VILE BODIES--A MENTAL MACHINATION

By

Stephen A. Tyler
Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology & Linguistics Rice University
Houston, TX 77251
circa June-November 1993

Befores/Behind

"Vile Bodies," which forms part of the title of this piece is meant to "tune" readers to the text by conjuring images of gyring bodies, whose twisting and turning symbolizes the strophes and tropes of this text. "Vile," by itself, is meant to evoke the themes of the text through its anagrams: "evil," "live," "veil," which, with the addition of the gyring figure of the "-s" plural, yield those two potent symbols of popular culture--"Elvis" and "Levis."
The text is also a meditation on the metaphysical contrast between the figures "gyre" and "circle." The latter is expressed in two contemporary encirclements which appear to be different, but are actually the same event. I refer to the destruction of the Davidian cult at Mt. Carmel in the Spring of 1993, and to the now halted construction of the super-collider. Both of these encirclements occur in the vicinity of central Texas, but they have more in common than location in time and place, for they are both allegories of the legitimation of power in the conquest of the body.

Body positions

These disembodied embodiments are reminders that the body is, after all, a trickster. As the old man said in reply to the doctor's "How are you today?" "Well, some of me hurts most of the time, most of me hurts some of the time, and what don't hurt don't work." This paper, then, is a parody of two body positions--positions in body discourse--that seem to be different, but are, in fact, fitted together in reciprocal intercourse. I call them "Body" and "Anti-body." They are contemporary discourses only because they occur in our time, but they are really repetitions of the tired old Cartesian dualism of body and mind, with, as we might expect under the sign of the gyre as well as the circle, a new twist. Body people keep reminding us that the body is the source, ground, and foundation of being, feeling, perceiving, and knowing; it is the concrete living/lived, enacting/enacted, present-centered, experiencing/experienced body-as-organism (Varela 1992:320-328; Lock 1993:133-155). For my purposes here, there are two strands of body discourse, one in which the body more-or-less symbolizes a kind of pre-rational natural power which is the source of all creation, change, movement, and time. It is opposed to the alienating artifice of reason, which is not only abstract and disembodied, but creates only by means of a deception in which it appropriates and distorts what was initially provided by the body. Since reason is parasitic and at best only distorts what it illegitimately appropriates, this body of discourse, which one finds articulated most clearly in some versions of feminism, seeks a kind of nostalgic-therapeutic return to the pre-rational bodily source, a return that will enable us to rediscover feeling and intuitive understanding before they were transformed and perverted by the unnatural acts of reason. We will re-establish community and connection through the powers of the pre-rational. We could say that this is a kind of paganism. The second body of body discourse conjures the imagery of the body not as a rejection of reason, but as the way for reason to heal itself. It returns to the body-as-origin not for a permanent stay, but in search of a pharmakon--a cure for reason's maladies. We could say that it is a kind of Catholic Christianity. Incarnation is not the end, it is only the beginning of transfiguration. Here one thinks of Merleau-Ponty (1963) or more recently, of Bourdieu (1977), Lakoff and Johnson (1987), or of the "rerendering of the body" in some contemporary biology (Sagan 1992:363). They seek community through reasoned consensus. Common to both bodies of discourse is the idea that the body is the origin and foundation, the literal source of all psychic functions. Concepts, imagination and memory are tropological transformations of the body's concrete symbiosis with the environment. These discourses differ only in their respective attitudes toward tropes. For the first discourse, tropology itself is the problem, but for the second discourse, it is only the failure to understand how tropes are derived that makes them objectionable. There is nothing new in either of these discourses since their central notions have formed the basic constants in the narrative of the psyche's origin at least since Aristotle. Even their difference is not new, for the idea of embodiment or incorporation is reminiscent of the Stoic objection to the Logos of both Plato and Aristotle.
In contrast to these body people, the anti-body folk want to get rid of the bod y, to decouple it from the subject, to innoculate the mind against the viral body (Stone 1992:20). They are akin to those Protestants for whom the body is an obstacle to spiritual perfection, an obstruction in the path to the Heavenly City. For contemporary anti-bodians, the body is just something to be overcome before consciousness can enter entirely into the world of the disembodied network of cyberspace where the mind is no longer the mind in the encumbering organic body, but is "... interpolated into the matrices of techno-scientific maps" (Harraway 1992:42) as the mind-as-machine in the "machinic body," the "body without organs," the Cyborg. Here the body, sensorially enhanced by various cybernetic prostheses, is overcome by its machine mind which detaches consciousness from the body and projects it into the intercommunicant net work as another voice in the choir of angels. Despite the breathless "gee-whizzness" of antibody discourse with its supposedly paralogical interventions and its brave talk of bodies that are neither substa nces nor defined organically by form and function, but are constituted instead by relations of rest and motions, as relations between different velocities, as affects and affecting, as latitude and longitude (Deleuze 1992:625-632), much of the discourse is incantatory word-magic and relies on traditional tropes, rhetorical strategies, and narratives. Moreover, binarism and the Cartesian matrix, on which the whole disc ussion of networks and cyberspace depend, are hardly new and revolutionary. They are standard methods of the techno-fascism that has characterized the hubris of Western culture at least since Descartes. Even the opposition posed here between body and anti-body discourses is hardly startling. It merely continues the old game of opposition between mind/body, spirit/material, that has been the mainstay of Western metaphysics. Recommendations for a return to the world of material reality and exhortations to leave it behind (for good, if possible) are standard stuff, particularly in the modern epoch where these two themes have complicitly opposed one another again and again. They are part of the old modernist program that simultaneously opposed and endorsed primitivism and futurism, low civilization and high technology, and indeed, it is just this juxtaposition--low civilization/high technology that is being characterized here in these body metaphors.

Body Metaphors

It is, of course, true that the body is often the source of metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claim, but it is also the target of metaphors. Consider the following examples:

I. The Body as the Source of Metaphor

The foot of the mountain
The mouth of the river (cave)
A neck of land
The lip of a glass (cup)
The tongue of a shoe (wagon)
The mind's eye
The eye of the storm
The long arm of the law
The finger of fate
The belly of the volcano
The head of the line (company, department) The teeth of a harrow (comb)
A table leg
A leggy plant
A wine with good legs
A body of water (work)
Someone is cheeky (nosy)
Someone has balls (cheek)
Someone is a prick (asshole, fat ass, cunt, armpit) Give someone a hand (knuckle sandwich)

2. The Body as the Target of Metaphor

The pupil (doll) of the eye
The bridge of the nose
The lobes of the ear
The mount of Venus
The mother of the hand (the thumb)
The mouse of the arm (the bicep)
The brain is a hydraulic system (telephone exchange, computer) The soup strainer (moustache)
Muscles are ropes and pulleys
Veins and arteries are canals
The lungs are bellows
The pot (belly)
The testicles are nuts (balls)
The process (penis)
Breasts are melons (knockers)
The eyes are windows
Someone has legs like tree trunks (piano legs) The trunk of the body

Far more interesting than these uses of body parts as the source and target of metaphors is the drganicIorganismic, part!whole synecdoche that enables the ide a that the body is a whole consisting of parts, each functioning to maintain the body by carrying out its particular job. This is the source of the idea of soc iety--and of other non-organic "organizations"--as an integration of parts worki ng together to maintain and reproduce a "self-regulating," "self-organizing," an d "selfperpetuating" whole. This organic trope has always contrasted with meton ymy, the mechanical relation of parts-to-parts, and was further contrasted with the machine, whose movements are geometric transformations of energies imparted to it from outside. The contrasts are str&ight4orward. The machine is a totali zation; it is not a whole, for it cannot be characterized by the kind of recipro city and reflexivity denoted by "self-," as in "self-perpetuating" above. There is but one activity for which "self-" may be used in characterizing machines, a nd that is "self-destructive." Just as biologists say that the aim of every cel l is to make another cell, we can say that the aim of every machine is to destroy itself. (keep that in mind the next time you plunk down $60,000.00 for your new Mercedes.) One need only observe briefly the working of the intern al combustion engine to get the idea. A whole chain of countervailing forces is needed to control a sequence of explosions that would otherwise make the engine rip itself apart--which it ultimately does anyway. The Purusa Sukta in the Rg Veda is perhaps the most concrete expression of the metaphor "society is a body." This hymn is dedicated to the first sacrifice, wh ich was man (Purusa). His severed body parts constituted the hierarchic order o f society. The Brahmin (priest, the highest social class) was born from his hea d; the Ksatriya (warrior, the second highest social class) was born from his arm s and shoulders; the Vaisa (landowner, merchant, the third highest social class) was born from his torso; and the Sudra (laborer, the lowest social ciass) was b orn from his legs and feet. Each class, moreover, has its own specific duties i n the performance of sacrifice and in the maintenance of social order and social reproduction. Each class, by performing its proper duty, contributes to the go od of the whole, just as the parts of the body, by performing their proper funct ions, contribute to the functioning of the whole body. 6

Here the etymological connections among organ, work, energy, surgeon, organizat ion (all from lE *uergom) are foregrounded. The energy expended by the organ i n doing its work creates organization-the body of organs. Along with telos, the se concepts answer the question of "works for what?" They have provided the pri me model of Western society for centuries, and their implicates have been the in struments by which a hierarchical society has legitimized and justified the oppr essionisuppression of those whose work was deemed to be lower in the scale of sy mbolic significances structured by the ideologization of powerlreason. This organic metaphor of society is now either explicitly discredited or is evo ked nostalgically for political purposes. Except as a rhetorical stratagem, soc iety is no longer a body, or even less, a body politic. It is only a collection of disconnected organs whose work has been dis-organ-ized. Society no longer w orks and work is no longer the defining characteristic of orphaned organs. This dis-organ-ization of work, brought about by the relativization of work to the n eeds of the multinational corporation has disconnected work from society. Despi te the body metaphor implied by "corporation," the multinational corporation is not a body, nor is it an organ of society. It has no locus within society and p erforms no functions necessary to society that are not first necessary to itself
. At its most effective, it is an organ without a body, or when less effective,
it is the "tail that wags the dog." Society is not longer a "selfregulating," "self-organizing," "self-perpetuating" whole. It is neither organic nor mechan ical. It is a simulacrum of the organic, the organic recreated and reproduced b y the mechanical symbolizing instrumentality of the machine--the trick of the m achine (from Latin machina "a device," "a trick"). It is the trick of the app lication of reason to the body.

The Body Reasoned

The application of reason to the body treats the body not just as a machine, bu t as a sculpted effect. This sculpting has a long history that is not limited j ust to the human body, but is recorded as well in the history of the transformat ion of plant and animal bodies. The whole, long story of plant and animal domes tication is nothing but the tale of how plants and animals were remodelled for s uch specific purposes as greater 7

size, ease of handling, and dependable yield. It is the story of the trick that transformed ecologically emergent organisms into logically designed machines. It is the story of the application of the idea of mechanical reproduction even b efore the advent of the machine, and it is the model behind the idea of genetic engineering, which is itself the reversal of the ingenuous metaphor that generat ed engine,--the "passion" of the machine-out of genus--the reproductive power of the organism. The gene and the en-gene (engine) are the energies that carry out the work of mechanical reprodu ction, which is to say that "the *gen- and the *gen- are the * uergom that car ry out the *uergom of mechanical reproduction. The story proceeds from body sculpting to body re-organ-ization by means of bo dy supplements and part replacements. The list of practices is long, but some s ense of its range can be evoked by considering such things as eye glasses, false teeth, hearing aids, pace-makers, skin grafts, circumcision, clitoridectomies, organ transplants, liposuction, breast enhancement, hair dyes, false eye lashes, contact lenses, penis implants, lipstick, rouge, ear piercing, tattooing, nose piercing, dieting, sex changes, plastic surgery, and tissue implants. The list includes everything from what might be called "repairs" to enhancements, the lat ter being both symbolic!aesthetic and sensorylinstrumental. In the beginning th e aim is to transcend the. limitations of the body-as-given through improvements that make it conform more closely to cultural ideals of form and make it work better as an instrument for fulfilling the imperatives of social function. The list could be extended to include all tools, for they are, in fact, more-or-less detachable prostheses-machines that become organs of the body and enhance its p erformance. This "tool-as-organ" metaphor derives from the inversion of the meta phor "the organ is a tool." Thus, the tool : the machine the organ : the body implies "the organ is the tool of the body, and the tool is the organ of the mac hine," which implies that the machine and the body are joined by the common inst rumentality of their toollorgans. This is the metaphoric means by which machin es are adapted to bodies an bodies are adapted to machines, and machine bodies a re adapted to machinelsocieties. All of the body "improvements" listed above are more than exterior changes, for they are at the same time inner transformations of consciousness. Some changes have small and seemingly inconsequential implications for consciousness while o thers, such as sensory prostheses, have more powerful effects. The latter are a kin to crude technologies 8

that employ direct violence in restructuring consciousness, such as lobotomies, electric shock, insulin shock, psychoanalysis, propaganda, advertisements, and e ducation. But all of these violent means are too blunt and imprecise, and their effects are often unpredictable and undesirable. The contemporary goal of bioe ngineering is something more like "precision bombing" or "surgical strikes" that destroy just the functions you want to eliminate without effecting adjacent or related functions that you want to preserve or enhance. There should be no "inc ontinent ordnance" (shooting your own troops by accident) in the battle to enha nce the body through the elimination of unwanted effects. The contemporary goal of enhancement through the magnification of desirable effects is similarly motiv ated by the desire for precision and the limitation of unwanted side-effects. T he central idea is that whatever is to be eliminated or enhanced can be treated as if it were completely isolable and independent of any organismic or ecologica l context. Manipulation of a single gene, for example, should effect only the

• utput of that gene and should have no synergistic effects on the output of other genes. Restructuring the genetic code is an attempt to re-organ-ize the body from with in by changing its means of self-reproduction. Other technologies, such as in v itro fertilization, embryo implants, and artificial insemination, have a similar aim, but are less predictable. They contain uncontrolled mechanisms that creat e unforseen effects. They do not make perfect or predictable copies, but all. i ncluding genetic engineering, are modern versions of the ancient paternal desire for immortality, the father's wish to reproduce perfect copies of himself witho ut the risk of the image-imperfecting womb. All of these practices defeat the idea of the body as an assemblage of parts wo rking together as a self-sustaining, self-organizing, selfproducing, autonomous unit. They dissect the body and disperse its organs, just as in the Purusa Sukt a, but unlike that hymn, they do not implicate a social body reconstituted from these severed parts. Only an inner restructuring of consciousness can reflect a nd produce the outer restructuring of society, for it is by means of the reflexi vity of selfunderstanding that consciousness conceives of its own organization a s the organization of the body and as the organization of society. When consci ousness no longer understands the social and physical body as a body, as an orga n-iz-ation, but thinks of it only as a dissipated and 9

