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Communities are to be distinguished,
npt by their falsity/genuineness,
but by the style in which they are
imagined Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (p. 6) IntroductionThere are many confusions haunting cyberspace. Primarily the confusions can be located at the level of metaphors which are invoked to characterise the nature of cyberspace. There are two images in particular which strike us as inimical, yet are frequently uttered in tandem in many of the fashionable journals and articles about the Internet and so forth; namely - cyberspace as community, and cyberspace as city. By way of brief examples we could note the title of Howard Rheingold's new book The Virtual Community, and that of Peter Hinssen's article in the first issue of Wired:, ‘Life in the Digital City’. Indeed in the Rheingold volume, the author at various junctures refers to cybernets as the basis for a community, that is, people coming together creating a web of personal relationships, and as the basis for civic democracy which in effect is describing a digital city state.Internet magazines stress both the possibility of bringing people together into greater or lesser degrees of community, and the possibility of sailing the boundless, resource-rich seas of the net without home port for security. Why we are puzzled abou the co-presence of these two terms in descriptions of cybernetic relations is because community is about closed systems and reified relations, and city about openness and change. This difference is predicated upon the positing of diferent life-worlds and modes of appropriating space resulting from each system respectively. However, much widely available literature portrays cyberspace to be at once possessed of the properties of community and the city. Our focus is upon the role of the territorial imaginary in the construction of space, and how the metaphor of ‘net’ allows for the conflations of city/community, and virtual city/virtual community, that is: to explore the utopian urge to image open relatively indeterminate spaces of the city (for that is how such ‘openess’ appear to many at the subjective level) as enclosed spaces of community. And furthermore, to consider how these bastard spaces are given an ‘objective’ correlate in the form of network models of urban space which visualise that space as enclosed. This latter aspect determines the indeterminate thus giving prompts for communitising the city into a meaningful whole. It is the relation of the pre-figure (the city) to the current figures of understanding space (cyber-space) that forms the basis of this paper. More simply, we want to use readings of the nature and meaning of city space to interrogate and critique cyber space and its surrounding hype. In so far as we can argue that we can draw parallels between how we imagine the city and how we imagine cyberspace, we will be arguing by analogy. But in doing so we will try to expose some of the false analogies that have been drawn in an attempt to ontologise the cyberworld as a parallel universe to our own - as a space apart with its own terms and conditions into which we are inserted as nodes of communication and as identities constituted as a function of the meanings internal to the virtual realm. Part of the problem is that we not only are led to envisage cyberspace as a self-constituting realm, but at the same time to entertain ideas of virtual communities or virtual cities which are directly taken from conceptions of ideal cities or communities fashioned for the purpose of living in the non-virtual world. The language we use to try to grasp the structure of cyberspace thus trades on notions of radical difference and sameness. Towards the end of the paper we will argue that the idea of cyberspace as an alternative structure in which new forms of social and intra-personal relations are mediated is illusory; that cyberspace and how we relate to it is little different from how fin-de-siecle social theorists such as Simmel and Kracauer described the phenomenology of experiencing the city and how Bachelard described the movement of the poetic image. Despite our noting the force of the metaphors of city and community, we want to argue that the dominant mode of understanding cyberspace is as community, but that it is better conceived as being like a city space, uncoded by the petrifying effects of spatial net analysis, the latter removing the flaneur like role of the subjective consciousness roving from one virtual space to another. We ought to see cyberspace as movement and individualised flows of subjective consciousness, and the nature of the relation between user and cyberspace as dithyrambic. The transcendental and metaphysical mode of talk about cyberspace is but a poetics of space, and with this in mind we will also draw on the work of Gaston Bachelard to understand the moments of what we will identify as absorbed consciousness - the sprit taken by its own poetic images, and the mind taken by the form of its activity as if there were no alternative. From the standpoint of theory, the basic problem we address is: How is the virtual imaginary constructed? What are its shapes? And what description can we give of the flow of the construction of that spatial imaginary? As we intimated at the beginning, we will look at ways in which theorists have construed urban space, and then at how those readings have their counterparts in firstly a misconceived grasp of cyberspace, and secondly, in what we believe to be a more plausible, less magical account of cybespace. Modelling the City as Phenomenology of Community.One of the major foci of urban geography has been