To say that we live in a world of confusion is not only an understatement but a mistake. It supposes that there may be an essential sense to it all; that there's a purpose beyond that which we impose on a chaotic world that we, as a species, have attempted to harness. Fact is, rationality and sense are our own creations - the trappings of our own created landscapes - of the simulacra and virtual realms which we create. While it's true that in our postmodern society we live in an age of "stridently assertive human rights", the basis for these rights has again come into question as we ressurect timeless questions concerning the nature of the 'human' with the advent of 'Cyberspace'. The Information Age is upon us. Rather, it always has been, but now we play on a different field. The landscape of our memory has been transplanted to what William Gibson refers to in Neuromancer as the "consensual hallucination" that is, or promises to be, the Net. Utilizing the modalities available to us at this stage, namely the World Wide Web and email, a frenetic cyber-discourse has already plunged headlong into the analysis of human nature. Not only this, but the mother of such discourse - literature - also produces a body of philosophical speculation comporable to that produced on the Net. In fact, as has been stated, "...the intensity and ubiquity of this discussion suggests that we have been living with it for much longer". While the discourse itself is nothing new, the realm in which it is now being addressed is born from the technological landscape which is so quickly developing around us. This use of a new landscape or situation in order to provide focus on the human condition is in some ways, reaching into the aforementioned literary tradition, 'Kafkaesque'. Franz Kafka, especially in stories such as In the penal colony or Metamorphosis, in which "Gregory Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug" , challenges the absurdity of the human. We are transforming what we know as the 'natural world' in more ways than one, the most basic metamorphosis being ourselves. While it's true to say that we consume material resources as we do so, this technological landscape is constructed using a much more malleable and abundant resource - information. We ourselves enter into this realm changed. We become cyborgs, androids like those from Philip Dick's Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep?, creatures no more unnatural than the Cartesian Janis that has been our reflection for so long. Now our minds become melded with flesh and machine in a world "of light arranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
Felix Guattari states that "[d]iscourses and realities never cease to interfere with each other" . The virtual is not only the place in which a new discourse concerning human nature is to be played out, but the field in which we can play and fantasize to our hearts content. It is precisely this link to notions of fantasy, and a concomitant lack of boundaries, that makes the Net the most fertile ground for a new discourse on human reality. We cannot ignore that in order to play, according to the old paradigm, we flirt with the irrational. We break and manipulate the rules. Do we therefore, in exploring beyond the boundaries, move further away from notions of truth? Of reality? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would say no - the virtual being the realm in which a "production of the unconscious" can be executed. It seems ironic that the very word - virtual - implies a realm that is not 'real' when its Latin root word - virtus - evokes "the semantic idea of 'truth' with the ethical idea of 'worth'". It seems that we require a new paradigm which would more accurately describe the process even now taking place over the Net. Keys to this new paradigm can be found in a simple reflection upon another root word - the Greek Kybernan. Source of the prefix 'cyber', it means "to steer or guide". This definition, pertaining as it does to navigation, serves as the source for phrases such as 'surfing the Net', or the internet software provider Netscape's references to it's internet browser as a 'navigator'. The internet is a vast ocean of information within which our identities are dispersed. We have entered a territory in which we are displaced; finding ourselves in all places at once. "In the Electronic Age, then, communication, identity and presence are defined by absence, the art of being where you are not" . It should be no surprise that discourse upon human nature therefore takes 'residence' here, nor that Deleuze and Guattari offer such a startingly attractive and relevant philosophy synonymous to our journey in Cyberia. They speak of the machinic - of the action of 'rhizomes', which in virtual terms can be seen as an amalgam of the computer conected to the Net, and the individual using it as a window into cyberspace. Before we examine the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari we need to review the old paradigms - the preceding philosophy - that got us this far, but now no longer seems applicable. The Electronic Age, as is described in On the Line, "...still retain[s] the oldest models of thought insofar as they confer power on a central organ or memory".
The philosophy we need to revise is as old and venerated as the philosopher Plato himself. While it comes short of describing the virtual experince in its entirety, it still lends itself to the basic ideas. It would be difficult for any avid Net-user to say that they didn't feel the inclination to subscribe to the Platonic notion of 'pure forms' after a foray into cyberspace. There's that nasty feeling that the seductive, powerful and engaging world of the internet represents the 'actual' more than the 'real'. Who, after a taste of the euphoric Internet vision, wouldn't seem some similarity to Dick's "Mercerism" - the religion of the world after "World War Terminus". The computers of our time are the quivalent of the Empathy Box that characters such as the 'chickenhead' John Isidore and our leading man Rick Deckard and his wife clasp the handles of in order to merge with the Christ-like Wilbur Mercer. It's through experiences like this, comporable to religious rapture, that we experience an epiphanic glimpse at the 'actual'. At what makes us human. The androids that Deckard hunts for a living cannot understand Mercerism and, until the Nexus-6 model android Roy Baty reveals his desire to also share such an empathic experience, had no motivation to do so. "An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism - an experience which [Rick Deckard], and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty" . If it is indeed empathy or understanding that makes us human, why does it seem to be so foreign to our grasp of the 'real'? It is precisely because we carry the baggage of an old dichotomous worldview that limits the potentiality of the Internet culture. Plato was right when he suggested that the realm of pure forms would never be accessed. But, conversely, it would be wrong of us to again fall into old modes of thought in concluding that this was because of our bond to the "imperfect and changable outer shell" that is the world we know - that is our bodies. A comparison which springs to mind from Kafka's In the penal colony is the suicide of the officer in the mechinations of his beloved torturing device. Upon learning that his form of punishment is no longer relevant to the growth of society, he surrenders himself to it in a ridiculous (although strangely just!) denial of the new frontier of the human. In the same fashion, in surrendering ourself to the old philosophies which now seem inadequate, we commit the ultimate act of sacrifice, but at the cost of our own 'life'.
According to the Cartesian vision of the 'human', our mind is intrinsically linked with the rational, and that as conscious beings we must therefore excercise that rationality. The view is "that it is an independant and autonomous faculty of mind/reason which is categorically seperated from an 'animal nature'" . This is the same nature that allows Rick Deckard to kill the new Nexus-6 model 'andys' that have escaped to Earth from enslavement on Mars. He finds his job easier when he views the andys as being 'bodies' - as killers who steal identity rather than actually possessing one. When these andys assume characteristics that make it harder to draw the distinction between the human and the created by appearances, Rick is confronted by the very question that confronts us when faced with a technologised, cybernetic identity - what am I? The Cartesian distinction becomes almost ineffectual as a means of exp,aining the difference between Rick and the calvalcade of androids that he seeks to destroy. Rachael Rosen 'reasons', and therefore possesses a 'mind' as she demonstrates in her interactions with Rick. Indeed, it is Deckards confrontations with her and Phil Resch that send him tumbling into a realm of uncertainty, and then retrieve him from those very same depths. Phil Resch is interesting because he has been given a "synthetic memory". He thinks he's human to such a degree that he made his mission on Earth - in this assumed role - the destruction of androids just like himself. Resch becomes a paradox due to the memories he has been given, which lend him an identity - a history. It is precisely this factor which makes him so interesting, and why he causes Rick Deckard to question the differences between the 'real' and the 'actual', between the 'human' and its 'likeness'.
