• Cognitive Anthropology, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1969).
• India: An Anthropological Perspective, Goodyear Publishing Company (1973)
• The Said and the Unsaid, Academic Press (1978)
• The Unspeakable, University of Wisconsin Press (1987)
• "A Post-modern In-stance," in: Lorraine Nencel and Peter Pels (eds.) Constructing Knowledge. Authority and Critique in Social Science. Sage Publications (1991)
• Vile Bodies. A Mental Machination. Presented at the international conference "Body Images, Language and Physical Boundaries" at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1993)
• "Mneme. Critique of Cognitive Studie," in: Language Sciences, Vol. 16, no. 1. Pp. 139-159. (1994)

"Vile Bodies," which forms part of the title of this piece is meant to "tune" readers to the text by conjuring images of gyring bodies, whose twisting and turning symbolize the strophes and tropes of this text. "Vile," by itself, is meant to evoke the themes of the text through its anagrams: "evil," "live," "veil," which, with the addition of the gyring figure of the "-s" plural, yield those two potent symbols of popular culture--"Elvis" and "Levis."

The text is also a meditation on the metaphysical contrast between the figures "gyre" and "circle." The latter is expressed in two contemporary encirclements which appear to be different, but are actually the same event. I refer to the destruction of the Davidian cult at Mt. Carmel in the Spring of 1993, and to the now halted construction of the super-collider. Both of these encirclements occur in the vicinity of central Texas, but they have more in common than location in time and place, for they are both allegories of the legitimation of power in the conquest of the body.

These disembodied embodiments are reminders that the body is, after all, a trickster. As the old man said in reply to the doctor's "How are you today?" "Well, some of me hurts most of the time, most of me hurts some of the time, and what don't hurt don't work." This paper, then, is a parody of two body positions--positions in body discourse--that seem to be different, but are, in fact, fitted together in reciprocal intercourse. I call them "Body" and "Anti-body." They are contemporary discourses only because they occur in our time, but they are really repetitions of the tired old Cartesian dualism of body and mind, with, as we might expect under the sign of the gyre as well as the circle, a new twist.

Body people keep reminding us that the body is the source, ground, and foundation of being, feeling, perceiving, and knowing; it is the concrete living/lived, enacting/enacted, present-centered, experiencing/experienced body-as-organism (Varela 1992:320-328; Lock 1993:133-155). For my purposes here, there are two strands of body discourse, one in which the body more-or-less symbolizes a kind of pre-rational natural power which is the source of all creation, change, movement, and time. It is opposed to the alienating artifice of reason, which is not only abstract and disembodied, but creates only by means of a deception in which it appropriates and distorts what was initially provided by the body. Since reason is parasitic and at best only distorts what it illegitimately appropriates, this body of discourse, which one finds articulated most clearly in some versions of feminism, seeks a kind of nostalgic-therapeutic return to the pre-rational bodily source, a return that will enable us to rediscover feeling and intuitive understanding before they were transformed and perverted by the unnatural acts of reason. We will re-establish community and connection through the powers of the pre-rational. We could say that this is a kind of paganism.

The second body of body discourse conjures the imagery of the body not as a rejection of reason, but as the way for reason to heal itself. It returns to the body-as-origin not for a permanent stay, but in search of a pharmakon--a cure for reason's maladies. We could say that it is a kind of Catholic Christianity. Incarnation is not the end, it is only the beginning of transfiguration. Here one thinks of Merleau-Ponty (1963) or more recently, of Bourdieu (1977), Lakoff and Johnson (1987), or of the "rerendering (my italics) of the body" in some contemporary biology (Sagan 1992:363). They seek community through reasoned consensus.

Common to both bodies of discourse is the idea that the body is the origin and foundation, the literal source of all psychic functions. Concepts, imagination and memory are tropological transformations of the body's concrete symbiosis with the environment. These discourses differ only in their respective attitudes toward tropes. For the first discourse, tropology itself is the problem, but for the second discourse, it is only the failure to understand how tropes are derived that makes them objectionable. There is nothing new in either of these discourses since their central notions have formed the basic constants in the narrative of the psyche's origin at least since Aristotle. Even their difference is not new, for the idea of embodiment or incorporation is reminiscent of the Stoic objection to the Logos of both Plato and Aristotle.

In contrast to these body people, the anti-body folk want to get rid of the body, to decouple it from the subject, to inoculate the mind against the viral body (Stone 1992:20). They are akin to those Protestants for whom the body is an obstacle to spiritual perfection, an obstruction in the path to the Heavenly City. For contemporary anti-bodians, the body is just something to be overcome before consciousness can enter entirely into the world of the disembodied network of cyberspace where the mind is no longer the mind in the encumbering organic body, but is "... interpolated into the matrices of techno-scientific maps" (Harraway 1992:42) as the mind-as-machine in the "machinic body," the "body without organs," the Cyborg. Here the body, sensorially enhanced by various cybernetic prostheses, is overcome by its machine mind which detaches consciousness from the body and projects it into the intercommunicant network as another voice in the choir of angels.

Despite the breathless "gee-whizzness" of antibody discourse with its supposedly paralogical interventions and its brave talk of bodies that are neither substances nor defined organically by form and function, but are constituted instead by relations of rest and motions, as relations between different velocities, as affects and affecting, as latitude and longitude (Deleuze 1992:625-632), much of the discourse is incantatory word-magic and relies on traditional tropes, rhetorical strategies, and narratives. Moreover, binarism and the Cartesian matrix, on which the whole discussion of networks and cyberspace depend, are hardly new and revolutionary. They are standard methods of the techno-fascism that has characterized the hubris of Western culture at least since Descartes.

Even the opposition posed here between body and anti-body discourses is hardly startling. It merely continues the old game of opposition between mind/body, spirit/material, that has been the mainstay of Western metaphysics. Recommendations for a return to the world of material reality and exhortations to leave it behind (for good, if possible) are standard stuff, particularly in the modern epoch where these two themes have complicitly opposed one another again and again. They are part of the old modernist program that simultaneously opposed and endorsed primitivism and futurism, low civilization and high technology, and indeed, it is just this juxtaposition--low civilization/high technology that is being characterized here in these body metaphors.

It is, of course, true that the body is often the source of metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claim, but it is also the target of metaphors. Consider the following examples:

I. The Body as the Source of Metaphor

The foot of the mountain
The mouth of the river (cave)
A neck of land
The lip of a glass (cup)
The tongue of a shoe (wagon)
The mind's eye
The eye of the storm
The long arm of the law
The finger of fate
The belly of the volcano
The head of the line (company, department)
The teeth of a harrow (comb)
A table leg
A leggy plant
A wine with good legs
A body of water (work)
Someone is cheeky (nosy)
Someone has balls (cheek)
Someone is a prick (asshole, fat ass, cunt, armpit)
Give someone a hand (knuckle sandwich)
A knuckle duster

2. The Body as the Target of Metaphor

The pupil (doll) of the eye
The bridge of the nose
The lobes of the ear
The mount of Venus
The mother of the hand (the thumb)
The mouse of the arm (the bicep)
The brain is a hydraulic system (telephone exchange, computer)
The soup strainer (moustache)
Muscles are ropes and pulleys
Veins and arteries are canals
The lungs are bellows
The pot (belly)
The testicles are nuts (balls)
The process (penis)
Breasts are melons (knockers)
The eyes are windows
Someone has legs like tree trunks (piano legs)
The trunk of the body
A shock of hair
A mop of hair
Apple-cheeked
Prune-faced
Pear-shaped
Hourglass-shaped
Eyes like pissholes in the snow
Sunken eyes
Drum of the ear
Roof of the mouth
Crown of the head
Shoulder blades
Calf of the leg

Far more interesting than these uses of the body and/or its parts as the source and target of metaphors is the organic/organismic, part/whole synecdoche that enables the idea that the body is a whole consisting of parts, each functioning to maintain the body by carrying out its particular job. This is the source of the idea of society--and of other non-organic "organizations"--as an integration of parts working together to maintain and reproduce a "self-regulating," "self-organizing," and "self-perpetuating" whole. This organic trope has always contrasted with metonymy, the mechanical relation of parts-to-parts, and was further contrasted with the machine, whose movements are geometric transformations of energies imparted to it from outside. The contrasts are straight-forward. The machine is a totalization; it is not a whole, for it cannot be characterized by the kind of reciprocity and reflexivity denoted by "self-," as in "self-perpetuating" above. There is but one activity for which "self-" may be used in characterizing machines, and that is "self-destructive." Just as biologists say that the aim of every cell is to make another cell, we can say that the aim of every machine is to destroy itself (keep that in mind the next time you plunk down $60,000.00 for your new Mercedes). One need only observe briefly the working of the internal combustion engine to get the idea. A whole chain of countervailing forces is needed to control a sequence of explosions that would otherwise make the engine rip itself apart--which it ultimately does anyway.

The Purusa Sukta in the Rg Veda is perhaps the most concrete expression of the metaphor "society is a body." This hymn is dedicated to the first sacrifice, which was man (Purusa). His severed body parts constituted the hierarchic order of society. The Brahmin (priest, the highest social class) was born from his head; the Ksatriya (warrior, the second highest social class) was born from his arms and shoulders; the Vaisa (landowner, merchant, the third highest social class) was born from his torso; and the Sudra (laborer, the lowest social class) was born from his legs and feet. Each class, moreover, has its own specific duties in the performance of sacrifice and in the maintenance of social order and social reproduction. Each class, by performing its proper duty, contributes to the good of the whole, just as the parts of the body, by performing their proper functions, contribute to the functioning of the whole body.

Here the etymological connections among organ, work, energy, surgeon, organization (all from IE *uergom) are foregrounded. The energy expended by the organ in doing its work creates organization--the body of organs. Along with telos, these concepts answer the question of "works for what?" They have provided the prime model of Western society for centuries, and their implicates have been the instruments by which a hierarchical society has legitimized and justified the oppression/suppression of those whose work was deemed to be lower in the scale of symbolic significances structured by the ideologization of power/reason.

This organic metaphor of society is now either explicitly discredited or is evoked nostalgically for political purposes. Except as a rhetorical stratagem, society is no longer a body, or even less, a body politic. It is only a collection of disconnected organs whose work has been dis-organ-ized. Society no longer works and work is no longer the defining characteristic of orphaned organs. This dis-organ-ization of work, brought about by the relativization of work to the needs of the multi-national corporation has disconnected work from society. Despite the body metaphor implied by "corporation," the multinational corporation is not a body, nor is it an organ of society. It has no locus within society and performs no functions necessary to society that are not first necessary to itself. At its most effective, it is an organ without a body, or when less effective, it is the "tail that wags the dog." Society is not longer a "self-regulating," "self-organizing," "self-perpetuating" whole. It is neither organic nor mechanical. It is a simulacrum of the organic, the organic recreated and reproduced by the mechanical symbolizing instrumentality of the machine--the trick of the machine (from Latin machina "a device," "a trick"). It is the trick of the application of reason to the body.

The application of reason to the body treats the body not just as a machine, but as a sculpted effect. This sculpting has a long history that is not limited just to the human body, but is recorded as well in the history of the transformation of plant and animal bodies. The whole, long story of plant and animal domestication is nothing but the tale of how plants and animals were remodelled for such specific purposes as greater size, ease of handling, and dependable yield. It is the story of the trick that transformed ecologically emergent organisms into logically designed machines. It is the story of the application of the idea of mechanical reproduction even before the advent of the machine, and it is the model behind the idea of genetic engineering, which is itself the reversal of the ingenuous metaphor that generated engine--the "passion" of the machine-out of genus--the reproductive power of the organism. The gene and the en-gene (engine) are the energies that carry out the work of mechanical reproduction, which is to say that "the *gen- and the *gen- are the *uergom that carry out the *uergom of mechanical reproduction.

The story proceeds from body sculpting to body re-organ-ization by means of body supplements and part replacements. The list of practices is long, but some sense of its range can be evoked by considering such things as eye glasses, false teeth, hearing aids, pace-makers, skin grafts, circumcision, clitoridectomies, organ transplants, liposuction, breast enhancement, hair dyes, false eye lashes, contact lenses, penis implants, lipstick, rouge, ear piercing, tattooing, nose piercing, dieting, sex changes, plastic surgery, and tissue implants. The list includes everything from what might be called "repairs" to enhancements, the latter being both symbolic/aesthetic and sensory/instrumental. In the beginning the aim is to transcend the limitations of the body-as-given through improvements that make it conform more closely to cultural ideals of form and make it work better as an instrument for fulfilling the imperatives of social function. The list could be extended to include all tools, for they are, in fact, more-or-less detachable prostheses--machines that become organs of the body and enhance its performance. This "tool-as-organ" metaphor derives from the inversion of the metaphor "the organ is a tool." Thus, the tool : the machine :: the organ : the body implies "the organ is the tool of the body, and the tool is the organ of the machine," which implies that the machine and the body are joined by the common instrumentality of their tool/organs. This is the metaphoric means by which machines are adapted to bodies and bodies are adapted to machines, and machine bodies are adapted to machine/societies.

All of the body "improvements" listed above are more than exterior changes, for they are at the same time inner transformations of consciousness. Some changes have small and seemingly inconsequential implications for consciousness while others, such as sensory prostheses, have more powerful effects. The latter are akin to crude technologies that employ direct violence in restructuring consciousness, such as lobotomies, electric shock, insulin shock, psychoanalysis, propaganda, advertisements, and education. But all of these violent means are too blunt and imprecise, and their effects are often unpredictable and undesirable. The contemporary goal of bioengineering is something more like "precision bombing" or "surgical strikes" that destroy just the functions you want to eliminate without effecting adjacent or related functions that you want to preserve or enhance. There should be no "incontinent ordnance" (shooting your own troops by accident) in the battle to enhance the body through the elimination of unwanted effects. The contemporary goal of enhancement through the magnification of desirable effects is similarly motivated by the desire for precision and the limitation of unwanted side-effects. The central idea is that whatever is to be eliminated or enhanced can be treated as if it were completely isolable and independent of any organismic or ecological context. Manipulation of a single gene, for example, should effect only the output of that gene and should have no synergistic effects on the output of other genes.

Restructuring the genetic code is an attempt to re-organ-ize the body from within by changing its means of self-reproduction. Other technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, embryo implants, and artificial insemination, have a similar aim, but are less predictable. They contain uncontrolled mechanisms that create unforeseen effects. They do not make perfect or predictable copies, but all, including genetic engineering, are modern versions of the ancient paternal desire for immortality, the father's wish to reproduce perfect copies of himself without the risk of the image-imperfecting womb.

All of these practices defeat the idea of the body as an assemblage of parts working together as a self-sustaining, self-organizing, self-producing, autonomous unit. They dissect the body and disperse its organs, just as in the Purusa Sukta, but unlike that hymn, they do not implicate a social body reconstituted from these severed parts. Only an inner restructuring of consciousness can reflect and produce the outer restructuring of society, for it is by means of the reflexivity of selfunderstanding that consciousness conceives of its own organization as the organization of the body and as the organization of society. When consciousness no longer understands the social and physical body as a body, as an organ-iz-ation, but thinks of it only as a dissipated and dispersed array of dissected bits that are no longer parts of anything other than the array that may arrange them without organ-iz-ation in the matrix-that-is-not-a-womb, there can be no consciousness that reflexively understands itself as a self-constituted, self-constituting organ-iz-ation. Consciousness can neither reflexively conceive of itself as an organon nor see itself reflected as an organization in the mirror of the dis-organ-ized physical and social body. Consequently, the grammar of reflexivity that posits the self that reflects upon itself as the subject of its own objectivity and the object of its own subjectivity no longer organizes consciousness or any of its discourses.

The inner restructuring of consciousness both reflects and produces the outer restructuring of what was the physical and social body, but the model of the body-as-organism-organon is replaced by a different, more virulent form of Cartesianism, one that at last realizes the full possibilities of the Cartesian matrix in the idea of the network that inhabits and is inhabited by the Cyborg (Harraway 1985), the machine/body, the body that has become its own prostheses, the body that, in order to meet the needs of postmodern capitalism, has been technologically modified and brought into conformance with the ideals of techno-fascism.

The machine/body, which is a fusion of the mechanical and the organic, blurs the distinction between the machine and the organism, but this interpenetration of the mechanical and the organic does not produce an Hegelian synthesis that overcomes the difference between machines and organisms in the form of a new, emergent, universal ur-mensch, nor does it merely reduce the organic to the mechanical, as in earlier forms of mechanical reductionism. It does not, in other words, produce a mechanical superorganism nor reduce organisms to machines. Instead, it posits the idea of the machine-as-organism. These living machines are not robots, hominoids, or purely mechanical automata, as in earlier forms of Cartesianism, but are organisms whose sensory-motor and logic-memory systems have been remodelled and supplemented by computers. Computers enhance human perception and imagination, but they also "capture" human organismic capabilities for the machine. The organism is captured by its prosthesis. These living machines have not somehow acquired the organic capabilities of self-organization, self-maintenance, and self-reproduction by a kind of emergent machine consciousness, but because these organic capabilities are now managed by machines, machines have, somewhat parasitically, captured these capabilities, much as an animal species is able do things it is organically incapable of by "capturing" other species that can do what they cannot. This relation of machine and organism, however, is not symbiotic, since only one part of the relationship is biotic. It is biomechanical, where that name properly implies what its linguistic form declares it to be: namely, the "biology of machines." What is now called bio-mechanics should be called mechanobiotics, the understanding of biology as mechanics.

This blurring of the distinction between bodies and machines is part of the long history of the capture and domestication of nature by culture, the triumph of reason over the pre-rational, of civilization over the primitive, which has brought about the general failure of the polar differentia that have constituted the givens of Western metaphysics. It is one episode in the story of the failure of the opposition between nature and culture that has produced the naturalization of culture and the culturization of nature, and which has, in turn undermined all the fundamental oppositions of Western metaphysics, such as natural/artificial, body/mind, organic/mechanical, female/male, process/structure, chance/determinism, passion/reason, and unconscious/conscious (Harraway 1992).

The Panglossian reading of these failures is that they are liberating. They will free minds from centuries old metaphysical errors, and they will free individuals from power structures that have traditionally controlled access to the global network of information. In place of individuals defined in terms of essences in opposition to other essences, it will ultimately produce "....a revolution in intelligence, sensitivity and creativity...." (Guattari 1992:30), and bring in to being true processual, singularizing, self-valorizing subjectivities (ibid. 19-22). This revolution will be realized through the computerization of subjectivity that will enable the hyper-development of visual imaging, memory storage, rapid processing and updating, access to information in international data banks, and the formation of virtual communities connected to one another through the cybernetic network.

A cynic might say that this reversion to enlightenment rhetoric within the discourse of techno-fascism is either an hypocritical stratagem or a piece of Heideggerian naivete, but what is most interesting in this version of futurist discourse is its avoidance of any real account of the role in this utopia of the universal totalitarianism of deterritorialized capitalism, of free market, global capitalism, which arrogates to itself all the functions that were formerly thought to belong to the state or to society or to the community or to the individual. The state has, indeed, "withered away," not by means of communism, but by means of a capital driven techno-fascism that now needs neither the state nor society, and everywhere seeks to free itself from their encumbering archaisms. In this "biosocial world" (Rabinow 1992: 241) it will not have been the "free play" of techno-science "working out," in grand, unmolested, autonomous innocence, the implications and imperatives of its own ideas and practices, it will have been techno-science bottom-lined by the market and "working up" the imperatives of the market. To put it differently, it is pure romanticism to believe that techno-science will be permitted to work out its own destiny independently of global capitalism. And it is folly to suppose, with Deleuze, Guattari, Harraway, and Rabinow that global capitalism will be undermined and overcome by the liberating forces of techno-science. Techno-science too, will not have the privilege of the grammar of reflexivity that would grant it the power of predicating "self-." The failure of the super collider project and the scaling back of NASA are sufficient reminders of how the market imposes its will on the production of all knowledge, techno-scientific or otherwise.

The body is property, and it, or its various parts, can be bought and sold. Though we may have abolished slavery, we still legally recognize that bodies--not just their labor, but bodies themselves--are property, things that have a price, things that can be owned and transferred from one person to another, and even though there is not now an explicit market for bodies or body parts, there is, as economists might say, an imperfect one. For some time now, we have sold our blood, semen, ova, and hair for a price, and in the forms of surrogate mothers and prostitutes, have even allowed bodies to be rented out. Moreover, separate body parts, along with the life of the body, have an "administered" price based on a kind of labor theory of value that is only indirectly set by the market and the law of supply and demand. Thus, in return for premiums, insurance companies regularly put a value on lives and body parts, agreeing to pay so much in the event of the body's death, so much for the loss of an arm, so much for the loss of an eye, so much for the loss of a finger. Particularly valuable body parts, such as the arms of baseball pitchers, or the noses and cheekbones of actresses, can be insured for large amounts that reflect their "earning potential."

On our deaths, our personal "rights over our bodies" can be disposed of by will and testament, if for example, we should choose to donate body parts to a hospital or a needy relative. We may also donate some "redundant" or "self-replacing" body parts, such as kidneys or blood while we are still living, but these personal rights over our bodies end with our deaths and, if we do not ourselves dispose of these rights before death, our bodies become the property of our next of kin, who can donate them, or certain parts of them, to a hospital, which then chops them up into marketable components and sells them to its customers in the form of organ transplants. Organ procurement agencies collect these donated body parts and distribute them to transplant hospitals who then install them as replacements in their customers. These procurement agencies are paid a fee that includes a payment to the hospital to cover the costs of "harvesting" organs. Also included in the fee are the expenses of "storing" the organ and of "shipping" it from one place to another. Agencies also include various "overhead" charges in determining their final price. Transplant hospitals then pass along these procurement agency charges to the organ recipient as a percentage of the total cost of the transplant operation. Even though we might say that persons do not have a right to rip out parts of their own living bodies and hawk them about in the bazaar next to the butcher shop or to sell any of their own body parts that are not "redundant" or "self-replacing" for harvest before they are dead, it is clear that the effect of the fiction of "donation" is to make it legal for fictive persons, such as hospitals and organ procurement agencies, to sell body parts (taken from both living and dead bodies) in the market place. It will have been only a matter of time before we will have given to the poor, the infirm, and the disenfranchised of the world the right to sell their bodies or body parts--so long as they do not profit directly or excessively by the sale. As they are now, sales will be made only through "appropriate" profit-making intermediaries such as hospitals and procurement agencies, and only to those who can pay the price. We will have given the poor the qualified right to sell their bodies in order that they may become more useful to society as spare parts for the rich.

Human bodies or body parts may not yet be listed on the commodities exchange, but we do buy and sell them much as we buy and sell corn and wheat or any other commodity, and we calculate the price in terms of all the usual economic variables of scarcity, transformation, storage, and transportation. By separating the idea of the person from the body and by transferring personal rights to fictive persons we accomplish the legal fiction for the sale of bodies and their parts. There is nothing new in this process; it is merely the working out of market principles and the possibilities of property already long established, but it does tell us that when the semantic distinction between nature and culture, machine and organism finally disappears into the amphiboly of the "living machine," everything becomes a resource that can be appropriated, allocated, and transformed according to the imperatives of the imperial market, and when human eggs, sperm and body parts can be bought and sold like chicken eggs and pork bellies, and human bodies can be genetically resculpted and cloned like those of pigs and peanuts to meet the needs of the market, it is not a revolution in subjectivity; it is the elimination of subjectivity and the silencing of every ethical voice except that of the market-as-transcendental-subjectvity, the deus ex machina that decides for us. There will be no "....voices of self-reference developing a processual subjectivity that defines its own coordinates...." (Guattari 1992:19), and it will not be the computer-enhanced, liberated subjectivities of humans that speaks and decides; it will have been the computer-enhanced, liberated voice of the market speaking, as it were, through the mask of god--but perhaps not the God Heidegger had in mind. When the market will have become the Nietzschean "free play of power" and the "transvaluation of all values," when the market will have become nature humans will have ceased to exist as such. They will have become apotheosized as interchangeable and expendable parts of the transcendental subjectivity of the market--in that time when the "house of being" will have been not even a "machine for living," but a "living machine."

It is also predictable modernist romanticism to suppose that residual pockets of primitivism will contain the key to the reappropriation of machinic subjectivity, that the "barbarian compromise" of a "North-South axis" will function as a mediating third voice of self valorization for human collectivities (Guattari 19 92:14-16). Nothing could be more symptomatic of the failure of techno-scientific discourse than this re-cycling of the tired old modernist theme of the primitive-as-therapeutic, this juxtaposition of past and future, primitive and techno-futurism as the cure for the present.

This is not to say that the relatively dystopic present will be replaced by an absolutely dystopic future as envisioned by Gibson (1984) and other science fiction writers and film makers. These apocalyptic visions--in spite of their seeming departures from standard textualization and cinematography--are little more than bad digests of the Book of Revelations, including even its obscurities of emplotment and character motivation. They do not, in other words, portend innovative reflections of Cyborg sensitivity and sensibility; they are little more than predictable works of modernist transgression that, at best, merely repeat, with heavy-handed pretentiousness, the eschatology, the themes, and textual imperatives of the inventio they purport to transgress.

The rhetoric of techno-science and of its redundant surrogate, science fiction, is boringly predictable. There is the same tired deployment of narrative stages (usually three), the same desire for apotheosis and resolution, even if it is nothing more than the expected ironic irresolvability, the same invocation of the forces of good and evil, even if they are veiled in the seemingly vile manners of sinners who, by the depth of their gyring plunge into the abyss of sin, are closest to virtue, if not God, the same use of displacement into phantasmagoric realms of unfamiliar realities or of familiar realities defamiliarized, the same themes of altered states of consciousness induced either by this displacement or by Kafkaesque metamorphoses of body and mind, the same simultaneous evocation of nostalgia, elegy, threat, and transmogrification, the same confrontations of identities confused, established, and disintegrated, the same, the same. We might well ask why the new forms of Cyborg-consciousness have produced no new rhetoric. To reply that it is only because of their relative infancy would be to miss the main point, which is: Cyborg consciousness is not new. It is merely the working out of themes and ideas already available, not just in the textual tradition, as Gadamer might say, but of what is already possible within the form of consciousness facilitated by the Cartesian matrix, which is, after all, the source and means of the computer itself. Just as the network is the idea of the matrix projected outward onto the social body, the computer is the idea of the matrix introjected into the mind as the body of thought.

Even contemporary discussions about civil society, which might be expected to reflect or reflect upon the implications of the "living machine" for communities and individuals, have been only tentative and have continued to cast the discussion in the wholly traditional terms of the opposition between individual rights and the good of society. In the world of the "living machine," where individuals and society are at best only archaisms, the current debate between liberals and communitarians, which focuses almost exclusively on the issue of individual rights versus the good of society, is beside the point--para. Individuals and society are no longer relevant terms in the construction of the idea of the civil, and when the civil will have become the market, we can no longer imagine the civil as the norms, customs, laws and usages that govern the conduct of individuals in society as if the images of the individual and society were still relevant. Both liberals and communitarians assume that there are undivided unities of thought and expression or of values, beliefs, and practices, identities that can be characterized as bundles of shared essences. Individual and society are actually homologous "individuals" in competition with one another. The collectivity is simply a fictive individual with rights, needs, and dispositions, and the individual is a sensorial community with rights, needs and dispositions. Both pretend to reflexive understanding, arrogating to themselves the autonomizing reflexive "self-." Both liberals and communitarians presume the necessity of consensus, whether it is that of the individual's identity-producing sensus communis or that of society's identity-producing agreements in values, beliefs, and shared understandings. They neither address, in an interesting way, the changes and transformations of the life-world brought about by the technologies of rational control that have produced the mechanization of life and the vitalization of the machine, nor do they seek to understand the way the structure and content of subjectivity--whether of individuals or of society--is altered and manipulated by the powerful phantasmatic instrumentalities of the computer and television. Where bio-engineering and genetic engineering remodel life forms and the computer and television reformulate imaginative possibilities, the imagery of the individual and society, and all the familiar dualisms associated with their opposition and complementarity are not so much eliminated or resolved as they are simply set aside--para--as no longer relevant issues in any discourse. They will have become part of the grammar of a dead language.

The favorite sensorial prosthesis of the modern age, the prosthesis that in fact enabled the modern age, is the mirror-cum-lens installed in such machines as telescopes and microscopes that enhance the visual sensorium by producing images as magnified reflections of things out there. We have come to the end of the age of mirrors, not that we have given up on visual images--quite the contrary--we are more involved with images that do not just reflect and magnify exterior objects, but--with our participation--co-create ourselves and the objects we inspect. Typical examples are the computer-enhanced images produced by magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, and, of course, in pure form, virtual realities of all kinds produced in the prosopon, the so-called human-machine "interface."

The production of such virtual realities is no mere re-inscription of the idea of representation, for a virtual image is not a straight-forward mirroring or representation of an originary object out there. Such an image is a manifestation in the strict sense--but perhaps not by the manus of God--or maybe by the left hand. It is part of the displacement of the object out there by paradigmatic objects, and it illustrates the simultaneous involvement and displacement of the subject in the production or construction of the object. Here the character of subjectivity is also being re-imaged, re-imagined, just as it was in the modern period by its Involvement with the lens. A different prosthesis creates a different subjectivity--one that is no longer certain of its identity apart from its prosthesis. We have then, subjectivities produced without mirrors, for we have stepped through the looking glass into a different kind of narcissism in which there are no reflections of an I and no eye that sees the I.

