1077 lines
60 KiB
Plaintext
1077 lines
60 KiB
Plaintext
BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY:
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JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE
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by
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DONALD F. THEALL
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University Professor
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Trent University
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<dtheall@trentu.ca>
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_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)
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Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall, all rights
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reserved. This text may be freely shared among
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individuals, but it may not be republished in any
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medium without express written consent from the authors
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and advance notification of the editors.
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[1] _The Gutenberg Galaxy_, a book which redirected the way
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that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the
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role of technological mediation in communication and
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expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to
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write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has
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not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's
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major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures
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(such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida,
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Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about
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aspects of communication involving technological mediation,
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speech, writing, and electronics. While all of these
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connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic
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Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific
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bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist
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contemporaries to the development of electric communication
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and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality.
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McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_"
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established him as the first major disseminator of those
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Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis
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for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive
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McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an
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unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.
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[2] In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the
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emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the
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development of electromechanical communications, telematics
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and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the
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simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of
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multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:
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All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon
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city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of
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grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it
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was too complicated, trying to find your way to the
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particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry
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called that.^1^
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This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted
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from the banks of every computer in the human system"
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creates an "unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged
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in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of
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data. Like city lights receding."^2^ Almost a decade
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earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the
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late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^
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It steps up the velocity of logical sequential
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calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to
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body count by touch . . . . It brings back the
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Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers
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are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy
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in favor of decentralization. When applied to new
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forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and
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videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric
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texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging
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ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^
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McLuhan's %hieroglyphs% certainly more than anticipate
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Gibson's %iconics% and McLuhan's particular use of
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hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily
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derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico.
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[3] It is not surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by
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side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early
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researchers in MIT's Media Lab^5^, for these researchers
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also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and
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collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic,
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proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^
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The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such
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as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of
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individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei
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Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the
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semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and
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involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading
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figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of
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painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light,
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movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _Large
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Glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying
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notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A
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l'infinitif_. His interest in the notes as part of the
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total work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of
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_Work in Progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it
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(e.g., _Our Exagmination Round his Factification for
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Incamination of Work in Progress_). Joyce also explores
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similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and
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concept. So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with
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poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth
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and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes,
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many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed
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great importance on collaboration with artists involved in
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exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating
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new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other
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senses.^8^
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[4] Understanding the social and cultural implications of
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VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the
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inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace
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description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced
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vision of the development of electric media, and the
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particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings
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about electrically mediated communication and on the views
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of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems
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of mediation and communication. Such a reassessment
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requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the
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crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of
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language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used
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by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the
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idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses
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and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have
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addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter
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Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have--like them--failed
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to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a
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Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility,
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gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the
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emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality.
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This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of
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the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary
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exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist
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colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual
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development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would
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integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and
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neurological information in currently existing and newly
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emerging art forms.
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[5] Joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the
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artistic exploration of two sets of differences--
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orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have
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since become dominant themes in the discussion of these
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questions. _Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major
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poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media
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present to the traditionally accepted relationships between
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speech, script and print. (_Ulysses_ also involves such an
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encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic
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development of mediated communication.) Imagine Joyce
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around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the
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book in a culture which has discovered photography,
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phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and
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telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines,
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advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? What people
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once read, they will now go to see in film and on
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television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and
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more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in
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television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the
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potentialities of sound recording.^10^
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[6] The "counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of
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*the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the
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dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its
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frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or
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language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic,
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encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous
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involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book
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about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of
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the new technology.^11^ The _Wake_ is the most
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comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the
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ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for
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the arts of language and the privileged position of the
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printed book. The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary
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deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world
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where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with
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entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting
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information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety
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of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and
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writing. Joyce's selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as
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the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of
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Homer's _Odyssey_ in _Ulysses_--underscores how his interest
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in the contemporary transformation of the book requires
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grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of
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communication, especially gesture and language and the
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"prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future.
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[7] As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the
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construction of artifacts and processes of communication in
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the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation
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(not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had
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historically evolved. Confronted with this situation, Joyce
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seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the
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book within this new communicative cosmos, while
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simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development
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of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium,
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"virtual reality." Since the action takes place in a
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dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic
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imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future.
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His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere,
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accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise
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from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the
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visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily
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the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they
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will utilize his present, which will have become the past,
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to transform the future.^13^
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[8] The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes
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Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic
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condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric
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transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a
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presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and
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ohmes." Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an
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electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic
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environment), which becomes an extension of the human body,
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an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the
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playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling
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attention to the interplay of sensory information within the
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electro-chemical neurological system. This medley of
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elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of
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oral and written language in an electro-mechanical
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technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive
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modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks
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Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality.
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[9] Acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of
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speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the
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kinesthetic and other modes of expression, Joyce roots all
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communication in gesture: "In the beginning was the gest he
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jousstly says" (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of
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gesture (gest, F. %geste% = gesture)^15^ is linked with the
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mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale
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(gest as a feat and a tale or romance). Gestures, like
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signals and flashing lights that provide elementary
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mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent
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power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon,
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beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where
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flash becomes word and silents selfloud." Since gestures,
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and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from
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the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a
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flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the
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original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" +
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original sin (239.1)]. "Communicake" parallels eating to
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speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of
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communion as participation in, and consumption of, the
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Word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of
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Marcel Jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the
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origin of language, _La Manducation de la Parole_ ("The
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Mastication of the Word"). By treating the "gest" as a bit
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(a bite), orality and the written word as projections of
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gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a
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communicating machine.^16^ The historical processes that
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contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the
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growing emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke's, on
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the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called
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communication is *secular, paramodern communion*.^17^
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[10] The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the
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communicative process of encoding and decoding required to
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interpret an encoded text, which itself is
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characteristically mechanical:
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The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately
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is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the
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raiding there originally. That's the point of
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eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in
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soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded
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can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere
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grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have
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occasioning cause causing effects and affects
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occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me
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take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's
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tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
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hand is the hand of Sameas. (482.31-483.4)
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The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an "outlex"
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(169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and,
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therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally
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discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding"
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[i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^ This reading
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encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the
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excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the
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designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions,
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drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of
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continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully
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crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _Book of
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Kells_ are. Seeing and hearing are intricately involved in
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this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes
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a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the
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machinery of writing. It is a production "in soandso many
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counterpoint words" that can be read only through the
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machinery of decoding, for "What can't be coded can be
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decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for"
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(482.34). The tale that the pen writes is transmitted by
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the post, and the whole process of communication and its
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interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily
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gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the
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hand is the hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).
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[11] Orality, particularly song, is grounded in the
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machinery of the body's organs: "Singalingalying. Storiella
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as she is syung. Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for
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yestures" (267.7-9).^20^ The link is rhythm, for
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"Soonjemmijohns will cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over
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Browne and Nolan's divisional tables" (268.7-9). Gesture,
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with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular
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movements of the body, is a natural script or originary
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writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral
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style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics"
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(36.8-9). Since the oral is "reconstricted" (reconstructed
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+ constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are
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crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which
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is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive
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script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^ Runes and
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ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing
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(i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the
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word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of
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gesture.
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[12] Joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply
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that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of
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the word, the image, and the icon also changes. Under the
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impact of electric communication, it is once again clear
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that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and
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events as well.^22^ Writing and speech are subsumed into
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entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image,
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gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input,
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especially the tactile. To continue to speak about a
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dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading
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over-simplification of the role that electric media play in
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this transformation, a role best comprehended through
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historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human
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communication where objects, gestures and movements
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apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds.
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Marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the Aschers'
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discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss's discussions of
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the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of
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some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^
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Adapting Vico's speculation that human communication begins
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with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," Joyce
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early in the _Wake_ presents an encounter between two
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characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and Jeff of
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comic strip fame. Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a
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nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach
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eather" (16.8-9).
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[13] Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce
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traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine
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development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the
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future. For example, an entire episode of the _Wake_
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(I,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and
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the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in
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which the _Wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a
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manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all
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scripture" (107.8). At each stage, Joyce recognizes how the
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machinery of codification is implicit in the history of
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communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes
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that
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on holding the verso against a lit rush this new
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book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent
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query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out
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the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not
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punctured (in the university sense of the term) by
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numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged
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instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3)
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This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the
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telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the
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early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation
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of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings." "Morse code" is
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indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code
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is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment
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when the mechanical is electrified), the role of
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codification is radically transformed by mechanization.
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[14] The appearance of the printing press demonstrates the
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effect of this radical transformation:
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Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast
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and great primer must once for omniboss step
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rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no
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virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one
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warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
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hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though
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not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister
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Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies.
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Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word
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will be bound over to carry three score and ten
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toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends
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Jined . . . . (20.7-16)
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As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and
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great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the
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dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
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hints and misses in prints." Topics (L. %topos%) and types
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(L. %typus%) as figures, forms, images, topics and
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commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric,
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are now realized through typesetting. Implicit in the
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technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal
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ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry
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three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book
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of Doublends Jined." Printing sets in place the "root
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language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the
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world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate
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codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects,
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movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the
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electromechanical march towards VR and cyberspace.