Aristotle argued that humanity had an urge to create "likenesses", and that this capacity for imagining or imitating both our landscape and what constitutes our world "was an innate quality, related to learning" . It seems that he's not far off the mark. Even now I describe the Internet as a realm, as did all those various discourses that were read about the newly developing Cyberculture and the virtual world in which it finds itself. We need to visualise a landscape. In transforming Dick's novel to the cinema screen, the creators of the film Bladerunner drew upon their memory of the existing landscape to create a vision of a future world. Similarly, Gibson uses descriptions of this same vision of an industrialised, sprawling city-scape to mirror a future in which we live side by side with the cybernetic. Not only this but our physical self can be developed with the addition of machinic parts or new organs ordered to go. The 'Razorgirl' Molly has become a killing machine as "with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails" . There's also the one hundred and thirty-five year old sexless Julius Deane, who's had "his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums an hormones" . A denial of the flesh in itself, never mind the escape into cyberspace. We are moving from landscapes of the 'real', bodies and brains that are 'real', into the cyberscape and technofuture of the 'actual' in which bodies are as malleable as the memory which constitutes the new landscape. This cyberscape is constructed from a postmodern meld of data and memory. Our memory becomes transplanted and gives shape to the "consensual hallucination" that we then experience. Memory, as with imagination, is "central to our everyday perception of the world we live in, our ability to visualize ourselves and our place in the world, and our continuous recollection of our immediate and long-term past" . This is the fantastic aspect of the landscape in which the new discourse will evolve - that it is born from our imagination.
Kant agreed with Plato's belief in a clear demarcation between the realm of perfect forms (the actual) and a material presence or appearance (the real). He certainly agrees that imagination is essential to our perception of the real and to the establishment of knowledge. Similarly to Aristotle, he believes that imagination is dualistic in that it serves as an "agent for creating...a second nature out of the materials supplied to it by the first nature" . It's a notion such as this that makes the realm of cyberspace so 'unreal'. To suggest that it is constructed of elements of one true nature gives it an almost dream-like quality. This in itself is a popular notion. Kathy Acker, in an exchange with Rosie Cross, made the rather startling statement - "When I started to spend all my spare time with the computer my dreams stopped" . It would seem Acker was suggesting that the faculty she excercised in dreams had been transplanted to the realm of the virtual. Similarly, in Neuromancer, we find Case tortured during sleep by dreams of the cyberworld he had been cut off from by a dose of 'Russian mycotoxin': - "But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there".
Victor Siedler identifies the addictive nature of the dreamscape/cyberspace realm as being a refuge of fantasy in which knowledge can be embodied - given shape. "It becomes easy to lose ourselves, as minds become overcharged and we literally come to live in our heads". Cyberspace becomes a place in which the self can be projected without deferring to a "culture that is dominated by disembodied forms of knowledge" in which the superiority of a patriarchy can no longer be taken for granted. The Net is popularly held to be a refuge in which - for males epecially - "it becomes tempting to live in denial". This seems a rather pessimistic way of framing the potentiality of cyberspace, but unfortunately, reflects the Net as it is today - albeit in its infancy. While still in the early evolutionary stages, cyberspace's development is being impaired by outdated frames of reference. While the belief is that we can enter a realm in which gender, race, ethnicity and so forth no longer restrict us, this is almost a fantasy in itself. It also suggests that we can render part of ourselves negligible, a reductionist and escapist belief. The view of Descartes, coupled with modern theory and thought, has been translated into the new image of the mind as a "local computer" consciousnes trapped within the "spatio-temporal confines of the body". This is true to some extent - as space and time are imported into cyberspace - but it does not accurately reflect the situation in its totality. The fact is that the body, as well as that other antithesis to rationality - emotion - need to be integrated ratherthan rejected. "Growing up to identify with the mental life of the mind alone, we are often estranged from bodies and from emotions and feelings as a source of knowledge".
It is for this reason, I would suggest, that in both Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the female characters (particularly Molly and Rachael Rosen) become represented as the 'other'. Rationality, as with science, can be interpreted as a strictly masculine phenomenon - a game for the boys. Whereas emotion and the body (most evidently sexuality) are tied to conceptual understandings of the feminine. Case can only bring the body into cyberspace, his rational realm, by entering Molly's body and seeing the world, literally, through her eyes. It's interesting to note that even when he does this, communication is only one-way. Similarly, when Rick Deckard wants to understand, to rationalize, the difficulty he is having killing something he can no longer categorically see as 'other', he turns to Rachael Rosen and, predictably, has to fuck her to once again see the 'difference'. Females not only embody emotion and the physical, but at this stage, as feminine entities, are barred from the Net - a rational experince of identity. The feminine needs to be integrated before the Net becomes the free-space we envision it to be, or it will become another example of a culture of refuge in which knowledge remains 'disembodied'. That is, it will be nothing more than a realm of fantasy and male seclusion.