The transformation of subject and object implicates the emergence of a different kind of semiology in which the signifier/signified relation will no longer constitute a foundational structure of opposition. It will have been a semiology in which signifier/signified will have been no longer significant. It will have been a different grammar.

Because living machines neither communicate with one another nor interrogate nature from within that distance of the identities self-other/subject-object, they require a different grammar, a grammar of participatory imagery in which no firm distinction between form and content, logos and imago, and subject and object guarantees the structure of reason or legitimates a form and style of writing as the representation of reason. We will have thought a grammar and a writing "...without presence and without absence, without history, without cause, without arcia, without telos..." (Derrida 1982:67). This grammar, appropriate to, and appropriated by, living machines must reformulate the categories of person, tense, voice, and the sentential structure based on the oppositions of subject/object, and noun/verb (Bohm 1980:1-65, 173-213, Pred and Pred 1985:465-470).

Person and time are figures of discourse. Just as the "I" signifies "person" only by means of its occurrence in a discourse so that "I" is the voice of the speaker, the per-sonare (by sound) rather than the per-s'opta (by sight), time too, is the creature of voice, of the speaker speaking now. The present is generated in the act of utterance, which, as Benveniste says "...is renewed with each production of discourse...[and]...is coexistent with our own presence..." (1971:8 3). Moreover, this present, this speaking now is always conditioned by the negativity of an unspeakable "...will have been said..." which contains within it those negations of the present known as the past and the future. The present presents itself as the dialectical overcoming of its negativity and thus as the overcoming of time in the now, the immediate, the in-mediate, unmediated by the past and future.

This dialectic of the present constitutes a paradigm in which now is the objective moment of the real, of the being that can be known as the true. In addition to the differentiation of time into past, future, and present, it presents a prolation, a structure of oppositions involving objective vs. subjective , real vs. unreal, being vs. non-being, known vs. unknown, true vs. untrue, the One vs. the Many, universal vs. particular, timeless vs. time, and indication vs. signification. The unreal opposes itself to the surreal, non-being opposes the become to the becoming, and the unknown opposes remembering to imagination. These relations of opposition are illustrated in thought picture 1.

Thought picture 1 tells the following story. We can only know for sure what is present in the present, for that is what is real and can be indicated, shown, pointed out as an object coexisting in the present with the act of indicating. Thus, whatever is present is an objective, real being that can be shown or demonstrated as a "this here now," a "truth." As for the past and the future, whatever is there is not a real being. In the case of the past, it is only what has become, a no-thing, a non-present, a not here anymore, a was, an unreal remembered something, an untruth, a subjective non-being that can only be signified but not indicated, and known only mediately as a memory. The future is only a surreal , a subjectivity, something imaginable but not knowable because it is a becoming, a not here yet, a "wannabe" that can be signified but not indicated. Nothing true can be said of it except that whatever is "in it" does not exist--yet.

This paradigm of the present is the "grammar of the real." Whatever can be truly written must conform to this structure of oppositions. But this grammar depends upon the sleight of hand that establishes indication as the means of making objects known to subjects. Its basis seems to be something like pointing, a gesture that directs someone's gaze to a visible object. It thus presumes someone who points, something pointed to, and someone pointed-for, and thus conforms to the actor/action grammar of agent, action, patient, and beneficiary.

Although the agent or actor might be signified by a personal name, a noun, or a pronoun, in the case of a supposedly originating predication, the only real candidates available for that slot are "I," or a deictic "this," "that." "He points," or "John points," or "something points," for example, cannot be foundational because these utterances presuppose an "I say he, John, somebody points." As we have seen, however, "I" cannot be posited as existing prior to the discourse in which "I" occurs. This grammar then, cannot be founded on the agent or actor subject. Similarly, the object, the pointed to and the pointed-for are brought into the present only by the discourse that originates from the non-foundational "I." The action of pointing, in turn, makes no sense without someone who points to something for someone. The deictics "this" or "that" accompanying the gesture of pointing, or represent it, can only be imagined as having the function of representing in a context of discourse where someone is pointing out something for someone for some reason. In effect, the act of indicating, which establishes the connection between objects and subjects by "presenting" objects to subjects not only recapitulates the grammar of actor/agent, it also presupposes a discourse in which the "this" or "that" can mean "this here now" or "that right over there now." Indication, which pretends to be the means of the present that establishes the objective reality of knowable objects, cannot be performed solely within the present, for not only is the present itself already conditioned by the negativity of "it will have been," the act of indicating too, is similarly conditioned by "it will have been said." The realities of the present cannot be established either by unspoken gestures or by uttered pronouns. There is finally, no useful distinction between indicating and signifying (Cf. Derrida 1973: Ch 2). We can say that indicating is nothing more than another way of signifying.

The consequence of the failure of indication as a wholly separate means of representation is that the grammar of the real contains a paradox. It is the means of the discourse of the real that ensures that the real will always be represented as the unreal. The present does not actually overcome its negativity as much as it contains it within itself as a kind of secret, unspeakable discourse. In the remainder of this text I will have attempted to write this unspeakable discourse by means of a parody of the grammar of the real, a prosopopeia.

Since reflexivity, the positing of the self-, is the central grammatical function in the idea of the organic, grammatical reconstruction begins with the category person, which says 'asmi' ("I am"), 'asit' ("he/she/it is"), and which is the simultaneous source and goal of the reflexive. Person will have been recast in accordance with the machinic self which has no fixed identity, but is instead infinitely multiple. In the first place, the easy rapport among individual and person through the psychological and grammatical notions of identity, subject, and subjectivity cannot be sustained in the absence of identity. Secondly, there can be no reflexivity where there are no identities. Self-, in other words, is not produced in the overcoming of the opposition of subject and object where these are not separable, fixed identities. The individual, which predicates self- of it-self does not emerge except in the context of an identity producing negativity that enables the difference between self/other, subject/object. The enunciative priority of the first person singular--whether God or the individual-- which enables the possibility of self-reference through the identity of "I" as the speaker, is disabled through the failure of the singularizing individual. The first person singular is muted in favor of the first person plural, which will have been anyway the culmination of the desire of Western metaphysics, in spite of the fact that it will have been the first person singular that will have provided the optical/visual priority of "I see," which, though subjective, is the basis for all objectivity when "I see" becomes magically transformed into "We see." The ambiguity here is that We are not so sure about the "We," especially when there's nothing to "see," as in the case of thinking, knowing, believing, wanting, and intending. We think "I think" is more certain than "We think" and We know "I know" is more certain than "you know."

The unhappiness of the first person is that we now think there's something odd about an "I think" or an "I am" that will have been prior to a "We think" and a "We are." The solitary cogito thinks its own being only if it is not solitary--as Vygotsky, but not Piaget, might have put it. This silencing of the originary ego-centric out-cry, the primordial predicament, however, does not establish a foundational first person plural "WE" that we could simply re-inscribe by the old way of writing as a kind of super I. We have to remember the implication of plurality here as a sign of multiplicity and multivocality that cannot be reduced, by a kind of "consensing" act, to a single voice or a single subject--the multitude singing, as it were, in harmony. Pandemonium will have been as reasonable, and we will have thought the idea of the individual which is neither a particular nor a universal, but is the unity of their difference, the individual which cannot posit self- without another, which is not an essence, a collection of qualities, traits, attitudes, memberships--the individual without singular identity.

The time of the organism is the present of its past and future, but the time of the living machine is ambiguous. The old writing will have located everything in the past. This is the paradox of history and historicization. All events are relativized to history--except history. The relativization to time and context is possible only through the universalization of history--which is also the universalization of the causality that enables science, even as the latter will have seemed to have repudiated both history and causality.

