BEYOND THE ORALITY/LITERACY DICHOTOMY:             JAMES JOYCE AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE                                  by                           DONALD F. THEALL                         University Professor                           Trent University                          <dtheall@trentu.ca>               _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.[2]       In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the     emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the     development of electromechanical communications, telematics     and virtual reality.  Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the     simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of     multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:          All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon          city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of          grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it          was too complicated, trying to find your way to the          particular piece of data you needed.  Iconics, Gentry          called that.^1^     This "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted     from the banks of every computer in the human system"     creates an "unthinkable complexity.  Lines of light ranged     in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of     data.  Like city lights receding."^2^  Almost a decade     earlier, McLuhan's remarks about computers (dating from the     late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^          It steps up the velocity of logical sequential          calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to          body count by touch . . . .  It brings back the          Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers          are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy          in favor of decentralization.  When applied to new          forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and          videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric          texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging          ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^     McLuhan's %hieroglyphs% certainly more than anticipate     Gibson's %iconics% and McLuhan's particular use of     hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily     derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico.[3]       It is not surprising then that McLuhan's works, side by     side with those of Gibson, have been avidly read by early     researchers in MIT's Media Lab^5^, for these researchers     also conceive of a VR composed, like the tribal and     collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic,     proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^     The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such     as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of     individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei     Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the     semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and     involvements.  Duchamp, for example, became an early leading     figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of     painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light,     movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _Large     Glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying     notes from _The Box of 1914_ through _The Green Box_ to _A     l'infinitif_.  His interest in the notes as part of the     total work echo Joyce's own interest in the publication of     _Work in Progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it     (e.g., _Our Exagmination Round his Factification for     Incamination of Work in Progress_).  Joyce also explores     similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and     concept.  So the road to VR and MIT's Media Lab begins with     poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth     and early twentieth century; later, as Stuart Brand notes,     many of the Media Lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed     great importance on collaboration with artists involved in     exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating     new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other     senses.^8^[4]       Understanding the social and cultural implications of     VR and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the     inter-relationships between Gibson's now commonplace     description of cyberspace, McLuhan's modernist-influenced     vision of the development of electric media, and the     particular impact that Joyce had both on McLuhan's writings     about electrically mediated communication and on the views     of Borges, Cage, Derrida, Eco and Lacan regarding problems     of mediation and communication.  Such a reassessment     requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the     crucial nature of VR's challenge to the privileging of     language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used     by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the     idea of VR's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses     and transcends all media.  The cluster of critics who have     addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of Walter     Ong, H.A. Innis and Eric Havelock, have--like them--failed     to comprehend the fact that McLuhan was disseminating a     Joycean view which grounded communication in tactility,     gesture and CNS processes, rather than promulgating the     emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality.     This emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of     the CNS in communication is a key to Joyce's literary     exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist     colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual     development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would     integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and     neurological information in currently existing and newly     emerging art forms.[5]       Joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the     artistic exploration of two sets of differences--     orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have     since become dominant themes in the discussion of these     questions.  _Finnegans Wake_ is one of the first major     poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media     present to the traditionally accepted relationships between     speech, script and print.  (_Ulysses_ also involves such an     encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic     development of mediated communication.)  Imagine Joyce     around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the     book in a culture which has discovered photography,     phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and     telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines,     advertising, Hollywood, and sales promotion?  What people     once read, they will now go to see in film and on     television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and     more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in     television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the     potentialities of sound recording.^10^[6]       The "counter-poetic," _Finnegans Wake_, provides one of     *the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the     dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its     frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or     language.  This enigmatic work is not only a polysemic,     encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous     involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book     about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of     the new technology.^11^  The _Wake_ is the most     comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the     ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for     the arts of language and the privileged position of the     printed book.  The _Wake_ dramatizes the necessary     deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world     where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with     entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting     information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety     of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and     writing.  Joyce's selection of Vico's _New Science_^12^ as     the structural scaffolding for the _Wake_--the equivalent of     Homer's _Odyssey_ in _Ulysses_--underscores how his interest     in the contemporary transformation of the book requires     grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of     communication, especially gesture and language and the     "prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future.[7]       As the world awakens to the full potentialities for the     construction of artifacts and processes of communication in     the new electric cosmos, Joyce foresees the transformation     (not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had     historically evolved.  Confronted with this situation, Joyce     seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the     book within this new communicative cosmos, while     simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development     of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium,     "virtual reality."  Since the action takes place in a     dreamworld, Joyce can produce an impressively prophetic     imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future.     His dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere,     accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise     from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the     visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily     the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they     will utilize his present, which will have become the past,     to transform the future.^13^[8]       The hero(ine)^14^ in the _Wake_, "Here Comes     Everybody," is a communicating machine, "This harmonic     condenser enginium (the Mole)" (310.1), an electric     transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a     presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and     ohmes."  Joyce envisions the person as embodied within an     electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic     environment), which becomes an extension of the human body,     an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the     playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling     attention to the interplay of sensory information within the     electro-chemical neurological system.  This medley of     elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of     oral and written language in an electro-mechanical     technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive     modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks     Joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality.