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"Is Oedipus On–line?"
I compute, thus I am
Descartes was perhaps the first to worry about virtual reality, as he sat musing in front of the fire, wondering if the hand before him was "his" hand, and if he himself were not perhaps a "virtual" construct, a figment of someone else's dream. He proceeded to cogitate himself into existence; but can we "postmoderns," wary of positivism, follow his lead? In a recent lecture at Columbia University, Slavoj Zizek coined a millennial aphorism that foregrounds the equivocal status of "being" in the information age: "We are what we want, in cyberspace." This provocation, which recasts ontological status as an effect of virtual desire, suggests why some bimillennials are still reading Freud, to discover if our "postsociety" has succeeded in substituting interface for face–to–face.
That the public imagination is increasingly prone to virtual seduction is obvious from the proliferation of programs on cyberromance on the talk show circuit; even in highbrow France, Bernard Pivot (the media maven of French culture, host of Bouillon de culture) recently reported that a Parisian matron is suing her husband for virtual adultery. (Is there stunning replicant in your romantic future––the Standard Pleasure Model of Bladerunner, the prescient eroto–robot of Varley's Millennium, a perfectly muscled Terminator, programmed to please?)
In any case, popular publications such as Wired and On–line, warn the new cyber masses that it is rough out there in the virtual world, teeming with pornographers and con artists. (The cult film Lawnmower Man trenchantly raises the question of the ethical status of virtual crime; when the woman is raped in a virtual sex game, has a crime been committed?) Little wonder, then, as technological know–how and debate concerning its applications increases exponentially, that our post–everything age seems to be characterized by a paranoid tonality, a pan–global free–floating Angst about our own accessibility and availability to Anyone, Out There. This omnipresent anxiety has even invaded romper space: on Nickelodeon, a child psychologist recently posted warnings about the dangers of cyberspace for kids (don't cybershout by FLAMING; above all don't give out information about who you "really" are.) "Use good sense," the counselor opined cheerily, "as you would in any public place."
Any "public place"––cyberspace seems, then, to have acquired the density of matter, in the public imagination. Nonetheless, the part of the body that inhabits the cranium seems very worried about the fate of the rest of it, if we may judge from the proliferation of discussions about the disappearance, viral invasion, or mortification (by decorative self–mutilation) of the real body. Human being does indeed seem to be increasingly "beside itself": a condition evoking the etymology of "para–noia" (the mind beside itself). Is grey matter in imminent danger of being outwitted by hardware? (Witness the pathos of the battle of the chess genius Kasparov against the sinister Big Blue.) In theoretical circles, as in the popular media, there is a growing concern about the ascendency of the inhuman and the disappearance of real social interaction among embodied human beings, a patent alarm about the endangered status of the human subject.
Are we witnessing the demise of social being as we know it, as suggested by dystopian thinkers like Baudrillard, Arthur Kroker, Adam Parfrey, even Foucault? Many former fans of the techno–revolution and the post–modern (Lyotard, Hassam, Baudrillard) fret about the transparency of virtual communication, the immediacy of gratification, the privileging of image over matter, and declare that Oedipal models of intersubjective interaction no longer speak to the narcissistic realities of the information age. In Lacanian terms, many cultural theorists (Schiller, Jameson, Bigelow) seem to be saying that our times bear witness to an eclipse of the Symbolic by the Imaginary; even predicting dire political consequences of the ascendancy of the image. But this negentropoic concern, which seems to be feeding on itself in a kind of epidemic panic, might itself suggest one reason to continue to consult Freud in the third millennium, as the Ur–theorist of Angst, in spite of the anti–Oedipal stampede of the last two decades. Does psychoanalysis come with an expiration date, circa 2000?
Post–Oedipal Syndrome
Surprisingly, we even find Slavoj Zizek ("we are what we want, in cyberspace") among the throng of Cassandras (Foucault, Haraway, Deleuze) discrediting the Oedipal drama as outmoded family romance. His card–carrying Lacanian credentials notwithstanding, Zizek remarks (in the aforementioned seminar) that "what gets lost in virtual communication is the very opacity of the other." This is an assertion I want to contest, for the assumption of the opacity of the Other founds both Freud's and Lacan's account of subjectivity. Indeed for Lacan it is the opacity of the self as its own Other, beginning in the alienation of the mirror stage, that results in a confusion of self with ego that is never fully surmounted, even in successful analysis, thanks to the unfathomability of the unconscious.
But Zizek and his fellow travelers argue that the loss of distance or opacity between self and other in the social order––the elimination of mediation of the unconscious (the Other big O)––results in a totalitarian social structure, in which the Other may become, in his words, "fully contextualized," without mystery, lucent, the site of a totalizing global vantage point. Thus for Zizek the totalitarian social field is by definition paranoid, since it enforces the complete transparency of all subjects in a global circuit, a too–accessible knowledge of the Other, emanating from a single point of view.
