"The Rhizomatics of Cyberspace" [part 2 of 2]
Charles J. Stivale
_"Spam, spoof, lag, and lurking"_
On LambdaMOO (a synchronous Multi-User Dimension, or MUD), a
(re-)acquaintance named Lemi (whose self-designated gender is
neutral, known as Spivak) discusses discourses of cyberspace: "A
gentle chiming in [my] ear brings a message from Lemi: E pages,
'Spam, spoof, lag, and lurking... the four big aesthetic values
negatively expressed on MOO-dom'." As each of these poses the threat
of possible "blockages," I want to explore these as potential modes
of experimentation in the BwO-Zone. As forms of play, spoofing and
spamming are complementary, though distinct practices: "spoofing"
contradicts a tenet of on-line "Netiquette" according to which all
statements require attribution to a proper name, i.e. so all
involved in a computer-generated exchange know the source of a
transmission. Without this, not only is any response impossible
other than the expression of surprise or exasperation, but a
definite sense of paranoia can set in, explicitly "who said that?"
and implicitly "what might s/he/it say/do next?" Spam, on the other
hand, is generally an attributed transmission that assumes what
Jakobson called the "phatic" function of language, i.e. designating
the presence of Net discourse itself, usually playfully, but
sometimes in ways that may be irritating, even offensive and
sexually harassing, depending on the sensibilities of the Spam-ee
(cf. Stivale). On some multi-user sites, the most common form is
the "bonk," for example, when someone "bonks" me on the head, and I
and those on-line "with" me receive a transmission such as, "Doofus
bonks CJ. CJ schizoanalyzes, 'Make rhizomes, not roots, never
plant!'" With both of these practices, blockages can occur to the
extent that synchronous discussion can be interrupted, even
seriously so depending on the persistence, and even aggressivity, of
the "spoofer" or the "spammer." But regular users of synchronous
Net sites quickly become accustomed to several conversation strings
appearing on-screen at once, so that in some ways, most "spoofs" and
"spams" become the noise around which real discussion takes place,
as in a crowded cocktail party. In fact, "spams" and "spoofs" can
achieve the status of a counter-discourse on synchronous sites
without which the very environment of exchange would take on a
rather dry, lifeless tone.
While these two "values" employ the Net for unattributed or
apparently "unproductive" enunciation, the opposite occurs when
someone logs on (synchronously) or receives posts from Lists
(asynchronously) and then only witnesses or reads, i.e. "lurks," in
the background, never responding or contributing. Here no extension
of the "rhizome" is possible, at least on-line for what occurs "in
real life" for the "lurker" may be entirely different. However, when
all subscribers start to "lurk," real gaps can occur as did recently
on the Deleuze-List, in response to which Erik Davis employed
exhortation and cajoling: "Come on, when you read a Deleuze post,
don't you have that little itch at the end? That sense of some
tendril being thrust from the screen through your eyes, your brain,
down the nerves to your fingers hovering over that 'reply' function?
Extend the rhizome! Don't 'create' it if you're too sleepy, but let
the ping-pong ball keep bouncing!" (6 April 1994). I took a
different spin, introducing a statement by Deleuze that speaks
directly to the questions of _silences_: "The problem [today] is no
longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little
gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find
something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people from
expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves.
What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing,
because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever
rarer, thing that might be worth saying" (Z 177/P 288-89).
As for the fourth so-called value, "lag," Netsurfers become
wearily accustomed to this nemesis of swift exchange of data during
moments of the twenty-four hour cycle when transmission speed slows
due (among other causes) to heavy user load. If I want to be sure to
connect with European participants in the synchronous sites, for
example, the morning hours until noontime in the U.S. are prime
Net-time for generally low-lag, although traffic on my local server
tends to crank up, thus with speed slow-down, by late morning.
