the present, where there's energy pockets now, where people seem excited about stuff, what might happen quickly. BB: And the body has always been, in your writing, the site of tremendously anamorphic changes. This parallels the confusion of the animate and the inanimate in more institutional re-makings of the body, I'm thinking of bio-medical engineering and the textual space of the laboratory as... KA: Yeah, I mean I'm not sure what's animate and what's not animate. The disciplines that interest me are things like meditation disciplines, breathing disciplines, which relate to the body. I'm very fascinated by the relationships between breath, language, and the body. Those are the disciplines I work with. When I work in areas, like this business about women not having bodies in society, what interests me is exploring the female imaginary. I'm never clear what's animate and what's not animate. If you put a piece of metal in your body is it animate or is it not animate? I don't know. I don't know if a tree is animate or not. In my sexual relations, my main sexual relation is with my motorcycle. I just got my labia pierced and two little pieces of metal going through a tiny part of my body, just a pinch, is a major experience, a major change. Are you saying that this is inanimate? I don't know *what* it is. It's literature. It's definitely within the myth's sexual realm. ----------------------------------- THE "PLEASURES & TERRORS" OF IDENTITY: LANGUAGE & SUBJECTIVITY IN KATHY ACKER'S _EMPIRE OF THE SENSELESS_ MARK JENKINS "Thus the compulsions, repressions, symptoms, etc., are nothing more than the dialectical supersession of lack by reason, by reason as syntax, as language." --J. Lacan "Revolt--its face distorted by amorous ecstasy--tears from God his naive mask, and thus oppression collapses in the crash of time. Catastrophe is that by which a nocturnal horizon is set ablaze, that for which lacerated existence goes into a trance--it is the Revolution--it is time released from all bonds; it is pure change." --G. Bataille Georges Bataille's extravagant description of life torn from the homogeneity of productive existence could be a description of the scenario of Kathy Acker's 1988 novel, _Empire of the Senseless_, though Acker is considerably less sanguine about the possibilities of revolt than Bataille. Like Bataille, however, her fictions employ transgressive sexuality and violence to explore the limits of the homogeneous codes of a society which fetishizes order and reason and construes these impulses in forms which extend the dominion of violence in the many names of the Law of the Father. It is Acker's belief that the relation between subjectivity, language and the desiring body is best explored at the borders between the rational and the transgressive. In _Empire of the Senseless_, the site for her experiments in structure and subjectivity is a near future Paris, in which the ostensible collapse of patriarchy shatters the unity of the social and releases effects which promise both crisis and opportunity for subjects dislodged from their former identities. One of Acker's tasks is to identify the traces of normative patriarchy as they emerge in the manufacture of gender and subjectivity and become inscribed in the libidinal economy of the subject. Another is to attempt to imagine the limits of oedipal desire and to pose an alternative myth for contemporary subjects. Essential to each task are strategies for using concepts of identity in ways which demonstrate that oedipal desire belongs to a "culturally and historically determinate Other--to a particular symbolic order, and not one which is universal or absolute." (Silverman, 192) Acker believes that the limits of this "symbolic order" can be highlighted by bringing it into confrontation with transgressive and oppositional values that are unredeemable in the symbolic economy of patriarchy. Following Lacan, Acker thematizes subjectivity within a semiotic problematic, in which the body is imagined as a text organized by the coercive significations of oedipal desires, scripted within the gender and power producing mechanisms which appear foundational in the structure of the family and society. Acker's account of the gendering of the body represents it as a coercive process for both male and female subjects. It is clear, however, that for Acker most oedipal logic is particularly and unremittingly hostile to female subjects, and that it inevitably subjects women to the threat of male violence and patriarchal domination. However bleak this vision, it is precisely for these reasons that women have more potential to construct means for the criticism and transgression of the taboos built into patriarchal social processes. The social function of taboo is thus articulated in the subject's relation to her own body and her own desire. For Acker, desire plays a double game. In its oedipal mode it constantly reinforces, even motivates, normative subjectivity. The subject thus described is always "subject to" phallic scenarios of ideological interpellation: subjectivity becomes an endlessly recursive algorithm by which the subject calculates her own lack and its pervasively negative valuation, leading her to seek an imaginary fulfillment in the delusory plenitude of phallic significations. But the body becomes the privileged site in Acker's work not because it is easily regulated and circumscribed by oedipal interpellation, but because it is not. The narrative stages of subjectivity culminating in oedipal determinations--in theory--take place with a great and unlikely precision, telling a story which relies on a specific and unidirectional flow toward socialization and submission to the dictates of mandated social identities. Resistances to these determinations are firmly censored in the form of repressions and taboos within the family-- primarily the incest taboo, which regulates the exchange of women's bodies--and in the larger social laws which mirror and regulate the familial economy in the "name of the father." The repression of alternative subjectivities and the language-practices by which Acker seeks to represent them are the foundation of her purposeful linking of body and text. The image of the subject as the focus of multiple and conflicting social texts is doubled by an image of the body as the seat of equally incommensureable pleasures--creating the potential for "heterogeneous" conjunctions exceeding the normative prescriptions of "homogeneous" society. This heterogeneity of the relation between subject and body provides the warrant for her assault on identity in its rationalist and subjectivist forms. In _Empire of the Senseless_ subjugation is shattered by "criminal" languages, desires and pleasures, and the unitary subject explodes along multiple vectors of language and sensation in a splitting which finally begins to defy recuperation within the dialectic of castration which produces gender and identity as its product. The uncertainties and paradoxes of identity become, in _Empire of the Senseless_, tools for imagining resistance and freedom. Acker's early fiction addressed questions of identity in the crucible of the authorial subject. Characterized by fragmentation, plagiarism and a radical suspicion toward the subject-effects inherent in narrative, Acker's literary methods--from _The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula_ to _Great Expectations_, _Don Quixote_, and _Blood and Guts in High School_--can be read as experiments "about identity in terms of language," leading to the conclusion that identity is "a false problem because its a thing that's made...I was splitting the I into false and true I's and I just wanted to see if this false I was more or less real than the true I...and of course there's no difference." (Acker, _Hannibal Lector, My Father_, 7) Despite this contention, in an environment still dominated by the regularities of traditional "authority," Acker's "calving" identities and plagiarized, composite subjectivities remain a key strategy in her later writing. As such her seeming hostility to identity does not lead to the potential cynicism of (for instance) a Baudrillard, and a subject dissolved in the white noise of corporate postmodernism. For Acker, loss of identity is a condition, not a proposition--therefore opposition must be enacted utilizing the tools made available by the fact of this loss. Acker accepts the dictum of French poststructuralism that the logos to which contemporary identity must be referred is in "crisis"; that this may represent a crisis of Western rationality and its forms of civilization in general; and that the subject is sutured to the concept of identity only through the endless recapitulation of oedipal codes and processes. As this crisis becomes a feature of self-reflection, the stable identity of mythic self-hood becomes a wavering mirage, causing the subject the immense pain and confusion of desire infinitely deferred. But amidst this infinite mortgaging of self, Acker argues that the very ex-centricity of our regime of dislocation and absolute difference presents new opportunities for the construction of previously impossible narratives of new desires and, therefore, new kinds of subjectivities. In _Empire of the Senseless_ Acker initiates an experiment in narrative and subjectivity. In her previous work, narrative had been considered as the property of the domain of phallocentric authority. Strongly influenced by William Burrough's "cut-up" writing, Acker deconstructed the hegemonic complicity of authorship and narrative in experiments with plagiarism designed to shatter social syntax at the site of signification. These works are, in the terms of Deleuze & Guattari, purely "rhizomatic" arrangements of "variously formed materials, of various dates and speeds" (Deleuze & Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_, 2), implicating and renovating canonical and transgressive texts on complex literary bodies. For Deleuze & Guattari, all books are potentially rhizomes, and "hence unattributable" to a subject, because the attribution of a book inserts it into an identitarian mode of cultural reception, a "functional...means of classification" (Foucault, 123) which allows interpretation to return comfortably and repeatedly to scripts of closure available within the patriarchal economy of knowledge. For Acker, the rhizome becomes a writing practice addressed to the task of a new reading of social relationality. One efficacy of thinking the rhizome is that interpretation under its sign refuses the blockages and one-way streets of oedipal attribution and its redundant determinations in order to focus on "relations of exteriority" among a given work's diverse materials. Acker's early works, with their "decentralized structures" which the reader "can read wherever they want" (Acker, _HL_, 15) echo Deleuze & Guattaris' conception of the "multiple entrances" of the "map or rhizome" (D&G, _On the Line_, 32), though her emphasis on re-making identity rather than denying its existence absolutely remains at odds with the radically stochastic impetus of Deleuzian metaphysics. Both take as their goal the confounding of the "Oedipal and paranoid formations" which characterize traditional productions of narrative subjectivity, but Acker's experiments attempt to move this task one step farther by seeking practical opportunities and images for the new formations that might be built on the ruined sites of oedipal phantasms. In _Empire of the Senseless_, however, Acker requires narrative for the production of alternative stories of subjectivity. Combining the anti- oedipal strategies of her earlier work with the oedipal risks of narrative often makes for a language practice of formidable complexity. Acker makes narrative work against itself as a tactical carrier-wave for an attempt to "make the kind of myth that would be applicable to me and my friends." (_HL_, 18) Such a myth would enact a kind of "guerilla warfare" to "see what makes sense at the moment." (17) If in its hegemonic form narrative is a stabilizing agent which repeats, reinforces and inculcates the desire for identity and unity, Acker's usage makes it only one element among many--a tool, not a paradigm--in her "attempt to find a myth, a place, not the myth, the place." ("A Few Notes on Two of My Books," 35) The ultimate goal of such a myth would be to imagine life in a non-logocentric world of difference which not only does not depend on the validation of the Law of the Father but which refuses, as much as possible, the pressure of the oedipally mandated identities imposed by the "property structure of reality" (_HL_, 23) and communicated in the expressive structures of language and desire. _Empire of the Senseless_ is set in what is presumably a near-future post-revolutionary Paris, in which, in Robert Siegle's description, "the much-prophesied apocalypse of Western Culture has already happened, but Suburbia didn't notice." (107) The first major section, entitled "Elegy for the World of the Fathers" pieces together a representation of that world from strands of family melodrama, violence and scandal. As Acker describes it, the purpose of this section is "the description of the society defined by the oedipal taboo." ("A Few Notes," 35) The plot introduces and describes Abhor, the novel's female protagonist, and her male partner and adversary, Thivai and represents the beginnings of the death of oedipal society in a vision of revolution carried out by Algerians in Paris. In this section, Acker explains, her goal is to write "an elegy for the world of patriarchy. I wanted to take the patriarchy and kill the father on every level. And I did that partially by finding out what was taboo and rendering it in words." ("A Few Notes," 17) Themes of family relations are written in terms of prostitution, incest, and sadism, and Acker's language continually slashes at and interrupts the narrative structures she considers complicit with patriarchal reason and oedipal violence. In the second part of the novel, Acker confronts the formidable task of imagining the post-revolutionary world and the new forms of subjectivity that might be engendered by such an event: "The second part of the book concerns what society would look like if it weren't defined by the oedipal taboo." ("A Few Notes," 35) Acker's attempt to represent post-oedipal relationships, is, however, blocked by the intercession of an new oedipus also apparently freed from the dialectic of identity, content to operate on the post-subjective "digital" realm of the signifier/signified relationship while human subjects repeat oedipally mandated scenarios of violence and loss in the absence of any "reason" to do so. As Acker continues, "Unfortunately, the CIA intervenes: I couldn't get there. I wanted to get there but I couldn't." ("A Few Notes," 17) The CIA represents and enforces the impossibility of imagining a world outside the codes of representation which structure every social aspect of the subject's corporal existence. The CIA becomes the police force of multinational capitalism and the leader of the Algerian Revolutionary Police, suggesting that revolutionary desire is always recuperated by its own oedipal structuration. Though "The Algerian revolution has succeeded" (_ES_, 109), it becomes immediately evident that "the Algerian revolution had changed nothing." (110) The final stage in the novel's anti-oedipal project involves the construction of new myths to replace or circumvent the signifying prerogative of oedipus. This is the subject of "Pirate Night," the novel's final section. Against the impossibility of completely effacing patriarchy's desire-writing of subjectivity, Acker constructs new myths for autonomy clustered around bodies imagined as multifarious and desire imagined as productive and explosive. Images and stories of pirates, tattoos and criminality represent attempts to redirect subjectivity on a tangent to oedipal closure and to imagine a anti-logos of the tactical, a myth for making-do through the construction of "derelict spaces" (Massumi, 104) of freedom and autonomy, if not privilege and signification. The world of the subject in the indifferent regime of the "unending growth of multinational capitalism" is reduced (or rather expanded) to "just tactics, to how." (_ES_, 126) Acker is no longer interested in a utopian claim of success or closure for her experiment in senselessness--such a claim would merely constitute a new regime of sense and homogeneity. Thus the novel ends witht he achievment of ambivalence: in Acker's words, "with the hints of a possibility or a beginning: the body, the actual flesh, almost wordless, romance, the beginning of a movement from no to yes, from nihilism to myth." ("A Few Notes," 36) Acker's book is a series of suggestive category-errors: a novel which simultaneously inhabits and refuses narrative emplotment; a writing which is also a stealing or borrowing from other writing; an assemblage of ill- fitting parts which exist to generate absolute contradictions in an open- ended play of false identity and non-identity. Contradictions are not exposed to be subsumed or transcended, but remain in motion on the surface of the work as enactment of her anti-identitarian language game. In the terms of Deleuze & Guattari, _Empire of the Senseless_ is a rhizomatic desiring-machine rather than an "arborescent" or identitarian one. It is dependent for its motive force on the destabilization of the very categories of self-hood and desire around which normative subjectivity is oriented. What emerges from the experience of _Empire of the Senseless_ is a sense of a resistance to codification which forces the reader to take pleasure in the understanding that singularity and contradiction exist unresolved and proliferate in productive ways even within the constraining grids of an overcoded world. Acker's tactical practice provides a rich store for imagining new beliefs (for, as Deleuze states, belief and desire are always linked), among them the belief that it is possible not to desire one's own oppression. This is one aspect of the politics of anti- identitarian writing: that disbelief in the dominant symbolic economy is possible, and that a refusal of belief can create more than a specular image of hegemony, in a new register for subjectivity where desire is freed from the architecture of the paradigm and into the tactics of pathfinding. The question to ask of Acker's writing is not "does it work?," but rather, "does it *do* work," does it instigate new relations, fewer conclusions, more and more partial models of synthesis and disjunction--is it pragmatic? In my final section I attempt, somewhat paradoxically, to represent how some of Acker's images function to destabilize identity in language and to indicate some of the parameters of her complex and ambivalent struggle to supercede the dictates of the oedipal code. "The whole world," Abhor writes to Thivai near the end of the novel, "is men's bloody fantasies." (210) In _Empire of the Senseless_, these fantasies are often miraculated on Abhor's body, from which blood flows freely, on many occasions, throughout the novel. Penetrations and cuts generally induce the flow of blood, which is in turn linked to pain and desire. Often such bodily insults are the result of "oedipal" or patriarchal violence, but the link between desire and pain and control creates a situation in which Abhor, of necessity, must create self out of conditions made available by catastrophe and brutality. Since for the oedipal subject, (in the words of Abhor's male partner Thivai) desire and pain are the same, the beginning of a post-oedipal subjectivity hangs on the problem of using desire/pain in such a way as to begin to recognize pleasures not caught in this circuit of bodily abjection. Any technique for imagining alternatives to oedipal self-hood requires, as Abhor comes to understand, that "I, whoever I was, was going to be a construct." (33) By imagining this construction as a self-authorization rather than ideological interpellation, Abhor begins to imagine subjectivity as something taken rather than something which occurs or is mandated, a becoming rather than an object of signification. The problematic of construction is one of exteriority posed against the interiority of the oedipal subject, and of an awareness of the gap that exists between the internalization of the desiring-economy and of an exteriority saturated by oedipal determinations but which it is possible to detourne in the name of a kind of freedom or autonomy. Abhor plays in the irreconcilable gap between ideological interiority and its exterior determinations. A scene in which Abhor is raped by her father makes a image bundle of these themes: "After he put the phone receiver down on the table, he put his cock up me." (12) The matter-of-fact realism of Acker's representation of the rape in a quotidian narrative syntax exemplifies a view of social grammar in which any action might end in some form of rape. In this syntax, there is a subject using an object--in this case, the object quality is extended to the mediation of the phallus itself--the father uses the phallus to discipline the female child. But Abhor under-"cuts" the violence of the scene, referring its closure to her own body: "There was no more blood than a period." Blood becomes a manageable function of Abhor's female body. Her evaluation of the act of rape begins by multiplying the function of blood--"deterritorializing" it from the scene of the violence of penetration and freeing it, as an image, for use in other contexts, nonetheless retaining and stabilizing its partial function as a signifier of male violence. Ambivalence becomes, in some sense, a productive function of the sign at particular moments with particular force. Far from debilitating the subject in search of some construction of identity, the ambivalence of signs becomes a token of a nascent freedom of desire. In Acker's text meaning is cut--certainly "senselessness" begins by reflecting knowledge, but its unfolding in different contexts sets in motion a series of effects which are not contradictory, but incommensureable with the meanings, the oedipus, which still calls to it from the other side. To say at this point--'you're just talking about castration again" describes a possible world, but does not describe the only such world. For such a world would tolerate non-meaning only insofar as it remains a negative image, a contradiction, the mere outlaw which reinforces the presence of the Law. But to drag each singular denial of the rational back to oedipus is tantamount to a philosophical claim that non-rationality only occurs in one relation to the rational, in one variety of anti-meaning: this is the dialectical claim, par excellence. It seems that Acker's position is that possible worlds do not exist in dialectical suspension only. Rather, they proliferate through a variety of strategies of differentiation, and so it is with Acker's texts. To make a new subject, we must knock the binary down to a level where it is only one of many possible worlds of meaning, even if we can only begin to understand what that might imply. To undermine dialectical semiology is to question the restriction of desire to a negative image of subjectivity--Acker's project is precisely to free desire from its oedipal/genital determinants, which is a different thing than saying that such determnants do not exist, or that they do not exert force on subjectivity. Yet we can, through Acker's struggle with language and Abhor's struggle with the laws of desire, begin to imagine, even anticipate, a subjectivity that is something taken, rather than something that fills an inert form only to empty it out over and over again. Identity in this imagining is neither the fixation of identity nor its anarchic pulverization, but a self which partakes of a scavenger ethic: old tools released to new uses, in a series of unanticipated worlds united only by a strategy of continual differentiation, freed from the homeostatic entropy of the Freudian death drive. When we link the blood in the scene recounted above with that of an earlier violence, the motion of Acker's signifying becomes, in a sense, traceable, if not "realistically" imaginable: "He taught me a final trick. He showed me how to insert a razor blade in my wrist just for fun. Not for any other reason. Thus, I learned how to approach and understand nature." (9) The violence of the father in this scene writes a gratuitous discipline on Abhor's body, but it is a discipline immediately appropriated by Abhor to initiate a process of "understanding" rooted in pain and death as both inevitable outcomes of her relations with men (for the male subject, "desire and pain "re the same" [32]) and as limit experiences which enable a movement toward complexity exceeding oedipal dictates: "Daddy left me no possibility of easiness. He forced me to live among nerves sharper than razor blades, to have no certainties. There was only roaming...I trusted him for this complexity." (10) "Understanding nature" becomes a parodic, but productive reading of male violence and its presumed naturalness in "the order of things" but at one and the same time, Acker disconnects it from its oppressive function, reconnecting it in another series of signs, one which begins with Abhor's claiming of her grandmother's "stubborness and determination" for herself. As we have seen in Abhor's grandmother's case, the play between signification and appropriation, oppression and something which might move toward pleasure and freedom exceeds the realm of hegemonic signification. The possibility of freedom is, in the radically ambivalent semiosis of the novel, the "complexity" into which Abhor's violent victimization frees her. The scene of incestuous rape serves multiple functions in the death of the father, and serves them simultaneously. The incest, which is socially repressed precisely for its implication in the field of oedipal desire, indirectly causes the death of Abhor's father because it violates social norms, not because of its violence to Abhor as a person. However, in terms of Abhor's subjectivity, it instantiates both the virtual and, for that, no less "actual" status of oedipal violence within her field of perception. The result of this is a gap separating Abhor's understanding of the imaginary and oppressive nature of the law of the father and the rape which supposedly violates that law, but which only desublimates its violence and links it to the structures of heterosexual desire as described in the field of the father. The rape ends with Abhor's profoundly ambivalent insight into this problematic, which drives her subjectivity through this gap in the law: "Part of me wanted him and part of me wanted to kill him." (12) Abhor's fragmentation--the cuts in her wrist as well as the penetration of rape--initiates a complex series of signs which resist reading narratively, that is to say, morally, for such a reading demands a juridical evaluation--perhaps even a readerly revenge fantasy--which Acker's language refuses to enable. What Abhor feels for her father is both paradoxical and true. While the "cuts"--the writing of the body from the "exterior"--begin a sequence in which self-oppression is as likely an outcome as freedom for Abhor, it is these logics of social determination and fragmentation which provide Abhor's only tools at hand for the pursuit of "pleasure"--which "only gathers in freedom." (12) These tools are of use only at the cost of patriarchal society, for such a society would mandate Abhor's victimization and assimilate her from the dysfunction of her family's law into the larger social symbolic economy in a perverse play on oedipal subjectivation. As a woman, this process would remove her from the status of her father's chattel to the Father's chattel, as, in the Freudian scenario, oedipus ends for women as it begins, with the desire for the father "in all his disguises." Acker's project places pressure on this circuit in order to articulate something different, and it is through the ambivalence of the "cut" that this difference may be partially articulated. The scene of rape is followed immediately and improbably by a dream. In this dream, "blood lying over the ocean" (12) becomes a light source allowing Abhor to see "visions" of freedom which extend the possibility of pleasure and prophecy, or possibly enact, the revolution which results in the death of the fathers: "After years of regular torture, boredom replacing all other metal activity, continuous fear, forgetfulness of all dreams to the point of the inability to dream, to have visions...suddenly the people in this city were free. They were free to experiment." (13) Contained within the dream, as if in parentheses, is a critical "aphorism" in which Abhor names the problematic of reason and freedom as the stakes of any subjectivity, as well as a version of romantic critique of that problematic which echoes, albeit abstractly, the story of Alexander and Nana: "The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions that we do. Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of a repressive society. Property's pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unfies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled...The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable." (12) The situation is familiar, though we have been using a different set of terms for it. This paragraph seeks a "revolutionary" resolution which arises from the operation of desire and identification: "Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified...The German Romantics sung brazenly, brassily of spending and waste. They cut through conservative narcissism with bloody razor blades. They tore the subject away from her subjection to herself, the proper, dislocated you the puppet: cut the threads of meaning; spit at the mirrors which control." (12) Two things to note in this paragraph: it takes place in an historical past, but in the terms of mythic collectivities of hegemony and opposition; and, as per Acker's description of mythic narrative, where "people aren't sure they can define their genders. That's the way you feel in mythical stories." (_HL_, 23), Abhor dreams of the liberation of female subjects, a liberation which certainly does not occur in the "historical" record defined by the story. Indeed, perhaps most importantly at the novel's diegetic level, is that, for all the cutting and slashing, patriarchy and reason did not fall either, for they exist, on Abhor's body, even as she dreams. Torn away from its triumphal rhetoric, the story of the German Romantics becomes an occasion for the assessment of tools, a place to begin and not an alibi for an ending, as the whole narrative thrust of the paragraph would have us read. The story becomes an image of thought, with successes and failures built into the structure of its telling--an instruction manual for the use of razor blades and mirrors, not a road to follow to a pre-destination. Thus, the ecsatasy of Abhor's vision cannot be trusted to escape the violence it releases, and Abhor realizes, in her dream, that her vision of a collective impulse to freedom is not entirely utopian, but that freedom is the name of a process which begins, if at all, on the body always already subjected to the symbolic regime of oedipus: "There was no such thing as rescue. There could have been no reality. I had only myself to save myself. I couldn't save myself...Inside my mind I scream aloud; inside my mind, the world, I scream aloud. Somewhere I am female and I have long hair and that hair is floating over soil so dry, for centuries, that nothing ever grows in it." (13) When one begins to talk of cuts, the current of critical signification flows all too quickly toward images and signs clustered around themes of castration. Acker's work with the image, as I have begun to explore it, does not deny the valence of castration, but incorporates it in new series of meanings, while turning it against itself in an implosive procedure of over-coding. Castration move from the position of dominant meaning in this series to the debilitated level of self-parody. As Acker teaches us to read complexly--to cut ourselves off from "easiness" of meaning in the name of imagining tactics of language, we can see castrations working against themselves, in unexpected directions, providing opportunity and violence, and meaning and a motor for new, pleasure-oriented desires. Castration becomes at once polymorphous and irreducible--that which, even in its de-centered, Lacanian forms it cannot be and retain its rhetorical privilege, a privilege which I believe Acker writes as nominal, not necessary. It is an interesting and often paradoxical choice, imagining the operation of cutting both as an aspect of the Lacanian "castrations" which produce meaning and reason, and the Freudian castration which constitutes a clearer image of violence and threat. Images of cuts, penetrations and cracks are persistent in the philosophical texts of French poststructuralism, and are generally linked to castrative moments and themes. However, the analyses which accompany these images often repress the threat of the cut in favor of a bloodless textuality. Derrida's use of this image in the text "The Scission," in _Dissemination_ seems a typical theoretical reading of this image: "Castration--always at stake--and the self-presence of the present...But the pen, when you have followed it to the end, will have been turned back into a knife. The present can only present itself as such by relating back to itself...only reach itself if it breaches itself, (com)plying with itself in the angle, along a...[brisure]: in the release of a latch or the trigger. Presence is never present...Such will have been the relation between presence and castration in play and at stake." (302-3) If indeed it is not possible to dispense once and for all with the hegemony of the Signifier it is because the movement of castration persists in both time and space--in the imaginary self presence of text. This is where we can locate Acker's simultaneous reversal of and reliance on post-structuralist theorizations. If Derrida and his others rely on the bloodlessness of the textual to enact theories which diligently analogize text and body, it can be argued that Acker makes a counter- claim on this analogy to show the results of the "textuality" of the body as blood and pain and struggle, not symbolic castration and lack. Luce Irigaray formulates the problem of the cut in a way which remains rather abstract, but which gets us a little closer to the use value of the image of the cut, if still in a "castrative," critical formulation: "So there is, for women, no possible law for their pleasure. No more than there is any possible discourse. Cause, effect, goal...law and discourse form a single system. Women's enjoyment is--for them, but always according to him--essentially anarchic and a-teleological. Sexual pleasure is engulfed...in the body of the Other. It is 'produced' because the Other, in part, escapes the grasp of discourse. Phallicism compensates for this discursive crisis, sustaining itself upon the the Other, nourishing itself with the Other, desiring itself through the Other...A barrier, a break, a fantasmatic cutting-out, a signifying economy, an order, a law, govern the enjoyment of the body of the Other." (95-8) Certainly, Irigaray's formulation offers one sense to Acker's cuts. My reading of this passage is extremely selective, but once again we see the patriarchal anlysis of the "cut" as a surgery or removal which allows "phallicism" to desire itself through the body of the other, thus creating a symbolic economy through which the female subject on the oedipal circuit has no desire other than the Father's. "The only person I wanted was my father" (10) says Abhor at one point. The play between the Father and father creates the diegetic situation in _Empire of the Senseless_ in which the father, by violating Abhor, breaks the Law of the Father as it is instantiated in the family, creating a cut which on one side is described as "Part of me wanted him" and on the other as "part of me wanted to kill him." This semantic cutting plays back Abhor's "razor blade" complexity on either side of the oedipal divide: part of me wanted him is part of the censored oedipal scene; part of me wanted to kill him is another part. But on this latter side of the sentence, the potential violence against the father is a first step, but only gets the subject so far, as exemplified in the story of the German romantics as I have read it. The father's violations--by razor and by phallus--free these impulses: the father eventually falls to the product of his own violence. But what counts for Abhor is, ultimately, the oscillation between two impossible desires and her blood which flows between them; the existence of the paradox on her body, and the clarity with which she is led to oppose Thivai's "desire and pain're the same" with her own "pleasure gathers only in freedom." As embodied in this dualism, Abhor begins to seek pleasure through freedom, not oedipally mandated desires, and certainly not the "normal" regime of sexual desire, though certainly such desire always already inhabits her body: "It's just that every time a guy's screwed me more than twice, he's thought he could tell me what to do. Since I had to fight the fucker for my own power, my life: I either gave up the fuck or gave up myself. Usually myself cause I like fucking so much...I don't want to be fucked up, no more, thank you, sir...In order to live again, I had to stop fucking the fucker." (126-7) "No wonder," Abhor continues, "heterosexuality a bit resembles rape." (127) As she struggles to enunciate her own pleasure, Abhor begins to define her own female pleasure in a way which, following Irigaray's critical construction of the hegemony of law in sexual pleasure, produces anti-sense, or a sense outside the binary cutting of patriarchy: "Physical pleasure can only be pleasurable if it is pleasurable, not the cause of fighting and suffering all the time...A man's power resides in his prick. That's what they, whoever they is, say...what and where is my power? Since I don't have one thing, a dick, I've got nothing, so my pleasure isn't one thing, it's just pleasure. Therefore, pleasure must be pleasurable. Well, maybe I've found out something, and maybe I haven't." (127) The recognition of the separation between pleasure and desire serves as another "cutting out," but it is also--in a mock Lacanian movement--a construction of a site of subjectivation, an entry into a certain level of meaning. If this revelation is ambivalent (maybe, maybe not), we can recognize it as an aspect of Acker's practice: she won't attach herself to any dialectic for too long. The tautology "pleasure must be pleasureable," with the parodic logical operator "therefore" constructs a useable proposition for Abhor, but one which oscillates between the registers of parody and resistance and disallows any conclusion, any final closure to the problem of pleasure. Pleasure remains a problem for Abhor, no more natural or liberatory in its opposition to pain than any other tactic. It is not, however, located in a "dick," but must be sought and struggled for in, what is for Abhor, a territory without maps. As Abhor struggles to construct pleasure as the motor for her "progress" as an autonomous, though fragmented self, Thivai plays out scenes of desublimated male subjectivity. He imagines himself as a terrorist, a criminal, a rapist; but only the last category captures the persistence of patriarchy in the novel. The relation between Abhor and Thivai becomes a sort of "fort/da" game played with Abhor's body, as Abhor escapes only to return or be "rescued" by Thivai: "Why do you want to find a woman? Because I had Abhor on a string and the string was tied around my little finger...I need to pull strings. (My cock got hard. Thinking about it.)" (61) For Thivai, thinking is always related to a "hard cock" and to violence, and reason serves as the alibi for the narcissism which makes Abhor the property through which Thivai recognizes himself and his desires. Though, there are "no more bosses," Thivai continues to live out their traits and stories: "What are we going to do now there are no more bosses?" he asks Abhor, but, without pausing, enacts the very impulse on which the regime of the bosses is erected: "I've got you. Now, I'm your owner." (82) In the fort/da game, it is in the opposition between "here" and "gone," and the string pulled by the little boy that desire is, in Lacan's terms, raised to "a second power" in the realm of language and the symbolic: "If the child now addresses himself to an imaginary or a real partner, he will also see this partner obey the negativity of his discourse...he will seek in a banishing summons the provocation of the return that brings the partner back to his desire. Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire." (103-4) "Our code was death," Abhor interprets; but for Abhor, unlike Thivai, the symbolic game presents no subjectivist benefits: 'I needed new instructions.' (56) Her encounters with Thivai convince her that 'the Algerian revolution had changed nothing,' and it is this realization which allows her to play against Thivai's desiring game, as she becomes more autonomous--less death driven--with each escape. Once again, such escapes are always provisional, and rife with recidivism and struggle. These escapes put Abhor into contact with a series of mythic stories and images, many related to the "cuts" elaborated earlier, through which Abhor gains some degree of autonomy and freedom through the articulation of the 'smooth space' of a desire imagined as productive and affirmative. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the products of such desire are life affirming rather than death driven--they are the products of a "nomadology," not a subjectivity. For Acker, there is no simple rejection of patriarchy, for it inhabits the body in the form of subjectivity, just as there is no simple rejection of the sense-making forms of language: "Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy languages which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions." (134) Here, the language of the cut privileges its patriarchal usage: nonsense cuts language in two in a general, rational way, constructing nonsense as the "other," as the counter-body on which rationality depends. However, this passage is embedded in one of the novel's most profound "autonomous zones," in an analysis of the relation between pain and pleasure in the "cutting" of a tattoo into skin. This image is only witnessed by Abhor, who retells the story of a sailor and the tattooist in terms which stress the voluntary exchange of pain and art which enjoin the two in a gift relationship; a voluntary and mutual signification: "As the other man and he backed away from each other, as if they were engaged in a ritual, they drew closer to each other. The expectation of the pain the other man would be giving him, a gift, made Agone able to rely on the other man. The complicity of friendship is pain." (136) Acker leaves this image in a relatively unformed state. She is not necessarily prescribing that everyone get a tattoo--this narrative serves as a "mythic" image of relationality, and an extension of Acker's dictum that "body is just more text." The relation between the two participants is complex and specific--as an aesthetic, it cements the relation between artist and an art "object" imbued with consciousness and autonomy. It is mutual, participatory and binding, requiring a high degree of trust--a symbolic, rather than an economic exchange. The tattoo is the aesthetic conferral of a mutual and collaborative signification which is constituted and continually reconstituted in an "infinite succession of local operations." (D&G, _Nomadology_, 55) This both from the point of view of the tattooist, who enters into multiple exchanges, and in the tattooed, who re-invents his or her life in the outlaw status of this continual and mobile signification--which always signifies from a new "site" of expression and subjectivity, and always enters into new constellations of relations, creating a tactical space of communication on the body. The tattoo, as Acker's mythic image of thought, initiates an infinite series of imaginative and potential realizations of subjectivity--actualizations which do not return obsessively to patriarchal signage. Acker emphasises her intention that this signification be non-phallic by describing the encounter in terms which explicitly deny the closure of patriarchal narrative and sexuality: "...the power of the tattoo became intertwined with the power of those who chose to live beyond the norms of society. In the same manner, normal society had ruled that he shouldn't touch another man, but he was, that he shouldn't love another man, but he was. The realm of the outlaw has become redefined: today, the wild places which excite the most profound thinkers are conceptual. Flesh unto flesh. Mouth on mouth. Cock on cock. Agone pulled away from the tattooer before either of them came because he didn't want to reach any port." (140) This scene echoes Deleuze & Guattari's notion of the "plateau," a non- narrative site of continual intensity, reaching no end, desiring no "little death," but only the pleasures of mobility and continuation. This is Acker's conception of an image of self-hood not enslaved to oedipal determinations, of a concept "desire" which creates a new space outside the to and fro of desire and lack: "He was amazed how indirect his human soul was: how there were goals of desire, objects of desire, resting places, beds, and he never sailed to these places directly. There were no straight routes, except by chance. Rather the soul travelled in such turns and windings, that a world was found defined. The soul created out of its own desires." (136) The cut is translated from oedipal violence and masochism to an exercise in self-discipline which finds its ultimate unfolding in the extensive and interpersonal discipline of trust--and the multiple cuts--of the tattoo. This is one of the things that might happen when we disconnect the cut from its investment in the castration series of meanings--though these meanings coexist with the others I am speaking about, in a certain register of interpretation, it would be perverse to prioritize this interpretation in view of Acker's apparently anti-oedipal stance. Roland Barthes' formulation of the "cut" provides a reading possibly more appropriate to Acker's conception in the dual proximity it affords to the explicit concerns of the themes of _Empire of the Senseless_, especially to the relation between text and body, desire and pleasure. Barthes, in reference to a text of Sade's (a writer Acker cites as a primary source of oedipal "intertexts" for _Empire of the Senseless_ [_HL_, 18]), writes a passage which could have been written about Acker: "...pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models. As textual theory has it: the language is redistributed. Now such redistribution is always achieved by cutting. Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it has been established by schooling, good usage, literature, culture) and another edge, mobile, blank, (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. Neither culture not its destruction is erotic; it is the theme between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so." (6-7) For Acker, we remember, the "body's more text" (_HL_, 21), a proposition, which, in the case of Barthes, once again serves to privilege text as the source of erotic pleasure. In Acker's text, however, the flow is reversed, and the body is the degree zero of cultural inscription--the death of language, the blank edge. The compromise, however, implies a juridical bearing which moves away from Acker's work toward the mobile edge of the outsider, of the heterogeneity of the body, of language, and, therefore, of the subject. It is through the many forms of the cut in _Empire of the Senseless_ and their diverse symbolic functioning that Acker begins to articulate the potential for a new economy of subjectivity. In everything above, cuts produce meaning, cuts produce language--but they never are referred to pain, or to the blood of the Other who is their repressed victim. Acker will not allow the body to undergo the conflation of pain and pleasure in the symbolic economy of desire. The pain of the cut must be re-directed toward the flight from pain, the ascesis of endurance--it must become an anti-oedipal motor. By the end of the novel Abhor has learned that desire and pain are do not, in fact, need to be the same, and that this ambivalent knowledge is one possible pathway to "a society which wasn't just disgust." (227) Acker's experimentation in _Empire of the Senseless_ shows evidence of the modulations of a language which reveal its construction as a trait or rhetoric of exteriority; her theories work through several models of opposition, to contest as many of the "many vectors that define the abstraction process" (De Landa, 177) as possible and multiply analytical levels in the pursuit of "killing the father on every level." This is a brand of "molecular" politics that seems well suited to contesting the changing faces of power in the many names of heterogeneity. REFERENCES Acker, Kathy. _The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula_. New York: Grove Press.1973. Acker, Kathy. _Blood and Guts in High School_. New York: Grove Press. 1984, c1978. Acker, Kathy. _Great Expectations_. New York: Grove Press. 1983, c1982. Acker, Kathy. _Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream_. New York: Grove Press. 1986. Acker, Kathy. _Empire of the Senseless_. New York: Grove Press. 1988. Acker, Kathy. "A Few Notes on Two of My Books" in _The Review of Contemporary Fiction_. Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall, 1989): 31-36. Acker, Kathy. _Hannibal Lecter, My Father_. New York: Semiotext[e]. 1992. Barthes, Roland. _The Pleasure of the Text_. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. Bataille, Georges. _Visions of Excess_. Trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1985. De Landa, Manuel. "Policing the Spectrum," in _Zone 1/2_. Ed. Crary, Feher & Kwinter. Cambridge: MIT Press, (1986): 176-93. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. _On the Line_. Trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). 1983. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. _Nomadology_. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Semiotext(e). 1986. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. _A Thousand Plateaus_. Trans. Brian Massumi. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987. Derrida, Jacques. _Dissemination_. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1979. Foucault, Michel. _Language, Counter-Memory, Practice_. Trans. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1977. Irigaray, Luce. _This Sex Which Is Not One_. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1985. Lacan, Jacques. _Ecrits: A Selection_. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1977. Massumi, Brian. _A User's Guide to Capitalism & Schizophrenia_. Cambridge: MIT Press/Zone Books. 1992. Siegle, Robert. _Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing & the Fiction of Insurgency_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. 1989. Silverman, Kaja. _The Subject of Semiotics_. New York: Oxford University Press. 1983. ----------------------------------- FINAL AMPUTATION: PATHOGENIC ONTOLOGY IN CYBERSPACE MARK D. PESCE "Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? What's the difference?" --N. Stephenson PROLOGUE Twelve months have passed since "Pathogenic Ontology", and the ideas contained within it, began to take shape. It seemed more of an introduction than an overview, a statement of direction rather than a survey. Despite all the talk of the "infobahn" and a universe of "channels" serving up pay-per-view, cyberspace, the realm of visualized, virtualized communication, is no nearer. Somehow, like AI, cyberspace has managed to show incredible promise without delivering anything substantial, apart from a few experiments which highlight both the promise and stagnation of its current state. Most significantly, this work has added a new plateau in its discussion of cyberspace, that of *vivogenics*. This neologism, born from a need to define an opposite to pathology, has come to encompass an approach, an assemblage, which frames cyberspace in terms of mythological content and communicative bilaterality. In the essay that follows I argue that these elements are fundamental to the design of cyberspace, whether consciously intended or subconsciously realized. Immediately following the Third International Conference on Cyberspace (where this work was first presented), conference attendees Dr. Brenda Laurel (author of _Computers as Theatre_, and an expert on the human/machine interface) and filmmaker Rachel Strickland, began the PLACEHOLDER project at the Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. Their goal, to create a sense of "place" within a synthetic world, encompassed many of the same design guidelines outlined in this work. Most importantly, they moved the mytho-content of the space into the foreground, and this formed the basis for self-representation and navigation. Furthermore, the mythological representation was consistent, and this meant that participants in PLACEHOLDER did not need to be "trained" to use the system. It was a well-executed example of what Dr. Laurel calls "No Fucking Interface!" My own work has resumed its fundamentally technical course. Over the next year cyberspace, in the sense of a three-dimensional "consensual hallucination" envisioned by St. Gibson of the Matrix, will come to be realized, in part because of certain technical innovations to which I have been a party. Cyberspace will move into reality, and its fictive evocations will fade before its implementations. The experimental mytho- logic of highly connected spaces for communication will become the practical "laws" of the medium. If I could wish any response from the reader of this work, I would ask that it evoke a terrorizing fear; that our unprotected minds are soon to be laid open, to be pried apart in ways that would make William Randolph Hearst or Joseph Goebbels green with envy. A dedicated study of vivogenics is, in my assessment, the only thing which could afford us any protection at all. I wish to draw the reader's attention to the one part of this work which I feel has been overlooked; the definition and exploration of the qualities of the "trans-space," a highly participatory, highly bilateral environment for communication. While it may be some time before the media permit a high-fidelity experience in the trans-space, it is now possible to create a low-fidelity experience which has analagous qualities. To this end, I have defined and am working toward the realization of the VOCE project. VOCE, in its organic form, is a group activity of "toning" (vocalization of continuous sounds) which corresponds to and follows the yogic defintion of the chakra centers. Individuals who participate in this experience report that they feel a certain sense of union or unity with the other participants in the VOCE session. Using newly available techniques, we will be moving VOCE into an electronic context, where (in its final demonstration), it will be possible to walk around a physical space, corresponding to a dymaxion map of the earth, and hear the sounds of those engaged (coming from all corners of the planet) localized to their specific presence in the map. It will be possible, in this sense, to hear the "song of the world", and furthermore, to participate, via cyberspace, in an experience of union with other humans. Fitting the requirements for vivology in cyberspace, I look forward to meeting you there. Mark Pesce, April 1994 INTRODUCTION The history of the human relation to technology is one of the gradual replacement of organic function with that of mechanical or electrical artifact. A century and a half ago humans extended and superseded their organism through the use of the electric technology of the telegraph. In an instant the velocity of human communication and the ability to coordinate human activity reached its uppermost physical limit, the speed of light. This phenomenon has been described by Marshall McLuhan, in _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_, as an extension, or outering, of the human nervous system: "After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man--the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be a "good thing" is a wide open question. There is little possibility of answering such questions about these extensions without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex." (McLuhan, _Understanding Media_, 3-4) The primary quality of any electric medium is its inherent electroplasticity, that is, its ability to construct a range of perceivable effects. The telegraph has a binary electroplasticity, dit and dah, whereas High-Definition Television has an exceptionally broad range of possible effects. As is natural in any technological evolution, electric media have tended toward a greater range of effects, or greater electroplasticity, through time. Roughly a decade ago, major research began on media which are both highly electroplastic and designed to produce holosthesia. This word, coined by Martens (1989) has its roots in the Greek holos (whole) and aisthesia (to feel or perceive), and describes any medium which produces the perception of an event through several (or all) sensory modalities in a self- consistent manner. Immersive technologies such as virtual reality fall into this class of electroplastic media. The fundamental intent of virtual reality is to produce in the observer the perception of an event as if it had occurred in the physical world. Holosthesia is the necessary component of such a form of synthetic perception. Cyberspace, at the union of the holosthetic technology of virtual reality and communications technology can create a shared holosthetic experience. (_Mondo 2000_, Fall 1990, 76) It is nowhere implied that this experience will be safe. This is an important point, if only for the following reason; within twelve months, hundreds of thousands of children will be experimenting, on a daily basis, with a highly holosthetic medium. Experimenting is the operative word; within a few days more hours will be logged inside virtual environments by these children than has been amassed by the scientific community over a decade of research. Furthermore, as our tools and technology evolve beyond their current and primitive state, our ability to orchestrate holosthetic experience will be similarly extended, and this too raises questions: not of what is possible, but rather, what is safe. For this reason, this paper will directly address the issue of safety within holosthetic environments, particularly with respect to cyberspace. Having participated in the design and implementation of one of these "Home VR" systems (Sega VR), I have come to a realization which relates to all research work thus far performed in the field of holosthetic technology; while careful attention has been paid to the biological aspects of such systems, to prevent adverse physiological effects, very little research or design work has been conducted on the ontological or mythological content presented by these devices. Yet these aspects are fundamental to the devices themselves; the creation of a world necessarily implies the creation of a world-view. Geoffrey Hill, in _Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film_ discusses cinema, the most holosthetic of our current media, in the context of mythology: "The cinema has become to the modern world the collective cathedral of primitive participation mystique. It is the tribal dream house of modern civilization...Indeed, the cinema is the theater of life, the screen of human existence casting illuminating shadows onto the wall of tribal participation...If Marshall McLuhan is correct in arguing that each of our media is an extension of ourselves, and that the medium is the message, then his argument would support the contention that film is but an extension of our most inner and ancient consciousness...The dark cavern of the cinema is reminiscent of a ceremonial sweat lodge, an initiation pit, the dark night of the soul, the belly of the fish, the alechemical grave, or the wilderness of the night journey...It is the baptismal font where our skepticism is drowned in the motherly sea of awe and wonder." (Hill, 4-20) If these statements are true of cinema, how much more so for immersive technologies, which, beyond providing a space for the "suspension of disbelief", bind the participant to the mythology through interaction within the mythos? Cinema is the passive viewing of a mythology, cyberspace the active participation within a space that is essentially mythic. Thus far this technological development has been an unconscious enterprise, directed primarily toward entertainment, but always containing a scientific as well as mythic or ontological thread. Like the works of William Irwin Thomson, I suggest the existence of a continuity between these aspects; each helps to create and sustain a particular configuration of the other: "The scientist tries to examine the 'real' nature of the photograph; he tries to get away from psychological configuration, the meaning of image, to move down to some other, more basic level of patterns of alternating dots of light and dark, a world of elementary particles. And yet what does he find there but another mental configuration, another arrangement of psychological meaning? If he persists in this direction long enough, the mythological dimensions of science will become apparent in his work, as they would if he had asked questions about the meaning of sunlight rather than questions about the behavior of photons. Science wrought to its uttermost becomes myth...But what is myth that it returns to mind even when we would most escape it? Forms of knowledge change as society changes. Sometimes these changes are small and incremental; at other times the changes are transformations of the structures of knowledge and not merely the contents...But this movement is not simply a linear and one-directional shift toward increasing rationalization and demystification; when the rational historian has come in to take away authority from the mystical and tribal bard, the artist has returned to create new forms of expression to resacralize, re-enchant, remythologize." (Thomson, 3-4) In this piece I am using a conceptual framework, known as perceptual cybernetics, for discussion of both the scientific and ontological issues raised by holosthetic media. I argue that holosthetic media have the ability to cause a change in the physical state of the user. Further, these states can be pathogenic, that is, they can produce conditions harmful to the organic being of the participant. My main thesis is that these states of physical pathology have an analogue in the psyche, that is to say, holosthetic media can create states of "pathogenic ontology". This pathogenesis has roots in both aspects. Further, holosthetic media can rapidly deliver an individual into a psychotic state. If it is possible to create states of pathogenic ontology, is it possible to know in advance which configurations of holosthetic media give rise to such states? Using perceptual cybernetics as a model, I describe an experiment which illustrates some of the potential dangers of high- fidelity holosthetic media; it represents one possible model for how this pathogenisis might take place. Conversely, it is equally possible that holosthetic media could produce a vivogenic ontology, one which strengthened the durability and responsiveness of the psyche, particularly with respect to interactions between participants. The model also yields some possible designs of these kinds of spaces as well. Finally, I want to explore some of the likely effects of long-term exposure to holosthesia. In doing so I will comment on the phenomenon of "incorporated experience", that is, the construction of a world-view and experience base built upon elements from both the physical and synthetic worlds. NARCISSUS AS PSYCHOSIS: AMPUTATION OF THE ORGANIC FUNCTION OF THE SELF While a great deal of work has been done to forward the "engineered" aspects of holosthetic media systems, little or no research has been done upon the effects of such use. McLuhan makes the following point: "In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to the new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists." (McLuhan, 64) And goes on to send a warning: "As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse." (McLuhan, _UM_, 68) To continue research into the development of holosthetic media without any examination of the consequences of its unique qualities--that it can generate "real" experience in a "virtual" world--would be a mistake of the highest order. Starting with two explanations of the effects of technologies upon their users, one developed by Marshall McLuhan, the other provided by perceptual cybernetics. Holosthetic media have a qualitative aspect unknown in earlier technologies: they lead to a total replacement of an organic function of the self with an electronically mediated self-experience. I will use my experience in the development of telepresence systems to illustrate this point. TECHNOLOGICAL STRESS AND SELF-AMPUTATION In Understanding Media, McLuhan frames a basic model for the effects of technology upon its users. Those in the grip (or thrall) of a technology willingly undergo a painful psychological amputation: "Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body... Physiologically, man in the normal use of his technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it..." (McLuhan, _UM_, 45) An oft-given example is the automobile. The technology of the automobile was created to satisfy the demands of speed-up in transportation which followed the widespread adoption of the electric technologies of telegraph and telephone. (McLuhan, _UM_, 42) The automobile greatly increases the speed of locomotion through the conscious self-amputation of the human organs of motion. The legs, which in their pure biological function carry human beings from one place to another, are self-amputated and replaced with a control interface (literally, a cybernetic interface). This amputation enables a greater speed of locomotion, which relieves the speed-up stress, but introduces new stresses of its own. The replacement of the biological or evolutionary function of organism by control or cybernetic function is the essential element in the human relationship to technology. The stresses caused by recent technologies have been outlined by many authors, including Allucquere Rosanne Stone: "At the close of the twentieth century, I would argue that two of the problems are, first, as in Paul Virilio's analysis, speed, and second, tightly coupled to speed, what happens as human physical evolution falls further and further out of synchronization with human cultural evolution. The product of this growing tension between nature and culture is stress...The development of cyberspace systems--which I will refer to as part of a new technics--may be one of a widely distributed constellation of responses to stress...Cyberspace can be viewed as a toolkit for reconfiguring consciousness in order to permit things to go on much in the same way." (Stone, 110) The challenge of humans in the late twentieth century's technological societies has been the development of a strategy for maintaining equilibrium (both physically and psychically) in an information-rich environment. The explosion in the accessibility, quality and quantity of information available to the individual is the hallmark of our cultural epoch, and from MTV to computer viruses, the human relationship to information is changing. Information has become our clothing, our food, our air, and free access to it is becoming perceived as a basic human right. (Kapor, 1991) Yet, at the same time, humans can be overwhelmed by information, drowned in a sea of choices, confused by conflicting viewpoints and data, and find themselves unable to navigate or make decisions within the info-sphere. (Toffler _Powershift_, 316) This is a basic source of stress in our culture, for as this wave of information has burst upon us, it has become clear that, while for most of human history, only a few "decision makers" needed access to vast amounts of information, the very content of each of our lives is so dependent