The very currency of this paranoid version of postsociety suggests the compelling nature of the phantasms aroused by the virtual, where drive as desire is replaced by drive as circuitry, where efficacy and performativity are the new criteria, unencumbered by considerations of agency or ethics. But is it true that the gratification afforded by virtual reality contributes to a closing down of enabling distance and dimension? Is virtual mindplay ineluctably narcissistic and implosive, anti–ethical, even politically disastrous?
Increasingly, the alarm being sounded by cultural theorists foregrounds one motif: the fragility of the human self, vulnerable to programming by information networks (as Lyotard argues in The Inhuman), is corollary to the frailty of the all–too–human body, subject to colonization by deadly viruses or new life forms. This anxiety is manifest in films like Alien, Species, or Outbreak, adumbrated in fifties cult classics (The Attack of the Pod People). In the near–future setting of Alien, the threat is harbored and gestated in the spaceship's circuitry, and subsequently infiltrates the innards of its crew; in Jurassic Park, the archaeological past, as the literal return of the repressed (buried, sedimented information), becomes a deadly threat to the present, thanks to manipulations of DNA.
The threat to human convention would seem to be real as well as phantasmal, as indicated, for instance, by the much–discussed New York Times series on worker displacement in the 90's [March, 1996]; as well as the proliferation of trendy essays on the narcissistic and paranoid "culture of hate" such as Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture (and his most recent kinky sub–culture hit, Cult Rapture.) Nonetheless it is disheartening to see psychoanalytic social theorists like Zizek adopting such gloomy diagnoses wholesale, lending credence to the notion of the inexorable eclipse of the Imaginary by the Symbolic in the information era (no more oedipal resolution, by which subjects emerge into social being––just a "pre–oedipal" absorption in self and screen). Psychoanalytic theorists ought to know better. For this is giving up on the radicality of the discovery of the unconscious, and the vicissitudes of the Symbolic Order as the social register, by definition intersubjective, the very predication of the human in and through language.
Cyber–chosis
No theorist has raised these issues in more spectacularly paranoid terms than Jean Baudrillard, who from Simulations to The Transparency of Evil has decried the "post–oedipal" era of information circulation, where the image or simulacrum is the new currency. For Baudrillard, the network of simulacra elides the old Lacanian categories of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. The Imaginary and the Real have been conflated in what Baudrillard calls the "hyperreal" (an image which does not represent a thing, but replaces it; Baudrillard's example is the "grid" computer drawings of automobiles in commercials where the auto is never shown). The Symbolic in particular, as an effect of difference and maintained space, seems in danger of dissolving altogether in an epidemic of facile access to the flat screen, hypervisibility, obscene spectacle.
In fact in Simulations, Baudrillard argues not only that we are witnessing the demise of Oedipal theories of interaction, as our own bodies are reduced to "control screens," but also the obsolescence of all psychoanalytic object theory. Taking issue with Barthes' characterization of the automobile as object of desire and identification, Baudrillard notes the disappearance of "a subjective logic of possession and projection." There are no more fantasies of power, where speed and appropriation are linked to the object itself, says Baudrillard, for in our age "the subject is a computer at the wheel, the vehicle a kind of capsule" (129), and the logic of possession has been replaced by "the logic of driving itself" (128). One might say that object–related desire has lost its symbolic dimension, and with it, its enabling capacity of differentiation. The driver is "a computer at the wheel," just as the astronaut is "a navigating device, a terminal screen"(129). It would seem that, for Baudrillard at least, we are indeed becoming cyborgs of sorts: we no longer identify with our objects of desire, we meld with them.
For all his histrionics, Baudrillard seems to have a point. In the age of the virtual, the joy of encounter with difference seems to be replaced by the comfort of a homogenized global ambiance, serving up Big Macs on Tianamen Square, Thai food in Tucson. Deploying one of his favorite images, Baudrillard has argued that the mindlessness of our age is concomitant with bodilessness, sending us all into orbit: "the centrifugal force of our technologies has stripped us of all weight...freed of all density, all gravity, we are being dragged into an orbital motion..." (The Transparency of Evil, 30–31).
If the metaphor of the encapsulated astronaut insists in the writing of Baudrillard and many others, it is no doubt because of the suggestiveness of its thematics of monitored hypervisibility––the astronaut's every function is known, watched, broadcast. And this image also evokes a transparency, an "unbearable lightness of being," to borrow Kundera's term, in what might be called a loss of mindfulness, accompanied by a loss of "gravity" (the pun suggested by another ludic Kundera work about weightlessness, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). This absence of mind produces producing a vapid, flattened subject, incapable of creative projection:
This realization of a living satellite in quotidian space [causes] what was projected pyschologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as metaphor [to be] henceforth projected onto reality, without any metaphor at all, in an absolute space which is that of dissimulation. (Simulations, 128) Yet again, the new order as described by Baudrillard conflates the loss of differentiation and distance with the collapse of the differentiated self––the loss of space required for the deployment of metaphor, is associated with the loss in space of human agency. Sleepwalker, spacewalker, computer nerd: a collapse of space and a boundless vacancy finally produce the same result: the unmooring of self, without somatic coordinates.
