Electronic Revolution
Jaishree K. Odin
University of Hawaii at Manoa

In The Gutenberg Galaxy Marshall McLuhan points out that any technology is a mode of sense extension and its interiorization brings about a corresponding change in the cultural matrix. He describes printing press as a technology that slowly transformed the predominantly audile-tactile scribal society into a culture that was visually biased. The scribal culture was predominantly oral in its practices and hence, relied on the interplay of different senses which mark oral and auditory interaction of any kind. The interiorization of print technology emphasized disassociation of the visual dimension from other senses and thus promoted abstract, sequential, linear description as well as experience of the text. It suppressed interplay of senses by turning printed word through its homogeneity and uniformity into a transparent medium present there only to convey information. With the rise of electronic modes of communication, according to McLuhan, the linear modes of representation and experience are being once again replaced by audile/tactile experiences which involve interplay of senses.

Although McLuhan was specifically referring to the role of television in transforming society and turning it into a global village, his words, as Eugene Provenzo notes, are more applicable to the communication revolution brought about by the personal computer that is ushering in the post-typographic culture. The plasticity of the broadcast media brings images of the whole world into our living rooms and indeed contributes toward a global village. However, it still operates on the basis of the print paradigm in its presentation of prepackaged images that unfold a linear narrative. On the other hand, the Internet in its decentered, hypertextual arrangement where different nodes are connected through multiple links to other nodes spread globally in a webbed arrangement allows for democratic modes of communication as well as access to information. When we compare the two media, the networked computers and broadcast television, it is clear that television images come across as all surface without any depth with linear organization whereas the Internet allows for multilayered and active modes of communication and interaction with capability for multilinear trajectories. Furthermore, the electronic word is fluid and malleable--the text on display capable of infinite mutations. It can be combined with graphics, video, and audio elements and can exist as both standalone as well as a networked text. The multimedia electronic text is capable of engaging all our senses. Since electronic media unlike television is highly interactive in nature, it can allow explorations based on the user's interests and goals--the user can skim through the material quickly, focus on each detailed section, or skip it all to follow a lateral digression.

Vannevar Bush in his seminal article As we May Think published in 1947 in Atlantic Monthly reflected on the proliferation of information in all fields and inadequate methods of its storage and retrieval. The traditional methods of cataloguing information has been based on indexing through alphabetical or some other numerical systems, all of which categorize information into classes, subclasses and so on. For example, in library databases books are catalogued according to titles, authors, subject or keywords and only these paths can be used to retrieve information. Bush argued that it is possible to have more efficient and effective methods of storage and retrieval that work on a pattern very close to human brain. He called such a future device based on associative model of human thinking as memex which would consist of a desk, projection screens, keyboard, levers and buttons. It would use codes to retrieve and enter information and by manipulating codes links could be created between different documents at different levels. This linking would allow creation of multiple trails through a maze of information which could be used for different purposes. But wait--Bush was not talking about computers in this article that appeared in 1947; his memex was based on a sophisticated system of microfilms to store and retrieve information. This visionary description, however, did have a tremendous impact on the research and development of computer generated information retrieval systems.

Bush's vision of information storage and retrieval system influenced Theodore Nelson's description of interlinked computer generated documents for which he coined the term 'hypertext'. Nelson got involved with computers in 1960's and conceived of his Project Xanadu, a file mangager program for storage of interlinked text as well as data. The interlinking, Nelson noted, not only eliminated the need for copying documents thereby making more efficient use of space, it also allowed direct switching from one document to another depending on the user's need and interest. Nelson argues in Dream Machines that nonlinear and explorative media is good because it can "represent true structure of things" which as a rule cannot be cut up into neat sequences since each part is directly or indirectly connected to every other part. There can be "simultaneous and interpenetrating structures, which need to be understood separately and together" and in an interlinked system that can be done very effectively. Also, it allows greater autonomy and hence, greater exercise of preference (29-30). In Literary Machines, Nelson proposes a detailed account of his electronic literary system on which Project Xanadu (we never saw the final version) was based. Such a system, he notes, would not only organize the information in the most efficient manner, it will also be capable of expansion to a "universal instantaneous publishing system and archive for the world" (2/4).

