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.[27]      As 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.[28]      Joyce 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.[29]      That 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.[30]      If 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).[31]      Natural 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^[32]      Why 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.[33]      Second, 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.[34]      VR 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