dispersed array of dissected bits that are no longer parts of anything other tha n the array that may arrange them without organ-iz-ation in the matrix-that-is-n ot-a-womb, there can be no consciousness that reflexively understands itself as a self-constituted, self-constituting organ-iz-ation. Consciousness can neither reflexively conceive of itself as an organon nor see itself reflected as an org anization in the mirror of the dis-organ-ized physical and social body. Consequ ently, the grammar of reflexivity that posits the self that reflects upon itself as the subject of its own objectivity and the object of its own subjectivity no longer organizes consciousness or any of its discourses. The inner restructuring of consciousness both reflects and produces the outer r estructuring of what was the physical and social body, but the model of the body -as-organism-organon is replaced by a different, more virulent form of Cartesian ism, one that at last realizes the full possibilities of the Cartesian matrix in the idea of the network that inhabits and is inhabited by the Cyborg (Harraway 1985), the machinelbody, the body that has become its own prostheses, the body that, in order to meet the needs of postmodern capitalism, has been technologica lly modified and brought into conformance with the ideals of techno-fascism. The machinelbody, which is a fusion of the mechanical and the organic, blurs th e distinction between the machine and the organism, but this interpenetration of the mechanical and the organic does not produce an Hegelian synthesis that over comes the difference between machines and organisms in the form of a new, emerge nt, universal ur-mensch , nor does it merely reduce the organic to the mechanica l, as in earlier forms of mechanical reductionism. It does not, in other words, produce a mechanical superorganism nor reduce organisms to machines. Instead, it posits the idea of the machine-as-organism. These living ma chines are not . rnbots, hominoids, or purely mechanical automata, as in earlier forms of Cartesi anism, but are organisms whose sensory-motor and logicmemory systems have been r emodelled and supplemented by computers. Computers enhance human perception and imagination, but they also "capture" human organismic capabilities for the machi ne. The organism is captured by its prosthesis. These living machines have not somehow acquired the org an ic capabilities of self-organization, self-maintena nce, and self-reproduction by a kind of emergent machine consciousness, but beca use these organic capabilities are now managed by machines, 10

machines have, somewhat parasitically, captured these capabilities, much as an a nimal species is able 10 do things it is orgaflically incapable of by "capturing " other species that can do what they cannot. This relatiqn of machine and orga nism, however, is not symbiotic, since only one part of the relationship is biot ic. It is biomechanical where that name properly implies what its linguistic form declares it to be: namely, the "biology of machines." What is now called b io-mechanics should be called mechanobiotics , the understanding of biology as m echanics. This blurring of the distinction between bodies and machines is part of the lon g history of the capture and domestication of nature by culture, the triumph of reason over the pre-rational, of civilization over the primitive, which has brou ght about the general failure of the polar differentia that have constituted the givens of Western metaphysics. It is one episode in the story of the failure

• f the opposition between nature and culture that has produced the naturalization of culture and the culturization of nature, and which has, in turn undermined a ll the fundamental oppositions of Western metaphysics, such as naturallartificia l, bodylmind, organicimechanical, femalelmale, processistructure, chanceldete rminism, passionireason, and unco nscious!co nscious (H arraway 1992). The Panglossian reading of these failures is that they are liberating. They wil l free minds from centuries old metaphysical errors, and they will free individu als from power structures that have traditionally controlled access to the globa l network of information. In place of individuals defined in terms of essences in opposition to other essences, it will ultimately produce "....a revolution i n intelligence, sensitivity and creativity...." (Guattari 1992:30), and bring in to being true processual, singularizing, self-valorizing subjectivities (ibid. 1 9-22). This revolution will be realized through the computerization of subject ivity that will enable the hyper-development of visual imaging, memory storage, rapid processing and updating, access to information in international data banks , and the formation of virtual communities connected to one another through the cybernetic network. A cynic might say that this reversion to enlightenment rhetoric within the disc ourse of tech no-fascism is either an hypocritical stratagem or a piece of Heide ggerian naivete, but what is most interesting in this version of futurist discou rse is its avoidance of any real account of the role in this utopia of the unive rsal totalitarianism of de 11

territorialized capitalism, of free market, global capitalism, which arrogates t o itself all the functions that were formerly thought to belong to the state or to society or to the community or to the individual Yhe state has, indeed,"with ered away," not by means of communism, but by means of a capital driven techno-f ascism that now needs neither the state nor society, and everywhere seeks to fre e itselt from their encumbering archaisms. In this "biosocial world" (Rabinow 1 992: 241) it will not have been the "free play" of techno-science "working out," in grand, unmolested, autonomous innocence, the implications and imperatives of its own ideas and practices, it will have been tech no-science bottom-lined by the market and "working up" the imperatives of the market. To put it differentl y, it is pure romanticism to believe' that tecbno-science will be permitted to w ork out its own destiny independently of global capitalism. And it is fQlly to s uppose, with Deleuze, Guattari, Harraway, and Rabinow that global capitalism wil l be undermined and overcome by the liberating forces of techno-science. Techno -science too, will not have the privilege of the grammar of reflexivity that wou ld grant it the power of predicating "self-." The failure of the super collider project and the scaling back of NASA are sufficient reminders of how the market imposes its will on the production of all knowledge, techno-scientific or other wise. When the semantic distinction between nature and culture, machine and organism finally disappears into the amphiboly of the "living machine," everything become s a resource that can be appropriated, allocated, and transformed according to the imperatives of the imperial market, and when human eggs, sperm and body part s can be bought and sold like chicken eggs and pork bellies, and human bodies ca n be genetically resculpted and cloned like those of pigs and peanuts to meet th e needs of the market, it is not a revolution in subjectivity; it is the elimina tion of subjectivity and the silencing of every ethical voice except that of the market-as- transcendental-subjecdvity , the deus ex machina that decides for us . There will be no "....voices 0! self-reference developing a processual subjec
tivity that defines its own coordinates...." (Guattari 1992:19), and it will not be the omputer-enhanced, liberated subjectivities of humans that speaks and dec ides; it will have been the computer-enhanced, liberated voice of the market spe aking, as it were, through the mask of god--but perhaps not the God Heidegger ha d in mind. When the market will have become the Neitzshean "free play of power" and the "transvaluation of all values," when the market wlll have become 12

nature humans will have ceased to exist as such, They will have become apotheo sized as interchangeable and expendable parts of the transcendental subjectivity of the market--in that time when the "house of being" will have been not even a "machine for living, " but a ffg machine." It is also predictable modernist romanticism to suppose that residual pockets o f primitivism will contain the key to the reappropriation of machinic subjectivi ty, that the "barbarian compromise" of a "North-South axis" will function as a mediating third voice of self valorization for human collectivities (Guattari 19 92:14-16). Nothing could be more symptomatic of the failure 9f tech no-scientifi c discourse than this re-cycling of -the tired old modernist theme of the primitive-as-therapeutic , this juxtaposition of past and future, primitive and techno-futurism as the cure for the present. This is not to say that the relatively dystopic present will be replaced by an absolutely dystopic future as envisioned by Gibson (1984) and other science fict ion writers and film makers. These apocalyptic visions--in spite of their seemi ng departures from standard textualization and cinematography--are little more t han bad digests of the Book of Revelations, including even its obscurities of em plotment and character motivation. They do not, in other words, portend innovat ive reflections of Cyborg sensitivity and sensibility; they are little more than predictable works of modernist transgression that, at best, merely repeat, with heavy-handed pretentiousness, the eschatology, the themes, and textual imperati ves of the inventlo they purport to transgress. The rhetoric of techno--science and of its redundant surrogate, science fiction , is boringly predictable. There is the same tired deployment of narrative stag es (usually three), the same desire for apotheosis and resolution, even if it is nothing more than the expected ironic irresolvability, the same invocation of t he forces of good and evil, even if they are veiled in the seemingly vile manner s of sinners who, by the depth of their gyring plunge into the abyss of sin, ar e closest to virtue, if not God, the same use of displacement into phantasmagori c realms of unfamiliar realities or of familiar realities defamiliarized, the sa me themes of altered states of consciousness induced either by this displacement or by Kafkaesque metamorphoses of body and mind, the same simultaneous evocatio n of nostalgia, elegy, threat, and transmogrification, the same confrontations o f identities confused, 13

