BARBARA KENNEDY INTRODUCTION II The virtual machine'and new becomings in pre-millennial culture W ARNING:JACKING IN WILL BE EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS.In many ways this is no ordinary introduction.Endings and beginnings mingle in an assemblage of deterritorialized subjectivities.Endings and beginnings repeat the Eternal Return.Whilst this book is a Reader in cyberculture,a collection of the work of many writers,the intentions of this introduction are to offer some connecting thoughts,some ways of thinking,some intensities which will provide a plateau for engagement with the collection itself and a way into thinking the endless possibilities within the theoretical domains of cybercultural experience. This introduction sets out to meld some formal techniques of writing together with some polymorphous outpourings of subjectivity'experienced as a result of the intense moment of a near-death experience ..a near-fatal car cash...a full stop...blank screen ..but an inertia that was at the same time potential movement and a new beginning.The joyful cruelty of becoming'. What has this to do with cyberculture?Why has a car 'crash'any significance to a Reader about cyberculture?The computer,of course,is not unlike the car(see Lupton 1999);both are machines,in the literal and traditional sense of the word.Video games and virtual reality can emulate the exhiliration and thrills of speed and power felt behind the wheel of the car,both dangerous but pleasurable spaces.Indeed,in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies,James Bond (Pierce Brosnan)drives/jacks into the controls of his car which is simultaneously a computer.He literally sits inside the machine,becomes part of the machine,finger tips at the small digital control pad.Leaving aside all those phallically-conceived semiotics which the car and computer share (why is it that my two sons endlessly love the control pad of their computer console,driven to compete for the highest score,the fastest rush'?)-such a decoding is boringly prevalent in the now redundant discourses of Freudian psychoanalysis-driving the freeway or the super- highway nonetheless involves similar experiences:pleasure,exhiliration,jouissance
14 BARBARA KENNEDY control (or lack of),and of course a possible disembodiment or death ..restless machines! Princess Diana's death by car crash joins a long line of romantic and mythologized gods/goddesses of popular culture:James Dean,Marilyn Monroe,Grace Kelly,etc.The car crash deifies'the beauty of the inaccessible,the unrequited desire;the 'lack'that constitutes desire.But here we are merely reflecting on that hotbed of contempt psychoanalysis.In late twentieth-century cyberculture,the computer takes over the role of the car;certainly it is imbricated within the techne of newly-built cars.They are hardwired (and not far off Bond's model)for cybernetic control.Computerized equip- ment fills the dashboard of the latest models (see Dery 1997). The car has been a near-sacred object in twentieth-century history.Symbiotically, the computer is similarly taking on this deified existence in our culture.Not as a vehicle for transportation through our material existence,but through a virtual space,outside the realm of physical,bodily movement.The computer is a means towards a different form of travel...a mind space,a mindset even,where the body,it could be argued, is eviscerated,rendered immobile,at the expense of the consciousness.It might also produce a different space for the desires and pleasures of disembodiment.But where is the body in the hyperspaces of cyberculture?Several chapters in the Reader contest the role of the body,its new configurations,and its post-humanist manifestations (see sections five and six). What connects the car and the computer is the structure connecting human and machine,the interface between those two spaces.The pleasures of the interface (Springer 1996)may offer near-death jouissance,that petit mort.The pleasures of the interface open up interrogations of ontological and epistemological concerns such as the defini- tion of the real,the human,identity,subjectivity,cognition and sensation.Political and ethological issues as to the nature and significance of gendered identity are also brought into focus.Jacking in to cyberspace may be a 'jouissancial'experience for console junkies,cyberbabes and trendy Trekkies,but its implications for interrogating socio/aesthetics are becoming increasingly apparent and urgent. This introduction is written in an experimental mode of address,not as an acad- emic text,nor like the more usual introductions to a collection of essays.Some will recognize the twists and leaps taken from colourful theoretical pallettes.Some may be suspicious of its Artaudian dramatic drawl,critical that this is no place for self-conscious creative prose or contagious outpourings.Why not?What justifies such legitimations? I don't apologize,for in that sensuous,transversal and often stream-of-consciousness style of writing is a serious inception and invitation to rethink some of the basic cate- gories of Western thinking:the nature of subjectivities,identities and the body in connection with technology and nature.Felix Guattari (1992)defends delirious narra- tive as a discursive power for the construction and reconstruction of mythical,aesthetic, even scientific worlds.Ironies of course abound.An introduction wallowing,some may say,in the self-pity of subjectivity (such irony!)tries to position a consideration of a virtual machinic existence which deterritorializes that subjectivity. Subjectivity,for example,has been theorized within Western discourse primarily through a dialectical concern with a self/other dichotomy.Psychoanalyis has offered theoretical insights into the structure of a subjectivity created through such binary