However, as the day progresses, and as users in different time-zones
log on, transmission speed is increasingly impeded, and LambdaMOO
has gone so far as to block logon when lag is high in relation to
current user load. When one is in synchronous communication with
another on-line, lag creates awkward gaps in discussion and thus
contributes to the necessarily mediated slowness of exchange. Yet,
intensities can still continue to pass, even if the question of
speed and slowness, movement and rest becomes all to literal in
lagged cyberspace. As Kurtz/Brando mutters in "Apocalypse Now," "you
must make a friend of horror," and so too one learns to "move
within" lag, to take advantage of the slowness in order to emit, for
example, a series of commands for reviewing posts (to internal
bulletin boards on MUDs), and then wait for their transmission to
appear, eventually, on screen. Depending on one's "real-life" mode
of Net connection, one can certainly multi-task, toggling to other
windows other while waiting out the lag. And for WorldWideWeb, "lag"
often poses only minor delay other than the actual speed of display
and jumps from one hypertextual link to another.
_Flame Holes_
Yet another well-known form of potential blockage, known as
"flaming," recently came under scrutiny in several ways on the
Deleuze-List. On bulletin boards and newsgroups of all sorts, the
fragility of computer-mediated communication becomes all too
apparent when some "intensity" within an exchange triggers what has
come to be known as a "flame war" (cf. Dery 1993). On the
Deleuze-List, the quality of discussion (and concomitantly, the low
"flame" quotient) is exceptional, but even so, one participant's
earnest (yet, in fact, ironic) assertions incited a querulous
response, to which several other responses ensued sharply, and to
which the corrected correspondent then retorted quite defensively,
insulting one previous respondent, and so on. While this is a now
banal tale on BBS's and internal MUD-lists, even these sparks flying
and flowing result at times in one being "bolstered directly on a
line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and
make new connections" (ATP 15). For this very "blockage" of the
rhizome resulted on the Deleuze-List in a further exchange on the
"rhizomatics of cyberspace" in relation to "flaming":
-- Greg Polly wondered if "flamewars [might exist] as the
monster black holes of the internet", and refers to Brian Massumi's
_User's Guide_ (125) to describe some motivations and (re)actions of
Netsurfers: "People sign up in clubs of like-minded to rehearse
their own subjection to the club... OR different quasicauses enter
the same netgroup and battle it out. But when that happens --despite
the potentially fertile field of differences --the result is not
recombination but further territorializing." And he concluded: "And
the scary thing that the flamewar reveals is how easily one or two
fascist adversarial types can hold an entire net hostage, can
proscribe any other kind of language game and even draw other people
into their agon" (April 8);
-- my own quick (and not very thought-through) response to Polly
included the comment that he seemed to equate Netsurfing with the
asynchronous sites (bulletin boards, newsgroups) on which "flaming"
quite frequently occurs, to which Polly responded, "Not such a
metaphysical claim, just that this was my greenhorn experience. And
that the ubiquity of flamewar was at odds with the utopian discourse
one sometimes hears about internet" (April 9, 1994). I ended my
post: "I spend most of my time on synchronous sites (e.g. PMC-MOO);
that is not to imply, however, that they are any less 'flamed'...
actually, it can get quite rough and tumble, but extremely
rhizomatically so. Black holes? [I wondered, and then profoundly
pronounced] Dunno, gotta ponder that" (8 April 1994).
-- Polly offered further clarifications the next day: "To my
mind a flamewar can't be rhizomatic by definition: when I call it a
black hole, I'm referring to its power to stop rhizome and lines of
flight and institute a dreary polemical becoming-same." He developed
this further in terms of faciality: "Far from a rhizomatic
combination or jazzing off an enemy position, . . . flaming centers
on a personalist mode of vengeance that exploits the subjected form
of seeing-yourself-in-the-other's-gaze, the pain and humiliation
which that mode of subjectivity entails. Flaming does not involve
conceptual improvisation or jazzing or riffing but the constant
attempt to *reframe* the quotations of another so that the 'self'
inscribed by that post will, by virtue of the reframing, be
humiliated before the gaze of others. Subjectivity is ruthlessly
kept within the circuit of those eyebeams."