established, and disintegrated, the same, the same. We might well ask why the n ew forms of Cyborg -consciousness have produced no new rhetoric. To reply that it is only because of their relative infancy would be to miss the -main point, w hich is: Cyborg consciousness is not new. It is merely the working out of the mes and ideas already available, not just in the textual tradition, as Gadamer m ight say, but of what is already possible within the form of consciousness facil ltated by the Cartesian matrix, which is, after all, the source and means of the computer itself. Just as the network is the idea of the matrix projected outwa rd onto the social body, the computer is the idea of the matrix introjected int o the mind as the body of thought. Even contemporary discussions about civil society, which might be expected to r eflect or reflect upon the implications of the "living machine" for communities and individuals, have been only tentative and have continued to cast the discuss ion in the wholly traditional terms of the opposition between individual rights and the good of society . In the world of the "living machine," where individua ls and society are at best only archaisms, the current debate between liberals a nd comm unitarians, which focuses almost exclusively on the issue of individual rights versus the good of society, is beside the point--para . Individuals and society are no longer relevant terms in the construction of the idea of the civi l, and when the civil will have become the market, we can no longer imagine the civil as the norms customs, laws and usages that govern the conduct of individ uals in sodety as if the images of the individual and society were still relev ant. Both liberals and communitarians assume that there are undivided unites of thought and expressiom or of values, beliefs, and practices, identities that c an be characterized as bundles of shared essences. Individual and society are a ctually homologous "individuals" in competition with one another. The collectiv ity is simply a fictive individual with rights, needs, and dispositions, and the individual is a sensorial community with rights, needs and dispositions. Both pretend to reflexive understanding, arrogating to themselves the autonomizing re flexive "self-." Both liberals and communitarians presume the necessity of cons ensus, whether it is that of the individual's identity-producing sensus communis or that of society's identity-producing agreements in values, beliefs, and sh ared understandings. They neither address, in an interesting way, the changee and transformations of the life-world brought about by- -Ihe technologies of rat ional control that have produced 14

the mechanization of life and the vitalization of the machine, nor do they seek to understand the way the structure and content of subjectivity-whether of indiv iduals or of society--is altered and manipulated by the powerful phantasmatic in strumentalities of the computer and television. Where bio-engineering and geneti c engineering remodel life forms and the computer and television reformulate ima ginative possibilities, the imagery of the individual and society, and all the f amiliar dualisms associated with their opposition and complementarity are not so much eliminated or resolved as they are simply set aside--pa ra--as no longer relevant issues in any discourse. They will have become part of the grammar of a dead language.

Through the Looking Glass

The favorite sensorial prosthesis of the modern age, the prosthesis that in fac t enabled the modern age, is the mirror-cum-lens installed in such machines as t elescopes and microscopes that enhance the visual sensosrium by producing images as magnified reflections of things out there. We have come to the end of the age of mirrors, not that we have given up on visual images--quite the contrary- -but rather that we are more involved with images that do not just reflect and magnify exterior objects, but--with our participation--co-create ourselves and the objects we inspect. Typical examples are the computer-enhanced images produ ced by magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, and, of course, in pure form, virtual realities of all kinds produced in the prosopon, the so-c alled human-machine "interface ." The production of such virtual realities is no mere re-inscription of the idea of representation, for a virtual image is not a straight-forward mirroring or re presentation of an originary object out there. Such an image is a manifestation in the strict sense--but perhaps not by the manus of God--or maybe by the left hand. It is prt of the displacement of the object out there by paradigmatic ob jects, and it illustrates the simultaneous involvement and displacement of the s ubject in the production or construction of the object. Here the character of s ubjectivity is also being re-imaged, re-imagined. just as it was in the modern p eriod by its Involvement with the lens. A different prosthesis creates a differ ent subjectivity--one that is no longer certain of its identity apart froin its prosthesis. We have then, subjectivities produced 15

without mirrors, for we have stepped through the looking glass into a different kind of narcissism in which there are no reflections of an I and no eye that see s the I. The transformation of subject and object implicates the emergence of a differen t kind of semiology in which the signifierisignified relation will no longer con stitute a foundational structure of opposition. It will have been a semiology i n which signifierisignified will have been no longer significant. It will have been a different grammar.

Meditation on Grammar Appropriate to Living Machines

Because lMng machines n-either communicate with one another nor interrogate nat ure from within that distance of the identities selfother/subject-object , they require a different grammar, a grammar of participatory imagery in which no fi rm distinction between form and content, logos and imago , and subject and obje ct guarantees the structure of reason or legitimates a form and style of writi ng as the representation of reason. As a beginning, the grammar appropriate to living machines must reformulate the categories of person, tense, voice, and the sentential structure based on the oppositions of subjecUobject, and nounlverb (Bohm 1980:1-65, 173-213, Pred and Pred 1985:465-470). Person and time are figures of discourse. Just as the "I" signifies "person" on ly by means of its occurrence in a discourse so that "I" is the voice of the spe aker, the per-sonare (by sound) rather than the per-s'opta (by sight), time too, is the creature of voice, of the speaker speaking now. The present is generated in the act of utterance, which, as Benveniste says "....is renewed with each pr oduction of discourse....(and]....is coexistent with our own presence... (1971:8 3). Moreover, this present, this speaking now is always conditioned by the nega tivity of an unspeakable "....will have been said...." which contains within it those negations of the present known as the past and the future. The present pr esents itself as the dialectical overcoming of its negativity and thus as the ov ercoming of time in the now, the immediate, the in-mediate, unmediated by the pa st and future. This dialectic of the present constitutes a paradigm in which now is the object ive moment of the real, of the being that can be known as the true. In additio n to the differentiation of time into past, future, and present, it presents a p rolation, a structure of oppositions involving 16

objective vs. subjective , real vs. unreal, being vs. non-being, known vs. unkn own, true vs. untrue ,the One vs, the Many, universal vs. parlicular, timeless vs. time, and indication vs. signification. The unreal opposes itself to the surreal, non-being opposes the become to the becoming, and the unknown opposes remembering to imagination. These relations of opposition are illustrated in thought picture 1.