how one can best represent the city - as a capitalist city with flows of money and labour; as an aestheticised space a la Simmel; and among others, as a formal systems-theoretic net of lines and points marking out such things as communication and transport patterns and points of population or housing densities and so forth. The latter approach provides a schematic diagram bounded by defined city limits, and internally enriched (or not) by the range of social, economic, political factors represented. This kind of modelling is common to control systems analysis, and found in the traffic control operations rooms of police, city planners offices, and electricity companies's offices wherin the National Grid may be represented. Such a grid mapped onto the city encloses the city, but equally will spread according to its own rules of construction as the city spreads. Such a way of envisaging the city offers us a rationalised construction of the structurally regulated features of the city carrying intimations of an integrated community. Network analysis sponsors the notion of city as community. It does this by its enclosing of space, of regulating and rationalising that space, of seeing the city not as an anomic, amorphous sprawl, but as a structurally integrated whole constituted by the interdependency of the parts. Allan Pred refers to the net approach in his essay ‘The Social becomes the Spatial’ where he notes:"Places and regions, however arbitrarily delimited, are the essence of traditional human geographic inquiry... [and] whether presented as elements within a spatial distribution, unique assemblages of physical facts and human artefacts, as units interacting withone another in a system, or as localised spatial forms, places and regions have been portrayed as little more than frozen scenes for human activity." (p.337, Gregory & Urry, 1985)In Mille Plateaux (1980), Deleuze and Guattari analyse this kind of coding by net structures in a variety of human resources such as the State, language, the town, war and so forth. They describe how the abstract machine of the net reterritorializes spaces made of discrete places of intensity. For instance, the city is a plane or plateau on which there are intensities of population, road intersections, cars, danger zones, high crime. In the order of the material world these particular spaces are separated, but under the net they are reterritorialized by being connected through the grid lines that re-place the city structure. If we were to imagine the city as made up of a series of towns (intensity-places) we might see what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that: "It (the town) is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization, because whatever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized enough to enter the network...to follow the circuit of urban and road recoding...Towns are circuit points of every kind, which enter into counterpoint along horizontal lines; they effect a complete but local, town-by-town, integration."(p.432)Here then the authors are showing that a net structure recodes the spatially discrete through the deterritorialisation/re territorialisation couplet connecting towns together in a large yet integrated circuit. By analogy, we would argue that the effect of net analysis of the city works in the same way. The abstract machine of the net is: "an abstract machine of overcoding: it defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity, because it produces or rather reproduces segments...laying out a divisible homogeneous space striated in all directions." (ibd., p.223) For our purposes, the effect of the net is to put the discrete domains of intensity within the whole space of the city ‘fundamentally in contact’. This ‘drawing together’ is how we are invited to see the machinic reterritorialisation of city space; that is an imagery which resonates with the character of community. Community, that most contemporary and ancient word connoting stability, order, regularity, and at least in today's terms, security, perhaps even ontological security, is about the diminution of the feeling of distance between persons. The warmth suggested by the term ‘community’ is at root importantly signifying the desire to have a sense of shared space, orderly and respectful of personal space. This is not a space in which the distances between ourselves and others are so wide that no-one feels responsibility to be concernful about anyone else other than being concerned about ones feeling that one should be concerned, but not feeling sufficiently obligated to help out. Communities tend to be self-regulating, because of the shame and guilt one will feel, and often be made to feel of one acts irresponsibly to another member of the community. This is a function of proximity to others, and that one cannot get away quickly enough to avoid the real or imagined disapprobation of others. Thus the handling of risky actions and trust in the community setting is mediated through mechanisms of reflexivity not dissimilar the ‘invisible hand explanation’ found in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (1754). The belief that they will work underlies the hope for a more orderly, graspable world. Essential to this belief is a further belief that we do live in proximity to others, and thereby the mechanisms of solidarity can work. Network analysis images large spaces as, in fact, contiguous cells, showing persons and resources in proximity with each other. Such grids of intelligibility are by implication grids of nearness to each other. Robert Fishman comments of this image as looking like ‘the network of superhighways as seen from the