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[15] By the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _Wake_, Joyce
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playfully anticipated how central sporting events or
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political debates would be for television when he described
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the TV projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's
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"regulars" (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene
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in literary history). Joyce's presentation of this image of
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the battle of Butt and Taff, which is peppered with complex
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puns involving terminology associated with the technical
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details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality,
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underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of
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Butt and Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment
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screen" ("bairdboard" because John Logie Baird developed TV
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in 1925). Joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment
|
|
screen," the TV as receiver, receives the composite video
|
|
signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses
|
|
that form part of the composite video signal), that come
|
|
down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the
|
|
carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with
|
|
the bitts bugtwug their teffs." Joyce imagines this
|
|
receiver to be a "light barricade" against which the charge
|
|
of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed,
|
|
reproducing the "bitts." Although (at least to my
|
|
knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in
|
|
communication technology at the time, Joyce is still able,
|
|
on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or
|
|
photons as bits of information creating the TV picture.
|
|
[16] Speech, print and writing are interwoven with
|
|
electromechanical technologies of communication throughout
|
|
the _Wake_. References to the manufacture of books,
|
|
newspapers and other products of the printing press abound.
|
|
Machineries and technological organizations accompany this
|
|
development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad
|
|
men who produce "Abortisements" (181.33). Since complex
|
|
communication technology is characteristic of the later
|
|
stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny"
|
|
magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a
|
|
phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would
|
|
"roll away the reel world." Telecommunications materialize
|
|
again and again throughout the night of the _Wake_, where
|
|
"television kills telephony."
|
|
[17] The "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology
|
|
in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including
|
|
in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe,"
|
|
"telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible,"
|
|
"televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear
|
|
in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as
|
|
"velivision" and "dullaphone." This complex verbal play all
|
|
hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of
|
|
technologically mediated communication. In the opening
|
|
episode of the second part, the "Feenicht's Playhouse," an
|
|
imaginary play produced by HCE's children in their nursery
|
|
is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in
|
|
cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four
|
|
tubbloids" (219.28-9). Like the cinema, "wordloosed"
|
|
(wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such
|
|
media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages
|
|
and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures
|
|
and a pan-international hyperculture.
|
|
[18] In the concluding moments of the _Wake_, Joyce
|
|
generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate
|
|
performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also
|
|
anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of
|
|
culture, communication, and technology. A brief scene
|
|
setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as
|
|
the HCE is awakening. In the background he hears noises
|
|
from the machines in the laundry next door. It is breakfast
|
|
time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are
|
|
being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of
|
|
the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^
|
|
At this moment a key passage, inviting interminable
|
|
interpretation, presents in very abstract language a
|
|
generalized model of production and consumption, which is
|
|
also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that
|
|
consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself
|
|
digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could
|
|
one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be
|
|
"litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary?
|
|
[19] The passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole
|
|
millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational
|
|
gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be
|
|
written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the
|
|
sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor
|
|
clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby Mannor Millor
|
|
laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of
|
|
engineering, for essentially it relates the production of
|
|
cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like
|
|
reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text
|
|
mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as
|
|
eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can"
|
|
(614.28)). The passage concludes, "as sure as herself
|
|
pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs"
|
|
(615.9-10). Here the frequent pairing of speaking
|
|
(writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is
|
|
related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of
|
|
nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining.
|
|
[20] These bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic +
|
|
dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition,"
|
|
may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the
|
|
"heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff
|
|
of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his
|
|
staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by
|
|
tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance
|
|
. . ." (614.33-615.2). All of these bits--matter, eggs,
|
|
words, TV signals, concepts, what you will--are
|
|
"anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified
|
|
paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic
|
|
structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as
|
|
hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8). In anticipation of
|
|
the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," Joyce
|
|
associates the structure of communication (ranging from TV
|
|
and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and
|
|
kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information.
|
|
He presents it as essentially an assemblage of
|
|
multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing
|
|
moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic
|
|
branches of differing motifs, through a process of
|
|
transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of
|
|
blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the
|
|
discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and
|
|
punctuation--those "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8).
|
|
[21] Here Joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of
|
|
cyberspace seems somewhat Deleuzian. It is an ambivalent
|
|
and critical vision, for the "ambiviolence" of the
|
|
"langdwage" throughout the _Wake_ implies critique as it
|
|
unfolds this history, since Joyce still situates parody
|
|
within satire. He does not free it from socio-political
|
|
reference, as a free-floating "postmodernist" play with the
|
|
surface of signifiers would. This can be noted in the way
|
|
that Joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones
|
|
of McLuhanism. Joyce plays throughout the work with spheres
|
|
and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical
|
|
definitions of God frequently attributed to Alan of Lille
|
|
(Alanus de Insulis), but sometimes referred to as Pascal's
|
|
sphere. Speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says:
|
|
our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as
|
|
sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all
|
|
directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the
|
|
infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and
|
|
manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has
|
|
thoughts of that eternal Rome) . . . . (298.27-33)
|
|
Here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and
|
|
circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and
|
|
undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is
|
|
sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself
|
|
without apparent limit. This is both an embodied and a
|
|
disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so
|
|
as to impede any closure. The same spherical principle is
|
|
applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of
|
|
hearing. The reception of messages by the hero/ine of the
|
|
_Wake_, "(Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)" (108.23), is
|
|
accomplished by "bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down
|
|
in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a
|
|
melegoturny marygoraumd" (309.22-4), a sphere for it
|
|
requires "a gain control of circumcentric megacycles"
|
|
(310.7-8). It can truly be said of HCE, "Ear! Ear! Weakear!
|
|
An allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is
|
|
"%h%uman, %e%rring and %c%ondonable"(58.19), yet "humile,
|
|
commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations
|
|
his "%h%ardest %c%rux %e%ver" (623.33) [italics mine].
|
|
Though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this]
|
|
exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "%H%einz %c%ans
|
|
%e%verywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of
|
|
sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would
|
|
%c%hallenge their %h%emosphores to %e%xterminate them"
|
|
(81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to
|
|
enclose him.
|
|
[22] This discussion of sphere and hearing critically
|
|
anticipates what McLuhan later called "acoustic space"--a
|
|
fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of
|
|
multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment
|
|
within which aural information is received by the CNS--that
|
|
also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic
|
|
insight that "the universe (or nature) [or in earlier
|
|
versions, God] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is
|
|
everywhere, the circumference nowhere."^27^ Today, VR, as
|
|
Borges' treatment of Pascal's sphere seems to imply, is
|
|
coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this
|
|
symbol, a place where each participant (rather than *the*
|
|
deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center.
|
|
People englobed within virtual worlds find themselves
|
|
interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual
|
|
multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through
|
|
complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks.
|
|
[23] All of this must necessarily relate back to the way
|
|
Joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that
|
|
is *the book*. While, beginning with Mallarme, the themes
|
|
of the book and the death of literature resound through
|
|
modernism, Joyce's transformation of the book filtered
|
|
through the "mcluhanitic" reaction to "mcluhanism" becomes,
|
|
in the usual interpretation of McLuhan, the annunciation of
|
|
the death of the book, *not* its transformation, as with
|
|
Joyce. Joyce is important, for following Marcel Jousse and
|
|
Vico,^28^ he situates speech and writing as modes of
|
|
communication within a far richer and more complex bodily
|
|
and gestural theory of communication than that represented
|
|
by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. As
|
|
the predominance of print declines, the _Wake_ explores the
|
|
history of communication by comically assimilating the
|
|
method of Vico's _The New Science_--which, as one of the
|
|
first systematic and empirical studies of the place of
|
|
poetic action in the history of how people develop systems
|
|
of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for
|
|
constructing their society to the poetic function.
|
|
[24] Joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the
|
|
complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy
|
|
dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as
|
|
verbal--a privilege based on theological and metaphysical
|
|
claims. The same dichotomy creates problems in discussing
|
|
technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated
|
|
communication, including VR and TV. At one point in the
|
|
_Wake_ "Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our
|
|
eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for
|
|
TV also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic. Yet
|
|
most McLuhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy
|
|
split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print.
|
|
The same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on
|
|
gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium. As the
|
|
_Wake_ jocularly observes:
|
|
seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the
|
|
cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second
|
|
parents . . . the touching seene. The solence of that
|
|
stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster
|
|
rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape from Wildu
|
|
Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb as
|
|
Mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os
|
|
across the wineless Ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss
|
|
potent of suggestion than in the tales of the
|
|
tingmount. (52.34-53.6)
|
|
The mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement
|
|
seeming like a landscape or a movie.
|
|
[25] Facile over-simplification also overlooks that long
|
|
before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print
|
|
had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and
|
|
writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its
|
|
encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such
|
|
as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and
|
|
tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear.
|
|
While writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency,
|
|
its history is far more complex, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has
|
|
established.^29^ The orality/literacy distinction does not
|
|
provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print,
|
|
any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive
|
|
images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace
|
|
(e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the
|
|
Aspen map), which, to adapt a Joycean phrase, directly
|
|
transmit "feelful thinkamalinks." Since VR should enable a
|
|
person to feel the bodily set of another person or place,
|
|
while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory
|
|
messages, understanding the role of the body in
|
|
communication is crucial for understanding VR. When McLuhan
|
|
and Edward Carpenter first spoke about their concept of
|
|
orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print
|
|
to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and
|
|
primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in
|
|
communication, for "In the beginning there was the gest."
|
|
[26] As Kenneth Burke realized in the 30s, Joyce's grounding
|
|
communication and language in gesture is distinctly
|
|
different from an approach which privileges language, for it
|
|
involves a complete embodying of communication. While the
|
|
oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire CNS is
|
|
necessarily involved in all communication, including speech.
