A Review of Recent Cyber Theory

A Review of Some Recent Cyber Theory
MA Film and The Moving Image
First Semester Essay
Keith Devereux
Student Number: 10154146

The simulacrum is never that which conceals
the truth it is the truth which conceals
that there is none The simulacrum is true
Ecclesiastes
(Baudrillard, 1983:1)
This quotation, taken from Jean Baudrillards pamphlet, Simulations, is as
true for the ‘cyber age’, if that is where we are, as it was for
Ecclesiates himself. If we are, to paraphrase Baudrillard living ‘entirely in
simulation,’ then cyberspace is our new home. In this essay I would like
to consider if cyber theory is rewriting some postmodern
principles, whether we are moving toward a new plane of cultural
existence, or if cyber theory is just another means of
presenting the unpresentable.

What is cyber theory?
Originally a term created by Norbert Wiener in 1948 to define the
development of automata, cybernetics was appropriated to describe the
enhancement or ‘re-imaging’ of the body ‘as a fundamental
element in a machine culture’ (Tomas, 1995:23). Building on this
foundation, Clynes and Kline in 1960 proposed that ‘altering mans bodily
functions’ (Clynes and Kline, 1995:29) using machine technology would aid
the U.S. space programme and coined the term cyborg.
Defined as a
self-regulating human-machine organism… which are
integrated to enhance the body’s power potential
(Featherstone and Burrows, 1995:2),
the cyborg has emerged to be used in a range of scientific and
cultural usages. In medicine, cyborgs may describe the use of prosthetics
and aids such as pacemakers and in literature and mass culture, cyborgs
such as the Terminator, or the Borg in Star Trek, are iconic figures in 80’s
and 90’s cinema. The cyborg has even been used as a metaphor to discuss
cultural studies.

Cyberspace
During the 1980’s, new terms emerged, such as cyberspace –applied to the
rapidly developing information system that is the Internet- and
cyberpunk, literature which uses this new technology as the foundation
for ‘visions of future worlds of cyberspaces’ (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995:3).
Defined as a
generic term which refers to a cluster of different technologies
some familiar some only recently available some being developed
and some still fictional
(Featherstone and Burrows, 1995:5),
cyberspace is the coalition of military, academic and hacker technology.
Developed by the U.S. military as a means of maintaining control in the event of a
nuclear attack, the early Internet was a tightly controlled network of linked
computers. Following the break up of the Soviet Union, and with the advent of
cheap, easily available personal computers, the internet grew slowly, but was still
mainly confined to academics and hackers. It was only when Tim
Berners-Lee, a British academic working at Berne in Switzerland, made his ‘www
program’ freely available on the Internet that the medium really took off.

Berners-Lee wanted to create a common language that would allow different
computers running different operating systems to be able to communicate with
each other. As he said in an interview, he carefully chose three groups,
the high-energy physics community because that s what I needed
to justify my spending time on it… the hypertext community
because I put it on the alt hypertext newsgroup and… the NeXT
community because those were the people who could actually run
the software
(Berners-Lee, 1996).
Ted Nelson at Brown University originally developed the common language
known as Hypertext as an electronic text composed of nodes (blocks of
text) which may be linked together non-sequentially. However, while hypertext
provides ‘both a utopian vision of writerly artistic capabilities and dramatic
cultural change’ (Landow, 1999:154) Nelson took a different path to Berners-Lee
when he tried to commodify information, proposing a charge for the transfer of
data by a process he called transclusion. Faced with this, most users
of the Internet rejected this idea, preferring instead to use the free browsers
that companies such as Netscape and Microsoft were making available.

Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Internet is a global
network, and is as much a collection of communities as a collection of
technologies, and as one commentator has stated:
The real revolution of the Information Age will not be one
of hardware but of the human spirit It will be the chance
to be more than human
(Frank Herbert, in a 1984 ad for Pacific Telephone’s ‘Infosystems.’)
When Marshall McLuhan suggested that humans have ‘extended
our nervous system itself in a global embrace,’ (McLuhan, 1964:11), he
was talking about radio rather than cyberspace, which he could never
have foreseen but which today is the perfect embodiment of his ‘global
village.’ Posited as a utopian vision of the future, McLuhan
suggested that by ‘abolishing both space and time,’ (Ibid:11) humanity
could co-exist together in relative harmony.