air, crowded in all directions, uniting a whole region into a vast super-city’. We would suggest that we are given the impression that cities are essentially built inside the boundaries of the net such that we imagine cities as developing internally rather than spreading outward. Cities can be represented as determinate spaces which fill up with people and things drawing us ever closer such that the invisible hand mechanism begins to work, disciplining our behaviours, obliging us to act responsibly towards others. Phenomenologically, networking or ‘gridding’ the city does not invite us to extend the grid outwards, but to work inside the boundaries of the net structure. In this we would oppose the view of Frank Lloyd Wright who argued that such a grid would imply boundlessness, capable of extension in all directions. Grids are synchronic models of particular space, and the image of movement is determined by the rods and lines which make up the model. Our idea of the citiy is encrypted by the structure and limits of the model, and not the other way round. Furthermore, the net structure simplifies our sense of distance and the complexity of spaces that would otherwise signify alienation. This is analogous to the feeling that a place is not so very far away if we can identify a route to it made up of a clear series of connecting roads punctuated by identifiable settlements which confirm that we are on the right route. It is the very ease of seeing the route and being able to shorthand it by using road numbers that makes even a long journey appear simple and our destination close at hand. In short, it seems that ‘we are never too far away’. To paraphrase de Certeau (1984): The net model of the city (the Concept-city), like a proper name (eg. M1, A52, B339), provides a way of conceiving, simplifying, and construing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties. (see de Certeau, ibid., p.94) The point here is that the rhetoric of these formal models can stimulate a way of seeing cities as possible communities by mapping the city as an enclosure, a matrix of proximities rather than of distances between. Such analyses feed into the hope for unity - for co-munity. The Imaginary and the Cybernetic Community.We have argued that one way of imagining the city is as a community, and that this image is projected by formal network graphs and grids. In as much as this way of visualising the city-as-community is taken to reveal a proper way (a desired way) of making sense of the city, phenomenologically the model stands as the truth of the real (itself a simulacrum), and of course the real is the model. This inversion is familiar to us through the writing of Baudrillard, but equally the inversion of the real and the imaginary at the level of persuading us to see the world in a particular way is to be found at the heart of Althusser's theory of ideology.Out of the collapse of the city/community distinction arises a further curious movement. We live technologically and aesthetically. InHeideggerian vein, trading on Heidegger’s celebrated essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ we might say that our mode of being is made through the enframing (gestell) - through an ordering structure which sets-upon. We ‘get the picture’ of the world which permits us movement through space. Thus we plan our route, but this route has already been planned for us by the technical enframing of the cartographer. But in not reflectively grasping this hermeneutic, this ‘pre-disposing’, we continue to believe that rationality and freedom are not inimical. In other words we defend the voluntarism of the will and imagination. Our desire always to affirm our choosing to do something is an attempt to give expression to the truth of self - to unconceal self to ourself. And we live that expressive aesthetic truth through technological ordering. Our only crime is that we deny that the ordering patterns our movements, to preserve our sense of self-possession. However, what we can cope with is a squaring of self affirmation as a claim of origin with the originary ordering of nature, so long as that nature is benign or affirming of self. It is the clash between nature and self that is the mother of technological invention - a point Marx knew only too well. The harmony between nature and self when it can co-exist is the original community. Things stand well to each other when nature is inert and we produce simply to reproduce ourselves - that is, when there is an order of the same. Such arrangements are predicated upon a pastoral vision of a fertile earth yielding up her riches prompted by a non rapacious husbandry. This esential community is made no worse by being extended to encompass similiar activities of others. Heidegger might recognise this as a structure of social relations in the condition of standing-reserve. That is a letting things be, uncorrupted by the enframing of technology. Technology becomes dangerous when it is manipulated by the ambitiousness of man. In our modern world ambition is executed in the mode of hyperactivity pressed even on by the demands of capital. Heidegger writes of the technological enframing as destining, but this is to historicise man and it is the fate of the hyperactive world of technologyx and capital to obscure historicity so as to appear to live only in the present. Further, this present is but punctuations, singular moments of now-time, we never knowing what the next moment will bring. Hyperactivity brings forth the challenge of radical contigency and unpredictability. Paradoxically this excitable anxiety of modernity brings on tiredness, often literally. Above all, the city is the place of the hyperactive, the