(Very!!) Temporal Autonomous Zone
The symbolic light-year, sprawling impossibly between the festive potlatch of the Boston tea-party, way back at the bud of the 18th century, and the commodity fetishist's orgy of the 21st century's frictionless capitalism (as the contemporary messiah- Gates- puts it), couldn't have been traversed on no account but via the bidirectional highway of the American ethos. Clearly, a fate of a nation born from within a volcanic effervescence of desire for independence, and ending up in the schizophrenic wilderness of the global market is, first and foremost, a case of sheer irony; And if by now we are ready to accept Avital Ronell's hypothesis, referring to such case of irony at its pure, then indeed we won't be dealing here with a narrative of an upheaval, nor a sudden turnabout in historiography, but precisely with the possibility of a simultaneous occurrence of two happenings-polarized as they may be - at the same time. In a nutshell, the critical point of departure, when examining overall American culture's such extreme polarities, of which cyber culture is an exemplary epitome, is exactly taking in to account the profound ambivalence which at best can be conceived as "dialectic" and at the worst -- --schizophrenic.
Hakim Bey (or Peter Lamborn Wilson, it depends where you're looking from) proposes what he calls "the closure of the map", - the symbolic threshold in 1899 when allegedly all remains of earth unclaimed by any nation-state is "eaten up", as an anecdote for what he designates as the annihilation of the Frontier, becoming the first century without any terra incognita left for it; both in the symbolic sense as well as de- facto. In "psychotopologycal" terms, as bey wonderfully fashions his neologisms in T.A.Z, rather then a physical predicament the annihilation of the Frontier is the very threat upon the fundamental desire for open latitude, a menace to the hardly surviving notion of non-governed land, unlisted to the ever watchful gaze of the Big Other. Of course, we can easily challenge Bey's premise, again with a considerable amount of irony, claiming that precisely this very desire, for (still) unclaimed earth, was the same one running through the veins of all great explorers, pirate-utopians, buccaneers and other proto-adventurers who "closed the map" apropos of their passionate peruse after new frontiers; in fact finishing all terra incognita precisely on account of their desire for it. Yet more effectively, the Janus face of such process of "closing the map" could be set as a classic model for the constituent duality underlying the American affinity for the Frontier; the very ambiguity cyberspace would eventually be engendered by. At least, I'll be using it for an introductory index, enumerating the polarized movements typical of the cyberspace culture as both: exemplary modern Frontier zone, possibly the most concrete expression of non-sovereign mega-district, and on the other hand- an always-already policed territory, constructively "civilized" and entirely infected by sovereign bio-power.
If I'll risk myself, parasitizing once more upon Hakim Bey's serviceable edifice, then it is possible to discern already at the level of his title- T.A.Z, the witty usage of extreme ambiguity , through a kind of a "double wink" gesture: once aimed towards the archetypical politically-alerted-anarchistic-computer-geek, for whom the collocation "Temporal-Autonomous" alone arouses enthusiastic twitching, and once- through encapsulating his title in the very much referential initialing- towards the ultimate core of capitalist matrix; bringing to mind, among others, the Warner Bros. familiar and beloved Tasmanian devil carrying the same name, and thus partly enclosing Bey's usage of typical late-capital branding strategy- precisely the one he pretends to offer an escape-trail from. IBM is apparently a "Paleolithic" example; Universal Studios becoming "US" among the prestigious circuits of cinematography colleges is rather an exemplary functioning of such strategy, taken by those mega-corporations who read thoroughly the aphorism inscribed on top of Delphi's "portal": Know thy self… "
I began by leaning back rudely upon Hakim Bey's back, for T.A.Z tends to offer simultaneously- activist optimism (sometimes up to the degree of credulity a-la May 68') and at the same time anti-revolution sobriety that very much refers the "ancient" Monodid visionary momentum from the 90's. hence, to be honest, there is somewhat sense of necrophilia (or at least some guilt…) in our hyper-age, in every attempt for an autopsy on the perfectly embalmed body of Mondo 2000; especially when taking in to account the reflexive and clearheaded (ambivalent) discourse it destined for the cyberspace, in such precedential matter that there is no way to think cyber-culture avoiding the very usage of Mondoid cocktailed lexicology. I.e., standard ambiguous approach surely won't suffice here, when dealing with edgy hybrids such as Ken Goffman. the impossible condensation of ideologies stirred within the Mondoid cauldron is, first of all, its legit moment of excess; a healthy chronicle of every slightly successful revolution and its transgression; for if Mondo wouldn't have dared going just over the limit, who else would?
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari may have contributed, in their Nomadology: the War Machine, a handy supplement to Frederick Jackson Turner's famous Frontier motif: shedding some light (and in a jiffy dimming it…) upon the profile of whom might be the reincarnation of Turner's prototypical American- Frontier-agent, in their precise characterization "He (the modern Nomad) is but a vector for deterritorialization". A preliminary model for such deteritorialization movement perhaps can be discerned already at Michelangelo's Sistine chapel ceiling, which was notably painted under the immense influence of Columbus's expedition, along its dramatic flow of proclamations- entitling the just now-discovered-continent "the Lost Paradise". In it, the very liminal conduction of the Frontier notion beautifully unfolds itself through two major manipulations: First, the explicit illusionistic expropriation of the "ceiling"- the ultimate limit to the sphere of the worldly, and its radical transubstantiation- becoming the projection of a brand new lavishing frontier, wild and most importantly "open". Secondly, there is the radical shift within the spectator's body itself- formerly operating in correlation with the spatial imperative introspectivity, now transforms into its very obverse- a total openness towards the (meta) spatial heavenly latitude; all in all, a shift produced ultimately by proto-technological means. The Sistine Chapel case is crucial here, since the Frontier motif turns out most significant exactly when it doesn’t serve as a concrete future settling fantasy in a certain territory, but precisely as the very mediating of such territory itself through infiniteness; that is, through a singular interface enabling the overlapping of the pre-visualized frontier (Heaven) - which has to be ontologically empty, and its reincarnation in the very fullness of the "actual" frontier; from the "Turtle Island" becoming "that indigenous wasteland" for the Spanish, to finally meriting the United States of- .
Cyber culture fully relies on the absolute and exceptional readiness of the "American Spirit" to endorse, sometimes regardless of the consequences, the very excess of every slightly significant political fluctuation-ultimately through its myth. In the case of the American pioneering settlement, this excessive component turned out to be a hazardous diffusion from the mythical to the concrete, and vice versa. The myth resided in the hearts of the pioneers, as Tina Laporta remarks in her analysis, dangerously presupposed that wide-handed American Frontier to have been naturally (and neutrally) "empty"; that is, untouched by former civilization agents. The total disavowal-repression of the native population (the "Indians"- as they perpetuated even their erroneous name) enabled the settlers to claim ownership over the land in the name of civilization, and at the same time detach themselves precisely from it. Hence the "Went to Croatan" myth, if ever truly existed, remains mostly a hippie memorabilia (not to mention a collector's item…
Concisely, the supposed emptiness of the old American frontier was, in effect, the direct fulfillment of the pre-imperial fantasy: how hard would it be to turn it empty.
The original form of indigenous settlement, that very "wild-nobility" later on to appear in the heavenly imagery of western nostalgia, of which Karl May is an exemplary case, was perceived in actual fact -at the time- as an already mythical entity, and therefore was literally "refuted"(as if the word "occupied" here, in a kind of an ironic reversal, is too merciful to depict the western occupiers total disavowal of the native population. In a very much similar way, the cyberspace first "settlers" preferred to create an ex-nihilo kind of halo to their enterprise -paraphrasing the "out of nothing" to (literally) "in the nothing". The cyber-frontier saw and still sees itself, as a direct heir to the most exotic attributes Turner ascribed to the prefabricated historiography of the American Frontier. The witty self-aware presentation of the cyberspace as the new (this time "unending") Frontier, served as the meta-narrative for Mondo's evolutional taradiddle, wholesaled to anyone supposedly stupid enough to be still wearing his (wearing) meat-ware. That is to say, cyberspace first ambassadors in fact heaped-up the pioneering narrative upon the Darwinistic narrative, only to cast a new meaning to the very idea of being human, as well as being a "citizen". Once more, in what's known as the "(forlorn) return of the repressed", the presupposition that cyberspace was genuinely and patently empty, "one big potent void", exploded and still exploding within its current phase. How?