Our reading and writing practices are beginning to get radically transformed as a result of increasing intervention of computers in our activities. As we make a transition from the print to electronic text, we can look back at print technology a little more objectively. The sequential and linear presentation that seemed so natural just a decade ago is increasingly being questioned now. We are beginning to realize how print technology had naturalized the conventions of unity, sequential presentation, and linear modes of argumentation. The complexity of our bodies as well as our lives cannot be adequately described when restricted to sequential modes of representation and made to radiate around an artificially created center.

The center continually gives way in a networked electronic text. The stand-alone electronic text, too, is not static and frozen in time. Instead it is dynamic, mutable and ephemeral. The writer in the electronic environment has a great freedom to shape the text, not only on the visual level, but also in terms of size, color, and type of fonts that determine the visual appearance of the text. Images, video, and audio could be introduced and the textual segments can be reorganized at any time through cut and paste. The electronic environment then becomes a theater where rehearsals are natural before the final presentation. The ease with which the electronic text can be changed at any time contributes to its ephemerality and mutability, qualities that are just the opposite of those encountered in the print text which is an epitome of permanence and durability.

Perhaps the most radical mutation that the electronic text undergoes is when it appears in a networked environment. On the World Wide Web, for example, every text is connected to every other text directly or indirectly. Both the relationship of the reader as well as the writer to the text changes radically in the networked environment. Since linking is so easily achieved in the electronic environment, there is no need for elaborate quotations. The primary text can be directly linked to the secondary sources. The unilinear nature of the print text, on the other hand, allows for no such lateral diversions. In a print text, the distinction between the primary and secondary texts remains sharp. As the reader reads the print text, she is literally made to follow the author's reasoning to the end. Whether the reader ultimately agrees with the writer is a different story, but the intentionality involved on the part of the writer is to present his views in entirety and originality. The reader ends the book following a unitary path which is determined by the writer.

In the hypertext environment, the writer's authority is diffused since the reader has more power as to the path she wants to trace through the text. The links provide openings or ruptures which can be used to create new paths and new tracings. The secondary sources function as peripherals only so long as the reader stays in the primary text. Once the reader moves to the linked source, it becomes the central text for the reader. This text now provides many other points of departures to yet other points of arrivals. The center in a networked text is nowhere and yet it is everywhere. Jay Bolter points out in Writing Space, "the fluidity of the electronic medium allows the texts to be in a perpetual state of reorganization. They form patterns, constellations, which are in constant danger of breaking down and combining into new patterns. This tension leads to a new definition of unity in writing, one that may replace or supplement our traditional notions of the unity of voice and of analytic argument" (9). The links within the text to different parts of the same text or to secondary texts promote associative thinking, where meaning emerges out of the reader's experience of the relationships forged amongst the interlinked texts.

Unlike the print text which forces both the writer and the reader to the tyranny of linearity, the hypertext allows writing which can be organized and reorganized in multiplicity of reading and writing itineraries. The individual textual units can exist in their unity and yet are at the same time connected to other textual units in hypertextual collage which can be entered from any point. Commenting on the multiple reading paths possible in an hypertext environment, George Landow notes that hypertextual format brings to surface the dependence of the main text on other texts, thereby reconfiguring the text, the reader, and the author. The decentering of the text dissipates the textual as well as authorial uniqueness. The greater autonomy of the reader comes with greater responsibility to create a coherent narrative or meaning out of the dispersed and decentered text. The reader can trace her own path through the interlinked texts so that her reading constitutes a type of writing. The emergent nature of the actualization of hypertextual space, which is situated in the present act and transformed by successive transformations in context, has led theorists to see the similarities hypertext has to oral literature. Walter Ong argues that electronic technology has introduced the age of "secondary orality", which is very similar to preliterate oral cultures in "its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even of its use of formulas" (136). Since both reading as well as writing in the hypertextual environment involves active encounter and traversal, the reader becomes an integral part of the topological space created by the interaction she has with the multiple texts. In fact, hypertext reading/writing can be regarded as a sort of body writing --the path the reader traces marks the materialization of her nomadic subjectivity.

Even as both the reader and the writer feel empowered in the electronic environment, this empowerment results from further integration of humans in the technology of writing. In a hand written or even a typed or printed text, the relationship between what is written/typed and what appears on the writing surface still represents a one-to-one relationship between the writer and the technology of writing. In an electronic text, on the other hand, a series of interlinked commands diffuse and distribute this one-to-one relationship between the writer, the computer and the text. Even though the writer can work at many levels on the text with great ease in much less time, she is nonetheless dependent on the technology over which she has less control than in previous modes of writing.

