Whitman College

Social theory today is experiencing the elusion of its object. "Society," as ever, has mutated and left it behind, stuttering. From a strictly technological point of view, one reason for theory's abandonment has to do with the development, over the last fifty years, of cybernetic and computer-based communication systems, along with closely related developments in the biological and medical sciences. Increasingly, our everyday lives are spent inhabiting cyberspatial--and cybertemporal--worlds, digital environments regulated by complex steering and feedback mechanisms from which the chances for escape seem ever more remote. Cyberspace is not just a name for the internet, nor is it some pop cultural fad. It refers, rather, to a whole bio-informational matrix, a cybernetic order that increasingly aligns and integrates bodies and machines, organic and inorganic forms.

From its origins, this was an order in which the very idea of society was at stake, at least inasmuch as that idea referred to an autonomous space of human action. The first use of the term cybernetics, by Norbert Wiener shortly after World War II, was already in reference to "human engineering," to the discovery of common principles of control and communication in human beings and machines (cf. Pfohl 1997; Bogard 1996). In sociology, Talcott Parsons (1971), and later Walter Buckley (1968), recognized that Western societies were increasingly organized on cybernetic principles. For them, the idea--or the possibility--of a cybernetic "society" was never in question. In other words, they took for granted that cybernetic societies were societies, and that one could still construct a "social" theory of them. It's not at all obvious, however, that cybernetic spaces are in fact social spaces, or that bio-informational systems are social systems. If they are, it's in a different sense of "social" that. Consider, then, a new concept for theorizing about the social dimensions of cyberspace--the idea of the sub-social, which can be characterized broadly as a space that is less than social but more than non-social, in all the different senses of that term, viz., as a mode of exchange or circulation, a relation of communication, a symbolic realm, a system of power, trust, reciprocity, obligation, value, etc.

By less than social, I mean that at best cyberspace is a simulation of these things. In cyberspace, the social is a "simulation reference," i.e., a reference that is never quite actualized--it is a field which has had its reality principle "subtracted" from it (cf. Baudrillard 1983, 1981). The social, in effect, constitutes cyberspace's "outside," an absence in relation to the conglomeration of codes, images, and information which stand in for it onscreen and online--in the same way that fractal images, and the equations which generate them, are often used to model natural processes, even though Nature itself constitutes a simulation reference of these models. Still, the social is not "outside" cyberspace in any absolute sense. If cyberspace is not exactly an order of reciprocity, or even an order of communication and power, exchange, etc., the simulation of these processes insures them a continued "ghostly" existence of sorts. That is, cyberspace is more than simply an asocial or non-social space--it develops virtual substitutes for what it exiles beyond its borders. When it comes to cyberspace, the outside is secretly transported back inside the system itself as a "virtual outside." Just as Mandelbröt's famous equations generate an infinity of images from a limited number of variables, cyber-systems form infinite but bounded sets, self-enclosed yet endlessly self-differentiating structures.

The claim that society constitutes an "outside" of cybernetic systems is complicated by the obvious fact that human beings design and operate these systems. Certainly, cybernetic technologies and human beings are interconnected--this is exactly my point. But this is not to say that humans are their causes. This would be to misconceive everything from the start, and to posit an autonomous human agency where none exists. I will therefore assert right from the beginning, taking my lead from Donna Haraway (1985), that there are no human agents in cyberspace, only cyborgs, part human and part machine. A human agent is as much a matter of simulation in cyberspace as a social relation. And to attribute causality to what is in effect a simulation would be equivalent to destroying the planet with a computer model of World War III. Perhaps someday a computer simulation will start a real war and kill everybody (the scenario of the movie "War Games")--but within the parameters of the model itself, the relations between human and technological systems are at best "quasi-causal" (cf. Deleuze 1990). That is, the cause is itself part of the effect. A cyborg is a paradox, neither human nor inhuman (both "outsides"), but subhuman, a mixture of human and machine.

Fractals and Sub-Phenomena

In geometry, fractals occupy a dimension greater than n and less than n+1, where n equals zero or some whole number. The Mandelbröt set infolds between two and three dimensions, producing infinite planes which never constitute a volume; similarly, the proliferating lines of van Koch's curve infinitely divides up, but do not fill, a finite space (cf. Glieck 1987). Fractals are not mathematical "fractions"--their sum does not total to a unity--and although they are iterated functions, none of the successive iterations exactly repeats any of the others. At the same time, fractal systems are indeed unities of sorts, or more accurately, multiplicities within unitary structures, in the sense that iterations derive from a single generative principle or formula. To borrow an idea from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), fractal systems are "false" rhizomes, where "rhizome"--a name for a variety of plant structure--refers to a model of open development in which every point (potentially) connects to every other and whose lines extend infinitely in all directions. Rhizomes are "true multiplicities," in that they cannot be reduced to unitary structures or identitary logics (x=x=not y). The rhizome is opposed to the "branching tree model" or the "fascicle-root," in which development either extends from or returns to a common element or form, and as such is constrained in at least one of its dimensions. Despite their apparent rhizomatic traits--non-repetitive reiteration, infinite differentiation, random connectivity--fractal systems are essentially tree or fascicle structures. They are uniform, ordered mathematical functions. Because they produce complex, unpredictable patterns, fractal systems appear to mimic more rhizomatic natural and social processes--they can be used to model climactic changes, market fluctuations, population movements, for instance. But like all branching tree-structures, they remain firmly attached to a central stem which controls the form of their expansion.

Fractals belong to the broader class of what could be called "sub-phenomena"--the class of the "almost," the "imperfect," "partial," "below," or "mixed." Or, from another point of view, to the set of "substitute" phenomena (cf. Virilio 1995a: 98), stand-ins or replacements for other things, objects, or processes. Sub-phenomena include simulations (the "almost real"), virtual identities (stand-in personas or roles), and cyborgs (human machines, organ-machine mixtures). The fractal planes of the Mandelbröt set, in this context, generate substitute or simulated volumes (e.g., the familiar "tunneling" or depth effects produced by successively iterated fractal images). Cyberspace, essentially, is a fractal or sub-space. In social terms, it is populated by figures that are almost human, that engage in simulated communications, that develop virtual or substitute relations of trust, power, and meaning (in the section on "cyber-trust" below, the participants in a computer discussion list develop trust not between themselves as fellow human beings, but with the medium as a mode of communication they believe will not betray their secrets). That cyberspace is a fractal space means, for one thing, that the idea of a "global" communications network is misleading, if that implies a naive holistic reading of the system. The individual nodes or terminals which comprise cyber-networks are like the cells of a hologram, each of which offers a local perspective on the whole, but none of which contains the whole. And this is one of the paradoxes of cyberspace--the whole is never absolutely outside its parts, but it is always greater than their sum.

Nor is cyberspace exactly a "hyper-space," if that means "more than space," or a "hyper-reality," if that means, as Baudrillard often implies, "more than real"; cyberspace, as we experience it everyday, for example, on our computer screens, is certainly less than a "space," not more, even if what the latter formulation suggests is that today it is the signs of space which proliferate excessively. The best virtual reality images today are still poor substitutes for reality, and at best, following Virilio (1995a), constitute only parallel realities. Things like "hypertext" should also perhaps more appropriately be called "subtext," to emphasize that it only simulates the rhizomatic traits of textual systems, i.e., their openness to the outside, their potentially infinite expansion.

What, however, can it mean to talk about a fractal society, or a sub-social form of cyberspace? It would be equivalent to saying that relations in cyberspace--for instance, relations of communication or power or meaning or class--are "almost" social, or only "partially" social, or a simulation of or substitute for the social. But what, in turn, do these ideas mean? Baudrillard (1981: 169ff.) has argued, to take one example, that the mass media are not really "communication" systems at all, since they do not allow "response." Symbolic communication, in his view, involves a reciprocal space of speech and response, a personal and social exchange. But the mass media function to exclude response--they "speak," and speak incessantly (i.e., information saturation and implosion), but they "always prevent response, making processes of social exchange impossible, except in the various forms of response simulation, themselves integrated in the transmission process, thus leaving the unilateral [and abstract] nature of the communication intact" (ibid: 170). In other words, the media does not communicate, but is a replacement for communication, a substitute for symbolic speech. It is a fractal form of communication, which means a continuous interior eruption of information that never attains the open reciprocity of a social form. For the mass media, the social is always something outside it, to which it can only simulate a connection--like a fetish standing in for the object of desire.

Donna Haraway's popular image of the cyborg (cf. 1995; 1991), which she applies to ecological processes in general, also captures something of the fractal social qualities of cyberspace. The cyborg is not an "agent" or an "identity," but a constantly mutating network of bio-machinic connections. Cyborgs, in the classic sense, are sets of interconnected nodes or cells, but these do not form "groups" or societies in the normal sense. Cyborg nodes are not "members" of a collective. Membership implies relations of inclusion and exclusion--us and them--but no such oppositions exist in cyberspace. (As Star Trek fans who followed the episodes on "the Borg" remember, cyborgs assimilate the races they encounter, they don't make them "members," with rights, duties, status privileges, etc.). Nodes are "individuals"--a cyborg, indeed, is a multiplicity of individuals--but there is nothing in or about a cyborg that could be called "the" individual or "supra"-individual, as an identity, neither in the component cells nor the network itself, which as a machinic assemblage cannot transcend itself, even though it differs from the sum of its parts (cf. Bogard 1996). There are no "in-groups" or "out-groups" in a cyborg order; nor is there such a thing as "social distance." Or rather, the cyborg apparatus must simulate all these things, have them coded into the functional makeup of its system. A cyborg is only social to the extent that it can mimic the social processes of inclusion and exclusion. And these processes, ultimately, are symbolic, not informational.

All this will probably sound like science fiction to anyone who insists we can and must analyze the evolving cybernetic order in conventional sociological terms. In this area, however, social theory needs more science fictional images, not less--even if actual technical developments in bio-communications will never follow exactly the imaginary paths laid out by science fiction, those images nonetheless structure the range of possibilities of those developments and propel selected lines of research. The social theory of cybernetic systems also needs a new vocabulary sophisticated in the language of chaos/complexity studies and post-structuralist philosophy. The language of fractals, singularities, strange attractors, simulation, etc., is standard in the technical discourse of cyberspace, but it has yet to find a central place in social theory (this is changing, although slowly--among others, T.R. Young (1992; 1991) has advocated the use of chaos concepts to describe the emerging socio-cybernetic scene for years) (cf. also Eve et al. 1997). The most fascinating thing about cyberspace is how it resists all the main categories of social theory, all its big concepts--communication, action, power, class, even humanity. If it doesn't catch up to developments soon, social theory, in the not so distant future, may find itself obsolete. Redeeming social theory implies not abandoning these concepts, but redefining them in view of fundamentally changed conditions.

Sub-Stranger

"If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptual opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" represents the unity, as it were, of these characteristics. This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one had, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations."

Simmel, "The Stranger"

Consider, for example, Georg Simmel's (1950) view of space, which he develops in his classic analysis of the stranger. That analysis contains some intriguing analogies for a sub-social theory of cyberspace, which could be called a contemporary form of strangeness. Simmel's stranger, for instance, is a "communications channel" to an outside that is, thanks to him, brought partially inside. The stranger himself has a partial or mixed form, part insider, part outsider, a marginal or borderland figure, not fully belonging to the group but not fully distinct from it either. Simmel says ironically that he is the one who "comes today and stays tomorrow," and who in spatial terms represents a curious blend of closeness and remoteness. It doesn't take much work conceptually to transform Simmel's stranger into a cyborg, and strangeness from a sociological form into a "machinic" relation of human bodies and information networks.

Simmel saw space as a duality: as a transcendental, in Kant's sense, an a priori condition of experience; and as collective representation, like Durkheim, a symbol of human society and interaction. Unlike either Kant or Durkheim, however, for whom it remained abstract, Simmel related this duality to the context of mobility, and to a practical synthesis of a contradiction between wandering and fixation at a point. The duality of space as condition and symbol, he says, is "revealed" interactionally in the sociological form of the stranger. The stranger is the unity of fixation and the liberation from all fixed points--and it is the synthesis of this "territorial" contradiction, between sedentariness and nomadism, if you will, that defines the abstract duality of space as both a field of constraint and openness. No doubt, Simmel in this way also tends to universalize the stranger beyond a specific type of actor--he implies that essentially we are all strangers, in the sense that space constitutes, for each of us, both a categorical limit and a symbolic realm of freedom. The human condition--which for Simmel is the social condition--is to be, at least in part, the perpetual stranger, a unity of stasis and nomadic flows: a stationary wanderer.

This idea--the stationary wanderer--is reminiscent of a popular science fiction model of cyberspace that circulated back in the 1980s (cf. Benedikt 1992). Plug in and go anywhere, without moving, call up any image, produce any experience, at the push of a button. In the years since, there have been many variations on this model, but the wetware or "chip-in-the-brain" fantasy is probably the most illustrative in terms of the way it updates and re-articulates Simmel's problem of the stranger in the context of current developments in telecommunications technology. The chip-in-the-brain, the idea of a perfect connection of nerves and electronics, works off an old dream--that the body, suitably outfitted with the right machinery, can escape its material limits (cf. Romanyshyn 1989). It is a dream about absolute deterritorialization, in which the wired brain becomes a kind of "bounded infinity," a "universe of reference" where endless wanderings may begin and return to--simply imagine a place, a time, and you're there. Even better, you're it, you are the territory, because ultimately this is a dream not just about calling up images of different territories, but about the pure transmutation of matter, i.e., instantaneous mutability--not just plug in and "go anywhere," move without moving, but become anything, shift shapes, shift bodies, entire sensoriums, at will. Mutate without mutating (cf. Virilio 1995b: 133ff.).