In contrast to the somewhat naïve modernist stages of the impossible dialectics between Frontier mythology and the Capitalist fantasy (devastating as it may have been), the Mondoid cyber-pioneers gang wasn't by any means naïve. As Vivian Shockback indicated: if ever was a naïve moment to the Mondo saga, it must have been due to chemical leftovers from the sixties; "The occasional acid-flashback"- as Big Lebowski describes what's left from the Port Huron Statement in Coen brothers' sad film. On a contrary: the Mondoids offered candidly, a shameless look at the hyper-consumerist genitalia that wildly sprung from their agenda; all that, along with the anarchistic pretensions they allegedly destined for the "cyberspace free republic ". More then that: perhaps it should be made clear that the very integrity of Mondo's prophecy, was precisely that sheer recognition of the Homo-Economics' uncanny potentialities regarding the cyberspace (and then still opting to wager on it. And maybe here it is also crucial to assert, that the aforementioned radical ambivalence is in itself a myth ought to be (one day) refuted: Bill Gates was himself a misfit, hacker, an ultramodern pimpled version of the anarchist , who like anybody dreamed of getting rich, but nonetheless was too fortunate to stay a dreamer. The cynicism of the Mondo group, as I see it, was far more severe.
The Mondoids were openly practicing the annihilation of every political sphere that could ever have proliferated in cyberspace. Just as the most prominent feature of the American version to multiculturalism, is countless small groups of victimized minorities (Indians, Mexicans, Afghans and so on'- all is accepted and recognized as long as it is about segregated victimized population without the ability to condition a concrete political demand, otherwise they are classified as terrorists), the supposed absence of the state from the domain of cyberspace was the sumptuous pluralistic packaging, and within lied the obscene surprise!: the very tamed tiger of capitalist agents. That is: the healthy reflex of the Mondoids was to create, in one modulation or another of the Hegelian equation- a sense of a new historical subject; to impersonate a quantum leap in history, while leaving the rest to wallow in the "old" morbidity of the (always) malfunctioning state, and of course the wearing meat-ware. In this specific sense, the ideological inertia of the early cyberspace happening was of great value; and it is highly important to remark that the very propagandic moment – the all sorts of psychedelic posters and so on'- was precisely the non-cynical and utmost successful gush of that period. Things derailed the moment cyber-citizens had renounced their very identity; Meaning, as soon as anarchy revealed itself to be only a cover for the real usage of cyberspace, being the ultimate platform for capitalist ventures perversive aspirations. To put it shortly: Anarchy, in its Mondoid variation, was precisely not the rare chance to act, invisible to the watchful eye of state's constant policing, but ultimately the doubtful libertarian privilege not to do a thing. At this point, Laporta and Shockback's analysis totally misses the destructive edge of Mondo's enterprise: the "excitement of every Frontier", to put it in Laporta's phrasing, is exactly not the symptomatic activity of creating more and more local alternatives to the Capital (what Kristeva refers to as "Revolts"), which naturally crash right upon its shore, but rather the very recognition in the emancipatory potential residing in cyberspace as a political class apparatus. Instead of frenetic distribution of opium for the masses in the guise of cheap cybergnosis, the Mondoids- if ever were a loyal force to the Frontier- should have revealed the Network's (the Web's) immense potentiality as a social-Net. And how far were they from doing so... Hence, no wonder the cyber-frontier turned briefly to a perfect isotope of the global capitalist arena, where the only reference- even to the most basic form of identity- is only and exclusively the Market. Cyberspace was never empty- it is just that every implement of political awareness, of "citizenship" with in it, was entirely revoked and refuted, so that the ground would be constantly kosher for the Real inhabiting activity: Pseudo-communal settlements in the most traditional manner of white-rich-suburbia; sterile (gesselschaft) interest-communities sharing the passion for a specific commodity: this time, rare vintage vinyl from the 70s, this time rare shotguns or anti-aircraft supply if possible, why not…
The tendentious deification of cyberspace, in the courtesy of Mondo 2000, is the siliconic tribute to the Statue of Liberty- what long since turned into a monument for the overdetermination of that very Liberty. Forgotten immigrants, who had been mesmerized by the both idiotic and beautiful phallic monument, are now being reincarnated in the exhausted souls of Silicon Valley refugees; the Revenge of the Nerds turned out to be all in all a missed adolescent myth.
The revolutionary instinct of the soft-ware was simply screaming: I'm androgynous! Forget sexual inequality, forget difference at all! If there are no sexes then there isn't really a problem, and so on and so forth. Yet again, the return of the repressed (this time Sex, and in the broad sense- Species in general) was all the more so symptomatic and inflational: if Woman is anyway a "perishing essence", then what is the point preserving the oh so "ancient" prohibitions regarding that "shedding peel of identity"-in the precise Mondoid phrasing. One doesn't have to steal Luce Irigaray's glasses to see that the presupposition of cyberspace's pioneering advocates was a tragic literal variation on Lacan's famous aphorism: "la femme n existe pas". Meaning: "There has been a woman" perhaps, or maybe "There is woman", anyhow she is probably somewhere within a dismal cellar beneath the earth in one of those cold Eastern European countries, or maybe Asia, where women were- and always will be- but prostitutes. It is easily discernable, that exactly alike all good commodities in our post-industrial era, Women had successfully traversed the bridge from Use-Value to pure Trade/exchange-Value. Either way, those very women are the marrow, meat and carcass of the "erotic" mega-market of cyberspace. And here it is crucial to assert: not due to the absence of a juridical enforcement of women rights, or any other form of external-institutional imposition, but precisely because cyberspace's advocates and "citizens" disavowed altogether the very existence of such "creature", of such being; in the exact same way they are constituently repulsing every element, which cannot be fully converted into the terms of the Global Market perversive libidinal economy (or shall we say- economic(al) Libido. And what about Man?
Well, like in every brand new ironed uniform, Man feels fairly comfortable inside his soft-ware: not only that finally it is possible to see an end to the "second-wave" feminist frenzy, but you can apropos of that return clandestinely to being a "Man" within your room. Meaning, to challenge the narrow waist of the "invention of everyday-life", and securely deviate into the absolute realm of jouissance, while obeying a new super-egoic solicitation: enjoy! Again we find, within the domain of gender as well, that the conceptual flexibility of American dialect is surprising in its supposed capability of encompassing radical cultural shifts, if you like- imagining new frontiers in which gender is but a vanishing slough- no to mention Identity in general. So, we must question nonetheless, what has gone wrong?
In similar to the great and very last Shakespearean play (and for the sake of this matter we'll borrow Bey's use of the Tempest), the two-facedness of American politics could be something resembling Prospero and Caliban at one schizoid persona. For instance, it is not quite clear if Bush jr. is in fact Caliban wearing a Prospero suit, or the other way around; Anyhow, what's clear is that Global Market is the very whimsical wild-land, to which trembling all characters finally submit (along the submission of the old European rationalists…Shakespeare bought it as well, he to moved in his twilight days to the desolate frontier [!]). Along with the gradual evolution of American Frontier mythology, the Naturalization of Global Market (the market spontaneously accelerates, drops, recesses, retreating, leaps etc.) within the economic discourse had swollen up to an astronomic scale. Correspondingly, politics (proper) had transformed into a nominal shock absorber, for the violent fluctuations of the Market. Hence feminism, as long as it is undecipherable in terms of stock changing, stays confined to the harsh bounds of forgetfulness. Of course, the exemplary counter test-case here would be the obscene parallel- the Metrosexual trend; Unisex's inferior incarnation.
Men "developing their Anima from within themselves", naturally turned out to be a hell of a lot popular then it was in the prior Guerilla Girls' defying banner "Release your Anima dweeb! In the exact same way, breast enlargement market is obviously the saddest paraphrase on the "enhance your womanhood…" 80's slogans.
