She slid the trodes on over the orange silk headscarf and smoothed the
contacts against her forehead.

"Let's go," she said.

Now and ever was, fast foreward, Jammer's deck jacked up so high above
the neon hotcores, topography of data he didn't know. Big stuff,
mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the nonplace that was cyberspace.
- William Gibson, Count Zero

In 1909, Arnold Van Gennep published Les Rites de Passage, an
examination of a class of rituals that mark major social stages in an
individual's life or in the collective existence of a group. Van
Gennep's study was the first focus on this important class of ritual and
notes its tripartite structure.

Rites of passage are ideally distinguished by three successive phases in
ritual or nonsecular space and time that function to engineer the
transposition and transformation of an initiand (or initiands in the
case of a social group) from one socioenvironmental, sociobiological,
social position or stage to another. Notable events that are mediated by
this ritual process include birth, puberty, marriage, and death.
However, other more general transpositions from one significant social
category, spatial area, cosmic, or seasonal phase to another are also
subject to ritual, rites of passage, mediation. The sequence of rites,
in such cases, is designed to acknowledge the importance and abnormality
of the events while negotiating the movement betweeen stages by
integrating them into a succession of socially sanctioned activities
while ensuring a certain spatial, temporal, and symbolic continuity.

The first phase of rites of passage, or rites of separation, consists of
symbolic behavior that initiates the transition from the secular and
profane world of the social group to a second phase known as a liminal
period. This phase is marked by a time of ritual metamorphosis that
mediates between the initiand's or group's previous and subsequent
state. It is a especially dangerous and unclean period, since the
initiand (or group of initiands) is considered to possess little of
her/his (their) former or later attributes. This period is not only
symbolically abnormal, but the location(s) and time in which the
transformation takes place is considered outside of society. Turner
(1977a) has described it as "betwixt and between" neither one nor the
other- a state of nonbeing, death, or nothingness. He has argued,
moreover, that "the liminal phase is the essential, antisecular
component in true ritual, whether it be labeled 'religious' or
'magical'" (Turner 1980: 161). When the desired sociobiological or
symbolic transformation has taken place, a procedure of renormalization
is needed to reinstate the individual or group into society. The third
phase, or rite of aggregation, functions as a "decontamination chamber,"
metaphorically speaking, in order that initiands can enter into a new
social or sociobiological status in society without polluting everyday
space and time with vestiges of former attributes or residues of the
ritual process itself.

If rites of passage clearly articulate human bodies and identities from
one social position to another, they do so because they function as
structured conduits between normally distinct social realities. However,
as Van Gennep originally pointed out,

Although a complete scheme of rites of passage theoretically includes
preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of
transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation), in specific
instances these three types are not always equally important or equally
elaborated. (1960: 11)

This observation was later confirmed by Turner's brilliant examination
and reconceptualization of the social and symbolic functions of the
central, or liminal, phase of rites of passage (1974, 1977a, 1977b,
1977c).

Reflexive transformation is the governing function of the liminal,
interstitial, and antistructural phase of the rites of passage in
"smallscale, relatively stable and cyclical" tribal socieities. In these
socieities, the liminal functions in relation to a "structure of
positions" (Turner 1977a: 93). Liminality is, within this patchwork of
stability, an interstructural space and time that always functions in
relation to the structured, between which the "passenger," to use
Turner's term (1977a: 94), is symbolically as well as spatially and
temporally articulated.

Transformation is signified and rendered effective by the unusaual and
"bizarre" symbolism found in the liminal phase (Turner 1977a: 96). This
symbolism, associated with bodily and biological processes, marks the
"amibiguous" and "paradoxical" condition that the subject or initiand is
in. It is an extraclassifactory stage in which the initiand is "no
longer classified and not yet classified" (Turner 1977a: 96). From the
former point of view, liminality is defined by symbols of death,
invisibility, structural dissolution, and other negative physical and
organic processes. From the latter point of view, the condition is
defined by symbols of gestation and parturition. Insofar as the liminal
phase encompasses the destructuring and restructuring of the subject, it
is also marked by the denial of structure and the origin of structure
per se. Turner has pointed out, in connection with its creative aspect,
that liminality is "a realm of pure possibility whence novel
configurations of ideas and relations may arise" (1977a: 97). This
creativity is well illustrated in his discussion of the communication of
"sacra" to the initiand in the form of "exhibitions," "actions," and
"instructions":

The communication of sacra and other forms of esoteric instruction
really involves three processes, though these should not be regarded as
in series but as in parallel. The first is the reduction of culture into
recognized components or factors; the second is their recombination in
fantastic or monstrous patterns and shapes; and the third is their
recombination in ways that make sense with regard to the new state and
status that the neophytes will enter. (Turner 1977a: 106)

The result is "a promiscuous intermingling and juxtaposing of the
categories of event, experience, and knowledge, with a pedagogic
intention" (Turner 1977a: 106).

