What most critics and defenders of cyberspace implicitly agree on, however, is that "cyberspace" exists, in one form or another, and that electronically mediated experience marks a decisive break in humankind's relationship to technology. In this paper I want to challenge both assumptions. Cyberspace does not exist as a coherent, technologically created spatial "arena" but as the discursive site of ideological struggles to define the relationship between technology and subjectivity. In this sense, it is both an imaginary projection of the idealized telos of technologically-mediated existence and the latest instance of the technological interventions in human subjectivity that, I argue, always have structured definitions of the human. Cyberspace, therefore, is a cultural conjunction of fictions, projections, and anxieties that foreground the ways in which technology intervenes in our subjectivity. But the interventions of technology in our "selves" are hardly a new, postmodern phenomenon; rather, technology has always been an affective agent in subjectivity, part of a dialogic relationship, among humans and their technology, that I shall call the "technological real."
Before this dialogic relationship can be examined, however, it is important to describe a heuristic notion of subjectivity that does not exclude technological processes and artifacts as ontologically antecedent to the human. My description of subjectivity therefore seeks to interrogate and integrate two current discourses: postmodernism and marxist-feminism. On the one hand, postmodernists critique the idea of an essential, unified, and coherent subject which exists prior to social, cultural and historical interventions. Many theorists (Lacan, Althusser, and Derrida among them) posit instead a fragmented, partial, shifting subjectivity which is contingent on our entry into language. Because language is radically undetermined, the nature of the sign/signified relationship is never fixed and meaning is continually deferred. The subject, as constituted through language, is, therefore, always unstable. On the other hand, some feminists and marxists have labeled this description of subjectivity nihilistic, primarily because it threatens to erode political efficacy and the possibility of agency. Such critics want to preserve, somehow, a sense of self which, although historically interpellated, retains the possibility of effective political action. These seemingly conflicting discourses, I would suggest, are not mutually exclusive--subjectivity is a complex construction of "working fictions" which, although constructed, partial, and shifting, do "work." That is, such fictions can constitute a reliable basis-- at once dialogic and contingent--for political agency. In this sense, I would invoke Bruno Latour who, in a different context, when interrogated about truth claims in science, replied "I know it's true, I want to know how it's made." The making of subjectivity, then, is not a metaphor; construction requires tools, and technology, in innumerable local ways, provides the tools that aid in constantly reconstructing notions of identity that are always and already marked by radical interventions.
In this regard, the technological real may be described as a symbiotic and contentious-- hence dialogic--relationship between the "human" and the "machine." To begin to understand thee significance of the technological real is to recognize that subjectivity is always in the process of being reconstructed by the technologies--material and semiotic--which it purports merely to manipulate. In this respect, any subjectivity or identity-- any sense of a pre-technological reality or a reality distinct from or prior to technological interventions--can be only imaginary. The technological real, therefore, describes the inextricability of embodied identity and technology in the construction of working fictions of subjectivity.
The advent of technologies that tend to celebrate rather than obfuscate the fact that they intervene in subjectivity, however, necessarily produces widespread anxieties about the "coherence" of the self. These anxieties, in part, at the end of the twentieth century, are redirected and assuaged by the invention of cyberspace. That is, the rhetoric of cyberspace-- (re)defines subjectivity in relation to technology and, simultaneously, creates an imaginary space, behind the computer screen, that both exploits and denies the "reality" of the technological real, the multiple interventions that comprise an always provisional and dialogic subjectivity.
It is, therefore, no surprise to read so many manifestos of "cyber-liberation" by those involved in promoting the sale and dissemination of computer technologies. Cyberspace fictions regularly channel anxieties regarding technology into romanticized notions of a reconfigured subjectivity that represents the triumph of algorithmic mind over a physical body that refuses to be fully computed. Shifting the focus from the constructed nature of subjectivity to the "need" for technological enhancement, such fictions create a desire to be connected, a desire not to be left behind on the "information superhighway." To escape the anxieties of being violated by an "inhuman" technology, therefore, becomes (paradoxically) a process of producing the desire to desire more technological intervention in order to become more fully "human." Cyberspace, therefore, is written by many as a new "reality" in which technology actively--but safely-- intervenes in subjectivity precisely to enhance it. That is, some idealized sense of a supra- physical, masculinized, and disembodied subjectivity is preserved.
Cyberspace thus is represented as intervening in our minds and bodies in a vaguely holistic fashion, not in the localized and multivalent ways in which "real life" assaults us. Behind the computer screen, we are to believe, this reconfigured relationship between human and machine creates a utopia of democracy, a place where the mutability of subjectivity leads only to euphoria and excess. However reassuring this imaginary vision may seem, it represses the implications of the technological real in an attempt to reinscribe the myth of a coherent identity that exists outside and prior to the technologies which create cyberspace. In this sense, cyberspace erases the material effects of virtual technologies on subjectivity. It presents the technological real as a matter of conscious choice, a decision to use or manipulate software which we can turn on and off at will. More specifically, the discourse of cyberspace suggest that humans "control" the technological interventions that are constantly (re)constructing our subjectivity. In this respect, cyberspace, in imagining a spaceless, timeless, and bodiless "presence," simultaneously rewrites and disrupts traditional notions of subjectivity, calling attention to the coherence of subjectivity as a fiction, yet offering itself as the actualizing of that fiction. This repressed recognition places cyberspace in a precarious position --it is always undercutting the coherent subject of western metaphysics that it assumes and reinscribes as its conceptual foundation.
To understand more fully the dialectical effects of cyberspace, to see how it can both reinscribe and erase traditional notions of subjectivity, one must understand the historical genealogy of theories of technology. These theories are labeled in a variety of discipline-specific ways; I want to begin by describing briefly the vocabulary of philosopher Andrew Feenberg who emphasizes the distinction between "instrumental" and "substantive" theories of technology, then demonstrate the ways in which virtual technologies confound such attempts to define technology distinct from of its interventions in subjectivity and culture. My purpose, in this regard, is to suggest how theories of technology become implicated in the metaphysics of cyberspace, reproducing, in particular, the gendered conceptions of mind and body, "human" and "machine" that continue to be played out in the seemingly postmodern world of the net.
Instrumental theory presents itself as the "common sense" or rational theory of technology; it treats technology as a tool which is always subservient to values established in other cultural spheres. As Feenberg describes it, "A hammer is a hammer, a steam turbine is a steam turbine, and such tools are useful in any social context." From this perspective, for example, the nuclear bomb could be viewed as ontologically value neutral because outside of its specific contexts of (potential) use, it is no more or less (im)moral than a screwdriver. In contrast, substantive theories of technology, such as those of Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger, among others, attribute an autonomous cultural force or logic to technology which overrides traditional or competing values. In this view, technology's effects on culture and nature are more significant than its ostensible goals. Technology is, at once, viewed as systemic and disruptive--it affects cultures in ways that are unpredictable and often unmanageable. The nuclear bomb, for instance, might be seen as the historical instigator and a governing principle of "nuclear culture," with effects that go beyond its immediate functions as weapon and deterrent.
Despite the claims for revolutionary nature of new computer technologies, theorists of cyberspace generally recode either the instrumental or substantive theories of technology, even as they proclaim the revolutionary or transcendental nature of electronic media. Proponents view these new technologies as further advances in a progressivist nature of revolutionary development, tools which can be usefully applied to education, entertainment, and medicine. On the one hand, Brenda Laurel insists that culture will use the new communication media that come with cyberspace, "as we have used every previous medium, to conjure up transformative powers, to propel us beyond the boundaries of our minds and push our cultural evolution into new territories." On the other hand, skeptics emphasize the systemic nature of the new technology and decry what they see as (yet another) of technological take-over of the human by machines. Neil Postman, to take only one example, sees computer technologies as the agents of a dystopian future: "We have relinquished control" he writes, "which in the case of the computer means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-advised and even inhuman goals because the computer can accomplish them." Postman's writing resonates with nostalgia for a return to a time when "humans" controlled technology and not the other way around. Significantly, though, both Laurel and Postman share the basic presupposition that there is an a priori human subject distinct from technology who will either use or be used by it. This unified, Cartesian subject either controls the neutral tools of technology and uses them to advance (almost always) his interests and values, or is reduced, in Heidegger's terms, to a "standing reserve" by a powerful controlling technological system. In either case, technology is cordoned off rather than interrogated, given a curiously autonomous and self-propelling logic of its own.
In arguing that virtual technologies are revolutionary in their effects on human subjectivity, proponents of cyberspace draw on traditional Cartesian distinctions of the mind and body to argue that the "self" is bodiless, and, indeed, that its abstract nature is precisely what allows it to be seen as unique, unified, and coherent. In an important sense, therefore, cyberspace both invokes and promises to "transcend" what, in fact, does not exist--the unified and self- identical subject who is distinct from his/her body and from the technological context of culture. David Tomas, in his article on the movement from Euclidian space to cyberspace, writes that new computer technologies will eventually allow us to "overthrow the sensorial and organic architecture of the human body, this by disembodying and reformatting its sensorium in powerful, computer-generated, digitalized spaces"(32). Tomas's prediction rests on a traditional vision of subjectivity, specifically, the assumption that what is to be overthrown is a subject which is knowable in full, open to a "reformatting" in a place beyond the body. In dismissing the body as simply a container, so much "architecture," from which to transplant the "sensorium," Tomas reproduces the age-old philosophical move of separating the devalued body from the mind.
These dualistic views of technology and subjectivity, from Feenberg to Tomas, cannot adequately convey the complexity of the relationship between humans and machines. The subject is now, and has been historically, constructed--embodied by and against the technologies of his/her time. In this sense, technology actively intervenes in the construction and social reformulations of subjectivity, so specific technological interactions, "assistance," and disruptions cause subsequent reformulations of one's sense of self. At the same time, the repressed recognition that technologies do intervene in our bodies produces the desire to distinguish ourselves from these interventions, to imagine a self that is not subject to prosthetic assistance or its corollaries: disease, decay, and death. The process of subjectivity cannot be separate from an embodied experience that impels both the denial of the technological real and the idealization of the disembodied self as a kind of fetish.
In contrast, a more complex view of subjectivity must examine the intersections among narratives of identity, material, social, and psychic interactions with technology, and the experience of embodiment. In positioning subjectivity as connected in a complex manner to the body, I do not mean to evoke simply another layer of abstraction, a generalized notion of "the body." This concept has been critiqued thoroughly by feminist theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz and Susan Bordo, who suggest that the "body"--as an abstraction--is ahistorical, erasing critical differences because it evokes notions of sameness, similarity, and continuity. The most appropriate critical response to those approaches that celebrate the displacement of historical bodies into "the body" is to ask, to paraphrase Foucault, "which one?" To fully understand the implications of celebrating disembodiment, one must be develop an understanding of the responsibility incurred by a recognition of embodiment and the materiality of specific bodies: sense perceptions, proprioception, muscle memory, other biological functions, and physical manifestations of emotional effects. Furthermore, as Foucault and others have demonstrated, the experience of embodiment exists in a dialectical relationship with social, cultural, and historical discourses and is a invariably implicated in a complex ecological as well as political environment. Pierre Bourdieu suggests as much in his concept of the habitus, which he defines as "embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history--[it] is the active presence of the whole past of which it is a product." For Bourdieu, common practices and representations are determined through the dialectical relationship between the body and a structured organization of space and time.
It is this "dialectical relationship" that constructs subjectivity, the complex interactions and relations among the materiality of technology, bodies, and narratives of identity that constitute the subject. This is a proposal at once simple and yet remarkably hard to comprehend. One has only to consider how fully implicated one's life is in current technologies--from the medicines we take that cure our illnesses, to our contact lenses, to the cars that enable us to live and work and play in a wide geographic area--to begin to recognize the pervasiveness of this claim. Technology affects the social and individual conception of the self, the parameters that enable "changes" in the self, even the social, political, and personal possibilities that subjects, as agents, can envision. This is not to say that technology determines social or personal identity in any systemic manner, nor is it to buy into simply another version of the substantive theory of technology. The "technological real" forces us instead to recognize the complexity and materiality of subjectivity; only through examining such complexity can specific sites of construction be examined and understood.
To recognize technology's specific interventions in subjectivity is to admit that the "self" and notions of identity are context-specific in ways that call attention to what Don Ihde has called the "doubled desire" of technology:to master technology in order to use it to reshape our environment in order to produce a "natural" bounty, which presumably will take us back to a prelapsarian world, and thereby render technology invisible. In his essay in this collection, Robert Markley argues that cyberspace is a prime example of this doubling of desire: "Cyberspace promises to take us beyond the interventions of technology--ironically, only by repressing those interventions, by effacing the technologies on which it depends" (503). It is precisely this attempt to erase its technological construction that allows cyberspace to erase the body, to invoke implicitly and explicitly a philosophical tradition that insistently devalues the material in order to create an idealized, ahistorical notion of the self. This tendency to erase the body has important implications for both current philosophizing about cyberspace and for a specifically feminist critique of the dangers and potential of virtual technologies.
Many critics of cyberspace--Michael Heim and Steve Shaviro among them--adopt Gottfried Leibniz as the philosopher who is most useful in theorizing the problems of subjectivity in cyberspace. For these critics, Leibniz's monadology offers a philosophical basis for the simulations created by computer technologies. Leibnizian monads, write Heim, "are nonphysical, psychical substances" which operate from a solitary, omniscient position (97). Monads, as cohesive, but bodiless entities, seem to represent precisely the experience (or more accurately the imagined experience) of cyberspace: they present themselves as expressions of pure desire. In contrast, I want to suggest that it is precisely the Leibnizian idealized erasure of the body-- repressing its materiality into the form of the monad--that makes his philosophy problematic in theorizing the complications of computer technologies. I want to suggest, then, that notions of subjectivity--however abstract--are always, inescapably, embodied. The bodiless entity that hypothetically "exists" in cyberspace depends, in a myriad of ways, on the referent of the corporeal body in front of the computer. The relationship between the embodied user, the creation of "alternate" subjectivities in cyberspace, and the technology of the computer, is tightly intermeshed, and evoking Leibniz can reduce the complexity by bracketing the body, allowing its displacement into the seemingly unencumbered, desiring intelligence (described by Heim and Shaviro) and encouraging the imaginary erasure of technology as the constitutive force of the simulation. In this respect, I would explicitly counter the move to adopt Leibniz as the philosopher of choice for cyberspace, and instead suggest an alternate history which factors embodiment into descriptions of subjectivity. In this sense, a more useful philosopher of subjectivity might be David Hume, who calls into question the metaphysical presuppositions of monadological views of cyberspace.
Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), posits subjectivity and identity as "working" fictions. Countering Descartes' notion of the mind as infinitely divisible and separate from the physical body, Hume suggests that the human consists of a flux of distinct sensory perceptions, continued through time and widely various. However hard individuals try to make sense of the distinct and unconnected nature of their sense perceptions, they are unable to process--without relying on fictions of causal connection--the continual movement and variety of their existence. Hume describes what is effectively a dialogic relationship between our awareness of the chaos of sensory perceptions and the putative stability of fictions of identity:
however at one instant we may consider the related succession [of perceptions] as variable or interrupted, we are sure the next to ascribe to it a perfect identity, and regard it as invariable and uninterrupted... Thus we feign the continu'd existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation. (254)
The process ofcrafting the fiction of "soul, and self, and substance," Hume argues, is founded on memory. Memory is, in a very real sense, truly the process of re-membering--yoking the temporal sequence of distinct sensory perceptions and the beliefs and ideas that they inspire through notions of resemblance and causation. For Hume, resemblance (the linking of like perceptions) and causation (the attributing of cause and effect relations to external and unconnected events) are tendencies of the mind which become the habit of identity. This is, of course, a narrative process. The narration of "past" becomes the foundation for present and future perceptions of our sense of self. Gilles Deleuze in the preface to Empiricism and Subjectivity writes a brilliantly succinct description of Hume's philosophy:
We start with atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages, "tendencies," which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give rise to habits. Isn't this the answer to the question "what are we?" We are habits, nothing but habits--the habit of saying "I." Perhaps there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self.
The answer of the self, in this respect, consists of an embodied entity who exists in space and time. These terms--identity, embodiment, space, time, and narration--crucial to Hume's argument, need to be seen in a non-traditional manner, as terms which resist efforts to collapse them into philosophical postulates or render them (in the case of the monadology) irrelevant. The subject exists through time, in memory, and by means of his or her "habit" of connecting perceptions in such a manner that they continually reinscribe the fiction of a stable identity. The space of sensory impression--in contrast to the imaginary spaces behind the computer screen--are proprioceptive spaces. Hume assumes, always, a primacy of the body which is inescapable. "We may well ask," writes Hume, "what causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but it is in vain to ask, whether there be a body or not? that is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings" (87). There can be no dismissing the space of our bodies which perceive and sense, which gather the data on which to assemble our habitual fictions.
It is crucial to emphasize that the stakes of this debate entail far more than mere philosophical musings. As materialist feminists have demonstrated, the erasing of specific situated bodies, through abstractions of disembodiment, serves primarily to bolster the privilege of those in western culture with unmarked bodies--primarily white, male and upper or upper- middle class. As Donna Haraway suggests, "We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future." Cyberspatial visions of selves unconstrained by bodies--of a radical unmarking of situated identities--appropriate the rhetoric of the liberation of self from the body to foster an idealized notion of a fluid, undifferentiated identity. Shaviro contends that in cyberspace, "selves are no longer constrained by rules of unity and organic form, you can adopt whatever pseudonym you want. We are all the same in cyberspace, and anyone can be replaced by anyone else." To buy into this rhetoric is to lose sight of the specificity of located subjectivities within a cultural, historical context and also crucially to lose sight of the ways in which this context is constantly being reproduced by technological interventions. In this respect, to recognize subjectivity as an effect of the technological real is not to sink into relativism nor to level socioeconomic and biological differences but to provide a means to critique the logic that reduces the relationships between humankind and technology to the sets of binaries that I have critiqued.
My emphasis on the ways in which cyberspace reaches back to Leibniz to promote an idealized vision of electronically-mediated experience and thereby to disembody subjectivity can be understood as a characteristic response to the advent of new media which we persist in trying to fit into traditional paradigms (such as mind-body dualism) of knowledge. Thirty years ago Marshall McLuhan argued that the content of any new media is precisely the old media that it has replaced. In this sense, cyberspace becomes a key site in a self-consciously postmodern culture in which individuals articulate and repress the antagonisms of class and gender that it claims to transcend. In this sense, the privileges of gender, class, and race persist in the ostensibly unmarked arena of cyberspace; experiments with, say, gender in cyberspace emerge less as alternatives to the complexity of embodied subjectivity than as unstable sites that erupt into crisis when the role-playing that some virtual spaces encourage come up against the inequalities and power differentials of Real Life.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone in her article "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" argues that cyberspace is collapsing nature into technology; "on the nets," she claims, "warranting, or grounding, a persona in a physical body is meaningless" (84), and goes on to celebrate the "decoupling [of] the body and the subject." But even as she invokes the notion of a coherent, reproducible subject that is non context-specific, Stone also offers examples which demonstrate moments of intense anxiety regarding the putative decoupling of body and subject. I should like to focus briefly on one of these, the story of "Julie," an older disabled woman who was known to the interne community only by her textual presence. "Julie," apparently, had an enormous effect on those who interacted with her. Stone tells us, "Her heart was as big as her greeting, and in the intimate electronic companionships that can develop... on-line....Julie's women friends shared their deepest troubles, and she offered them advice--advice which changed their lives" (83). When information was leaked that "Julie" was actually an able-bodied middle-aged male psychiatrist, the general reaction was of disbelief and outrage. Stone recounted a typical response from one woman, "'I felt raped,' [she]. 'I felt my deepest secrets had been violated'" (83). It is no accident that these women used rape discourse and metaphors to articulate their sense of violation. If, explicitly, these interactions seemed to be about confiding, sharing and advice, implicitly they reflect a process of constructing subjectivity. Within this process, which was mediated through the technology of the computer, the body was offered as foundational, as a territory, or site, of trust. The women who corresponded with "Julie" offered, as part of the process, their own embodied subjectivity "as women," in an economy of cyclical construction which established working fictions of subjectivity on the internet. Far from bodies being "decoupled," and hence meaningless, the women's reactions to "Julie's" betrayal demonstrate a intense embodied relation to one another--even in cyberspace. These women participated in the construction of a discursive subjectivity, and they had the expectation of an embodiment which would corresponds to that subject position--that of a disabled woman sharing sincerely felt emotions with them.
The expectation of bodies somewhere in a specific context, (in the case of "Julie" the expectation of a disabled, woman's body somewhere at a computer), at once gestures to a certain primacy of the body and to the expectation that technology, in this case, mediates between specific embodied realities, specific stable identities, rather than creating alternate realities. What is foregrounded in the "betrayal" is how technology intervenes, in powerful ways, in the construction of working fictions of subjectivities. The anger and anxiety registered by the women also suggests that cyberspace has the potential to disturb, to use Hume's language, our sense of resemblance and causality. The women thought that they recognized "Julie" as a similar subject, or at least as a particular kind of subject--a kind, wise, and disabled woman. Thus while these fictions of cyberspace assuage anxieties by suggesting that once we "jack out" of the matrix we will return to a coherent subjectivity--as a colleague recently put it, "We are only fluid and multiplicitous until someone unplugs the computer"--they also have the potential to disrupt narratives of causality and resemblance. When events such as "Julie's" betrayal occur, they foreground the constructed nature of subjectivity in intensely disturbing ways. Since technology allows for this relationship (textually, electronically) it is an intervention which causes disruptions that lead to certain reformulations of subjectivity. Stone tells us that, as a result of the discovery that "Julie" was a man, "Several [women] went so far as to repudiate the genuine gains they had made in their personal and emotional lives" (83). Their repudiations suggest both that the process of constructing subjectivity through the mediation of technology can yield "genuine gains," and that recognizing this process of construction was disturbing enough, in many instances, to negate those gains.
If the story of Julie suggests the insecurities that lie behind our associations of self and body, then another well-known example of gender-bending in cyberspace reveals the ways in which power, privilege, and hostility can appropriate the play of differences in an imaginary realm of supposedly fluid identities. Julian Dibbell, in his article "A Rape in Cyberspace," recounts a particularly complex example of the ways in which cyberspace recodes and is structured by the complex relations between technology and subjectivity. Dibbell's story, like Stone's, describes technologically mediated interactions, in this case, within a computer database named Lambdamoo (Moo stands for a multi-user domain, object-oriented). In brief, Lambdamoo is a shared computer space which allows multiple users to interact in a (textually described) communal environment, in this case, a large mystical mansion. Users log on to the imaginary space and write descriptions of characters who become their Lambdamoo persona. In describing the "rape" that occurred in Lambdamoo, Dibbell recounts two versions of the facts, one from VR (virtual reality) and one from RL (real life). In Dibbell's virtual reality version Mr. Bungle (a "fat oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown")
... commenced his assault entirely unprovoked, at or about 10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. That he began by using his voodoo doll to force one of the room's occupants to sexually service him in a variety of more or less conventional ways. That this victim was legba, a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl grey suit..
To assault legba Mr. Bungle used a voodoo doll subprogram which allows users to "appropriate" and control, temporarily, the character of another player. In this manner, Mr. Bungle "took over" the character of legba and subjected him/her to sexually explicit acts. In the "real life" version, though, as Dibbell puts it:
No hideous or trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident, no voodoo dolls or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any RL court of law has yet defined it. The actors in the drama were university students for the most part, and they sat rather undramatically before computer screens the entire time... no bodies touched. Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of electronic signals..
Further complicating the problem of defining the relationship between virtual violence and Real Life is the fact that, as Dibbell explains, the "rape" in cyberspace was a public act. Other users were logged on and "witnessed" Mr. Bungle's abuse. Reactions in the virtual community, as we shall see, ranged from anger and shock to amusement and indifference. The ensuing controversy centered around how best to respond to such an event. Should Mr. Bungle be "toaded" (eliminated from the MUD) or should some kind of community censure be the appropriate response?
Dibbell juxtaposes the two versions of this rape in cyberspace in order to complicate the notion of "alternate realities." He offers this story, with all its confusion and emotion, as a counter measure to what he calls "the techno-utopian ecstasies of West Coast cyberhippies," and as a place to begin to explore the relationship between the physical body and its cyberspatial projection. What is important to foreground in this respect is the idea of "relationship"--the word suggests a crucial fact about cyberspace: MUDs are not places of alternate subjectivities, of a transcending of one's social and biological identity, but of simultaneous subjectivities. There are always at least "two"--neither separated nor identical--subject positions for each user. "Julie" was, at once, a disabled women and a middle-aged male psychiatrist. Mr. Bungle was a "bisquick-faced clown" and, also and at the same time, a man somewhere before a keyboard. Crises such as the "rape" emphasize the slippage and cyber-schizophrenia that results when the relationship between the user and the projected persona is foreground.
