the pre-history of cyberspace.txt

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                BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY:
             JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE

                                  by

                           DONALD F. THEALL
                         University Professor
                           Trent University
                          <[e-mail]>

               _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)

          Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall, all rights
          reserved.  This text may be freely shared among
          individuals, but it may not be republished in any
          medium without express written consent from the authors
          and advance notification of the editors.



[1]       _The Gutenberg Galaxy_, a book which redirected the way
     that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the
     role of technological mediation in communication and
     expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to
     write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_."  It has
     not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's
     major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures
     (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida,
     Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about
     aspects of communication involving technological mediation,
     speech, writing, and electronics.  While all of these
     connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic
     Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific
     bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist
     contemporaries to the development of electric communication
     and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality.
     McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_"
     established him as the first major disseminator of those
     Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis
     for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive
     McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an
     unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.
[2]       In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the
     emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the
     development of electromechanical communications, telematics
     and virtual reality.  Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the
     simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of
     multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:
          All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon
          city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of
          grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it
          was too complicated, trying to find your way to the
          particular piece of data you needed.  Iconics, Gentry
          called that.^1^
     This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted
     from the banks of every computer in the human system"
     creates an "unthinkable complexity.  Lines of light ranged
     in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of
     data.  Like city lights receding."^2^  Almost a decade
     earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the
     late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^
          It steps up the velocity of logical sequential
          calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to
          body count by touch . . . .  It brings back the
          Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers
          are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy
          in favor of decentralization.  When applied to new
          forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and
          videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric
          texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging
          ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^
     McLuhan's %hieroglyphs% certainly more than anticipate
     Gibson's %iconics% and McLuhan's particular use of
     hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily
     derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico.
[3]       It is not surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by
     side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early
     researchers in MIT's Media Lab^5^, for these researchers
     also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and
     collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic,
     proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^
     The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such
     as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of
     individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei
     Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the
     semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and
     involvements.  Duchamp, for example, became an early leading
     figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of
     painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light,
     movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _Large
     Glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying
     notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A
     l'infinitif_.  His interest in the notes as part of the
     total work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of
     _Work in Progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it
     (e.g., _Our Exagmination Round his Factification for
     Incamination of Work in Progress_).  Joyce also explores
     similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and
     concept.  So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with
     poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth
     and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes,
     many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed
     great importance on collaboration with artists involved in
     exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating
     new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other
     senses.^8^
[4]       Understanding the social and cultural implications of
     VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the
     inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace
     description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced
     vision of the development of electric media, and the
     particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings
     about electrically mediated communication and on the views
     of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems
     of mediation and communication.  Such a reassessment
     requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the
     crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of
     language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used
     by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the
     idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses
     and transcends all media.  The cluster of critics who have
     addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter
     Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have--like them--failed
     to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a
     Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility,
     gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the
     emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality.
     This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of
     the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary
     exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist
     colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual
     development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would
     integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and
     neurological information in currently existing and newly
     emerging art forms.
[5]       Joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the
     artistic exploration of two sets of differences--
     orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have
     since become dominant themes in the discussion of these
     questions.  _Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major
     poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media
     present to the traditionally accepted relationships between
     speech, script and print.  (_Ulysses_ also involves such an
     encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic
     development of mediated communication.)  Imagine Joyce
     around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the
     book in a culture which has discovered photography,
     phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and
     telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines,
     advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion?  What people
     once read, they will now go to see in film and on
     television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and
     more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in
     television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the
     potentialities of sound recording.^10^
[6]       The "counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of
     *the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the
     dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its
     frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or
     language.  This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic,
     encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous
     involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book
     about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of
     the new technology.^11^  The _Wake_ is the most
     comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the
     ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for
     the arts of language and the privileged position of the
     printed book.  The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary
     deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world
     where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with
     entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting
     information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety
     of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and
     writing.  Joyce's selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as
     the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of
     Homer's _Odyssey_ in _Ulysses_--underscores how his interest
     in the contemporary transformation of the book requires
     grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of
     communication, especially gesture and language and the
     "prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future.
[7]       As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the
     construction of artifacts and processes of communication in
     the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation
     (not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had
     historically evolved.  Confronted with this situation, Joyce
     seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the
     book within this new communicative cosmos, while
     simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development
     of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium,
     "virtual reality."  Since the action takes place in a
     dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic
     imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future.
     His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere,
     accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise
     from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the
     visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily
     the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they
     will utilize his present, which will have become the past,
     to transform the future.^13^
[8]       The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes
     Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic
     condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric
     transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a
     presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and
     ohmes."  Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an
     electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic
     environment), which becomes an extension of the human body,
     an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the
     playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling
     attention to the interplay of sensory information within the
     electro-chemical neurological system.  This medley of
     elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of
     oral and written language in an electro-mechanical
     technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive
     modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks
     Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality.