the pre-history of cyberspace.txt

黑客培训教程

     necessarily involved in all communication, including speech.
     As John Bishop has shown in _Joyce's Book of the Dark_, the
     sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but
     these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs
     that permeate the dream and which constitute the _Wake_.^30^
     Joyce views language as "gest," as an imaginary means of
     embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his "feelful
     thinkamalinks."  From this perspective, the semic units of
     the _Wake_ (integrated complexes constructed from the
     interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm,
     orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the
     role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication,
     exploiting their limitations and differences.  Joyce crafts
     a new %lingua% for a world where the poetic book will deal
     with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be
     encompassed within technologically mediated communication.
     Simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual
     reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or
     technologically mediated modes of communication.  This
     process posits a continuous dialogue in which _Ulysses_ and
     the _Wake_ were designed to play key roles.
[27]      As Joyce--who quipped that "some of the means I use are
     trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient
     rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus
     episode of _Ulysses_ and in the "Triv and Quad" section (II,
     2) of the _Wake_) also included those interactive contexts
     where the body was an intrinsic part of communication.
     Delivery involved controlling the body, and the context
     within which it was presented, as well as the voice.  The
     actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory)
     also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses.  This
     analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way
     actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical,
     gestural and kinesthetic components.  Recent research into
     the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by
     Frances Yates,^32^ have demonstrated that memory involves
     the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual
     icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the
     oral itself.  Joyce playfully invokes this memory system
     familiar to him from his Jesuit education: "After sound,
     light and heat, memory, will and understanding.  Here (the
     memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for
     wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22).  A classical
     world, which recognized such features of the communicative
     process, could readily speak about the poem as a "speaking
     picture" and the painting as "silent poetry."  Here, there
     is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a
     dependency on a single channel of communication.
[28]      Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new
     culture of time and space for reconstructing and
     revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be "the
     greatest engineer," as well as a Renaissance man, who was
     also a "musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other
     things."^33^  The mosaic of the _Wake_ contributes to
     understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the
     radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce
     called "the chaosmos of Alle" (118.21).  In this "chaosmos,"
     engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he
     intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of
     cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic
     organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the
     construction of imaginary and virtual worlds.  One crucial
     reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a
     discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the
     most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual
     recollection (a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson
     as virtual memory).^34^  In counterpoint to the emerging
     technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of
     cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the
     creation of virtual worlds within natural language.
[29]      That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in
     mnemonic systems:
          A scene at sight.  Or dreamoneire.  Which they shall
          memorise.  By her freewritten.  Hopely for ear that
          annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns.  Is it in the
          now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the
          branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and
          yesters outcome . . . .   (280.01-07)
     Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of
     "everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips,
     "his producers are they not his consumers?").  All culture
     becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic
     writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that
     interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social
     unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate
     to perceiving the complexities of the new world of
     technologically reproducible media:
          What has gone?  How it ends?
          Begin to forget it.  It will remember itself from every
          sides, with all gestures, in each our word.  Today's
          truth, tomorrow's trend.  (614.19-21)
     Joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words,
     enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling "Today's truth.
     Tomorrow's trend."  The poet reproducing his producers is
     the divining prophet.
[30]      If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a
     kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan's project was
     frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new
     tribalized global society--the global village, itself
     anticipated by Joyce's "international" language of
     multilingual puns.  In fact, in _War and Peace in the Global
     Village_, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, freely
     associated) as marginalia.  McLuhan flourished in his role
     as an international guru by casting himself in the role of
     "*the* prime prophet" announcing the coming of a new era of
     communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or
     cyberspace, though he never actually used that word).  The
     prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed,
     is to be found in Joyce and Vico.^36^  The entire Joycean
     dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the
     anticipated awakening (Vico's fourth age of ricorso
     following birth, marriage, and death) is "providential
     divining":
          Ere we are!  Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that,
          primeval conditions having gradually receded but
          nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having
          to a great extent persisted through intermittences of
          sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn
          sepulture and providential divining, making possible
          and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves
          and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under
          consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary
          military maritory monetary morphological
          circumformation in a more or less settled state of
          equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium.
          (599.8-18)
     Earlier, it is said of the dreamer that "He caun ne'er be
     bothered but maun e'er be waked.  If there is a future in
     every past that is present . . ." (496.34-497.1).  Joyce,
     from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the
     medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a
     fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world,
     in which the "give and take" of the "mind factory," an
     "antithesis of ambidual anticipation," generates auspices,
     auguries, and divination--for "DIVINITY NOT DEITY [is] THE
     UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE" (282.R7-R13).
[31]      Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about
     futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally
     familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a
     reading of history and its relation to that virtual,
     momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and
     always undergoing change.  Joyce appears to blend this
     medieval concept with classical sociological ideas--of
     prophecy as an "intermediation"--quite consistent with his
     concepts of communication as involving aspects of
     participation and communion.  It is only through some such
     reading that the future existent in history can be known and
     come to be.  McLuhan's reading, adapted from Joyce, of the
     collision of history and the present moment led him to
     foresee a world emerging where communication would be
     tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and
     pan-sensory.^37^
[32]      Why ought communication history and theory take account
     of Joyce's poetic project?  First, because he designed a new
     language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida)
     to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex
     socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic
     production.  Two brief examples: Hollywood "wordloosing
     celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of
     the Hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the
     reel world," reveal media's potential international
     domination as well as the problems film form raises for the
     mutual claims of the imaginary and the real.  For example,
     the term "abortisements" (advertisements) suggests the
     manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged
     relation of advertisement to butchering--the segmentation of
     the body as object into an assemblage of parts.
[33]      Second, Joyce's work is a critique of communication's
     historical role in the production of culture, and it
     constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the
     importance of Vico to a contemporary history of
     communication and culture.^38^  Third, his work is itself
     the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the
     complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking,
     aurality, and orality.  Fourth, developing Vico's earlier
     insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the
     importance of the "poetic" as a concept in communication,
     for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative
     potentials between medium and message.  This provides the
     poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production
     with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication,
     an ecology of sense, and making sense.  Fifth, in the
     creative project of this practice, Joyce develops one of the
     most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation
     of our media of communication.  And finally, his own work is
     itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the
     poetic in human communication.
[34]      VR or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of
     existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our
     classifications of media and their effects.  The newly
     evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace
     is a site where people are intellectual nomads:
     differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize
     its structure.  Joyce and the arts of high modernism and
     postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people
     constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the
     traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a "virtual
     world" and of the tremendous powers with which electricity
     and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia
     that would eventually emerge.

     ------------------------------------------------------------

                                NOTES

          ^1^  William Gibson, _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ (NY: Bantam
     Paperback, 1989), 16.

          ^2^  William Gibson, _Neuromancer_ (NY: Ace, 1984), 51.

          ^3^  This quotation is taken from the posthumously
     published Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, _The Global
     Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st
     Century_, (NY: Oxford UP, 1989).  It was edited and
     rewritten from McLuhan's working notes, which had to date
     from the late 70s, since he died in 1981.  McLuhan's words