THE VIRTUAL MACHINE'AND NEW BECOMINGS 15 concepts.But psychoanalyis is too strangely familiar and evocatively redundant in the new world disorder of cyberculture.Psychoanalysis cannot explain subjectivity suffi- ciently,due to the fact that it reduces social factors and affective states to the realm of psychological mechanisms.Much Continental philosophy (such as that of Deleuze and Guattari)has some purchase in such debates.I only want to signal tangentially their significance here,as this introduction serves merely to signpost new areas of thinking, rather than explore them fully.The reader might like to follow up the references provided, or trace such theoretical presences through the essays in the Reader. Some brief description might encourage that connectivity.Deleuze and Guattari offer an exploration of the production of a subjectivity not premised on a self/other dichotomy. The production of subjectivity,writes Guattari (1992),is more complex,and involves the affective intensities of a pre-personal stage of subjective encounter;subjectivity is produced through a-signifying regimes as much as signifying regimes.In other words, subjectivity is not merely predicated on the realm of the signifer and language alone. The pre-subjective states are felt before a subjectivity constructed through language. The pre-linguistic production of subjectivity might account for the intensities of 'feeling' which cannot be theorized through language.Taking his lead from the work of Daniel Stern,Guattari looks to ethology (the science of animal behaviour applied to human behaviour)as a means of understanding the structures of pre-subjective states.Guattari discusses the machinic nature and heterogeneity of subjectivity (here the 'machinic'takes on a much more abstract sense:'technological machines operate at the heart of subjec- tivity,not only within its memory and intelligence,but within its sensibility,affects and the unconscious fantasms').The ghost in the machine is at the heart'of us all. This questioning of the subjective and the pre-subjective becomes one of several vital questions in any discourse on cyberculture,since any use of the computer (like driving that ultimate 'machine',the car),whether through the web,email transactions, bulletin boards etc.,involves some sense of what we know as a 'subjective'encounter. That mind-space might be a place for subject empowerment,pleasure,play and creative connection.This cultural space in cyberculture is known as cyberspace'.Whilst Michael Heim (1992)writes that cyberspace is 'a tool for examining our very sense of reality', Howard Rheingold suggests that 'cyberspace is a human-computer interface,but it is also a mind-space,the way mathematics and music and myth are mind-spaces-mind- space you can walk around in and grab by the handles'.The relational elements across human/machine/nature,then,are key. However,one of the questions we might ask is:are these relational elements in fact separable,or is there a more significant consilience across their architectures?-a greater 'force'propelling new intensities of thinking and imaging:a 'virtual machine' which develops outside traditional conceptions of subjectivity (Guattari 1992).Brian Massumi,for example,following from Deleuzian philosophy,writes that there is only one world,one nature and -below the quantum level of matter and beyond the synapses of our brains -one unified field'(Massumi 1992).Where is the body in this assemblage?The body is only a natural object,and has its own phylogenetic structure: from the point of view of social forces that seize it',Massumi writes,'it is as much a raw material to be moulded,as is wood'.But questions concerning the machine are multiple and varied.In traditional philosophical discourse,the machine has been seen
16 BARBARA KENNEDY in opposition to the organism.But cyberculture might better be understood and inter- rogated through more complex connections across the nature of the machinic and the organic,and the implication of those definitions for considering the concepts of nature, technology and the body.Guattarian discourse,for example on machinic heterogenesis and the emergent virtual machine of pre-millennial existence,is particularly appropriate to re-thinking what we mean by the 'machinic'(Guattari,1992). Dagognet has suggested that there never was any separation across the categories of nature/culture and technology,but that all three are imbricated in an interrelational complex.As Allucquere Rosanne Stone writes,Francois Dagognet suggests that the recent debates about whether nature is becoming irremediably technologized are based on a false dichotomy:namely that there exists here and now,a category "nature"which is "over here"and a category "technology"(or for those following other debates, "culture")which is "over there".'Dagognet argues on the contrary that the category nature has not existed for thousands of years;not since the first humans deliberately planted gardens or discovered slash-and-burn farming.Indeed,Stone expands upon this to provide new definitions of the concept of nature as a 