8 DAVID BELL Many people using computers on an everyday basis appear reluctant to acknowledge or embrace the notion of the 'post-human body',preferring to continue to draw rigid distinctions between human'and 'technological arte- fact'.Nonetheless,while most participants denied a propensity to humanize their personal computers,the ways they talked about them often betrayed a suggestion that they did invest their computers with human qualities such as agency,moods and emotional reactions,particularly in times of frustration, when the technology failed to 'work'. (Lupton and Noble 1997:94) Of course,as Lupton and Noble point out,computers are increasingly designed and marketed to lend themselves to humanization;if I leave my machine unattended for a few minutes,a message flashes to cajole me to 'Please wake up'.At other times,it offers advice,sometimes questioning my commands ('Are you sure you want to delete this file?').Sometimes it 'speaks'in a language I can't understand ('An error of Type 2 has occurred'),making me feel inadequately 'techie'(especially as someone who teaches and writes about cyberculture).Remembering what we said earlier,about the need to see computers as technocultural artefacts,my experience of machines is always medi- ated by cultural factors,too;I'm never just sat at my computer,typing,without simultaneously logging on to all the ideas and images that clutter the mediascape (and my own mindscape);cyberpunk moments,cybertheory moments,tech-noir moments, cyborg moments flicker across my screen.'Reality'is,then,always already virtualized in the whirl of data that connects in ever-different ways in the rhizomes of our brains and the rhizomes of our machines. Nowhere is this more apparent than in certain hi-tech'cybersubcultures-micro- cultures which expressively blend and mutate the facts'and the 'fictions'of cyberspace (see in this volume Sobchack,Terranova,Tomas).Here we witness cybercultural work which reflexively (sometimes ironically)works within and between the human-machine interface,that pulls in past,present and future experiences and perspectives (hippie idealism,modern primitivism,technophilia,cyberpunkishness)to fashion a family of creolized (culturally-mixed or hybridized)techno-tribal identifications:hackers,techno- shamans,Extropians,cybergeeks,New Age and New Edge cybergurus and acolytes ..(see also Dery 1996;Leary 1994;Mondo 2000 1993;Rushkoff 1997;Taylor 1998).While such groups are often too easily dismissed as fringe activists(even freaks), we should try to read their subcultural work in a more productive way,wary of the manner in which hackers,for example,have been both demonized and infantalized (or at least adolescentized')by the mass media and by corporate cyberculture.As Andrew Ross shows in chapter 16,'Hacking away at the counter-culture',the moves that make this possible also work to deny the hacker's threatening presence as an enemy within' -someone with knowledge and machine skill combined with maverick sensibilities.What such groups do,ultimately,is to perform a critica/function;reminding us that we are perhaps being carried along a bit too easily by a cybercultural teleology that both seduces and scares us,and which we could perhaps be responding to in more creative,less predictable ways. Ross'essay urges us to take up the hacker's stance of 'techno-scepticism',of informed critique rather than ignorant technophobia (or technophilia),and this takes us back to
CYBERCULTURES READER:A USER'S GUIDE 9 the 'Embodied computer/user';Lupton notes how little many users know about their computers,and how this accounts for our ambivalent perspective on them.Hackers amplify that by showing how much more than us they know.And that's why computer viruses carry such potency:as much as the actual damage that any virus may do to an operating system,the thought of the virus and its possible consequences induces panic in users,producing a kind of ambient fear that infects users much more than it effects computers (on computer viruses,see Lupton 1994).Scaremongering rumours of viruses circulate and proliferate endlessly via email,to the extent that they themselves become viral.We can read this scenario with the help of Richard Thieme's essay (chapter 14) on the conspiratorial logic of the Net.The concept of the meme-a contagious idea' which spreads through the system-helps us to understand viral panic.If we receive a message,no matter who from,warning us of a new,virulent strain of computer virus hidden inside some seemingly innocuous email message,we have no real choice but to believe it-and that carries with it the duty to inform all our virtual neighbours.Receive a few such