-- My own response, expressed here (and there as well, since I
post[ed] this talk to the list for purposes of creating new
"bifurcations" of this discourse) is, first, that the utopian
discourse about the Net is highly overblown (as attested by essays
the Dery collection on "Flame Wars" as well as in recent articles by
Dibbell [1993] on "Netrape," Davis [1994] on "MUD Worlds," and Katz
on "online gender bending"). But second, this very discussion about
"flaming" suggests how the rhizome is _not necessarily_ blocked
within a "flame"-hole. Of course, such impasses might well occur
within the BwO-Zone, and not only in the ways Polly details. More
and more, institutions can (and will) get involved as in the
University of Texas-Dallas case where an aggressive bulletin board
user was denied access to his local server when his perceived
"flaming" to one BBS resulted in complaints by other users who
disagreed with his positions and modes of expression there (Watson
1993). But jumping out of the impasse and extending the rhizome can
also occur: our continuing "string" on "rhizomatics" and "flaming"
was/is proof of that, and *not* simply of the genre, "I'm more
rhizomatic than thou."
-- Following up our posts with his own reflections on the "black
holes," Erik Davis agreed with Polly: "I have nothing against
withering critiques per se. It's the personalism, the egos, the
faces involved that I object to. . . . We should feel the dispute
pervade the space in a flash, like a flash of lightning that clears
the ground. It's when we grip our swords tightly that the game
prolongs." And his riff folds back toward the possibilities of
"becoming-imperceptible": "What if we could remember no-one's name .
. . think of the faces it would dissolve! Am 'I' Michael now, or
Stivale, or MBOON, or a woman who's holding on tight to her sword
and who cannot even remember her name? There would just be the
bouncing ball, the mad dash down the valley, functions and styles
commingling and not solidifying into 'spurious ghosts.'" And he
concludes, "If I have nothing to protect, nothing to admit, then
even the phil-lit [flaming] poster's digs against Michael for being
a 'non-academic' will slide off me. It becomes a slippery rock that
I avoid as me and my pack plummet forward -- look out, black hole
ahead! In that sense, maybe I can love the list the more I forget
all your names" (9 April 1994).
-- As for an alternative, Davis's response to Polly's queries
about the potential differences on synchronous multi-user sites
known as MOOs, enlivens the possibilities of spam, spoofs and other
on-line activities: "The conversations flow past your eye into
nothingness, you riff and jam off of puns and unintentioned
allusions as much as points. In fact points become the rocks that
you leap from as you plunge down unknown paths -- rocks that you
know you cannot 'stand on' because you have too much momentum going,
you and your pack, and if you let the points' gravity rule over your
own momentum, you'll eat shit. Not that the point isn't solid,
useful, coherent. It's just that you often only 'get it' once it's
gone, under your feet, back there" (9 April 1994).
I follow this "string" in some detail because these shifts,
jumps, shoots on the BwO-Zone suggest, as do Deleuze and Guattari,
that "the failure of the _plan_ (plan/plane) is part of the _plan_
itself: The _plan_ is infinite, you can start it in a thousand
different ways; you will always find something that comes too late
or too early, forcing you to recompose all of your relations of speed
and slowness, all of your affects, and to rearrange the overall
assemblage. An infinite undertaking" (ATP 259).
_Caution, Not Wisdom_
This last citation might well serve as an yet another epigraph
to my own undertaking here, for in preparing this assemblage, I
find it continually intersected by new lines that kept the
"rhizome" open, in flux, but that produced "bifurcations," on-line
and off-line, making me wonder constantly how and if the BwO-Zone
could be (re)presented or (re)produced through such a linear
discourse. And I also wonder about the site of reception of this
discourse, and the utter frustration that might well within it, from
an array of sources (boredom, hunger, burnout) and desires, not the
least of which is the question well formulated on the Deleuze-List
by a participant identified only as a "chrestomathy of subconscious
yearnings" (from Carleton, Minnesota): "How do we decide with
Deleuze, or if we want, with rhizomes, what can and cannot be said
about them? Can we ask what might seem to be basic questions, such
as 'How do we think rhizomatically?' or even 'How _can_ - we think
rhizomatically?', - or do we just leap to the evident assumption
that we _do_ think in this way? (7 April 1994).