This description of hyperreality, when transcoded into Freudian terms, bears a resemblance to paranoid psychosis, as described in the famous case of Dr. Schreber, who projects his own version of reality outward, constructing an absolute system in place of the real world. We might say that the paranoid lives not in fantasy, at least at the millennial cusp, but in the hyperreal. As Lacan puts it (in the third and eleventh seminars), the paranoid does not believe in the Other, the Symbolic (social) order founded on consensual pact––he believes in the Other of the Other, the puissant Authority who supports the totalitarian system that "clarifies" everything, disqualifying opacity and doubt. It is little comfort that the playground of cyberspace, presumably the new virtual opiate of the people, is being monitored by virtual Marxists: in a recent interview in Wired, Marilouise and Arthur Kroker––authors of Hacking the Future––worry about the exploitation of "virtual flesh"; the Krokers even discuss virtual surplus value, apparently soon to be measured in e–money.
Even theorists as sanguine about postmodernity, cybernetics and social agency as Donna Haraway and Jean–Francois Lyotard, express "paranoid" anxieties about the disappearance of humanity, corporeality, even of matter itself––and Manuel DeLanda talks about the danger inherent in the "paranoid" reasoning of computers in "war games" staged by the Pentagon in doomsday scenarios. Donna Haraway, pro–cyborg as she is, nonetheless underscores the monstrous aspects of the new somatics, when she asserts, in a Manifesto for Cyborgs, that we are all postmodern frankensteins: "By the late twentieth century, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in that, we are cyborgs. The cyborg gives us our ontology; our politics" (193). In the same essay, significantly, she too dismisses Oedipus, as representative of an outworn redemptive telos or "post–oedipal apocalypse":
The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history [...] the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non–Oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival. (192)
We could say that this different logic of repression evoked by Haraway is not a matter of depth but of surface, with again, an attendant collapse of dimension, governed by the logic of the network, the node, the circuit, the rhizome. These new conduits of energy (pace Foucault, Deleuze)––which can no longer even be called "power", implying an agonistic struggle––circulate along a looped itinerary, obedient only to the hydraulic surface logic of network and tributary.
When Haraway invokes the monstrosity of this process of non–differentiation, she is pointing out a process of grafting, which melds disparate elements to produce the new version of mechanized, non–differentiated humanity:
This cyborg is a creature in a postgender world, it has no truck with pre0edipal symbolica or other seductions to organic wholeness through appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense, a final irony since the cyborg is also the artful apocalyptic telos of the wests's escalating domination of abstract identification, a man in space. (192) Like Baudrillard, Haraway launches us into orbit, and once again Oedipus does not have the right stuff to serve as astronaut.
No Body Sees Me
It is difficult to discount this paranoid theorizing, however hyperbolic: if the body is still very much with us in the millennial age, it has without a doubt been cut down to size in a universe where 40 billion new galaxies have just been discovered (this in a single view of the Hubble telescope). This sense of diminished human importance, a neo–copernicism which now decenters our heliocentric conceits (other solar systems having now been "detected" or inferred), may account for the phobic tone of so many late twentieth century texts. This social edginess is evident, for instance, in the ubiquitous trope of the astronaut lost in space, not just in the empyrean of theory, but in popular representations––as in the narrative of Star Trek and its innumerable sequels, where the millennial argonauts are embarked on a recursive voyage, with no end in sight. The very concept of cyberspace, perhaps first popularized by William Gibson's classic Neuromancer, echoes a dread of the vacuum, the fear of spaceage humanity––which is nonetheless an ancestral phylogenetic fear, inherited from Odysseus and beyond––but fitted now with technotrappings and motif, such as travels through time, or hallucinatory "trips" induced by implanted chips, or even perilous nanotech missions within the body, evoking the terror of getting lost in the infinitely minute. Every astronaut risks flying off into space, slipping out of electronic reach, or severing the umbilical tether in the spacewalk: the millennial phantasm is the terror of sailing off into a void from whence there is no return, where the familiar human axial fort–da symmetry of absence followed by presence, the primal rhythm which grounds our very language, is disrupted.