messages and we start to suspect any unfamiliar incoming email of harbouring a virus:the sterile,impermeable machine is compromised by the ever-present threat of contamination (a recently-released computer game,Virus,allows us to play out these anxieties;it copies the files from our hard drive,then lets loose a malevolent virus to destroy them-only in this game,we can combat the virus,fighting to protect our data). Viruses,then,tell us some important things about our relationship with computers-as, indeed,do computer games like Virus. Sexing the cyborg Before we completely lose the figure of the cyborg,we need to focus on one more key area of debate in cybercultural theory:cyberfeminism.Among the most provocative and productive work emerging at the human-machine interface (whether at the level of theory or of practice,or,indeed,of both),cyberfeminist thinking has used the cyborg metaphor following Donna Haraway's lead-to begin to retheorize gendered and sexed identi- ties in the digital age.Part of this work centres on a critique of the masculinist boys'-toys construction of machines and machine-work,seeking to find ways for women to access virtual worlds on their own terms (see Wakeford,chapter 21).This calls for a reori- entation of feminism and the sexual politics of technology-as well as the technology of sexual politics (see Wajcman 1991).'Wired women'and Harawayan cyborgs work to find,then,a feminist politics of technology-part of what is sometimes named 'post- feminism'(see section four).As we see in the work of,for example,Chela Sandoval, a different mode of 'cyborg consciousness'is here invoked:one which works in-between categories,unsettling those binaries that once connected man to technology,woman to nature,and locked the two sets in an opposition (man/woman,technology/nature),always weighted to privilege one term over the other.This shift doesn't simply mean reversing the terms of the binary,so that privilege slides over,or a simple reshuffle (to equate women with technology)-it means a deconstructive move that negates fixed positions As Haraway says,science fiction has given us its cyborgs;now cyberfeminism has given us new ways of thinking the cyborg,sometimes liberatory and sometimes more cautious
10 DAVID BELL (for those who see digital technologies,for example in biomedicine,as invasive and appropriative;for a discussion,see Kember 1999).This cyberfeminist cyborg is not a unitary figure,then;while there is a clustering of readings/writings of the cyborg that link back to Haraway,the strands and pulses of cyborg theory found in cyberfeminism ripple outwards in almost infinite manifestations (compare in this volume,for example, Springer's chapter with Sandoval's or Plant's;and see Kennedy 1999). Barbara's introduction 'The "virtual machine"and new becomings in pre-millennial culture',which follows this User's Guide,works through some of these issues,through what we might call a poetics of cyborgization.Her car/computer metaphor (much more than a metaphor,given the crash-consciousness which explodes through her essay)also signals a key theoretical influence in cybercultural theory:the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.The writings of Deleuze and Guattari have resonated across the regimes of academia in recent years,influencing not only traditional philosophical discourses,but also the fine arts,literature,music,economics,law,film theory and most specifically cultural theory and cultural studies.Their work therefore has a major role to play in the ways in which we relate to cyberdiscourse.Reading their work alongside some cybercultural texts lends a creative array of ideas from which to approach dialogue and debate.Their texts are wide ranging (both in timescale and in content),multiplic- itous and often contradictory,but the significance of their ideas has been in the critique of foundational and structuralist thinking,found in traditional discourses,specifically psychoanalysis. Anti-Oedipus (L'anti-Oedipe,1972),perhaps their best-known text,offers a critique of psychoanalysis,where desire is theorized through negative and transcendent para- digms.Instead,Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is processual,aleatory and positive,and cannot be merely relegated to the Oedipal myths and scenarios of Freudian psychoanalytic frameworks.Their discussion of the desiring-machine as production formu- lates a model of the unconscious premised outside the theatrical myths and narratives of Freudian theory.The unconscious is rather something that can be produced. Much of their collaborative work is written in a rhizomatic format,which as explained earlier is not meant to be read as a simple,linear or logical narrative.Such works take a wider look at the creative connections across literature,poetry,the arts, music,and theoretical.Refreshingly creative and inspirational,the style of A Thousand Plateaus (Mille plateaux,1980)provides an innovatively-framed poetics/anti-philosophy, which distanciates metaphysical and binary thinking,offering new languages for theo- retical contexts.One of the main lines of flight (an expression Deleuze and Guattari use to explore creative possibilities in thinking processes)is their definition of the 'body'as something outside its determinations within binary thinking.Thus the body is recon- ceived outside any notion of its role as a corporeal or biological amalgam (the body without organs').The definition of the body becomes polysemous,complex;such new definitions of the 'body'become central to rethinking the body'in cyberculture (see Kennedy,2000). Both Deleuze and Guattari have produced texts which inspire and provide pallettes through which we might think the language of cyberculture (of course their relevance is much wider than this);such concepts as force,intensity,volition,sensation and machinic.'Machinic'is perhaps the concept which most strikes us in cybercultural theory
CYBERCULTURES READER:A USER'S GUIDE 11 In their work,the concept of 'machine'becomes much more complex than the tradi- tional description of machine as the opposite of nature.Language,argues Deleuze,has been insufficient to explain the experiences of being (Deleuze 1980).He refers to a wider concept called the 'abstract machine',which operates outside of the formalistic structures of linear and logical language,and which incorporates the pathic,the gestural and the transitivist elements felt at levels deeper than verbal language. Guattari's Chaosmosis (Chasmose,1992)provides a consideration of the machine within a wider framework,what he calls a neo-aesthetic paradigm.From a description of the production of subjectivity,emphasizing the heterogeneity of forms from the pre- personal to the media and technological,Guattari considers the nature of the machinic in much more amorphous ways than the merely technological.Here 'machinic'becomes a term which might describe the ways in which a whole range of different elements compose our experiences of being and existence;from the physical,the material to the psychological and the perceptual.The virtual ecology'which Guattari describes in Chaosmosis is a way of explaining the interrelationship of elements across the pathic, the gestural,the transitivist,and the pre-personal states of our experiences,in relation to the material world we inhabit.He advocates a revised aesthetic consideration of new ways of being,and new ways of living,which provides mutant forms of collective under- standing and collaboration.The machinic is a way of describing the fitting together,the working together,in a relational way,of different elements of our existences.The virtua/ machine is much more than a technological machine in the traditional sense.It breeds from complexity and chaos and is dependent upon relationality across different elements; material,cultural,technological and psychical.In thinking through the various sections of the Reader,such ideas have a significant part to play in cyberdiscursive theory. We can trace Deleuze's and Guattari's thinking through Barbara Kennedy's intro- ductory essay.In using the motif of the near-death car crash,she confronts the human-machine interface,looking for a new becoming',echoing Stephen Metcalf's writing on J.G.Ballard's novel Crash and crashing: Crash is followed by reconstruction as the virtually dead body is redesigned by means of life-support machines and prosthetic organs.The normally assigned boundaries of the body having been breached,wounded beyond recog- nition,the subject recedes into an ambient disappearance in the environment. No longer the sentinel controlling the flows of traffic between the interior and the exterior,the subject is diffused across a virtual machine. (Metcalf 1998:112) Subjects diffused across a virtual machine?The phrase has a hint of Gibson's consen- sual hallucination in it,or of Deleuze's and Guattari's work on the machinic and redefining the body.The crash body,then,is a cyborg body;not just in its banal meat-meets-metal sense,but in the way that Barbara shows:through a suspended still-point where subjec- tivity,identity,boundaries cease to exist,where all that is solid melts into air,where sensation,experience,memory,pleasure and pain co-mingle,mixing and morphing-a cyborg moment.'Life continues'.Cyborg life
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