draught only

In this section of the introduction, we explore some of the issues involved in the construction of online bodies and specifically how ideas of offline gender interact with these. Firstly we shall consider the idea of the online body as pure spirit or ghost, and secondly we shall consider the body as cyborg.

'Non-physical' Bodies

In a well known and oft quoted section of William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, written before the Internet became popular, the hero of the novel, Case, has his connection to cyberspace destroyed and Gibson writes; "For Case who'd lived in the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall... The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh" (1994: 6). Although the 'meat' body of Gibson (a kind of Cartesian zombie, and clearly a product of a past history which naturalises such statements), might influence people's initial expectations about the use of bodies in cyberspace (or arise out of the same kind of factors), their experience of what they do actually do, will then feedback into speculations about possible bodies.

A particular emphasis on body and mind divisions online may have arisen because Western cultures already had a set of 'virtual body' constructions, which were constructed as complementary to, or more often as opposed to, our constructions of the 'physical body' - those of the 'soul', the 'mind', the 'dream body', the 'angel body' and the 'ghost', all of which blend together due to their status of being 'not-physical' bodies. The purpose of this section of the chapter is to demonstrate some of the historical events which are involved in the separation of mind and body and to show that this separation is not inevitable.

These Western constructions of 'ghosts', 'spirits' or the dead are not universal, and not even stable throughout European history. Many cultures specify many different kinds of what we would call spirit. For example the people of Zinancantan in Mexico have a 13 part soul (Helman 1992: 109). Many forms of western esotericism have distinguished the 'occult anatomy' with similar complexity (Mead 1919). Other Western traditions, such as Lullian alchemy, have argued that the distinction between spirit and matter is one of degree, that matter can be etherealised and spirit concentrated - but even given the well known scientific proposition of the convertibility of matter and energy these conceptions do not seem to have ever gained dominance. Likewise, despite the sacred writings of the West distinguish between what we translate as 'soul' and 'spirit' these distinctions have not become part of popular modern religious discourse [[In the Hebrew Bible 'nephesh' is distinguished from 'ruach' and in the Greek Bible 'psyche' is distinguished from 'pneuma'.]] Europeans, in general, have one soul and one body and they are unrelated opposites. That Western studies of 'apparitions' tend to become studies dealing with ghosts and the existence of the soul (Green 1977: 120), also demonstrates this tendency towards bi-polar homogenisation.

As a further example of the variety in the way non-Western people construct 'spirits', it is frequently the case that some of those 'spirits' associated with humans can act independently but remain connected to the person - sometimes bringing joy other times disaster. Often these joined and connected souls will look like an animal and have the properties attributed to that animal. For example Ruel (1970) claims the Banyang say that all humans are individually connected to normally separate animals or other natural phenomenon (babu) which they can transform themselves into, or send out as an extension of themselves. The babu moves in a parallel world, the 'forest of babu', which is described as a 'shadow world', but can have effects in this world - making other humans sick or destroying their crops for example, and if the babu is caught then the person connected to it becomes ill. The point of this reference is not just anthropological exoticism but to illustrate that a not altogether unfamiliar schema (and I'm not making any point about complete translatability of Banyang concepts), could easily be applied to 'cyber experience'. There are separate but parallel worlds, one is a 'shadow' of the other, part of oneself goes into the other world and behaves differently (perhaps more socially 'irresponsibly'), yet the person remains connected to this other self. Tensions in one world can spill into the other. However such a model almost certainly will not be popular in the Western world, something restricts our possibilities. [[A probably similar concept of the 'familiar' is known in Europe as well, though our understanding may be distorted by theories of the demonic imposed by an interpretive elite. Probably the most interesting study of this is Ginzburg (1983) writing of the benedanti of North East Italy who fought astral battles against witches, but who under the pressure of the Inquisition came to be regarded as witches themselves.]]

Reactions to the dead throughout the world can be similarly varied. People can be afraid of them, or try to encourage them to stay near by. The dead can go elsewhere to another realm, live in a village over the hill, or live underground. The dead can be solid and concrete like normal humans, or shape changers, or intangible and so on. There is little point in looking for a universal construction of spirits or ghosts, so I shall concentrate here on European ghosts. It is of some interest to see how these conceptions of ghosts have changed over time and in parallel with other conceptions, though it is the ghost from the 19th Century onwards, the somewhat disconnected and uncolourful modern ghost, that is important for the Internet. Of course when discussing Western ghosts we are discussing those ghosts which literate recorders thought worthwhile to record, so there is a selection bias in this history, even beyond that of whatever experience it is that is constructed as a ghost.