Nor is weightlessness is the only specter that haunts the millennial body. Everywhere in the post–Foucaldian theoretical field, we find musings on the body captured and disciplined, overseen by "the eye in the sky" of the millennial warden, of satellite surveillance. Indeed if so many theorists of our Zeitgeist (among them, Zizek, DeBord, Foster, Jay) frame their analyses in optical imagery, it is perhaps because our post–society is not just a function of spectacle (as Guy DeBord asserts) but of hypervisibility, an epidemic of what Baudrillard terms the ob–scene excess of display, and which Zizek calls "pornography", that spectacle which fixes and objectifies the viewer.
In the disturbing book The Postmodern Scene, David Cook and Arthur Kroker cite a number of "postmodern" symptoms of this transparency, or hypervisibility: in fashion, the empire of the ubiquitous androgynous "look"; the currency of 90's sex, without secretions, over phonewire or on–line; the prominence of art forms celebrating a fragmented or dismembered body, parts adrift, animated and virtualized. Conversely, we see a symptomatic and obsessive return of the vengeful real body in the age of its morcelation and evanescence: might this not account for popular trends like tattooing or body piercing, by which one assures the body's material mooring by visible marks? (There has been a proliferation of articles in the subculture or hypertext "press"––Re/search, Found Object, Postmodern Culture, Atlantica––commenting on the primitivism of body art as a symptom of corporeal angst in the late 20th Century.) It is as though the body inscribed may be both claimed and weighed down, its owner securing a kind of copyright or patent.
To be sure, Cook and Kroker, as well as Baudrillard, make too–facile equations between the "virus" of drug abuse, AIDS, and computer viruses, as part of a social homologue. But in spite of their irksome glibness, their moribund social ethics does find a powerful emblem in the ubiquitous symbol of a disembodied, floating eye––the CBS corporate symbol, the spy satellite, the CNN camera, the UFO, the Magritte painting, the cult alien in Liquid Sky––and now we might add the Discovery Channel Logo, and the graphics of the cult TV series, The X–Files (the credits close with the image of an open eye under the motto: "The truth is out there").
In the popular imagination the millennial subject is figured as the object of chronic observation, even experimentation: witness, for example, the pervasiveness of testimony of abduction by unblinking bug–eyed aliens, who examine their hapless victims with probing instruments under glaring lights; or the currency of the rumor that the AIDS virus was deliberately generated for warfare, a belligerent microbe which "got loose."
A particularly compelling illustration of the coincidence of hypervisibility, high tech, cyborg culture, and virtuality, is found in the story of the famous virtual cadavre Adam, made to train surgeons on screen. The real subject, once a live convict with a real name, became EveryCorpse after execution, frozen in blue jelly, his body parts cut into 1800 cross sections, like a big deli sandwich, photographed slice by slice on slides, then computer animated. Adam can now be viewed––his private parts very public––in any combination, and from any angle, and sliced up again and again with a virtual scalpel.
The flip side of the complaint of modern humanity, the hollow men in the Wasteland––that nobody sees me, engulfed by the crowd, anonymous in urban society––would become, from Adam's point of view, so to speak, that EveryBody sees me, but that nevertheless (in the words of the popular song) "I Ain't Got No Body" because, paradoxically, I always have "Someone to Watch over Me." In the age of the virtual, it seems that even the dead Other has lost his imaginary clout, his spookiness, his opacity (in counterdistinction to what Zizek calls the "undead", a piece of the real which won't go away, but which returns and persists). The story of the genesis of Adam is a parable of the age of hypervisibility: the virtual threatens to overlap with the real; the panopticon, overseeing the slices of space inhabited by its inmates, is transposed onto the microscope of the clinic, overseeing the slices of the inmates themselves.
It is evident that recurring motifs subtend these various accounts of the post–modern, pre–millennial, experience––and not just in the ether of high theory but in the popular press, from the pages of Mondo 2000, to the silver screen, to America On–line, to MTV. In other words, "If no–body sees me" is the lament of postsocial humanity, it's either because of the nagging suspicion that "I ain't got no body..." (like the feckless space men of classic films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Silent Running, hopelessly adrift, alone in space) or because of the corollary angst: the fear that the body I have is public domain, obscene spectacle, monitored and surveyed (Adam has in fact gone global, as a site on the internet). This phantasm represents a weightless, vacant body, adrift in space, the foetal astronaut floating at the end of his tether; the space voyager cut off from earth (Apollo 13), uncathected to objects––or simply undifferentiated from them, as the humanoids prominent in 80's "cyberpunk" fiction (e.g. Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive; Sterling's Global Head; The Difference Engine). Cyberanalysis in Psychospace
A fascinating if weird reflection along these lines––"Can thought go on without a body?" in Lyotard's The Inhuman––is framed significantly as a gendered dialogue between "he" and "she". Lyotard's interlocutors ponder the feasibility of colonization of the universe by thinking machines, artifacts of humanity, after the human race itself has become extinct, as it inevitably will in four billion years with the explosion of the sun (if some microbe doesn't get us first). The question becomes a philosophic one––can computers duplicate human thought processes? The essay rehearses the familiar Heideggerian argument, in the work of Hubert Dreyfus (What Computers Can't Do), that the opacity of the world is experienced by a body with depth and substance, a corpus which puts us there (Dasein), permitting us to anticipate and imagine unseen surfaces, positioning ourselves analogically, "as if" we could see from another angle, thanks to identification with the other's point of view. This multiple vision escapes the binary logic of here/there; on/off; either/or; it is not limited by the cadre of the visual information bit, the pixel. (Even when 3–D computer imaging circumvents an object, as cyberfather Nicholas Negroponte explains, there is no "as if" to its logic, it "sees" sequentially, by piecing together information that is linear, not simultaneous, borrowed, identificatory, or, to use a quaint twentieth century term, intuitive.)