'construct,by means of which we attempt to keep technology visible as something separate from our "natural"selves and our everyday lives'.Similarly,Baudrillard (1983)has posited that the boundaries between technology and nature are in the midst of a deep restructuring:the old distinc- tions between the biological and the technological,the natural and the artificial,the human and the mechanical,are becoming increasingly unreliable'.Questions about the interconnections across nature/culture and technology,their productions and of course their significance within cyberculture are key issues,then,in this collection. This introduction offers an interrogation of issues that are fundamental to human social and aesthetic engagement in a pre-millennial cyberculture.Cyberculture provides languages and knowledges through which we can begin to explore and examine the emer- gence of the 'virtual machine'in a pre-millennial temporal/spatial zone.The virtual machine of pre-millennial culture provides a construal,a mingling at a molecular level, of organism and machine.Organisms,previously disintegrating,changing or ossifying in terms of human'genetic and molecular cells,are in fact producing an emergent machine/organism,a new evolution in genetics and a new organism.For this to develop, Guattari and Deleuze write,the organism'has to be dismantled.What happens to subjec- tivity in the dismantling?As several chapters in the Reader explore,a new connection of machine/organism becomes part of the creative landscape of cybercultural technolo- gies,a landscape in which subjectivity is frequently challenged,ossified or at least deterritorialized. Both editors of this Reader have envisioned the text as a collection and a machinic performance,a text to be created as a choreography,an abstract machine to be assem- bled or produced as an event,by the reader her/himself (selves).We invite the reader to taste,feel and move with the words,the tones,the images and the rhythms of this introduction,equipped to then feel some experimental flights between,across and through the interstitial spaces within the book.Those not brave enough to fly alone,preferring the more sedate pages of a linear,'logically'framed book (such loss of jouissance!) will be helped by the User's Guide,which offers some points of contact and compar- ison across the Reader
THE VIRTUAL MACHINE'AND NEW BECOMINGS 17 ..Endings and beginnings...not a smear nor a blemish,neither ripped flesh nor corruscated muscle,but a pure shell-like face,no mark,no blood, save a tiny morsel of glass in her third finger,left hand.Dressed in black... shimmering satin chemise to classy culotted trousers,shoes delicately tilted, exposing a recently suntanned ankle,strangely tilted,unnervingly perfect... a point of stillness.Stillness in time,in space,in being.A full stop in the middle of a processual flight through irreversible fantasies.Had this been an alien abduction?What sense of alien...alien...alien-ation...the subject removed from its body ..was she feeling at that moment,that inorganic point of finality in death ..reminiscent of Freudian origins?Beyond the Pleasure Principle.The Garden of Eden was where this 'mother'returned. And yet,that death had only been in the still point of her consciousness.The body,limp and lifeless,felt a nervous twitch,a new becoming,a continuum of her human'consciousness in a new world disorder ..a becoming-other. What Symbolic Exchange was this,that kinetically propelled her from one state to another,through which a total immersion with the machine and nature were imbricated through her body ..all part of the same virtual machine'.Nature,human and technology in total synthesis....But this was me,me myself ..I.I think,therefore I exist.Cogito ergo sum.Is this merely the myth of cultural contamination,because of course I really don't exist?Or do I? Cyberculture marks the current state of twentieth-(going on twenty-first-)century experience,a pre-millennial convergence of man,mind and technologies interlocking through nature,the ether of molecularized matter and the ultimate machine within the bigger machine,the computer.Scott Bukatman (1993)writes,in Termina/Identity, nuclear destruction,like the apocalyptic car crash of Ballard's Crash,represents the ultimate interface with the realities of a technologized existence'.In my own interface with technology,my 'crash',my own near-death experience-this was no Hollywood- induced sensation,no box-office formula for proft (what is it that makes death so intensely intriguing and jouissancial to those who merely 'watch'?).One witness (male, of course)said it was the best stunt he had ever seen.Was I really only an item for a Jeremy Clarkson charade?I was propelled by massive voltage waves through the air at 60 miles per hour,swirling in a vortex,unsure whether this was real or whether I was really only dreaming ..a dream which became too real ..human,all too human, when I hit the metal road sign at full velocity...escape velocity...stop...then landed in the soft,mossy earth ..another place,another zone,an imperceptible zone. A return to the Garden?The interface of nature,technology and the body quite liter- ally became my 'worlded experience',my lived reality for a brief moment in time,a brief ellipsis in the passing of time.My body merged in molecular fusion with its surrounding hardware and software.Metal,glass,grass,ferns,flowers,earth becoming the flesh and body of 'woman'...this 'woman'... Fade-out,,·