focus of technology and capital variably circuiting by dint of oppurtunities for profit. From Hayek and his teacher Mises we learn this. Mises drives home the message that we live ex ante in anticipation of outcomes which are derailed by the contingent actions of others. The modern city is the space of endless activity, insecure. It is not the structure of standing-reserve. If we can but neutralise this restlessness, then the city may become a more understandable, rderly space. This is what we do by our mediated imagination - we see the city under the net. Net analysis freezes the city, it is at once an enframing which is also in standing-reserve. The rhizomatic movement is arrested by the set flows of horizontal and vertical lines. It is this which structures the heuristic imaginary. In simplifying space, more geometrico, we can re-take possession of ourselves. In a more determinate world we can let things be. We can trust and feel secure. The metaphor of the net connotes an integrated inter-dependency of all the parts, co ordinated by an underpinning undynamic benign structure of rules and regulations. We have here the ground of the imagined community, a space absent of the fear of contingency and without neurotic attachment to rule-systems. Our dream of community is an enclosed soft system in which the absence of threat encourages us to be unconcealed - to express our thoughts, feelings, and concerns. This is an aesthetic ideal flourishing on the basis of an ideal of technology under restraint. It presumes a regularised circuit of flows which is not a totalitarian product of human artifice but is voluntarily self-sponsored reciprocality with the other. Thus such an image of the genesis of community is squared with nature - our original nature as freely willing self-possessing beings. In cyberspace the same relation of the aesthetic to the technological obtains. We let the technology be as if it were benign, and dream of virtual community where we exist in the virtually shared. The lived imaginary of virtual community activates the forgetting of the technological, and the latter goes into standing-reserve. The ideals of virtual community are basically the same as those of the ideals of non-virtual community. They are ideals super-imposed upon uncongenial spaces and modes of living. At the level of human subjectivity the possibility of life in cyberspace can, at least in part be construed as motivated by a resistance to the uncongienial, and ultimately as a manufacturing of an illusion of self possession. We will develop the latter points below. The way the meaning of cyberspace is conceived is then analogous to the way that a methodology of network analysis persuades us to conceive of the city; that is, as a community. Of course not all cybersurfers see cyberspace as a community, but many do. Thus we want to explore for a moment how those who do, talk about the net or parts of the net as a community. The proselytiser and editor of the very first issue of On-line World; Clive Grace comments:"The net has been in the public eye for months now...Over the years it's developed in a community of people all eager to share, enjoy and communicate". Even more preposterous, but altogether more seriously meant is the comment of Thomas Moore in Net Guide (Feb, 1995) Moore, a lecturer in archetypal psychology living in...no, not California, but New York, says that: "The age of therapy is ending, the age of the therapist and patient in one room, one to one. I truly believe this. The new therapy that replaces it will occur outside of a room, in a kind of nurturing community, which the Internet might provide. It will be a community of support and understanding where people with like minded problems talk about the soul, about the heart." (pp. 39-40)His interviewer asks: ‘Group therapy in Cyberspace?’; Moore answers: ‘Why not?’ For Moore, we can even interpret the self on the net. The Harvard academic, Dorothy Zinberg, just the other day in the Times Higher noted in more cynical vein: "Everywhere I turn, whether it is trendy new magazines like Wired or Internet, or to the mesmerised users of the equipment at the latest hot spot in town, the cybersmith, where access to state-of-the-art cyberspace technologies can be rented, or even while lurching along the Infobahn myself, I am bombarded with ‘data’ that proclaims, the arrival of a new community in cyberspace." (p.14, THES, 7.4.1995) Broadly, we sympathise with the scepticism of Zinberg. At best the virtual community is but a projection of community, it is an imagined community which lacks the substance of ontological as well as emotional security. The title of Benedict Anderson's 185 book is very familiar to most of us: Imagined Communities, and irrespective of the purpose of Anderson’s book, which was to explore imagining nations as communities, many writers have latched on to the phrase as giving expression to the phenomena of humans wishing to image as communities the web of relations to persons and environments with whom they are in regular contact. But even if this is what many understand by Anderson's phrase, then they ignore a dimension of community which we consider central to the concept, namely, its affective aspect, the dimension of fellow-feeling bound to ‘being together’. This is the emotional/feeling strand of solidarity. Community is not merely proximity to the other obligating us to be responsible toward the other and toward the community. In Keywords (1976), Raymond Williams refers to this as the persuasive ‘community...of feelings’. Bruce Murray's submission to the Aspen Workshop on ‘Society, Cyberspace and the Future’ goes further when he states that: "..for