Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Fri 06 Mar 2009 02:54 PM PST
DONALD F. THEALL
BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY: JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE
The Gutenberg Galaxy,
a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and
communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in
communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's
desire to write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has
not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major
writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis
Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who
have written about aspects of communication involving technological
mediation, speech, writing, and electronics.
While all of
these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of
them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work
of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of
electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual
reality. McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_"
established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean
insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking
about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has
become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage. In
the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of
cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of
electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality.
Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time,
space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:
All
the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could
cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because
if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the
particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.^1^
This
"consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted from the banks
of every computer in the human system" creates an "unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters
and constellations of data. Like city lights receding."^2^ Almost a
decade earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the late
70s) display some striking similarities:^3^
It
steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed
of light reducing numbers to body count by touch . . . . It brings
back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are
all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of
decentralization. When applied to new forms of electronic-messaging
such as teletext and videotext, it quickly converts sequential
alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging
ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^
McLuhan's
%hieroglyphs% certainly more than anticipate Gibson's %iconics% and
McLuhan's particular use of hieroglyph or iconology, like that of
mosaic, primarily derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico. It is not
surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by side with those of
Gibson, have been avidly read by early researchers in MIT's Media
Lab^5^, for these researchers also conceive of a VR composed, like the
tribal and collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic,
proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^ The
experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such as the
Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of individuals (such as
Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated
the exploration of the semiotics and technical effects of such spaces
and involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading figure
in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of painting and
sculpture to explore arts of motion, light, movement, gesture, and
concept, exemplified in his _Large Glass_^7^ and the serial publication
of his accompanying notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green
Box_ to _A l'infinitif_. His interest in the notes as part of the total
work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of _Work in Progress_
and commentaries he organized upon it (e.g., _Our Exagmination Round
his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress_).
Joyce
also explores similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and
concept. So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with poetic and
artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century; later, as Stuart Brand notes, many of the Media Lab
researchers of the 60s and 70s placed great importance on collaboration
with artists involved in exploring the nature and art of motion and in
investigating new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other
senses.^8^ Understanding the social and cultural implications of VR
and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the
inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace description of
cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced vision of the development of
electric media, and the particular impact that Joyce had both on
McLuhan's writings about electrically mediated communication and on the
views of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems of
mediation and communication.
Such a reassessment requires that
two central issues be discussed: (i) the crucial nature of VR's
challenge to the privileging of language through the orality/literacy
dichotomization used by many theorists of language and communication;
(ii) the idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses
and transcends all media. The cluster of critics who have addressed
orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter Ong, H.A. Innis and
Eric Havelock, have—like them—failed to comprehend the fact that
McLuhan was disseminating a Joycean view which grounded communication
in tactility, gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the
emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality. This emphasis
on the tactile, the gestural and the play of the CNS in communication
is a key to Joyce's literary exploration of a theme he shared with his
radical modernist colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual
development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would integrate and
harmonize the effects of sensory and neurological information in
currently existing and newly emerging art forms. Joyce's work should
be recognized as pioneering the artistic exploration of two sets of
differences-- orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media—that
have since become dominant themes in the discussion of these questions.
_Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major poetic encounters
with the challenge that electronic media present to the traditionally
accepted relationships between speech, script and print. (_Ulysses_
also involves such an encounter, but at an earlier stage in the
historic development of mediated communication.) Imagine Joyce around
1930 asking the question: what is the role of the book in a culture
which has discovered photography, phonography, radio, film, television,
telegraph, cable, and telephone and has developed newspapers,
magazines, advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion? What people
once read, they will now go to see in film and on television; everyday
life will appear in greater detail and more up-to-date fashion in the
press, on radio and in television; oral poetry will be reanimated by
the potentialities of sound recording.^10^
The
"counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of *the* key texts
regarding the problem presented by the dichotomization of the oral and
the written and by its frequent corollary, a privileging of either
speech or language. This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic,
encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous involvement
of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book about the role of the
book in the electro-machinic world of the new technology.^11^ The
_Wake_ is the most comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or
70s, of the ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for
the arts of language and the privileged position of the printed book.