It may be useful when considering the idea of 'disembodied bodies' to have some grasp of the history of spirits and ghosts, and some idea of the kind of influences which have proved significant in this history.

Finucane writes that after purgatory became doctrine in the medieval West then the dead were thought to come from there when they visited the living (1982: 59). The dead tell that they are damned, or in need of confession or vicarious penance, or come to warn the living (ibid: 60). People can do penance for the ghost and free it from Purgatory (ibid: 67). Often ghosts would bear the marks of their punishment (ibid: 65). A dead scholar, for example, might wear a parchment cape covered in writing which looked to be as heavy as a church tower (ibid: 72). As the living pray for these burdened ghosts the ghost body would become white. Most spirits looked like sad pale versions of their living selves. Some were intangible, more were concrete. Medieval ghosts spoke clearly and plainly, they usually told their viewer what to do - though sometimes the viewer had to speak to the ghost first. Apparitions announcing their own or the spectator's death were rare in this period (ibid: 81-2). Of the recorded ghosts most seem to have been male and clergy, as were their viewers and recorders, and most viewers knew the ghost (ibid: 84). It is to be expected that in this period the experiences of women might end up unrecorded, so that might affect the qualities of the sample.

In countries which became Protestant after the Reformation, Purgatory was discarded, and so ghosts could no longer originate there (Finucane 1982: 91). Protestant writers usually believed that ghosts were illusions, demons or of angelic origin (ibid: 93). The writers, of this period show some concern for what makes the body of a ghost - Guazzo, for example, describes a damned spirit making a body out of the air, while Glanville argues that spirits contain an aerial and an astral body, the astral departs but the aerial can remain. King James thought the devil was the source of all apparitions and could even reanimate the dead (ibid: 121, 105, 95).

Joseph Glanville and his friend the Cambridge Platonist Henry More specifically used the examples of 'ghosts' and 'witches' to make arguments about the complexity of the 'subtle bodies' (to use a more recent term), and the forces, present in the world (1700 originally ???). They also argued for the pre-existence of the soul, and that the soul needed different and specific kinds of bodies to interact with the created world (1682). However this kind of explanation by multiples seems to have become impossible during the 18th century and was abandoned- along with the spirits, witches and magic which exemplified this complexity.

About half the narrations from this period that Finucane looks at, deal with provisions for heirs, warnings to the living, and murders (including those done by the ghost before death) (1982: 126). He comments; "Most seventeenth century ghosts were practical beings, known to their percipients, who returned for some particular purpose, from pursuing murderers to comforting their mourning loved one's" (ibid: 145). "The dead were still functioning in society, were concerned with ongoing trivial and familial problems... two thirds were personally known to their percipients" (ibid: 150). These ghosts tend not to be wreathed in flames, or blackened like their medieval counterparts. Though they can often represent the condition at death, most are quite normal in appearance. They generally do not just appear or float through walls, but open and close doors and pull back bed curtains (ibid: 149), which implies they had a degree of physicality.

In the 19th and 20th centuries there are three kinds of representations of ghosts - the 'manufactured' ghosts of either seance or literary tale, and the ghost as perceived (and perceived eagerly we might add). Whereas ghosts of the seance were helpful and ghosts of story vindictive and malicious, the ghost as perceived was generally indifferent. Most Victorian ghosts were "wispy figures that floated about darkened chambers with no apparent reason" (Finucane 1982: 204), they were apparitions of humans unknown to the viewer, they tended to be insubstantial, vague, often greyish, and tended to be mute and often apparently unaware of the viewer. They were often identifiably of a previous time (ibid: 211).

Modern ghosts are pretty similar to the 19th century ghost with the difference that they are more often opaque or tangible (Finucane 1982: 223).

Although ghosts appeared in great numbers in nineteenth century fiction, these appearances declined during the twentieth, becoming ineffectual and now almost always comic (Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost is probably the first of such stories). For modern writers, horror seems to focus primarily on the 'monster', or even upon the human - it focuses on physical bodies, mutilation and the walking dead - the body violated or out of control and lethal.

