| The Online Body Breaks
Out? Asence, Ghosts, Cyborgs, Gender, Polarity and Politics
[1]
Jonathan Marshall
Representations of the online body seem constantly involved with
issues of imprecise, crossed or broken boundaries. Online boundaries,
both personal and group, appear especially fluid when contrasted
with moves towards establishing impermeable boundaries offline.
This contributes to perceptions of disembodiment or potential unity
with machines. Online bodies are thus described in terms reminiscent
of other constructs such as ghosts – partly because experiences
of materiality can be described in terms of boundary issues, and
partly because it is difficult to bring offline bodies to bear.
From another angle, gender, when constructed as a polarity, also
serves to “ghost” experience. However, online bodies are also connected
to constructions and feelings of offline bodies to reduce ambiguities
and to establish authenticity online. For example, mood, as sustained
by the offline body, acts as a framing for communication in netsex,
mourning and flame.
Another popular body metaphor in this context involves the description
of people as cyborgs. It is sometimes claimed that cyborgs form
radical “hybrid” entities. Yet cyborgs also get caught in boundary
issues. The cyborg is, for example, caught in narratives that further
capitalist technopower, whatever our intentions.
The situation becomes even more complex when we consider that both
the ghostly body and the cyborg body are often contrasted with a
virile and active offline body. This provides a further set of paradoxes
if we consider the possibility of online action affecting the offline
world. There are no easy answers.
1.1 Boundaries and Offline Bodies
As online and offline blur, and are intimately involved, it is
useful to begin by looking at some offline issues around bodies,
in particular those around boundaries. [2]
A common offline narrative indicating boundary anxiety holds that
Western [3] bodies
are precariously porous and under attack from outside by “germs”.
These germs or viruses are ubiquitous evils associated with matter
out of place, or untoward contact. They come from other people
and overpower us when our personal or social boundaries are not
maintained (Douglas, 1969). This narrative has expanded to include
other boundary violators, such as carcinogens, radiation, chemical
food additives, and genetic modification.
One of the best descriptions of this anxiety complex is given by
Martin in her study of ideas about the immune system. However her
thesis of change, from the maintenance of external barriers to the
maintenance of personal immune systems, over the last 40 years,
seems exaggerated. She gives plenty of contemporary examples of
boundary anxiety towards foreign substances (1994: 37-9, 53-4, 67,
230ff.), reflected also in recent advertising campaigns promoting
wars on bacteria in the household. The latter focus on children
ingesting germs if bacteria are not “wiped out”. This indicates
that barrier models of defence are still strong, despite reports
of such anti-bacterial agents helping the evolution of resistant
bacteria and impeding the development of the immune system.
Similarly in the “Western” world, boundaries between groups and
methods of maintaining boundaries seem insecure and focuses of anxiety.
People often feel unable to control either their own, or their group’s,
destiny or security. Forces around them (political, economic, cultural,
criminal, ecological etc.), seem beyond control and likely to overwhelm
at any moment, often fortifying conspiracy theories and what Timothy
Melly calls ‘agency panic’ (2000: 7-16).
Boundaries between work and home are threatened as portable electronics
bring us forever in range of work. In politics the global is said
to threaten the local and so on. States attempt to deal with anxieties
around vagueness and disruption in their boundaries brought by technology,
migration and corporate motility (Everard, 2000). In response, some
try to construct boundaries which are impermeable to the outside.
In Australia our government successfully appealed to an electorate
through panic about being overwhelmed by refugees. The “fortress”
enclave, equipped with private security guards, is widely represented
as a response by the wealthier middle class to disorder around them
(Hills, 1998). Evan McKenzie, writing in 1993, claimed that over
30 million Americans (one eighth of the population) lived in these
enclaves (q. Boyer, 1996: 151). There is no reason to suppose this
number has diminished.
As Cecil Helman points out, the terms of sickness (and hence boundary
violation) are commonly used in describing society and its boundary
problems – we live in a “sick society” suffering “epidemics”, or
“plagues” of social problems (1992: 53-4, 67, 230ff.).
1.2: Online Boundaries
Such pressures and panics can intensify online as online groups
rarely have formal boundaries, and almost never have boundaries
observable by all members. People wander in and out, and the majority
of members don’t participate, or participate so infrequently they
are invisible. Fear of disruption from viruses, from spam, from
outsiders, or trolls, who might wish to disturb the group is large
(Marshall, 2000: Chp 5, Herring et al, 2003).
This vagueness of group boundaries extends to the personal in a
blurring between presence and absence. In offline societies, it
is generally possible to tell whether a person is present or not.
Presence and status are acknowledged by others making, at the least,
eye contact or grunts in a person’s direction, or by their pointedly
ignoring that person. Identity is reinforced by reaction. People
are generally aware of who is listening to the conversation and
of their reactions to each other. Online this is usually not the
case. It is possible for a person to be present without others
being aware of them: there is no marker of existence beyond the
act of communication itself. “Asence” is the term I have coined
to express this almost ontological uncertainty, or suspension of
being between presence and absence.
Even in email “conversation”, this suspension of being occurs in
the lack of closure of exchange. In offline conversation, reception
of a message and the ending of communication is marked by a negotiation
of grunts and/or formal phrases – however, email conversation usually
ends abruptly in suspension. There is no certainty whether you
have been received, or read, or of the nature of your reader’s reaction.
The only way to know that you exist to others is by their response,
and yet only a relatively few mails to Lists receive acknowledgment,
even if people liked the post. The writer receives little reinforcement
or feedback to most of their communication presences. Their presence
is always drifting away. Status has to be continually re-earned
before a shifting audience. People might be able to express themselves
without inhibition, thus giving a feel of intimacy, but there may
be no response, thus giving the feel of absence and isolation.
Attempting to resolve this asence is important for many online behaviours
(Marshall, 2000; 2004).
2. Online Bodies
Initial explorations of what people report about online bodies
focuses on the Mailing List Cybermind, the group with which I have
most ethnographic experience. Cybermind was founded by Alan Sondheim
and Michael Current in mid 1994 to discuss the ‘philosophical and
psychological implications of subjectivity in cyberspace’. It has
always been a List that has combined this discussion with a large
amount of reportage, art, social activity and politics. I have
been on List since December 1994. [4]
In May 1997 Alan Sondheim wrote questions to Cybermind which were
relevant to these issues. The first question was: ‘When you are
on-line, do you feel that your body has a specific beginning and
ending? Are you aware of your body?’
