The Pre History of Cyberspace

BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY:

JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE

by

DONALD F. THEALL

University Professor

Trent University

_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)

Copyright (c) 1992 by Donald F. Theall, all rights

reserved.This text may be freely shared among

individuals, but it may not be republished in any

medium without express written consent from the authors

and advance notification of the editors.

1_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.

2In 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.

3It 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^

4Understanding 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.

5Joyce'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^

6The "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.

7As 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^

8The 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.

9Acutely 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 "communicakes with the

original sinse" originary sensethe 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^

10The _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" (readingraiding).^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).

11Orality, 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.

12Joyce'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).

13Beginning 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.

14The 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.

15By 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.

16Speech, 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."

17The "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.

18In 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?

19The 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.

20These 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).

21Here 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.

22This 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.

23All 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.

24Joyce 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.

25Facile 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."

26As 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.

27As 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.

28Joyce 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.

29That 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.

30If 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).

31Natural 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^

32Why 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.

33Second, 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.

34VR 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