CYBERCULTURES READER:A USER'S GUIDE 3 duces us to two other histories of cyberspace,the traces of which have to be set aside from the one sketched above.On the one hand we have the impacts of science fiction on the ways cyberspace works for us,and on the other we have the experiential,subjec- tive sense of the hallucinatory (wired)world we are engaging with.Let's begin with science fiction.An important component of a cu/tura/approach to cyberspace is to find it in our imaginations,to read its symbolic forms and meanings,to cross-reference to the ways in which it is represented.As many of the essays in this book make clear,we need to read cyberspace at the intersections of technology and representation,and see the two as mutually implicated in constituting our approach.Hollywood,to take an obvious but important example,has given us its scenarios of the (cyber)future,which resonate through our experiences of and responses to cyberspace:from the cyborgs of Robocop and The Terminator to the implanted memories of the replicants of Blade Runner or Quade in Total Recall (on all of these,see later);from the virtual reality experiences of the Lawnmower Man to the techno-body horror of Videodrome;from hacker playing in War Games to the biotechno matrix of the Borg in Star Trek:First Contact-the images pouring out from our (filmic)screens are fed back through our (computer)screens in a loop which ultimately blends 'fact'and fiction','reality'and fantasy'to create our sense of cyberculture (see section two of the Reader,and,in particular,chapter 11). What we find in cyberspace is the result of this complex interplay,which works at the level of subjectivity to produce something akin to Gibson's consensual hallucination; for if we ask the question 'Where are we when we are in cyberspace?',we have to move beyond the simple answer that,physically,we are seated in front of a monitor,our fingers at work on the keyboard (see Lupton,chapter 30).We are there,to be sure, but we're simultaneously making ourselves over as data,as bits and bytes,as code,relo- cating ourselves in the space behind the screen,between screens,everywhere and nowhere. Moreover,if we believe certain strings of cyberhype,when we are in cyberspace we can be who we want to be;we (re)present ourselves as we wish to (notwithstanding the constraints of the medium,which can and do serve to limit this performance-see for example the chapters in this volume by Tomas,Tsang,Foster,Stone and Nakamura); we can be multiple,a different person (or even not a person!)each time we enter cyber- space,playing with our identities,taking ourselves apart and rebuilding ourselves in endless new configurations.This phenomenon has led to much discussion of questions of identity and embodiment in cyberspace,as sections six and seven of the Reader show. The question,then,turns to 'Who are we when we are in cyberspace?-how much of our 'Real-Life'(RL)self do we take with us,how much do we jettison,do we fanta- size new identities and bodies for ourselves,or are our imaginings always already part of the code? To begin to think this through,let's compare the narratives of two popular Hollywood films which attempt to deal with this question.In the tech-noir sci-fi movie Tota/Recall, Douglas Quade (Arnold Schwarzenegger)buys past experiences-what Landsberg in chapter 11 calls prosthetic memories'-of a trip to Mars as a secret agent,from a kind of virtual travel agency.His identity,built from memories,is made and remade as his 'non-prosthetic'memories-which he had assumed to represent his 'real life'-turn out to be equally simulated,while his prosthetic'memories of being a secret agent seem
4 DAVID BELL suddenly 'real';indeed he later encounters via a pre-recorded video message his 'other' self,Hauser,who apparently really is a secret agent,and who says to him,'You are not you.You are me'.The film asks us,then,to consider our faith in memory as the building block of who we are;since Quade loses this faith,he (and the audience)loses his identity,his sense of who he really'is.Is he,in fact,Hauser?What counts as real, anyway?If memories can be simulated,experiences prostheticized,then how do we ever find our 'true'self?(Here,of course,we see traces of the arguments on simulation made by Jean Baudrillard,whose work remains an important if controversial influence on cybercultural theory;for discussion,see,for example,Kellner 1995.) A similar state is experienced by computer expert Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) in the conspiracy thriller The Net.The extent of her (and our)reliance on cybertech- nology to prove'who we are is frighteningly apparent to Bennett when her identity is effectively erased and then rewritten by the Praetorians who are infiltrating supposedly secure computer systems on the path to global domination.Bennett is rewritten on data- bases as a petty felon,Ruth Marx;despite her protestations,she effectively becomes Ruth Marx,since she is unable to prove that she is not-computers say that's who she is,and no one would question what a computer tells them.Bennett is depicted as the stereotypical computer 'nerd',with hardly any social connections in RL-though the film-makers stop short of making her look like the stereotypical nerd (on constructions of computer nerds,see Lupton,chapter 30)-and her near-total reliance on life on- line renders her completely vulnerable to this identity rewrite,since no one knows her other than via a screen. In both films,identity is no longer something internal,essential,fixed,or trust- worthy:it is something which exists cyberculturally,either as a series of memory implants or as the composite of our digitized personal records;moreover,it can be