Several people left the first part of this question unanswered,
which may imply body beginning and ending are not normally within
the awareness of “Western” people, or are taken for granted. However
some implied they felt their bodies extend on line. For
example Enok wrote: ‘I am a secret tiger, walking restless along
the fence, stretching my paws out between the bars, - to touch and
scratch the freedom’. Alan added: ‘it's as if I’m extended into
another space, boundariless’. Rose wrote that her body ‘flows into
the space created for it. Always!’. Jerry: ‘my fingers reach out
into the wires...’. These statements carry the implication that
online life is free from restriction or the “resistance of the Real”,
and hence from “materiality”.
Other people implied that they lost awareness of their body. Kerry
wrote:
[After logging in], body awareness subsides against the intense
linguisticity, the concentration on/of what is being _said_ even
as the digits and the pixels conceal and obscure.
FOP2 wrote: ‘If there is ever a time when my body is simply carrying
my eyes, this is it’. KNS suggested that body awareness varies
with activity:
Different activities involve different physical sensations:
reading on the web, my body is relaxed and I sprawl in the chair;
posting I am more attentive, all my awareness focused on my fingers
and I “feel” my mind more; with my online lover, I am aware of
intense erotic sensations very different from RL sex
Paula wrote of disruption to this lack of awareness:
As in RL I am most often unaware of my body. But on occasion,
as when the smell of the breeze (or person) causes a physical
response in me, online I may suddenly become aware of the silky
keys under my fingers.
Rose alone suggested that ‘Body awareness *increases*..... ('Course,
it might depend on the identity of the sender.... ;)’, implying
this is related to sexual attraction. She answered the question
about lack of boundaries with: ‘Only when a particular name appears.
Love’.
Extension, and loss of body awareness was not my experience. This
may be related to discomfort. I first proposed this when faced
with increasing hand pain and in discussing downloading consciousness:
Pain inhibits typing, so there is less presence of me.[...] Would
i exchange this body for a life in wires?
such a being would no longer be me, but i suspect there would
be a lack in the wires- even more marked than the lack in life,
and maybe- though pain free- I’d have even less to say.
Orlando, who did not mention extension, was also aware of physical
discomfort: ‘Perpetual bloody headaches. I'm aware of my fingers
and my head and my cramped legs, crossed and uncomfortable’. Similarly
G mentioned their awareness of boundaries, and wrote: ‘Yes, the
small muscles in my eyelids flutter like VoltaFrogsLegs. My butt
aches, I need Coffee’.
Another question Alan phrased in terms of boundaries was: ‘Do you
have immersion-feelings when on-line, lack of boundaries? If so,
to what do you ascribe these?’
Immersion seems to have been interpreted by respondents to refer
to their level of involvement in online activities, and was frequently
linked with lack of awareness of time passing. For example zoogirl
writes:
On-line (or whilst at the pc reading and writing) I feel immersed
in what I’m doing to the extent that time telescopes and dissappears.
I forget to eat (useful when dieting) and can usually carry on
regardless of how tired I feel. This is unlike other activities.
Sometimes, the tiredness evaporates when on-line in a way which
worries me. It seems that the body is producing some chemical
to override normal patterns in response to the CMC. I can’t work
out why it should do this.
Rose comments ‘I'll grant you this: the awareness of “time elapsed”
is suspended in this medium. Remarkably so’. Kerry discussing
the decline of his body awareness when online writes: ‘For evidence,
it's enough to look at the clock and see that 2 or 3 hours have
evaporated’.
Perhaps this lack of time-awareness renders the experience of online
life as occurring in a different type of time to “normal” time,
and helps reinforce historical vagueness (lack of group history)
or “mythic” time in which succession is not fixed.
Alan suggests “immersion feelings” are modality dependent:
I ascribe them to an identification with the site or domain I’m
reading/writing. It happens more often when working on, say,
javascript or exploring sendmail, than when reading/writing email.
It happens totally with Netsex, the strongest often in cuseeme.
KNS thought immersion was compensatory for life problems, suggesting
some moral ambiguities:
At times I do get completely immersed in being online and have
difficulty focusing on my “real” life. I ascribe it to my fascination
with the medium, but even more to difficulties in my real life.
Jerry locates the degree of immersion in intimacy and boundary
fluidity:
yes there are always immersion feelings - same as when I write
or read - the boundaries get fluid. I ascribe these to the question
of the locus of subjectivitiy - how close one is to the Other
- personal space is always variable depending on who one is talking
to.
FOP2 agrees to the lack of boundaries:
Yes, have immersion-feelings when on-line, lack of boundaries?...
Writing to a list is like being in Shaw’s heaven, where people
are coming and going in a mist, meeting, fading away, so yes,
no boundaries.
Which implies that to be conceived of as “boundaries” by “Western”
people such boundaries have to be sharp or observable.
These responses imply that people’s experience of personal boundaries
online are more fluid, weak or indefinite than in offline life (perhaps
leading to a larger sense of self), unless inhibited by pain or
discomfort. To become present online, the body becomes asent, which
may be its condition in much offline involvement as well, but it
seems more noticeable online. Vagueness of group and personal boundaries
may reinforce each other.
One method of dealing with these boundary problems is to rigidly
enforce the boundaries, or polarities, between the net persona and
the person themselves. This argument usually proposes that all
behavioural rules can be discarded because no behaviour on the net
(which does not interfere with a user’s computer) can actually hurt
another person. In this view only the “body,” as separated
from the “mind”, can actually suffer pain. Two List members took
this position at the Cybermind Conference but nearly all List members
who commented disagreed, which might be expected given the positive
valuation of empathy in the group (Marshall 2000, Chapters 10-12).
Perhaps this rigid separation is also held by those who propose
that netsex is safe sex with no ill consequences or that it is easy
to separate public and private spaces on the net, with those who
cannot being declared weak or naïve.
3. Sustaining Mood: Emotion, Framing and Intimacy
What people say about their online bodies does not exhaust the
way they use their bodies online.
On an email List, a variety of moods is common, as many threads
and responses appear simultaneously to the reader. Sustained mood
(often construed as a bodily response), which can then become a
stable framing for the interpretation of messages, is rare and most
commonly occurs in flame wars, although it also occurs with death
and netsex.