communities to be harmonious externally as well as internally they must provide not only a sense of belonging and wholeness for their members, but incorporate and tolerate diversity". It is this stress upon belonging and wholeness which we would suggest is not properly a feature of cyberspace interaction, but its possibility is a mythic projection of the desire for a community in the face of a fatalistic belief that we will never discover a true community or a satisfying life in the everyday world. Virtual communities are not imagined because they are virtual, that is that to grasp the virtual we have to make a leap of imagination, but imagined because people wish to refuse the sense of alienation that they may feel in relation to the apparently unstable world around them, and desire to be safely elsewhere. Disalienating effects may be promoted by imputing to cyberspace the property of being a benign objective world, or at least on the parts of cybernauts use. They construct what de Certeau might have called a ‘Concept-community’ which is a law unto itself, it is an in itself, comprehensible and complete for its initiates. The basis for community on the nets is the security afforded by the illusion of being in another world having left behind the environment so troubling to one. We will note below that this kind of alienation is registered as dissatisfaction, disappointment, and frustration as opposed to the grand forms of alienation of say, Marx. As Simmel notes: "The lack of something definite at the centre of the soul impels us to search for momentary satisfaction in ever new stimulations, sensations and external activities." (cf. Philosophy of Money, p.114, 1907/1978) Cyberspace offers a fantastical world through which we can live in an apparent proximity to others, talk to them, share views and express feelings. Howard Rheingold in his recent The Virtual Community cites the comment of sociologist Marc Smith: TVirtual communities require an act of imagination to use, and what must be imagined is the idea of the community itself. What Smith does not point out is that somehow to successfully project the net as a community we must in engage in what Nietzsche called an "active forgetting" that we imagined it as a community in the first place. The structure of a projection of virtual community is a double movement of alienation from the ‘real’ everyday world of objectified culture into the atomised private life-world and then to the ‘virtual’ community world. The latter being an illusion of the virtual community as humanly rich as the ideals of community in the everyday world. Contemporary alienation is not the materially grounded function of dispossession by the capitalist, the removal of surplus value, and the waste of labour power, but the expression at the level of feeling of being distant from, of lacking a meaningful life even if one has no meta-narrativised project to bridge the gulf between how one feels and how one might feel. Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990) picks up on aspects of this when he notes: "If in days gone by, it was sound strategy to accumulate the effects of alienation, today it is safer to stockpile the effects of indifference...Or yet again to become nothing but a ghostly hologram, a laser outline - so that it may then be all the easier to disappear without being noticed, leaving others prey to reality." (p.14)Baudrillard is right in as much as Marx and others who linked the condition of alienation to utopian projects needed alienation to become a cumulative force to motivate revolutionary action. But the aestheticised, contemporary version of alienation is more about feeling disaffected and enervated. In these latter terms, alienation is not linked to utopia, it is not a form of motivation. Alienation in positive terms is drift and indifference; that is, having no motivation to make positive choices, other than when we become ‘grabbed’ by the moments of the appearance of the spectacle. For some that spectacle becomes interesting to them, it offers them a mode of ‘creating’ output, of achieving an end. When this happens a small fissure in the apparent totality of indifference opens. Herewith the possibility of a local emergence of the teleological self of modernity. This is a self which, perhaps at a subliminal level, posits horizons of ‘I could get into this’. But still the frame of indifference prevails allowing people to drift from one activity or person to another. Any change towards ‘being-interested’ is often gradual and discrete. For many the backdrop to doing something is the generalised feeling that ‘I ought to do something to fill my time’. That is, vaguely looking for something interesting - the ‘I suppose I wouldn't mind doing that’. Perhaps we can describe these moments as characterised by the attitude of ‘indifferent purpose’. John Shotter (1980) comments on such processes of social action as unfolding in time. He writes of the view of people as ‘form-creators’ and as rule makers, ie. actively creating a personal form of life thus: "To take such a creative view of human action is to treat it as a formative process in its own right, as a sequence of transformation rather than as merely a sequence of discrete events, as a developing process rather than as merely a (changing) medium through which other (more constant) factors exert their determining influence...Viewing human actions not as a sequence of well-defined events but as something which develops in time, which involves a passage from something less to more definite, emphasise the fact that while we can, on occasions, act deliberately, according to rule, plan or script, we do not always necessarily