Memory, Orality, Literacy, Joyce, and the Imaginary: A Virtual History of Cyberculture

Donald F. Theall

Department of Cultural Studies
Trent University
dtheall@trentu.ca

 

Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. North Ryde, NSW: A 21*C Book published by Interface, 1998.

 

What might more properly be referred to by a more prosaic term such as “the digimediatrix” or “the digi-infomatrix” has through the poetic magic of William Gibson come to be known as “cyberspace.” And by the same token, the new cultural formations that are emerging from this amalgam of telecommunication, digital computing, information storage, and the merging of media are now denominated “cyberculture.” The standard approach to these new cultural formations is to examine them as if they represented a radical, near absolute break with the past by which we are moving beyond history. Whether pessimistic, enthusiastic, theoretic, or critical, most commentators place primary stress on the uniqueness and radical newness of the contemporary experience. With a few remarkable exceptions, academic historians, literary critics, and linguists have produced accounts of “hypertext” and “hypermedia” which are keyed almost entirely to the present. They have given us a view of some fundamental transformations in our understanding of the act of reading and the nature of the material text, but have failed to discover the ways that the cyberculture is shaped by critical moments of our remote as well as our more recent history.

 

In this situation, Memory Trade: A Pre-History of Cyberculture written by Darren Tofts, Chair of English and Media Studies at Swinburne University of Technology, and illustrated by the Award-winning digital artist Murray McKeich from the Department of Creative Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, is a major contribution to the current debate. This is an elaborate, complex, and yet compact book which is as remarkable for its splendidly satiric, posthuman illustrations and its high-quality production as for its intellectual and perceptual richness and the intensity of its writing. In a short review it is only possible to sketch the main points of Tofts’s analysis and critique of cyberculture, and to indicate a few of the pre-histories of the cyberworld that he proposes in his attempt to situate our cultural moment within a problematic of permanence and change. I will try to give a sense of the book’s broad contours, particularly as they relate to Tofts’s conclusions regarding the role of machines, memory, literacy, and writing in cyberculture. Special emphasis will be placed on Memory Trade‘s last chapter, which offers an important discussion of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a work which, published on the eve of World War II, helped to accelerate the emergence of cybernetics.

 

I do not wish to give the impression that the other chapters of Memory Trade are lacking in interest: Chapter One, which treats the current landscape of cyberphilia, cyberhype, cyber-revisionism (including panic-oriented theorists of cyberculture such as Arthur Kroker or Paul Virilio) and those who are hyping up the text; Chapter Two, on the history and theory of “the technology within”–writing, gesture, hieroglyphs, and hypermedia; and Chapter Three, which examines various aspects of memory in the age of digitalization, including the art of memory and mnemonics, machinic and technological memories, databases, and Gregory Ulmer’s conception of chorography. While each of the first three chapters makes a definite contribution to the literature, the fourth inaugurates a particularly compelling piece of pre-history. Here, Tofts explores the implications of Joyce’s Wake–published just nine years before Norbert Weiner’s announcement of the cyberworld in Cybernetics (1948)–for an understanding of our contemporary scene. He stresses the importance of Joyce’s having declared himself “the greatest engineer” to comprehending how his assemblage of the Wake as a literary machine aids our understanding the new post-electric world in which cyberculture is emerging–the world of “modernity’s wake.” Tofts examines Joyce’s concern with the “abcedminded[ness] of writing (FW 18.17); its dramatization of “memormee” (FW 628.14) as a phenomenon rooted in the differences and repetitions of this “commodius vicus of recirculation” (FW 3.2); and its navigation of the multi-dimensions in which “we are recurrently meeting… in cycloannalism, from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture” (FW 254.25-8). Tofts discusses how the Wake already appears to be participating in the debates of the late information age. On his reading, the Wake is nothing less than a literary machine for generating permutations of “verbivocovisual” language (FW 341.19) under the impact of “electracy” (MT 72). As such, it prefigures many contemporary discussions of writing, memory, repetition, difference, play, and the ecology of sense in the closing decades of this century.

 

It should be noted that Memory Trade is not primarily a book about Joyce, but a book that uses Joyce’s vision to understand these new phenomena and to critique the debate and discussion which have ensued. Virtually all the major contemporary figures associated with the cybercultural wars are discussed, critiqued or noted: writers professionally involved in cyberspace (e.g., David Rushkoff, Mark Dery, Gary Wolf, Erik Davis); academic communication theorists of orality and literacy (McLuhan, Ong, Havelock, Goody, Marvin); academic theorists of hypertext (Landow, Bolter, Heim); professional hypers of hypertext (Ted Nelson, Nicholas Negroponte); structuralist and post-structuralist theorists whose work impinges on hypertext and cyberculture (Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Cixous, Barthes, Lyotard); panic oriented theorists of cyberculture (Kroker, Virilio); and feminist theorists of the posthuman and the cyborg (Harraway, Hayles). Tofts advances the possibility that a theoretico-practical stance illustrated in the work of such creative practitioners as Stuart Moulthrop and Michael Joyce and by such theorists as Gregory Ulmer and Donald Theall is shaping a new understanding of the digimediamatrix and its relation to what Tofts calls “cspace”–a term whose pronunciation (identical with space) stresses the presence of the history of writing in the emergence of hypermedia.