3.1 Flame War
It only takes a few people to create a flame war. Although many
people may comment indirectly on a dispute the number of people
directly involved can be small. In one memorable war, most mail
came from five people, and not more than twelve commented directly,
yet perceptions were that the dispute overwhelmed the List. Mail
of one consistent mood (in this case hostile) dominated over the
more fragmented moods of other mails. This derives from asence;
only the visible or the responding exist to affect others. [5]
In an environment where it is next to impossible to exclude people
(particularly in newsgroups), public condemnation and humiliation
is the only obvious way to exert social control. Thus flames are
often used to establish boundaries, to point out those unfamiliar
with group conventions and get them to learn or leave. However,
the List may become almost unreadably voluminous in a flame war,
which drives away those with less commitment to it. So the way
of establishing boundaries can also disrupt them. Further, if the
body is the ultimate locus of power, then the frustration involved
in trying to bring the body directly into acts of social control
renders that body “immaterial” or at least asent; it cannot act
directly upon the bodies of others.
3.2 Death
Sustained mood may partly explain people’s surprise at their intense
emotional responses to Michael Current’s death in the first month
of Cybermind’s existence. For example, Debra writes two years later:
The most powerful event of my online life (so far) was the death
of Michael Current [...] I still don’t understand why, as right
now when I think of him I find tears in my eyes.
Argyle, lurking at the time, reports in an article that she wondered:
What was going on with me? Why was I so upset? Why did I have
to read all these messages. Why do I still think about it now?
(1996: 136).
At the time of death, many other List members wrote as if surprised
at the extent of their grief, and found they had to justify their
ties to Michael – usually by describing offlist contact – thus establishing
the personal ties necessary to legitimate grief.
Reiteration of grief from a relatively large number of people produced
a radically different experience from the normal mode of reading,
and for some this crossed Lists. Fido wrote:
For me the ritual has already begun in the cycling of messages
repeated and repeated from list to list as I leaf through five,
six seven copies of the same awkward anguish, one copy for each
place we haunted together
In these messages of grief, not only was the mood sustained, but
the mood was known by everyone, and possessed a momentum of its
own. We all have griefs, and these can all resonate (even if they
were not initially griefs for Michael). [6]
There was also no feeling that the surviving
family needed to be protected from the grief of those distant from
the deceased.
However there were few ritual usages to maintain mood, and no markers
to remind people of the appropriate mood. Ritual gestures such
as silence and quiet, common at “Western” funerals, would have simply
implied the List was not present or was uninterested. Thus even
with the intensity of feeling involved, the List could only maintain
the mood for several days, and soon returned to normal.
3.3 Netsex and Framing
Netsex on Cybermind is covered in Marshall (2003) so the arguments
are only briefly recapped here. Demands for authenticity and the
conflation of gender relations with intimacy make gender exceedingly
important in offlist or personal communication. Netsex is part
of the hidden life of Cybermind, and occurs between members in other
online environments. Following Foucault (1979: 6-7), discourse
about sex in “Western” society tends to be considered a revelation
of “truth”, and hence a form of declaring authenticity. This links
with signs of the body acting as signs of authenticity, and suggests
that sex is used to establish the “truth” needed to make intimacy.
Without normal persevering presence, sex and bonding become more
marked, especially on MOOs, to reduce asence and give a sense of
physical presence, anchored in a sustained, mutually referenced
and common, offline body response.
On MOOs boundary problems and forms of asence are emphasised.
On a MOO a person can be excluded; or an intimate conversation can
have participants which another participant is not aware of; or
a person can give attention to multiple subjects at the same time.
[7] I have
heard of people leaving the computer to smoke or go to the toilet
without informing the person they were supposedly being intimate
with. Any kind of special relationship in this circumstance needs
something which renders a claim possible, yet conventions of authenticity
clash with uses of ritual to maintain, or mark, these states or
claims. Commonly people use sex to sustain the mutuality of mood.
Within this high asence environment with weak boundaries and little
elaborated ritual code, people might need to “fall in love” to prove
a relationship actually exists. Love is the prime justification
in “Western” society for closeness and intimacy, particularly between
the sexes. A person can then maintain the presence of the other
before them via narration and body feeling. Netsex can also, as
one person wrote to me, restore contact if the dialogue slides out
of areas of mutual interest.
Concerns with asence and authenticity can clash and lead to deletion
– especially given widespread fears of gender appropriateness around
intimacy which translate into fears about the identity of the offline
body. Even if the gender of the person online may not match their
gender offline, the gender they choose usually exaggerates the conventions
of gender construction. On MOOs, most women and men are adorned
with an excess of the symbolisms of the gender and sexual discourse
they participate within. As Springer writes, when discussing cyberpunk
novels and films ‘cyberbodies, in fact, tend to appear masculine
or feminine to an exaggerated degree’ (1996: 64).
This use of gender symbols to enable the performance may appear
to simultaneously delete the presence of “real gender”, or a real
self, which might be expressed in uncertainties and hesitations.
As a consequence most people I have discussed online romance with
fear they could fall for fantasy (inauthentic) images, and hence
need to bring the relationship into the offline “real” to check
it or render it “true”.
Thus, although online romance may be perceived as intense, it may
also be perceived as “unreal” (the offline body being real). The
person becomes caught in a contradiction between an intimacy which
can only be confirmed offline, and an equally supposed ability to
only be “who they are” while online.
In this context, one List member asked:
on the net we can (start to) efface the connections between the
body and the signs of discipline or the inhabitor of the body
and the enactor of discipline. Once that happens then what is
the body, or the person, that *isn't* those things?
Perhaps we can suggest that they become spectral or even more elusive.
4. The Haunted Computer
“Western” cultures already have a set of “virtual body” constructions,
which are complementary to our constructions of the “physical body”;
those of the “soul”, the “mind”, and the “ghost”, all of which blend
together due to their status of being “not-physical” bodies. The
polarity between mind/body, generates the parallel of “virtual”
or online for “spiritual”, and offline for physical.
Such a material/immaterial split is not essential, and many Western
traditions have proposed more elaborate divisions of the mind, including
the sources of mainstream religion. The Hebrew Scriptures distinguish
nephesh from ruach, and the Greek Testament distinguishes
psyche from pneuma. Both of these divisions are often
translated as “soul” and “spirit”. Lullian alchemy makes the distinction
between spirit and matter one of degree; matter could be etherealised
and spirit concentrated. Mid Seventeenth Century philosophers such
as Joseph Glanville and Henry More used examples of ghosts and witches
to make arguments about the complexity of the multi-part soul’s
interaction with the world. Such arguments seem to have become
incomprehensible in the Eighteenth Century and later. [8]
Other cultures can become more elaborate. The people of Zinancantan
in Mexico have a 13 part soul (Helman, 1992: 109). According to
Ruel (1970) the Banyang claimed that humans are individually connected
to animals or other natural phenomenon (babu) into which
they can transform, or send out as an extension of themselves.
