the pre-history of cyberspace.txt

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

     "televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear
     in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as
     "velivision" and "dullaphone."  This complex verbal play all
     hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of
     technologically mediated communication.  In the opening
     episode of the second part, the "Feenicht's Playhouse," an
     imaginary play produced by HCE's children in their nursery
     is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in
     cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript.  In four
     tubbloids" (219.28-9).  Like the cinema, "wordloosed"
     (wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such
     media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages
     and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures
     and a pan-international hyperculture.
[18]      In the concluding moments of the _Wake_, Joyce
     generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate
     performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also
     anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of
     culture, communication, and technology.  A brief scene
     setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as
     the HCE is awakening.  In the background he hears noises
     from the machines in the laundry next door.  It is breakfast
     time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are
     being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of
     the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^
     At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable
     interpretation, presents in very abstract language a
     generalized model of production and consumption, which is
     also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that
     consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself
     digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could
     one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be
     "litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary?
[19]      The passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole
     millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational
     gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be
     written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the
     sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor
     clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor
     laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of
     engineering, for essentially it relates the production of
     cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like
     reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text
     mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as
     eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can"
     (614.28)).  The passage concludes, "as sure as herself
     pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs"
     (615.9-10).  Here the frequent pairing of speaking
     (writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is
     related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of
     nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining.
[20]      These bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic +
     dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition,"
     may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the
     "heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff
     of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his
     staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by
     tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance
     . . ." (614.33-615.2).  All of these bits--matter, eggs,
     words, TV signals, concepts, what you will--are
     "anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified
     paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic
     structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as
     hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8).  In anticipation of
     the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," Joyce
     associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV
     and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and
     kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information.
     He presents it as essentially an assemblage of
     multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing
     moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic
     branches of differing motifs, through a process of
     transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of
     blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the
     discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and
     punctuation--those "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8).
[21]      Here Joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of
     cyberspace seems somewhat Deleuzian.  It is an ambivalent
     and critical vision, for the "ambiviolence" of the
     "langdwage" throughout the _Wake_ implies critique as it
     unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody
     within satire.  He does not free it from socio-political
     reference, as a free-floating "postmodernist" play with the
     surface of signifiers would.  This can be noted in the way
     that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones
     of McLuhanism.  Joyce plays throughout the work with spheres
     and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical
     definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille
     (Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal's
     sphere.  Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says:
          our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as
          sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all
          directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the
          infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and
          manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has
          thoughts of that eternal Rome) . . . .  (298.27-33)
     Here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and
     circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and
     undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is
     sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself
     without apparent limit.  This is both an embodied and a
     disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so
     as to impede any closure.  The same spherical principle is
     applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of
     hearing.  The reception of messages by the hero/ine of the
     _Wake_, "(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)" (108.23), is
     accomplished by "bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down
     in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a
     melegoturny marygoraumd" (309.22-4), a sphere for it
     requires "a gain control of circumcentric megacycles"
     (310.7-8).  It can truly be said of HCE, "Ear! Ear! Weakear!
     An allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is
     "%h%uman, %e%rring and %c%ondonable"(58.19), yet "humile,
     commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations
     his "%h%ardest %c%rux %e%ver" (623.33) [italics mine].
     Though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this]
     exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "%H%einz %c%ans
     %e%verywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of
     sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would
     %c%hallenge their %h%emosphores to %e%xterminate them"
     (81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to
     enclose him.
[22]      This discussion of sphere and hearing critically
     anticipates what McLuhan later called "acoustic space"--a
     fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of
     multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment
     within which aural information is received by the CNS--that
     also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic
     insight that "the universe (or nature) [or in earlier
     versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is
     everywhere, the circumference nowhere."^27^  Today, VR, as
     Borges' treatment of Pascal's sphere seems to imply, is
     coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this
     symbol, a place where each participant (rather than *the*
     deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center.
     People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves
     interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual
     multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through
     complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks.
[23]      All of this must necessarily relate back to the way
     Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that
     is *the book*.  While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes
     of the book and the death of literature resound through
     modernism, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered
     through the "mcluhanitic" reaction to "mcluhanism" becomes,
     in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of
     the death of the book, *not* its transformation, as with
     Joyce.  Joyce is important, for following Marcel Jousse and
     Vico,^28^ he situates speech and writing as modes of
     communication within a far richer and more complex bodily
     and gestural theory of communication than that represented
     by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate.  As
     the predominance of print declines, the _Wake_ explores the
     history of communication by comically assimilating the
     method of Vico's _The New Science_--which, as one of the
     first systematic and empirical studies of the place of
     poetic action in the history of how people develop systems
     of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for
     constructing their society to the poetic function.
[24]      Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the
     complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy
     dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as
     verbal--a privilege based on theological and metaphysical
     claims.  The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing
     technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated
     communication, including VR and TV.  At one point in the
     _Wake_ "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil.  Our
     eyes demand their turn.  Let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for
     TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic.  Yet
     most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy
     split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print.
     The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on
     gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium.  As the
     _Wake_ jocularly observes:
          seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the
          cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second
          parents . . . the touching seene.  The solence of that
          stilling!  Here one might a fin fell.  Boomster
          rombombonant!  It scenes like a landescape from Wildu
          Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as
          Mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os
          across the wineless Ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss
          potent of suggestion than in the tales of the
          tingmount.  (52.34-53.6)
     The mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement
     seeming like a landscape or a movie.
[25]      Facile over-simplification also overlooks that long
     before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print
     had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and
     writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its
     encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such
     as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and
     tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear.
     While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency,
     its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has
     established.^29^  The orality/literacy distinction does not
     provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print,
     any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive
     images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace
     (e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the
     Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly
     transmit "feelful thinkamalinks."  Since VR should enable a
     person to feel the bodily set of another person or place,
     while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory
     messages, understanding the role of the body in
     communication is crucial for understanding VR.  When McLuhan
     and Edward Carpenter first spoke about their concept of
     orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print
     to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and
     primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in
     communication, for "In the beginning there was the gest."
[26]      As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce's grounding
     communication and language in gesture is distinctly
     different from an approach which privileges language, for it
     involves a complete embodying of communication.  While the
     oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is