If the internet is going to reach fruition as a cyberspace in which we continue to effectively discover our own humanity, it should become a space of truly integrated understanding. "The virtual is the link or bond that unifies our experience of the world and our conceptual understanding of that experience" . This attempt to understand is based upon the Nets current status as a development of the written word - Literature and print culture. As is pointed out in Tofts and McKeich, "Electronic writing is as much dependant upon literacy as it is upon knowing how to use a mouse or scroll bar" . We cannot jack into the "consensual hallucination" as Case does, or Neo in the new film The Matrix. We are still reliant upon the technologized word and its power to symbolically and epistemologically construct the world. It would seem that due to the fact that we are dealing in a literary medium, the structures and modes of thought which are part and parcel of any attempt to literally construct the world also bind the Internet realm in visions of modernity. Now, however, as has been suggested, there's the temptation to immerse oneslef in this world and leave the body behind. We can use our memory and imagination to reconstruct who we are and even how we want to be. However, "it seems, in contrast to the theoretical utopian visions, people on the Net want to discover your 'true' identity" . Which, considering the cyberscape in which the meeting is taking place, would be difficult, as the essential nature of the realm has already transformed the individual. There are two examples of this phenomenon to be found in Neuromancer - Case's 'profile' and the 'flatline' McCoy Pauley.
Buzzed when approaching a sentient artificial intelligence (AI) over the Net, McCoy Pauley found himself immersed in black ice and was never the same again. Actually, he's dead. The McCoy Pauley we know now is a construct, an eerie assemblage of memories that talks like McCoy, but just ain't the real McCoy (couldn't resist). Similarly, Case keeps meeting people who seem to be in the strange position of being able to say that they know him, simply because they've seen his profile. "We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year". The fact is that these are virtual constructs of the 'real', but they lack the spontaneity and abstract thinking that constitute the human. McCoy Pauley is constantly reminding Case that it's a mistake to attribute motives and human characteristics to an AI, or even to the new McCoy himself. They react according to how they've been programmed using the various responses open to them in a repertoire of stolen reactions. It's shocking for Wintermute when Case acts outside his profile - it's like going against your own nature for the AI. Sounds like the androids that Rick Deckard finds himself chasing doesn't it? "[T]he Nexus-6 did have two trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity. In .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain structure cpould assume any one of fourteen basic postures..." This similarity is due to the fact that they all represent reflections of the true self, of the human. Humanity is something that at best can be grafted onto them. That's why Deckard likes to think that the andys have stolen identities. It's also why people are so determined to discover the 'real' you when they encounter you over the Net - as hard as you try, it just won't be the same 'you' that they'd meet 'in real life'. Annoying, but true. The identity that they meet within the virtual space is an ideal, conscious projection of the self that lacks all those characteristics you may yourself be ignorant of in real life. In fact, the new you might even be described as completely different for not only lacking certain qualities (emotion and the body for example - the 'feminine' discussed above) but because it expresses those qualities that you either consciously or unconsciously always wanted. It's for this reason that the 'new you' was described in the introduction to this essay as being an android, a cyborg, a simulacra. We find Turkle expressing the same idea when speaking of a the Net as a 'play space' - "...though as a virtual space it does not allow the movement that takes place when we share our fantasies with people face to face, say in a therapeutic group" . There's no body language for starters, often a reliable sign of whether or not you're being told the truth! Despite this potential for creation the Net is still a "consensual cliche, a dumping ground for repackaged philosophies about space, subjectivity and culture".