faked,even erased.The narratives of Total Recall and The Net work to focus on the instability of this dis-location of identity,as the flipside of those other narratives which stress the freedom that on-line life offers (in terms of making ourselves over in cyberspace,rather than being made over).Ultimately,this raises a further question (though this is outside of the plot of The Net,but dealt with more fully in movies like Blade Runner):if we rely so totally on technology to locate ourselves,to even be ourselves,does that mean we are still human'-and is it still possible (or even desirable)to define the boundary between the human and the machine? Intimate machines The question of the human-machine interface has occupied a central place in discus- sions of cyberspace,especially in relation to its effects on our experiences of embodiment and subjectivity.Are we now so inseparable from our computers that we have effec- tively become them?Are they us?Are they extensions of our identities-prostheses? Do we blend with them,each incorporating the other,to become hybrid cybernetic organ- isms cyborgs?Like Angela Bennett,do we find ourselves existing more and more through technology,through computers,in computers?At both individual and collective (societal)levels,we have given our lives over to technology,entrusting computers in
CYBERCULTURES READER:A USER'S GUIDE 5 ever more ways-hence the conspiratorial narrative of The Net,that world domination now means information domination.In Sherry Turkle's (1996)phrase,the personal computer is an 'intimate machine'.As a trope in Hollywood sci-fi,the dark side'of technological dependency appears almost ubiquitous;witness the war machines of the Terminator series,built to automate combat but instead turning paranoid,destroying all humans (just as the computer HAL in 2001:A Space Odyssey flips out and turns on his human shipmates). Of course,the counter-narrative to this is to be found in,for example,arguments for post-humanism,which advocate our co-mingling with technology (see section seven). A new union of meat (our bodies)and metal (technology)offers the next great leap forward here,the only logical outcome of the cybercultural trajectory;this is outlined in the 'Post-Human Manifesto': All technological progress of human society is geared towards the redun- dancy of the human species as we currently know it....Complex machines are an emergent life form....As computers develop to be more like humans, so humans develop to like computers more. (Pepperell 1995:180) The 'redundancy of the human species as we currently know it'doesn't here equate with Terminator's view of man versus machine;instead,it means co-evolution,increasing prostheticization,augmentation,cyborgization:as Stelarc imagines it,we and our machines become one -in a way,already have become one (see chapter 35).As the boundary between human and machine blurs,as the technologization of culture quickens pace,so we enter into the age of post-humanism.And,as the Manifesto says,part of this process involves learning to love rather than fear the technology:in place of The Net's paranoia and distrust,post-humanism urges us to welcome our incorporation into cyberculture (and its incorporation into us),to stop worrying about who we are and who/what we might be in the future;to let our selves go. But let our selves go into what?To become what?What do our imaginings of this co-mingling of meat and metal bring forth?In one sense,we have already seen perhaps the most powerful of these imaginings,in the figure of the cyborg.The explosion of images of cyborgs (and theorizing about cyborgs)has given us a repertoire for recon- figuring the body-technology interface,and this has become so central to cybercultural work that we need to spend a little time with the cyborgs here (and see also sections two,four,six and seven).While we should point out that cyborgization does not equal post-humanism,the cyborg stands as a potent figure to help us think through our rela- tionships with machines,and theirs with us.In 'Social policy for cyborgs'(1999),Tony Fitzpatrick offers up a usefully broad attempt at defining this figure for us: The cyborg is the interface of the organic with the technological;the tech- nicizing of the human and the humanizing of technology,i.e.the body as both the hardware of machines and software for machines....The cyborg is partly the product of surgical implantation,where the machine and/or the simulations it generates (as in cosmetic surgery)penetrate the surface of the body.The cyborg is also the product of the daily interaction of perception/
6 DAVID BELL cognition with the screen,where the body melts into the electronic images that it receives,reflects and transmits. (Fitzpatrick 1999:97) What this means is that Angela Bennett is no less of a cyborg than,say,Murphy in the movie Robocop;if we take the concept of the cyborg to include not only techno- logical augmentation of the human body (the Robocop variety)but also 'the identity of organisms embedded in a cybernetic information system'(Balsamo 1996:11)-as in The Net-then we can begin to think about the extent to which all our lives are turning cyborg.In fact,arguments can be (and have been)made that would extend this idea to cover every meeting of people and things out of which something new -something irreducible to either the person or the thing-then emerges.Take a number of more or less random examples from recent cybercultural work:Deborah Lupton(1999)argues that the car/driver combination is one of cyborgization(something that clearly resonates through the following introduction by Barbara Kennedy);Kwok Wei Leng (1996)uses the cyborg to think through the female menopause and hormone replacement therapy (HRT);in ultrasound imaging,Lisa Mitchell and Eugenia Georges (1998)find the cyborg foetus';and the forty-plus essays in Chris Gray's The Cyborg Handbook(1995) push the cyborg in every conceivable direction,tracking countless manifestations.From that collection,David Hess'essay 'On low-tech cyborgs'argues persuasively that almost everyone in urban societies could be seen as a low-tech cyborg,because they spend large parts of the day connected to machines such as cars,telephones,computers,and,of course,televisions'-and he goes on to ask whether even a person watching a person watching a TV might constitute a cyborg'(Hess 1995:373).Thanks to Donna Haraway's provocative manifesto-writing (see chapter 18,the cyborg metaphor can work with this kind of question,always troubling distinctions,disrupting assumptions,unsettling bound- aries:human/machine,nature/culture ..in Haraway's essay,the cyborg metaphor playfully skips around these binaries-which have been the building blocks of Western metaphysics throughout modernity-fuzzying them (see also Latour 1993). To the extent that cybertechnologies are implicated in all of our lives,then-and we could argue that systems such as the transnational commodity markets make this a truly global experience that can impact on anybody's life,no matter where they are and how seemingly removed they are from that technology (see Sassen 1999)-we are all,to some degree or another,becoming cyborg.Perhaps,though-and this is also to return us to Hollywood's cyborgs-we need to add something else to Hess' cyborg theorizing:are we only cyborgs to the extent that we experience ourselves as cyborgs?Robert Rawdon Wilson (1995:242)refers to this as prosthetic conscious- ness:'a reflexive awareness of supplementation'.Even if we don't use such terminology, we can argue,I think,that many of us do experience ourselves in this way-we come to rely on technology more and more,and often feel simultaneously enabled,even thrilled, by this (how much harder would it have been for me to put this User's Guide together with a pen and paper?)and a little uneasy,if we feel dependent (could I,in fact,have done this at all,on pen and paper -or can I only think/write with the help of my computer now?-see Lupton on this).Does this make me a cyborg?Am I part of a lineage which branches out to include Arnie (whether as the Terminator or Quade/Hauser
CYBERCULTURES READER:A USER'S GUIDE 7 or in his role as a pregnant male scientist in Junior,or even just Arnie as Arnie with his muscles enhanced by pumping iron and pumping steroids)as well as anyone taking Viagra,or with a pacemaker,or riding a bicycle,or withdrawing cash from an ATM, or acting out their fantasies as Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider game or as a Nato bomber pilot blitzing Kosovo,or anyone watching footage from Kosovo live on the late-night news? Cyborg life If we are going to think about cyborg experience (we might term this cyborg ontology, or perhaps cyborg consciousness),we need to take up Arturo Escobar's call for ethno- graphic/anthropological work in cyberspace,which can help us understand how different user-groups understand and negotiate cyberculture.Sherry Turkle's work with kids and cybertechnology,for example,shows the ways in which cyborgization is made sense of by children -and this is important to look at here,for kids are in one way at the cutting edge of cyborg theory,since they are less pre-programmed with or troubled by preconceptions about things like binaries.In 'Cyborg babies and cy-dough-plasm'(1999) Turkle discusses children's dealings with an assortment of cybercultural artefacts computer games,artificial life programs,robots-and shows the ways in which they formulate new and complex understandings of 'life',consciousness,and the distinction (or lack of distinction)between the biological and the technological.The recent craze for cyber-pets(Tamagochi)reads in the same way:while many adults found the bridging of the bio-techno boundary ridiculous,and assumed children to be woefully naive in treating cyber-pets as alive',kids'interactions with the pets opened up a new kind of thinking about what life'is-as Turkle says,children think of computers as 'sort of alive'(319);or,to use the famous Spockism from Star Trek,it's life,Jim-but not as we know it.This,too,is part of what cyberculture is all about-new kinds of rela- tionships with technology (see Lupton,chapter 30,Terranova,chapter 17,and section seven).As the Post-Human Manifesto says,complex machines are indeed legible as emergent life-forms-but only once we expand our definition of life'(see also Bec 1997). Empirical work on our interactions with computers,then,begins to reveal the extent of our cyborg consciousness-and the ways in which we negotiate the 'doubleness'of desire and dread which machines can evoke in us.Lupton's chapter 'The embodied computer/user'picks out some of the experiential realities of the more day-to-day inter- actions that many of us have;she shows us something of what actually goes on 'in cyberspace'.A later co-written paper (Lupton and Noble 1997)expands this work to look at the strategies users deploy to place their computers in what they consider to be appropriate'symbolic space in their lives-especially in terms of the extent to which they 'humanize'their machines,by giving them names,establishing emotional relation- ships with them,trusting them (and then feeling betrayed when they fail).This clicks us back in to the earlier discussion of post-humanism and cyborg consciousness,since Lupton and Noble asked respondents to consider their relationships with their computers (at least implicitly)in those terms: