Cities, Subjectivity and Cyberspace 

by Graham McBeath (Nene College, Northampton) and Stephen Webb
(University of Derby)

e-mail s.webb@derby.ac.uk

Introduction

There are many confusions haunting cyberspace. Primarily the confusions
can be located at the level of metaphors which are invoked to
characterise the nature of cyberspace. There are two images in
particular which strike us as inimical, yet are frequently uttered in
tandem in many of the fashionable journals and articles about the
Internet and so forth; namely - cyberspace as community, and cyberspace
as city. By way of brief examples we could note the title of Howard
Rheingold's new book The Virtual Community, and that of Peter Hinssen's
article in the first issue of Wired:, `Life in the Digital City'. Indeed
in the Rheingold volume, the author at various junctures refers to
cybernets as the basis for a community, that is, people coming together
creating a web of personal relationships, and as the basis for civic
democracy which in effect is describing a digital city state. This
problem lies at the level of the social. Internet magazines stress both
the possibility of bring ing people together into greater or lesser
degrees of community, and the possibility of sailing the boundless,
resource-rich seas of the net without home port for security. Why we are
puzzled about the co-presence of these two terms in descriptions of
cybernetic relations is because community is about closed systems and
reified relations, and city about openness and change. This difference
is, for us, importantly predicated upon the positing of different
life-worlds and modes of appropriating space resulting from each system
respectively. Such a distinction between community and city is
pre-figured in other familiar binary oppositions: the country and the
city, the rural and the urban, between the parish and the
cosmopolis. However, it seems to us that the literature portrays
cyberspace to be at once possessed of the properties of community and
the city. And this kind of conflation, we are now going to argue, finds
a parallel in how cities themselves are modelled.  

We initially focus upon the role of the territorial imaginary in the
construction of space, and how the metaphor of `net' allows for the
conflations of city/community, and virtual city/virtual community.

We wish initially to explore the utopian urge to image open relatively
indeterminate spaces of the city (for that is how such open spaces
appear to many at the subjective level) as enclosed spaces of
community. And furthermore, to consider how, or at least that, these
bastard spaces are given an objective correlate in the form of network
models of urban space which visualise that space as enclosed. This
latter aspect determines the indeterminate thus giving prompts for
communitising the city into a meaningful whole. It is the relation of
the pre-figure (the city) to the current figures of understanding space
(cyber-space) that forms the basis of this paper. More simply, we want
to use readings of the nature and meaning of city space to interrogate
and critique cyber-space and its surrounding hype.

In so far as we can argue that we can draw parallels between how we
imagine the city and how we imagine cyberspace, we will be arguing by
analogy. But in doing so we will try to expose some of the false
analogies and metaphors that have been drawn in an attempt to ontologise
the cyberworld as a parallel universe to our own - as a space apart with
its own terms and conditions into which we are inserted as nodes of
communication and as identities constituted as a function of the
meanings internal to the virtual realm. However, at the same time we
image cyberspace as having spatial and structural forms similar to those
in the material world, ie. City/community. The language we use to try to
grasp the structure of cyberspace thus trades on notions of radical
difference and sameness.

Towards the end of the paper we will argue that the idea of cyberspace
as an alternative structure in which new forms of social and
intra-personal relations are mediated is illusory; that cyberspace and
how we relate to it is little different from how fin-de-siecle social
theorists such as Simmel and Kracauer described the phenomenology of
experiencing the city. Despite our noting the appearance of the
metaphors of city and community, we want to argue that the dominant mode
of understanding cyberspace is as community, but that, pace Simmel et
al. it is better conceived as being like a city space, uncoded by the
petrifying effects of spatial net analysis which removes the flaneur
like role of the subjective consciousness roving from one virtual space
to another. Rather we ought to see cyberspace as movement and
individualised flows and the nature of the relation between user and
cyberspace as dithyrambic.

The transcendental and metaphysical mode of talk about cyberspace is
merely a poetics of space, and with this in mind we will also draw on
the work of Gaston Bachelard to understand the moments of what we will
identify as absorbed consciousness - the spirit taken by its own poetic
images, and the mind taken by the form of its activity as if there were
no alternative.

