the pre-history of cyberspace.txt

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

[9]       Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of
     speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the
     kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all
     communication in gesture: "In the beginning was the gest he
     jousstly says" (468.5-6).  Here the originary nature of
     gesture (gest, F. %geste% = gesture)^15^ is linked with the
     mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale
     (gest as a feat and a tale or romance).  Gestures, like
     signals and flashing lights that provide elementary
     mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent
     power" (345.19).  A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon,
     beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where
     flash becomes word and silents selfloud."  Since gestures,
     and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from
     the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a
     flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the
     original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" +
     original sin (239.1)].  "Communicake" parallels eating to
     speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of
     communion as participation in, and consumption of, the
     Word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of
     Marcel Jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the
     origin of language, _La Manducation de la Parole_ ("The
     Mastication of the Word").  By treating the "gest" as a bit
     (a bite), orality and the written word as projections of
     gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a
     communicating machine.^16^  The historical processes that
     contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the
     growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke's, on
     the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called
     communication is *secular, paramodern communion*.^17^
[10]      The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the
     communicative process of encoding and decoding required to
     interpret an encoded text, which itself is
     characteristically mechanical:
          The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately
          is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the
          raiding there originally.  That's the point of
          eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in
          soandso many counterpoint words.  What can't be coded
          can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere
          grieved for.  Now, the doctrine obtains, we have
          occasioning cause causing effects and affects
          occasionally recausing altereffects.  Or I will let me
          take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's
          tale posterwise.  The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
          hand is the hand of Sameas.  (482.31-483.4)
     The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an "outlex"
     (169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and,
     therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally
     discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding"
     [i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^  This reading
     encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the
     excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the
     designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions,
     drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of
     continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully
     crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _Book of
     Kells_ are.  Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in
     this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes
     a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the
     machinery of writing.  It is a production "in soandso many
     counterpoint words" that can be read only through the
     machinery of decoding, for "What can't be coded can be
     decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for"
     (482.34).  The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by
     the post, and the whole process of communication and its
     interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily
     gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
     hand is the hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).
[11]      Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the
     machinery of the body's organs: "Singalingalying.  Storiella
     as she is syung.  Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for
     yestures" (267.7-9).^20^  The link is rhythm, for
     "Soonjemmijohns will cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over
     Browne and Nolan's divisional tables" (268.7-9).  Gesture,
     with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular
     movements of the body, is a natural script or originary
     writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral
     style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics"
     (36.8-9).  Since the oral is "reconstricted" (reconstructed
     + constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are
     crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which
     is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive
     script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^  Runes and
     ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing
     (i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the
     word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of
     gesture.
[12]      Joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply
     that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of
     the word, the image, and the icon also changes.  Under the
     impact of electric communication, it is once again clear
     that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and
     events as well.^22^  Writing and speech are subsumed into
     entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image,
     gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input,
     especially the tactile.  To continue to speak about a
     dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading
     over-simplification of the role that electric media play in
     this transformation, a role best comprehended through
     historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human
     communication where objects, gestures and movements
     apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds.
     Marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the Aschers'
     discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss's discussions of
     the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of
     some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^
     Adapting Vico's speculation that human communication begins
     with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," Joyce
     early in the _Wake_ presents an encounter between two
     characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of
     comic strip fame.  Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a
     nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach
     eather" (16.8-9).
[13]      Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce
     traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine
     development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the
     future.  For example, an entire episode of the _Wake_
     (I,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and
     the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in
     which the _Wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a
     manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all
     scripture" (107.8).  At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the
     machinery of codification is implicit in the history of
     communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes
     that
          on holding the verso against a lit rush this new
          book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent
          query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out
          the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not
          punctured (in the university sense of the term) by
          numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged
          instrument. . . .  (123.34-124.3)
     This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the
     telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the
     early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation
     of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings."  "Morse code" is
     indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code
     is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment
     when the mechanical is electrified), the role of
     codification is radically transformed by mechanization.
[14]      The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the
     effect of this radical transformation:
          Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast
          and great primer must once for omniboss step
          rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no
          virtue more in alcohoran.  For that (the rapt one
          warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
          hints and misses in prints.  Till ye finally (though
          not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister
          Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies.
          Fillstup.  So you need hardly spell me how every word
          will be bound over to carry three score and ten
          toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends
          Jined . . . .  (20.7-16)
     As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and
     great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the
     dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
     hints and misses in prints."  Topics (L. %topos%) and types
     (L. %typus%) as figures, forms, images, topics and
     commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric,
     are now realized through typesetting.  Implicit in the
     technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal
     ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry
     three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book
     of Doublends Jined."  Printing sets in place the "root
     language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the
     world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate
     codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects,
     movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the
     electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace.
[15]      By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _Wake_, Joyce
     playfully anticipated how central sporting events or
     political debates would be for television when he described
     the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's
     "regulars" (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene
     in literary history).  Joyce's presentation of this image of
     the battle of Butt and Taff, which is peppered with complex
     puns involving terminology associated with the technical
     details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality,
     underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of
     Butt and Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment
     screen" ("bairdboard" because John Logie Baird developed TV
     in 1925).  Joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment
     screen," the TV as receiver, receives the composite video
     signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses
     that form part of the composite video signal), that come
     down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the
     carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with
     the bitts bugtwug their teffs."  Joyce imagines this
     receiver to be a "light barricade" against which the charge
     of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed,
     reproducing the "bitts."  Although (at least to my
     knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in
     communication technology at the time, Joyce is still able,
     on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or
     photons as bits of information creating the TV picture.
[16]      Speech, print and writing are interwoven with
     electromechanical technologies of communication throughout
     the _Wake_.  References to the manufacture of books,
     newspapers and other products of the printing press abound.
     Machineries and technological organizations accompany this
     development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad
     men who produce "Abortisements" (181.33).  Since complex
     communication technology is characteristic of the later
     stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny"
     magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a
     phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would
     "roll away the reel world."  Telecommunications materialize
     again and again throughout the night of the _Wake_, where
     "television kills telephony."
[17]      The "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology
     in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including
     in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe,"
     "telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible,"