|
|
As John Bishop has shown in _Joyce's Book of the Dark_, the
|
|
sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but
|
|
these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs
|
|
that permeate the dream and which constitute the _Wake_.^30^
|
|
Joyce views language as "gest," as an imaginary means of
|
|
embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his "feelful
|
|
thinkamalinks." From this perspective, the semic units of
|
|
the _Wake_ (integrated complexes constructed from the
|
|
interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm,
|
|
orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the
|
|
role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication,
|
|
exploiting their limitations and differences. Joyce crafts
|
|
a new %lingua% for a world where the poetic book will deal
|
|
with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be
|
|
encompassed within technologically mediated communication.
|
|
Simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual
|
|
reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or
|
|
technologically mediated modes of communication. This
|
|
process posits a continuous dialogue in which _Ulysses_ and
|
|
the _Wake_ were designed to play key roles.
|
|
[27] As Joyce--who quipped that "some of the means I use are
|
|
trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient
|
|
rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the Aeolus
|
|
episode of _Ulysses_ and in the "Triv and Quad" section (II,
|
|
2) of the _Wake_) also included those interactive contexts
|
|
where the body was an intrinsic part of communication.
|
|
Delivery involved controlling the body, and the context
|
|
within which it was presented, as well as the voice. The
|
|
actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory)
|
|
also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. This
|
|
analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way
|
|
actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical,
|
|
gestural and kinesthetic components. Recent research into
|
|
the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by
|
|
Frances Yates,^32^ have demonstrated that memory involves
|
|
the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual
|
|
icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the
|
|
oral itself. Joyce playfully invokes this memory system
|
|
familiar to him from his Jesuit education: "After sound,
|
|
light and heat, memory, will and understanding. Here (the
|
|
memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for
|
|
wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22). A classical
|
|
world, which recognized such features of the communicative
|
|
process, could readily speak about the poem as a "speaking
|
|
picture" and the painting as "silent poetry." Here, there
|
|
is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a
|
|
dependency on a single channel of communication.
|
|
[28] Joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new
|
|
culture of time and space for reconstructing and
|
|
revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be "the
|
|
greatest engineer," as well as a Renaissance man, who was
|
|
also a "musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other
|
|
things."^33^ The mosaic of the _Wake_ contributes to
|
|
understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the
|
|
radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that Joyce
|
|
called "the chaosmos of Alle" (118.21). In this "chaosmos,"
|
|
engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he
|
|
intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of
|
|
cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic
|
|
organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the
|
|
construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. One crucial
|
|
reason for raising the historic image of Joyce in a
|
|
discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the
|
|
most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual
|
|
recollection (a concept first articulated by Henri Bergson
|
|
as virtual memory).^34^ In counterpoint to the emerging
|
|
technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of
|
|
cyberspace, Joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the
|
|
creation of virtual worlds within natural language.
|
|
[29] That tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in
|
|
mnemonic systems:
|
|
A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall
|
|
memorise. By her freewritten. Hopely for ear that
|
|
annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the
|
|
now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the
|
|
branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and
|
|
yesters outcome . . . . (280.01-07)
|
|
Joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of
|
|
"everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips,
|
|
"his producers are they not his consumers?"). All culture
|
|
becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic
|
|
writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that
|
|
interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social
|
|
unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate
|
|
to perceiving the complexities of the new world of
|
|
technologically reproducible media:
|
|
What has gone? How it ends?
|
|
Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every
|
|
sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's
|
|
truth, tomorrow's trend. (614.19-21)
|
|
Joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words,
|
|
enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling "Today's truth.
|
|
Tomorrow's trend." The poet reproducing his producers is
|
|
the divining prophet.
|
|
[30] If speaking of Joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a
|
|
kind of futurology, the whole of McLuhan's project was
|
|
frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new
|
|
tribalized global society--the global village, itself
|
|
anticipated by Joyce's "international" language of
|
|
multilingual puns. In fact, in _War and Peace in the Global
|
|
Village_, McLuhan uses Wakese (mostly from Joyce, freely
|
|
associated) as marginalia. McLuhan flourished in his role
|
|
as an international guru by casting himself in the role of
|
|
"*the* prime prophet" announcing the coming of a new era of
|
|
communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or
|
|
cyberspace, though he never actually used that word). The
|
|
prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed,
|
|
is to be found in Joyce and Vico.^36^ The entire Joycean
|
|
dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the
|
|
anticipated awakening (Vico's fourth age of ricorso
|
|
following birth, marriage, and death) is "providential
|
|
divining":
|
|
Ere we are! Signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that,
|
|
primeval conditions having gradually receded but
|
|
nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having
|
|
to a great extent persisted through intermittences of
|
|
sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn
|
|
sepulture and providential divining, making possible
|
|
and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves
|
|
and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under
|
|
consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary
|
|
military maritory monetary morphological
|
|
circumformation in a more or less settled state of
|
|
equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium.