In the wetware dream, and in the cyberspace dream more generally, a new version of the stranger is born--a hybrid, bio-machinic version. Here the stationary wanderer, contrá Simmel, is not a "human relation" anymore, but a "sub-human" relation of nerves and silicon. The stranger doesn't have a human body, but is a cyborg, part human and part machine. Unlike Simmel's form of stranger, the cyborg stranger is not a synthetic unity; it is a fractal, or false multiplicity. Composed of reiterated but non-identical nodes, a conglomeration of non-qualitatively differentiated individuals, it never attains, as we've seen, the status of the individual. In the same way, a cyborg is never the subject, nor the person, nor the agent, not even exactly the stranger, which in Simmel's meaning must always imply a connection to an outside--it is, instead, just a complex of bio-circuits, each node hooked to every other node in an internally expanding matrix of connections, each semi-mirroring the others. There is no outside for a cyborg, which means that it is only a stranger to itself--a pseudo-stranger or sub-stranger, connecting an inside to its own projection of itself as an exterior.

Just as the chip-brain model instantiates a different kind of stranger, the cyborg, it also describes a unique and different kind of space. Like the cyborg which "inhabits" it, cyberspace has the form of partiality. It is a simulation of space, and in particular, a simulation of the openness of space. In terms of the duality which interested Simmel, the space in cyberspace is neither an a priori condition of experience nor a symbol of human interaction, but rather "sub-conditional" and "sub-symbolic" order of information. In the first case, it is a self-enclosed space of endlessly ramified conditions--"if-then" connections, branching tree-logics, programmed loops, switches, and engineered feedback mechanisms--which never attains the status of an a priori. Rather, it mimics the condition of space, as any video game addict will confirm, while imposing, at least for the duration of the game, none of its limitations on action. In the second case, cyberspace is an excess production of signs which never amounts to the symbolic. Virtual systems like cyberspace, as Baudrillard says, never achieve the "radical Otherness" or "exoticism" of the symbolic, but are always more of the Same, more variations on a "code" (cf. Baudrillard 1993: 113ff.). In cyberspace, the contradictory unity of the stranger--i.e., his practical synthesis of mobility and immobility--becomes a paradox of infinite ramification within a bounded territory, or of infinite mutation within an immutable form, open to the inside, but closed to the outside, which it can only reproduce in information. Cyberspace is less than a space of pure freedom, or pure nomadism, since it can never be more than its program and hardware. It can never exceed its instructions and engineering--its design. At best, it generates a kind of delusionary freedom. And it is less than fixation at a point--each perspective within cyberspace, rather, provides only a "partial fix" on every other, and is itself only a contingent collection of partial fixes (since "location" in cyberspace is always ambiguous).

Cyberspace, in the same way, is less than a social space. The social forms, in Simmel's theoretical framework, are identities; they always reveal, he says, the resolution of contradictory elements in "coordinated and consistent lines of interaction" (1950: 403). For Simmel, the stranger is one among many such forms (which includes the coquette, the mediator, the arbitrator, etc.). In particular, the stranger is the one who opens up a group to an outside--this is what makes him, in many ways, a typically modern figure, a representative (and representation) of the "Other." His social relation to the group, and hence his social identity, involves a synthesis of contradictory "distances," since he is both, as Simmel says, close to the group and far from it, inside and outside it at the same time. Social relations in cyberspace, however, do not constitute identities, at least not in any straightforward sense, since there is no "Other" that might function as a "negative ground" for identity (which, as Baudrillard has noted," makes it incorrect to speak of "alienation" as a general condition of contemporary societies--the negativity upon which alienation was grounded has given way to the unchallenged positivity of simulated events) (Baudrillard 1983b). In the brain-chip model the very notion of "social distance" is indeterminate. There is no contradiction between inside and outside to resolve, since every node connects and is internally related to every other. Close and far, likewise, have little meaning, because every node of the system is equally and instantly accessible. The cyborg is only a continuously branching or dividing interior, endless "infolds" of its surface. Because it develops fractally, the interior never generates an identity, it develops nothing which could be called its "Other," and certainly not the human or social beings which interface the system. The cyborg--human/machine--has no social or group "identity" in the normal sense, i.e., an inside counterposed to an outside (or a Self to an Other). Rather, identity in cyberspace, as I've said, is a matter of simulating a connection to an outside. In fact, this is the brain-chip's primary function, to return to this image, to simulate a channel that opens beyond itself. And this is the crux of the connection of the cyborg to Simmel's stranger. The cyborg is a simulated stranger--a simulated connection to an outside, to an Other. Its "identity" is sub-social--not both inside and outside the group simultaneously, like Simmel's stranger, but between the group and non-group, n and 0, a fractal stranger. The simulated stranger, in one sense, still does connect an inside with an outside, but the outside, we'll see below, can only be the social itself, and the connection is a fake.