Dibbell's description of the reactions to the assault seem similar to the ones Stone recounts. Other characters in Lambdamoo were angry, disgusted, and bewildered. The reaction of legba (in real life a female Ph.D candidate at the University of Washington) illustrates, I believe, the contradictory ways in which technologically mediated "assault" may affect subjectivity. Legba's written contribution to the discussion in Lambdamoo of how to punish Mr. Bungle demonstrates the slippage. It is a strange mixture of outrage and annoyance. "Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing," she writes, "and mostly I tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more trouble than they prevent. but I also think
that Mr. Bungle was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I... want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I'm not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I'm not sure what I'm calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn't happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn't happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass.
The woman user who created the legba persona is clearly outraged, in places her rhetoric reproduces classic rape discourse, mingling anger, confusion, denial, and disbelief. On one level her response calls for "virtual castration"--a bodily retaliation for an assault that, though electronic and textual, is, on one level, coded in terms of the body. Her anger, in this respect, testifies, once again, to the persistence of the "real" body in cyberspace and confirms her feelings that an assault on her avatar is somehow an assault on her body and on her embodied identity. The doubleness, the simultaneity, of the avatar of legba (the Haitian trickster spirit) and the embodied woman user at a keyboards are, in this moment of crisis, thrown into dramatic relief. This complication is reflected in her conflicted response to the "rape." Rather than reacting as though the legba persona is an "alternate personality," a conscious role that she can put on or off at will, she testifies strongly to the connection, the continued complicity, of technological mediation in her sense of a "real" self.
In addition to the outraged embodied reaction, there is another quality to her response, what Dibbell describes as an "eyeball rolling annoyance." This quality is evident most clearly in the sudden shift from the rape discourse--"I didn't think it would happen to me"--to her expectation that "people will act with a veneer of civility." Dibbell writes, "Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own livingroom, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of 'civility.'" He accounts for such a discordant response by attributing it to the "buzzing, dissonant gap" between virtual reality and real life. Another way to account for this is to read it as a disturbance, again, of an organizing principle of subjectivity -- the causality without which, as Hume notes, agency cannot exist. The "eyerolling" annoyance of the user coupled with her discourse as rape victim -- shows the instability of the simultaneous subject positions, the inability to rely on a coherent a prior subjectivity, predicated on a notion of control. Cyberspace discourses suggest that users can consciously construct what "else" they would be. Agency inheres in the idea of a user who can construct alternate subject positions. In the "rape" case the woman user, believes she is in control of the process of constructing "legba," her cyberspatial projection, until she is suddenly shown -- in a graphic and visceral way -- that the process of constructing subjectivity is far more complicated and open to interventions that the simple transcendent promise would lead one to suspect.
For instance, the woman who has/is legba on screen has no legal recourse for the "assault." The notion of causality between the act and her distress is denied in the social and cultural context where "she" is physically present. "Legba" has no agency, she cannot prosecute, no one in "real life" recognizes any claims about her identity in cyberspace. The loss of a coherent social and bodily context seems to disrupt the woman/legba's ability to decipher just what happened to her "self," precisely because this interaction foregrounds the construction of subjectivity as a process of intervening social and technological forces, in many ways, beyond the control or agency of the "user."
If cyberspace is a discursive site of ideological struggles to define the relationship between subjectivity and technology it becomes crucial to theorize our technologies, to move beyond the visions of tools and encapsulating systems, and to recognize the multiple ways that technologies intervene in our cultural identities. For feminist critics to ask how cyberspace might reproduce traditional gendered discourse is to pose an interesting and relevant question, but ultimately this study is a subset of, what I argue, are much larger questions. How do technologies create gendered subjectivities? How do we reformulate gender in light of technological interventions? What is the history of such interventions?
To explore these questions is to take seriously a view of the subject that is more Humean than Cartesian or Leibnizian, that is, to see the gaps and lacunas between our sense perceptions and our narratives of identities and to recognize the absolute necessity of the body in producing and maintaining those foundational perceptions. It is to understand the subject not as stable, coherent or knowable but always in process, a kind of ongoing technoproject. If one understands the subject as contingent on the experience of embodiment, then any theory that suggests a radical reconstruction or abandoning of the body must be read as part of a traditional metaphysics which from Plato, through Descartes, to Heim, has devalued corporeal experience. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, it is to recognize the subject as context-specific and to see subjectivity as created in an always "interactive" environment, in which whatever we experience as true, real, and fundamental is inseparable from the technologies through which we are continually reinscribed.
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