|
|
(599.8-18)
|
|
Earlier, it is said of the dreamer that "He caun ne'er be
|
|
bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in
|
|
every past that is present . . ." (496.34-497.1). Joyce,
|
|
from whom McLuhan derived the idea, is playing with the
|
|
medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a
|
|
fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world,
|
|
in which the "give and take" of the "mind factory," an
|
|
"antithesis of ambidual anticipation," generates auspices,
|
|
auguries, and divination--for "DIVINITY NOT DEITY [is] THE
|
|
UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE" (282.R7-R13).
|
|
[31] Natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about
|
|
futurology with which Joyce and McLuhan were naturally
|
|
familiar from scholasticism and Thomism, occurs through a
|
|
reading of history and its relation to that virtual,
|
|
momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and
|
|
always undergoing change. Joyce appears to blend this
|
|
medieval concept with classical sociological ideas--of
|
|
prophecy as an "intermediation"--quite consistent with his
|
|
concepts of communication as involving aspects of
|
|
participation and communion. It is only through some such
|
|
reading that the future existent in history can be known and
|
|
come to be. McLuhan's reading, adapted from Joyce, of the
|
|
collision of history and the present moment led him to
|
|
foresee a world emerging where communication would be
|
|
tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and
|
|
pan-sensory.^37^
|
|
[32] Why ought communication history and theory take account
|
|
of Joyce's poetic project? First, because he designed a new
|
|
language (later disseminated by McLuhan, Eco, and Derrida)
|
|
to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex
|
|
socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic
|
|
production. Two brief examples: Hollywood "wordloosing
|
|
celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of
|
|
the Hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the
|
|
reel world," reveal media's potential international
|
|
domination as well as the problems film form raises for the
|
|
mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. For example,
|
|
the term "abortisements" (advertisements) suggests the
|
|
manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged
|
|
relation of advertisement to butchering--the segmentation of
|
|
the body as object into an assemblage of parts.
|
|
[33] Second, Joyce's work is a critique of communication's
|
|
historical role in the production of culture, and it
|
|
constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the
|
|
importance of Vico to a contemporary history of
|
|
communication and culture.^38^ Third, his work is itself
|
|
the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the
|
|
complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking,
|
|
aurality, and orality. Fourth, developing Vico's earlier
|
|
insights and anticipating Kenneth Burke, he sees the
|
|
importance of the "poetic" as a concept in communication,
|
|
for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative
|
|
potentials between medium and message. This provides the
|
|
poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production
|
|
with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication,
|
|
an ecology of sense, and making sense. Fifth, in the
|
|
creative project of this practice, Joyce develops one of the
|
|
most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation
|
|
of our media of communication. And finally, his own work is
|
|
itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the
|
|
poetic in human communication.
|
|
[34] VR or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of
|
|
existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our
|
|
classifications of media and their effects. The newly
|
|
evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace
|
|
is a site where people are intellectual nomads:
|
|
differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize
|
|
its structure. Joyce and the arts of high modernism and
|
|
postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people
|
|
constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the
|
|
traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a "virtual
|
|
world" and of the tremendous powers with which electricity
|
|
and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia
|
|
that would eventually emerge.
|
|
|
|
------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
NOTES
|
|
|
|
^1^ William Gibson, _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ (NY: Bantam
|
|
Paperback, 1989), 16.
|
|
|
|
^2^ William Gibson, _Neuromancer_ (NY: Ace, 1984), 51.
|
|
|
|
^3^ This quotation is taken from the posthumously
|
|
published Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, _The Global
|
|
Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st
|
|
Century_, (NY: Oxford UP, 1989). It was edited and
|
|
rewritten from McLuhan's working notes, which had to date
|
|
from the late 70s, since he died in 1981. McLuhan's words
|
|
were written more than a decade before their posthumous
|
|
publication in 1989.
|
|
|
|
^4^ McLuhan (1989), 103.
|
|
|
|
^5^ Stuart Brand, _The Media Lab: Inventing the Future
|
|
at MIT_ (NY: Viking, 1987).
|
|
|
|
^6^ Marshall McLuhan, _The Letters of Marshall
|
|
McLuhan_, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William
|
|
Toye (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987), 385.
|
|
|
|
^7^ Craig E. Adcock, _Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the
|
|
Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis_ (Ann Arbor,
|
|
Michigan: UMI, 1983), 28: "The _Large Glass_ is an
|
|
illuminated manuscript consisting of 476 documents; the
|
|
illumination consists of almost every work that Duchamp
|
|
did."
|
|
|
|
^8^ Stuart Brand (1987).