Cyber-culture is perhaps the number one agency for promoting the capricious Market model. So "Frictionless Capitalism", to put it again in Gate's posh phrasing, is in effect the very silencing of every socio-political initiation in the domain of cyberspace, and the forfeiting of it for the sake of absolute flow for the whimsical global market trembling. The net-communities- portals, blogs, chats and so on'- derive their (non) identity from locating themselves in relation to a certain consumerist agenda, or in the worst scenario- through initiating a victim-based unionizing. There are, for instance, web-communities such as "the Kansas-City militia for protecting young innocent youth from exploitation by the porn industry", or "the portal for protecting lesbo-Islamic Burca wearing girls". That is, the cyber-version of multiculturalism turned out to be none other but the Privatization of suffering (Pathos) itself. There are small communities for "protecting" every thinkable minority - Even the ones victimizing themselves merit "protection"; such are the Pro-Ana communities (for bulimic/anorectic "beginners") proliferating within the web. The duplication of the civil model of global capital: exploitation and "tolerance" of and towards everybody at the same time, proved to be a given to cyber-culture; "There's room for everyone!" The Mondoids are still shouting at their great-grandsons. In practice, cyberspace is the most effective zone for delaying any crucial shifts within the "digitized liberal democracy": again, I'm tempted to paraphrase Lacan's well known saying "il n'y pas de rapport social". Hakim Bey can keep mumbling about finally renouncing the old puritan gemeinschaft, but the cyber-gesselschaft is a pale sequel to the ancestral utopian vision: Fourier, Gide, Thoreau and D'Annunzio among its founders. Cyber community is a deadly cocktail of guild and militia: hence two of its most typical movements are non-surprisingly (1) unionizing for the sake of denunciation-censorship (for example all sorts of P-polices, which are mostly groups of bored suburban men sworn to eradicate exploitative porno, and here we must question within "ontological brackets" what exactly is tolerant porno"?), and (2) grouping for the sake of consuming ( I believe it is unnecessary to enumerate the googols of "buy & sell" sites sprawling all over the net).
If so, censorship on the one hand and incessant lobbying on the second, necessarily creates a constant push-pull effect, simultaneously increasing both the worship of technology but also absolute antagonism towards it, in a very much similar way to how Freemasonry was perceived in America at the time. As much as the young nation was keen about embracing the advanced technological apparatus freemasonry conferred, it had been compelled to scapegoat it for "metaphysical" pretexts, which were none other but the ones engendered by the uncanning (unheimlich) clash between technology and gnosis. As always, the desire for maximal technological development far exceeded the socio-ethical platform, up to the extent in which freemasonry replaced the very heretical imago America had clearly lacked. Thus, the justification for perusing the masons had to be transformed- through manipulating the Gnostic interface of their manifesto- to a purely religious one; turning them in to a kind of both satanic and alluring gadget (a classic object a, and if I may offer a small typographical adaptation: object "@". There is no wonder then, meta-evolutional or trans-human technology proliferating just beneath the surface aroused the very same panic amid American so called "ultramodern" mega-community.
American Frontier, as a historic-national motif, can be set as a perfect synecdoche for everything "traditional" European colonialism could never have been. The cunning naturalization of Market-power is the very metamorphosis of the Wild-Unknown, from the primal agrarian vision. If so, thinking cyber-frontier in terms of indirect, even obscure course of domestication, alike many of its modern interpreters do, is a crucial if not fatal misreading of it. In opposed to European tendencies, American Frontier culture conditioned a devious conversion of the explicit violent moment, within the level of the Patriarch as well as the Colonist, through returning to the anthropomorphic model of Law of Nature. The sweaty gendarme scampering across the African steppe looking for some black people to beat, dissolved into the insured superiority of the alpha Male (rather then Man) WASP. The old American frontier, later to incarnate in cyberspace, exchanged Authority with direct-power. Indeed: there is no trace of dominant policing branch amid the realm of cyber-savanna, which is power anchored in sovereign consensus, yet precisely for that logic exerting power within cyberspace forever lacks the sublimated mediation of prohibition. There, the famous Derridian proclamation- "Prohibition itself is prohibited"- gets a lethal implementation; for that immanent logic of prohibition could never be fully acknowledged without the possibility of the actual expression of one. The naturalistic logic of cyber-frontier is thus far from resembling the old notion of becoming "pets on a leash", but precisely the absolute forfeiting of sovereign authority to the mercy of global jungle's speculative economics. (In cyber-universe Homo-Economicus should thus be understood inversely: the only true Subject within global-economy is global-economy itself; one huge "economicus homo".
Three generations of writers with a sensible seismograph can witness: Kafka was probably the first one to sense the absolute mysticism of capitalist market; he developed a healthy anxiety towards it. Thomas Wolf and his dandy entourage preferred the endless entertainment of capitalist joy-ride. And Thompson, he was apparently the wise one- aiming his ashes to a brand new frontier way up within Real space…
The saddest tale will be, naturally, that of the 60's so called counter culture. Thus, telling it here would be the ultimate risk of archiving for all eternity cyberspaces' net bourgeois, which from time to time- in its best days- sheds a bit of Berkley 68's, if ever really was one…let's not challenge it.