Sub-trust

If social order depends on trust established between persons, then cyberspace is an order of simulated or substitute relations of trust established between persons and electronic networks, or between individuals and their computers. That is, one no longer trusts the person at the other end of the communication. Instead, we'll see, one places trust in the medium itself, a trust not to betray one's secrets. Your computer, so to speak, becomes your confidant--its very objectivity and neutrality, its ambiguous "distance" from you (both close and far-away, as Simmel described our relations to "the stranger," whose very form also inspires trust), allow you to tell it everything and in return receive a non-judgmental hearing--this is not a "social distance," of course, between humans, but the distance between operator and machine. Moreover, even secrecy becomes a matter of simulation and fractal interiorization in cyberspace, as "real" secrets, the social relations of secrecy, disappear without a trace in a totally connected environment, were every keystroke is recorded, indexed, filed away for future reference and surveillance. As Baudrillard (1983c) once said apropos of cybernetic civilizations, "The secret, were there such, would be such that it could never be betrayed." That is, like the social itself, and like the trust it demands, the secret would be something to which one could refer to only in simulation.

I've said that conventional sociological categories do not describe cyberspace communications without considerable reconceptualization. Baudrillard (1983) hypothesized that it might even be impossible to apply the term social to simulated orders, since those orders place the reality principles of social relations--otherness, reciprocity--in serious question. Traditionally, questions about the constitution of society are often framed by problems of identity and how identity forms a privileged space in the vicinity of which relations like trust are constructed. Such relations necessarily are formed on the basis of incomplete knowledge of others and carry various risks--of betrayal, discovery, cheating, shame, criticism, etc. (cf. Giddens 1990; Lingis 1994a). In cyberspace, like all spaces of communication, identity is always a problematic affair, a product of shifting strategies and alignments (cf. Stone 1991; Morley and Robins 1995; Bruckman 1993). Unlike other forms of communication, however, cyberspace erodes the reality principle to which a resolution of problematic identities could be referred (identities, that is, never "touch down," but like hypertext links only connect in endless loops to other simulated identities). For Simmel, the contradictory identity of the stranger, and his problematic "location" in the group, are precisely what allow specific forms of trust to develop. Simmel shows how we are often willing to trust strangers in ways we cannot trust friends, who are too close to us and to whom, consequently, we are too vulnerable. Trust between personal friends carries higher risks (of emotional damage, damage to the relation, etc.)--in this sense, the stranger acts like a surrogate friend. Secrets are in one sense easier to tell a stranger, who Simmel notes can be "objective," i.e., can be both receptive and neutral, functions of his special role in mediating communication, his unique position between groups or persons. Again, the analogy to today strikes me. In cyberspace communications, strangeness as a matter of this contradictory identity and its special relation to trust and secrets is built into the very operation of the medium. In cyberspace, persons confide in the medium itself, which they trust not to judge or betray them, as much as or more than they confide in one another. The medium--one could even say, the PC on one's desktop--becomes like the stranger, a kind of surrogate friend, someone (something) to tell our secrets. A simulated stranger that forges a connection to the "real stranger," if you will, the stranger that lies permanently beyond the borders of cyberspace, whose inhabitants, in constructing their online identities, refer to, and continuously refer to, but with whom, in the final analysis, they are unable in any meaningful sense to communicate.

Take, for instance, the now almost legendary story of "Julie," which illustrates this in the case of gender (we could construct similar stories today for race, age, class, weight, any "social" category whatever). Stone (1991) recounts the tale (originally in Van Gelder 1985) of a disabled woman who over the years became a trusted confidant and confessor to a number of women on a computer bulletin board (BBS). Julie's accounts of how she dealt with her disability were so movingly rendered and passionate that a number of the participants began to reveal to her the most intimate details of their own lives. Confidences were exchanged, advice was given, people were inspired and lives transformed. Julie, as it notoriously turned out, was a male psychiatrist who logged onto the conference accidentally (so he claims) and found it too fascinating to log-off. "I was stunned," he said. "I never knew that women talked among themselves that way." He concocted the approachable sexual persona of Julie--vulnerable, victimized, and confined to her small apartment--to learn more, and eventually s(he?) became the center of the group's conversation. When it came out, the news that Julie was a man stunned many participants and prompted one woman to say she "felt raped." Others said, pointedly, that they felt the sense of trust they had taken years to build up had been violently shaken.