Cyberspace has provided an avenue for new ‘virtual communities’ to
spring up, and to users of the Web, cyberculture is
a collection of cultures and cultural products that exist on
and/or are made possible by the Internet along with the stories
told about these cultures and cultural products
(Silver, 1997).
However, while cyberspace has certainly
catalysed the formation and resurrection of a whole range of
philosophical social economic and political beliefs
(Collinson, 1998),
and has provided for the development of new avenues of expression and social
interaction, it has also been appropriated for extreme political and anti-social
ends.

It was suggested that the freedom that has existed on the Internet was due
to ‘a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism’ (Barbrook, 1998).
Barbrook proposed that
the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could
successfully live together without needing either the state
or the market
(Ibid.)
and that
this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community
media and hacker- activists in cyberspace
(Ibid.).
However, while the gift economy revolutionised the use and transfer of
information in cyberspace, these New Left libertarian ideals were also
appropriated by the political right under the guise of what Barbrook calls neo-
liberalism, and promoted a right wing agenda.

This usurping of a utopian ideal into a more dystopian regime was
described as:
cyberauthoriairianism a stridently pro-technotopia movement
particularly in the mass media typified by an obsession…
with emergent technologies and with a very deliberate
attempt to shut down silence and exclude any perspectives
critical of technotopia
(Kroker, 1996:167).
Both Barbrook and Kroker agree that neo-liberal journals such as Wired
magazine, while promoting free speech are actually acting as ‘ideological
opinion maker[s] for new capitalists rising in the digital
industries’ (Stein, 1999:200). So while Wired appeared 'hip and trendy', they
were actually promoting extreme right wing politics, and their prominent
position in the marketplace, and location in Silicon Valley, California, meant
that they became the benchmark for discussion about cyberspace

In an article called The Californian Ideology Barbrook and Cameron proposed
that Wired manages to combine two apparently opposite views in the same
ideology. On the one hand it draws on the hippie tradition of California,
particularly the Bay area, where the counter culture arose, while on the
other hand promote a combination of right wing ideals.
The group behind Wired, the Global Business Network, is funded by several
right wing multinationals. They have also given funds to such
people as the former right wing leader of the House of Representatives, the
Republican Newt Gingrich. His 'think tank', the Progress and Freedom
Foundation received funds from the GBN, and leading members of Wired are
also associated with the hard right PFF.
The development of such a tradition, where the culture is shared by all but
understood only by an elite, harks back to the English cultural studies of T.S.
Eliot and Matthew Arnold.

In the cyber age, the so-called elite have been called the ‘digerati’ (and the
masses are ‘netizens’), and celebrate their existence in self-congratulatory
web sites such as The Edge:
Who are the digerati and why are they the cyber elite ? They
are the doers thinkers and writers who have tremendous influence
on the emerging communication revolution They are not on the
frontier they are the frontier
The digerati evangelize connect people adapt quickly They like to
talk with their peers because it forces them to go to the top of
their form and explain their most interesting new ideas They give
each other permission to be great That s who they want to talk to
about the things they are excited about because they want to see
if it plays They ask each other the questions they are asking
themselves and that s part of what makes this cyber elite work
http://www.edge.org/digerati/index.html
Certainly there is a tendency to form information elites’, and evidence of this is
found in the romanticising of the hacker as a counter cultural hero, or
the portrayal of the digerati as the controllers of cyberspace.

More real than real
Cyberculture posits a society that lives simultaneously ‘on-line’ and in
the real world. This juxta-positioning of existence, is best seen in the study of
virtual communities such as The Well, one of the first such communities,
and the myriad chat rooms that exist on-line. But this exposes another issue:
whether what we are experiencing is ‘real’ or ‘not real.’
When Walter Benjamin suggested that works of art possessed a ‘unique existence’
which
determined the history to which it was subject throughout the
time of its existence
(Benjamin, 1935:214),
he could not have foreseen the reproduction of works in cyberspace –nor the
generation of original works by digital artists.
But are digital works, or representations of traditional works, any less ‘real’?