Someone who seems to share these concerns is Deleuze himself,
particularly as concerns the "rhizomatics" of "cyberspace." For he
has taken pains to express his wariness, in an entirely
non-rhapsodic way, concerning the relationship between "control" and
"becomings." In a discussion with Toni Negri entitled in
_Pourparlers_ as "Control and Becomings", Deleuze distinguishes the
"disciplinary societies" closely examined by Foucault, but that "we
are in the process of leaving behind," from "societies of 'control'"
to which corresponds a particular machinic regime, "cybernetics and
computers": "But machines explain nothing," says Deleuze, "we have
to analyze the collective assemblages of which machines are only one
part. Faced with emerging forms of incessant control in an open
milieu, it is possible that the strictest forms of disciplinary
'enclosures' (_enfermements_) will appear to us to belong to a
delicious and gentle past" (P 237). Furthermore, says Deleuze, "the
research into 'universals of communication' is enough to make us
tremble" (P 237), a facet of which he develops in "Postscript on the
Societies of Control" (as well as, briefly, in _What is
Philosophy?_). In these modern societies, "the essential trait is no
longer a signature or a number, but a code [_un chiffre_]," that is,
a "password" that replaces the "order-word" [_mot d'ordre_] of the
disciplinary societies" (1992, 5 [O]/P 242). The numerical language
of control, says Deleuze, "is made of codes that mark access to
information," and the former dichotomy between individuals and
masses is replaced by "'_dividuals_'," on one hand, and on the
other, by "samples, data, markets or 'banks' . . . The man of
control [_l'homme du controle_] is undulatory, into orbit, on a
continuous network. Everywhere _surfing_ has already replaced the
older _sports_" (P 244).
While Deleuze recognizes that some forms of resistance, such as
pirating and spreading computer viruses, have already emerged, he
doubts that these and other forms of "transversal" resistance would
be available to minorities for their own expression: "Perhaps the
spoken word [_la parole_] and communication are already rotten. They
are entirely imbued with money, not by accident, but naturally" (P
238). And he insists quite starkly: "No science fiction is required
to conceive of a control mechanism providing instantaneously the
position of an element within an open environment (whether an animal
in a reserve or a man in a corporation, as with an electronic
collar). Fe'lix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able
to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks
to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises one barrier or
another. But the card could just as easily be rejected on a given
day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier, but
the computer that tracks each person's position -- licit or illicit
-- and effects a universal modulation" (O 7/P 246).
To this stern, apocalyptic or perhaps "only" pragmatic
assemblage, Deleuze offers equally grim alternatives: on the level
of "nascent control mechanisms," their "socio-technological study .
. . must be categorical and describe what is already in the process
of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose
crisis is everywhere proclaimed": prison regimes, educational
regimes, hospital regimes, corporate regimes, i.e. all revealing
"the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of
domination" (O 7/P 246-47). In terms of the regime of communication,
"What is necessary [says Deleuze] is to high-jack _la parole_.
Creating has always been something other than communicating. The
important thing will perhaps be to create pockets [_vacuoles_] of
non-communication, interrupters, in order to escape control" (P
238). Yet, he concludes the discussion with Negri on a slightly less
ponderous note: "To believe in the world also means to inspire even
tiny events that slip past control, or cause new space-times to be
born, even superficial or of limited volume. . . . It's on the level
of each undertaking that are judged the capacity for resistance or
the opposite, the submission to control. We need both creation _and_
people" (P 239).
The inspiration of such "tiny events" are indeed part of "virtual
futures"; do they consist in extending the rhizome? how does one
"high-jack _la parole_" and create "interrupters" capable of
escaping control? To answer these questions with in the
Deleuze-Guattarian assemblages, I believe that we need to look
closely at their final work together, _What Is Philosophy?_, as well
as Guattari's proposal in _Chaosmose_ of a generalized ecology, or
an "ecosophy" (cf. also Guattari 1989). Within this "ecosophy" would
be an "ecology of the virtual" that would have as goal "not only of
preserving endangered species of cultural life, but also of
engendering new conditions for creation and for the developement of
unheard-of, unimaginable formations of subjectivity" (1992,
127-128), that is, "virtuality machines," "blocks of mutant percepts
and affects" be characterized by "limitless interfaces that secrete
interiority and exteriority constituted at the root of any system of
discursivity" (1992, 128-131; cf. Conley 1993 on "terminal humans"
related to this "ecosophy").