Significantly, in Lyotard's gendered dialogue, the interlocutor labeled "she" argues for the incommensurability of binary logic with human perception and reasoning: human thought is an effect of suffering––in Freud's terms, of remembering and working through, the Durcharbeitung ("The pain of thinking isn't a symptom coming from outside to inscribe itself on the mind instead of its true place" The Inhuman, 19). In other words, "suffering"––Kasparov's agony before Big Blue––is "thought itself resolving to be irresolute" (the opposite of the Cartesian plan by which thought resolves to rid itself of error); it is "[thought] deciding to be patient, wanting not to want, wanting, precisely not to produce a meaning in place of what must be signified" (TI, 19). Human ratiocination requires a patient receptivity to the point of view of the other, the deployment of a listening eye.
The influence of Levinas as well as Heidegger, of course, is evident in this argument, which may also be cast in Lacanian terms: listening itself may be considered a function of human shiftiness or mobility, which Lacan calls the transvitism of the subject position. For to be human is to be in a dialogue made possible by the shifting loci of interconnected subjects. As the conversation is bandied back and forth between interlocutors, each is obliged to project her vision to the place of the other, lending the Other the subject pronoun "I", for a turn: the subject is thus able, and obliged, to see herself as object, to see from "where the Other is coming from."
Finally, Lyotard makes the radical––and also Lacanian––point, that human thought has a gender, and that this is a productive stimga, a mark of its incompleteness, indicating a reaching out to other subjects who are, irremediably Other. Lyotard's "She" argues that thinking machines will not colonize the universe unless they can learn to suffer, to yearn, to submit to the conviction of lack, to live and activate difference. And this is not just sexual difference, but also the difference between self and other, between you and me, subject and object, even the difference between I and Me, ego and self. Thanks to the space of difference that alienates but facilitates, separating subject from object, these encounters occur in a social web, the shared field of the gaze. Like Lyotard (and Heidegger) Lacan insists that human beings think and dwell in the gaze of the Other; and that our bodies give us a position in that field, constituted from other viewing sites, in the eye of the Other. This recognition of the shiftiness of the listening eye, site of the wandering or multiple gaze, counters the conventional Western aspiration to one correct "overview," the position associated from the Renaissance onward with the single point of view of the monarch, the triumph of one–point perspective. In our mobility and capacity for "trying on" other positions, we lose our near–sighted vainglory. So the many eyes of cyberspace may remind us of the contingency of our human being; but if we are on–line, must it mean that we are at the end of our rope?
Perhaps we may cut ourselves some slack and suggest that all of this anti–psychoanlytic, technophobic, paranoid theorizing, even if it is accurate or descriptive, is not prescriptive or even predictive. Oedipus is not quite dead, though vital signs may be flagging; a psychoanalytic model of "depth" in the subject may suggest ways of retrieving and salvaging our embodied minds––if they are indeed in danger––from their cyber–wanderings, reeling them back into physicality. For every fort will have its da. Oedipus Interknot
I have suggested that we may begin to counter the paranoid Zeitgeist by recasting the term "paranoid" itself, following the lead of Jacques Lacan (in seminar III), who views paranoia as a modality––not just an illness––an episteme which characterizes the acquisition of human knowledge. Lacan argues that every time we structure our discourse in light of an anticipated response, as in a talk, or any form of writing, we are fantasizing and constructing in a "paranoid" mode, acting "as if" we know what the other might see or hear, we are social sleuths, attempting to solve the other's mystery by looking from his "web site".
In fact is not all human knowledge "always already" deflected through alien observers, the "eye in the sky" over the cradle, the hovering giant visage at once alien and like ourselves? Lacan asserts that the infant Self is caught and humanized by a web of objects––animate and inanimate––that seem to look back, so many faces enlivened by our attention and reflecting our desire. In psychoanalysis, desire is read as contagion, contracted by the infant human in interaction with other human beings and their objects. And though (as Lacan reminds us) the world and its objects may respond to the infant's needs, they will never fully conform to its demands (for of course every baby, even when fed, warm, and dry, still cries, inexplicably, implacably, for something more). This is a expressed succinctly in Lacan's formula for human desire: desire is the excess of demand over need. In other words, we don't ever get what we want, even when we get what we need: desir is a circuit in which we always miss our appointments with our objects.