The point of Julie's story is not simply that persons can use electronic networks in a deceitful way, nor that computer messages can't always be trusted (both of which are true), but that the medium itself generates a "strange" form of trust--not between intimates (i.e., friends and lovers) or between nameless, faceless, isolated individuals, but somewhere "partway" between these extremes (somewhere, as I've said, between one and two). It is trust as a function of the medium-generated erasure of the cultural border between outside and inside, between the real social world, relegated permanently to a simulation reference which can no longer be accessed, and the virtual world of the screen (cf. Morley and Robins 1995). Persons on the "other end of the line," like our psychiatrist, don't simply disappear into their online "doubles" (Julie). In a special sense, they disappear into the medium itself--if Julie is a "good double," it is because the medium doesn't betray her (his?) secret. At the same time, the medium can also be said to disappear into them--if it is a good medium, it carries their messages neutrally and objectively (i.e., lies and all) (cf. Baudrillard 1988: 207-219; also 1983b). The ideal medium is one in which the connection between communicator and communication is indiscernible, where all that remains visible is just the communication itself, a "partial" or sub-identity, making all messages untraceable to either their source or destination. This is the sense in which the system of communication, the apparatus itself, can become a "trusted confidant" of those whose messages it carries. What is trusted is not just the communication or the communicator, i.e., the content of the message or the person who sends it, but the material form of the communication itself, the technology and its system of interfaces--just as for Simmel, what is trusted is not just the message or even the person of the stranger, but the material form of the stranger, his objectivity, neutrality, non-judgmentality, i.e., his disappearance as a carrier of information with an identity uniquely his own (he is always somewhere between, somewhere "on the way"). What is interesting about the story of Julie is thus not Julie per se, but what it tells us about the formal qualities and technology of cyberspace. Julie was a cut-and-paste figure--all her qualities were abstract and edited. But, in that sense, so were all those who responded to her online. Although they did not disguise their identities in the deceitful way the psychiatrist did, and without diminishing the nastiness of what he did, in the end, everyone involved was complicit in one way or another in staging this piece of digital theatre, placing their trust in the medium not to betray them. Onscreen, the psychiatrist was able to construct and maintain an identity that was simultaneously credible and a complete fantasy. His interactants "shared" this fantasy, but it was a kind of sharing based not on personal knowledge but the strangeness of the medium, the fact that the channel of communication had collapsed nearness and farness, closeness and remoteness, all the criteria for sortings into in-groups and out-groups, etc., and disappeared. There was a kind of intimacy here, but as Simmel would say, it was a strange intimacy, closeness (indeed, as many of the participants reported, love!) combined with remoteness and anonymity, and built entirely on abstract commonalities (i.e., stereotypes of "women like Julie," of the disabled, of what it's like to be confined, to be a "woman in general"). Julie was not the real stranger here; she was only an onscreen form of the deeper, more fundamental strangeness that enveloped and defined the whole system of communication. The story of Julie is not just about trust in Julie, but trust in cyberspace as a medium. And again, not only the psychiatrist's trust in the medium to let him be "someone he really wasn't," but the trust of the women participants in it as well, to let them be "who they really were" (some women remarked that it was only when they got online that they felt they could be themselves). In the end, they both trusted in the neutrality and strangeness of the medium, albeit in different ways, not to betray their fantasy of an online friendship. In the end, that was the real secret that both confided in the medium and that neither wanted betrayed--that the fantasy wasn't real, and that the "outside" social world that they continuously referred to in fact ended along the "inside" edge of their computer terminals.