Benjamin’s position is that the presence of the artwork is diminished by
reproduction and that by making works available to a wide audience
diminishes their impact.
His comments on the Dadaists, that they intended to ‘outrage the public’
(Ibid: 231) reflects definitions of postmodernity. Lyotard suggests that
postmodernism is a means of presenting the unpresentable, or challenging the
aesthetic. But he goes on to say that
a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern
Postmodernism… is not modernism at its end but in the nascent
state and this state is constant
(Lyotard, 1979:44).

This continued forward momentum, first of postmodernity then of
modernity is reflected in cyberspace. The creation of new works, or of
performance artists like Stelarc, who designs virtual creations then attempts to
recreate them in the real world, has led to cyber theory in general being
classed as postmodern. However, other theorists have suggested that
cyberspace is
breaking down the boundaries… to revive utopian impulses
coupled with… moving into a reconfigured world
(Featherstone and Burrows, 1995:1).
This ‘superpostmodernity’, which falls loosely in the definition
proposed by Lyotard, has been radically explored by philosphers such as
Baudrillard and Virilio. These two writers in particular, who make similar
proposals but from a different direction, discuss the position of the ‘real’.

Baudrillard and Virilio
We lived once in a world where the realm of the imaginary was
governed by the mirror… Today that realm is the realm of the
screen of interfaces and duplication of contiguity and networks…
(Jean Baudrillard, Xerox and Infinity, in Transparency of Evil, p. 54)
During the May 68 events in France, the Situationists, an important
libertarian group came to prominence. They originated in a small band of avante-
garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dada and Surrealism. They were
principally concerned with the "suppression of art", that is to say, they wished like
the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to supersede the division of art and
culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life. Guy
Debord emerged as an important figure, and publication of The Society of the
Spectacle in 1967 argued that capitalism had turned all relationships transactional,
and that life had been reduced to a "spectacle". Although the spectacle is the key
concept in many ways they merely reworked Marx's view of alienation.

Debord’s argument that
when the real world changes into simple images simple images
become real beings
(Debord, 1994:18)
reflects Baudrillard’s concept of the nature of the real and pre-dates some
arguments of cyber theory. In his discussions, Baudrillard suggests that human
civilisation has changed in three major stages, each marked by a change in meaning
of our symbol systems. During the first steps in civilisation, where speech and
writing were created, signs were invented to point to reality.
During the second step, which Baudrillard says takes place over the last century,
signs were invented to hide reality, and in the third stage, which we presently
inhabit, the sign hides the absence of reality. In a fourth step, Baudrillard suggests
that there is no ‘real’ anymore, that we live in an age of ‘hyperreality’
which is ‘a way of presenting and receiving reality’ (Levin, 1996:274). For
Baudrillard cyberspace, like Disneyland, could be said to be
neither true nor false but- a deterrence machine set up in order
to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real
(Baudrillard, 1983:25).

However, as Nunes states,
for Baudrillard the shift from the real to the hyperreal occurs
when representation gives way to simulation
(Nunes, 1995),
but in his denial of the real, Buadrillard’s argument ‘clings… to a real; he
desperately needs a real to recognise we are in a land of simulation’ (Landsberg,
1995:178). Paul Virilio on the other hand does not deny the real, suggesting
instead that reality in cyberspace relies on a process of ‘substitution’
rather than ‘simulation’.
As Virilio explains:
Here lies the big difference between Baudrillard and myself I
don t believe in simulationism I believe that the word is already
old-fashioned As I see it new technologies are substituting a
virtual reality for an actual reality And this is more than a
phase it s a definite change We are entering a world where there
won t be one but two realities
(Wilson, 1994).

Virilio sees cyberspace as
a new form of perspective… free of any previous reference it is a
tactile perspective To see at a distance to hear at a distance
that was the essence of the audio-visual perspective of old But to
reach at a distance to feel at a distance that amounts to
shifting the perspective towards a domain it did not yet
encompass that of contact of contact-at-a-distance tele-contact
(Virilio, 1995).
Like McLuhan’s ‘speed up of information’ (McLuhan, 1964:326) or David Harvey’s
‘time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1989:240).), Virilio sees that
for the first time history is going to unfold within a one-time-
system global time
(Virilio, 1995).
Virilio considers that the world is redeemable, if we are prepared to do
something about it.