Pre-dominant is the metaphor of organicity - of an interdependent
wholeness linking each part to all other parts to constitute an
unfragmented body, a reflexive structure of meaning by which one part
shapes and is shaped by all other parts. This is the world of Descartes
great deceiver, and of Leibniz's monadology. Such worlds are worlds of
containment giving the illusion of human creative freedom inside of them
due to the relative richness of the resources found therein. In these
worlds we are at once secure and free, or so the promises of Stalin and
other great dictators made out. However, while in the Soviet Union there
were people to blame; on the Internet there is no-one to blame, it is
simply an evolutionary structure into which we become absorbed. Once in,
there is no outside. This absence of exteriority is an illusion of our
subjective relations to the space we enter. It is an effect, not of a
necessary logic, but of a psycho-logic of desire and absorption.


From the standpoint of theory, the basic problem we address is: How is
the spatial imaginary constructed? What are its shapes? And what
description can we give of the flow of the construction of that spatial
imaginary? As we intimated at the beginning, we will look at ways in
which theorists have construed urban space, and then at how those
readings have their counterparts in firstly a misconceived grasp of
cyberspace, and secondly, in what we believe to be a more plausible,
less magical account of cyberspace.  Modelling the City as Phenomenology
of Community

One of the major foci of urban geography has been how one can best
represent the city - as a capitalist city with flows of money and
labour; as an aestheticised space a la Simmel; and among others, as a
formal systems-theoretic net of lines and points marking out such things
as communication and transport patterns and points of population or
housing densities and so forth. The latter approach provides a schematic
diagram bounded by defined city limits, and internally enriched (or not)
by the range of social, economic, political factors represented. This
kind of modelling is common to control systems analysis, and found in
the traffic control operations rooms of police and Fire Brigade HQ's,
city planners offices, and electricity companies's offices wherein the
National Grid may be represented. Such a grid mapped onto the city
encloses the city, but equally will spread according to its own rules of
construction as the city spreads. Such a way of envisaging the city
offers us a rationalised construction of the structurally regulated
features of the city carrying intimations of an integrated
community. The more general point here is that the method of analysis
may have semiotic properties prompting us to image the city from the
standpoint of a set of social values. In this case we consider that
network analysis sponsors the notion of city as community. It does this
by its enclosing of space, of regulating and rationalising that space,
of seeing the city not as an anomic, amorphous sprawl, but as a
structurally integrated whole constituted by the interdependency of the
parts. Allan Pred refers to the net approach in his essay `The Social
becomes the Spatial' when he notes:

Places and regions, however arbitrarily delimited, are the essence of
traditional human geographic inquiry...whether presented as elements
within a spatial distribution, unique assemblages of physical facts and
human artefacts, as units interacting with one another in a system, or
as localised spatial forms, places and regions have been portrayed as
little more than frozen scenes for human activity. (p.337, Gregory &
Urry, 1985)

In Mille Plateaux (1980), Deleuze and Guattari analyse this kind of
coding by net structures in a variety of human resources such as the
State, language, the town, war and so forth. They describe how the
abstract machine of the net reterritorializes spaces made of discrete
places of intensity. For instance, the city is a plane or plateau on
which there are intensities of population, road intersections, cars,
danger zones, high crime. In the order of the material world these
particular spaces are separated but under the net they are
deterritorialized as separate and reterritorialized by being connected
through the grid lines that re-place the city structure. If we were to
imagine the city as made up of a series of towns (intensity-places) we
might see what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that:

It (the town) is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it
is fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold
of deterritorialization, because whatever the material involved, it must
be deterritorialized enough to enter the network...to follow the circuit
of urban and road recoding...Towns are circuit points of every kind,
which enter into counterpoint along horizontal lines; they effect a
complete but local, town-by-town, integration. (p.432)

Here then the authors are showing that a net structure recodes the
spatially discrete through the
deterritorialisation/re-territorialisation couplet connecting towns
together in a large yet integrated circuit. By analogy, we would argue
that the effect of net analysis of the city works in the same way. The
abstract machine of the net is: an abstract machine of overcoding: it
defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity, because it produces
or rather reproduces segments...laying out a divisible homogeneous space
striated in all directions.