Julie's story is now part of the lore of electronic bulletin boards, the precursors of IRCs, MUDs, etc. This meant she essentially had a textual identity (Julie was only words on a screen). But in the imaginary of those engineers who design today's cyber-systems, soon we will interact with virtual bodies, customize their appearance onscreen, even, if we look far enough ahead, "touch" them (the recent and awful film, Lawnmower Man, gave us a sci-fi glimpse at the "tactile" future of cybersex--not very pleasant) (cf. Bogard 1996: 156; Durkin 1995; Mazur 1994). It is in these kinds of visions--along the disappearing line between the real and the imaginary, truth and fiction, between real people and data constructs--that Simmel's nightmare of what he terms the triumph of objective over subjective culture comes closest to full expression. The triumph of objective culture, paradoxically, has to do with the disappearance of the object--in this case, the medium of communication itself. The stranger, who for Simmel embodies objective culture in modern society, disappears and is reincarnated in postmodernity as a material medium that tends, like the stranger himself, towards its own immateriality. The development of communications media today is guided by a principle of unobtrusiveness (e.g., the less apparent the particular distractive qualities of the media--e.g., screen, interface, channel, technology--the better, truer, more real, more objective the image) (Bogard 1994: 317-318). Simmel, although he didn't say it, of course knew that the stranger was always involved in a disappearing act . This is, in fact, the condition of his objectivity--that although he stays, he is always mobile, always gone, present and absent, here and there. All message bearing systems (or forms) aim to disappear this way into their message (cf. Serres 1995).

What ultimately is interesting in the story of Julie is that when the psychiatrist's secret was finally exposed, what suffered was not just participants' trust in people, although that was surely the case, too. More than that, the system of communication itself no longer inspired confidence. One could not trust the medium to support a collective fantasy. It lost its strangeness--inside and outside, us and them, public and private, suddenly all these distinctions reemerged. What was revealed in the process was that trust was not a function of the truth of the message, but how it was conveyed. Julie, for her online group, was "too good to be true" anyway; she was the perfect listener, sympathizer, confessor--her very unreality was the condition of her acceptance. Trust in Julie was trust in the fiction of Julie, i.e., trust that the fiction was true--sub-trust. When Julie's "real" identity became known, what devastated trust was as much the loss of this fiction as the discovery of a truth. That fiction disappeared when the medium suddenly reasserted itself and lost its strangeness.

Sub-Bodies

The social, Deleuze and Guattari say, is the force of inscription on the body (1977). Scars, piercings, blemishes and blotches, the marks of dismemberment and reconnection. So many body parts, thrown together in a smooth, swirling mixture like the objects caught in a vortex. Fingers connect to arms which run machines guided by eyes which feed into nerves which form the relays of the circuits of capital. Fissures, wounds, cuts across the surface, lines forming territories--visual lines, surgical lines and sutures, fashion lines, cuts in apparel, in tissues themselves, marking lines of desire, seduction, entrapment, so many carvings and mappings of the body's surface in the vicinity of which "subjects" form, subjugations, phantasms, ideological and cultural systems, etc. (cf. Deleuze 1990) What, then, if the body disappears, only to leave empty, "ideal" cuts, marks with no connection to the skin, the eyes, the organs, phantom sutures that stitch together only ghost tissues? What becomes of the social? This, in fact, is what happens in cyberspace. The body becomes a reference in simulation, and the cuts which mark it as belonging to this or that circuit of power, status, normativity, become so many fake wounds--a body without stakes, a sub-body, as easily disposed of as the characters in the video game Mortal Kombat, and just as easily resurrected--endlessly selectable, transformable, and killable immortals (cf. Kroker and Kroker 1987).

You walk into the room, alone, and sit before the screen... A smiling face flashes a greeting, a musical chord, tickings and wind sounds, the system powers up. A few clicks and you're at the entranceway to the Palace. Once inside, you can select from a variety of masks and disguises to wear on your passage through the Palace's many rooms, each of which is designed as a specific environment in which to communicate with other travelers--lounges, bars, streets, parks, bedrooms, boats, deserts, oceans, planets, whatever backgrounds the designer can imagine.

The masks vary from the ridiculous to the virtually sublime. Glasses, fake noses and mustaches, party hats, sunglasses, lipstick, jewelry, cigarettes, a range of "masculine" and "feminine" apparel, "expression" options (sad/happy, straight/intoxicated, serious, horny, inquisitive, dangerous, reflective). Whatever you want within a strictly closed range of options (which is, after all, the American Dream). Once you have selected your image, your persona, which you can alter whenever you feel the impulse, you choose a room/setting/environment and go there to wait for the chance encounter, whether it is on the barstool at the blues club (one of the Palace's many online sites), the Empire State Building, or the steps ascending to a simulated image of Macchu Pichu. Encounters are randomly pleasurable, brutal, vacuous, welcoming, uncomfortable, or hostile. "Encounter," of course, may be the wrong word here, if it implies meeting an other. The "other" is constructed from the same disembodied code, has been selected from the same options, traveled the same electronic pathways, just like you. Any symbolic difference, otherness, alienation, is purely superficial and contrived--male/female? child/adult? black/white? powerful/powerless? Any chance meeting points only to itself, and any hint that the icon beside you is operated by a "real person" or a "real body" outside is immediately short-circuited. The cuts don't coincide. If you were to overlay the simulated body beside you over the real body which is its "operator," its body of reference, the inscriptions, the "social markings," would not match. Even if by chance they did match, even if, as in Borgés famous image of simulation, the map perfectly coincided with the territory, it would remain at best a trace, a washed-out double, a data construct. The essential cut, the cut which constitutes the human body itself, its skin, muscles, sinews, nerves, blood, membranes, discharges, would remain ineluctably different, other to the icon that now stands beside you, i.e., beside your own icon or trace.