The babu moves in a parallel ‘shadow’ world, the ‘forest of babu’,
with effects in this world – making humans sick or destroying crops
for example.
The point of this reference is not just exoticism but to illustrate
a schema which could easily be applied to online experience, but
which seems unavailable to Westerners. 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 we are connected to this other self. Tensions in one world
spill into the other.
Despite such traditions, we tend to polarise body and mind, often
while criticising other people for doing so.
A recent tendency is to represent minds as software, with the result
that the distinction between computers and minds blurs. Computers
become host to the realm of spirits. There are “true stories” of
ghosts of 17th Century Englishmen typing messages onto computers
(Wester, 1989), and there was, at one time, ‘a clearing house for
information about possessed PCs’ (Watson, 1990: 208). Research
shows that many people approach computers as if the computers were
conscious social actors (Weizenbaum,1993: 6-7; Frude, 1982: 62,
75, 77, 83; and Reeves and Nass, 1996). There are many science fiction
novels in which computers become intelligent, in which human minds
wander through computer networks, or in which Artificial Intelligences
assume an independent and powerful net life of their own. [9]
Software can be seen as analogous to independent mind and hardware
to body, even though software would be meaningless without the
hardware it can run on. One result is that people can be reduced
to nodes in networks of information, without thought of the metaphor's
implications.
In his book Mind Children (1988), Hans Moravec, director
of the Mobile Robot Lab at Carnegie-Mellon University, describes
four imagined procedures for transferring a person’s mind to a machine
to gain spiritual immortality – most of which assume that replication
is equivalent to identity. [10]
Ed Regis quotes Moravec as saying:
The idea that your essence is software seems a very small step
from the view that your essence is spirit... This is not some
way of tricking you into being less than you are; you’re going
to be more than you are... It really is a sort of Christian fantasy:
this is how to become pure spirit (Regis, 1990: 6, 176).
Academic Iain Chambers casually invokes a similar complex of ideas:
in the zone of “bodiless exultation” in cyberspace, we also confront
the alchemy of anthropological mutation... Here in the infinity
of the memory chips the body of homo telematicus is finally superseded,
dematerialized. Projected into the fourth and eternal dimension
of cyberspace, anatomy is replaced by the electric impulses of
“pure” intelligence (Chambers, 1994: 54, 60).
4.2: Online Bodies as Ghosts
“Disembodied” is a term frequently used in academic analysis of
online life. For example Dery writes of ‘disembodied... combatants’
(1993: 559), Marcus of a ‘disembodied medium’ (1996a: 23), McLagan
of ‘disembodied communication’ (1996: 161), Danet et al of ‘disembodied
"virtual play"’ (1998: 41), while Wertheim ambiguously
oscillates between arguing that people perceive Cyberspace as immaterial
or that it is an ‘immaterial space of mind’ (1999: 41, 228-9,
231-2).
Email is also sometimes stated to be like “disembodied” or, “mind
to mind communication”. This model, and attacks on this model,
were moderately common on Cybermind. For example John writes:
It took a while, but I learned to type and Zen-program in my
sleep and suddenly I wasn’t in my chair in a computer lab, I had
left it and was in an astral plane. Programs were spells, and
I was a magi of unlimited mana.
In reply to KK, who wrote ‘a soul is nothing but a neuro chemical
process’, Paula wrote:
Oh PLEEEEEEASEE. Always and forever the soul is an electric
force that shivers and shimmers and reflects the essence of a
human being. Don’t you know that’s why we take so natually to
cyberspace? It’s a lovely marriage of electrons, human and machine.
Another List member argued the Internet confirmed the mind/body
split, paving the way for a new Cartesianism. T-Bone, being critical,
remarked: ‘It particularly irks me when people with online access
[...] imagine they have somehow now purchased an astral body for
"moving through" cyberspace’. Another writer, more positively,
wrote ‘cybersex does not need a body’, Kara claimed that in ‘virtual
relationships [...] there is no physical reality and no desire for
it’, and Bernadette wrote of her and her netlover that ‘We desire
to merge but our body gets in the way’. Perhaps the “lack” of a
body feeds into Western visions of the perfect love as loss of self,
where ‘united souls represent the purest form of romance’
(Springer, 1996: 61 emphasis added). [11]
As argued previously boundaries on MOOs are particularly uncertain.
People on MOOs resemble modern ghosts and are treated that way.
They merge with the spiritual realm of the program. Unknown in a
person’s normal life, they contrast with this normality as an independent
force which touches it. They can appear out of nowhere and be exorcised
by formulae. Actions of figures in a MOO are symbolic actions.
Most of their external life actions are deleted, only those redolent
with meaning remain and they are repeated, just as a ghost’s actions
have some specific meaning and are repeated. The number of bodies
that may be squeezed into a room is not influenced by the described
size of the room and it is also usually impossible to interact with
most of the features of a location or room, another reminder of
immateriality. People in electronic communication also resemble
ghosts in that they function on one sense band only; for modern
Western ghosts this can vary being visual, auditory or kinetic,
but MOO, or List, ghosts are texts.
There is also a marked class/power division on MOOs. If Wizards
are like ghosts, they are like the holy ghost. They can cross most
barriers, they can observe whatever happens in a room without being
present to the occupiers, they can disconnect less powerful characters,
and some are reputed to record the conversations of others for their
own use. A MOO is a society under surveillance by invisible spirits.
This problem, though frequently resented, is usually ignored.
Given the emphasis on gender in net behaviour, uses of etherealisation
and the ghostly nature of net presences might also connect with
the gendered history of the net. A common point made in feminist
critiques of Western philosophy and ideologies (e.g. Goldenberg,
1990: 78ff.) has been the tendency of male theorists to denigrate
the body and to either praise some etheric transcendence or to derive
the world from some disembodied set of categories or processes,
while simultaneously constructing the female as an inferior, passive,
and physical, body.
A fairly common narrative is that this opposition developed in
the 17th century through a successful strategy employed by an “intellectual”
administrative class to distinguish realms controlled by the church
from realms which were open to its own investigation, theorisation
and control. This became institutionalised in divisions between
the governors, or managers, who undertook mind work, and the governed
who performed body work and who, ideally, do not question.