|
|
|
|
^9^ A further paper needs to be written on the way in
|
|
which synaesthesia as well as coenesthesia participate in
|
|
the pre-history of cyberspace. The unfolding history of
|
|
poets and artists confronting electromechanical
|
|
technoculture, which begins in the 1850s, reveals a growing
|
|
interest in synesthesia and coenesthesia and parallels a
|
|
gradually accelerating yearning for artistic works which are
|
|
syntheses or orchestrations of the arts. By 1857 Charles
|
|
Baudelaire intuited the future transformational power of the
|
|
coming of electro-communication when he established his
|
|
concept of synaesthesia and the trend toward a synthesis of
|
|
all the arts as central aspects of %symbolisme%. The
|
|
transformational matrices involved in synaesthesia and the
|
|
synthesis of the arts unconsciously respond to that
|
|
digitalization implicit in Morse code and telegraphy,
|
|
anticipating how one of the major characteristics of
|
|
cyberspace will be the capability of all modes of expression
|
|
to be transformed into minimal discrete contrastive units--
|
|
bits.
|
|
This assertion concerning Baudelaire's use of
|
|
synesthesia is developed from Benjamin's discussions of
|
|
Baudelaire. The role of shock in Baudelaire's poetry, which
|
|
links the "Correspondances" with "La Vie Anterieur," also
|
|
reflects how the modern fragmentation involved in "Le
|
|
Crepuscle du Soir" and "Le Crepuscle du Matin" is
|
|
reassembled poetically through the verbal transformation of
|
|
sensorial modes. This is the beginning of a period in which
|
|
the strategy of using shock to deal with fragmentation is
|
|
transformed into seeing the multiplicity of codifications of
|
|
municipal (or urban) reality. So when the metamorphic
|
|
sensory effects of nature's temple are applied to the
|
|
splenetic here and now, in the background is the emergence
|
|
of the new codifications of reality, such as the photography
|
|
which so preoccupied Baudelaire, and telegraphy, which had
|
|
an important impact in his lifetime.
|
|
|
|
^10^ See D.F. Theall, "The Hieroglyphs of Engined
|
|
Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in
|
|
_Finnegans Wake_," _Joyce Studies Annual 1991_, ed. Thomas
|
|
F. Staley (Austin: Texas UP, 1991), 129-52. This
|
|
publication provides major source material for the present
|
|
article.
|
|
|
|
^11^ "Machinic" is used here very deliberately as
|
|
distinct from mechanical. See Gilles Deleuze, _Dialogues_,
|
|
trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Haberjam (NY: Columbia UP,
|
|
1987), 70-1, where he discusses the difference between the
|
|
machine and the 'machinic' in contradistinction to the
|
|
mechanical.
|
|
|
|
^12^ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_, ed.
|
|
T.G. Bergen and M. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1948).
|
|
|
|
^13^ For fuller discussion of Joyce and these themes
|
|
see Donald Theall, "James Joyce: Literary Engineer," in
|
|
_Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch_,
|
|
ed. Gary Wihl & David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP,
|
|
1988), 111-27; Donald and Joan Theall, "James Joyce and
|
|
Marshall McLuhan," _Canadian Journal of Communication_,
|
|
14:4/5 (Fall 1989), 60-1; and Donald Theall (1991), 129-152.
|
|
A number of subsequent passages are adapted with minor
|
|
modifications from parts of the last article, which is a
|
|
fairly comprehensive coverage of Joyce and technology.
|
|
|
|
^14^ While in one sense the dreamer is identified as
|
|
the male HCE, the book opens and closes with the feminine
|
|
voice of ALP. It is her dream of his dreaming, or his dream
|
|
of her dreaming? Essentially, it is androgynous, with a
|
|
mingling of male and female voices throughout. For another
|
|
treatment of the male-female theme in the _Wake_, see
|
|
Suzette Henke, _James Joyce and the Politics of Desire_ (NY:
|
|
RKP, 1989).
|
|
|
|
^15^ "Jousstly" refers to Marcel Jousse's important
|
|
work on communication and the semiotics of gesture, with
|
|
which Joyce was familiar. See especially Lorraine Weir,
|
|
"The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and _Finnegans
|
|
Wake_," _James Joyce Quarterly_, 14:3 (Spring 1977), 313-25.
|
|
|
|
^16^ This motif will be developed further below. It
|
|
relates to Joyce's interest in Lewis Carroll. Gilles
|
|
Deleuze comments extensively on manducation in _The Logic of
|
|
Sense_, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed.
|
|
Constantin V. Boundas (NY: Columbia UP, 1990).
|
|
|
|
^17^ See Dewey, _Art As Experience_ (NY: G.P. Putnam,
|
|
1958) and Kenneth Burke, _Permanence and Change: An Anatomy
|
|
of Purpose_ (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
|
|
|
|
^18^ Cf. T.S. Eliot, _Selected Essays_ (NY: Harcourt,
|
|
Brace, 1932), 182: "One of the surest of tests is the way in
|
|
which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets
|
|
steal . . . "; see also "Old stone to new building, old
|
|
timber to new fires," ("East Coker," _Four Quartets_, l. 5).