Know Time- Indicate Objective Present Being Real less 0

        + Signify Subjective      Past    Future  Non-being  Unreal Time
Remember        Imagine Become<-->Becoming

Thought Picture 1: The Dialectic of the Present

Thought picture 1 tells the following story. We can only know for sure what is preserit -in the present, for that is what is real and can be indicated, shown, pointed out as an object coexisting in the present with the act of indicating. Thus, whatever is present is an obje9tive, real being that can be shown or demon strated as a "this here now," a "truth." As for the past and the future, whateve r is there is not a real being. In the case of the past, it is only what has be come, a no-thing, a non-present, a not here anymore, a was, an unreal remembered something, an untruth, a subjective non-being that can only be signified but no t indicated, and known only mediately as a rnemory. The future is nly a surreal , a subjectivity, something imaginable but not knowable because it is a becoming , a not here yet, a "wannabe" that can be signified but not indicated. Nothing true can be said of it except that whatever is "in it" does not exist--yet. This paradigm of the present is the "grammar of the real." Whatever can be tru ly written must conform to this structure of oppositions. But -17

this grammar depends upon the sleight of hand that establishes indication as the means of making objects known to subjects. Its basis seems to be something lik e pointing, a gesture that directs someone's gaze to a visible object. It thus presumes someone who points, something pointed to, and someone pointed-for, and thus conforms to the actorlaction grammar of agent, action, patient, and benefic iary. Although - the agent or actor might be signified by a personal name, a noun, or a pronoun, in the case of a supposedly originating predication, the only real c andidates available for that slot are "1," or a deictic "this," "that." "He poi nts," or "John points," or "something points," for example, cannot be foundation al because these utterances presuppose an "I say he, John, somebody points." As we have seen, however, "I" cannot be posited as existing prior to the discourse in which "I" occurs. This grammar then, cannot be founded on the agent or acto r subject. Similarly, the object, the pointed to and the pointed-for are brough t into the present only by the discourse that originates from the non-foundation al "I." The action of pointing, in turn, makes no sense without someone who poi nts to something for someone. The deictics "this" or "that" accompanying the ge sture of pointing, or represent it, can only be imagined as having the function of representing in - a context of discourse where someone is pointing out someth ing for someone for some reason. In effect, the act of indicating, which establ ishes the connection between objects and subjects by "presenting" objects to sub jects not only recapitulates the grammar of actorlagent, it also presupposes a d iscourse in which the "this" or "that" can mean "this here now" or "that right o ver there now." Indication, which pretends to be the means of the present that e stablishes the objective reality of knowable objects, cannot be performed solely within the present, for not only is the present itself already conditioned by t he negativity of "it will have been," the act of indicating too, is similarly c onditioned by "it will have been said." The realities of the present cannot be established either by unspoken 9estures or by uttered pronouns. There is final ly, no useful distinction between indicating and signifying (Cf. Derrida 1973:Ch 2). We can say that indicating is nothing more than another way of signifying.

The consequence of the failure of indication as a wholly separate means of repr esentation is that the grammar of the real contains a paradox. It is the means o f the discourse of the real that ensures that the real will always be represente d as the unreal. The present does not 18

actually overcome its negativity as much as it contains it within itself as a ki nd of secret, unspeakable -discourse. In the remainder of this text I will have attempted to write this unspeakable d iscourse by means of a parody of the grammar of the real, a prosopopeia.

PersonlProsopon

Since reflexivity, the positing of the self- , is the central grammatical funct ion in the idea of the organic, grammatical reconstruction begins with the categ ory person , which is the simultaneous source and goal of the reflexive. - erson must be recast in accordance with the machinic self which has no fixed identit y, but is instead infinitely multiple. In the first place, the easy rapport amo ng individual and person through the psychological and grammatical notions o f identity, subject, and subjectivity cannot be sustained in the absence of ide ntity . Secondly, there can be no reflexivity where there are no identities. S elf- , in other words, is not produced in the overcoming of the opposition of su bject and object where these are not separable, fixed identities. The individ ual, which predicates self- of it-self does not emerge except in the context o f an identity producing negativity that enables the difference between self/othe r, subject/object. The enunciative priority of the first person singular--whet her God or the individual-- which enables the possibility of self-reference thro ugh the identity of "I" as the speaker , Is disabled through the failure of the singularizing individual. The first person singular is muted in favor of the f irst person plural, which will have been anyway the culmination of the desire of Western metaphysics., in spite of the fact that it will have been the first per son singular that will have provided the opticalivisual priority of "I see," whi ch, though subjective, is the basis for all objectivity when "I see" becomes mag ically transformed into "We see." The ambiguity here is that We are not so sure about the "We," especially when there's nothing to "see," as in the case of thin king,knowing, believing,wanting, and intending. We think "I think" is more cert ain than "We think" and We know "I know" is more certain than "you know." The unhappiness of the first person is that we now think there's something odd about an "I think" or an "I am" that will have been prior to a "We think" and a "We are." The solitary cogito thinks its own being only if 19

it is not solitary--as Vygotsky, but not Piaget, might have put it. This silenc ing of the originary ego-centric out-cry, the primordial predicament, however, d oes not establish a foundational first person plural "WE" that we could simply r e-inscribe by the old way of writing as a kind of super I. We have to remember t he implication of plurality here as a sign of multiplicity and multivocality th at cannot be reduced, by a kind of "consensing" act, to a single voice or a sing le subject--the multitude singing, as it were, in harmony. Pandemonium will hav e been as reasonable, and we will have thought the idea of the individual which is neither a particular nor a universal, but is the unity of their difference, t he individual which cannot posit self- without another, which is not an essence, a cotlection of qualities, traits, attitudes, memberships--She individual witho ut singular identity.

Tense-the Past

The time of the organism is the present of its past and future, but the time of the living machine is ambiguous. The old writing will have located everything in the past. This is the paradox of history and historicization. All events ar e relativized to history--except history. The relativization to time and context is possible only through the universalization of history--which is also the uni versalization of the causality that enables science, even as the latter will hav e seemed to have repudiated both history and causality. The hegemony of the writing that will have been implicated here is displaced by endless textualizatfons that never produce a text, by the secondary orality of television and multi-media presentation, and by performance--the dramaturgic act ing out of a presentation. The whole armamentarium of classical reason is in qu estion here--identity, causality, proximate action, the excluded middle, and the Cartesian coordinates of space that map the world into the iniaginary matrix th at makes reason. There is an antipathy between history and civil society, a kind of Gresham's L aw. History drives out civil society, reduces it to something like sociology or economics or political science. So we return here to another idea of history m ore compatible with a Ciceronian imagination where history is not history, a nar rative that unfolds in or through time, 20

but is instead fabula and exempla. Fabula are the stories we tell for rhetoric al purposes--stories that do not function as narratives or as systems of rules, or as universals guaranteed by scientific method, but which function i-nstead as examples. Examples need not narrate, though they might, and they are neither p articular nor universal, but contain within themselves the possibility of both p articular and universal. An example is a concrete particular, but it portends m ore than its particularity; it invites the imagination to go beyond the particul ar, to see in it a kind of universality.

Tense--the Future

We think causes produce effects even when we say we don't think that way anymor e. But the machinic subjectivity will want to have thought that effects will ha ve produced their own causes--will have sought them out, as if in telos. We mi ght say that causes and effects are co-constructs since we cannot think the one without the other, but the machinic mind will have thought a systematic displace ment of the past and future. It will itself have displaced the distinction betw een past and future that will have been the enabling condition for the idea of c ause and effect. Cause and effect cannot have their usual organic meaning if th ere is no difference in time such that something can be -said to have come befo re something else or that something has come after something else. While before and after are dispersed into the loci of the network and in the first place mea ns literally in the first place , time is only the illusion of the movement from place to place within the spaces of the already existent network which will ha ve recapitulated itself. The machinic mind needs a grammatical tense in which t ime--the opposition between past and future--is not realized as that dialectica l neutralization of the past and future which is the instrument of their unreali ty and which we call the present. It will have been thought by a time that is always ambiguous, a time for which pst and future are indeterminable and there i s no present, and it will have thought something like a passe-anterieur--a locut ion more cpnsistent with the idea of a become becoming which can have no locatio n in time other than the possibility of all the locations within the network. I t wlll have been. 21