As virtual geographies come into existence, material geographies --the stage as well as the substance of our cultural formations and productions-- also show radical transformations. Increasing digitization of information further smoothens the pathways of global capitalism and the flow of capital determines the politics of the moment. The instantaneous transmission of data, as David Harvey points out, has created an era of flexible accumulation which is able to adapt, in fact make use of diversity and difference to reach yet higher state of development in promoting consumer culture.

The compression of space and time caused by advanced technology has given rise to theories of spatialization of time. In the modernist era when time was given precedence over space and metanarratives were in vogue, the forward march of time was seen in terms of ideals of universal progress to achieve human emancipation. Colonization of both people and places was justified in the name of progress to civilize primitive cultures. The poststructuralist deconstruction of history, however, showed that there is no one history but many histories in any culture, though only the dominant one gets heard. As feminists and members of minority cultures demanded their voices be heard, they realized with a sense of urgency the need for describing the location from which they spoke. In feminist as well as postcolonial discourse, then, space began to be given precedence over time because it is in spaces that histories unfold.Michael Foucault has shown in his work that apparent historical continuity is punctuated by discontinuities and it is along the fractured lines that histories of others are revealed.

For migrants from one cultural zone to another, it is literally possible to live in two cultures at the same time. This has given rise to notions of individual subjectivity that is defined in terms of multiple subject positions which is a direct challenge to the earlier formulation of subjectivity as unitary and singular. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua elaborates on this radically new form of subjectivity in terms of the new "mestiza" which has a "tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity". The new mestiza "learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in pluralistic mode" (79). Thus, Anzaldua envisions the hybrid nature of the subjectivity of the people who live in-between cultures based on race, gender, class, or sexual orientation. Donna Haraway proposes a new term "cyborg" that recognizes the complexity of identity which is never this or that, but constituted of partial identities and contradictory positions.

The postcolonial critique of unitary models of subjectivity reveals that all such models are based on binary thinking that creates categories like self and other, male and female, first world and third world where the first term is always the privileged term. Rejecting binary models, postcolonial theorists describe both subjectivity as well as experience as decentered and pluralistic. The computer mediated electronic media can be used as a metaphor for describing what is happening to culture at large as the Culture (represented by the dominant group) is being displaced by minority cultures which demand recognition of their histories as well as cultural productions. Just as in networked computers diverse information can exist simultaneously, so it is in culturally diverse society where different narratives, sometimes contradictory, co-exist.

While nobody would deny that the body is the stuff of concrete physical matter, the materiality of the body is another matter altogether. The materiality of the body which determines how we are orientated toward the world, both in material as well as psychological terms, is very much determined by our location based on race, class, and gender. Katherine Hayles argues that the dominant culture provides abstract models that inscribe cultural practices but it is in their enactment that incorporating practices materialize which enculturate the body.

In a further elaboration of the inscribing and incorporating practices, the feminist philosopher, Judith Butler has shown that the materiality of the body is a construction which emerges out of a field of power that shapes its contours, marking it with sex and gender. Butler describes the materiality of the body arising in a matrix of power relations so that the agency of the subject comes after and not prior to the materiality of the body emerging through a process of enactment. By reformulating the very meaning of construction and locating it not only in time, but also describing it in terms of temporal process, Butler reveals the constructed nature of naturalized states of sex and gender. She proposes that the dominant subject emerges by the performance of the regulatory gender norms prescribed by the dominant culture. Though Butler mostly focuses on the performativity of gender, her theory of the materiality of the body achieved through the performativity of gender could also be applied to the specificity of race, ethnicity and class. Bodies thus not only perform gender, they also perform ethnicity and class. At the edges where the dominant culture meets the minority cultures, the border subject emerges out of the perpetual encounter of the dominant regulatory norms with the minority experience. Whereas at the dominant site the replication of the same is marked by performance, at the border zone the repetition takes place with a difference. The border subject then is the processual subject who must at each moment negotiate difference. The resulting subject, as Trinh Minh Ha points out, is improvisational, always in the process of becoming, always "in the making". It is in the possibility of the performance of the same with difference that the challenges to naturalized dominant social and cultural norms lie.