The philsophy of Deleuze and Guattari provides the perfect paradigm for understanding the Internet experience, dealing as it does with the notion of map-making and the exploration through production of the unconscious. In describing 'machinic phyla' in Chaosophy , Guattari points out that wherever the desire to "really live springs up", or a new development is taking place, this growth and production of ideas involves a "rejection of contemporary systems of organization and hierarchization", something which has been advocated more than once within these pages. Deleuze and Guattari capture the creative spirit of Cyberian space. In On the Line, the analogy of the rhizome, a sites of potential growth on the roots of trees, provides an excellent method of conceptualising the action taking place over the Net and what it produces. It mirrors the "tantalizing abstraction" of cyberspace, "the state of incorporeality, of disembodied immersion in a 'space' that has no coordinates in actual space" . It's this lack of coordinates that makes Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy so relevant, with its focus on deterritorialization and the exploration of territory beyond "energetico-spatio-temporal coordinates or category systems".
First and foremost, the rhizome is constituted by a principle of connection and heterogeneity. It connects semiotic chains, ideas, conceptual frameworks, theories and so forth by searching for similar rhizomes on the 'surface' of these ideologies. The goal is to connect and form a map of the vast territory of which we have only just begun to fathom the endless expanse and depth of - the unconscious. The earlier conception of cyberspace as an ocean links it with the production of the unconscious, both being territories that require navigation. Rhizomes are those spaces of the ocean that send us plunging into the depths or indicate passage to as yet undiscovered waters. The map-making, the cartography, that is in progress is limited to the description of the only discernable feature of a vast ocean - land masses. Similarly, those personalities encountered on the Net become the wildlife seen swimming within its depths. Kafka and Dick both use animals as analogous images of the human to point out our own ridiculous situation. Samsa becomes a huge dung-beetle scurrying about in the realm of the literary. What water sprites do we assume the likeness of on the Net? Sirens tempting sailors to crash their ships upon the rocks of ossified, taproot systems. Dolphins playing about the hull of the ships navigating an endless ocean. Some glowing sac of jelly floating about in the night-time waters in the very depths of the sea. Such a rich diversity opens itself up to us that we can only look to those recognisable tracts of land with which we are so familiar in order to give us some anchorage. The explorers of past ages set sail in a direction they thought best in the hope that they'd reach their destination, and oftentimes discovered whole new countries - all new territories. Plateaus of thought have formed on an immeasurable expanse. The rhizome serves to connect these masses of land across the depths which isolate them.
I also entertain the notion of a rhizome as being conporable to the corpus callosum - that complex bridge of nervous tissue connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. Consider how this relates to the Matrix - the result of the merging of the two Ai's Winternute and Neuromancer. "Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality..." . Wintermute even subscribes to this idea as an artificial intelligence, stating to Case - "I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's brain" . That same aspect which limits those using the Net, that half of our consciousness that uses what already exists as a means of constructing the new. Wintermute assumes the form of people Case knows, and situates him into virtual worlds stolen directly from his own memory (again the notion of 'stealing'). It is the other half, personality, Neuromancer, that completes the picture. Personality as the incorporated 'whole person' - emotion and physicality no doubt included. We find Neuromancer's beach cyberscape to be disturbingly dreamy, and inhabited by, you guessed it, a female. Just as Wintermute and Neuromancer, two halves of the same mind, must unite to form the whole, so should we combine aspects of ourselves through the activation of the principle of rhizomatic connection before plunging into the virtual.
The idea is to resist singularity or rigid isolation that comes about as a result of homogenous specification. In reaching out across the cyberspace and establishing links to other virtual identities, we have broken free from the isolation of space and time, for what are these measures if not irrelevant imports from the 'real'? There are no dimensions to an infinite space and, undoubtedly, the realm of cyberspace is such an infinite territory. We escape along lines of flight (or, 'light' as Gibson would have it) from the signification and organization of striated, explored territories towards new ground - Cyberia.
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