The virtual encounter with the sub-body is entirely without stakes. In your cyber-travels in the Palace you click to an isolated location with a backdrop that looks like a Martian plain and happen upon two "lovers" sharing an "intimate" moment. "Shit," he says. "Who the fuck is that?" she says. (He/she?). "TXL81," he suggests, in code. In an instant they "de-materialize" before you, bound for an unknown "private" location to be "alone." You yourself transport to another room, fireplace, draperies, thick chairs. "Who's is it?" someone asks. Five happy faces threateningly surround you, jerkily superimpose themselves on you in a mock mugging. "Take off," the one in the fake nose says. You experience a moment's uncertainty--is he saying this to you? You have the distinct sense you're not welcome here either, despite the stiff, frozen smiles. No problem. Getting out from under this pile of cyber-flesh is only a point and click. Or you can choose to stay. After all, who can harm you? Nothing really matters, you can come and go as you choose, say and do what you want, no commitments, no obligations, no touching. Pain, suffering, wounds, pleasure, laughter, tears. These things mean nothing, or count for very little, in this setting.

If the social is a space of symbolic reciprocity, then sub-social environments like the Palace introduce a general factor of nonreciprocity. Symbolic regimes involve political and economic stakes with real consequences for bodies. Gifts are given, debts are incurred, relations of power form, the body becomes a contested site, a territory upon which wars are fought, sexual energies expended, sacrifices performed. In social space, nothing happens immediately, or all at once--everything takes time, and every action requires a reaction, a response, an interpretation. Social life, as Baudrillard says, is a duel, a relation of challenge and seduction, whose stakes include one's death, one's dismemberment; it is a zone of ebullition and expenditure, of continuous pressure, flows of desire. Without the body as a surface of its inscription, without flesh and blood, the social collapses.

Or, rather, becomes a simulation of the social, and a simulation of the bodies which would comprise it. In cyberspace, at least in the dreams of the engineers that design its systems, there are no gifts or debts. Gifts carry no special obligations, and all debts are immediately discharged. Reciprocity is not a matter of a body indebted to respond to a symbolic gesture, but an event to be avoided at all cost. In the Palace, a gift (of one's conversation, one's ideas, one's time) demands no equivalent return. One can simply disappear, drop off the list, trash the software. The gift of one's body is an impossibility. Hence the impossibility of power in these systems. Despite all those "sociological" analyses which point to the uneven distribution of access to information in contemporary societies, power, like the body, does not exist in cyberspace. In the projected development of these systems, only the chimera of power remains, a cynical power reduced to the manipulation of images rather than the organization of bodies. From this point on, the body suffers wounds only in simulation. It becomes a fractal, cyborg body bound to interminable reiteration without repetition, like any video avatar, unable to feel pain, unable to die, without life, without connection (how ironic that what is perceived as the ultimate form of connection only simulates that bond).

Lingis (1994c) has spoken eloquently about the "community of those who have nothing in common." The paradoxical basis for community, he claims, is the fact that each person faces his or her death alone, that each body in its relation to suffering and anguish is irremediably singular. It is in the moments leading up to death, and at those moments only, that the other truly communicates to one, in the silence that is at the very heart of all communication, of all social bonds. In the dreams of transcendent cyberworlds that pass for our modern utopias, death is irrelevant, World War III is irrelevant, space and time are irrelevant. Communication itself is irrelevant. There is no communication in cyberspace, despite the incessant hype about a communications revolution. If communication, with the other, with the outside, is only possible in the silence that precedes one's death, what cyberspace offers, on the contrary, is the total absence of silence, the cacophony of messages that bombard the senses but say nothing, the endless depiction of death in a scene in which no one touches the hand of the one who dies, where everyone truly experiences death in a state of radical aloneness, i.e., in the absence of others. Today cyberspace is our substitute for community, for silence, for the outside, for the human body and its wounds, our peculiar form of postmodern sacrifice. Instead, we content ourselves with the ghosts of these things, at peace in our isolation, noise, interiority, and phantasms.

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