For Lacan, both understandings of paranoia––as psychosis and as episteme––may be considered Imaginary constructs, as revealed by the etiology of the disease: paranoia is attributable to a fixation, as Freud tells us, in the narcissistic state. It would seem then that our fascination with the virtual image is indeed a millennial version of Lacan's "mirror stage": the mirror has become the screen, where the imago––chosen from a enticing menu of possible apparitions––is the site of projection, reflecting back on the "operator" who interpellates the image (by "clicking on", summoning the fantasy site).
But "paranoid knowledge" is perhaps just another term for the human condition, governed by human nature, which is of course anything but natural: the Imaginary, Lacan has always insisted, is inextricably imbricated with the Symbolic. We are human because we are social, invested in others and their perceptions of us as cast in language ("our desire is the desire of the Other"); the human field is "covered with objects" of that desire, shared and contested (Seminar III).
I suggest that the panic aroused by the possibilities of virtual reality, the millennium's hyper–Imaginary mode, may be countered by a notion of the cyber age hyper–Symbolic, the region of hypertext, in which space is figured not as a vacuous no–man's land, but as a crossroads, a site of communication, and an emblem of difference. If this sounds familiar, it is not just because I am reinforcing an argument made by the more sanguine of the internauts, but also because I am sketching something more preliminary, very like what Freud calls the resolution of the Oedipal complex––a move from lethal incestuous short–circuit to salutary social detour, thanks to the presence of the overseeing Other as prohibitory third, as screen. This Oedipal dimensionalization allows us to think what a postmodern subject might be, if not an invisible soporific video consumer, disembodied and stupefied by virtual entertainment, mesmerized and stymied by what Ray Barglow and others have termed the "pre–oedipal" computer (the addictive lure of the "mother board" to which one is connected for hours on end).
I am suggesting that an engaged postmodern subject may indeed be paranoid, and absorbed, but in a sanguine sense, not necessarily caught in the lockstep of the image, but engaged in anticipatory thinking and projection vis a vis the Other, the world and its objects. Rather than a tool of surveillance––the one–sided mirror of the panopticon––the listening eye may be an effect of transvestism, the ability to adopt other subject positions, to see anamorphotically, "as if" through the other's eyes.
Could we not then conceptualize cyberspace as the space of the virtual, the analogical "as if", which enfranchises our human subjectivity, a net in which the Other is caught but not captured? For the virtual permits us to try out other corporeal perspectives, other points of view, thanks to our symbolic capacity to analogize space. Lacan, after Freud, insists that the Symbolic is at the heart of the social; the body is at the heart of the Symbolic; and human difference, gendered, contagious, and ontological, is at the heart of the body.
Oedipus Internaut
Somewhat more whimsically, I think we can conceive of Lacan's paranoid knowledge as an apt analogue of communication in the information age; in cyberspace we gain information through a transferential process of projective identification, identifying with "screen names", playing roles in chat groups, adopting visual icons as "ourselves" in a virtual version of the mirror stage. We are self–nominated participants in play, but also in serious discussion groups, through which we identify with areas of expertise or interest. (We can of course "lurk" on–line without participating, but that very possibility, extended to all Others, helps create the ambient paranoia of cyberspace, the sense that "someone is there", in both its positive and negative connotation.)
What is a labyrinthine message "path" but a voyage in space, a peregrination, traced in the header––a signifying chain, where the subject is a subject for another signifier, the address a message for another address?. In other words, when Zizek quips that "we are what we want, in cyberspace" it does not have to mean that we are hopelessly stuck in a closed narcissistic circuit; we are following a "path" which is also a called a "string", taking us hither and yon (fort and da), passing linked bits of knowledge from terminal to terminal, subject to subject. (Given the prevalence today of the notions of net, web, weaving, webcrawlers, and labyrinth, perhaps the myth of Ariadne and Theseus rivals that of Oedipus as millennial paradigm; when we perform a "search", our little spider–messengers crawl around in the cybermaze, following commands that respond to a "string.")
So even if the virtual is an imaginary structure in the Lacanian sense, and always has been, it is a symbolic circuit as well, a signifying chain sending an always rerouted message in the place of a missing object (the real letter of which e–mail is the simulacrum, or even as the real person who sends it, staying in touch but out of reach). The message path retraces the vicissitudes of the subject as constituted in Lacan's schema L, the chart of deflected desire by which what we imagine we want is linked to who we are, seen through the listening eye of the Other.