The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary deconstruction and reconstruction
of language in a world where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics,
combined with entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting
information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety of new,
highly specialized roles on speech, print and writing.
Joyce's
selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as the structural scaffolding for
the _Wake<-the equivalent of Homer's _Odyssey_ in
_Ulysses<-underscores how his interest in the contemporary
transformation of the book requires grounding the evolution of
civilization in the poetics of communication, especially gesture and
language and the "prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future.
As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the construction of
artifacts and processes of communication in the new electric cosmos,
Joyce foresees the transformation (not the death) of the book--going
beyond the book as it had historically evolved. Confronted with this
situation, Joyce seeks to develop a poetic language which will
resituate the book within this new communicative cosmos, while
simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development of a
theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium, "virtual
reality."
Since the action takes place in a dreamworld, Joyce
can produce an impressively prophetic imaginary prototype for the
virtual worlds of the future. His dreamworld envelops the reader within
an aural sphere, accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that
arise from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the visual
act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily the most complex
multi-media forms and envisions how they will utilize his present,
which will have become the past, to transform the future.^13^ The
hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes Everybody," is a communicating
machine, "This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an
electric transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a
presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and ohmes." Joyce
envisions the person as embodied within an electro-machinopolis (an
electric, pan-global, machinic environment), which becomes an extension
of the human body, an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the
playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling attention
to the interplay of sensory information within the electro-chemical
neurological system.
This medley of elements and concerns,
focussed on questioning the place of oral and written language in an
electro-mechanical technoculture that engenders more and more
comprehensive modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks
Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality. Acutely
sensitive to the inseparable involvement of speech, script, and print
with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic and other modes of
expression, Joyce roots all communication in gesture: "In the beginning
was the gest he jousstly says" (468.5-6). Here the originary nature of
gesture (gest, F. %geste% = gesture)^15^ is linked with the mechanics
of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale
or romance).
Gestures, like signals and flashing lights that
provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are "words of
silent power" (345.19). A traffic crossing sign, "Belisha beacon,
beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "Where flash
becomes word and silents selfloud." Since gestures, and ultimately all
acts of communication, are generated from the body, the "gest" as
"flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a flash" that becomes word and
"communicake[s] with the original sinse" [originary sense + the
temporal, "since" + original sin (239.1)]. "Communicake" parallels
eating to speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of
communion as participation in, and consumption of, the Word—an
observation adumbrated in the title of one of Marcel Jousse's
groundbreaking books on gesture as the origin of language, _La
Manducation de la Parole_ ("The Mastication of the Word"). By treating
the "gest" as a bit (a bite), orality and the written word as
projections of gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a
communicating machine.^16^
The historical processes that
contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the growing
emphasis, in theories such as Kenneth Burke's, on the idea that the
goal of the symbolic action called communication is *secular,
paramodern communion*.^17^ [10] The _Wake_ provides a self-reflexive
explanation of the communicative process of encoding and decoding
required to interpret an encoded text, which itself is
characteristically mechanical: The prouts who will invent a writing
there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the
raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of
kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't
be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved
for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing
effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let
me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale
posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of
Sameas. (482.31-483.4) The dreamer as a poet, a Hermetic thief, an
"outlex" (169.3)—i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and,
therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally discovering the
reading of the book and does so by "raiding" [i.e., "plundering"
(reading + raiding)].^18^
This reading encompasses both the
idealistic "eschatology" and the excrementitious-materialistic (pun on
scatology) within the designing of this "book of kills" (deaths,
deletions, drinking sessions, flows of water—a counterpoint of
continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully crafted or
machined as the illuminations of the _Book of Kells_ are. Seeing and
hearing are intricately involved in this process, so the reader of this
night-book also becomes a "raider" of the original "reading-writing"
through the machinery of writing. It is a production "in soandso many
counterpoint words" that can be read only through the machinery of
decoding, for "What can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize
what no eye ere grieved for" (482.34). The tale that the pen writes is
transmitted by the post, and the whole process of communication and its
interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily
gesture-language: "The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the
hand of Sameas" (483.3-4).