upon the flash-flood of data that each individual, in order to reach their potential within our civilization, also needs to have access to it and a degree of mastery of it. (Toffler _Future Shock_, 45) Holosthetic media are the natural reaction to this stress. Humans seek to overcome the stresses of the informational space by placing themselves wholly within it, immersing all sensory modalities. This gives humans the power to completely modulate the effects of the info-sphere, for information is used to provide a shield against information. However, holosthetic media necessarily imply a self-amputation of the highest order, that of all sensory modalities, and, as will be shown, of the sense of self. Any technological amputation always has a consequent effect in the structure of the self, as the reconfiguration of the senses produced by self- amputation introduces a new gestalt, or world view. Total amputation within holosthetic media produces a complete reconfiguration of the human universe, but as all the senses are involved, these reconfigurations take place within the holosthetic space, further binding its participants to it. In a sudden cycle of positive feedback, people will find themselves unable to live without cyberspace almost as soon as they inhabit it. This quality has been identified by Stone: "...there is also a protean quality about cybernetic interaction, a sense of physical as well as conceptual mutability that is implied in the sense of exciting, dizzying physical movement within purely conceptual space. I find that reality hackers experience a sense of longing for an embodied conceptual space like that which cyberspace suggests. This sense, which seems to accompany the desire to cross the human/machine boundary, to penetrate and merge, which is part of the evocation of cyberspace, and which shares certain conceptual and affective characteristics with numerous fictional evocations of the inarticulate longing of the male for the female, I characterize as *cyborg envy*." (Stone, 108) The great rush to design holosthetic media has, as one of its primary undercurrents, this cyborg envy. A direct result of the stresses of the info-sphere, cyborg envy appears as a phantom pain, localized in no organ of perception yet created. It is the overloaded self crying out for final amputation within cyberspace. PERCEPTUAL CYBERNETICS: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK A conceptual framework to express, in terms of information theory, the relation and interaction between humans and their artifacts, or technologies, has been developed by Dr. David Warner, a Medical Neuroscientist at Loma Linda Medical Research Center. This framework, known as "Perceptual Cybernetics," describes a system of feedback loops and information interfaces which define the essentials of the relationship between a technology and its user(s). The major components of this system are described below. PHI--The physical universe, the set of items outside of the self. In the example of the automobile given previously, PHI represents the machinery itself, and the interface it presents to the human. It can be more than just the control interface; an automobile indicates its performance by sound and feel, rather than by pure instrumentation. In more philosophical terms, PHI is the "other", the exterior, and can contain within itself the potential for independent action. Fx ("Fecks")--The human biology, the raw organs of perception; the eyes, ears, nose, skin, and myriad other "senses" (sensors?) which provide humans the basic data by which they can create a view of the world. It is the affective interface as well, the means by which humans modify their world. In the sense that the eye watches road and traffic, the feet depress petals, and the hands steer the wheel, Fx is the interface between human beings and the other. PSI--Psychology, the mental state, the human world view, or mind. In the framework of Cognitive Psychology, PSI contains "experience," and all perception is mediated by it. Our assessment of traffic, choice of routes taken, and concern about punctuality are events which occur within PSI. Fx serves as the mediator between PHI and PSI. All human action expresses itself as PSI acting through Fx, and PHI expresses itself to human thought through Fx. Yet Fx can act of itself. Reflexes, such as the involuntary shutting of the eyes in response to a bright light, show that Fx, rather than just the slavish servant of PSI, has priorities of its own. Each of these components presents an "interface" to its companion component. PHI and PSI both have interfaces to Fx, while Fx presents interfaces to PHI and PSI. In scientific terms, the PHI/Fx interface is studied in the discipline of neurophysiology, the Fx/PSI interface in Physiological Psychology, and PHI/PSI in psychophysics. These interfaces are the most interesting feature of this framework, with respect to holosthetic media. If, as Aldous Huxley, William James, and the cognitive psychologists have suggested, consciousness is largely a reducing function, (Huxley, 22) an extraction from the universe of a restricted set of "events" that allow us to create a world view, a large part of this filtering occurs at these interfaces. The ear accommodates itself to a continuous sound. The eye adjusts to a constant pattern or movement. Seen as a cybernetic model, each of these interfaces represents an information "barrier" between a component and its neighbor component. It is possible for PHI to present information filtered by Fx (infrared light, for example), and it is equally possible for information to traverse the PHI/Fx barrier only to be stopped at the Fx/PSI barrier (Hungarian speech when all I understand is Japanese). Devices such as the Nanomanipulator demonstrate how holosthetic media can be used to "bandwidth-shift" information contained in PHI so that in can be presented (mapped visibly and tactilely) to Fx, to produce an understanding in PSI. (Taylor et. al., 1992) Conversely, most of the human aesthetic experience is predicated upon the assumption that it is impossible to directly communicate a PSI state from one human to another, and therefore music, dance, the visual arts and other media are employed to express what remains inexpressible. In the well-designed user interface, PHI speaks to both Fx and PSI in clear, unambiguous messages. (Laurel, 1990) TELEPRESENCE AS ELECTRONICALLY-MEDIATED SCHIZOPHRENIA In order to understand how this model works with respect to a holosthetic medium (in this case, telepresence), I will focus upon what we learned while building an inexpensive telepresence system. Our work was, from the point of view of technical feasibility, a very simple implementation of a well-understood technology, (Donahue and Pesce, 1991) yet several of the phenomena we encountered have led us to believe that the potential of holosthetic technologies for eliciting pathogenic effects is greatly underestimated. In the experiment, our goal was to construct a complete telepresence system for under a thousand dollars. With the exception of the video cameras, the total cost was under $250.00. The system consisted of a head-mounted display containing stereo headphones and two LCD color televisions mounted in a rigid framework located around a full-face motorcycle helmet. These televisions and headphones were wired to two video cameras mounted approximately 300 mm apart (lens center to lens center), again on a rigid frame. In the head-mount, two fixed lenses created a 40< binocular field of view (FOV) for the user. (Interocular adjustments could not be made.) During the construction of the system, four phenomena in particular were observed which relate to the pathology of holosthetic media. The first two of these phenomena caused motion sickness. In the first case, one of the experimenters spent several hours adjusting the lens system and tuning the interocular gap. After enduring hours of a poorly focused environment, the experiment had to be halted temporarily due to nausea and a headache. In the second case, the right and left video channels were reversed with respect to the displays in the head-mount. Although little disorientation was noticed immediately, as soon as the cameras were moved, the experimenter became suddenly and violently ill. The phenomenon of motion sickness in holosthetic environments is at least partially understood, (Robinett, 1991) and is known to occur when too great a disagreement exists between sensory modalities. For example, "lag times" of greater than 100 ms in virtual reality systems place the user well within the "barfogenic zone", and for many people the threshold is much lower. The third phenomenon arose from the mountings of the cameras. Because of the size of the video cameras, it was not possible to mount the lenses any closer together than 300 mm. The human interocular gap averages 65 mm, and our perception of binocular parallax, one of the six determinants of depth perception, is based upon the constancy of that gap. The experimenters and their test subjects noted, when inside the system, that their sense of depth and focal plane were markedly different from that which they normally experienced. Objects 5 m away were perceived as though they were less than 2 m distant. Objects closer than 1 m could not be fused binocularly. The experimenters christened this phenomena the "hippopotamus-eyes' view" (hyperstereo), and, while confusing, caused no pathological state to arise in any of the test subjects. In perceptual cybernetics, these first three phenomena involve the interface between PHI and Fx. They arise directly from biology. It is possible, even easy, to pass information across the interface that is pathogenic to one of the components of the interface. The information barriers that exist between the different components will not automatically reject any pathological information. In fact, motion sickness induced nausea is believed to be a response to the pathological effects of neurotoxic poisons, which can have similar disassociative effects upon the senses. From an evolutionary perspective, rejecting information within Fx, just because it is pathogenic, would tend against longevity, natural selection, and would countervail the building of the human experience base which is key to the evolutionary success of Homo Sapiens. Humans have evolved to collect experiences, and use these experiences as a basis for a survival strategy for themselves and consequently the whole species. Lacking the specialization of particular sensory modalities, such as the dolphin's ear or dog's nose, humans must involve the entire sensorium in the selection of survival strategies. (Fuller, 27-28) The fourth phenomenon was purely psychological, and unlike the previously discussed phenomena, could not be predicted from a physiological model. The experimenters guided a series of test subjects through the system. This included instruction on how to wear the head- mounted display, and how to fuse the image (in the absence of an interocular adjustment). Once the subject was comfortable, a telepresent tour of the lab began. The subjects were asked to identify objects in the lab and state how far away they perceived them to be. At the end of the experiment, the cameras were turned upon the subject. Without exception, the test subjects failed to identify themselves immediately, and most then passed through a shock of recognition as they realized that "they" were "out there." This phenomenon has been observed by others, including Rheingold: "I began to accept the odd sensation that accompanied the act of transporting my point of view to that of a machine--until I swiveled my head and looked at myself and realized how odd it seems to be in two places at the same time. Using your eyes and ears and hands to control a robot equipped with cameras, microphones, and mechanical manipulators sounds like a bit of fun, but I never thought of it as a thrill. What you don't realize until you do it is that telepresence is a form of out-of- body experience. It tasted to me like a little advance sample of the way it feels to be part of a silicon symbiosis." (Rheingold, 255-256) In its purest sense, telepresence, one of the simplest and most direct of all holosthetic technologies, creates a profound sense of disembodiment, one that in almost any other state of being would be called pathogenic. It is a form of electronically-mediated schizophrenia, where the self, through its various holosthetic extensions, removes itself from itself. The event occurs entirely within PSI. The system itself was well tuned, and gave no cause for physical discomfort in any of its users. Yet the image itself was disturbing. That is directly due to the fact that no image of the self exists within the self. The self is never seen, as it forms the background of perception. With telepresence, the background and foreground can be reversed. If PSI is considered a set of information from which an image or thought can be developed, the following can be stated: PHI delivered, and Fx presented, through its interface to PSI, data which contradicted an understanding or relationship internal to PSI. The set of experiences of the self do not include the direct experience of the self; the set PSI attempted to contain its contradiction, anti- PSI. The impossibility of the situation presented in this phenomenon, as a psychological event, its imminent self-contradiction, forces the discussion into terms which are essentially mystical, or ontological. At the same time, it is a profoundly pathological state, an electronic disembodiment, and can only occur when an amputation of the self qua the self has occurred. A sense of disembodiment from the self is not uncommon among schizophrenics or those in psychosis, but it is also a sought-after state of grace among mystics. Holosthetic media, in their capacity to create responses within PSI, will be able to express both of these ontologies. THE LANGUAGES OF HOLOSTHESIA As can be seen through the development of the previous example, two parallel languages are required to describe the effects of holosthetic media. The first is the rigorous language of science, of a blue light flashed at 3Hz into the right eye while a 1500 Hz tone at 80dB assaults the left ear. It is the language of systematic methodologies and perceptual cybernetics. While this language describes the actualities of perception, it fails completely when talking about events within PSI. The interface between Fx and PSI is the territory of semiotics; the human process of mapping event into symbol and symbol into understanding and understanding into world view. Cognitive psychologists are at the beginning of understanding the ties that bind subject to referent, of proximal events to distal perception. The second language speaks directly to being, and to those parts of humans which can accept breaches in rationality and causality, which sustain a world view through faith in unseen events. A large part of perception, even in the most "rational" human beings, is based upon a set of unconscious assumptions which provide the framework for a world view. When these assumptions are brought into the foreground, they take the form of mythology or magic. As David Tomas says: "This mytho-logic suggests that one of cyberspace's more fundamental social functions is to serve as a medium to communicate a form of 'gnosis, mystical knowledge about the nature of things and how they came to be what they are.' In cyberspace, the classical hardware interfaced cyborg and the postclassical data-based cyborg or personality construct meet with new post-human intelligences that engage in revelatory and pedagogic activities reminiscent of the activities of shamanistic figures who mediate between traditional sacred and profane worlds. Such mediations between human and post-human, analogue and digital spaces, suggest that cyberspace must be understood not only in narrowly socioeconomic terms, or in terms of a conventional parallel culture, but also and more importantly as an inherently original and inventive metasocial operator and potential creative cybernetic godhead." (Tomas, 41) Given McLuhan's assertion that the form of the medium determines the message delivered by the medium, it seems clear that holosthetic media, and cyberspace specifically, have a form that must be expressed in mythological terms. It is the only language which can frame the effects (in PSI) of holosthetic media. The language of PSI in relation to PSI, and the relationship between contradictory states of PSI (which exist in all humans) is the language of mythology and ontology. Because holosthetic media talk to PSI in the language of worlds, which is the internal language of PSI, it is necessary to create a language of myth, find expression for ontos, in order to fully understand the effect of holosthetic media upon PSI. From the Sumerians to Joseph Campbell, numerous systems have been developed to discuss mythology. The media which mostly closely resemble the myth- or world-creation skills needed to design holosthetic media are writing and the dramatic arts, which can, for limited periods, "suspend disbelief," and speak directly to PSI in its internal language. Pathology then, has two languages of description with respect to holosthetic media. The pathology of sensory tricks and confusion can be described, for the most part, in the scientific language. The pathology of world-views requires a frank and open usage of such value-laden words as evil, as the expression of pathology in mythical space. (Peck, 129) HOLOSTHETIC PSYCHOSIS The thesis advanced in the previous discussion, that holosthetic media can express pathogenic states, relates directly to the form of holosthetic media. The entire process of holosthetic media, seen from perceptual cybernetics, is that of a tuning, an adjustment of the interfaces between PHI and Fx, and Fx and PSI, to produce the widest possible range of holosthetic responses. Holosthesia is a form of interaction highly tuned to the particularities of the interfaces presented by each of the components of the model. A head-mounted display, for example, provides a high-bandwidth, self-consistent interface to the visual sense, so much so that it creates the perception of "space" within the mind of the participant. The improvement in the quality of the holosthetic relationship between PHI and Fx can therefore produce a qualitative change in PSI as well. Although current holosthetic technology is, at best, a crude attempt to optimize information transfer across these interfaces, an enormous amount of work is being done to improve these limitations. Most of this work, at the present, is being directed at the PHI/Fx interface, with technologies such as high-resolution head-mounted displays, spatial localization of sound, and tactile feedback. During the exploration of the PHI/Fx interface, researchers also carry on an exploration of the Fx/PSI interface. The greater the "fidelity" which can be achieved through the holosthetic optimization of the PHI/Fx interface, the more plastic PSI becomes vis a vis PHI. The eventuality of this process is that PHI will be able to completely (or almost completely) determine PSI. This is the true "man/machine" symbiosis, the end result a true cyborg, human united to machine. This process has its reverse component; work continues toward the expression of mind, or PSI, within the machine. Speech recognition, with its unfathomable ambiguities, outlines the difficulties inherent in such a task, but, as a more complete picture of Fx is created, the process will accelerate, and may, at some future point, succeed. This would represent a fully bilateral symbiosis, where machine steers mind as mind steers machine. A dance. These speculations, even in dim outline, trace out the most important details in the newly developing relationship between humans and their technologies. Perhaps the most relevant detail to this analysis is the component of speed. The electric age gave instantaneous speed to the entire spectrum of human interaction, now it moves forward into the entire spectrum of human relation to the machine. Much has been said on the potentials of holosthetic media in education. It is widely believed that virtual reality represents an incredible tool for investigation and study, for learning and experimentation. If that is so, it is primarily due to the fact that information presented will be "tuned," presented in a holosthetic form (via PHI/Fx/PSI) which is uniquely well suited for human absorption. Holosthetic media hold out the possibility for greatly accelerated learning, almost, as described by Rheingold, acting as "mind amplifiers." But this potential for speed-up represents only one aspect of such an amplifier. (Rheingold, 68-69) Like every technology, this speed-up will pair with self-amputation. However, rather than a "sensory" amputation, this holosthetic effect will lead to an amputation within the organic function of the "self." Integral to the human process of consciousness is the "reducing function," which operates at both the purely organic level and at the level of mind. For example, certain individuals suffering from forms of obsessive-compulsive disorders have "racing thoughts"--an organic condition that results in the inability to effectively discriminate between and retain trains of thought. In this case the organic reducing function is impaired. In order to speed information transfer from machine to mind, from PHI to PSI, this reducing function will need to be eliminated or circumvented all together. This, however, can only be done at great peril to our own sanity. A thought experiment illustrates this point. Suppose the existence of a high-fidelity holosthetic device, capable of creating and maintaining a world self-consistent in both biological and mythical or ontological aspects. This device has been designed to uniquely match the capabilities of a test subject who is placed into the device, or rather, immersed within the holosthesia generated by it. At the beginning of the experiment, the test subject has a known PSI, or mental state. The experiment begins with a full-fledged assault upon the test subject's senses, using every trick of holosthesia to express PHI, with the highest possible fidelity, and the greatest speed, through Fx, to PSI. The machinery creates a world, a world which the test subject inhabits. Furthermore, the machine has been programmed to create the anti-PSI state in the test subject (i.e., to present information pathogenic to the world view of the test subject). Under normal circumstances, this information would be discarded by PSI. But in this case, these mechanisms have been effectively disabled. The test subject would then enter a state of holosthetic psychosis, unable to create or maintain a consistent world view. The damage inflicted in such a condition could well be permanent. While this experiment may seem predicated upon tools and technologies which are still