 

In his third chapter, entitled “The Literary Machine,” Tofts raises the possibility that the process of our becoming cyborgs began with the very invention of alphabetic writing. To write such a pre-history requires producing “plausible narratives which make links between disparate, achronological moments” and, like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, involves “risk-taking and creative serendipity and flights of fancy.” Memory Trade achieves this end by locating a series of affinities between and among the new productions of hypermedia, Joyce’s Wake, a number of Borges’s tales, and Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the “ideal book.” The latter’s introduction to A Thousand Plateaus underlies Tofts’s complex and compelling argument of the inter-relation of the production and products of literacy with the production and products of cybertech’s electracy. The epigraph for the last chapter of Memory Trade, linking the Joycean project quite appropriately to SF, comes from Philip Dick’s Sci-Fi novel, Galactic Pot-Healer, in which Dick, who admired the Wake‘s treatment of dream and memory, describes a “mysterious” book given to the protagonist, Joe Cartwright, as “a peculiar book… in which, it is alleged everything which has been, is, and will be is recorded.”

 

The connection between Joyce and Sci-Fi is important to Tofts’s work, which seeks to ground the problem of virtuality as it appears in discussions of cyberculture in particular moments of the history of the technology of writing, so that the past moments of ancient Athens and of Egyptian hieroglyphs can be seen as coexisting in the present phenomena of hypertext and hypermedia. A discussion of Derrida’s deconstruction of Socrates’ critique of writing in the Phaedrus and Plato’s more devastating condemnation in the Seventh Letter demonstrates among other aspects that contemporary technofear (e.g. Kroker’s “technopanic”) began with the introduction of alphabetic (phonetic) writing. By this point it becomes apparent that memory has a complex role in Tofts’s work, for Derrida’s privileging of writing radically “inverts the Socratic/Platonic negation of writing,” for writing “is already within the work of memory.” Beginning with Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad” and Derrida’s reading of that essay, the treatment of memory in Chapter 3, “Total Recall” (the title of the film made from Philip Dick’s SF story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), encompasses such diverse topics as: Platonic and Aristotlean mnemonics and the role of the memory theatre in the history of rhetoric; Bruno’s memory system, “technognosis” (Erik Davis), memory machines, and data cartography; the practitioners of the art of memory as eidetics–whose contemporary activity culminates in “the invention of imaginary or virtual space”; and the relation of architectonics and architecture to artificial reality construction.

 

The book’s title, Memory Trade, reflects its concern with the links between historic and contemporary approaches to hypomnesis. As Tofts explains: “while the perception of memory as something machinic and infallible appears to us very modern, it was something well-known to the ancients. Hypomnesis, or extended memory, formed the basis of the rhetorical art of memory that underpins our contemporary fascination with powerful mnemonic technologies” (MT 61). Relating Frances Yates’s seminal work, The Art of Memory, and Giordano Bruno to psychoanalytic and postructuralist discussion of the writing machine of the psyche, Memory Trade lays the groundwork for placing a multiplex understanding of memory and its relation to concepts of space and time at the very core of the emergence of cyberculture.

 

Tofts considers immersion to be one of the most essential characteristics of virtuality. He asserts that Gregory Ulmer’s chorography is to hypermedia what the art of memory is to the oral tradition. Chorography, which Ulmer describes as “the history of place in relation to memory” simultaneously “recognizes the importance of virtuality in the context of place.” The new world of immersion in information is for Tofts “the frontier of chorography,” a frontier which, as Ulmer and others have argued, is fundamental to Greco-Roman and Euro-American aesthetic theory (MT 73). The link is that the practitioners of the art of memory were eidetics with the ability to see verbal constructs as if they were visible–the ultimate ideal of immersion (Tofts, Ulmer). Memory Trade, therefore, can query Gibson’s coinage, for it becomes clear that Gibson does “not have a copyright on consensual hallucination” (MT 74). Early in his work Tofts posits the concept of cspace (space/cyberspace), which permits a satirically ambivalent critique of cyberspace. Cspace is an ambivalent metasignifier that rhetorically “mimes the concepts it seeks to designate.” Behind cspace is Tofts’s recognition that cyberculture’s central concern with its mediated apprehension and understanding of the world actually emerges with the advent of the alphabet and literate societies, so that cyber-enthusiastic concepts of virtual space and hyperreality (such as Heim’s ‘electric writing’) are really technologically transformed types or incarnations of Havelock’s “abcedarium.”

 

The myths of difficulty and incomprehensibility supplemented by the concerns of intellectualism and elitism have continued to surround Joyce’s writings, particularly Finnegans Wake, even though those myths should have been dissipating over the last two decades as his works became more familiar and their relevance to the culture of the everyday world has become apparent. Joyce’s Ulysses, because of his major revisions in the last years before publication, and particularly his Finnegans Wake, consciously became the earliest major exploration of the impact of the wake of electricity on codes, writing, and memory as well as on mass media and and popular culture. Therefore, while Tofts’s selection of Joyce’s Wake as the major focus of the final chapter of Memory Trade may seem initially perverse, it proves most illuminating, yielding through the exploration of the percepts and affects generated by Joyce’s “feelfulthinkamalinks” (FW 613.19) a new, powerful critical deconstruction of cyberspace, cyberculture, and hyperspace. It serves as well to clarify the impact of Joyce on a wide variety of important writers of the latter half of the century.

 

For example, Jacques Derrida claims to have spent thirty-five years of fascination and ressentiment with Joyce’s Wake. Deleuze’s earliest work stresses the importance of Joyce in the development of transverse communication and parallels his fascination with nonsense in his analysis of Lewis Carroll in The Logic of Sense; Julia Kristeva’s La révolution du langage poétique uses Joyce together with Mallarmé as one of its focal points; Joyce further provided the beginning point for Umberto Eco’s theoretical writing in The Open Work and remained a persistent presence in his semiotic theories; and Marshall McLuhan continually stressed the essential nature of Joyce’s Wake to his study of media and communication. To the degree that in varying ways the work of such theorists has impinged upon the same issues as those traversed in contemporary discussions of writing, extended memory, cyberculture, and hypermedia, a reconsideration of Joyce as a particular moment in the pre-history of cyberculture should be of vital assistance in our understanding of such phenomena and their pre-history. Joyce dramatically underlines how various moments and events which precede the age of cybernetics and computer networks are an intrinsic part of the culture of the digimediatrix.

 

Tofts’s reading of the Wake is consistent with, but also extends and deepens, the recent work of other Joyce scholars. He sees the Wake as “a literary unicum that marks a transitional moment in the age of print literacy as it converges with electronic digitalization” (MT 87). Confirming what I argued in Postmodern Culture in 1992 and in James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics, he notes that “The Wake uncannily provides us with a history of the evolution of our emergent cyberculture and offers us a premonitory sampling of how it may function as an integrated whole or social machine” (MT 87). Memory Trade traces how the “abcedminded[ness]” of Joyce’s Wake, rooted in its polysemy, is the “nanotechnology of literacy, super-charged micro-machine capable of generating ‘counterpoint words’ at the speed of thought” (MT 90). It then explores the new electrification of language as exemplified in Joyce’s analysis of television as “the charge of the light barricade” (FW 349.10), noting that Joyce not only anticipated Wiener’s association of energy and information, but also anticipatorily fused the linguistics of Jakobson, the mathematics of Mandelbrot, and the game theory of von Neumann.

 

Moving on to a consideration of the Wake as a “verbivocovisual presentement,” Tofts argues how the centrality of synaesthesia in Joyce’s work is a logical outcome of the “inclusive, immersive medium” that he has constructed, a medium which itself follows from the Joycean insight that the poetic provides an ecology of sense for human communication. The Wake being one of the most “garrulous and written” books in English thus goes beyond Ong’s “secondary orality” to a pre-post-Derridean “secondary literacy,” incorporating the sensory interplay of sight, sound, and touch. Consequently the centrality of “the babbelers” (FW 15.12), the “turrace of babel” (FW 199.31), and their “pixillated doodler[s]” (FW 421.33) is examined as a factor of the “too dimensional” (FW 154.26) dramatization of the activities of space, time, and memory in the technologization of the word within a poetic history which is introduced by Joyce as being a “commodiusvicus of recirculation.”

 

Memory Trade‘s conclusion, reinforced by its analysis of Joyce, overtly confirms Stuart Moulthrop’s view that hypertext “differs from earlier media in that it is not a new thing at all but a return to or a recursion to an earlier form of symbolic discourse” (MT 116). The Wake, using Vico’s strategy of poetic history, blends past, present, and future. It manages both to represent the machinic, web-like social matrix within which our post-mass-mediated culture has taken shape, and to show that that machinic, web-like matrix was always already figured in earlier “technologizings of the word.”