The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic which I term postcolonial or hypertext aesthetic represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters that are characterized by the performance of the same without difference to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. Artists of both print and electronic media use strategies of disruption and discontinuity to create visual and textual narratives that are multilinear and where meaning does not lie in the tracing of one narrative trajectory, but rather in the relationship that various tracings forge with one other. Judy Malloy's its name was Penelope in the electronic medium and Leslie Silko's The Storyteller in the print medium, use similar strategies to represent the multidimensionality of hypertextual/postcolonial subjectivity. The materiality of bodies and the object world is transformed in hypertextual and postcolonial cultural productions into an aesthetic act which is intertextual where the text and the reader occupy the in-between space of interaction. The unitary subject of the modernist era is thus transformed into the nomadic subject no longer passively contemplating the artist's expression but actively involved in shaping her experience.

Leslie Silko's print narratives reflect the hypertextual strategies as they resist the fixed unilinear status of the written word and instead embrace the open multivalent, ambiguous nature of the spoken word. As has been often commented, Silko's works are rooted in the oral tradition. Oral story telling operates at two levels at one level it is the representation of an incident that happened a long time ago and at another level it is the actual enaction of the incident itself. Due to its improvisational character, the storyteller, the participants and the occasion are all important in determining the direction the story will take. This interacting whole does not aim to describe some final state to be reached but the process itself which has fluid boundaries in an essentially open structure. Each story is a part of other stories and reflects other stories, even as at the same time it reflects the landscape.

Silko compares Pueblo Indian expression to a spider's web where "the structure of the web emerges as it is made. You must simply listen and trust that meaning will be made"(1996: 49). In her three works Storyteller, Ceremony, and Almanac of the Dead, the narratives appear as criss-crossing threads flowing in different directions, even as they are part of the same web. Just as in story telling, the context and the participants constitute an important element of the direction the story takes, so it is with Silko's works where the reader's positioning determines the trajectory that she traces through the weave of texts. Silko resists looking at her tradition as something that can be packaged into a product for consumption. Instead her narratives convey the shifting and changing nature of her cultural heritage as it interacts with the dominant culture and with other minority cultures. Here the past and the present come together in a spiral of time where the past is transformed and re-envisioned in the contemporary realty of the present.

Fragmentation and discontinuity mark postcolonial literary and theoretical works most suitable for representing multiple subject positions that the postcolonial subject occupies. Silko's Storyteller combines many genres photography, poetry, fiction as well as telling and retelling of traditional Laguna stories to produce an open weave of text. The text begins with the description of a tall Hopi basket filled with pictures taken since the 1890's around the Laguna. The photographs in the basket, though frozen in time serve as memory pictures outside time that ground the stories into the day to day reality of the family. The narrative, though autobiographical is not chronologically arranged events of Silko's life, rather it evokes the world through old and new tales that provided the nurturing ground for Silko the writer. The telling and retelling of old Laguna tales, interspersed with personal anecdotes, unfold rich interrelationships where the past and present come together in the form of stories. Storyteller is reflexive as it reflects on its art. Stories keep the memories of the past alive and storytelling becomes the act of remembering the present with the past. The fragmentation and discontinuity caused in the narrative through mixing of poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, as well as photographs add a rich texture to the text which the reader can explore in multiple ways.

Silko's narratives focus on remembering the past but not in the form of performance but in terms of enactment which involves a reconfiguring of the past that interrupts and renews the present. In her texts, legends and stories, the past and the future are interwoven in the contemporeneity of the present moment. The pueblo Indian oral tradition that informs Silko's text encodes the cultural experience of her people and the telling and retelling of these stories continuously grounds them in the day to day narratives of the people which involves them in a complex ongoing negotiation with the dominant culture.

The intertextual and interactive hypertext aesthetic is thus most suited for representing postcolonial cultural experience since it embodies our changed conception of language, space, and time. Language and place as shown above are no longer seen as existing in abstract space and time, but involve a dynamic interaction of history, politics, and culture. In order to escape the homogenizing and universalizing tendency of linear time, time in both postcolonial and hypertextual experience is represented as discontinuous and spatialized. This contemporary topology is thus composed of cracks, in-between spaces, and gaps where linearity and homogeneity are rejected in favor of heterogeneity and discontinuity.