|
|
Joyce's use of "outlex" relates to Jim the Penman, for Joyce
|
|
analyzing Shem in the _Wake_ is aware of how the traditions
|
|
of the artist as liar, counterfeiter, con man, and thief
|
|
could all coalesce about the role of the artist as an
|
|
outlaw.
|
|
|
|
^19^ "Kills" in the sense of "to kill a bottle";
|
|
"kills" also as a stream or channel of water.
|
|
|
|
^20^ See Walter Ong's remarks about Marcel Jousse in
|
|
_The Presence of the Word_ (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967),
|
|
146-7, and Lorraine Weir's more extensive development of the
|
|
theme in (1977), 313-325, and in _Writing Joyce: A Semiotics
|
|
of the Joyce System_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
|
|
UP, 1989).
|
|
|
|
^21^ I.J. Gelb, _A Study of Writing_ (Chicago: U of
|
|
Chicago P, 1963).
|
|
|
|
^22^ Cf. McLuhan (1989), 182.
|
|
|
|
^23^ Alexander Marschak, _The Roots of Civilization_
|
|
(NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982); Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher,
|
|
_Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, mathematics and
|
|
Culture_ (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981); Claude
|
|
Levi-Strauss, _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_, trans.
|
|
James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney
|
|
Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
|
|
|
|
^24^ The usual way to indicate sections of the _Wake_
|
|
is by part and episode. Hence I,v is Part I episode 5.
|
|
There are four parts, the first consisting of eight
|
|
episodes, the second and the third of four episodes each and
|
|
the fourth of a single episode.
|
|
|
|
^25^ Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, _Understanding
|
|
Finnegans Wake_ (NY: Garland Publishing, 1982), 308-09.
|
|
|
|
^26^ For detailed discussion of the treatment of the
|
|
ear and hearing in _Finnegans Wake_, see John Bishop,
|
|
_Joyce's book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake_ (Madison, WI: U
|
|
of Wisconsin P, 1986), Chapter 9 "Earwickerwork," 264-304.
|
|
|
|
^27^ Jorge Luis Borges, _Other Inquisitions:
|
|
1937-1952_, trans. Ruth R. Sims (NY: Simon and Schuster,
|
|
1968), 6-9.
|
|
|
|
^28^ Lorraine Weir (1989).
|
|
|
|
^29^ Elizabeth Eisenstein, _The Printing Revolution in
|
|
Early Modern Europe_ (NY: Cambridge UP, 1983).
|
|
|
|
^30^ Bishop (1986), 264-304.
|
|
|
|
^31^ Eugene Jolas, "My Friend James Joyce," in _James
|
|
Joyce: two decades of criticism_, ed. Seon Givens (NY:
|
|
Vanguard, 1948), 24.
|
|
|
|
^32^ E.g., in Frances Yates, _The Art of Memory_
|
|
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966).
|
|
|
|
^33^ James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, _Letters_,
|
|
ed. Stuart Gilbert (NY: Viking, 1957), 251 [Postcard, 16
|
|
April 1927].
|
|
|
|
^34^ For a discussion of this see Gilles Deleuze,
|
|
_Bergsonism_ (NY: Zone, 1988), Chapter 3, "Memory as Virtual
|
|
Co-existence," 51-72.
|
|
|
|
^35^ Speaking of the all-embracing aspects of VR and
|
|
cyberspace, the work which Baudrillard has made of
|
|
"simulation" and "the ecstasy of communication" should be
|
|
noted. This issue is too complex to engage within an essay
|
|
specifically focused on Joyce. In approaching it, however,
|
|
it is important to realize the degree of similarity that
|
|
Baudrillard's treatment of communication shares with
|
|
McLuhan's. In many ways, I believe it could be established
|
|
that what Baudrillard critiques as the "ecstasy of
|
|
communication" is his understanding of McLuhan's vision of
|
|
communication divorced from its historical roots in the
|
|
literature and arts of %symbolisme%, high modernism, and
|
|
particularly James Joyce.
|
|
|
|
^36^ This is a major theme of McLuhan and McLuhan's
|
|
_The Laws of Media_ (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988).
|
|
|
|
^37^ See Donald F. Theall, _The Medium is the Rear
|
|
View Mirror; Understanding McLuhan_ (Montreal:
|
|
McGill-Queen's UP, 1971).
|
|
|
|
^38^ John O'Neill credits Vico with a "wild sociology"
|
|
in which the philologist is a wild sociologist in _Making
|
|
Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology_ (NY:
|
|
Harper & Row, 1974), 28-38. The significance of Vico's
|
|
emphasis on the body is developed in John O'Neill, _Five
|
|
Bodies: The Human Sense of Society_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
|
|
1985).
|