One of the interesting things about modern Western ghosts as perceived is their difference from the ghosts of literary story (cf Jaffe 1979: 181-3). A similar difference has also been noted between people reporting abduction by aliens and those asked to imagine such an abduction (Bryan 1995: 45) [[The sample for this research was absurdly small and the proposition cannot be held to be demonstrated, but nevertheless it is an interesting result.]]. Precisely what this means is unclear, but it seems the ghost as perceived has far more effect upon people's behaviour and conceptualisation than the ghost of literature.

In general we may note the connection between religion and ghosts, or rather the relation between the beliefs about the dead and the observations people made of what they interpreted to be ghosts. The increased opposition, or difference between the theories about mind and body seems to have rendered the ghost more ineffectual and less interested in its current surroundings.

This complete opposition between mind and body, though having a long history among other positions, can be said to have developed and become dominant in the 17th century through a successful strategy employed by an 'intellectual' administrative class to distinguish realms which could be controlled by the church from realms which were open to its own investigation, theorisation and control. This became institutionalised in the governors, or managers, who undertook mind work and the governed who performed body work and who, ideally, do not question. One of the problems for the 'New Philosophy' of Descartes, Boyle and Newton was to retain the necessity of God, while removing the possibility of unmediated communication with God, as the latter theory ('religious enthusiasm') was widely blamed for the social upheavals of the Seventeenth Century. The Mechanical Philosophy, by stripping matter of life, removed the immanence of divine process, while rendering God necessary to design, start and maintain the machine. Eventually the machine became conceptually sufficient alone. [[The analytical arguments about this are intense, as might be expected. As well as Marshall (1992), which gathers the social, political, linguistic and epistemological arguments, good introductions to the debate are M.Jacob (1976), J.Jacob (1977), Easlea (1980), Hunter (1981), Merchant (1990), Shapin (1994).]].

People's expectations about spirits changed as this process continued. As we saw the ghost becomes more ethereal from the 17th to the 19th Century. The upheavals of the current century for a while loosened this boundary and the ghost became more 'solid'. It might be worth drawing attention to the contrast between the apparent increase in preoccupation with both body and State boundaries over this period, (as described by Elias), and the growing etherealization, and detachment, of the ghost.

In the post computer age some constructions of the 'mind' appear to be etherealising again online. This might be linked in mutual feedback with the constant attempts to characterise the new elites supposedly dealing with immaterial information, as 'knowledge workers' opposed to 'physical' service workers or the valueless unemployed. If some such position is accepted, then as the Internet has primarily been colonised by Western males who seek dominance via the supposed excellence of their mental, or administrative abilities, or their symbolic creativity, it might be expected that they have used the Internet to emphasize etherealization as part of their construction of their male identity. As an example Taylor and Saarinen write that their female students using email were:

"much more uneasy about the 'out-of-body' experience they are having than the men. Cynthia and Kaisu are obsessed with email and yet are deeply disturbed by the evaporation of the material and the absence of face-to-face. The men in the class are much less bothered by all of this" (1994: 'Body Snatching 7').

Hall points to another aspect of etherealization:

"Bodyless communication, then, for many men at least is characterised not by a genderless exchange but rather by an exaggeration of cultural conceptions of masculinity - one realised through the textual construction of conversational dominance, sexual harassment, heterosexism, and physical hierarchies" (1996: 158).

However, this simple division between male etherealisation and female embodiedness did not seem dominant on Cybermind in its early days, as might be expected if gender no longer marks 'knowledge workers'. The offline body could be feminine if compared to online 'spirit', but masculine if virile and active as compared to online ineffective. However later discussions implied that men were more likely to consider that the body markers of identity - particularly those of gender - could be abandoned, perhaps because their default symbolic position had more in common with normal male identity patterns.

However, usage of bodies in a MOO or on IRC or on a mailing list differ even when the users share the same type of social background. [[needs to be shown]] These constructions are hard to keep separate as they will interact and influence each other.

At the same time a counterpositional process has been occurring with the association of online presence with the 'non-virile body', when compared with the possibility of an active and effective body offline. This is what we might call 'the brain in the vat' model, where online usage is implied to waste away the physical body and the possibility of effective action. [[write more - kroker etc]]

The construction is a least as complex as: Male : Female :: Intellect : Body :: Manager : Worker :: Active Body : Passive Body.