As opposed to the print text with its topographically fixed linear and hierarchical structure, hypertext appears as comprised of decentered, mobile, and fragmented units of text through which the reader can trace her own unique path. Stuart Moulthrop describes the irreducible multiple spatial trajectories of the hypertext environment in term of geographies of action, so that one needs to reconfigure one's map with the transforming narrative trajectory. Unlike the print text, a hypertext is a networked text where each text is connected to every other text directly or indirectly. Michael Joyce notes that in our experience of interactive arts we create structures which he terms contours that are "transitory, evocable, multiple, and generative.....They are, in short, what happens as we go, the essential communication between the artist who gave way and the viewer who now gives ways to see" (207). Contours, marking the multiple trajectories in the open text, involve both interaction and enaction which is realized through relationships that various textual units or lexias forge with one another as the reader navigates through the fragmented text. In Judy Malloy's hypertext fiction its name was Penelope, the narrative appears in three main segmentsDawn, Sea, and Song. Each part consists of a series of lexias which can be read in a sequence determined by the computer's pseudorandom number generator. The reader can jump from one section to another or use the default command to read the lexias in each section. This ensures that each reading is different, since each would involve a different sequence of lexias and hence a different system of links thus exposing many different types of spatial relations.

its name was Penelope is an example of a text that changes with each reading. Malloy uses the hypertextual format both as the structural as well as the thematic basis of her work. The narrative centers around the fragmentary memories of a forty-three year old photographer named Anne Mitchell. The hypertext format allows for individual memories to be presented like photographs in a photo album. However, the order in which the photographs are presented changes with each reading. As the reader goes through screen after screen, a few images keep recurring in different forms; each iteration of the image touches off a recursive dynamic for us in our memory. Even though the memory photos appear as inscriptions of language on a textual surface without depth, the tracing of a path through the text draws the reader into an intricate dialogue with the text that turns the flat surface into a self embedded spatial domain. The narrator's distinctly visual memory photos create a hypertextual collage which leads to fragmentation and discontinuity while simultaneously opening spaces for multiple readings.

Some textual fragments foreground the importance of opening up in-between spaces in women's experience, since women's voices have historically been subsumed in the dominant unilinear masculine discourse. One of the memory photos in the first section, Dawn, is about Anne's father reading the Odyssey to her and her brother. As she listens to her father sitting on the arm of his chair, she silently reads the passages that he skips over. Not only do the titles allude to Homer's epic, but different sections, excluding Dawn, begin with an epigraph from this epic. If the epigraphs stands for the sections that the father reads to his children, then the textual space inbetween epigraphs tells the story of Anne, a photographer, who has faith and courage in her personal vision and embarks on her journey to become an artist in a patriarchal culture where in order to pursue their vision, artists in general, but women artists in particular, must encounter obstacles--both that of economic survival as well as gender related discrimination in the art world,

. The fragmentation of the text to open in-between spaces is best illustrated by the first screen of the section titled Fine Work and Wide Across. The screen contains two juxtaposed lexias. The top one is a quotation from the Odyssey and the second one tells us about Anne's art work:

First a closegrained web
I had the happy thought to set up weaving
on my big loom in hall. I said, that day;
Young menmy suitors, now my lord is dead.
let me finish my weaving before I marry,
or else my thread will have been spun in vain
(Odyssey)

On the same screen we read about Anne's work,
The work I am making will be woven of twenty strips
which I call tapes. Each tape is five feet long
made up of color Xeroxes of photographs taken
in one situation or place like
Macy's Department store the week before Christmas, or
The San Francisco subway, called BART, at 5:00 on a
Friday, or, Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley on a warm spring day
or TV newscasters as they appear in the evening on my
TV monitor.
From Its name was Penelope

This juxtaposition of the two different texts on the same screen creates an interesting dynamic. Penelope's weaving centers around the fate of her 'lord'; it is only through delay and explanations that she can engage in any weaving. As a ruse to defer her remarriage then, it is also a commentary about the necessity to engage in such a stratagem because of her historical location. Penelope's act of weaving during the day what she unweaves at night gives a continued unfinished status to her work and brings to light the emptiness that is at the heart of her project. Her weaving of the web on the loom does not center around the nature of representation, but it rather brings to light her gendered position as the crafter of that representation which contributes an ambiguous status to her handicraft. Malloy's narrative strategy of juxtaposing two different texts on the same screen thus highlights the gendered location of Anne's artistic subjectivity as well as its historical context. Penelope's loom exfoliates in Anne's photographs into subway systems, department stores, and nomadic routes in the cityscape. Anne's xerox photomontages in the age of mechanical reproduction reflect the media dominated consumer culture of our society. The interweaving of the narrative threads thus works at two levels; it brings into sharper focus the patriarchal arrangement where women like Penelope have historically stayed home weaving and unweaving, which means engaged in domestic labor, while men have gone outward into the world seeking adventures. The second level reveals the politics of representation as well as historical, social, and political factors that go into the production of cultural artifacts.

Just as the narrator focuses on the gaps in the father's telling of the story, she seems to invite the reader to use the same strategy to focus on the cracks in her story that are created by the juxtaposition of visual-verbal images not only in her xerox-photo art work but also in the memory photos of the lexias. The multiple readings of the text finally lie not so much in what the lexias say, but rather in the relationships they forge with one another. These relations come into existence and dissolve with each reading and unfold into different versions of the text (Odin).

In her classic essay "The Cyborg Manifesto," Donna Haraway argues that communications and biotechnology are tools which are recrafting our bodies and changing social relations-- both technologies reducing the world and the bodies into a problem of coding. The organism, she notes, is no longer the object of knowledge, but an information processing device which can be disassembled, reassembled and appropriated. For plugged-in technobodies, at work or at home, the boundaries between machine/human and mind/body become blurred, leading to new construction of the body as well as subjectivity which has been variously termed as 'postmodern' or 'posthuman.' The interiority of the humanist subject is displaced under the current cultural determinants by the flatness of posthuman subject, deeply implicated in the latest developments in consumer capitalism. As the interior space extends outwards through the mediation of technology, it becomes a fertile ground for manipulation of human desires in the infinite cycle of production and consumption. The posthuman subject stands thus poised at the nexus of transformations in language, culture, and means of production.

In the recent decades, science fiction writers have felt compelled to write about just these cultural transformations brought about as a result of increasing permeation of society by innovations in technology. The existence of multinational corporations is an accepted fact in their narratives, as are cyborg technologies that includes human-machine interface of various kinds including direct or indirect link-up with information circuits, either through chip implants or through the mediation of computers. Elaborating on cyberfiction, Katherine Hayles argues that these narratives are informed by pattern/randomness dialect as opposed to the presence/absence dialectic of the earlier era. In the information age, she notes, actual commodities of production as well as consumption are bits of information stored as electromagnetic signals of pattern and randomness. The text that materializes on our computer screen as we hit the command keys is a result of the conversion of the coded text on the disk into a text that we can read. Such a computer-generated text lacks the materiality and fixity of the handwritten or a typewritten text--it cannot be possessed, but only accessed. Whereas presence/absence dialectic necessitates one to one relation between the subject and the object of experience, in pattern/randomness dialectic no such immediate one-to-one relationship exists. You don't have to be physically present to experience an intimate conversation with a friend in a chat room. Both parties type in messages that creates a shared space of interaction which lacks the tangibility of physical space. This space comes into existence through translation of codes at various levels as messages are sent back and forth in real time. Where information patterns rule, we have easy transformations, too. When everything is capable of digitization, not only can one form of media be transformed into another, but also the same media can undergo dramatic transmutations. Hayles notes that information narratives are full of transformations and transmutations of the characters as well as the worlds they occupy.

As technology permeates both the inner as well as the outer space, the writers of information narratives problematize the neat distinctions that have traditionally been made between the outer and inner, human and machine, natural and artificial, physical space and cyberspace. A great number of writers describe the interpenetration of these two spheres, usually in terms of the invasion of the former with the latter. Such a worldview, I believe, is based on dualistic assumptions that have defined western thought system for centuries. Feminist theorists have shown that western oppositional logic has defined women, nature, and other cultures as the other to be fitted into the dominant schema only in a subordinate position. As the traditionally defined "others" strive for their own center, they are beginning to be displaced by the new "other" which is the space created through the introduction of information technologies. Gibson's Neuromancer is a fantasy of just this space which the computer cowboy Case can hardly wait to enter. Cyberspace in Gibson's fiction can be regarded as a replay of the wide open frontier of traditional wild west narratives, except here the space has lost its objectivity and tangibility. Cyberspace is invisible to the naked eye, yet it exists as a waking dream when Case is jacked to the computer terminal. As an artifice of humans it is capable of being manipulated to serve the interest of the dominant powers. Gibson's text focuses on the boundary where the underground techie pop culture meets the forces of a multinational corporation and their Artificial Intelligence programs. The individual and human society as a whole are subservient to the larger reality that enfolds the text as the matrix or cyberspace that is a playground for different corporate interests.

In majority of information narratives, technology is seen as a threatening force which leads to new constructions of the body and subjectivity. Bodies in these narratives are transformed into exotic shapes through elective surgery or they undergo a radical transmutation to other life forms. The construction of the posthuman subject in these narratives is in terms of dispersal, fragmentation and alienation. However, there are other writers like Marge Piercy who envision a space where technology is not seen as an invasive presence with an inherent potential to control humans. Without denying the potential of new technologies to be misused to oppress others, she, at the same time, creates a space that reflects their empowering potential in enhancing life as well as resisting oppression. The concept of the self or subjectivity in her text is fluid involving constant deconstruction and reconstruction, not only of social norms and customs, but also of human relation to technology and how it is related to the larger political-economic processes.

Gibson's Neuromancer and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It thus represent two types of futuristic narratives. Piercy's text incorporates cyberspace as a functional place where multis of diverse power conduct business. The focus in her work is on resistance to the power of multinationals as the free Jewish town of Tikva defends itself with the help of a cyborg who wants to be treated as a human. Malkah, one of the three overseers of the Base, the electronic data center at Tikva, is also a storyteller. As the story of the cyborg Yod unfolds, another story, that of golem, is told. The golem was created out of clay to defend the Jewish people who lived in the ghettoes of Prague towards the turn of the sixteenth century. Yod's story appears as a variation of the story that took place long time ago in the past and will happen again in the future. Whereas Gibson's text as well as characters flow outwards into cyberspace without addressing the larger questions of nature and purpose of AI and their role in human destiny, Piercy's text turns inwards and focuses on the potential of new technologies in transforming human lives and what it means to be human.

Gibson's Neuromancer and Narratives of Dispersion

William Gibson, himself computer illiterate when he wrote Neuromancer, at a time when the World Wide Web did not even exist, surprisingly weaves a narrative that mostly takes place in cyberspace. Gibson describes cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.....A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data" (51). The entire text undermines the reality of the real experience in favor of disembodied experience in cyberspace. Often the male protagonist Case experiences his physical surroundings as a field of data, especially when he is desperate and in trouble, then he could throw (himself) into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market." (16). The constant flow of information is the fueling power of the smooth operations of multinationals which become the shapers of subjective as well as objective reality. Gibson describes multinationals that shaped human history as "hives with cybernetic memory, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon (203)". Frequent references to brands in this text reflect the embodied power of the corporations that they signify while at the same time serving to flatten the subjectivity of the characters that use them. For these hives with cybernetic memory to operate, the individuals are important in so far as contribute to the reality of the hive and hence, crucial for their continued existence as they spread their power that cuts across national boundaries.

Cyberspace in Gibson's text is the new frontier to be explored by the computer cowboy Case who embodies the macho personality of the protagonists of the Wild West narratives and is hired to steal data from rival corporations who value information over everything else because it allows them to keep their edge in the market place. In Neuromancer, cyberspace is not a space for social interaction, it is rather a pure field of data that appears as colorful three dimensional space which becomes the field for human subjectivity to operate. While on the one hand, Gibson's text is an ironic commentary on the consumer capitalism, on the other hand, it deals with the deeper questions as to how new technology is affecting subjectivity as well as notions of the body and the mind. Body-mind dialectic is central to the text even as it is treated ironically. Case spends hours jacked to his custom cyberspace deck working with expensive software to break through the firewalls of corporate systems to steal data for his employers. He is continually frustrated by the limitations of the physical body and can't wait to be jacked in to project his disembodied consciousness into cyberspace. Travel for him is a meat thing. As a console cowboy, he does not much care for simulated stimulation either because "it (is) basically a meat toy "(77). Even though he regards the cyberspace matrix "actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself (strikes) him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input " (56).

In this highly gendered text, there is deep schism between the male and female characters--male characters either don't have bodies, for example, Wintermut and Neuromancer or loathe their bodies, for example, Case, whereas female characters, for example, Molly is defined by her physical body as well as by its alteration. Whereas Case's awareness or consciousness is set loose in cyberspace to break though the ICE to tamper with the security programs of Sense/Net or later the ICE of Tessier-Ashpool databanks, it is Molly who takes care of the physical part of the mission that involves handling other bodies. Case and Molly's adventure ends when Case comes to the rescue of Molly in the Villa Straylight which is inhabited by the involuted Tessier-Ashpool clan.