The Cyborg Manifesto
At the start of the essay we defined a cyborg as a
self regulating human-machine organism… which are integrated to
enhance the body’s power potential
and much of cyber theory has been based around this apparent symbiosis
between man and machine. As a result, it is considered that the divisions
between the body and the outside world –nature and technology- are being
broken down.
In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway, proposed that we are no
longer able to think of ourselves as biological entities. Instead, we have become
cyborgs, mixtures of person and machine, where the biological side and the
mechanical/electrical side become so inextricably entwined that they can't be
split.

Haraway insists that
we are all chimeras theorised and fabricated hybrids of
machine and organism in short we are cyborgs
(Haraway, 1991:150).
Haraway’s manifesto, which was ‘a reconstruction of socialist feminist politics’
(Haraway, 1983), used the cyborg as a metaphor to discuss how
the categories of the biological the technological the natural
the artificial and the human… are now beginning to blur
(Featherstone and Burrows, 1995:3).
The manifesto was also an early example of cyber feminism, ‘an
alliance between women, machinery, and new technology’ (Sadie Plant, quoted
in Hari, 1997).

As such, writers such as Plant and Allucquère Rosanne Stone have also used the
cyborg and cyberspace to discuss feminist politics.
Plant has suggested that the patriarchal society is threatened by a
fear of the matrix
and that
cybernetic systems are fatal to his culture
(Plant, 1995:62-3).
In turn, Haraway took the argument one step further, proposing that the Gaia
hypothesis, that the Earth is ‘a dynamic, self-regulating, homeostatic
system,’ suggested that the earth itself was a cyborg,
a complex auto-poietic system that terminally blurred the
boundaries among the geological the organic
and the technological
(Haraway, 1995:xiii).

Conclusions
In his introduction to The Digital Dialectic, Lunenfeld states that the
dialectic
has remained central to Western philosophy… [T]he dialectic is
commonly understood to be a dynamic process in which one
proposition is matched against another (often its opposite) in
order to bring a third combinatory proposition into being
(Lunenfeld, 1999:xvii).
This definition also applies to cyber theory. Virtual reality provides ever
closer integration between the two oppositional forces of the natural and the
technological world, to provide the first inklings of the
consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions
(Gibson, 1984:12).

When Karl Marx presented his theories in Capital, he was looking towards
a utopia of the proletariat
(Lunenfeld, 1999:xviii),
which many of the cyber theorists are also considering. In his suggestion that
Marx’s dialectic moves from
feudalism through capitalism to communism
(Ibid:xvii),
Lunenfeld raises the prospect of the ‘digital artisan,’ occupying a similar position
today to the artisans of the feudal era -craftsmen with a specific set of
knowledge.
In this sense to continue the analogy, the ‘digerati’ are the feudal lords,
seeking to control cyberspace.

Despite the proliferation of thought towards a blurring of the boundaries
between the natural and the technological, as described by Haraway and others
looking at empowerment of the body, especially women’s bodies, there is still a
marked difference between the digital and the real.
Whether this is the ‘yes no yes no’ (Gigliotti, 1999:62) or the zeros and
ones suggested by Sadie Plant, cyber theory is still seen to some degree as an
‘otherwhere’. Cyberpunk novels such as Neuromancer, and films such as
Ghost in the Machine, have even proposed that consciousness could be transferred
to cyberspace, freeing the mind from the body:
For Case who’d lived in the bodiless exultation of cyberspace it
was the Fall In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot the
elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh The
body was meat Case fell into the prison of his own flesh
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984:12)

As Jones (1995:11) states,
in modern everyday life it is difficult (and becoming impossible) to
definitively classify experiences as ‘real’ or ‘not real’ it is more
helpful to determine the ‘degree’ or accent of reality
Most prominently shown by Baudrillard as the embodiment of the hyperreal,
cyberspace is a denial of the real. When we are continually bombarded with images
and experiences –from our TV screens and from cyberspace- the Baudrillian
position is certainly tempting.
But as Virilio points out, what we are experiencing is not ‘simulation’ but
‘substitution’. Like Haraway, Virilio keeps us on track, observing that
we have emerged into a world that has nothing anymore in common
with the world of history as we knew it
(Oliveira, 1995).

Bibliography
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