This allows elision of 'the female' on two fronts - that of 'the mind' and of 'the body'. Perhaps the starkness of the gender polarity and its linkage with these other dyads that gives the mind body split its apparent recurrence.

Cyborgs

The ghost is not the only model of the cyberbody to be found online - the cyborg, a melding of human and machine is also quite common. This, in contrary to the usual movement of describing landscape in terms of the human body, attempts the reverse, to describe the body in terms of the electronic machines it lives among. Harraway suggests that while we sit relatively passively in front of the machines, the machines themselves seem active, and imbued with more life, or resistance, than ourselves.

References to the Cyborg body seemed rarer than references to the disembodied body on Cybermind, and more self conscious. Such variation might have something to do with either the topic or the people involved.

However many theorists also involve gender explicitly in cyborgization. For example they may connect the machinization of the human with the loss of human 'emotions', tenderness or 'contact' (which are associated with the feminine), suggesting, in Western terms, that cyborgization exaggerates of ideas of masculinity, distance from emotional contact, and its transcendence of the (gendered) flesh.. And its obverse that as the machinic becomes human, like Schwarzenegger's Terminator, it gains emotions. [[It is interesting that Schwarzenegger's character in Terminator 2 comes up in all discussions of cyborgs I have seen, when technically the character is not a cyborg - it is a robot which looks human.]]

In this theory, it can be alleged that disruptions to ego development are sheltered behind ideas of armour, and people attempt to attain invulnerability by allying with the machine. Under a dominant system of technological control where boundaries and command are drawn and imposed from outside people further identify with the machine, and release their fear of dissolution in aggression against outsiders. Reference is particularly made here to Theweleit's study of the Freikcorps who particularly feared the 'bloody mass' of the feminine (reminiscent of Reynolds' associating the female with the protoplasmic), in this case the flow of the unformed threatens the hyper-form of the machinic ego (Bukatman 1993: 303-4, Robins & Levidow 1995).

Springer argues the image in films of the Cyborg makes use of the overt power and strength of the 'passing' industrial technology, while powered by the diffuse, concealed power of computers - it is a 'hypermasculine' resistance (1996: 111-2). Or as Bukatman phrases it: "The techno-organic fusion of these cinematic cyborgs thus represents only an exaggerated defensive formation, another panic subject frantically hiding its obsolescence behind a suit of armour" (1993: 310). Motifs of 'obsolescence' imply another triumphal narrative - this time of 'soft-tech'.

This leads to the question of whether more aggressive net users see themselves as cyborgs with greater ease than less aggressive. Or whether Cyborgization primarily functions in net discourse to indicate one is an insider and deeply implicated in cyberspace usually in relation to, or with, others.

This summary of a summary emphasises the mythic attraction the ideas of the relationship between cyborgs and male gender have. However, in her famous essay - A Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Harraway sees cyborgs as post-gendered (Harraway 1989b).

Harraway argues that the cyborg "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism" (149) can be a model for re-imagining liberation. "In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics...- the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination" (150). In particular the borders concerned are those between animal and human, human and machine and physical and non-physical. And the cyborg is supposed to challenge these divisions, without leading us to the "seductive" desire for some kind of organic wholeness, and nature ceases to be simply a resource appropriated by or incorporated into culture. However it could possibly be argued that the border war, has been fought, or even wone, by the dominant groups trying to extend the machine into the regulation of, or incorporation of, the subordinate. Thus it is largely working people who have rebelled against the extension of the machine, and the regulation of their lives by machine - because it is the work people who largely become fodder for a machine programmed elsewhere with no regard for their lives. If this is the case then the cyborg could be thought of as an extension of industrial power into the human realm - a way of making work total. However there is little doubt that the machines can also be seen as ways of extending a person's, power into the world as well, of extending their boundaries.

Another, more unlikely argument she makes is that cyborgs have no dependency - yet cyborgs must depend on machines - even while these machines may be elsewhere or not under their control - and on being serviced. Further she argues that cyborgs cannot return to dust, and thus might avoid the telos of nuclear war. The reason why disruption of the telos might have this effect is unclear to me, as nuclear war can also involve images of shattered machinery - perhaps not dust but rust. Indeed we might be haunted by images of a bio war in which all our human parts die while the machines labour on, or die with us.