The ghost becomes more ethereal as this process becomes more pronounced.
The upheavals of the last century loosened this boundary and the
ghost became more solid. [12]
Nowadays 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” or
“creative” 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, administrative, or creative abilities,
it might be expected that they have used the Internet to emphasise
etherealisation as part of the construction of their male identity.
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 likewise argues that:
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 does not seem dominant on Cybermind,
as might be expected if gender no longer marks “knowledge workers”.
Boundaries seem important to materiality. Judith Butler proposes
that we ‘return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface
but as a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to
produce the effect of boundary fixity and surface we call matter’
(1993: 9). If so, then we can suggest that materiality is linked
with a rigid boundary, and that non rigid boundaries constitute
the immaterial. Materiality becomes related to the process of making
categories firm and exclusive. The lack of boundary fixity in people’s
experience online, particularly when not interrupted by pain, creates
a sense of personal immateriality, which is perhaps furthered by
the loss of time sense as an organiser of experience, and the apparent
diminishment of restraint or resistance. [13]
This
leads not only to boundary vagueness but to problems of polarity
deletion.
4.3 Polarity, Gender and Spectres
All polarity categories, such as male and female, may delete “the
other pole”. Suppose, for instance, there are two groups A and
B, and members of A define a polarity such that A is positive and
B is negative. By default B becomes defined as not-A. However
as “events/things” are rarely logical opposites (i.e. women are
not logical opposites of men, or vice versa), B becomes “illusory”
or “spectral” to A. [14] But
as A becomes set off, or defined, by being not-B (ie not-not-A)
A becomes a negation of an illusion. The situation is further confused
if B refuses to accept completely the attributions of what is considered
by A as not-A, and then constructs A as not-B. Thus although Luce
Irigaray argues that Plato, in the Timaeus, makes the masculine
occupy both halves of a binary opposition and, as a result, deletes
the feminine (Butler, 1993: 35ff), it might seem that by occupying
both halves of the binary the “masculine” is distorted or spectralised
as well, even if representationally dominant.
Further, if, as Germaine Greer argues (1997), in modern society
women are deleted and primarily conceived of as voids, without power
or potency, endlessly available (almost as prostheses) to be penetrated,
then such a construct might be unsatisfactory not just for women
but for men as well, as it puts a vacuum at the heart of all relationships.
“Existential emptiness”, opens its void in the midst of the only
intimacy allowed “Western” men. This boundless void can never be
filled, and there can be no co-operation. The penetrator can never
surrender, never be “soft” without risking becoming the void. These
might only be metaphors, but that is the point.
Within this complex of polarity and absence of boundary, the “two
bodies” become one body, and its lack. Qualities of the male and
female body which limit or influence gendered experience are deleted,
or turned into the default image of the ideal male or female; which
is itself a deletion.
The resultant tendency is to magnify the possibility of asencing
and spectralising the body – which can only be grounded by an excess
of symbolic gender, belonging to either sex, effectively asencing
the body even further. There is no pause in which to explore the
“underlying” “feelings” or kinaesthetics which might be held to
render us present.
The asent body, the asent self, as neither present nor absent becomes
a virtual body like a ghost. Sometimes the virtuality is taken
as real (as in the narrative of how the virtual world allows true
expression of authentic being), and sometimes it is the offline
world which is taken as real (as in the narrative of how computer
use is an escape from, or abandonment of, real life). However,
the overwhelming of one category pole by “the other” might not tend
to solidify the dominant pole but unsettle it. The Ghost becomes
not pure spirit or matter but an uneasy oscillation.
As Alan writes (20 Oct.97), the Ghost is a ‘disturbance of material
and semiotic processes, something peripheral - on the (dis)order
of the uncanny’. Likewise Derrida suggests that what happens between
“twos” (polarities) ‘Can only maintain itself with some ghost, can
only talk with or about some ghost’, even if this spectral ‘is never
present as such’ (1994: xviii). He later suggests that ‘[O]ne must
perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist
in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic between actual,
effective presence and its other’ (ibid: 40). The answer is perhaps
not so clear.
5.Cyborgs
One body model which is supposed to undo oppositions is the cyborg,
a melding of human and machine. However, it may not escape the
problems of another haunting – that of power.
Many visions of the net were shaped by a literary movement – cyberpunk
[15] –
in particular by William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), in
which the hero plugs directly from his brain into the machine.
For these cyborgs, wires and weapons course through their bodies
and they run the risk that the burden of their hardware will destroy
their humanity – a much reiterated theme in the narratives of science
fiction. Somehow, in narrative, becoming machines leaves humans
with no option but conquest. Long before the overwhelming presence
of computers the Cybermen in Dr. Who (1966+) replaced all their
body parts with prostheses and became “rational” killing machines.
[16]
In a well known and oft quoted section of Neuromancer, written
before the Internet became popular, the hero, 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). In this case the cyborg is Christian Cartesian.
Unlike many societies where the landscape is seen as a human body,
in cyberspace it is common for the human to be perceived as permeated
with wires and becoming cyborg. The machinic is transferred to
life and becomes alive itself. In this invasion the screen flashes,
circuits or programmes move imaged electrons. We give “input”,
not participation. The body is immobile and the imagined movement
of the machine becomes our movement – ‘our machines are disturbingly
lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert’ (Haraway, 1989: 152).
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr writes
Historically, the cyborg has stood for the radical anxiety of
human consciousness about its own embodiment at the moment that
embodiment appears almost fully contingent. Cyborg anxiety has
stood for a panic oscillation between the "human" element
(associated with affections, eros, error, innovation, projects
begun in the face of mortality) and the "machine" element
(the desire for long life, health, physical impermeability, self-contained
control processes, dependability).
Use of the term cyborg is often phased in reassuring terms of us
already being cyborgs (because we use tools or even language) and
in terms of alarm that if we do not become cyborg we will be superseded
and computers or robots will take over the world.
There also seems a mythic relationship between the machinisation
of the human and the loss of human emotions, suggesting, in “Western”
terms, that cyborgisation exaggerates of ideas of masculinity and
its transcendence of the (gendered) flesh.
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 “hard” machine. Springer argues
that the filmic image 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). Whatever their
intent, these motifs of “obsolescence” imply another triumphal narrative
of machine over human, this time of “soft-tech”.