In fact, the post–lacanian paranoid episteme may be read as a metaphor for (E)go–mail, bounced back and forwarded, marked by its origins, always recursive, a purloined letter of sorts, a response to the Desire of the Other, a reaching out to the objects of the Other. We may think of the zigzagging pass of desire in the Schema L as a kind of electronic path, where our own messages return to us in inverted form. It is as though our own ego–mail is "forwarded" and circulated on–line, with a proliferation of screen names and headers, returning to us relabeled as a message from another site on the net, perhaps behind another screen name or enclosed in an anonymous mailer, or reproduced and forwarded, replying to and eliciting "replies" from a chain of possible screen interlocutors. And, since every letter reaches its destination with the homing accuracy of a smart missile, our own message, encoded, decoded, a refraction of our own desiring gaze, returns to us, marked with tortuous headers (like the one that appeared on my screen recently "reply/ forward/reply/re:no subject").
This recursive path of Ego–mail reminds us again of the Lacanian formula for desire, as the excess of need over demand. In this formula, cyberspace is a virtual playground of desire as excess. For do we in fact need all this information, on demand? Or is the information deluge a kind of excess––a welter of cyberchat, usenets, information downloads––which is a sign of the primacy of the social, rather than of its demise? In any case, the virtual does not pretend to provide complete gratification, and thus is not the mirage of fulfillment or implosion. Virtual reality, paradoxically, reminds us of the limits of the Imaginary––its success is measured by how real the experience seems, as adjudicated by a real body, which, in spite of itself, reminds us that the virtual game is an illusion premised on lack, on the unavailability of anything like the Real Thing. For Lacan, this excess of lack is termed desire.
So the virtual is merely the latest techno form of a psychic configuration as old as the species itself: our imaginary narratives have always permitted us to navigate the Real. In a sense the Imaginary has always been virtual––daydreaming is virtual reality minus the hardware. The accessibility of the Real is what the virtual pretends to offer. The inaccessibility and mystery of the Real is what the virtual signifies. Oedipus Astronaut
Yet many of our transactions in cyberspace give a new cast to psychoanalytic theories, including Lacan's notion of the signifying chain: "Our desire is the desire of the Other" (our on–line "service providers" constantly exhort us to visit the hottest, most frequented websites); "a subject is a subject for another signifier" (in an e–mail chain of forwards); our love is an effect of ambivalence (reflected in the traditional lover's lament, now gone cybernetic, "I need my space"). Even the actual psychosis of paranoia has a cyberanalogue: our own projected desire, which comes back at us as a fantasy of persecution seemingly perpetrated by an Other, displays all the aggressivity of mail bounced by the Mailer Demon, labeled, maliciously, "no path to host," or "unrecoverable error" (and, to add insult to injury, when our own message turns on us like a boomerang, it is often announced cheerily: "You have mail.")
But a return is not always a rebuke, as the spacewalker knows when he touches ground, Odysseus come home. In his own prodigal homecoming to the father Freud, Lacan recasts the Oedipal narrative as the symbolic pact with fellow beings. It is this social net which, for Lacan, will always bring us back from the ether, tangled up in real life, always "owing" what Lacan calls "the Symbolic Debt", the social desire caught from Others and which must be transmitted on to Others, as paranoid knowledge. The air is fairly humming with voices, and this buzz has created its own institutional paranoia among "right–thinking" individuals, from Berlin to Washington. But these attempts to legislate behavior, after the fact, have given rise to the electronic resistance, like the "blue ribbon" internet crusade for free speech, complete with an "electronic march on Washington"; and on a more spontaneous and interpersonal level, the proliferation of joke networks, chain letters, and even of popular mini–revolts, like the now famous dissemination of the outrageously priced "secret" Neiman–Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe to millions of internauts. So I suggest that we keep Oedipus around to cruise the net: for far from losing its purchase, millennial psychoanalysis offers us several ways of saving the body, of thinking about space in a way that does not elide or efface the Other as embodied subject. Psychoanalysis allows us to eschew a determinist fatalistic view of the future, and provides a way to lay claim to some decisions about its shape: we will be, after all, what we want, in cyberspace.
Oedipus is still accused of consorting with Descartes, two members of the old boys' network, vestiges of a positivist patriarchal world–view. However, let us give the Doubter his due: Descartes is as sceptical as the most militant postmodern, in his search for answers. The mythical King Oedipus, on the other hand, is in deep denial of "evidence" which inculpates him and tangles him in the web of human frailty. But whereas Descartes thinks to exist, Oedipus exists to think, and is thus post–cartesian, even "postmodern", in spite of himself. While Descartes interpellates the Other as the all–knowing God who guarantees existence ("HE thinks, thus I am," is the gist of Descartes' ontological cop–out); Oedipus interrogates the Other as enigma, to discover that even when "I" solve the riddle through reason, "I" am precisely never who my cognitions think I am. ("I think, thus 'I' am not").
