The Heimlich Home Page of Cyberspace

 
 
Abstract: This collaborative document is a hypertextual reflection upon the politics of of sovereignty, self-hood, and community as they are embodied in three distinctive moments and formations of the social imaginary in Western capitalism: the emergence of linear perspective and the specular visual ordering of the social senses in Renaissance mercantile capitalism; the formation of imperial identity that was manifested in the rhetorical and cartographic construction and physical conquest of the “New World”; and the simulacra of virtual selves and communities of cyberspace. It explores the performative emplotment and emplacement of virtual “home pages” of identity in MOOspaces and the World Wide Web, and argues that a critical understanding of the “new frontier” of cyberspace must take into account the ways in which it uncannily restages the imperial drama of sovereignty which animated the conquest of the old frontier of America as “New World.”–ah

 

Proceed to Hypertext…