The hegemony of the writing that will have been implicated here is displaced by endless textualizations that never produce a text, by the secondary orality of television and multi-media presentation, and by performance--the dramaturgic acting out of a presentation. The whole armamentarium of classical reason is in question here--identity, causality, proximate action, the excluded middle, and the Cartesian coordinates of space that map the world into the imaginary matrix that makes reason.

There is an antipathy between history and civil society, a kind of Gresham's Law. History drives out civil society, reduces it to something like sociology or economics or political science. So we return here to another idea of history more compatible with a Ciceronian imagination where history is not history, a narrative that unfolds in or through time, but is instead fabula and exempla. Fabula are the stories we tell for rhetorical purposes--stories that do not function as narratives or as systems of rules, or as universals guaranteed by scientific method, but which function instead as examples. Examples need not narrate, though they might, and they are neither particular nor universal, but contain within themselves the possibility of both particular and universal. An example is a concrete particular, but it portends more than its particularity; it invites the imagination to go beyond the particular, to see in it a kind of universality.

We think causes produce effects even when we say we don't think that way anymore. But the machinic subjectivity will want to have thought that effects will have produced their own causes--will have sought them out, as if in telos. We might say that causes and effects are co-constructs since we cannot think the one without the other, but the machinic mind will have thought a systematic displacement of the past and future. It will itself have displaced the distinction between past and future that will have been the enabling condition for the idea of cause and effect. Cause and effect cannot have their usual organic meaning if there is no difference in time such that something can be said to have come before something else or that something has come after something else. While before and after are dispersed into the loci of the network and in the first place means literally in the first place, time is only the illusion of the movement from place to place within the spaces of the already existent network which will have recapitulated itself. The machinic mind needs a grammatical tense in which time--the opposition between past and future--is not realized as that dialectical neutralization of the past and future which is the instrument of their unreality and which we call the present. It will have been thought by a time that is always ambiguous, a time for which past and future are indeterminable and there is no present, and it will have thought something like a passe-anterieur--a locution more consistent with the idea of a become becoming which can have no location in time other than the possibility of all the locations within the network. It will have been.

[the] thinking of [the] machinic mind, which is its own participatory reality, will have dispensed with the definite article, will have bracketed it [as in this sentence]. This bracketing prohibits the foundational prote ousia by eliminating the designating or indicating of a particular or a real by means of a definite article. It dispenses with the imputed difference between particular and universal signified by "the dog," for example, as "this particular, real dog right here," and "the dog" as the name for the universal dog or class of dogs. The machinic mind will thus have eliminated the presumptive difference between particular and universal and between indication and signification, which is after all, only a syntactic function in which nouns are seemingly indicated by definite articles whose definitizing role is to point to real, definite, particular things--to prote ousia, first things. Moreover, since the machinic mind is participatory, it will have eliminated the necessary priority of subjects and of the distinction of subject and object, and since it is this distinction that will have enabled the idea of the opposition between the active and passive voices, it will have derived these voices from the middle voice. Subject and object will have emerged only as the mutual implicates of the action of the verb, only as a potentiality within the middle voice. It will not have been the reflexive, that hall mark of the Cartesian cogito which requires a subject which thinks its own objectivity as a kind of feed-back, that enables the egregious self-. The reflexive simply re-inscribes the subject/object as separate but cooperative entities and facilitates the temptation to think their separation and distance, their ontic necessity, and to imagine the action of one on the other. The middle voice, by contrast, is participatory, and subjects emerge or undergo change as an interactive process from which they cannot distance themselves either by thinking [the] process, or by thinking [the] self thinking [the] process. Subjects are inside process as agents and patients, sources and goals, benefactors and benefactees, origins and termini, actors and acted upon. There is no subject/object articulation or even relation between them via the verb, for subject and object are not differentiated from the process signified by the verb.

Even though English does not have a proper structural middle voice, and has recourse either to the passive or the reflexive where another language might use a middle, certain English expressions have the effect of a middle voice. Consider, for example, the English sentence, "I grew up." Here there is no actor/action, subject/object relation, no agent who performs upon itself the action of growing up. Even though "I" is present in the sentence, that "I" is not a subject from which any action emanates, nor is it the object toward which, or on which the action is directed. It is not reducible to a reflexive, as in the case of "I shaved," for example. "I shaved" can be supplemented by -self-, as in "I shaved my-self," but "I grew up" cannot be--except as parody or hyperbole--"I grew myself up" or otherwise. The "I" that seemingly grows up in this sentence is not even the subject as object of an instrumental act in a passive sentence. "I" may have been raised by my parents, but "I" was not "grown up" by them. "I grew up" is neither active nor passive, nor even less, reflexive. "I" cannot extricate myself from the process of growing up, and since I cannot extricate myself from it and thereby distance myself from what is happening to me, I cannot control it. It is, of course, this illusion of control that is facilitated by actor/action, subject/object sentences, whether they are active or passive. The agent, disengaged from the process, stands outside of it, is unaffected by it, and can interfere in it without being mutually affected. This disengaged agent is the source and instrument of the idea of objectivity. It is embedded in the subject/predicate, function/argument idea of the sentence in both grammar and logic, and it is this subject/predicate, function/argument sentence that permits and encourages the framing of causality and transitivity as hegemonic relations among and within objects and selves. The power of the subject/predicate form is so strong that even Frege, in his speculations on logic, could not really countenance argumentless, naked functions, which is what a middle voice is in its most extreme form. Similarly, many studies of the middle voice retain the idea of the subject or agent or actor as an indispensable part of the idea of the middle voice (Benveniste 1971, Kemmer 1990). The middle voice is characterized as those sentences in which the "subject" is effected by the action or undergoes change within the process of the verb or benefits from the action of the verb. The "subject" (agent, actor) is here necessary to the definition. The definition, so to speak, merely recapitulates the very difference it seeks to overcome, which statement itself is actually a middle voice process of the sort that enables Derrida's idea of difference. This definition not only retains the opposition between noun and verb or pronoun and verb that is the foundation of the subject/predicate grammar and of its correlative function/argument logic, it reinstates it in even more powerful form. It is thus a reinscription of the enabling opposition between noun and verb. In its fullest realization, however, the middle voice creates a sentence in which the verb not only dominates the noun, it incorporates it in such a way that the noun participates in the verb as an indistinguishable part of it and is thus unnecessary to the action of the verb. The middle voice is the idea of pure process independent of any quality of reality as an object in the form of a noun or pronoun (Cf Hardy 1993, Webster 1958, Pred and Pred 1985:465-469, Barber 1975). This merger of the subject/object with the verb is the analog of the Cyborg's desire to become one with the network. The loss of the organic body by the mind-in-the-network is the loss of the subject/object noun in the middle voice. [The] middle voice is [the] network, the subject/object noun is the body- as-corpse.

In the sentences immediately preceding this one, the brackets and bold face indicate the association of the noun phrase and the definite article in English. The conjunction of these two grammatical devices is the means of the ousia as a definite, particular object, a real existent, a proper thing, and it is the source of the ideology that connects the noun with the real, as the name of the real. The role of the definite article is to pick out a particularity, to indicate the real by signifying that its collocated noun is a bounded, isolable, definable, and stable entity, a true being about which true things can be predicated. The definite article and the noun are the stuff identities will have been made of. In association with such nominalizing grammatical devices as infinitives, which transform verbs into nouns, and participles, which can be collocated with the definite article, as in "the doing," as if "doing" were a noun no different from "tree," English grammar systematically dissociates [the] action and process from the agent and the object or permits them to be assigned to the agent or the object as if they were alienable and transferable attributes. These are all techniques of entification, the instruments by which the noun and the thing establish and maintain their Newtonian hegemony in consciousness, the means by which activities are inscribed and transformed into stable representations as if they were things in the mind no different from such familiar dead objects as tables and chairs, whose activity is always imparted by agents external to them. [The] middle voice, by contrast, is the instrument of de-entification, that in-corp-oration of the noun by [the] verb that produces no body-as-corpse.