For our purposes, the effect of the net is to put the discrete domains
of intensity within the whole space of the city `fundamentally in
contact'. This drawing together is how we are invited to see the
machinic reterritorialisation of city space; that is an imagery which
resonates with the character of community.

Community, that most contemporary and ancient word connoting stability,
order, regularity, and at least in today's terms, security, perhaps even
ontological security, is about the diminution of the feeling of distance
between persons. The warmth suggested by the term `community' is at root
importantly signifying the desire to have a sense of shared space,
orderly and respectful of personal space which allows us a delimited
freedom, but not a space in which the spaces between ourselves and
others are so wide that no-one feels responsibility to be concernful
about anyone else, other than being concerned about ones feeling that
one should be concerned, but not feeling sufficiently obligated to help
out. In other words knowing a moral rule about how one ought to act, and
not doing so. Communities tend to be self-regulating, because of the
shame and guilt one will feel, and often be made to feel of one acts
irresponsibly to another member of the community. This is a function of
proximity to others and that one cannot get away quickly enough to avoid
the real or imagined disapprobation of others. Thus the handling of
risky actions and trust in the community setting is mediated through
mechanisms of reflexivity not dissimilar the 'invisible hand
explanation' found in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
(1754). The belief that they will work underlies the hope for a more
orderly, graspable world. Essential to this belief is a further belief
that we do live in proximity to others, and thereby the mechanisms of
solidarity can work.

Network analysis images large spaces as, in fact, contiguous cells,
showing persons and resources in proximity with each other. Such grids
of intelligibility are by implication grids of nearness to each
other. Robert Fishman comments of this image as looking like `the
network of superhighways as seen from the air, crowded in all
directions, uniting a whole region into a vast super-city'. We would
suggest that we are given the impression that cities are essentially
built inside the boundaries of the net, such that we imagine cities as
developing internally rather than spreading outward. That cities can be
represented as determinate spaces which fill up with people and things
drawing us ever closer such that the invisible hand mechanism begins to
work, disciplining our behaviours, obliging us to act responsibly
towards others. Phenomenologically, networking or `gridding' the city
does not invite us to extend the grid outwards, but to work inwards, in
this we would oppose the view of Frank Lloyd Wright who argued that such
a grid would imply boundlessness, capable of extension in all
directions. However, his notion of urban decentralisation suggesting
spread or 'sprawl' does not sit easily with the images of connectedness
and contact between spaces of intensity which would be his decentralised
areas comprising the city.  Furthermore, the net structure simplifies
our sense of distance and the complexity of spaces that would otherwise
signify alienation. In the later case it is analogous to the feeling
that a place is not so very far away if we can identify a route to it
made up of a clear series of connecting roads punctuated by identifiable
settlements which confirm that we are on the right route. It is the very
ease of seeing the route and being able to shorthand it by using road
numbers that makes even a long journey appear simple and our destination
close at hand. In short, it seems that `we are never too far away'.

To paraphrase de Certeau (1984): The net model of the city (the
Concept-city), like a proper name (eg. M1, A52, B339), provides a way of
conceiving, simplifying, and construing space on the basis of a finite
number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties. (see de
Certeau, ibid., p.94)

The point here is that the rhetoric of these formal models can stimulate
a way of seeing cities as possible communities by mapping the city as an
enclosure, a matrix of proximities rather than of distances
between. Such analyses feed into the hope for unity - for co-munity.

The Imaginary and the Cybernetic Community.

We have argued that one way of imagining the city is as a community, and
that this image is projected by formal network graphs and grids. In as
much as this way of visualising the city-as-community is taken to reveal
a proper way (a desired way) of making sense of the city,
phenomenologically the model stands as the truth of the real (itself a
simulacrum), and of course the real becomes the model. This inversion is
familiar to us through the writing of Baudrillard, but equally the
inversion of the real and the imaginary at the level of persuading us to
see the world in a particular way is to be found at the heart of
Althusser's theory of ideology.