Under a dominant system of technological control where boundaries
and command are drawn and imposed from outside people can identify
with the machine, and release their fear of dissolution in aggression
against outsiders. Reference is made here (by Bukatman, Springer,
Foder and Dery) to Theweleit’s study of the Freikcorps who particularly
feared the “bloody mass” of the feminine (reminiscent of Reynolds’
claims that females are associated, in the ‘technical world view’,
with the unformed or the protoplasmic (1991: chapter 3)). In this
case the flow of the unformed threatens the hyper-form of the male
machinic ego (Bukatman, 1993: 303-4, Robins & Levidow, 1995).
Despite his claims about cyborgs and defense mechanisms Bukatman
will eventually conclude:
The body must become a cyborg to retain its presence in the world,
resituated in technological space and reconfigured in technological
terms. Whether this represents a continuation, a sacrifice, a
transcendence, or a surrender of "the subject" is not
certain (1993: 247).
This not only assumes some kind of triumphal narrative, even if
one not desired, but assumes only cyborgs have a future, perhaps
because Bukatman sees all human interaction with and production
of technology under the rubric of the cyborg, which has its own
narrative direction. Whereas it is perhaps the ambiguities and
uncertainties which are important.
Such theories suggest cyborgisation acts as avoidance of the “tender”,
or fleshly feminine. This leads to the question of whether more
aggressive net users see themselves as cyborgs with greater ease
than less aggressive, or whether Cyborgisation primarily functions
in net discourse to indicate one is an insider and deeply implicated
in cyberspace usually in relation to, or with, others.
Cyborg references seemed rare on Cybermind, and more self conscious
despite the opening line of the List Manifesto which proclaims ‘We
are all dwelling in cyberspace, coursing through the wires, becoming
cyborg and becoming human’. Remarks about cyborgs tended to be
in reference to books, academic papers, conferences, performance
art, occasional discussions whether human use of technology has
rendered us always already cyborg, and to events in the Cybermind
Novel (2004). It might be suggested that the prominent reference
to cyborgs in the Manifesto was largely influenced by Donna Haraway,
who is a prime source for the conception of cyborgs as a radical
form of body metaphor.
5.1: Haraway – Cyborg Politics and Borders
Haraway famously argues that Cyborgs are post-gendered, but if
gender is vital to “Western” self regulation and framing online
as argued previously, then this seems improbable, and thus dubious
as a libratory tool. Furthermore, portrayals of cyborgs on the
Internet tend to be thoroughly gendered (DeVoss, 2000). Silvio
(1999) demonstrates that an apparently radical cyborg anime, also
portrays control of female body by male spirit, so the myth is easily
gendered by spirit and dominance. Wilkerson goes so far as to write
that ‘from the standpoint of feminist bisexual identity… I contend
that this [cyborg] myth evades the very issues of race and sexuality
which it seems to be addressing’, and suggests that ‘it is vitally
important to keep tensions of race and sexuality present rather
than to blur the boundaries’ (1997: 164, 172). There is nothing
necessarily radical in hybridity, especially if one side subsumes
the other. Terms like asence draw more attention to the complexities.
Cyborgs, according to Haraway, are not haunted, yet 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 (1989: 153),
suggest that, even for her, cybermachines are already homes for
some kind of disembodiment and etherealisation. As others have
demonstrated, cyborg theology and transcendence are easily possible
(Kull 2001, 2002).
However, if Bartsch and Dipalma (2001) are correct, Haraway’s use
of the cyborg body is one in a series of politically motivated
rhetorical tropes, and not an attempt at analysing contemporary
bodies and their situatedness. It is part of a series of ‘secular
technoscientific salvation stories full of promise’ (2001: 131).
It is intended as a device for crossing or confounding boundaries
and categories; and for linking temporary coalitions.
An exuberant conference announcement posted to Cybermind declares
that Haraway's Manifesto:
interrogates and/or collapses the differences between the sentient
and the non-sentient, the human and the non-human; it engages
and undoes a wide range of binary oppositions from Cartesian dualism
to culturally coded distinctions of gender, class, and race; and
it exemplifies the breaching of boundaries and frontiers in social,
ethical, legal and technological issues from disability to genetic
engineering to computer privacy.
However, it is doubtful whether it quite fulfils these welcome
aims. ‘Cyborg’ is not a value neutral term, it already has its
ties and complexes, as implied above. Myths, even 'ironic' ones,
have their own directions. [17]
In addition, it is often the case that those oppositions that the
cyborg was to overcome re-emerge in the attempt to find a third
term combining both or acting as a bridge.
In other words, the “cyborg” ignores what we might call the sandpile
problem. One grain of sand is not a 'heap' but 100,000 grains might
be, and the boundary is never going to be clear. To use a cyborg
cliché: imagine you have a human, you keep adding machinery and
subtracting flesh, at what point does it stop being human? How
many fragmented cells makes a human? This is the nature of many
categories. Putting in a hybrid third merely allows the poles to
separate while pretending to overcome them. Categories usually
have some kind of bounding, and such boundaries become a way of
conception. They will always appear somewhere.
Exploring the way these category borders are used (as done in the
more ethnographic section of this paper) would seem more interesting
than transcending them as hybrids, or by describing the current
by models of a posited future. I hope a more modest word like asence
which draws attention to the process of boundary uncertainty, of
suspension and oscillation; that does not act as a bridging third;
and which leaves the categories with the force that they have, is
more useful than a hybrid like cyborg which already has its own
drives, elisions and politics in place.
It is the way of categories that a category that seems a disrupter
of other categories sometimes becomes subservient to them, apparently
privileging one side. 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.
6: Online back to Offline
If the cyborg, then, sometimes subverts itself as a radical option,
what kind of move is the online to the offline often conceived as?
6.1: Virile Bodies
If “physical” body is the ultimate locus, or victim, of power then
the frustration involved in social control and action renders that
body “immaterial” if online, or, if offline, “ineffective” or “unvirile”.
So the offline can be contrasted with the online, as Real, as is
indicated by the common use of RL (Real Life), for offline life.
Phil wrote:
As much as the virtual world here enchants me, I still have the
feeling of the morning run to keep things in perspective-- no
email is going to match the feeling of crisp cold air burning
my nostrils
Robert muses on the pallid interaction between the embedding world
and the net:
Does a major in the Jonathanas Savimbi army shudder at the thought
that Cybermind disapproves of their attack on a major import/export
center [...] Double Bah, tripple humbug and a loud Hah!