VoicelPer-sonare

[thel thinking of (the] machinic mind, which is its own participatory reality, will have dispensed with the definite article, will have bracketed it las in thi s sentencej. This bracketing prohibits the foundational prote ousia by eliminat ing the designating or indicating of a particular or a real by means of a defi nite article. It dispenses with the imputed difference between particular and u niversal signified by "the dog," for example, as "this particular, real dog righ t here," and "the dog" as the name for the universal dog or class of dogs. The machinic mind will thus have eliminated the presumptive difference between parti cular and universal and between indication and signification, which is after al l, only a syntactic function in which nouns are seemingly indicated by definite articles whose definitizing role is to point to real, definite, particular thing s--to prote ousia, first things. Moreover, since the machinic mind is participat ory, it will have eliminated the necessary priority of subjects and of the disti nction of subject and object, and since it is this distinction that will have en abled the idea of the opposition between the active and passive voices, it will have derived these voices from the middle voice. Subject and object will have emerged only as the mutual implicates of the action of the verb, only as a poten tiality within the middle voice. It will not have been the reflexive, that hall mark of the Cartesian cogito which requires a subject which thinks its own objec tivity as a kind of feed-back, that -enables the egregious 5 elf-. The reflexive simply re-inscribes the subjectiobject as separate but cooperative entities and facilitates the temptation to think their separation and distance, their ontic necessity, and to imagine the action of one on the other. The middle voice, by contrast, is participatory, and subjects emerge or undergo change as an interact ive process from which they cannot distance themselves either by thinking [thei prncess. or by thinking [the iself thinking [the Iprocess . Subjects are inside process as agents and patients, sources and goals, benefactors and benefactees, origins and termini, actors and acted upon. There is no subjectiobject articula tion or even relation between them via the verb, for subject and object are n ot differentiated from the process signified by the verb. Even though English does not have a proper structural middle voice, and has rec ourse either to the passive or the reflexive where another language might use a middle, certain English expressions have the effect 22

of a middle voice. Consider, for example, the English sentence, "I grew up." H ere there is no actorlaction, subjectiobject relation, no agent who performs upo n -itself the action of growing up. Even though "I" is present in the sentence, that "I" is not a subject from which any action emanates, nor is it the object toward which, or on which the action is directed. It is not reducible to a refl exive, as in the case of "I shaved," for example. '1 shaved" can be supplemente d by -self -, as in "I shaved my-self," but "I grew up" cannot be--except as pa rody or hyperbole--"l grew myself"--up or otherwise. The 'I" that seemingly gro ws up in this sentence is not even the subject as object of an instrumental act in a passive sentence. "I" may have been raised by my parents, but "I" was not "grown up" by them WI grew up" is neither active nor passive, nor even less, ref lexive. "I" cannot extricate myself from the process of growing up, and since I cannot extricate myself from it and thereby distance myself from what is happen ing to me, I cannot control it. It is, of course, this illusion of control that is facilitated by actorlaction, subjectiobject sentences, whether they are acti ve or passive. The agent, disengaged from the process, stands outside of it, is unaffected by it, and can interfere in it without being mutually affected. Thi s disengaged agent is the source and instrument of the idea of objectivity. It is embedded in the subjectipredicate, functionlargument idea of the sentence in both grammar and logic, and it is this subjectipredicate, functionlargument sent ence that permits and encourages the framing of causality and transitivity as he gemonic relations among and within objects and selves. The power of the subjecti predicate form is so strong that even Frege, in his speculations on logic, could not really countenance argumentless, naked functions, which is what a middle vo ice is in its most extreme form. Similarly, many studies of the middle voice ret ain the idea of the subject or agent or actor as an indispensable part of the id ea of the middle voice (Benveniste 1971, Kemmer 1990). The middle voice is char acterized as those sentences in which the "subject" is effected by the action or undergoes change within the process of the verb or benefits from the action of the verb. The "subject" (agent, actor) is here necessary to the definition. T he definition, so to speak, merely recapitulates the very difference it seeks to overcome, which statement itself is actually a middle voice process of the sort that enables Derrida's idea of differance. This definition not only retains the opposition between noun and verb or pronoun and verb that is the foundation of the subjectipredicate grammar 23

and of its correlative functionlargument logic, it reinstates it in even more po werful form. It is thus a reinscription of the enabling opposition between noun and verb. In its fullest realization, however, the middle voice creates a sent ence in which the verb not only dominates the noun, it incorporates it in such a way that the noun participates in the verb as an indistinguishable part of it a nd is thus unnecessary to the action of the verb. The middle voice is the idea of pure process independent of any quality of reality as an object in the form o f a noun or pronoun (Cf Hardy 1993, Webster 1958, Pred and Pred 1985:465-469, ar ber 1975). This merger of the subjecUobject with the verb is the analog of the C yborg's desire to become one with the network. The loss of the organic body by the mind-in-the--network is the loss of the subjectlobject noun in the middle v oice. [The] middle voice is [the] network, the subject/object noun is the body- as-corpse. In the sentences immediately preceding this one, the brackets and bold face ind icate the association of the noun phrase and the definite article in English. T he conjunction of these two grammatical devices is the means of the ousia as a d efinite, particular object, a real existent, a proper thing, and it is the sourc e of the ideology that connects the noun with the real, as the name of the real. The role of the definite article is to pick out a particularity, to indicate t he real by signifying that its collocated noun is a bounded, isolable, definab le, and stable entity, a true being about which true things can be predicated. The definite article and the noun are the stuff identities will have been made o f. In association with such nominalizing grammatical devices as infinitives, wh ich transform verbs into nouns, and partici pIe 5, which can be collocated with the definite article, as in "the doing," as if "doing" were a noun no different from "tree," English grammar systematically dissociates ithei action and process from the agent and the object or permits them to be assigned to the agent or t he object as if they were alienable and transferable attributes. These are all techniques of entification, the instruments by which the noun and the thing esta blish and maintain their Newtonian hegemony in consciousness, the means by which activities are inscribed and transformed into stable representations as if they were things in the mind no different from such familiar dead objects as tables and chairs, whose activity is always imparted by agents external to them. [The] middle voice, by contrast, is the instrument of de-entification, that n-corp-or ation of the noun by [the] verb that produces no body-as-corpse. 24

Irrealis

It will have been necessary to have contextualized the real--ihat idea that rea lity is singular and foundational--within sensibilities for plural, multiple, co -existent realities, any one of which might be realized as that single,foundatio nal reality by the arbitrary, authoritarian dictat of consensus. It is not tha t the really real will have been replaced by simulacra or the hyperreal or the v irtually real, but that these realities coexist and even interpenetrate one anot her. In contrast to this notion of multiple, co-existent realities, Baudrillard (1983: 1-12) and Guattari (19-2:3-6) tell the story of these different realitie s as a narrative in which the really real is first displaced by its representati on, and that representation of the real is then displaced by its representation, creating that familiar sequence of Aristotle's peri hermenian in which really real-->real as representation-->representation of real as representation or rea l-- >surreal-- >hyperreal, the latter being the simulacrum that has forgotten o r obscured its origin in the real and passes itself off as the real. In the man ner of Vico, Baudrillard and Guattari understand these sequential realities as h istorical or evolutionary stages, each characterizing a particular age and each being a transformation of the previous age. Though they differ in specific deta ils, both Baudrillard and Guattari describe a sequence that might be rendered as pre-modern (primitive)-- >modern-- >postmodern. Each of these periods or ages correlates with its dominant mode of representation, so that direct, unmediated apprehension of the real by indication (perhaps even prelinguistically) is the mode of the primitive or pre-modern age, while mediated understanding by way of images that signify the real-asindicated is the mode of the modern age, and sym bols that reflexively represent their own representation is the mode of the post modern age. Each period and mode of representation is determined by the usual Ma rxist infra-structural modes of exchange, as in: land work money rent profit taxation These obviously involve the duality of (I) direct comparisons of land, kinds of labor, and objects, and (2) manipulative appropriations of land, labor and compa rison. This duality itself is the movement from the real (direct 25