some distance away, the effects of holosthesia upon PSI can not yet be predicted. The biological boundary states expressed in PHI/Fx and Fx/PSI have chaotic components. It is therefore difficult to predict the results of an experiment, especially a highly complex one, involving mythology or ontology, before the experiment is performed. The change or addition of an otherwise inconspicuous component could have profound effects. It may be, and probably is, a great deal easier than the example given above to produce holosthetic psychosis. Even the relatively simple experiment in telepresence already described expressed a significant portion of the PSI-state required to produce such a condition. At the very least, it is important to note that speed-up in information absorption carries with it a consequent lack of discrimination, and this, by itself, can lead to holosthetic psychosis. REVERSALS OF AN OVERHEATED MEDIUM: LIMITS OF HOLOSTHESIA In _Laws of Media: The New Science_, Marshal McLuhan identifies four questions--comprising what he terms a "tetrad"--that can be asked of any human activity or artefact, whether technological or purely social: 1) What does it enhance or intensify?; 2) What does it render obsolete or displace?; 3) What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?; and 4) What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?" (McLuhan, _Laws of Media_, 7) Holosthetic media, like all other forms of media, can be analyzed through this tetrad. Of particular interest to the current work is the issue of the extreme case of holosthesia, the final item in the tetrad. The extreme of any medium produces reversal; that is, the phenomenon of speed-up at its outermost limits reverses the normal effect of the medium. Holosthesia is artifice, synthetic experience, but its reversal through speed-up is the opposite, reality. In this case the form of the medium is reversed from synthetic to physical, from interior experience to exterior reality. Holosthetic psychosis is a pathogenic state of the complete exteriorization of ontology, whereas the trans-space (discussed below) is a vivogenic state of this same exteriorization. TELEPATHOLOGY: CYBERSPACE AND HOLOSTHETIC MEDIA Cyberspace, as a specific form of holosthesia, is a communication space. Its essence is in that it is occupied. (Benedikt, 160) In this case, PHI appears as the mediator between two presumably (but not necessarily) human entities. PHI is the Matrix, the network, the device that facilitates the communication, but does not of necessity shape it. This is left to the participants in the communication. One goal of research into cyberspace systems is to optimize the interface between the participants, to present the clearest possible connection between the PSI of one participant and the PSI of another. This has been named "post- symbolic communication." (Lanier, 279) In essence, such a device will create the sensation of empathy and telepathy. It is already possible, using telepresence, even if only in the most tenuous sense, for one human being to inhabit the "self" of another. This connection need not be fully bilateral; nothing guarantees it, and this is likely the greatest danger of holosthesia in cyberspace. All of the possibilities present in the relationship between humans and holosthetic media are also present in the interrelationship of humans through holosthetic media in cyberspace. Pathologies are as possible, perhaps even more possible, in cyberspace. For the moment, the only tool capable of adeptly manipulating a human mind is another human mind. The capability will come with us into cyberspace, but greatly amplified. Thus, cyberspace presents an opportunity for telepathology; the expression of pathogenic ontologies, through holosthetic media, from a distance. EXPLORATIONS OF HOLOSTHETIC SPACE Having framed the dangers of holosthetic media--how they can elicit a wide range of pathological physiological effects and an as-yet-undefined range of pathological psychological effects--it becomes even more necessary to examine strategies for the prevention of such pathologies. It is both possible and desirable to develop a design methodology for holosthetic systems which tends away from pathology, and researchers in holosthetic media need to be able to identify those features which must be present to prevent holosthetic pathology. The next portion of this work examines the basic relationships which exist between PHI, Fx, and PSI to serve as a guide to the construction of safe holosthetic media. While inherently safe media are an honorable design goal, it is as yet impossible to develop an accurate model for the cognitive effects of holosthesia. The most accurate model is the "real" world, but it is neither unsophisticated nor safe. Nevertheless, it is possible to use the human conception of real space, and the mechanisms already present in our biology and ontology, to maintain our sense of self in holosthesia. NAVIGATION WITHIN HOLOSTHETIC SPACES Designing to avoid disorientation is the first prerogative in the engineering of a holosthetic environments. Disorientation represents a step toward the amputation of the self, and necessarily precedes the dislocation of self that culminates in holosthetic psychosis. This portion of this work will concern itself with elements of this design. Navigation, and the design of systems which promote self-orientation in holosthesia, should be a primary focus in development of holosthetic media. If you know where you are, you probably know who you are. As has been noted by Benedikt and others, aids to navigation, such as a clock dial on the horizon, (Lanier, 279) or a well-defined "floor," are necessary features in a holosthetic space. Navigable space implies a continuity and regularity in holosthetic space which resembles "real" space, and provides a set of "cognitive handholds" which participants in the space can use to preserve their self-orientation. This metaphor could be extended as far as desired, with a sun in the sky to indicate up-down orientation, or perhaps a hand-held compass or world-map. (George, Plate 4) In general, the widest possible set of navigation aids should always be provided in holosthesia. In addition, there should be another prerogative in the development of holosthetic environments; there should be a "real world," or "Earth" (Pesce and Donahue, 1991) present in cyberspace. This doubling of the physical world in holosthetic space can serve as both an experimental space, where the subconscious aspects of navigation can be explored and discovered, and as a transition space between the physical and holosthetic environments. These suggestions primarily confine themselves to the visual realm, which is, in western civilization, the ultimate realm of organization. However, holosthesia may not have a strong visual component, or may lack it entirely. There is a need, therefore, for the development of cognitive handholds within other sensory modalities, to serve as "reality checks," or navigation buoys in an invisible space. A class of experimenters needs to be found with the specific skills required to create these cognitive handholds. They will serve as the first "explorers" within holosthesia, and need to be trained to act as "rock climbers," placing the pitons in the sheer rock face of sensory experience. We have a suggestion from McLuhan on where to find and recruit such a class of explorers: "Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another...[T]he artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures created by electric technology...[and in providing] exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties...[I]n experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritants (self- amputations) or technology. For those parts of ourselves that we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to 'ride with the punch,' instead of 'taking it on the chin.'" (McLuhan, _UM_, 54-56) McLuhan points out that artists are the cultural agents of adaptation to new media, mapping disparate sensory modalities, and acting as the buffers of self-amputation. Experimental art in the twenty-first century, then, is an attempt to map the holosthetic space created by electroplastic media. Artists' action in the present, as opposed to the reaction to the past, uniquely equips them to explore the rich but dangerous ground of holosthesia. Art performs a necessary reversal of foreground and background, reversals common within holosthetic space. Artists create familiar objects in unfamiliar spaces and unfamiliar objects in familiar spaces. Both of these capabilities must be enlisted in the exploration of holosthetic space, and artists, as the individuals in our culture best-equipped to confront holosthesia, should form the "pioneer" base of this process. Explorers would be charged with two tasks; the placement of navigation aids, our cognitive handholds, and the creation of maps. It is unwise, however, to place too much faith in artists. The PHI/Fx/PSI interfaces under exploration in holosthetic space are essentially personal. Although human beings have a number of characteristics in common at the psychological and social level, artists can only explore the boundaries of their own private holosthetic spaces, spaces that posses meaning (or pathology) only for them. But it's a beginning. MAPS OF HOLOSTHETIC SPACE Humans have a substantial history of exploration, both at the cultural and the personal level. A common feature of exploration is the map, a tool for navigation in an unknown space. Maps are reassuring, they show humans what to expect within a space, and, to some degree, help to prepare them for it. Explorers of the holosthetic space must make a map of that space as it relates to pathogenic ontology. There already exists a substantial base of information with which such explorations can be guided. The exploration of holosthetic space is an exploration of the human perceptual space. *Maps of the outside (cyberspace) are maps of the inside (perceptual space)*. Research into the scientific specifics of perception, a century of work, from William James to Edwin Land, should be drawn from and form the basis of such explorations. Yet this work confines itself to the biological aspects of perception, the PHI/Fx interface. Very little of it is applicable to the Fx/PSI interface, the architecture of the self. For this, the cognitive psychologists provide some useful starting points, but hardly a detailed landscape. The holosthetic map must necessarily contain an ontological or mythological component to describe the effects of holosthetic spaces, in the language of PSI. Using a mythological basis such as that presented by Carlos Castaneda, one possible map of holosthetic PSI-space could be divided into three components: the "known," the "unknown/knowable," and the "unknown/unknowable." (Castaneda, 75) In the realm of the known, familiar objects are found. This is the "real world" in holosthetic space. In the unknown/knowable realm, it is possible for an individual to comprehend the PSI-effects of holosthesia and to develop a framework for understanding and navigation within it. This is the space of cognitive handholds and navigation buoys. In the last case, unknown/unknowable, the structure of the holosthetic space itself is such that it defies both reason and myth. Nothing can be learned in such a space; it contains elements which represent anti-PSI influences. Such spaces should be identified by these explorers, marked on the maps, and avoided. Here the limits of human expression become visible. It is necessary to create these maps of holosthesia, so that a mapping can be made of the regions of pathology. However, these spaces are not necessarily or primarily visual. Is it possible to create maps of non-visual holosthetic spaces, such as would be required for the exploration of haptic, kinesthetic or olfactory spaces, in such a way that the information can be conveyed to other people? Some work has been done on the mapping of the timbre space into the visual space, (Martens, 1988) but a heavy reliance on our over-developed visual facility will leave some information outside of the realm of expression. I propose that an investigation into the study of "holosthetic cartography," the science underlying the design of such maps, begin. This is analogous to and would draw from Robinett's (1992) proposed taxonomy of synthetic experience. Once sufficient information has been gathered to create maps of the pathology of holosthetic space, experimenters will be able to "map out" those states within the devices producing holosthesia. In the production of commercially available holosthetic media, regulations may be required (similar to those required for other human-factors devices) to prevent the accidental or intentional marketing of devices which can produce pathogenic holosthesia. Fortunately, the unregulated products on the market presently, or soon to be introduced, are unsophisticated enough to severely restrict the range of holosthesia an individual may experience while using them, but there is no guarantee that these products are intrinsically safe. PROBABLE PATHOGENIC ONTOLOGIES To focus on the "content" of holosthetic space--i.e., the world-view or PSI-state expressed in holosthesia--requires a discussion of the mythology or ontology embodied in the design of such a holosthetic space. An examination will now be made of the ontological elements which could contribute to pathology in these spaces. Using the guidelines given above, the outlines of vivogenic holosthetic spaces are also clearly defined, and will be discussed in the context of games and communication. CONTINUITY AND MYTHOLOGICAL SPACE A "mythos" or world-view is the dominant feature expressed in a holosthetic space. The expression of that mythology may be a conscious design goal, or it may be inferred from a contextual analysis of the space, but it in all ways permeates the holosthetic space. It is impossible to produce true holosthesia without an ontological component, that is to say, without a place for "being" in the world. The various sensory modalities may be tricked into a minimal holosthesia, but the participant will not "suspend disbelief" to enter the world. Drawing upon the explorations of the human/machine interface described by Laurel, it is clear that one way to express the mythological component of a holosthetic space is through the classical dramatic arc of exposition, inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, falling action and denouement. (Laurel, 86) Just as in the case of a poorly designed user interface, a confusion of these principles in holosthesia, with consequent violations of the expectations of dramatic causality, will lead to confusion within the space. Due to the finite human capacity to withstand discontinuity, the need for spaciotemporal reason sets a clear boundary beyond which holosthetic space can not extend with any degree of safety. Discontinuity is an anti- PSI state, as PSI is responsible for orchestration of the events of perception into a continuum. This is not to say that classical drama presents the only model for interaction. A study of mythological archetypes, especially those which have evolved outside the flow of Western thought, could give rise to vivogenic environments which are not, in the strictest sense, rational, but adhere to and create worlds within deeper structures of PSI. BROADCAST SPACE Of particular relevance is the relationship between cyberspace and pathology. As has been stated previously, telepathology is one possible result of this relationship. Cyberspace is a region of communication; its form is dynamic and derived from the connections present, at any moment, within it. (Benedikt, 180) Almost all of the holosthetic connections controlled by only one (or very few) participants in the "holosthetic connection space" are pathogenic. McLuhan states clearly: "Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly." (McLuhan, _UM_, 68) Broadcast holosthesia, the transmission of information from one to many, represents, in most cases, a highly pathogenic ontology. The mythology inherent in such a space can only be autocratic or messianic. Holosthesia will create an implosion of far greater mega-tonnage than that produced by the introduction of the radio or the public address system, technologies that McLuhan believes allowed Hitler to come into political existence by directly relaying his thoughts to the German people. (McLuhan, _UM_, 300) It reverses the foreground and background of the self, and the history of the self, in a final self-amputation. In the absence of safeguards, the experience of holosthetic autocracy will be dramatically easy to create. The design of holosthetic media, then, especially with respect to cyberspace, must tend away from broadcast holosthesia. EROS AND THANATOS: PATHOLOGY IN THE DILDONIC SPACE One of the rarely acknowledged but well-known ends of the development of holosthetic media is "dildonics." This term, coined by Theodor Nelson to describe the sexual relationship between human and machine, or human-to- human mediated by machine, raises a host of issues involving the interface between human biology and the conception of self. (Rheingold, 179) Stone, in her interviews with phone sex workers, outlines the creation of a sexual ontology, constructed over the low-fidelity telephone, in which the worker deftly manipulates the client's PSI-state with a stream of information: "Phone sex is the process of provoking, satisfying, constructing desire through a single mode of communication, the telephone. In the process, participants draw on a repertoire of cultural codes to construct a scenario that compresses large amounts of information into a very small space. The worker verbally codes for gesture, appearance, and proclivity, and expresses these as tokens, sometimes in no more than a word. The client uncompresses these tokens and constructs a dense, complex interactional image...This act is thoroughly individual and interpretive; out of a highly compressed token of desire the client constitutes meaning that is dense, locally situated, and socially particular." (Stone, 103) These "tokens of desire" are themselves highly "tuned" to elicit specific, if personal, responses, and represent the "high-fidelity" transmission of PSI-state from one communicant to another. Here the primary question is of the relationship between sexuality and pathology, and how, mythologically, each expresses itself in the other. The long- term existence of an S/M subculture and the recent appearance of the cyberpunk-cum-"Modern Primitives" are the visible evidences of such a relationship. However, our earliest civilizations show a common consciousness of the connection between sexuality and pathology. Pathology may be the essence of sexual reproduction. From Oedipus to Freud, love and death have always been paired archetypes. Hence, one flavor of the human sexual drive is to "push the envelope" within the field of sexual experience, up to (or beyond) the limits of pathology. This will present a very compelling temptation to creators and users of holosthetic media. I would argue that the first accidental sufferers of holosthetic psychosis will encounter it during experiments in dildonics. Caution is especially required in the exploration of dildonic holosthesia, because biology would, of its own, tend away from it. PROBABLE VIVOGENIC ONTOLOGIES Of equal importance to the mapping of holosthetic zones of pathogenic ontology is the identification of those factors which produce a vivogenic holosthesia, an environment which, in the very elements of its design, tends away from pathology. Certain safeguards for human biology can and will be built into holosthetic media, but no mechanism can detect the presence of a pathogenic ontology. In vivogenic ontologies, a careful selection of a mythology and the creation of a nurturing "place for one's self" are absolute necessities. GAMES "We think of humor as a mark of a person of sanity for a good reason: in fun and play we recover the integral person, who in the workaday world or in professional life can use only a small sector of his being...Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic...counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stresses of the specialized actions that occur in any social group...dramatic models of our psychological lives providing release of particular tensions. Ancient and nonliterate societies naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or of the outer cosmic drama." (McLuhan, _UM_, 235-236) Here McLuhan describes the perfect form of involvement in holosthesia. Games are stress-relievers, and connect humans, at a basic level, to themselves and their beliefs about the world. Games, as restricted forms of behavior, with their own complex of internal rules systems, are, by and large, the least pathogenic forms of holosthetic media. For example, SIMNET, the Defense Department's battle-readiness simulation training system (specifically, a cyberspace), shows how humans can quickly adapt and come to "enjoy" a game-based holosthesia. Indeed, most participants feel as though they were "really there," fighting the battle, and exit the system praising the "reality" of what is, in fact, a low-fidelity experience. The rule set of SIMNET, however, exactly conforms to the rules of engagement (on both physical and ontological levels) that the participant has been trained to expect. The fulfillment of expectations in game-based holosthesia is part of the enjoyment, whereas the lack of rules or the arbitrary mutability of these rules would produce confusion. Both complete flexibility of the rule space and spaces with only a few rules can be pathogenic. Games in cyberspace are thoroughly democratic systems of communication, insofar as their rules allow. All play, within the rules, is safely bilateral. If the rules are known and agreed to in advance, any lack of bilaterality is replaced with a meta-bilaterality, the social contract that participants accept to enter the game. "Simon Sez," for all of its childishness, speaks volumes about the social contract implicit in the game; that even liberties integral to the self can be safely suspended for specific purposes. TRANS-SPACE One approach in the design of a vivogenic space would be to focus upon the mythology present in such a space, and bring it into the foreground. For ourselves as humans, this tradition comes from shamans and high priests, from covens and conclaves. It is, viewed from the self, a "religious" event, or space, a place where the gods speak and are spoken to. In cyberspace there may be a holosthesia that is less communication than communion. Certainly the capability immediately exists for darshan, the mystical experience of being simultaneously present with a multitude of others. When it is possible, in a few years, to gather a billion people into a single space, fidelity may not be necessary to produce the sensation of a profound, and for some, mystical, experience. It is possible to extend this even further. At its most comprehensive, trans-space represents the fully multilateral, holosthetic union of a large number of human beings. I have no wish to speculate about the qualities of trans-space, except to state that it could well be a "holy" place. INCORPORATED EXPERIENCE One of the outcomes of long-term exposure to high-fidelity holosthetic media may well be a progressive blurring of the "in-here" and "out-there" sensory modalities, with consequent confusions in the psyche. Well- designed holosthesia will linger in the consciousness, and perhaps form part of the human experience-base. This "incorporated experience" (Chrichton, 187) will not be based on physical actualities, but rather, on the subtle interplay of biology, mythology and ontology. It is also possible that as the base of incorporated experience extends within an individual, that individual will broaden the plasticity of their ontology (i.e., have a greater tolerance for and ability to survive in the presence of previously pathogenic ontologies). Our children, without an extensive experience-base to serve as filter and navigation guide, will incorporate much more holosthetic experience into their self-ontology than those who have formed a self and personality in the absence of such technologies. Those who have grown up in holosthesia will have considerably more plastic definitions of their "selves" and of "reality." These humans will weave experiential modes, both physical and holosthetic, to arrive at a new understanding of self. They will be able to tolerate spaces that others, less flexible in their ontologies, would find immediately pathogenic. The expression of experience gathered by a participant in a holosthetic space safe to the participant, but pathogenic to others, cannot occur. The expression would need to take place within that space itself. When the human experience base has become so broad that human communication becomes impossible across certain boundaries, a threshold of note has been crossed. I believe that the next generation of children, raised in holosthesia, will be very different from their parents, so much so that the TV-generation "gap" will seem ridiculous by comparison. With holosthetic media we are creating a new language. Like any highly complex language, only native speakers will have "internal fluency" in its nuances and idioms. Our children will be those native speakers. CONCLUSIONS This work, which is at best introductory, outlines some of the mechanics and specifics of a new human relationship. There is a dialectical, biological process involved in the relation of humans to their machines, as has been carefully outlined by McLuhan, Stone, Warner, and others. This dialectical relationship can be expressed in both scientific or mythological terms. Holosthesia and holosthetic media require that both languages be employed, for we are engaged in making machines that can contain our myths. This simultaneously represents a chance for ecstatic communion or the utter destruction of self, for "darshan" and "Gehenna." These machines *can* be employed in malevolent ways, either by themselves or through the agency of others, can speak to and subvert us at our most vulnerable inner selves. We have created the most potent technology for mind control since the advent of human culture; if we remain ignorant of this potential we will inevitably pay a heavy price for it. The potentials for addiction and enslavement do not outweigh the potentials for creative play and communication, but to ignore one and focus on the other is both short-sighted and foolhardy. The decisions made today by the architects and designers of holosthetic media will set the tone, *define the mythos*, for the coming community. We must do our best to construct a vivogenic cyberspace, one that supports both individual and community, where every person can extend their creative potential, free from pathogenic influences. The situation speaks for itself. Very soon hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of children will be enjoying holosthesia daily. Fortunately, the hardware is primitive, the range of possible effects narrow, and, directed as they are toward entertainment, the market will provide a range of games, safe content for a dangerous medium. In this there is some temporary refuge. A few years will pass before high-fidelity holosthesia becomes widely available. Then, only our research, exploration and mapping can guarantee our safety. We would do well to begin a full-scale investigation of pathogenic holosthesia, ferret out those spaces, and write on the maps "Here Be Dragons!" A future Columbus may prove us wrong, but to err on the side of caution will save ourselves, and our children, from an uncertain insanity. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to two individuals from whom I drew the structure for this work: Marshall McLuhan and Dr. David Warner. Dr. William Martens contributed holosthesia, a very useful word, and has provided extensive documentation, based upon his own work, to support my thesis. Both W. Gregory Jacobsen and Robert Powers were instrumental in helping me outline and organize the concepts expressed. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Sandy Stone, the gang at Ono-Sendai: Michael Donahue, Darr Aley, Marc de Groot, bandit, Michael Perry, Dan Lynch, Rosemary Machado and Timothy Childs, Peter Kennard, D. Owen Rowley, Linda Fleming, and Dr. Stephen Corey. Lastly, I would like to thank my family, who has consistently supported me throughout my years of research. NOTES 1. We recognize this as a fault of the system. Ideally, the cameras would be able to "cross" their lenses and so fuse the binocular field. REFERENCES Benedikt, Michael. "Cyberspace: Some Proposals." _Cyberspace: The First Steps_. Benedikt, ed. MIT Press, Cambridge. 1991. Castaneda, Carlos. _The Fire from Within_. Simon and Schuster: New York. 1984. Chrichton, Michael. _The Terminal Man_. Bantam Books. 1973. Donahue, Michael J. and Mark D. Pesce. "A Low-Cost Telepresence System." Unpublished. 1991. Fuller, R. B. _Critical Path_. St. Martin's Press: New York. 1981. George, Stan. _Cyberspace: The First Steps_. Benedikt, ed. MIT Press: Cambridge. Plate 4. 1991. Hill, Geoffrey. _Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film_. Shambala Press: Cambridge. 1992. Huxley, Aldous. _The Doors of Perception_. Harper & Row: New York. 1970. Kapor, Mitch. _The Electronic Frontier Foundation_. 1991. Lanier, Jaron. "Virtual Reality: A Status Report." _Cyberarts: Exploring Art and Technology_. Jacobson, ed., Miller Freeman: San Francisco. 1992. Laurel, Brenda, ed. _The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design_. Addison-Wesley: New York. 1990. Laurel, Brenda. _Computers as Theatre_. Addison-Wesley: New York. 1991. Martens, William. "Pallette: An Environment for Developing an Individualized Set of Psychophysically Scaled Timbres." Northwestern University. 1988. Martens, William. "Spacial Image Formation in Binocular Vision and Binaural Hearing." _3D Media Technology Conference_. 1989. McLuhan, Marshal. _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_. 3rd Edition. McGraw-Hill: New York.1964. McLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan. _Laws of Media: The New Science_. University of Toronto Press: Toronto. 1988. _Mondo 2000_. "An Interview with Jaron Lanier." Fall 1990. No. 2: 76. Peck, M. Scott. _The People of The Lie_. Random House: New York. 1983. Pesce, Mark D. and Michael J. Donahue. _Elements: The Navigation of Cyberspace_. Unpublished. 1991. Rheingold, Howard. _Virtual Reality_. Summit Books: New York. 1991. Robinett, Warren. Virtual Worlds Research at the University of North Carolina, University of North Carolina. 1991. Robinett, Warren. "A Proposed Taxonomy of Synthetic Experience." University of North Carolina. 1992. Stephenson, Neal. _Snow Crash_. Bantam Books: New York. 1992. Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures." _Cyberspace: The First Steps_. Benedikt, ed. MIT Press, Cambridge. 1991. Taylor, et. al. _The Nanomanipulator: An Atomic-Scale Teleoperator_. the University of North Carolina. 1992. Thomson, William Irwin. _The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality & the Origins of Culture_. St. Martin's Press, New York. 1981. Toffler, Alvin. _Future Shock_. Bantam Books: New York. 1970. Toffler, Alvin. _Powershift_. Random House: New York. 1991. Tomas, David "Old Rituals for a New Space: Rites de Passage and William Gibson's Cultural Model of Cyberspace." _Cyberspace: The First Steps_. Benedikt, ed. MIT Press: Cambridge. 1991. ----------------------------------- IMAG(IN)ED GULFS ROBERT F. NIDEFFER The 1991 war in the Persian Gulf was about the control of space. It was about the control of many different kinds of spaces--the geographic space of Kuwait and by extension Iraq (if not the whole Middle East), the psychic space of the American public on the massively mediated receiving end and, most notably, the electronic space within which the vast majority of the war was waged--the radio, phone, satellite, television and computer. That the Gulf War took place primarily in electronically generated spaces spawned a strong reaction and led to a tonnage of reporting in the press and the academy about the nature of warfare in a "postmodern" era. For many, Operation Desert Shield -> Sword -> Storm represented "a new virtual--and consensual--reality: the first cyberwar, in the sense of a technologically generated, televisually linked, and strategically gamed form of violence...[its] truth...constructed out of and authorized by spectacular, videographic, cyberspatial simulations of war." (Der Derian, 175-91) This split between the "virtual" and the "actual," the "simulated" and the "real" was continually replayed and served to link many otherwise dissimilar reports together. The Gulf War as "prime-time videowargame," where the "real" horror and trauma of war had been replaced by electronic screens of various sorts, was the de facto starting place for many cultural critics writing about it. The belief that we had somehow lost touch with the reality of war was simply taken for granted. This essay takes a step back from this starting point--a point which constantly rearticulated in many different yet strikingly similar ways, the unnegotiable split between the "fictional" and the "factual"--in order to explore what it was about this war that generated a whole discourse about its being unreal, a war with a reality that masked it's own status as reality, and to question the role technology played in shaping its discursive field. POSTMODERN POSITIONINGS Contemporary arguments asserting that the preparation, execution and experience of warfare had undergone a fundamental shift were frequently predicated upon epistemological sensibilities reflective of the postmodern turn in science, art and literature. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard is without doubt one of the preeminent spokespersons charting this terrain. Baudrillard's central thesis is that dramatic changes in technologies of reproduction have led to the implosion of representation and reality where *simulacra* come to replace the reality they once only signified: "Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding..." (_Ecstasy of Communication_, 12). He goes on: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself... " (_Selected Writings_, 167). As war broke out, Baudrillard was quick to provide an illustrative example of his thesis. In a 1991 essay published in English as "The Reality Gulf" he asserts that the strategic site of the Persian Gulf War was not the desert sands of Arabia, but the screens of the world's TV sets; war had been reconfigured as electronic artifice, stripped of its traditional trappings, it remained ungraspable, undefinable, technologically mystified (25). From his perspective, it was a war enabled by revolutionary advances in information technologies and constituted in its mass media coverage: "We must now be satisfied with virtual reality...In our fear of the real, of anything that is too real, we have created a gigantic simulator. We prefer the virtual to the catastrophe of the real, of which television is the universal mirror. Indeed, it is more than a mirror: today television and the news have become the ground itself...Even soldiers have not been able to retain for themselves the privilege of real war." (25) Following suit, English journalist Benjamin Woolley writes, "missile targets were not real locations but map coordinates displayed on a VDU, troop movements were formations of pixels in computer-enhanced, false- colour satellite images. From a postmodern perspective, the entire war, at least on the level at which anyone could make sense of it, was just patterns on a screen." (190-91) War was no longer simply being mass mediated through the television, the news press and the theater, it was being mediated through the nosecones of missiles, remotely-piloted vehicles and computerized command control centers. The antiseptic imagery resulting from this type of technological mediation was a far cry from the battle images generated during Vietnam-- little girls running naked down the street after being bombed by napalm, U.S. soldiers using cigarette lighters to torch an entire Vietnamese community--and evoked a sense of pleasure and excitement uniquely geared toward an audience, on the battlefront as well as the homefront, whose viewing habits had been honed by Hollywood special effect, videogame parlors and Nintendo home entertainment systems. One didn't have to look too deeply into popular culture to see that the dominant discursive field of this war quickly became a technologized, and technofetishized, one--_Time's_ early reporting of how "Vast superiority in aircraft, tanks, training and logistics should help the U.S. score a quick knockout in a battle with Iraq" (January 21, 1991, 34-35), _Newsweek's_ cover story on "High-Tech Hardware" that included a pullout poster spotlighting the new "Weapons of War" (February 18, 1991), Topps' Desert Storm Trading Cards, Gulf War retrospectives produced for the network and cable TV, video footage of bunker blow-ups taken from the nose-cones of smart bombs, and simulated battle strategies, graphics, and logos generated on computer desktop publishing systems, all helped to make this point perfectly clear. Temporal and spatial barriers had collapsed. New information technologies allowed us to get closer to war faster than ever before. Paradoxically, from the postmodern perspective, it was through the use of those same technologies that we were kept and/or chose to remain strangely distant, a distance reflected in the war's massively mediated representation: "It looks like a fourth of July display at the Washington Monument," shouted CNN's John Holliman in the network's (in)famous live broadcast of the Allied bombing of Baghdad. "I feel like a young athlete after his first football match," said one U.S. pilot during a post-bombing run interview. "Baghdad was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was tremendous!" "It was exactly like the movies," said others. "This is the war--brought live straight into your living room. The biggest computer game of all time fought out right under your nose," wrote Sue Masterson in the _Observer_. (Woolley, 193-97) And so the story went. That the perceptual encoding of the war in the gulf would take place more within a field of pleasure and entertainment than horror and docudrama paid fitting homage to a growing body of academic literature concerned with articulating the experiential and phenomenological reception of electronic media. The basic assumption of such accounts is that different representational technologies offer radically different ways of being-in- the world, and hence, as film theorist Vivian Sobchack puts it, alter our subjective experience by exciting different "sensual pleasures, aesthetic responses, and ethical responsibilities" which serves to selectively and uniquely shape our "presence" to the world and our representation in it." (1) Take for example the photographic. According to Sobchack, the photographic was dominant in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and is characterized by its ability to reproduce a moment frozen in time, previously only able to be captured so faithfully by the human eye. The image of the photograph is isolated and abstracted from the temporal flow. It is fixed in place and can be controlled, contained, circulated and possessed: "The photograph 'freezes' and preserves the homogeneous and irreversible *momentum* of this temporal stream into the abstracted, atomized, and secured space of *a moment*. But at a cost. A moment cannot be inhabited. It cannot entertain in the abstraction of its visible space, its single and static *point* of view, the presence of a lived-body--and so it does not really invite the spectator *into* the scene..." (8) The primary difference between the transcendental moment of the photograph and the existential moment of the cinema is precisely this difference between a photographic scene which can only be *contemplated*, and a cinematic scene which can actually be *lived*. (Sobchack, 8) But even more importantly, in terms of theorizing the phenomenological distance believed to be inherent in the technologically mediated experience of the Gulf War, was the character of the electronic, a character that is perceived to turn the analogic quality of the photographic and the cinematic into discrete bits of abstract, digital information that are then transmitted discontiguously and insubstantially across a network: "[While] the cinematic exists as a visible performance of the perceptive and expressive structure of lived-body experience...[n]ot so the electronic, whose materiality and various forms and contents engage its spectators and 'users' in a phenomenological structure of sensual and psychic experience that seems to belong to no-body...Thus, the 'presence' of electronic representation is perceived at one remove from previous representational connections between signification and referentiality. Digital and schematic, abstracted from reproducing the empirical objectivity of realist Nature that informs the photographic and from presenting a representation of individual subjectivity and the modernist Unconscious that informs the cinematic, the electronic constructs a post- modernist meta-world where ethical investment and value are located in representation in-itself." (Sobchack, 17-20) It isn't too hard to see that although Baudrillard's and Sobchack's paths are slightly different their destination is very much the same: "Without the temporal emphases of historical consciousness and personal history, space becomes abstract, ungrounded, and flat--a site for play and display rather than an invested situation in which action 'counts' rather than computes. Such a superficial space can no longer hold the spectator/user's interest, but has to constantly stimulate it like a video game. Its flatness--a function of the lack of temporal thickness and bodily investment--has to attract spectator interest at the surface." (Sobchack, 22) Presumably, what this all leads to in the end, as Baudrillard argues, is the "progressive divestment" of politics from the scenes of history, and the everyday. (_Ecstasy of Communication_, 12) Because electronic space is all surface it cannot be inhabited. Because it disembodies instead of embodies, electronic representation, for theorists like Sobchack, "liberates" one from any deep structure of feeling and creates a free-floating and impersonal presence that is "dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria." (24) Thus, "we no longer partake of the drama of alienation," but instead float around rather aimlessly "in the ecstasy of communication." (_Ecstasy of Communication_, 22) If one is persuaded by this logic it becomes much easier to explain the celebratory nature of so much of the Gulf War experience. From the postmodern perspective, a war so dominated by electronic imagery, as was the Allied assault in the Persian Gulf, would naturally be experienced as a playful yet shallow abstraction of its former photographic and cinematic splendor. But the phenomenological shift this logic asserts was, for many wartime observers and armchair participants, exceedingly difficult to digest. Not surprisingly, this digitally enabled move into the analog(ue) realm of the simulated, a kind of electronically encoded foray into ontological uncertainty about the status of the "real," created considerable anxiety. REACTIVE RESPONSES It was this surreal sense of celebration, playfulness, and the perceived lack of any deep and meaningful engagement that unleashed a barrage of trenchant commentary attempting to recapture and foreground what was seen as the more rightful horror and reality of war. In a book entitled _Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War_ American literary theorist Christopher Norris starts his first chapter by rhetorically asking: "How far wrong can a thinker go and still lay claim to serious attention?" He quickly answers: "One useful test case is Jean Baudrillard, a cult figure on the current postmodernist scene, and purveyor of some of the silliest ideas yet to gain a hearing among disciples of French intellectual fashion." (11) Norris' resentment is anchored in a rejection of what he takes to be the outcome of adopting a far too fashionable and politically irresponsible, "postmodernist position" which believes "reality just is whatever we make of it according to this or that predominant language game, discourse, or mode of signifying practice." (24) According to Norris one need simply reject this mystifying premise and the "real-world" war in which "countless thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed daily" will become more visible and, once visible, generate a morally appropriate outrage from viewers that would ideally lead to "real-world" political action. Indeed, as Elaine Scarry put it in her article "Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War," what this critically necessary rejection entails is a concerted effort to work out of our "infantilized position" in order to "regain the actual powers of military and civil deliberation that were the population's to begin with," ("Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War," 69) powers that disappeared with the spectacular immobilization of the American public, and now take purely mimetic form. According to Norris, our collective migration into Baudrillard's realm of purely fictive or illusory appearances stems from the misguided belief that truth has gone the way of empiricist reason forcing an epistemological move to a point where there is no last ground of appeal to self-deluding enlightenment values that once possessed authority: "...the Gulf War figures as one more example in [his] extensive and varied catalogue of postmodern 'hyperreality.' It is a conflict waged-- for all that we can know--entirely at the level of strategic simulation, a mode of vicarious spectator-involvement that extends all the way from fictive war-games to saturation coverage of the "real-world" event, and which thus leaves us perfectly incapable of distinguishing one from the other." (13-15) This inability to distinguish fact from fiction was adopted by more than a few writers attempting to respond to the dangers they saw as endemic of uncritically accepting this transition to the hyperreality of war. American philosopher Douglas Kellner perhaps best epitomizes the resentful social critic struggling to see through the smokescreen of images created by the mass media before, during, and after the fighting. In a nearly five hundred page tome entitled _The Persian Gulf TV War_, he makes his agenda clear right at the beginning: "In this book, I concentrate on how the mainstream media in the United States presented the Gulf War, though I am also interested in 'what really happened' and thus draw on a variety of sources to put in question the mainstream account of the war [and to] debunk the version...presented on television..." (7) When it was perceived that the primary sight/site of the Persian Gulf War was electronic battlefields of various sorts, sights/sites that inhibit any deep structure of feeling, sights/sites that are moving evermore toward the virtual and artificial, sights/sites that preclude the possibility of embodied inhabitation, relegating the receiver to fragmented yet playful parodies of some formerly unified and ontologically grounded ego state, the prospects for political action are pretty poor--at least political action of the persuasion that theorists like Norris and Kellner seem to be hoping for. We saw how ineffective organized political action was in the gulf, how easily rendered silent and obsolete. That was because Operation Desert Storm had a 1990s sensibility, where autonomous, isolated individuals who were capable of *using* technology had the potential to do far more damage than some collective body that was only capable of being *used* by it. Power was far more systemic and embodied in and through the machine. A lone hacker, distant in time, space and maybe even political intent, had far more power to bring down a complex system, to "jam the code," through the introduction of some digital disease, than any unified group of activists carrying placards and lobbying for change. This is the kind of politics that now, more than ever, provides a vision of our VIRtuAL future. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THESE PICTURES The jingoism, nostalgic remembrances, hero worship and massively marketed production and consumption were all part and parcel of the perceptual unreality generated by the technological mediation of the Persian Gulf War. The struggle to render visible the disfigured and disembodied phantoms haunting this war--illustrated so well by theorists like Norris and Kellner--revolved around subverting the master narrative by marshaling evidence to support the contention that it was not a clean war, it was not a particularly precise war, and the mass mediated imagery simply did not capture that. Thus we never had a "real" picture of the battle. But from the point of view of the vast majority of the audiences polled on the receiving end, the technocrats responsible for plotting, planning and managing the war, and the companies producing the human and inhuman materiel, the representations of the battle in the Persian Gulf, and more importantly the consequences of those representations, were as real as they come. They just weren't very grotesque. The Desertification of Iraq served primarily to dissolve spatial and temporal boundaries rather than reinscribe them, the traditional goal of most warring activity. American literary theorist Avital Ronell put it this way: "...the war in the Gulf has destabilized our understanding of location, and has instituted a teletopical logic: a logic of spaces aligned according to technological mappings, where the near is far and vice versa, and where systems of boundaries and borderlines will have to be entirely rethought." (76) Such locational destabilization provided the space for, on the one hand, postmodern scholars like Baudrillard, Woolley and Der Derian to struggle to understand how war had become a fragmented, decentered and staged event, a perfect copy that has no original, a playful parody of its former horror. On the other hand, it simultaneously allowed "enlightenment" scholars like Norris, Kellner and many others, to find such theorizing politically problematic because of the perception that it caused one to live in a state of "terminal indifference with regard to truth and falsehood." (Norris, 22) So here we have a group of writers who (seemingly) have serious philosophical and epistemological differences but who nevertheless remain uniformly critical of what they see as a shifting mediascape where there is an increasing "separation of the sign from what it signifies, culture from nature, truth from reality," and where all we are left with is "a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential." (Woolley, 198-99) The enlightenment scholars simply hold out more hope that lost territory can be reclaimed. However, postmodernist or enlightenment, both positions are obsessed with, or at the very least their rhetorical force relies upon, counterposing "reality" against "unreality," whether in order to assert reality has become a simulation and we better just get used to it, or to reject the simulation reality has become. It is senseless to speak of a technologically induced shift from some prior historical moment that granted access to the real, to some present moment of unreality characterized by nothing but an endless multiplicity of free-floating signifiers. To make such an argument presupposes that in a different time and place it was possible to directly experience an umediated reality, that a one-to-one correlation between the experience of some thing and the interpretation of that thing existed, and that the type of information we now produce, disseminate and consume is somehow less "authentic," either because it is an ephemeral presentation or a failed one. The Operation in the desert showed us that, contrary to the popular perception that postmodern warfare had been fundamentally transformed, in many ways it remained very much the same, we just had some exciting new ways to screen it. We experienced a hypervisibility of a different sort, the sort the press, and by extension the public, did not or should not want--the sort that was a hell of a lot more fun. The aesthetic component remained, and emerged in a way that gave it more prominence than ever before; but this aesthetic component was not unprecedented--it was simply the latest version, an (il)logical extension of all that had gone before. The new was fused with the old in interesting and idiosyncratic yet representative ways. Culture, technology and politics continue to come together in war, making it evolutionary in the sense that war is always marked by distinctive sociocultural formations, formations that must continually be re-read, re-mapped, and up-dated. Yes, the perceptual field of the Persian Gulf War was a massively mediated one. It was massively mediated by the various agencies actively producing and disseminating information about it (privately and publicly owned news outlets, the federal government, special interest groups, significant others) and it was massively mediated by the technologies (planes, tanks, radars, satellites, televisions and computers) used to wage it. And as weapon sight continued to extend human sight on the battlefield, as technologically enabled imagery continued to bombard the battlefront and the homefront, and as responsibility for premature death and destruction continued to shift from human operators to machinic ones, the fires feeding the sense of unreality so frequently discussed and disparaged by the mass media and the academy were furiously and in certain cases enthusiastically fanned. But the central point to be made is that *reality*, or lack thereof, is not the ontological or philosophical problem, *simulation* is. If it is perceived that we are losing touch with the real, that everything is now questionable, because it is "simulated," "artificial" and before long "virtual," where all we can do is playfully uninhabit electronically generated spaces, it mistakenly implies that reality is not always already socially constructed, mediated and (un)intentionally made to mean. The Gulf War meant a lot of things to a lot of people, none of which can in any objective sense be ontologically privileged. Simulated battlezones, whether in flight and tank trainers, living rooms and theaters, or the killing fields themselves, were as real as any other, the reality they represented simply resided in the realm of the electronic. To retheorize the psychosocial impact of electronically mediated representations of war it is far more politically productive to reject the belief that technologically generated spaces are inherently unreal, separate from the social-self, and serve only to take us ever further away from the reality of death and destruction, and instead shift the focus in order to look more closely at what the reality of death and destruction have become. Indeed, the biggest myth generated about the war in the gulf was that it could not and did not "really" take place in digital and analog(ue) space. REFERENCES Baudrillard, Jean. _The Ecstasy of Communication_. Trans. by Bernard and Caroline Schutze. Sylvere Lotringer (ed.). New York: Semiotext(e). 1987. Baudrillard, Jean. _Selected Writings_. Mark Poster (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988. Baudrillard, Jean. _Guardian_. "The Reality Gulf." January 11, 1991: 25. Baudrillard, Jean. "La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu Lieu." Paris: Galilee. 1991. Der Derian, James. _Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War_. Oxford: Blackwell. 1992. Kellner, Douglas. _The Persian Gulf TV War_. San Francisco: Westview Press. 1992. _Newsweek_. February 18, 1991. Norris, Christopher. _Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War_. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1991. Ronell, Avital. "Support Our Tropes: Or, Why in Cyburbia There Are a Lot of Cowboys." _The Yale Journal Of Criticism_. (1992) Vol. 5, No. 2: 73- 80. Scarry, Elaine. "Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War." _Media Spectacles_. Marjorie Gerber, Jann Matlock, Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds.). New York: Routledge. 1993: 57-73 Sobchack, Vivian. "Materiality and Technologic: A Phenomenological Meditation on the Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic." Abridged From "The Scene Of The Screen." In _Materialities of Communication_. Ed. H.U. Gumbrecht. 1993. _Time_. "Advantage: the Alliance: Vast superiority in aircraft, tanks, training and logistics should help the U.S. score a quick knockout in a battle with Iraq." January 21, 1991: 34-35. Woolley, Benjamin. _Virtual Worlds_. Oxford: Blackwell. 1992. ----------------------------------- DIGITAL FALL GUYS How the threat of terrorism and crime in Cyberspace is actually the US Government's new bogeyman aimed at replacing the obsolete concept of "scarcity" of broadcasting bandwidth in telecommunications. WILL KRETH THE OBLITERATION OF "SCARCITY" Since the early to middle part of this century, when the last great "land rush" over AM and FM radio and VHF television frequencies took place, the Federal Communications Commission has made ownership of broadcasting stations an extremely difficult proposition. Aside from the high costs of licensing fees, tariffs, and regulations, one of the things that makes broadcasting stations expensive to begin with is the fact that the radio and television frequency spectrums (also known as "bandwidth") are physically limited in the amount of individual stations that they can carry--a finite expanse of "slots on the dial" or channels to turn to. For the FCC, this made their jobs a lot easier. Monitoring illegal, unlicensed broadcasting was limited to the same amount of bandwidth across the country. Regional agents of the FCC had their work neatly cut out for them. While the tools of amateur radio (ham, citizen's band and even illegal, pirate radio delivered over the FM and AM spectrum) have been relatively easy to access for the enthusiast in recent history, television cameras, editing and broadcasting equipment all remained rather expensive, making them a rather remote option for most people. But ever since the advent of cable television, bulletin boards, and now, of course, the rise of the Internet, the FCC argument of bandwidth "scarcity" has become obsolete. Everything can be made digital, and it can be sent through a variety of channels--not just the limited, precious airwaves any longer. We live in a new world. Today, we see a new explosion of human interest in autonomous and collaborative methods of expression. The Internet, the world's largest communications network that individuals in developed nations can gain relatively painless access to, has approximately 20 million users. Billions of words and millions of messages traverse it everyday. Seasoned and novice writers are pouring gargantuan amounts of verse, verbiage and information onto the Net. Who knows? Perhaps some of the greatest novels of the future are being written, edited, read and reviewed on the Net as you read this. Maybe these works will be dedicated to bound, paper tomes for distribution to the unconnected masses someday (the masses who currently have neither the access nor patience to endure the eyestrain of current display screen technologies). But the interesting thing is that they will have been published *first* in Cyberspace, and *then* made manifest in the material world of ink on paper. Meanwhile, video cameras are now a standard consumer item in most developed nations, and while costs go down, quality continues to go up. Limited amounts of low-quality, yet real-time video have already traversed their way across the Internet. It is only a matter of time before video, film, animation and moving images in general will be readily available on the "Infobahn." The government, as they have stated publicly again and again, will not be building the National Information Infrastructure (or NII) themselves. Since private enterprise *will* be building it, and the government wants to remain a player in the proceedings, they have to have some enforceable means of control. CLIPPER So, the Feds have rolled out the Clipper chip again. The Bush administration couldn't make this turkey fly, but by golly, the NSA, FBI and the policy wonks of the Clinton Administration are sure going to try. The Clipper chip has been slammed in editorials by almost all the major print news-media, including: _Business Week_, _The New York Times_, _Forbes_, _U.S. News and World Report_, _Time_, and _WIRED_. Polls show a majority of Americans are against Clipper: "In a Time/CNN poll of 1,000 Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners, two-thirds said it was more important to protect the privacy of phone calls than to preserve the ability of police to conduct wiretaps. When informed about the Clipper Chip, 80% said they opposed it." (Elmer- Dewitt, 1994) The Feds have also expressed an intention to put this compromised chip, or a cousin to it, called Tessera (which according to a Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) newsletter was a chit that slaves had to carry during the Roman empire) into a wide variety of consumer electronics: "The Defense Department reportedly plans to employ the Clipper technology in a device known as a 'Tessera Card' in not only phones, but in personal computers, fax machines, set-top boxes for interactive television, and in the PBX switches of local phone companies. We checked the dictionary and found the results to be kind of frightening: "Tesserea n. Lat. (pl. tessereae). Literally, 'four-cornered.' Used to refer to four-legged tables, chairs, stools, etc. Also, a single piece of mosaic tile; a single piece of a mosaic. _Pol_: An identity chit or marker. Tessereae were forced on conquered peoples and domestic slaves by their Roman occupiers or owners. Slaves or Gauls who refused to accept a tesserea were branded or maimed as a form of identification." (_CPSR_, 1994) When one really considers the scope of these efforts, it becomes apparent that rather than the stated reasons for government-controlled encryption technology, their hidden agenda is to monitor compromised encryption algorithms in order to keep a leash on the number of voices of dissent in society. And it's not even a case of simple suppression of wild-eyed, quasi-seditious cranks calling for the overthrow of the U.S. Government, because they and their modus operandi are easily understood by the authorities, but rather, the truly iconoclastic voices that walk the margins of contemporary thought regarding "values," "lifestyles," "demographics," and "psychographics." Authors and artists who question the most basic and banal underpinnings of our societal and economic constructs. The day-to-day Western mindset or "operating system" that keeps all the machines running smoothly (or not-so-smoothly) behind the curtain. Visionaries who look for ways to disintermediate hierarchies and channels of distribution and control from information. Call them "strange attractors," free-agents of autonomedia, memetic mavericks, or meta- navigators of alternate (dare we say "better"?) societal operating systems. Providing an ontological detour around the traditional polemic, their arguments frighten "authority" more than any conventional weapon. STATUS QUO TREY GENERIS All media is either created and/or controlled by one of three entities: Individuals, Corporations, and Governments. INDIVIDUAL MEDIA MAKERS We now enjoy more options for autonomous media expression via electronic telecommunication vehicles than ever before. However, it remains but a fraction of the audience reach that the corporations have. How this will expand is not known. The liberties enjoyed today may not exist tomorrow. Some of the current generation of individual media makers include: public access television, the Internet, BBS's, 'Zines, phone trees, independent newspapers, independent video distribution, flyers, and alternative cinema. Still out of reach of most individual media creators is the delivery and distribution power of broadcast television. Video "for the masses/by the masses" has not arrived yet. And like it or not, television is still unquestionably the most powerful tool for shaping public opinion and popular consensus in the industrialized world. MULTINATIONAL CORPORATE MEDIA INDUSTRIES Big business sees huge profit markets in the Infobahn. They hate excessive regulation, and like to know "who" their competition is, and would really like to control the methods of creation, production, distribution and profit collection of programming. They could well view the future of interactive television as an extension of the models they're familiar with, such as: pay-per-view, video "lifestyle" infotainment, product Infomercials, and tabloid or "reality-based" TV, filled with what _San Francisco Chronicle_ columnist Jon Carroll refers to as "near-life experiences." The Media Industries include: delivery merchants (or "hose providers"), broadcast television (the "big Four"--ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX), MSO cable operators (TCI, Viacom, etc.), RBOC's (Pacific Bell, Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, etc.), long-distance telcos (Sprint, AT&T, MCI, etc.), and to a lesser extent generic online conferencing systems: CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, etc., and the "infotainment" software providers: Time/Warner, Sony/Columbia, Matshushita/MCA, Viacom/Paramount/Blockbuster, QVC/Bell South, Disney, and many others. GOVERNMENTAL MEDIA GATEKEEPERS Media gatekeepers have relied on "bandwidth scarcity" to control, or at least keep a long leash on, popular expression via the powerful consensus-shaping tools of broadcast and electronic telecommunications. The advent of broadband communications networks have exploded the rationale of scarcity. To reassert their "leash," encryption has become the new modus operandi, a potentially chilling federal freon-blast of executive privilege to protect the State and the Union from wild-eyed Hezbolah, Shiites and seventeen-year old hackers with digitized videotape of the next Rodney King or Dolores Huerta police beating. The government has a keen interest in shaping public opinion, as we witnessed during the Iran/Contra hearings, the conveniently forgotten S&L crisis, and the Persian Gulf war. Happy consumers are also obedient vidiots whose daily consumption must include a steady intake of the six basic television food-groups: sex, violence, religion, politics, sports, and shopping. That's it. Most everything one sees on the tube can be reduced down to carrying the message of one or another of these groups. They are the fuel of television as we know it and will certainly be promoted as the name-brand gas-stations on the impending Infobahn. LITTLE BROTHER WANTS MORE The precedents for government spying on dissident and non-conformist groups in this country are numerous and a matter of public record. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) makes for a clear paper-trail of evidence. Clipper will make this even easier. That's why the covert agencies of the Clinton administration are playing such a wicked game of hardball with this subject. The late Ithiel de Sola Pool quotes Alexis de Tocqueville as saying: "It would seem, that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days...it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them." (Pool, 1983) When one considers the potential level of surveillance at the disposal of covert federal agencies in this county, via the implantation of security- compromised encryption chips in nearly every telecommunications device in the home or office--it certainly does feel as if our civil rights are either in the process of being, or are planned to be, degraded. KEEP ON SHOPPING Messages of religious fanaticism, gratuitous violence, and sex really do not matter to the censors/regulators of the government, as long as the programming encourages passivity and sells products, and as long as the message bearers pay their taxes. Consumer interest in purchasing must be kept high to stimulate the economy. Voices that dissent from the messages of complacent consumption as the ideal lifestyle are not given marketshare and are effectively attenuated. We can see evidence of this in the fact that anti-consumerist television spots created by the Vancouver, British Columbia magazine _Adbusters_ have been refused airtime on several stations in the US and Canada. (_Adbusters_, 1993) Alan Kay (a distinguished Apple Fellow at Apple Computer) had this to say before Vice-President Gore's InfoHighway Summit at UCLA in January: "Like the printing press, the new computer media will bring forth its own very special ways to think about complexities we have not been able to deal with up to now--especially for complex chaotic systems such as the AIDS epidemic and the ecological balance of our planet. But much care has to be taken with design and education in order for the change to be positive. We don't have natural defenses against fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, alkaloids or media. Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual--not how to use it, but why, when, and for what. Another way to think of road-kill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are off-ramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor...or shiny beads from a shopping network. Not couch potatoes, but mouse potatoes! It's not the wonderful things they could do with new media, it's what they will be convinced they should do. This is a new tragedy in the making. No democracy can survive that is less than 10% literate in the driving forces of society. Television should be the last mass communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a Surgeon General's warning!" (Kay, 1994) Fortunately, it is true that no one can control what people think or choose to consume, but within the limited menu of formulaic electronic media images that surround us--images that are manipulated and propagated throughout the world by corporations and tacitly condoned by governments- -there is a rigid mental itinerary of things for people to think about and choose from. A commodified package of the right pop stars, the right soft drinks, the right products and the right accouterments of status for happiness everlasting. At the Microsoft-sponsored Intermedia trade-show in San Jose, California on March 3rd of this year, Robert Kavner, executive vice president and CEO, multimedia products and services at AT&T, was quoted as saying that: "...he [Kavner] believes the industry [meaning the Infobahn] will be driven by two human needs: a sense of community (it's 'in our genetic code') and the need to be stimulated, refreshed, changed by content. He said home shopping answers both these needs." (_Cowles Media Business Daily_, March 1994) Now, one can infer several things after hearing something like that. That's right, shopping is in our DNA and we've just been in denial that we were, as they say, "Born to Shop." From the Womb to the Tomb, I'll be an interactive hunter-gatherer--just show me to the merchandise on the screen, give me a remote control and I'll stay true to my animal instincts of passive perception and aggressive consumption. Transcendence? Isn't that a new cologne I can buy on the Calvin Klein Channel? Or, you can look at it as what were up against--an arrogance so deeply entrenched in the mindset of the multinationals that there's really no hope for the planet. Consumerism is no longer mindless, it's just human nature! Well personally, I have no problem with buying things for my survival and pleasure under the current cash-based civilization called Capitalism. I'm not some naive anti-business or anti-commerce anarchist. I know how the game is played in this society. I am not homeless, but I know what not having money is like. I am not wealthy, but I can appreciate what wealth can do if used wisely. BUT LISTEN TO ME, Mr. AT&T--I do not LIVE to SHOP. It does not build my community of friends and associates to know we all use the same home shopping channel! Even if I used your future network to buy something, it wouldn't be the consummate daily social-event your interactive wet-dream has portrayed it to be. I've really valued the situations in my life where I could trade goods with someone, as opposed to buying. Bob Kavner of AT&T? I've got a word for ya--"Potlatch"--look into it. I have nothing against businesses using information networks to sell products. But business is not all about an automated act of sellers selling and buyers buying. It's about information and knowledge transfer. It's not the "zipless fuck" of a clean, QVC 1-800-number call, credit- card transaction and overnight delivery. It's about people having real choices from a myriad of different suppliers and retailers. If you have to buy something, it's about having an inventory to look at and compare from, visiting different vendors and asking them questions, and finding the right tool for the job at the right price. ENTREPRENEURS ON THE INFOBAHN Statistics point to a return to home/cottage industries via the Net. The recent Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles was a terrible natural disaster, but it was also a watershed event in the history of people getting out of their cars and telecommuting. A new era of entrepreneurial businesses being operated out of the home started in the early '80's with the advent of the fax machine and increased competition between overnight courier services. Authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers have written an excellent book that may change the nature of advertising, merchandising, and retailing forever. It's called _One to One Future_. The following excerpt from their book provides some evidence for this shift: "New college graduates will not be able to find a place from themselves in the bureaucracies [of corporate America] at all. Only small companies create jobs today. And the smaller they are, the more job growth is possible. All these unemployed and yet-to-be-employed knowledge workers are fueling a renaissance of entrepreneurial home businesses. There are already over 20 million income-producing business being run out of homes in this country. By 1995, one household in every four will include some kind of income-producing business." (Peppers & Rogers, 1993) The natural evolution in this area points to a sharp rise in the number of SOHO's (the acronym for "Small Office/Home Office") that will start to plug into the high-bandwidth Infobahn in the same way that they did with email (which, in addition to faxes and overnight couriers, has given these types of businesses a major boost). This should give tremendous ammunition to the argument for legal encryption for the private sector. Small, digitally-enabled home offices in suburban and rural communities will certainly lobby for secure, private encryption software to protect their transactions from government, especially the IRS. Can you imagine the outcry if the IRS was caught snooping on the digital business transactions of some Midwestern granny's quilting shop on the Infobahn? We might ask, "Where on the Infobahn will be the equivalent of the little companies that populate the classified pages of the _New Yorker_?" Let us hope that the on-ramps for maverick entrepreneurs in distant SOHO's will be many and that they will be secure places to do business. The Interactive Home Shopping hysteria certainly appears to have been recognized as hype in the minds of the nation's teenagers. In a recent survey that was actually conducted over the television-based _Interactive Network_, teens in four cities--San Francisco, Sacramento, Chicago and Los Angeles--were asked what new or future communications breakthrough was most important to them: "27% said online global communications, while an equal number said video teleconferencing. Other choices: distance learning (22%), interactive TV (13%), movies-on-demand (9%), and home shopping (0%)." (_Cowles Media Business Daily_, March 1994) You can draw your own conclusions, but I'm sure the results were disheartening to the those conducting the test. So, the kids like email! Surprise, surprise--what do you know, a lot of adults do too. These kids are the "planned consumers" of the panoply of interactive merchandising that everyone's banking on. The generation that will be the "installed user-base" when interactive television finally arrives. What's wrong with this picture? Perhaps shopping, in and of itself, just isn't that *cool*. If you think about it, why do bored suburban kids go to the mall anyway? To buy products they can't afford and don't really need? NO! They go there to hang-out with their friends. And now you can do that online. Only now it's global and you can talk to people who don't care what you look like or dress like or what kind of minivan you drove to the mall in. In extremely small towns where everyone knows everyone, email and online conferencing systems could be viewed as a godsend by young adults. Kids also believe that global online community is going to happen and it's going to affect them. In response to the question: "Will the Information Highway directly affect the way you work and play or is it just a trendy buzzword?," 65% said it will directly affect them, 21% said it will affect "certain people, not me," and 10% said it will not affect them for five to 10 years." (_Cowles Media Business Daily_, March 1994) A FORK IN THE BITSTREAM All media have become software in a digital world. What will it be like when one can easily send sizable amounts of any kind of software, be it text, audio, video, or plain-old application code, to almost anyone, anywhere in the world? Perhaps we'd be better off speculating if it will even happen. Universal service to the Infobahn--or as it's also known: "Video Dial-Tone"--could change everything. A single television network in a central location (i.e.: a CNN, or an ABC) sends off its programming to millions around the world via satellite. That's a "broadcast." It is the embodiment of "one-to-many" communications. Tens of thousands video entrepreneurs and video hackers create their own programming and send it over the Infobahn to tens of thousands of other interactive viewers. What works today for mass emailings could work tomorrow for video mail, delivering it in video mailboxes the world over. That's a "multicast." It is the essence of "many-to-many" communications. What happens when this power is unleashed on the world? If the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics can reach tens of millions with a pleasant, entertaining, but essentially empty diversion, what happens when thought- provoking new programming, created outside of the Hollywood/New York mindset, reaches a larger audience? Can a qualitatively superior work, given a massive boost of distribution by the information networks of the future, have a greater effect on a culture than a quantitatively massive yet hollow media spectacle? It depends on if people are listening, but I say yes. Here are three scenarios for the directions that independent video multicasting may take in the years to come: 1. It's early-1996. FCC Chairman Reed Hundt hands down a ruling that real-time and asynchronous video "multicasting" over the Internet or computer bulletin boards is illegal and must be licensed in the same way television and radio stations are. With new funding and new blood, enforcement is swift and a few celebrated cases (most likely child porno and pirate media channels--the public agrees: "It must be STOPPED!!") make national headlines, sending a chill across every desktop video "culture jammer" in the country. Fees are set at the same exorbitant rate as current radio and TV station licenses. The window closes and home shopping. pay-per-view and Infomercials reign. As the panicked US Marine said in the movie _Aliens_: "Game over, man." 2. It's mid-1997, and the FCC under the Dole administration makes a vain attempt to stem the tide of super PGP-encrypted DIY video multicasters everywhere, then relents under budgetary constraints. Like homesteaders in the squats of Manhattan, they own the place and simply become part of the landscape and marketplace. However, the economies-of-scale place the independents far behind the Time/Warners, Viacom/Paramounts and Sony/Columbias in gathering content and distribution. America is used to paying $47.50 for their coaxial/fiber optic drug per month and has a hard time locating these upstart video hackers on any of the 70 remote control buttons in their tensed-up mitts. 3. It's mid-1998 and the Infobahn is a traffic-jam of noise. But in a good way. The world-wide recession is finally over. Thousands of small businesses are now on the Net, and they're generating a phenomenal amount of electronic commerce; quite often doing it more effectively than large corporations. Sociologically, the Net has opened the minds of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the realization that the world does NOT revolve around them. Net-exchange programs create international bonds between previous strangers. Literacy-rates slowly start to inch up in countries with Net access. Video multicasting? The FCC never even tried to stop it, realizing that previous stringent licensing of station owners for broadcast was an unspoken relic of Cold War thinking. Markets for niche programming develop here and there, becoming subject to an evolution of content never imagined. Tastes and trends mutate as younger audiences coalesce in pockets around whatever the "flavor of the month" is. Older audiences watch what they always watched, only now they can see it whenever they want. Not much has changed as far a viewing habits. Only there are many more choices than before. Which one, if any, of these scenarios will come to pass--I have no idea. But I certainly hope it is something akin to "C"--the last one, because while I am extremely pessimistic that technology can reverse the trends toward corporate and governmental control, I also feel very strongly that it can--and that it is our best shot. Like it or not, we have arrived in an era where you either make your own media reality, or have it done for you. THE POST-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION WILL BE MULTICAST Where are the visionary voices of Cyberspace? Can we work to make it the kind of place that one would be compelled to visit, not a virtual "Mall of the Americas?" Or shall we just sit on our asses and watch it go completely homogenized and "lite," the way of Wonder Bread and Velveeta cheese? Like the observation of an African-American man overheard commenting about the WELL online service a few years back: "The WELL? That's what hip White folks are into these days." I want to kick-start the "Intellectual Greenbelt" (Liebhold, 1992) of the Infobahn into high gear. I want to visualize a friendly neighborhood, not a ghetto. I want to visualize a campus of learning and exchange of ideas- -not a strip-mall of fast-food franchises. pay-per-view video huts, theme parks and convenience stores. The Cyberspace I want to hang out in has City Lights and Cody's Books in the Bay Area, Europa Books in Austin, and Texas and Powell's books in Portland, Oregon--all online. The Cyberspace I want to hang out in has the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, EZTV and MOCA in Los Angeles, the Whitney in New York, the Museum of Moving Images in London, the Capp St. Project, Theatre Artaud, Galleria de La Raza, and Artist's Television Access in San Francisco--all online. The Cyberspace I want to hang out in has music samples you can listen to from artists performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Bang on a Can Festival, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Victoriaville festival in Canada, and New Music America--all online. Of course, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress and the rest of the major institutions are already, or soon will be, online, but I'm really concerned that the critical and cultural voices of our society have to demand a place in Cyberspace or indeed, they will become Infobahn roadkill. It is up to each of us to demand that the Virtual Global Village that we're going to be living part of our lives in provide some vital necessities for our health and mental well-being. Unlike the continental land-masses of the physical world, there is no limit to the amount of virtual real-estate available in Cyberspace. Vice-President Gore was in Buenos Aires, Argentina last week at a meeting of the International Telecommunications Union. Formed in 1865, the ITU is one of, if not the, oldest international telecommunications policy organizations. There, with the FCC commissioner in-tow, he gave a paper to the assembled international delegates that called for a GLOBAL, not a National, Information Infrastructure. (Gore, 1994) You've got to hand it to them, the Bubbas are thinking BIG. I agree with Vice President Gore that improved global networks will be essential, but I strongly disagree with his capitulation to the dark forces behind the Clipper chip. Cyberspace doesn't need to be colonized, organized, franchised, or haunted by moralistic, quasi-totalitarian thought-police. It does, however, need sane, literate people defending the right of open commerce, civil liberties and free speech. In closing, what I think we should all be asking our elected officials for--and fighting for--is this: Freedom from government regulation or interference in the areas of First Amendment rights, privacy, and secure, anonymous media, business and financial transactions over the Infobahn. Will Kreth (c) copyright 1994 REFERENCES _Adbusters_. Vancouver, BC: Canada. Vol. 2, No. 4. 1993. _Cowles Media Business Daily_. America Online. March 1994. _CPSR_. "CPSR Alert 3.04." Distributed by Dave Banisar <Banisar@washofc.cpsr.org>. Washington, DC. 1994. Elmer-Dewitt, Philip. 1994. "Who Should Keep the Keys." _TIME_. April 4. Gore, Al. Speech to the International Telecommunications Union. Buenos Aires, Argentina, (from a White House email press release, via the EFF). March 21, 1994. Kay, Alan. "Four Images For The Information Superhighway Summit." January 11, 1994. Liebhold, Michael. Speech to the Seybold Digital World conference, Beverly Hills, CA. July 1992. Peppers, Don & Martha Rogers. "The One to One Future." Doubleday/Currency: New York. 1993. Pool, Ithiel de Sola. "Technologies of Freedom," Belknap/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. 1983. ----------------------------------- ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS *Kathy Acker* is a writer whose work indicates the current face of theory-as-fiction and fiction-as-theory. Her uncensored appropriations of the literary debris include: _Empire of the Senseless_, _Blood and Guts in High School_, Don Quixote_, _The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula_, _Great Expectations_, _My Mother, Demonology_, as well as _Hannibal Lecter, My Father_ (much of the latter with Sylvere Lotringer). She is currently teaching at the Literature Board at U.C. San Diego, and lives in San Franscisco. *Benjamin Bratton* is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at U.C. Santa Barbara. He will be at University of Paris III (Paris Center for Critical Studies) for the academic year 1994-95, as part of an ongoing investigation into the role that mythological imaginations of media technologies played in the formation of social and cultural spaces in France from the late 1950's to the mid-1980's. Other current research interests include the social and cultural histories of Christian television in the United States, and the discourse of Millenialism in 20th century Evangelical Christianity. He is a founding editor of _SPEED_. *Mark Jenkins* is a Doctoral Candidate in Literature at the U.C. San Diego. The present piece is derived from his dissertation, which is entitled "Counter-Sites: New Maps of Subjectivity in Postmodern Speculative Fiction." His current research interests include theoretical approaches to the topic of gender and subjectivity in Multiple Personality Disorder; the popular culture of Prozac; technological "becomings" in the philosophy and culture of virtual reality; and the fiction of William Vollman. *Will Kreth* is both the Online Ambassador for and a contributing writer to _WIRED_ magazine. Prior to helping start _WIRED_, he worked for companies such as PF Magic, Apple Computer's Discovery Studio and the Apple Multimedia Lab. A freelance writer for the past seven years, he's the former editor of "_Focus On - Desktop Video_" a supplement to the monthly Bay Area industry trade publication _Film/Tape World_. His writing has appeared in _MacUser UK_, _Film/Tape World_, _WARD Music Monthly_, _OPTION_, the _Daily Californian_, and _Arete_. He is also a co-founding member and volunteer for an organization known as Bay Area Internet Literacy--or BAIL. Hosting low-cost, monthly "how-to" workshops (at public locations in the San Francisco Bay Area) on basic connectivity tools and navigational skills for beginners, BAIL is a non-profit group of telecom adventurers dedicated to increasing citizen participation in the Internet. *Mark Leyner* is the self-proclaimed "favorite cult writer of the MTV generation." His works include: _My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist_ , and _Et Tu, Babe_, both viciously humurous meditations on the over- adrenalized state of contemporary meaning. Before becoming a "genius," Leyner worked as an advertising copy writer, but claims that the only effect that it had on his prose was his learning the art of brevity-- terseness. Leyner is the likely candidate to succeed Bud Selig as Commissioner of Baseball. He lives in New Jersey on purpose. *Robert Nideffer* is finishing his Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology at U.C. Santa Barbara. His dissertation, "Bodies, No-bodies, and Anti- bodies at War: Operation Desert Storm and the Politics of the 'Real,'" is a critical examination of mass-media coverage of the Persian Gulf War, authored as an interactive CD-ROM. He has acted as a computer and multimedia consultant for a variety of organizations including: U.C. Santa Barbara's Social Science Computing Facility, Enhanced Performance Systems, HarperCollins Publishers, Compton's New Media, and most recently Pine Forge Press where he is currently employed as a software developer. Mr. Nideffer is also a founding editor of _SPEED_. *Mark Pesce* is a researcher, writer, and entrepreneur. After a decade of involvement in the field of computer internetworking he directed his efforts toward the development of truly large-scale, wide-area simulations. Recently, his work has appeared in _WIRED_ and _Millimeter_. As part of a vision to make the Internet navigable to untrained users, Mr. Pesce, in conjunction with the other principals at his new venture, Labyrinth Group, is developing Labyrinth, a tool which uses the World Wide Web and Cyberspace Protocols to produce a visualizable Internet. Labyrinth will be demonstrated at SIGGRAPH '94, as part of the SIGKIDS exhibition, where it will be used to provide a "walk-through" front-end to the U.S. Library of Congress. Mr. Pesce lives and works in San Francisco, California. --end--