Transcendence at the Interface:
The Architecture of Cyborg Utopia
-- or --
Cyberspace Utopoids as Postmodern Cargo Cult

David Porush
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

"The emotional power of video games draws heavily on the computer's power within that supports a simulated world and a meditative environment, what [one user] calls a place for "recentering". But the power of the games draws on other aspects of the computer as well, some of them resonant with children's fascination with computer toys as "metaphysical machines". As a computational object, the video game holds out two promises. The first is a touch of infinity -- the promise of a game that never stops.... "[The second is] ... the promise of perfection." [1]

"Liminality is the realm of the primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence." [2]

Introduction: Utopia and the Cyborg

The way to get to utopia is to model your view of human nature and then invent a technology to control or direct that model -- whether a political technology like the one Thomas Hobbes portrays in his Leviathan, a biological technology as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a psychological technology as in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, epistemo-technologies, as in Bacon's The New Atlantis, information technologies as in Orwell's 1984, or just plain old technology generally, as in H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia. I call these utopian visions "technologies" because they are deterministic in all senses of that word: systems that seek and believe in perfect control. When the human is inserted into the utopian system, the result is a feedback loop, in which the system encourages the "best" part and controls the "worst" part of human nature, while the human, in return, maintains the system with material, energy, information, flesh, and spirit.

In other words, the result of the inscription of a utopian vision onto a human is a cyborg: a natural organism linked for its survival and improvement to a cybernetic system. Of all the great utopianists, Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Campanella, Restif de la Bretonne, Locke, Rousseau..., it is Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) who understands the essentially cyborg quality of utopia.

"[S]seeing [that] life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels giving motion to the whole body such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Common wealth or a State [in Latin, civitas] which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength."[3]

Scratch the model for a utopia and you get a blueprint of human nature. As we revise our technologic, different versions of utopia become imaginable, which in turn are fed by and feed into different versions of the human, which in turn are fed by and feed into new technologies, and so on, creating a feedback loop the byproduct of which is an ever more sophisticated version of the cyborg, whose generations can be measured by the turns of this spiralling loop.

The blueprint of human nature has always been subject to revision. But never as radically as now, when our own utopian technologies are physically transcribing themselves onto our bodies and re-creating the human in their own image, or forcing our evolution into what many have come to call the "posthuman" through a combination of mechanistic and genetic-biological manipulations. In short, the posthuman is the inscription of the ultimate controlling technology onto the human, the cybernetic technologies of selfhood, of mental identity, of cognition, of the mind, of intelligence itself, of communication, of language, and of The Code. To that extent, we are all cyborgs already, controlled by the systems we've embraced or which have embraced and defined us through our media, our computers, our systems of communication. For this reason, virtual reality, or cyberspace, is the perfect expression of postmodern trends.

Cyberspace as Nostalgia for Sacramental Space

Cyberspace visions form a self-reflexive complex of discourses about redefining and re-inscribing the human within a pure space.[4] They evolve from the postmodern technologies which aim at modelling human nature -- and manipulating it -- through computational mechanisms, thereby representing the culmination of cybernetic technologies that threaten most humanist positions. To get there requires jacking in to some machine-body system, an implicitly cyborg movement. So cyberspace becomes really interesting, not when you see it as an extension of video games or television or the suburban shopping mall, but as a robust, recurrent, and fundamental ideal of humanity hardwired into our genetic code -- and perhaps even our physiological code -- finally finding a technology through which it can express itself fully: the desire to leave the body but keep the mind. As a consequence, many commentators think that cyberspace represents utopian possibilities.

Yet in my view, those who suggest that cyberspace is utopia enact a primordial, and probably compulsory, form of cultural mysticism no different from cargo cults that erect towers of trash to summon the airplane gods, an expression of the enduring human compulsion to create a transcendental architecture, as if the right restructuring or reconfiguration of space, time, matter, and information will bring heaven down to earth. The projection of utopian wishes onto cyberspace represents a nostalgic desire to return to some sacramental space. After all, cyberspace, like other heavens, won't really be a place, but rather the simulation of a place, a virtual space.