comparison, indication) to the unreal (unmediated comparison, significati on). Apart from the problems of the artificiality of the historicization of this seq uence and the attempt to correlate realities with historical periods or epochs, other complications beset this narrative. In the first place, it neglects virt ual realities.- Virtual realities are neither representations nor representatio ns of representations. They are selforiginated, not as copies of something els e, or even of themselves, but as potentialities that do not depend upon mirrors or the propagation and reflection of light, do not produce images as representat ions, and do not, consequently, require the objective gaze of the all-seeing eye as the final condition of their apprehension. They are not part of that pseudo -history of the real known as the narrative of the symbol. Virtual realities do not originate in the real either as derivatives of it or a s its representations. The narrative movement from the real to the unreal or hy perreal, this sequential derivation of representational reals from an originary, unrepresented reality merely recapitualtes the story of foundationalism,in whic h the really real can first be indicated and then tropologically signified in it s representations. Here the really real is the necessary source and origin of i ts representations, for there must be something to be represented that exists be fore its representation. The idea of representation itself requires this priori ty of the represented. The really real is primary, originary, and necessary. R epresentations are secondary, derivative, and arbitrary. Virtual realities, in contrast to representations, do not derive from th real, and do not imitate it. They are not even necessarily simulacra, though they might be. They are not su bstitutes or replacements for the real or its representations. They do not driv e out the real in the way representations and simulacra do. Virtual realities a raIIel the real and its representations and are not dependent on them. Baudrillard and Guattari understand reality as the dialectical process of its o wn overcoming in which the Inherent opposition between the real and the unreal create the surreal as in: 26

• surreal 0

+ real unreal

Here the surreal is neither the real nor the unreal alone, but is both an unreal real and a real unreal. This dialectic is produced by the dialectic of represe ntation, as in:

representation of representation (signification of indication) 0

direct representation mediated representation (indication) (signification)

The dialectic of representation derives from the dialectic of consciousness, wh ich derives from the dialectic of society represented by the sequence primitive- - >modern-- >postmodern ,which derives from the dialectic of labor. Each dialec tic is thus the overcoming of itself, and the sequence of dialectics is an alleg orical structure created by the analogical correspondences of the moments of eac h dialectic with one another, so that the real, for example, is the analog of re presentation, which is the analog of indication, which is the analog of the prim itive, which is the analog of land, and so on through the other dialectical mome nts. It is tempting to think that virtual reality is a fourth order of reality emerg ing from the surreal as the product of their transformation in technologies of r epresentation. This interpretation would obviously fit virtual reality easily i nto the sequence of dialectics as merely a fourth stage, and the sequence of soc ial epochs might be amend as something like primitive- - >classical-- >modern-- >postmodern. This easy solution, 27

however, neglects three important points about virtual realities: (I) virtual re als are not representations and thus cannot fit into the sequence of representat ional modes; (2) virtual reals are not recent or contemporary emergents facilita ted by postmodern technologies of reproduction and media, and are thus not neces sarily derivable from the pre-conditions of prior dialectics; (3) virtual reals are not dependent on the grammar of reflexivity that enables the subjectiobject to take itself as its object and thus create itself as a transcendental subject.

As noted earlier, virtual realities are not copies of something else; they are neither derived from something outside themselves nor from within themselves by representing themselves reflexively to themselves. Virtual reals create themselv es out of themselves not by mirrors that picture themselves to themselves, but b y juxtapositions and concatenations that do not require a prior syntax or object s to be juxtaposed and concatenated. There is nothing odd or new about this pro cess. It will always have been with us in our everyday use of words. Words are not necessarily or even originarily representations, even when they are used rep resentationally. Words are the chief means by which worlds are created and sust ained. Part of the work of words, or of language generally, is to do such thing s as describing and representing, but these are not their primary, originary, n ecessary, or most important functions. Moreover, they are not the source from w hich all other -language functions derive. To suppose that words, or language,. are essentially representational, is to submit to the grammar that produces the fairy tale of the real and the story of the psyche as a dialectic of representa tion. Virtual realities like those of language are parallel to representational reali ties, but they can cross-over into representational realities. Consider, for ex ample, the formative power of words such as universal, structure , power, concep ts, this , that, I, that even though they have no representational source outsid e of the discourses in which they occur, enable utterances like "I think concept uar structure--universal power," from which one can begin to imagine such possi bilities as conceptual structure," "universal power,1 "I think, hot because word s derive from images or from th image producing capacity of the imagination, but because the words stimulate the imagination to produce images and give the vagu e feeling, anticipation, or perhaps even vivid sense of some picture about to be
. Here the direction of origination is not 28

from an exterior reality to a representation or from one form of representation to another, but- flows instead from the virtually real to the real. Virtual r eality, by imitating the function of a concept, can thus simulate the path of a real in reverse. Compare the following sequences:

(1) real-->representation -->representation of a representation (image) -->representation of the representation of the representation (concept). (2) virtual real-->representation of the representation of a representation -

• >representation of a representation-- >representation-- >real.

The products of the virtually real in the second sequence above are not figments of the imagination or even figurations of the imagination, they are instead sti muli that encourage the imagination to produce figurations, figurations which, t hough they may ultimately derive from representations of the real in the imagina tion, have no counterparts in the real, for the imagination, enjoined by the vir tually real, will have concatenated what the real never conjoined. This figurat ive function of the virtually real provides the answer to how mathematics can wo rk in the world even though it is a system of pure abstraction that cannot be di rectly derived from any worldly reality outside itself. Mathematics too, is a v irtual reality that does not describe the world or even fit the world, but con-f igures it just as ordinary languages do. That is to say, it creates the world i n which it works. There is then no problem about how it is that a system of pur e abstraction fits the concrete world. The real problem would be if it were at odds with its creation and did not work. We can conjure up a history of western civilization as just this process by which the system of mathematical virtual r eality gradually colonizes and transforms the real into its own image (Cf. Heim1 993:72-81;Evans 1993:25-48). The case of mathematics is thus instructive in that it reveals how virtual real ities can come to dominate the real. Mathematics works not because it is a repr esentation of the real or just hapens by chance to be in harmony with the real, but because it has transformed the real to fit its own mode of figuration (Cf. J ones 1982:1-170). It has, in effect, trance-figured the real. In this instanc e, the virtually real has displaced the real, and it could do this not because o f any correspondence with the real, but because its source was parallel to the r eal, outside it, and not produced through representational transformations of it . It is not
29