The way the meaning of cyberspace is conceived is analogous to the way
that a methodology of network analysis persuades us to conceive of the
city; that is, as a community. Of course not all cybersurfers see the
Internet or the parts of the Internet that they use, as a community, but
many do. Thus we want to explore for a moment how those who do, talk
about the net or parts of the net as a community. The proselytiser and
editor of the very first issue of On-line World; Clive Grace comments:
`The net has been in the public eye for months now...Over the years it's
developed in a community of people all eager to share, enjoy and
communicate'. Even more preposterous, but altogether more seriously
meant is the comment of Thomas Moore in Net Guide (Feb, 1995). Moore, a
lecturer in archetypal psychology living in...no, not California, but
New York, says that:

The age of therapy is ending, the age of the therapist and patient in
one room, one to one. I truly believe this. The new therapy that
replaces it will occur outside of a room, in a kind of nurturing
community, which the Internet might provide. It will be a community of
support and understanding where people with like minded problems talk
about the soul, about the heart (pp. 39-40)

His interviewer asks: `Group therapy in Cyberspace?; Moore answers: `Why
not?' For Moore, we can even interpret the self on the net. The Harvard
academic, Dorothy Zinberg, just the other day in the Times Higher noted
in more cynical vein:

Everywhere I turn, whether it is trendy new magazines like Wired or
Internet, or to the mesmerised users of the equipment at the latest hot
spot in town, the cybersmith, where access to state-of-the-art
cyberspace technologies can be rented, or even while lurching along the
Infobahn myself, I am bombarded with `data' that proclaims, the arrival
of a new community in cyberspace. (p.14, THES, 7.4.1995)

Broadly, we sympathise with the scepticism of Zinberg. At best the
virtual community is but a projection of community, it is an imagined
community which lacks the substance of ontological as well as emotional
security. The title of Benedict Anderson's 1985 book is very familiar to
most of us: Imagined Communities, and independent of the finer nuances
of Anderson's meaning, many writers have latched on to it as pointing to
the phenomena of humans wishing to image as communities the web of
relations to persons and environments with whom they are in regular
contact. But if this is what many understand by Anderson's phrase, then
they ignore a dimension of community which we consider central to the
concept, namely, its affective aspect, the dimension of fellow-feeling
bound to `being together'. This is the emotional/feeling strand of
solidarity. Community is not merely proximity to the other obligating us
to be responsible toward the other and toward the community. In Keywords
(1976), Raymond Williams refers to this as the persuasive
`community...of feelings'. Bruce Murray's submission to the Aspen
Workshop on `Society, Cyberspace and the Future' goes further when he
states that: "..for communities to be harmonious externally as well as
internally they must provide not only a sense of belonging and wholeness
for their members, but incorporate and tolerate diversity".
	
It is this stress upon belonging and wholeness which we would suggest is
not properly a feature of cyberspace interaction, but its possibility is
a mythic projection of the desire for a community in the face of a
fatalistic belief that we will never discover a true community or a
satisfying life in the everyday world. Virtual communities are not
imagined because they are virtual, that is because to grasp the virtual
we have to make a leap of imagination, but imagined because people wish
to refuse the sense of alienation that they may feel in relation to the
apparently unstable world around them, and desire to be safely
elsewhere. Disalienating effects may be promoted by imputing to
cyberspace the property of being a benign objective world, or at least
to the parts of cybernauts use. They construct what de Certeau might
have called a `Concept-community' which is a law unto itself, it is an
`in-itself, comprehensible and complete for its initiates. The basis for
community on the nets is the security afforded by the illusion of being
in another world having left behind the environment so troubling to
one. We will note below that this kind of alienation is registered as
dissatisfaction, disappointment, and frustration as opposed to the grand
forms of alienation of say, Marx. As Simmel notes: `The lack of
something definite at the centre of the soul impels us to search for
momentary satisfaction in ever new stimulations, sensations and external
activities.' (cf. Philosophy of Money, p.114, 1907/1978)