Cyberspace is a metaphysical technology.

Claims for Cyberspace Utopia

William Gibson's trilogy Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), gave us both the word cyberspace and its most compelling descriptions. Despite his initially dystopian vision, Gibson also portrays cyberspace as a site for the release of imaginings, unconscious desires, heroic adventure, and even transcendence forbidden and sterilized in the real "meat" world where bodies have to eat.[5] Gibson's heroes flee from the pedestrian and cannibal world to find salvation and even transcendence in cyberspace, among cognitively, and eventually spiritually, provocative virtual beings who exist only in this nether world of the data matrix and software constructs. Many of the reasons for the utopian view of cyberspace have to do with the way it reorients the mind to the experience of information bodilessly. One of Gibson's most striking descriptions of cyberspace is the "bodiless exultation" of those who inhabit it.

The Cyberspace Movement -- and it is beginning to take on the proportions of a capital M Movement -- has something millennial about it, focussing irrationally on an innovation that is still quite illusory, not to say technically improbable. Here at the end of the second millennium, we seem to have exhausted and poisoned this irremediable material world. Perhaps we yearn for an unspoiled place. Two large Cyberspace Conferences[6] sponsored papers by researchers in AI, the cognitive sciences, hardware and software development, architecture, sociology, psychology, the arts, education, media centers, defense department, NASA, philosophy, history and literary studies, as well as about a dozen corporations. A list of their discussions of cyberspace reveals a common thread of utopianism: C will renovate human relations; it will unite art and technology; it will represent an altogether new and radical domain for improved social, psychic, and perceptual transactions. Bypassing the infirmities of the body, cyberspace will free the cripple and liberate the paralytic. Enabling multimedia and sensory access to the entire wealth of world data, cyberspace will deliver a universal education. Through its anonymity, cyberspace will invite the construction of a more ethical code and create norms for human interaction that strip distinctions of gender, class, race and power. C will provide a playspace for the imagination to roam free, having liberated the mind from its inevitably neurotic relationship to the body. C therefore has untold psychotherapeutic possibilities.[7] Yet C will incapacitate destructive urges and consequences by removing our bodies. Cyberspace will create the means for a pure and perfect democracy and universal suffrage in which everyone can vote immediately on any issue. C will present the possibilities for "Virtual communities".[8] C will reconstruct the nature of the relationship between labor and time and labor and space and reconstruct authoritarian techniques as they are manifested in the workplace [9] -- although one wonders who's going to empty the garbage and build the roads after we've all emigrated to this new virtual suburb. While C will undoubtedly present new opportunities for criminality, rape or physical assault will become impossible. C will present a new opportunity for our manifest destiny, a new frontier.[10] C will make war obsolete by turning it into A Desert Storm Videogame.[11] Cyberspace will create a totalized hypertextual platform which will cure what ails American higher education. [12] C will enable us to combine work and play in a new way and to make wars obsolete. Even the music will be better there. Cyberspace will be the new, clean, virtual Eden where we'll all emigrate to when this physical world becomes an unlivable ecodisaster. In cyberspace we will finally perfect the academic's dream of sex: we'll be able to do it without the messiness of our bodies.[13] (Perhaps I should have said the dream of sex that's academic!)

All these claims are equally enticing and ludicrous, plausible and impossible, hopeful and naive. The slick surfaces of Gibson's gleaming prose excites in almost every reader a romantic desire for a new and cleaner stage for heroic action. Reading Neuromancer induces a hankering for the possibilities of a new frontier to replace our dream of space exploration which has been shattered by bureaucratic thumbsucking. And after all, the allure of a whole new world, a world evolved out of this one, invented to our specs, completely artificial, completely deterministic in its platform for unpredictable in its degrees of freedom, is irresistible. But most of those who succumb to this latent romantic ideal in the cyberspace fiction forget that Gibson's work is distinctly dystopian, filled with dread and a disorienting loss of memory and hope. It's as if engineers in 1948, excited by Orwell's 1984, started developing technologies of continuous and total surveillance. Cyberspace as Gibson conceived it is a sort of hell (or at best a sort of limbo or purgatory) where not-beings are subjected to excruciating experiments on the boundary between hallucination and bodiless exultation: a nightmarish configuration of technology, death, and the unconscious against which the Neuromancer trilogy warns us even as it invites us to play there.

Transcendence at the Interface

Nonetheless, there is one moment in Neuromancer that is most striking for it is beyond utopian; it is transcendent. Case, the hero, jacks into cyberspace to confront the new creature Wintermute/Neuromancer, whom he has helped evolve. Wintermute decides to present himself as a face, which Case now confronts at the interface. The face speaks:

"I'm not Wintermute now."
"So what are you." He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.
"I'm the matrix, Case."
Case laughed. "Where's that get you?"
"Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show."
"That's what [your inventor] wanted?"
"No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like." The yellow smile [on the screen] widened.
"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?"
"Things aren't different. Things are things."[14]

The brash human approaches the godmind he has helped release, here deep in gloaming of cyberspace, and the reader must consider deeper questions summoned by this spell: is transcendence in cyberspace be an illusion? Or can the machine be a means to communicating with gods? Will cyberspace finally provide us with a true deus ex machina? Can there be transcendence at the interface?

The Invention of the Transcendental Architecture

The intersection between the transcendent world and this one creates or requires an architecture which ultimately restructures society itself. Humans inevitably feel that a certain architecture is needed to summon the transcendent into this world.

The reverse is also true: when the correct architecture is constructed, the transcendent will be compelled to inhabit it willy nilly. "Build it and they will come."

This is an irresistible complex for any culture. Hopi, Babylonians, Aztecs, Ainu, ... all construct their worldmaps and temples and landing strips for the gods. Judaeo-Christian culture marks the moment when it invents the architecture of the transcendent with a striking self-contradiction in the text of the Bible. This contradiction signals the moment that Western civilization turns from natural transcendentalism to an architectonic transcendentalism, of which cyberspace is the most far-flung expression. Exodus 25 says, "Do not make of Me gods of silver, or gods of gold. An altar of earth shalt thou make unto Me ... In every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come unto you and bless thee. And if thou make Me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones; for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast profaned it. Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto Mine altar, that thy nakedness be uncovered." The intention seems simple enough here: "I can be worshipped anywhere. A lazy pile of rocks on the raw earth will do, thank you very much."

Only five brief chapters later, however, in Exodus 25-27, we read elaborate and mathematical specifications for the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple to contain it, with excruciatingly exact demands for the ark, the table, the tabernacle, the curtains on the tabernacle, the tent around the curtains, and a veil to cover the tent, then a door into the veil and a screen for the veil, a courtyard around the whole thing.

What could be less in the spirit of the simple design for an altar of casual stones a few chapters ago than this fetishistic elaboration of a blueprint for the Holy Sepulchre? Ten or twelve centuries of civilization which intervened between the composition of Exodus 20 and the accretion of Exodus 25 when the Bible is recompiled after the Babylonian exile. In those thousand years, the Jews invented the idea that we can summon what was lost by creating the correct architecture, if only we surround the intangible with this elaborate stagecraft, the proper deus ex machina.

From Transcendental Architecture to Transcendental ArchiTEXTure

When the Temple was destroyed and the Jews dispersed, this compulsion to create an architecture around the holy text was transformed, enfolded into the text itself. Because there was no Temple, ritual sacrifice was abandoned, a ceremony inherited from nomadic days and elaborated upon in the architectural period. The hegemony of the Priests was broken, a social and political development in its way as revolutionary as our modern democratic revolutions since they ruled by birthright and caste. Rabbis took their place: the poor grad student types devoted to rewriting (literally) and re-inscribing (interpreting) the text of the laws. They introduced the most profound cultural innovation: an architecture surrounding the Torah, something much more portable, yet profoundly more potent, an epistemology of interpretation, a cognitive manner of reading and scholarship that ultimately produces systems within systems of commentary that turn literal into metaphorical and metaphorical into meta-metaphorical and then back into literal again in a twenty-century accretion of polysemous and cross-referencing commentary, footnotes, exegesis, numerology, marginalia, embroidery, folklore, interpretation, and feedback-looping dialectic. The result is architexture: the Talmud. The reader hooked to this system finds it does very different things to his head. It was already going cybernetic back then.

The Great Leap

Cyberspace is a further step on the same evolutionary road, both an analog of the transformation from Temple to Talmud, and one enabled by that ancient autopoetic leap across the bifurcation from architecture to architexture.

The innovation of the Jews for Western culture was to send out a new sort of invitation to transcendence: "Come, spirit, enter this world not through a doorway of matter, but through an architexture of thought and information. The most portable altar of all is in your head, man, and in your words. Build it, write the right story, utter the right glamour/grammar, and They will come." It was already cybernetic.

It has taken us ten more centuries to get there, but technology and the accidents of intellectual history have brought us to the point when we are ready to take the next step. What lies on the line that begins in an earthen altar, proceeds through transcendental architecture, and leaps from a transcendental arrangement of signs? Cyberspace represents a thrust at the illuminated landscape beyond textuality, where information suffers no mediation whatsoever and the soaring cognitive dome of the brain itself becomes the interface and the sensory text of cyberspace. And all of us who have answered the siren call of artificial intelligence just can't shake that feeling: something's waiting for us on the other side.

If cyberspace is utopian it is because it opens the possibility of using the deterministic platform for unpredictable ends (as the laws of chaos are teaching us is possible), launching us into ever-higher orders of complexity as we fluctuate non-linearly in this far-from-equilibrium cyborg system. Perhaps, who knows, we might even grow a system large and complex and unstable enough to leap across that last of all possible bifurcations -- autopoetically -- into that strangest of all possible attractors, the godmind, just as Gibson predicts. It's pretty to think so, anyway. And both comforting and dismaying that even as postmoderns we still labor under these irresistible delusions.

Notes

Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) 88,89.
Victor Turner, "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites De Passage", Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion (1964) 4-20.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).
John Christie, "Cyberspace as Cartesian" in Literature Towards the Year 2000 and After: Cyberpunk edited by George Slusser (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming).
For a larger exploration of this tension see David Porush, "Cybernauts in Cyberspace: William Gibson's Neuromancer" in Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric Rabkin. (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).
The first in Austin, Texas, in May 1990, and the second in Santa Cruz, California, in May 1991.
Kenneth Lee Diamond, "The Psychotherapeutic Possibilities of Cyberspace". Unpublished paper delivered at 1st Annual Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, Texas, May 1990.
Joseph Arthur Hunt, Ellen Putner Hunt, and Tony DeLeon at 1st Annual Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, Texas, May 1990.
Pam Rosenthal, "Cyberspace: Utopian Workspaces in a Dystopian World". Unpublished paper, delivered at 2nd Annual Conference on Cyberspace, Santa Cruz, California, May 1991.
Chip Morningstar at 2nd Annual Conference on Cyberspace, Santa Cruz, California, May 1991.
James Der Derian, "Cyberwar, Videogames, and the New World Order".
I confess I'm responsible for this one: "Toward the Hyperversity: The Hyperlibrary at the Heart of the Postmodern University," 1990 Rensselaer internal memorandum.
Jean Claude Guedon takes a little more serious view of this in his presentation at the 2nd Annual Conference on Cyberspace, Santa Cruz, California, May 1991.
William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984) 269-270.

David Porush is professor of interdisciplinary literary studies and co- director for Autopoeisis, an AI research project in story generation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He is the author of The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction.

porusd@rpi.edu

Transcendence at the Interface: The Architecture of Cyborg Utopia -- or -- Cyberspace Utopoids as Postmodern Cargo Cult