Dorrie feared that without an engagement with “Real Life” people
on the List might become, ‘Intellectuals with no muscles in our
backs’.
This kind of analysis can be found elaborated by the Krokers (1996)
as ‘bunkering in.... being sick of others and trying to shelter
the beleaguered self in a techno-bubble’. They also use terms like
‘fantasy’ and ‘infantilization’ to imply the online body is unable
to participate in the public realm.
Thus the offline body could be feminine if compared to online “spirit”,
but masculine if virile and active when compared to online ineffective.
The poles destabilise, but still exist.
6.2: Asence and Sensation
The more speedily and well the body functions, the more it can
be ignored. As we have seen, pain interrupts the transfer and sense
of presence online. Without this pain, deletion is perhaps possible
as computing is pre-dominantly a visual medium. We do not see the
body while computing, so we don’t ‘see’ its removal (if we don’t
feel its pain). Yet while using this computer, we are restricted
in movement: almost immobile, hunched over, eyes flicking between
hands and screen (but with little focal change and a lowered blink
rate), perhaps fearing that hand pain resulting from repetition
may cast us out from this world (which is our only source of decent
income). [18]
The sensations of computer usage are basically unpleasant. There
is little in the way of tactile, kinaesthetic or olfactory pleasure,
and little in the way of aesthetic or visual pleasure other than
on the web. It is possible there might be a sensory pleasure gained
from the mere presence of other (non-hostile) humans or plants and
animals which is missed as well.
Computer use is thus a competition between sensation and interest.
While the person is engaged, sexually evoked or intellectually interested
then sensual discomfort is overpowered. When topics recycle, the
threshold of engagement lowers, and discomfort is more noticeable.
The effort to increase the engagement might explain some of the
attractions of flaming or netsex, as these diminish registering
of background sensory distress. People do not approach the net
erotically or angrily, but become erotic or angry to maintain
an approach.
6.3 Asence and Politics
“Information” is an ambiguous category often used to terminate
narrative myths explaining changes in the economy, as in the expressions
“information economy”, “information companies” and so on (e.g Drucker,
1993: 181ff.). As such a category, it has tenuous boundaries, and
thus risks becoming ghostly itself – people can insist information
is immaterial. Information can even claimed to be a directly productive
force, as if it was self-animate or a never-ending alchemy of self-productive
signs. Furthermore, information can be abstracted from its specific
carriers. Computers allow the reduction of all data (whether mathematical
formulae or films) to digital representation, blurring any differences.
As Hayles argues this can influence the projected design of machines
designed to access data, so that the data becomes even more isolated
from its environment (1996: 34-5). Research or policy can be based
upon interaction with simulations rather than interaction with “realities”.
This may promote the deletion of reference to the social and technological
bases which allows the information to exist, which controls its
distribution, though leaving “the market” as an abstract determiner
of “success” (Grusin, 1996: 46, Henwod, 1995, Castells, 1996: 371ff.).
However, humans cannot live by abstract information alone, it always
needs to be legitimated, or converted into something else, usually
through some organisation. Only certain kinds of information can
be sold. As a result, the nature of the work of “knowledge workers”,
and of their place in the world, becomes representationally problematic.
The computer is often supposed to free people from body work, liberating
them for this ethereal, intellectual, creative or “knowledge” work.
However, for most workers, it renders “creative” skills even less
important. Those with superseded skills, or injury, join those
without computers, vanishing from the computerised world; becoming
represented as unable to “keep up”. We too become ghosts with no
impact, or cyborgs striving to remain embedded in the system.
The confined, neglected body haunts us, and this is reinforced
by political alienation, in the sense that people cannot act on
the world politically, so they tend to experience themselves as
“immaterial”. It is possible to allege that an otherwise disempowered
person through writing on the net, could produce political change
or, at least, reach the numbers of readers previously reserved for
mass media. However, such power does not seem currently common,
and may never be a common experience.
Further, the web of postmodern power appears nomadic, elusive and
always elsewhere – in some ways more alive than ourselves. It too
has no obvious boundaries and thus becomes represented as spirit-like,
a magic life haunting the net. We cannot act upon it, and the traditional
modes of protest available to all, such as occupying the streets
or a building are no longer effective (Critical Art Ensemble, 1994).
We might return here to where we began with the uncertain boundaries
of the offline world, and the attempts to close them. Yet again,
the boundaries are open to the corporate world. Little separates
them from your work, your home, your computers, your food, your
genes, your geography, your being. As Yaakov Garb asks:
Why is etherealism so popular in a world were matter isn't? More
eerily, how do the fantasies of disengagement from body and nature
emerge from the same military/industrial complex which manufactures
the technologies for the actual destruction of both (q. Springer,1996:
25).
Yet at the same time people’s action in online society is often
an attempt not only to act in the world, but to create a new world,
or at least to create a safe place in the world. So here again,
in the heart of the absence is presence – we have asence.
7. Conclusions
This paper has discussed some of the complex factors involved in
the way that people construct and use bodies, and experience boundaries
on the net, from within “Western” Internet cultures. Some of these
factors may depend on a history which has valorised a polarity between
mind and body as a factor in a male identity, polarised with female
identity, and based in administrative competence. The “mind” is
single, occasionally hidden, and associated with control over an
inferior opposite - the “body”. Before the 18th Century, mainstream
philosophers and poets could elaborate a complex set of interactions
between several variables, but by the 19th Century, and certainly
presently, despite monotonous recognitions of the “falsity” of these
distinctions, they have polarised and separated.
This polarisation may be linked to a “Western” tendency to try
to construct sharp either/or categories and group boundaries,
and impose these on more magical vague categories. With the advent
of the computer and the Internet this polarisation has in places
increased, while boundary definition of the self appears to have
weakened, and conceptual dominance has shifted from categories of
“matter” to categories of the “immaterial”. The textual body of
net culture becomes associated with the spiritual pole, perhaps
reinforced by the feeling that the immaterial is that without precise
boundaries or inhibitors, enabling expression of boundary anxieties
produced offline.
As with online groups, the sense of online self has asent boundaries
unless restricted by pain. This lack of boundaries leads to the
cyberbody being categorised as immaterial, in the same way as ghosts
and spirits are classified as immaterial in the “Western” world.
The cyberghost is validated by comparison with a construction of
an offline active and virile body. Construction of the body as
cyborg seems far rarer in actual online life, although common in
theory, and even so, still has ambiguities that arise from connecting
persisting polarities – even though those polarities are supposedly
overcome by it.