One can interact with cyberworld scenarios, either hypertextual or
graphical, comprised of re-combinable elements, but wherein each element
is a virtual version of features in the material world. In the case of
Multi-User-Dungeons and Furry-MUCKs, which are part discussion groups
and part fantasy games, users are just engaging either with on-line
Dungeons and Dragons, or developing in conjunction with others an adult
version of Brer Rabbit stories. These are just glorified children's
games of make believe. Participation in MUCK's and MUD's may require use
of the imagination but it does not secure the affective dimensions of
community. In focusing upon the story line one is going to contribute
one is simply playing a part in an unfolding process occurring in a
virtual space beyond the screen at which one is working.

Cyberspace offers a fantasy through which we can live in an apparent
proximity to others, talk to them, share views and express
feelings. Howard Rheingold in his recent The Virtual Community cites the
comment of sociologist Marc Smith: `Virtual communities require an act
of imagination to use, and what must be imagined is the idea of the
community itself'. What Smith does not point out is that somehow to
successfully project the net as a community we must in engage in what
Nietzsche called an `active forgetting' that we imagined it as a
community in the first place.

The structure of a projection of virtual community is a double movement
of alienation from the 'real' everyday world of objectified culture into
the atomised private life-world and then to the 'virtual' community
world. The latter being an illusion of the virtual community as humanly
rich as the ideals of community in the everyday world. Contemporary
alienation is not the materially grounded function of dispossession by
the capitalist, the removal of surplus value, and the waste of labour
power, but the expression at the level of feeling of being distant from,
of lacking a meaningful life even if one has no meta-narrativised
project to bridge the gulf between how one feels and how one might
feel. Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990) picks up on aspects of this
when he notes:

If in days gone by, it was sound strategy to accumulate the effects of
alienation, today it is safer to stockpile the effects of
indifference...Or yet again to become nothing but a ghostly hologram, a
laser outline - so that it may then be all the easier to disappear
without being noticed, leaving others prey to reality. (p.14)

Baudrillard is right in as much as Marx and others who linked the
condition of alienation to utopian projects needed alienation to become
a cumulative force to motivate revolutionary action. But the
aestheticised, contemporary version of alienation is more about feeling
disaffected and enervated. In these latter terms, alienation is not
linked to utopia, it is not a form of motivation. Alienation in positive
terms is drift and indifference; that is, having no motivation to make
positive choices, other than when we become `grabbed' by the moments of
the appearance of the spectacle. For some that spectacle becomes
interesting to them, it offers them a mode of `creating' output, of
achieving an end. When this happens a small fissure in the apparent
totality of indifference opens. Herewith the possibility of a local
emergence of the teleological self of modernity. This is a self which,
perhaps at a subliminal level, posits horizons of `I could get into
this'. But still the frame of indifference prevails allowing people to
drift from one activity or person to another. Any change towards
`being-interested' is often gradual and discrete. For many the backdrop
to doing something is the generalised feeling that `I ought to do
something to fill my time'. That is, vaguely looking for something
interesting - the `I suppose I wouldn't mind doing that'. Perhaps we can
describe these moments as characterised by the attitude of `indifferent
purpose'. John Shotter (1980) comments on such processes of social
action as unfolding in time. He writes of the view of people as
`form-creators' and as rule makers, ie. actively creating a personal
form of life thus:

To take such a creative view of human action is to treat it as a
formative process in its own right, as a sequence of transformation
rather than as merely a sequence of discrete events, as a developing
process rather than as merely a (changing) medium through which other
(more constant) factors exert their determining influence...Viewing
human actions not as a sequence of well-defined events but as something
which develops in time, which involves a passage from something less to
more definite, emphasises the fact that while we can, on occasions, act
deliberately, according to rule, plan or script, we do not always
necessarily do so. Often we act simply on the basis of our `thoughts and
feelings' we say in terms of the situation `as we saw it' (pp.31-32).

Another factor which should be taken into consideration is the
expectation, if not, demand by others who are more functionally minded
that one should get on and do something, viz. Shotter's other
determining factors. This is the cry of parents to children, and of
`respectable society' that provides a form of pressure which its victims
wish to dissipate. The move to travelling into cyberspace is accidental
to the extent that one could have done otherwise, it is not the product
of a logic of necessity, but a falling through an access point yet
pushed by the relatively gentle forces of curiosity, boredom,
opportunity and social pressure. Why, exactly, we pick on this rather
than that activity would be one explanation too far, as would be an
explanation of the genesis of having an interest. We have to be
satisfied with the brute social fact that we do become interested in
things, and that, as Shotter suggests, this is often a slow process of
accretion. But at root the personal m otive to do something else may be
as Kracauer (1975) suggests: travel is one of the greatest possibilities
for society (self) to hold itself from a confrontation from itself...it
leads to the splendours of the world in order that its ugliness goes
unobserved (p.299)

Some may see this process as `taking flight', but in our view such an
image would be mistaken. Often people drift away from uncongenial
situations to engage in an activity which will placate the people
putting them under pressure. It is more a response of `OK, I'll have a
go at this'. Doing computers is one way of filling ones time and more
importantly satisfying the demands for a show of
purposefulness. Computers are perfect for this as they promote a bounded
focused activity which carries intimations of science, knowledge, and
production. The inescapable conclusion is that in `doing computers' one
is doing something with a point to it. It is not accidental that recent
tv ads for computers place a stress on multi-tasking and educational
values.

We may of course just play with the machines for a few hours to keep
happy those who wish us to demonstrate that we are capable of a
purposeful life, but some will keep going, acquiring a word-processor, a
graphics card, a CD-ROM, a modem, access to the Internet and who knows
maybe even full-blown immersion in virtual worlds.

The medium of computing and ultimately virtual worlds offer us the
transformative power by which to convert the negative unfocused
alienation - the disappointment in and indifference towards the world -
into a positive good alienation. That is, a world away from the
irritations and boredom of everyday life. Again Kracauer (1930) captures
this point when he writes of Berlin that the lights from illuminated
monuments, neon signs and advertisements `together constitutes an attack
on tiredness which wishes to take over...' (cited in Frisby, 1985,
p.141) What may be considered here is that in respect of becoming a
cybernaut, ex ante alienation is simply an avowal of tiredness, but ex
post seems with hindsight to have been a disaffection with ones life as
a whole.  A Phenomenology of Cyberspace?

As we noted above, Baudrillard writes of how one can disappear, `leaving
others prey to reality'. (ibid.) Of course, one does not literally
disappear, but becomes immersed, and absorbed by at once the technical
operation of the medium and the virtual world which one enters, and then
one is subject to. This notion of absorption is the collapse of
indifference and the emergence of a gradually lost difference. To be
absorbed is to become oneself inside a frame where boundaries do not
matter. The more one becomes on the inside the less one is aware of an
outside.  In our view, becoming absorbed is the move into virtual
space. It is a fascination with the spectacle or the play of the game
that lets us forget that we are fascinated. As with Merleau-Ponty, we
become an embodied self inside a frame of whose boundaries we take no
account. Such a realm is a space that is not meant diacritically in
relation to its outside - that which is another realm of which we are
aware. Thus, this space has no meaning as this space, but rather has
meaning for the cybernaut from its interior, an interior of which the
cybernaut is part. Bachelard puts it thus:

The image offered us...now becomes really our own. It takes root in
us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression
that we could have created it, and that we should have created it. It
becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it
expresses; it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our
being. (p. xix)