Orality, particularly song, is
grounded in the machinery of the body's organs: "Singalingalying.
Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with endspeaking nots for
yestures" (267.7-9).^20^ The link is rhythm, for "Soonjemmijohns will
cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan's divisional
tables" (268.7-9). Gesture, with its affiliation with all of the
neuro-muscular movements of the body, is a natural script or originary
writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral style into
verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics" (36.8-9). Since the oral is
"reconstricted" (reconstructed + constricted or limited) into the
verbal, words also are crafted in relation to sound, a natural
development of which is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and
primitive script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^ Runes and
ogham are literally "woodwordings," so pre- or proto-writing (i.e.,
syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the word," which is
itself implicit in the body's use of gesture.
Joyce's practice
and his theoretical orientation imply that as the road to cyberspace
unfolds, the very nature of the word, the image, and the icon also
changes. Under the impact of electric communication, it is once again
clear that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and events as
well.^22^ Writing and speech are subsumed into entirely new
relationships with non-phonemic sound, image, gesture, movement,
rhythm, and all modes of sensory input, especially the tactile. To
continue to speak about a dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a
misleading over-simplification of the role that electric media play in
this transformation, a role best comprehended through historical
knowledge of the earliest stages of human communication where objects,
gestures and movements apparently intermingled with verbal and
non-verbal sounds. Marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the
Aschers' discussion of the quipu, and Levi-Strauss's discussions of the
kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of some ancient,
non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^ Adapting Vico's
speculation that human communication begins with the gestures and
material symbols of the "mute," Joyce early in the _Wake_ presents an
encounter between two characters whose names deliberately echo Mutt and
Jeff of comic strip fame. Mutt (until recently a mute) and Jute (a
nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather"
(16.8-9).
Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce
traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine
development, right down to the TV and what it bodes for the future. For
example, an entire episode of the _Wake_ (I,5)^24^ is devoted to the
technology of manuscripts and the theory of their
interpretation—textual hermeneutics—in which the _Wake_ as a book is
interpreted as if it were a manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a
polyhedron of all scripture" (107.8). At each stage, Joyce recognizes
how the machinery of codification is implicit in the history of
communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes that on
holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded
most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and
its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not
punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and
foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3)
This illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the telegraph) is
a transformation of the potentialities of the early manuscript, just as
any manuscript is a transformation of the "wordcraft" of
"woodwordings." "Morse code" is indicative of the mechanics of
codification, for while code is essential to all communication (thus
prior to the moment when the mechanical is electrified), the role of
codification is radically transformed by mechanization.
The
appearance of the printing press demonstrates the effect of this
radical transformation: Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter,
tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd
out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For
that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides
and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet
endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and
all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how
every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten
toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined . . . .
(20.7-16) As "Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and
great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the dream
reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses
in prints." Topics (L. %topos%) and types (L. %typus%) as figures,
forms, images, topics and commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing
and rhetoric, are now realized through typesetting. Implicit in the
technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal
ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry three score
and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined."
Printing sets in place the "root language" (424.17) residing in the
types and topes of the world and potentially eliminates a multitude of
alternate codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects,
movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the electromechanical
march towards VR and cyberspace.
By the 1930s, in a pub scene
in the _Wake_, Joyce playfully anticipated how central sporting events
or political debates would be for television when he described the TV
projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's "regulars" (possibly
the first fictional TV bar room scene in literary history). Joyce's
presentation of this image of the battle of Butt and Taff, which is
peppered with complex puns involving terminology associated with the
technical details of TV transmission, has its own metamorphic quality,
underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of Butt and
Taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment screen" ("bairdboard"
because John Logie Baird developed TV 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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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^
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.
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. 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).
© Donald F. Theall First Published in _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)
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