Have we overstated our case concerning cyberspace as the playground of capitalism? Are they the “evil” purveyors of youth, out to get their “souls”?
It has been argued that cyberspace is infinitely more flexible, more like the space of post-Oedipalization where the freedom to explore oneself is more open than ever; where the proliferation of personal home pages provide an opportunity for teens to present their “bedroom walls” to the world, and make a statement as to who they are (Chandler 1999). To change perspec-tives for the moment we look closely at the stance of Jerry Flieger (1997a,b 2001) who, from a psychoanalytical (Lacanian) stance, claims that cyber-space is still a site where authority is in place. Teens and adults are not as
“free” to do as they like. For her cyberspace acts like the Symbolic Order itself (RL). Its features are, by definition, intersubjective. Our interface with it works much the same as a “face-to-face” interaction. In the end we always address an Other who is “unknown” to us rather than the illusion of some transparent Other like our friendly neighbour. When interfacing with cyber-space, the same process happens. Even our close neighbor, as Freud (1940, Outline of Psycho-analysis, XXIII) pointed out is not transparent. S/he can become “too” close to us, turning ugly and threatening. Tony Soprano’s neighbors know that he’s up to no good. Nobody “really” wants to know him. Given the right distance, all is well. Cyberspace gives us that psychic dis-tance where we do not have to “love our neighbor.” Flieger argues that desire is always thwarted in cyberspace following Lacan’s maxim: “desire is the excess of demand [drives] over [biological] need.” (The baby’s cry bears an inexplicable excessive desire. It has been nursed, seemingly all its demands met—cuddled, rocked, sung to—yet it wants something “more.”) She directs our attention to Lacan’s characterization of the ego as a paranoid structure, not in the pathological sense of a psychosis, but as an epistemé of acquiring knowledge as Lacan develops it in S III, The Psychoses. All forms of communication (speaking, writing, art-ing, singing) require a form of decen-tering to take place by fantasizing the Other whom we are addressing. We act “as if ” the Other is staring back at us, and listening to what we are say-ing. This is what is happening in our interface with cyberspace (VR) as well.
In Flieger’s view, both our Ideal Egos and Ego Ideals can be shaped by the screen of the hypertext of cyberspace. First, narcissistically as an imaginary projection of an alter (Ideal) ego we can take in any virtual community—our representative avatar acts as an icon “as if ” we were a uni-fied ego and not the divided self that it represents. Second, as the imaginary perception we think that virtual community has of us—whether we are being confirmed or rejected—as Ego Ideal. What is behind the message that is
being conveyed to me on the screen? The uncertainty of the answer occurs at the symbolic level since we can never be sure of the relationship we have with this virtual Other. The cyberspace in this case acts as a space where we can try out other points of view, explore other parts of ourselves. At the same time, not all such exploration is freely permitted, as if our every demand is met. Cyberspace (Web) acts as an agency of prohibition that prevents access to our full gratification (jouissance). It is Oedipus on-line. My desire is medi-ated by the desire of the Other. It is impossible to do away with the interface so that there is no gap between my representative avatar and me. My demand (drive) is curbed within the jurisdiction of its Law as failed desire. The demand of a sent e-mail (or (E)go-mail as Flieger puts it) is never fully grat-ified as it goes through its cyberpath. Many things can happen to it. As it is forwarded it may be reproduced, replied to thereby eliciting further replies, relabeled, bounced back as no such address, and finally returned to me in an
“inverted form”—I answer my own question without ever being certain that I am right.
Cyberspace is thus filled with Oedipal questioning of desire, always arriv-ing at a fundamental enigma: “Just what does the Other see me as? What kind of object am I for his or her desire?” Thus cyberspace puts a limit to the Imaginary. It works ersatz for the Symbolic Order by the very use of our lan-guage. The constant threat of newer and better viruses seems to assure us that the Web is a fallible space, impossible to be controlled by any one sin-gle Being (an Other of the Other). We believe that no ONE is observing us;
no ONE has access to our home computer, yet the threat is always there. A virus can strike waking us up to the illusion of its infallibility. The success of an e-mail or a video game, or a MUD depends ultimately on how the inter-face has been felt by my own bodily situatedness. To what extent have desires been met within the confines of what is permissible within the Symbolic Order as represented by the www of cyberspace? Ultimately, the failure of gratification (of our drives) reinstates the border between RL and VR. In cyberspace we continue to search for (Real) completion, but we always end up lacking. Cyberspace continues to signify the mysterious Real that would fill the “hole” to make us “w(hole).” In light of our previous discussion of cyber-capitalism, it is precisely this “lack” that enables capitalism to maintain its driving force, to provide a never-ending stream of products that will never fill that lack up.
Zizek (1999a) takes a different tact. He accepts Flieger’s position that cyberspace presents a strictly formal structure of symbolic prohibition, but he names such a stance as also being a form of post-Oedipalization, not Oedipalization in its mythical sense as Flieger argues. What is missing in cyberspace is an embodied representative of the prohibition to jouissance.
No one is in charge except the mechanized formal structures of language (computer language). To put it bluntly, the “No” of castration is experienced mechanically—the program refuses to work properly, access is denied, full gratification thwarted by a mechanistic Law. Transference with a computer’s access to VR works strictly mechanistically. We trust that it “works,” but
when it doesn’t we become very angry. Our incestuous narcissistic pre-Oedipal attachment to the terminal is cut off rather rudely. About three-quarters of privileged on-line teens pooled by Pew Internet (Lenhart et al.
2000), for example, said they couldn’t “live” without the Net.
The alter ego that we create through our Windows word processor as we write, the avatar that runs around for us in chat domains, our “browsing”
and “surfing” the Net are all suddenly interrupted by this technical castra-tion. Are computer technicians then to become the embodiment of the reas-surance that the symbolic function of cyberspace can be trusted? Do we give them the transference of authority as embodying a “little bit of the Real,”
maintenance men “with a heart?” They regulate, restore, and expand access to the Web. In such a vision cyberspace is metaphorically characterized as a pre-Oedipal Mother, the Matrix of cyberpunk fictions, which as some feminists have argued (Sadie Plant 1997; Valie Export 2001; Zoë Sofia 1999) is really the masculine corporate body in disguise—cross-gendered with its military and cybernetic origins forgotten or repressed. When women and computers become structurally equivalent in the masculine imaginary, cyberspace becomes a maternal superego, a phallic woman (the vamp) deny-ing access like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey; or a dutiful Mother (the virgin) like the computer systems on Voyager, Star Trek, Johnny Mnemonic, and Alien, all working for their corporate bosses. The attack of the “viral girls” becomes the only way to assure that the system remains open, leaving its totality and existence in doubt. For cyberfeminists like Plant, Export, and Sofia castration happens at the breast—as Melanie Klein had maintained. The cutting “off ” the breast in Amazonian fashion now takes on new metaphor-ical meanings when cyberspace becomes a matrix (womb) as in Wachowski film Matrix (1999) complete with its submarine spacecraft submerged in amniotic fluid, generating power for the corporation’s super computer.
With this critique we, once more, arrive at a bleak picture cyber-capitalism, the dystopias presented by male theorists such as Baudrillard, Virilio, and female theorists Anne Balsamo (1995) and Claudia Springer (1996) alike. But, it can get worse. Flieger’s on-line Oedipalization thesis can lapse into a psychosis, into a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father as Zizek argues, for there is no flesh-and-blood representative as a symbolic stand-in for the paternal “No.” Such a bodily stand-in is required if a transference is to take place to sustain the illusion that someone as the representative of the Law, stands in the way to full gratification. In cyberspace no such authority exists, rather it is a reduced mechanized authority. Without such an author-ity, which could come by way of contingent technical failure, there is the danger of being immersed into a psychotic world as a fusion with the moth-erboard. The computer begins to function as a maternal Thing, swallowing up the subject into its endless “windows” of VR corridors in an incestuous fusion.
We might understand this concern of psychosis in yet another way.
Consider the replicants in Ridley Scott’s now classic film Blade Runner. They can be considered post-Oedipal in the way Zizek reads Flieger’s Oedipal
argument. As a convergence of genetics (DNA) and language they are con-demned to a psychotic life of living in the present, unable to embody lan-guage as memory with a past, present, and future. Their narrative lives are a literalized invention (a database collection of artifacts), not metaphorized.
They are in a constant search for their identities. But this is an impossible task for their language is externalized and objectified, as in psychosis; they are unable to enter the Symbolic Order and hence must be euphemistically
“retired.” To become “human” they search for their Father (their inventor, Eldon Tyrell) to free them from a predetermined mechanical death. This is their ultimate object of desire; their demand for eternal life (immortality), which is theoretically possible through cloning. Such a Father is what the replicants (homologous to cyberspace) lack—a representative of the Law.
The only Law that holds them is a mechanical one, not the human one of entropy where death is inevitable. But Tyrell is no superhuman god. He is portrayed as a frail old man with thick glass lenses (one would think that in the advanced future glasses would no longer exist). But it is this very frailty that makes him a believable “father” who says “No” to them. Only the replicant Rachel (Sean Young), Tyrell’s “daughter,” has a “father.” Like Athena born of Zeus, as a figure she updates the corporate takeover of technological fertility—the ability to clone. In the end Tyrell is murdered, but what of it? So that Decker (Harrison Ford) can copulate with a man-made machine that is “woman?” To keep her secret? Ultimately, to verify the impossible love between them? To confirm corporate masculine control over reproduction? The questions seem to proliferate to the paradox of an
“endless stand-still.”
In her very clever and witty response to Zizek’s critique of her position, Flieger (2001) attempts to set the record straight by carefully deconstruct-ing his essay on the possibility of traversdeconstruct-ing the fantasy of cyberspace (1999a). By using a baseball analogy as told by Abbott and Costello’s classic 1936 routine, “Who’s on First?” Flieger is able to match Zizek’s rhetorical flourishes with her own. At stake is the question of Oedipus. How is it to be interpreted since Zizek uses the term “post-Oedipus” and “beyond Oedipus” much as we have been using it as well? Flieger’s point is that Freud’s position was already “beyond” Oedipus “proper,” and “far beyond the gender and culture-bound casting of Oedipus as castration complex”
(66–67). In brief, Flieger’s “proper” Oedipus is directed to complexity the-ory, the notion of “thirdness” that she claims Freud was utilizing throughout his work, already evident in Totem and Taboo and his theory of jokes written well before Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud’s “thirdness” is a slippery term defined as the “site or differential position itself . . . in non-linear dynamics of change at the ‘tipping-point’ by the addition of a term which changes the very nature of the process in which it intervenes” (68).
It becomes a formal function.
The confusion between the two positions is that Zizek retains the notion of the Oedipus complex as a narrative when claiming the “post and beyond”
status, while Flieger wants to define it as a formal structure in terms of
complexity, which is consubstantial with the Symbolic Order. In this way historical materiality enters to the picture. Oedipus as “thirdness” becomes a “screen” that both sustains and prohibits the console-player’s desire. For Flieger there is no need to “humanize” this screen, whereas Zizek reads the screen of cyberspace as an all-too permissive space that requires a prohibitory
“No!” to emerge outside its influence through a flesh-and-blood represen-tative. For Flieger this inhibitory “No!” already happens through the tech-nological symbolic apparatus itself (like language). The bottom-line question is whether cyberspace does indeed assert the “No!” of the Symbolic Order, or whether it can be an indefinite play space where no prohibitions are met or avoided? It seems that both definitions of the Oedipal need to be main-tained in dialectic play with one another. Flieger does not dismiss the impor-tance of the Oedipal complex, but wishes to avoid reducing it to the usual misunderstanding that it is “only about sex.” Flieger’s Oedipal formalism of complexity theory and Zizek’s reminder of the flesh-and-blood of the console-player, who is forever interacting with it as a “screen” presence, are but two approaches of the same coin. They show that Oedipalization has to be rethought as to the way screen technologies are able to restructure the family complex that traditionally defined it by developmental ages. We need only to think of on-line dating, brides, romances, feigning of identity, and access to “adult” material to identify its post-Oedipal fallout.