do so. Often we act simply on the basis of our ‘thoughts and feelings’ we say in terms of the situation ‘as we saw it’" (pp.31-32)Another factor which should be taken into consideration is the expectation, if not, demand by others who are more functionally minded that one should get on and do something, viz. Shotter's other determining factors. This is the cry of parents to children, and of ‘respectable society’ that provides a form of pressure which its victims wish to dissipate. The move to travelling into cyberspace is accidental to the extent that one could have done otherwise, it is not the product of a logic of necessity, but a falling through an access point yet pushed by the relatively gentle forces of curiosity, boredom, opportunity and social pressure. Why, exactly, we pick on this rather than that activity would be one explanation too far, as would be an explanation of the genesis of having an interest. We have to be satisfied with the brute social fact that we do become interested in things, and that, as Shotter suggests, this is often a slow process of accretion. But at root the personal motive to do something else may be as Kracauer (1975) suggests: "travel is one of the greatest possibilities for society (self) to hold itself from a confrontation from itself...it leads to the splendours of the world in order that its ugliness goes unobserved" (p.299). Some may see this process as ‘taking flight’, but in our view such an image would be mistaken. Often people drift away from uncongenial situations to engage in an activity which will placate the people putting them under pressure. It is more a response of ‘OK, I'll have a go at this’. ‘Doing computers’ is one way of filling ones time and more importantly satisfying the demands for a show of purposefulness. Computers are perfect for this as they promote a bounded focused activity which carries intimations of science, knowledge, and production. The inescapable conclusion is that in ‘doing computers’ one is doing something with a point to it. It is not accidental that recent tv ads for computers place a stress on multi-tasking and educational values. We may of course just play with the machines for a few hours to keep happy those who wish us to demonstrate that we are capable of a purposeful life, but some will keep going, acquiring a word-processor, a graphics card, a CD-ROM, a modem, access to the Internet and who knows maybe even full-blown immersion in virtual worlds. The medium of computing and ultimately virtual worlds offer us the transformative power by which to convert the negative unfocused alienation - the disappointment in and indifference towards the world - into a positive good alienation. That is, becoming in a world away from the irritations and boredom of everyday life. Again Kracauer (1930) captures this point when he writes of Berlin that the lights from illuminated monuments, neon signs and advertisements ‘together constitutes an attack on tiredness which wishes to take over...’ (cited in Frisby, 1985, p.141) What may be considered here is that in respect of becoming a cybernaut, ex ante alienation is simply an avowal of tiredness, but ex post seems with hindsight to have been a disaffection with ones life as a whole. If the latter occurs - the ‘I wish I’d got into this sort of thing earlier’, the person concerned may become the committed enthusiast, and then a cyber-evangelist. We now come to the final section of this article where we offer a phenomenological reading of the poetics of self possession in the realm of the virtual. To execute this we have drawn on the extraordinary writing of Bachelard whose ‘Poetics of Space’ explores how the poetic image takes the spirit into the image. Here we are concerned with the absorption of the self into the spectacular surface of cyberspace, and try to show that the relation of self to cyberspace is an illusion of radical otherness and an illusion of projecting an objective world totally different to the non virtual world in which we live disappointingly. We will conclude with some remarks about how we believe the relation between self and cyberspace actually stands, suggesting that it is mmore like the city - hyperactive, lacking in basic structures of security and trust, and ultimately what we could call, without fidelity to Heidegger’s words, inauthentic. A Phenomenology of Cyberspace?As we noted above, Baudrillard writes of how one can disappear, ‘leaving others prey to reality’. (ibid.) Of course, one does not literally disappear, but becomes immersed, and absorbed by at once the technical operation of the medium and the virtual world which one enters, and then one is subject to. This notion of absorption is the collapse of indifference and the emergence of a gradually lost difference.To be absorbed is to become oneself inside a frame where boundaries do not matter. The more one becomes on the inside the less one is aware of an outside. In our view, becoming absorbed is the move into virtual space. It is a fascination with the spectacle or the play of the game that lets us forget that we are fascinated. As with Merleau-Ponty, we become an embodied self inside a frame of whose boundaries we take no account. Such a realm is a space that is not meant diacritically in relation to its outside - that which is another realm of which we are aware. Thus, this space has no meaning as this space, but rather has meaning for the cybernaut from its interior, an interior of which the cybernaut is part. Bachelard puts it thus: "The image offered us...now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, and that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being." (p. xix)The arborescence of