It will have been necessary to have contextualized the real--that idea that reality is singular and foundational--within sensibilities for plural, multiple, co-existent realities, any one of which might be realized as that single, foundational reality by the arbitrary, authoritarian dictate of consensus. It is not that the really real will have been replaced by simulacra or the hyperreal or the virtually real, but that these realities coexist and even interpenetrate one another. In contrast to this notion of multiple, co-existent realities, Baudrillard (1983: 1-12) and Guattari (19-2:3-6) tell the story of these different realities as a narrative in which the really real is first displaced by its representation, and that representation of the real is then displaced by its representation, creating that familiar sequence of Aristotle's perihermenian in which really real-->real as representation-->representation of real as representation or real-->surreal-->hyperreal, the latter being the simulacrum that has forgotten or obscured its origin in the real and passes itself off as the real. In the manner of Vico, Baudrillard and Guattari understand these sequential realities as historical or evolutionary stages, each characterizing a particular age and each being a transformation of the previous age. Though they differ in specific details, both Baudrillard and Guattari describe a sequence that might be rendered as pre-modern (primitive)-->modern-->postmodern. Each of these periods or ages correlates with its dominant mode of representation, so that direct, unmediated apprehension of the real by indication (perhaps even prelinguistically) is the mode of the primitive or pre-modern age, while mediated understanding by way of images that signify the real-as-indicated is the mode of the modern age, and symbols that reflexively represent their own representation is the mode of the post modern age. Each period and mode of representation is determined by the usual Marxist infra-structural modes of exchange, as in:

Apart from the problems of the artificiality of the historicization of this sequence and the attempt to correlate realities with historical periods or epochs, other complications beset this narrative. In the first place, it neglects virtual realities. Virtual realities are neither representations nor representations of representations. They are self-originated, not as copies of something else, or even of themselves, but as potentialities that do not depend upon mirrors or the propagation and reflection of light, do not produce images as representations, and do not, consequently, require the objective gaze of the all-seeing eye as the final condition of their apprehension. They are not part of that pseudo-history of the real known as the narrative of the symbol.

Virtual realities do not originate in the real either as derivatives of it or as its representations. The narrative movement from the real to the unreal or hyperreal, this sequential derivation of representational reals from an originary, unrepresented reality merely recapitulates the story of foundationalism, in which the really real can first be indicated and then tropologically signified in its representations. Here the really real is the necessary source and origin of its representations, for there must be something to be represented that exists before its representation. The idea of representation itself requires this priority of the represented. The really real is primary, originary, and necessary. Representations are secondary, derivative, and arbitrary. Virtual realities, in contrast to representations, do not derive from the real, and do not imitate it. They are not even necessarily simulacra, though they might be. They are not substitutes or replacements for the real or its representations. They do not drive out the real in the way representations and simulacra do. Virtual realities parallel the real and its representations and are not dependent on them.

Baudrillard and Guattari understand reality as the dialectical process of its own overcoming in which the inherent opposition between the real and the unreal create the surreal as in:

Here the surreal is neither the real nor the unreal alone, but is both an unreal real and a real unreal. This dialectic is produced by the dialectic of representation, as in:

The dialectic of representation derives from the dialectic of consciousness, which derives from the dialectic of society represented by the sequence primitive-->modern-->postmodern, which derives from the dialectic of labor. Each dialectic is thus the overcoming of itself, and the sequence of dialectics is an allegorical structure created by the analogical correspondences of the moments of each dialectic with one another, so that the real, for example, is the analog of representation, which is the analog of indication, which is the analog of the primitive, which is the analog of land, and so on through the other dialectical moments.

It is tempting to think that virtual reality is a fourth order of reality emerging from the surreal as the product of their transformation in technologies of representation. This interpretation would obviously fit virtual reality easily into the sequence of dialectics as merely a fourth stage, and the sequence of social epochs might be amend as something like primitive-->classical-->modern-->postmodern. This easy solution, however, neglects three important points about virtual realities: (1) virtual reals are not representations and thus cannot fit into the sequence of representational modes; (2) virtual reals are not recent or contemporary emergents facilitated by postmodern technologies of reproduction and media, and are thus not necessarily derivable from the pre-conditions of prior dialectics; (3) virtual reals are not dependent on the grammar of reflexivity that enables the subject/object to take itself as its object and thus create itself as a transcendental subject.

As noted earlier, virtual realities are not copies of something else; they are neither derived from something outside themselves nor from within themselves by representing themselves reflexively to themselves. Virtual reals create themselves out of themselves not by mirrors that picture themselves to themselves, but by juxtapositions and concatenations that do not require a prior syntax or objects to be juxtaposed and concatenated. There is nothing odd or new about this process. It will always have been with us in our everyday use of words. Words are not necessarily or even originarily representations, even when they are used representational. Words are the chief means by which worlds are created and sustained. Part of the work of words, or of language generally, is to do such things as describing and representing, but these are not their primary, originary, necessary, or most important functions. Moreover, they are not the source from which all other-language functions derive. To suppose that words, or language, are essentially representational, is to submit to the grammar that produces the fairy tale of the real and the story of the psyche as a dialectic of representation.

Virtual realities like those of language are parallel to representational realities, but they can cross-over into representational realities. Consider, for example, the formative power of words such as universal, structure , power, concepts, this, that, I, that even though they have no representational source outside of the discourses in which they occur, enable utterances like "I think conceptual structure--universal power," from which one can begin to imagine such possibilities as "conceptual structure," "universal power," "I think," not because words derive from images or from the image producing capacity of the imagination, but because the words stimulate the imagination to produce images and give the vague feeling, anticipation, or perhaps even vivid sense of some picture about to be. Here the direction of origination is not from an exterior reality to a representation or from one form of representation to another, but flows instead from the virtually real to the real. Virtual reality, by imitating the function of a concept, can thus simulate the path of a real in reverse. Compare the following sequences:

(1) real-->representation-->representation of a representation (image) -->representation of the representation of the representation (concept).
(2) virtual real-->representation of the representation of a representation -->representation of a representation-->representation-->real.

The case of mathematics is thus instructive in that it reveals how virtual realities can come to dominate the real. Mathematics works not because it is a representation of the real or just happens by chance to be in harmony with the real, but because it has transformed the real to fit its own mode of figuration (Cf. Jones 1982:1-170). It has, in effect, trance-figured the real. In this instance, the virtually real has displaced the real, and it could do this not because of any correspondence with the real, but because its source was parallel to the real, outside it, and not produced through representational transformations of it. It is not beneath, behind, above, or beyond the real; it is beside it, next to it, parallel to it, juxtaposed to it, and apart from this neighborliness, is totally other than the real and cannot be reduced to the real even as it accommodates the real to itself and colonizes it. Moreover, it does this because it has become the instrumentality of agencies that benefit from its transgressions, as Foucault has argued.