Lacan's version of the Oedipal story focuses on its detour from what it must ultimately reveal. Oedipus must ultimately pay the Symbolic Debt for solving the riddle of the sphinx concerning humanity; his "I think" is an anti–cogito, underscoring that "he is NOT" who he believes he is, and that the revelation of who he is will not be a grounding for being, but will only reveal his mortality, and provoke his wounding and wandering.
Lacan's Oedipal story is a parable of communication, the inescapable conditions of the Symbolic, as the domain of missed appointments; if our language ostensibly makes things clear, seeming to solve enigmas, it actually only obscures them further, imbricating its Subjects in the Web of the human desire and misrecognition. (Oedipus is never so off the mark as when he solves the riddle and is "recognized" as Jocasta's rightful husband.) As a final reminder of our corporeality and our mortality, Lacan insists on the notion of access to the Symbolic as a kind of wounding or death; reminding us of the illusory nature of what appears to be whole; alas, we die rather than signing off. Even the mirage of identity is predicated on a psychic wounding, a splitting into subject and object positions, body and mirror image. This splitting not only takes place in depth, in a dimensional body, thanks to space; but it actually creates depth in the psyche (the unconscious differentiated from the ego).
Perhaps the social is not dead, but has just changed its site, its cyber version enacting Oedipal prohibition as screen and detour, the conditions of e(ccentric)–communication ("thou shalt not" go directly from point a to b, without navigating the web). This is already Freud's lesson of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the pleasure of the most direct of resolutions, (death itself) is deferred by circumnavigation of the obstacles posed by life–instinct, serving the desire of each organism to die in its own time. Thus each of our messages must arrive by the proper path; as the computer nags reminds us when we try to sign off too abruptly ("you cannot try to drop things here"). Errant Oedipus may be suited up for the third millennium; his web site has always been mapped at the crossroads between Thebes and Corinth.
Nodal points, intersections, sites: let us finally keep in mind that when Lacan insists upon language as a position, a situation within a gender, he is talking about the necessity of a position from which to speak, not the fixity of anatomy or sex. Never is this so apparent as when we adopt a gendered screen identity in our anonymous cyber chatgroups (research has shown that about fifteen per cent of the players in MUD's are virtual cross–dressers). We can take any position we want, but we speak from a site. Our home page is only a point of view in the net of gazes that situate us as social beings.
To say that Oedipus is dead, or ready for retirement, is to misunderstand Oedipus' tale as ur–narrative, rather than paradigm, confusing the content of the message with its path. Cyberchat is indeed filled with Oedipus' questions: Who are my Others? What is human, what is monstrous? Are my Others who they say they are? But more significantly, the play of feint and deferral that represents Oedipus' itinerary––his path towards knowledge––is "activated" in cyberspace. Human doubt is now interactive; but has it ever been otherwise, in the human web of roles, of pretense, of misrecognition? But more important that what millennial Oedipae ask is how and where they ask it, by what circumlocution: cyberspace is the scene of the constitution of subjectivity, the finding of a path, an effect of our situation in respect to the other's "imaginary" identity (a kind of psychic URL, where he may be "located", but not found). The nature of the Other's perception of me is at the heart of the interrogation of the subject in the cyberchat "room" of the Symbolic, where we meet and speak, voicelessly.
Hence virtual reality deploys, electronically, the same intersubjective dynamic of guesswork and role–playing ("my screen name is") that has always constituted human identity, itself a virtual concept emanating from a body in space, a function of shifting subject positions, shuttling between self and Alien. As Lacan suggests, identity is an effect of maintained space, a function of metaphor, where the name is an illusory unified symbol, "standing in for" the divided self it (mis)represents. Just so, virtual reality simulates the real in the space of metaphor, "as if". Hence contrary to the concerns of Baudrillard concerning the impossibility of metaphor on a flattened screen, the virtual metaphor is alive and well, as evinced by the increasing literality of icons––with word processors we edited and deleted, with Windows, we cut and paste. The virtual insists on taking its point of reference in actions performed by the body, like a smile :–). Similarly, we have domesticated cyber trappings, now pets (the mouse, the webcrawler, the gopher). The more virtual technology abstracts, the more tenaciously the material insists, in our computer icons: the toolbox, the file folder, the hourglass (a symbol more primitive and "literal" than even the clock).
Nor have we completely escaped the Cartesian grid: in our worries about the Other who is pushing the buttons, Descartes haunts us still––he was after all, the first to worry in passing that the whole show might be staged by an evil genius, the ultimate internet host. For being on–line does not assuage or even reflect desire; it engenders it. In our interpellations of the Other (who goes there?), we continue to play out the drama of masquerade, feint and pact (Who is out there? Can you come out [or in, to my chat group] and play?). Cyberspace is the playground for the Other big O, who might just be Oedipus, asking us to come on–line. |