beneath, behind, above, or beyond the real; it is beside it, next to it, paralle l to it, juxtaposed to it, and apart from this neighborliness, is totally other than the real and cannot be reduced to the real even as it accommodates the real to itself and colonizes it. Moreover, it does this because it has become the I nstrumentality of agencies that benefit from its transgressions, as Foucault has argued. We may thus conclude that virtual reality, despite the adjectival position of " virtual" before "real," is not a kind of reality. It has no genealogical kinship with the real in the sense of being derived from the real or of sharing a commo n origin or common history with the real. We should say that virtual reality is just that situation in which the idea of the real is unnecessary1 inappropriate , or irrelevant because there- is no circumstance that could be different from o r other than that situation. It is akin to the One that encloses us entirely wi thin it, where nothing disturbs us and we are one with it. It is equivalent to the Heideggerian Gestell wherein even thoughts and acts intended to disconfirm o r challenge the unity of experience within the Gestell (such as this paper) can only serve to reconfirm that experience and the Gestell itself. Even those Luc e-ferian agencies that had once used the transfigurative power of the Gestell as an instrument of domination will have become the instruments of the Gestell. Virtual reality is the infinite network, and our ecstatic immersion in it is si milar to the feeling of oceanic oneness associated with the unreflective primiti ve or the transfigured consciousness of the mystic. This sense of intimacy, howe ver, is transitory, for it will have been by the play its own imperfection that the virtually real will have engendered disruptions, contradictions, and errors that will have intimated the - possibility of an outside, of an otherness beyond the enclosing certitudes. Th e real will have intruded then, neither as a contradictory and foundational cert ainty derived from perception nor as the body of expedence, the ilved body tha t phenomenology poses as the possibility of that "step back" from the unity of c onsciousness fhat will have revealed the world as strang and paradoxical (Merlea u-Ponty 1962:xiii), but will have been manifest as the dynamic means of the Gest ell itself. The Gestell produces within itself these illusions of difference th at produce within us a feeling ofdis-ease, a sense of the irreal. This is the c ondition of the irrealis, the uneasy consciousness no longer at home within its virtual reality, but suspicious still of that other real that can only be 30

apprehended in its unreality, and even so, required to act positively as if it w ere an agentive subject in the world it will thus have come to suspect. In contrast to the narrative of the real which is predicated on the grammar of reflexivity that enables the real to differentiate itself into the object of its -self (its subjectivity) by taking itself as a represented object, the virtually real is predicated on the grammar of the middle voice, which has the ultimate e ffect of preventing any differentiation of subject and object by means of repres entation. The grammar of reflexivity founds in a fictional separation of subjec t and object such as that between the "I" as subject and the "myself" as object in the sentence "I shave myself." The verb "shave" is the action of the subject on itself as its differentiated object, as if the 1at?aver" -were -other than t he "shavee." It is precisely this operation of differentiating the subjectiobject into the subject and the object that enables representation as the duality of th e representation and the represented, and which produces both the subjectivized object and the representation as unreals. The middle voice is the grammar of irrealis because it is not an instrument for the production of subjectivized objects or of objects of any kind that can be r epresentations of the real. Most definitions of the middle voice stress the ide a of the involvement of the subject with the action of the verb, as if the subje ct and the verb were different, and though many examples of middle voice constru ctions do fit this pattern, what needs emphasis here is not the difference betwe en subject and verb, but their participation in which the subject is involved in the verb and is ultimately immersed within its process as an undifferentiated u nity of verbisubject. Here no subject acts on itself a object or represents itse lf to itself, nor is there even a subject that acts. There is only the action i n which the subject is involved neither as the source of the action nor as its o bject or goal, but is, as we might say, "part of the action." As the verb "invo lve" tells us, this is the imagery of the spiral rather than the circle. - Since virtual realities are not representations, they do not derive from the story of the psyche, which is, after all, 6nly the story of representation. Vir tual realities then, are not products of experience. They do not arise from that action of the external world on the body that creates what we quaintly call "im pressions" or "sensations," those mysterious inner copies of the external world that become our perceptions, images, and concepts, those ordered inner appearanc es that mimic and represent the disappeared external reality, those - instrument s 31

of subjectivity that transform real objects into the unreal phantasms of the ima gination and transfigure those unreal phantasms of the imagination into the surr eal figurations we call concepts, the objects of subjectivity. The grammar of irrealis then is totally other than the grammar of the world of the real, for it requires no originary act of impregnation, no subjected object in which the body-as-patient is the maternal beneficiary of the penetrating acti on of external objects which fill it with the spirit of the externalipaternal an d which the the body then reproduces imperfectly in subjective objects. The gra mmar of irrealis can parody the grammar of the real, but that is necessary to it only when we attempt to write it in the forms and media of the grammar of the real which are suited only to representi fepresentations. Since- the grammar- i rrealis is not a representation and concerns itself with -virtual realities, whi ch also are not representations, the grammar of irrealis is not the representati on of representations and can only present itself as parody within the grammar a nd writing appropriate to the representation of representations. Here it will h ave been necessary to rethink the idea of media as middles, betweens, or connect ions that link a sender and a receiver or a representation and its source on the analogy of a verb linking a subject and an object. It will have been necessary to think of media without the idea of mediation, without the idea of subjects a nd objects independent of the media that will seemingly have linked them. To pu t it differently, it will have been necessary to have disposed of the metaphor o f media-as-verbs -in yet another instantiation of the grammar of actorlaction, s ubjecUobject in which subjects and objects are linked by verbs. It - will have been necessary to have thought of media not as linkages, but as totalizations in which subjects and objects, rather than being prior necessities, may instead be created as incidental components.That thinking, of necessity, will have been wr itten here only as parody in this grammar, but it will have been manifest elsewh ere as its own media. Even in parody, this attempt to write of irrealis in this grammar of the reallu nreal will only have recapitulated the metaphysics of the ineffable which will a lways have been part of the discourse of the real, either in the sense of the re al itself that can be represented only as the unreal, or as the hope of the ful filled present, the union of subject and object that words seemingly achieve onl y in poetic fantasy. Our desire for that lost unity of subject and object, sour ce and creation, is the 32

inescapable consequence of the grammar of the real which, by representing the re al, forever puts it beyond the realm of its representation in that limbo where i t will always have been the ineffable noumenal source, the real that

• can only reproduce itself as the unreal. We will have thought the oneness and unity of irrealis as if it were but one more instance of the telling of this tale of the ineffable as the separation from the source and the springing up of our longing for a return to the primordial state of being before the Fall into time. Or we will have told this tale again as the fable of transfiguration and unity in a st ate of being that transcends representation. Our desire is the dialectic of tim e, of the longing for the fulfillment of the past and the future in the timeless present Within the limitations of the grammar of the real--this grammar being written h ere in spite of my fitful attempts to subvert it--we will have thought that desi re again as the hubris of technology. We will have thought that the technology of virtual realities will have become the media that are irrealis. But, what el se could we have thought in this world where we have been mastered by our tools.

Para

(The] irrealis will have been that world in which the masculine principle will have triumphed completely over the feminine principle. This is the meaning of vi rtual reality, and it is worth remembering that virtual derives from *wer-/wir- , and is it-seff the source of the mascullne, the manly. Virtual reality is t he analog of asexual reproduction, just as the realities of representation are a nalogs of sexual reproduction. The paramount difference between virtual realiti es and the realities of representation is that in the latter, the masculine prin ciple's desire to reproduce itself perfectly will always have been frustrated by the necessity of reproduction through instrumentalities of representation that are incapable of exact reproduction. To put it differently, reproduction by rep resentation ensures that the copy will always differ from the original. The mas culine principle--the real--can only reproduce itself by means of the feminine b ody of the psyche which configures the masculine impression as an image that mus t always be other than its masculine source. By contrast, because virtual reali ties reproduce without representation, there is no relation of copy to original, and all 33

reproduction is not so much the making of exact copies as it is a means of repr oduction in which the idea of copy no longer has a meaning. Virtual realities a re akin -to clones in the sense that they imply total contr9l over the mechanics of reproduction where differences have been totally eliminated from the making of interchangeable identities. They are thus part of the same process that enab les all other forms of t h e w 0 r I d w I t h 0 u t e r r 0 r , of the final mastery over reproduction,such as in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering
. They are part of the same story of immortality, the defeat of time in the tri
umph of identity over difference, of the mind-machine over the body, of culture over nature, of masculine over feminine, the story that will have been told agai n of repetition without change, as if it caijid now be told

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