We may thus conclude that virtual reality, despite the adjectival position of "virtual" before "real," is not a kind of reality. It has no genealogical kinship with the real in the sense of being derived from the real or of sharing a common origin or common history with the real. We should say that virtual reality is just that situation in which the idea of the real is unnecessary, inappropriate, or irrelevant because there is no circumstance that could be different from or other than that situation. It is akin to the One that encloses us entirely within it, where nothing disturbs us and we are one with it. It is equivalent to the Heideggerian Gestell wherein even thoughts and acts intended to disconfirm or challenge the unity of experience within the Gestell (such as this paper) can only serve to reconfirm that experience and the Gestell itself. Even those Luce-ferian agencies that had once used the transfigurative power of the Gestell as an instrument of domination will have become the instruments of the Gestell. Virtual reality is the infinite network, and our ecstatic immersion in it is similar to the feeling of oceanic oneness associated with the unreflective primitive or the transfigured consciousness of the mystic. This sense of intimacy, however, is transitory, for it will have been by the play its own imperfection that the virtually real will have engendered disruptions, contradictions, and errors that will have intimated the possibility of an outside, of an otherness beyond the enclosing certitudes. The real will have intruded then, neither as a contradictory and foundational certainty derived from perception nor as the body of experience, the lived body that phenomenology poses as the possibility of that "step back" from the unity of consciousness that will have revealed the world as strange and paradoxical (Merleau-Ponty 1962:xiii), but will have been manifest as the dynamic means of the Gestell itself. The Gestell produces within itself these illusions of difference that produce within us a feeling of dis-ease, a sense of the irreal. This is the condition of the irrealis, the uneasy consciousness no longer at home within its virtual reality, but suspicious still of that other real that can only be apprehended in its unreality, and even so, required to act positively as if it were an agentive subject in the world it will thus have come to suspect.

In contrast to the narrative of the real which is predicated on the grammar of reflexivity that enables the real to differentiate itself into the object of its-self (its subjectivity) by taking itself as a represented object, the virtually real is predicated on the grammar of the middle voice, which has the ultimate effect of preventing any differentiation of subject and object by means of representation. The grammar of reflexivity founds in a fictional separation of subject and object such as that between the "I" as subject and the "myself" as object in the sentence "I shave myself." The verb "shave" is the action of the subject on itself as its differentiated object, as if the "shaver" were other than the "shavee." It is precisely this operation of differentiating the subject/object into the subject and the object that enables representation as the duality of the representation and the represented, and which produces both the subjectivized object and the representation as unreals.

The middle voice is the grammar of irrealis because it is not an instrument for the production of subjectivized objects or of objects of any kind that can be representations of the real. Most definitions of the middle voice stress the idea of the involvement of the subject with the action of the verb, as if the subject and the verb were different, and though many examples of middle voice constructions do fit this pattern, what needs emphasis here is not the difference between subject and verb, but their participation in which the subject is involved in the verb and is ultimately immersed within its process as an undifferentiated unity of verb/subject. Here no subject acts on itself as object or represents itself to itself, nor is there even a subject that acts. There is only the action in which the subject is involved neither as the source of the action nor as its object or goal, but is, as we might say, "part of the action." As the verb "involve" tells us, this is the imagery of the spiral rather than the circle.

Since virtual realities are not representations, they do not derive from the story of the psyche, which is, after all, only the story of representation. Virtual realities then, are not products of experience. They do not arise from that action of the external world on the body that creates what we quaintly call "impressions" or "sensations," those mysterious inner copies of the external world that become our perceptions, images, and concepts, those ordered inner appearances that mimic and represent the disappeared external reality, those instruments of subjectivity that transform real objects into the unreal phantasms of the imagination and transfigure those unreal phantasms of the imagination into the surreal figurations we call concepts, the objects of subjectivity.

The grammar of irrealis then is totally other than the grammar of the world of the real, for it requires no originary act of impregnation, no subjected object in which the body-as-patient is the maternal beneficiary of the penetrating action of external objects which fill it with the spirit of the external/paternal and which the body then reproduces imperfectly in subjective objects. The grammar of irrealis can parody the grammar of the real, but that is necessary to it only when we attempt to write it in the forms and media of the grammar of the real which are suited only to representing representations. Since the grammar of irrealis is not a representation and concerns itself with virtual realities, which also are not representations, the grammar of irrealis is not the representation of representations and can only present itself as parody within the grammar and writing appropriate to the representation of representations. Here it will have been necessary to rethink the idea of media as middles, betweens, or connections that link a sender and a receiver or a representation and its source on the analogy of a verb linking a subject and an object. It will have been necessary to think of media without the idea of mediation, without the idea of subjects and objects independent of the media that will seemingly have linked them. To put it differently, it will have been necessary to have disposed of the metaphor of media-as-verbs in yet another instantiation of the grammar of actor/action, subject/object in which subjects and objects are linked by verbs. It will have been necessary to have thought of media not as linkages, but as totalizations in which subjects and objects, rather than being prior necessities, may instead be created as incidental components. That thinking, of necessity, will have been written here only as parody in this grammar, but it will have been manifest elsewhere as its own media.

Even in parody, this attempt to write of irrealis in this grammar of the real/unreal will only have recapitulated the metaphysics of the ineffable which will always have been part of the discourse of the real, either in the sense of the real itself that can be represented only as the unreal, or as the hope of the fulfilled present, the union of subject and object that words seemingly achieve only in poetic fantasy. Our desire for that lost unity of subject and object, source and creation, is the inescapable consequence of the grammar of the real which, by representing the real, forever puts it beyond the realm of its representation in that limbo where it will always have been the ineffable noumenal source, the real that can only reproduce itself as the unreal. We will have thought the oneness and unity of irrealis as if it were but one more instance of the telling of this tale of the ineffable as the separation from the source and the springing up of our longing for a return to the primordial state of being before the Fall into time. Or we will have told this tale again as the fable of transfiguration and unity in a state of being that transcends representation. Our desire is the dialectic of time, of the longing for the fulfilment of the past and the future in the timeless present.

Within the limitations of the grammar of the real--this grammar being written here in spite of my fitful attempts to subvert it--we will have thought that desire again as the hubris of technology. We will have thought that the technology of virtual realities will have become the media that are irrealis. But, what else could we have thought in this world where we have been mastered by our tools.

[The] irrealis will have been that world in which the masculine principle will have triumphed completely over the feminine principle. This is the meaning of virtual reality, and it is worth remembering that virtual derives from *wer-/wir- ("man, manly"), and is it-self the source of the masculine, the manly. Virtual reality is the analog of asexual reproduction, just as the realities of representation are analogs of sexual reproduction. The paramount difference between virtual realities and the realities of representation is that in the latter, the masculine principle's desire to reproduce itself perfectly will always have been frustrated by the necessity of reproduction through instrumentalities of representation that are incapable of exact reproduction. To put it differently, reproduction by representation ensures that the copy will always differ from the original. The masculine principle--the real--can only reproduce itself by means of the feminine body of the psyche which configures the masculine impression as an image that must always be other than its masculine source. By contrast, because virtual realities reproduce without representation, there is no relation of copy to original, and all reproduction is not so much the making of exact copies as it is a means of reproduction in which the idea of copy no longer has a meaning. Virtual realities are akin to clones in the sense that they imply total control over the mechanics of reproduction where differences have been totally eliminated from the making of interchangeable identities. They are thus part of the same process that enables all other forms of t h e w o r l d w i t h o u t e r r o r , of the final mastery over reproduction, such as in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering. They are part of the same story of immortality, the defeat of time in the triumph of identity over difference, of the mind-machine over the body, of culture over nature, of masculine over feminine, the story that will have been told again of repetition without change, as if it could now be told

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