the flow of images offered entice us yet further into the depths of hierarchical virtuality, yet we do not see the hierarchy. If we think of the way we use the World Wide Web we should realise that we do not perceive hierarchy. Phenmenologically, each page seems to be lying at the same level as any other page. What we see is the florescent text as we scan it for a keyword to click onto. The seeming endlessness of available information intimates no boundaries and provokes exploration. Yes, we can use the Web in utilitarian fashion, but how few of us do this. There is always something else to look up, just as the gambler will play just another hand. Once absorbed, we live in the domain of cyberspace. Bachelard notes: "But poetry is there with its countless surging images, images through which the imagination comes to live in its own domain." (p. xxv) As we indicated earlier, the property of being truly seduced by the virtual realm is that we forget that we have been seduced, that we have an imaginary life inside the virtual. Baudelaire in his ‘Journaux Intimes’ puts it well: "In certain almost supernatural states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it". (p. 29) Of course the depth of life is always on the surface, on screen. Our absorption into a virtual world is the space of our own confidence, as such it is a felicitous space of which Bachelard says: "Attached to its protective value...are also imagined values which soon become dominant. Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination. For it concentrates being within limits that protect." (p. xxxii)From the perspective of the user she is in the electronic communal womb, the intimate immensity of cyberspace offering her space for support and growth. But on reflection is she not living a solipsistic life in an anomic universe? In this space we do not reflect upon the machines codes and rule structures that control what happens on screen, rather we choose our modes of engagement with others with the horizonal knowledge that we can virtually go elsewhere. We can drop in and drop out, come across things by accident and click on. Cyberspace is a lawless world that has its counterpart in the dangerous city. We do not know who is going to pop up on the discussion groups or whether we are going to suffer viral infection. Of course AIDS only happens in the wicked city. We may live through cyberspace as a participant in a communal setting, but this is an imaginary transmutation of the practices that we actually do. The idea of immensity made manifest by the possibility of ‘always somewhere else to go’, the anomic quality of cyberspace, and the absence of perception of hierarchy (hierarchy always posits origins and ends), produces wonderment. And as Bachelard notes: "The surest sign of wonder is exaggeration." (p.112) Only by phenomenological reflection do we grasp this movement. For Bachelard, the amazement is contained by intimacy, in this case of the relation between the screen image and the user. As we have pointed out this difference is erased by the process of fascination and absorption. When we are involved in a group conversation in cyberspace we are not in intimate relation with the other persons but only in an intimacy with ourselves, with the excitement of anticipation of what is going to come on screen next, or what one is going to say in response, but ultimately always with the magic of the immediate presence of the image into which we are incorporated. Again, Bachelard: "When considered in transmission from one soul to another, it becomes evident that a poetic image eludes causality." (p. xx) Screen images appear as if by magic, we do not perceive the causes of their appearance. They just happen. There are no hidden depths in cyberspace, all is on screen, and because of this we imagine that we reveal all at a touch of the mouse. There is an illusion of the totally public, of an open access democracy, whereas, in fact we are always hidden. Hidden from sight. We can hide our identities, change our identities, go anonymous. We can change our persona, become woman, become man, become transsexual. We can deceive or choose to tell the truth, but nobody can trust the statements we make. All the norms of validation that are part of the communicative structures of the life-world, the public world are undone. The lessons which Grice and Habermas taught us are inverted so that we live in a regime of invalidity claims. The evidencing of self and the manufacture of trust and obligation upon which the construct of community rests becomes unstable, and we are thrown back into the imaginary world of the indeterminate city, the city that contains the fleeting, the spectacle, the symptoms of anxiety. When we finally do step back from absorbed time, we may see that our relation with cyberspace is one overcoded with hope. This is the hope that our dark suspicion of a technological jungle will turn out to be a land of plenty and security. That the deterritorialised alien space of city/cyberspace will permit re-territorialsation by the figures of community which we try to pretend are not a projection of the imagination. Sadly, these are but daydreams of the intimacy of the immense. Or as Bachelard says: "The mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object." (p.190) Thus we are caught between reflexive reason and the poetics of hope that finds re-presentation in the oppositions of city/ community and exteriority/ interiority. Tell your readers that the Internet is a dangerous place Dr. F. Cohen, Personal Computer World, May 1995 (p.545) Graham McBeath and Stephen Webb, April 1995 Bibliography
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