In any case, here and now, I self-impose an "interrupter" and
leave where I commenced, _dans le milieu, intermezzo_, with the
Deleuze-Guattarian caution, not wisdom, as translated by an
_intercesseur_/mediator named De Landa: "All you can do is approach
carefully because the last thing you want to do is get swallowed up
by a chaotic attractor that's too huge in phase space. As Deleuze
says, 'Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.'
Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day
of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory,
otherwise you'll go nuts" (Davis 1992, 48).
_Bibliography_
Benedikt, Michael (1991; 1992), _Cyberspace: First Steps_, Cambridge &
London: The MIT Press.
Bukatman, Scott (1993), _Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in
Postmodern Science Fiction_, Durham: Duke University Press.
Conley, Verena Andermatt (1993), "Eco-Subjects," in _Rethinking
Technologies_, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 77-91.
Davis, Erik (1992), "De Landa Destratified," _Mondo 2000_ 8: 44-48.
Davis, Erik (1994), "It's a MUD, MUD, MUD, MUD World," _Village
Voice_, 22 February: 42-44.
De Landa, Manuel (1991), _War in the Age of Intelligent Machines_,
Cambrdige: Zone.
Deleuze, Gilles (1977), "'I Have Nothing to Admit," trans. Janis
Forman, _Semiotext(e)_ 2.3: 111-116. (1973 [1990]), "Lettre ? un
critique s?v?re," in _Pourparlers_ 11-23.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990), _Pourparlers_, Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles (1992a), "Mediators," trans. Martin Joughin, _Zone_
6, "Incorporations": 280-294. (1985 [1990]), "Les intercesseurs,"
in _Pourparler_ 165-84.
Deleuze, Gilles (1992b), "Postscript on the Societies of Control,"
_October_ 59: 3-7. (1990), "Postscriptum sur les socie'te's de
contole," in _Pourparlers_ 240-247.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Fe'lix (1977 [1983]) _Anti-Oedipus.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem
and Helen Lane, New York: Viking Press; rpt. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. (1972), _L'Anti-OEdipe. Capitalisme
et schizophrenie_ 1, Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Fe'lix (1987) _A Thousand Plateaus.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ 2, trans. Brian Massumi,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (1980), _Mille
plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrenie_ 2, Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Fe'lix (1994), _What is Philosophy?_
New York: Columbia University Press. (1991), _Qu'est-ce que la
philosophie?_, Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet (1987), _Dialogues_, New York:
Columbia University Press. (1977), _Dialogues_, Paris: Flammarion.
Dery, Mark, ed. (1993), _Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture_,
_The South Atlantic Quarterly) 92:4.
Dibbell, Julian (1993), "A Rape in Cyberspace," _Village Voice_, 21
December: 36-42.
Guattari, Fe'lix (1989), _Les trois e'cologies_, Paris: Galile'e.?
Guattari, Fe'lix (1992), _Chaosmose_, Paris: Galile'e.
Gibson, William (1984), _Neuromancer_, New York: Ace.
Hayles, N. Katharine (1992), "The Materiality of Informatics,"
_Configurations_ 1.1:147-170.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1993a), "The Seductions of Cyberspace," in
_Rethinking Technologies_, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 173-190.
Hayles, N. Katharine (1993b), "Virtual Bodies and Flickering
Signifiers," _October_ 66:69-91.
Katz, Alyssa (1994), "Modem Butterfly," _Village Voice_, 15 March:
39-40. Land, Nick (1993), "Machinic desire," _Textual Practice_
7.3: 471-82.
Laurel, Brenda (1991; 1993), _Computers as Theater_, Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
Maggiori, Robert (1991), "Deleuze-Guattari: Nous Deux",
_Libe'ration_, Sept. 12: 17-19.
Martin, Jean-Clet (1993), _Variations. La philosophie de Gilles
Deleuze_, Paris: Payot.
Massumi, Brian (1992), _A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari_. Cambridge:
The MIT Press.
Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross, eds. (1991), _Technoculture_,
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Stivale, Charles J. (forthcoming), "'Spam': Heteroglossia and
Harassment in Cyberspace," in _Communication and Cyberspace_, New
York: Hampton Press.
Wilson, David L. (1993), "Suit of Network Access," _The Chronicle
for Higher Education_, 24 November: A16.
------------------