The arborescence of the flow of images offered entice us yet further
into the depths of hierarchical virtuality, yet we do not see the
hierarchy. If we think of the way we use the World Wide Web we should
realise that we do not perceive hierarchy. Phenomenologically, each page
seems to be lying at the same level as any other page. What we see is
the florescent text as we scan it for a keyword to click onto. The
seeming endlessness of available information intimates no boundaries and
provokes exploration. Yes, we can use the Web in utilitarian fashion,
but how few of us do this. There is always something else to look up,
just as the gambler will play just another hand. Once absorbed we live
in the domain of cyberspace. Bachelard notes: `But poetry is there with
its countless surging images, images through which the imagination comes
to live in its own domain.' (p. xxv) As we indicated earlier, the
property of being truly seduced by the virtual realm is that we forget
that we have been seduced, that we have an imaginary life inside the
virtual. Baudelaire in his Journaux Intimes puts it well: `In certain
almost supernatural states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in
the spectacle however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which
becomes the symbol of it'. (p. 29) Of course the depth of life is always
on the surface, on screen. Our absorption into a virtual world is the
space of our own confidence, as such it is a felicitous space of which
Bachelard says:

Attached to its protective value...are also imagined values which soon
become dominant. Space that has been seized upon by the imagination
cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of
the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all
the partiality of the imagination. For it concentrates being within
limits that protect. (p. xxxii) >From the perspective of the user she is
in the electronic communal womb, the intimate immensity of cyberspace
offering her space for support and growth. But on reflection is she not
living a solipsistic life in an anomic universe. In this space we do not
reflect upon the machines codes and rule structures that control what
happens on screen, rather we choose our modes of engagement with others
with the horizonal knowledge that we can go on-line elsewhere. We can
drop in and drop out, come across things by accident and click
on. Cyberspace is a lawless world that has its counterpart in the
dangerous city. Equally we do not know who is going to pop up on the
discussion groups or whether we are going to suffer viral infection. Of
course AIDS only happens in the wicked city. We may live through
cyberspace as a participant in a communal setting, but this is an
imaginary transmutation of the practices that we actually do. The idea
of immensity made manifest by the possibility of ` always somewhere else
to go', the anomic quality of cyberspace, and the absence of perception
of hierarchy (hierarchy always posits origins and ends), produces
amazement. And as Bachelard notes: `The surest sign of wonder is
exaggeration.' (p.112) Only by phenomenological reflection do we grasp
this movement. For Bachelard, the amazement is contained by intimacy, in
this case of the relation between the screen image and the user. As we
have pointed out this difference is erased by the process of fascination
and absorption. When we are involved in a group conversation in
cyberspace we are not in intimate relation with the other persons but
with the excitement of anticipation of what is going to come on screen
next, or what one is going to say in response, but ultimately always
with the magic of the immediate presence of the image into which we are
incorporated. Again, Bachelard: `When considered in transmission from
one soul to another, it becomes evident that a poetic im age eludes
causality.' (p. xx) Screen images appear as if by magic, we
do not perceive the causes of their appearance. They just happen.

There are no hidden depths in cyberspace, all is on screen, and because
of this we imagine that we reveal all at a touch of the mouse. There is
an illusion of the totally public, of an open access democracy, whereas,
in fact we are always hidden. Hidden from sight. We can hide our
identities, change our identities, go anonymous. We can change our
persona, become woman, become man, become transsexual. We can deceive or
choose to tell the truth, but nobody can trust the statements we
make. All the norms of validation that are part of the communicative
structures of the life-world, the public world are undone. The lessons
which Grice and Habermas taught us are inverted so that we live in a
regime of invalidity claims. The evidencing of self and the manufacture
of trust and obligation upon which the construct of community rests
becomes unstable, and we are thrown back into the imaginary world of the
indeterminate city, the city that contains the fleeting, the spectacle,
the symptoms of anxiety.

Our relation with cyberspace is one overcoded with hope. This is the
hope that our dark suspicion of a technological jungle will turn out to
be a land of plenty and security. That the deterritorialised space of
city/cyberspace will permit re-territorialisation by the figures of
community which we try to pretend are not a projection of the
imagination. Sadly, these are but daydreams of the intimacy of the
immense. Or as Bachelard says: The mind sees and continues to see
objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an
object. (p.190) Thus we are caught between reflexive reason and the
poetics of hope that finds re-presentation in the oppositions of
city/community and exteriority/interiority.


Graham McBeath and Stephen Webb
April 1995




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