Cyborgisation and etherealisation are counterpositional narrative
myths of body subjectivity that function in different spheres.
Cyborgs have undergone their development primarily in action film,
comic and theory, whereas etherealisation has flourished more in
novel, science and online life. Like ghosts, it has been suggested
that the narrative and drives of the image of the cyborg do not
make it particularly consequence, or value, free for analysing the
interdependence and interinvolvement of the prior categories of
culture, nature, biology and technology, with all of their uncertain
and changing ambiguities and the ways they both enable and
restrict and are permeated by power. These category boundaries
cannot be dissolved by fiat, and it is more productive to look how
people deal with them, rather than hypothesise a yet to arrive future
in which they are gone.
Category matching and framing can be maintained by mood. The mood
produced by reiteration reinforces the content of the messages,
and usually refers to easily accessed offline moods, as with flames,
grief, sex and so on.
It has been argued that the online use of the body occurs in areas
of tension that arise because of the lack of formal roles (other
than gender), and social unease with permeable boundaries. Some
“Western” online relationships tend to become sexual, as a means
of maintaining mood and contact – particularly when the polarity
of gender (which is associated with intimacy and sex, and with the
polarity of body and mind) is able to diminish asence, and the symbolic
burden of the lack of roles and prescribed behaviours.
Finally, it was suggested that asencing of the body allows the
experience of “immersion” in online worlds. This asencing is caught
in a further dialectic between political presence (or the ability
to act upon an individual’s social problems through the use of the
net), and the narrative myth that Internet users are abandoning
both the “real world” and those persons who have been effectively
made invisible by their lack of access to either computers, or to
the powerful parts of the online world. The appearance of immateriality
is further increased by frustrations at the inability to use physical
force to control life online – those we try and influence may simply
ignore us. The cyberbody is caught between conceptions of impotence
and omnipotence.
Author's Biography
Jonathan Marshall is a ARC Research Fellow at the University of
Technology Sydney, who is engaged in a project exploring the construction
and use of gender online. His most recent paper was ‘Bachelard
and the Alchemy of Ethnography’, presented at the 2004 AAS
Conference, and forthcoming in a special issue of The Australian
Journal of Anthropology concerned with material poetics. He
is a joint editor of the Fibreculture Dictionary of New Media,
a Mailing List centred exploration of theory and practice. [Jonathan.Marshall@uts.edu.au]
Notes
[1] This paper has grown out of my fieldwork on
the Cybermind Mailing List between 1994 and 1998. Thanks is given
to the List for their encouragement, support and comments.
[back]
[2] Boundaries are not simple and can be of many
types. They can blend into one another or be distinct, they can
radiate in density from a central point. Boundaries can allow one
way or two way flow, can have different thresholds of permeability,
they can be abrupt or gradual, or can be in states of extension
or exclusion.
[back]
[3] I am using the term “Western”,
as a short cut for Western Mainstream Middle Class, English Speaking
People. But even here there is less homogeneity than is implied.
[back]
[4] For a more detailed history see Marshall (2000,
Chp 1), and a summary of more recent history in Marshall (2004).
[back]
[5] I have discussed the relationship between flaming,
asence and structure in Marshall (2004).
[back]
[6] Argyle writes: ‘The pain of the other’s
touched the pain held within myself. Personal experiences of loss,
memories of funerals and the sorrow of those left behind all flooded
me.... I grieved with them, for myself and my losses, and for theirs’
(1996: 140).
[back]
[7] Turkle instances a person acting on four different
MOOs at once (1995: 12). See also Odzer (1997: 43), Dudfield (1999:
np).
[back]
[8] I am submitting an article on this subject
to the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic. For the change in
ghosts between the medieval and contemporary periods see Finucane
(1982).
[back]
[9] A question to a group of four friends about
such stories immediately produced 15 different titles written by
12 different authors.
[back]
[10] To be clearer: the process of replication
destroys the original, so essentially you die so that copies of
you can “live”. The appeal of this idea is probably
connected with the magical mechanisms of “similarity”
and “transfer”.
[back]
[11] For example Milton in his description of
angels making love; (Paradise Lost, book 8). Note the contrast with
the “animal” which is “bodily” and the supposed
superiority of the “virtual” angelic.
But if the sense of touch whereby mankind
Is propagated seem such dear delight
Beyond all other, think the same voutsaf’t
To Cattel and each Beast.....
Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask;
Love not the heav’nly Spirits, and how thir Love
Express they, by looks onely, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?
To whom the Angel with a smile that glow’d
Celestial rosie red, Loves proper hue,
Answer’d. Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
Us happie, and without Love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs:
Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restrain’d conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.
[back]
[12] 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
1972), and the growing etherealisation, and detachment, of the ghost.
[back]
[13] It is not necessary to accept any other parts
of Butler's argument for this to be an interesting proposition,
and it is not necessary to assume that it works for all kinds of
matter – we are only discussing online experience. For a good
critique of Butler's position on matter in general see Kerin (1999).
[back]
[14] For example, the categories A and B may share
properties in common. Defining B as not-A, apparently removes those
common properties from B. Further, the set of not-A may include
B, but it also includes things which are not-B. So the category
B may have properties added and subtracted from it, by this operation.
[back]
[15] Lewis Shiner, one of the earliest writers
in the genre, writes (1992: 25) that he first heard the term “cyberpunk”
in 1983. The first of Gibson’s “sprawl” series
came out in 1981.
[back]
[16] By all postmodern uses of the term, the still
earlier Daleks are also cyborg, and yet again technically ingenious,
with a hard line on their own superiority, driven to conquest, murder
and autocracy. Daleks were once humanoid as well.
[back]
[17] My understanding is that Haraway wrote the
article as a polemic against mid-80s back to nature goddess feminism,
for which it is entirely adequate and to the point. However it has
been transported out of that limited context and considered to have
far wider, almost universal, implications. It is this that I am
objecting to.
[back]
[18] Hayes claims the rate of RSI among the workforce
increased by 1,246% between 1982 and 1992. The estimated cost of
dealing with this problem in 1992, was US$25 billion per year (1995:
176). In 1999 the cost to UK industry was estimated at between £5
billion and £20 billion annually (RSIA 2000).
[back]
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Jeremiad: (Mis)Understanding Donna Haraway’s Method of Inquiry’,
Configurations 9 (2001):127–164.
Boyer, M. Christine. Cybercities: Visual Perception in the
Age of Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural
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