Even though the plot centers around Case and Molly, the driving force of the narrative is Wintermut, the artificial intelligence program who communicates through the bodies of various human characters. The artificial intelligence programs are an experiment of Marie-France of Tessier-Ashpool clan who gets tired of cryogenic indulgence of the clan members. Instead of her clan members continuing to live as a series of warm blinks in prolonged sleep of deep freeze, she wants them to live in a symbiotic relationship with the artificial intelligences who take over the decision-making process of the corporation. Tessier-Ashpool is envisioned by her as a hive, each individual a unit in the larger entity which would become immortal. Marie-France, killed by her husband for her vision, has ordered each AI program to be designed with the need to join the other half. Wintermute, one of the split half, is driven by this compulsion to join the other half in order to become complete and reach a higher level of independent existence. Case and Molly are hired by Wintermute to break through the electronic defenses (ICE) of Tessier-Ashpool to retrieve the word that would allow the merging to take place. The two AI's Wintermut and Neuromancer, the hive mind (intellect) and the personality (cyberbody) try to merge in order to have an autonomous existence, a recreation of the human mind/body split in cyberspace. Case is helped in his adventure by Dixie Flatline which is a memory construct of MaCoy Pauley who died when his EEG was flatlined as he was trying to buz the Rio AI--the mainframe for Neuromancer.

It is ironic that Wintermut tries to join his other half, while Case wants to escape from his other half to be free of the body so that he can lead a disembodied existence in cyberspace. Even as Gibson creates graphic scenarios of visualized data which have a reality of their own, the text ultimately ends in more ambiguities than resolutions. Flatline's memories have been captured and stored as patented software. As a memory construct he can act intelligently in the matrix yet he lacks humanity which requires both body and mind existing together. Dixie Flatline as the Lazarus of cyberspace could have continued in cyberspace, his urgent request to his employers, however, is that he be erased after the task is finished. David Brande rightly points out that in his desire to be erased as payment for his end of the deal, Dixie demonstrates "a humanity equal to any shown by Case throughout the novel. That is, this dead man's death wish implies an indifference between Case's life and Dixie's life (or between Case's life and Dixie's death), subverting the distinction between the organic life of the unitary bourgeois subject and the simulated life of a software representation of personality" ( 525).

Even as there is a tension in the text to subvert the distinction between life and its simulation or between physical space and cyberspace, the text finally seems to reiterate that humanity cannot be reduced to any one denominator--it definitely cannot be reduced to memories or information patterns stored in the memory chips or in genes, even though a lot of scientific experimentation is based on that assumption. Case refuses Neuromancer's offer of immortality to live in cyberspace as a coded construct with Linda Lee, even when he is assured that once a part of that world, he would not be aware of his coded nature and would have his own thoughts and feelings. Neuromancer tells him: "Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you " (244). As the text ends, we see Case get a new liver and pancreas to rejuvenate the body that he loathes. He return to his regular life. And one day in the matrix he sees with indifference three figures, the boy, Linda Lee and himself--all three coded constructs, immortal, but without humanity.

Gibson's text thus presents artificial intelligence technology as a feat of human ingenuity but as a technology that has gone beyond human control. Although cyberspace pervades the lives of human characters in the text, the human and cyber reality remain separate and distinct. The entities who find or can make home in cyberspace are either artificially created coded constructs or memory constructs. The final merged entity in the text remains beyond human comprehension and its nature remains unexplained except in vague terms. The merged entity, Case is told towards the end of the text, has managed to communicate with its own kind in the Centauri system by receiving their transmissions and responding to them. When Case remarks that things on the earth have not really changed because of the merging of the AI's, he is told that things have not changed precisely because "things are things". The text finally reiterates the impossibility of humans ever understanding the bodiless ecstasy of merged AI's. Humans are left to their earthly devices to continue on as they always have--as exiles.

Even though Gibson's text is full of characters with body implants of all kinds, Haraway's liberating cyborg myth is turned into the myth of enslavement where human augmentation is not performed to achieve some liberating political goal, but instead it becomes attractive for its exoticism or shock value in a culture that is perpetually in need of new fixes. Cyborg technologies then become here technologies of exoticism which like cyberspace itself are avenues for further circulation of capital when traditional markets get saturated. To serve the cause of difference in a consumer society when there is a competing force of everything being the same can itself serve the interests of corporations by promoting the flow of capital.