These cyber machines, according to Harraway are not haunted, yet we have seen their "liveliness" perhaps makes them more haunted - it must be remembered that the counterpart to the cyborg is the ghost. Her statements such as "Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile ... Cyborgs are ether, quintessence" (153), suggest that even to her, cybermachines are ready homes for disembodiment and etherealisation, and possibly enable a destruction of our bodies and their homes.

Elsewhere she suggests that indeed the extension of the cyborg could lead to "the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet" - Computers are heavily involved in the control of work and in the command structures of corporation and military - but she suggests that it might simultaneously enable the visioning of a system in which people "are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (155). We might, however, wonder in what way the cyborg, who has slain their 'mere' flesh, would inevitably see some kind of kinship with the animal. It appears that people such as Hans Moravec in fact seem to see the cyborg as evidence that the flesh, or the animal, is not an essential part of the human, or even of life.

The cyborg might, she claims, further destabilise the categories of class or gender, which have previously lead the political Left to fission into different identity movements - "Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole" (157). She also argues against those forms of feminism (and it would apply to other 'victim models') which see the complete origin of woman in the desire of some other groups, rather than in the struggles of that self (or group). These particular forms of feminism, she claims, effectively obliterate the existence of women, and any other form of action that women may take (159). In her view, the cyborg allows us to "not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints.... no 'natural' architectures constrain system design" (162). However, seeing relatively oppressed groups as active, resistant and not without power, does not require us to transform either them or ourselves into cyborgs.

She also writes:

"Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings" (164).

This also might imply, as I argued above, that cyborgisation is often not driven by people embracing it, but by it being inflicted upon them - perhaps as an unintended consequence of transnational corporation and military control and communication. However it is possible that both infliction and embrace might be true - the boundary is not clear, certain or fixed.

It is not however obvious that making what were previously clear boundaries vague, is always radical when the vagueness is part of the way that the transnational corporation or the military seeks to avoid regulation, to destroy public participation in public life, or to make their workforce more vulnerable as well. Vagueness acts both ways, and may reinforce power at the same time it changes it.

"Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other" (175).

She continues that:

"Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. .... 'We' did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of 'texts' " (176).

Again it might be suggested that noise which stops us from thinking, and pollution which stops us from breathing or eating, might be being provided for us at much greater volumes by those who are already in dominance.

"Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric exten-sions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth" (180).

There may be others, of course, who think that a world in which no woman could engage in mothering might be one, in which the masculine has obliterated all difference.

In a slightly more pessimistic turn Cecil Helman suggests that the (cyborg) body of artificial parts like 'Frankenstein's monster' symbolises a type of society which is an assemblage of disparate parts animated by science and electricity, but with the brain of a criminal and, we might add, 'out of control' (1992: 24). It certainly seems the case, that to our mythic imaginations the danger of machines taking over, is more pronounced than that of us becoming one with them in an empowering sense. Never the less, it suggests that we can work with a triad of mind, body and machine, even though they are not really separate.

New Ways of Bodying

Mitrofanova has presented another interesting attempt to see the body as a matter of differential intensities through which information is transmitted. "the body as intensity which connects energetically and desiringly with other intensities; which produces organs as a response to specific events and creative necessities of the moment; which is presence and process rather than organized structure; which is hypertextual and has no gender program. So, an embodied intense database as an operative model of creation, of becoming, of happiness" ('Faith' 1999).

Eventually if 'our bodies' can be thought of as informational intensities, then we do not need to separate experience and language, both are inadequate to the other and resist each other without being separate from each other. Our bodies and the world 'speak' (as in exchange 'information', but this itself is only a deferral of a metaphor), but it may be in a different language which is not a simple transform of human language, or vice versa. And as all such exchange depends upon the context which it partly constitutes, then the worlding that gives forth the experiencing and speaking of bodies and selves may well change. The problem is that the split disposes of both, while appearing to dispose of one.

In some ways this split is about setting up barriers, or drawing lines between things, and apparently privileging one and perhaps we should ask what this apparent privileging allows the privileging of elsewhere, and what kind of dominance it is part of. We might even suggest that such disposals of the body suggest, not that the old forms of authority are disposed of, but that they are intensified.

Bodies on CM....