One begins to have a sense, in the case of small-scale societies, of the
creative possibilities-of social and individual regeneration-inhering in
this ambiguous phase of the rites of passage, a phase in which "the
central cluster of nonlogical sacra is then the symbolic template of the
whole system of beliefs and values in a given culture, its archetypal
paradigm and ultimate measure" (Turner 1977a: 108). Turner describes
this as a process in which "to look at itself a society must cut out a
piece of itself for inspection." He continues,

To do this it must set up a frame within which images and symbols of
what has been sectioned off can be scrutinized, assessed, and, if need
be, remodeled and rearranged. (Turner 1977c: 35)

This phase operates like a mythic cultural weaver whose function is,
according to Serres,

to link, to tie, to open bridges, pathways, wells, or relays among
radically different spaces; to say (dire) what takes place between them;
to inter-dict (interdire). (1983a: 45)

Moreover, as Serres points out in an observation that could have been
made in regard to liminality in general, "the category of between is
fundamental in topology and for our purposes here: to interdict in the
rupture and cracks between varieties completely enclosed upon
themselves" (1983a: 45). Thus, if the social is never, according to both
Serres and Turner, a completely stable construct but must always be
considered to be in a process of creative regeneration, then rites of
passage offer exemplary instances of a social process that achieves
unstable stability.

There are a number of similarities between the overall structure of
rites of passages and cyberspaces that suggest that the latter might be
closely related to the former in a functional sense. First, the acts of
"jacking in" and out of cyberspace by way of cyberdecks and matrix
simulators suggest radically truncated versions of separation and
aggregation "rites" in which the hardware serves as portal to, and exit
from, a parallel virtual reality. The full emphasis of this "access"
technology is on cyberspace itself, or on a central
liminal-virtual-condition. Moreover, access and exit are sequential,
[Turner draws attention to the definitive importance of "performative
sequencing" for any understanding of ritual because of its role in
ensuring a ritual's unidirectional transformative power (1980:
160-161).] but not necessarily unidirectional (cf. Turner 1980: 160-161)
in the sense that programmers and console cowboys can jack in and out of
cyberspace at will. At its most extreme, however, as in the case of
Bobby Newmark in Mona Lisa Overdrive, the technology can function as a
permanent prosthesis or hardwired interface (Turner 1988: 240). Second,
jacking into cyberspace involves a passage from the everyday space and
finite time of the organically human or postorganic hardware-based
cyborg to a digital-as opposed to an analogical-space and time that is
both transorganic and cyberpsychically collective. It is collective in
the sense that cyberspace exists, in the words of Continuity (an
artificial intelligence in Mona Lisa Overdrive), "insofar as it can be
said to exist, by virtue of human agency" (Turner 1988: 107). But the
nature and form of the "human" portion of "human agency" is now in
question. Finally, the nature of human identity at both an individual
and collective level is rendered problematic in terms of agency, for
cyberspace itself has the potential to become consensually posthuman as
well as "post-present," as when its matrix is inhabited by what appear
to human protagonists to be transcendent panhuman "intelligences" whose
power and creative inventiveness is signaled by intracyberspatial
influence or by way of the extracyberspatial production of cultural
sacra (cf. Gibson 1988; Gibson 1987a: 217, 225-227). [In Turner's words,
ritual is "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to
technological routine, having reference to beliefs in invisible beings
or powers regarded as first and final causes of all effects" (1980:
159).] The "mytho-logic" of these "presences" is explained by Continuity
in an exchange with a human, Angela Mitchell (Gibson 1988: 107):

"The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about
that?" 

"What would you like to know, Angie?" . . . 

"'When it changed'. . . "

"The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode
assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by
entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a
'hidden people.' The other involves assumptions of omniscience,
omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

"That the matrix is God?"

"In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms
of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being's
omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix."

"If it has limits, it isn't omnipotent."

"Exactly. Notice that the mythform doesn't credit the being with
immortality, as would ordinarily be the case in belief systems positing
a supreme being, at least in terms of your particular culture.
Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of
human agency."

This mytho-logic suggests that one of cyberspace's more fundamental
social functions is to serve as a medium to communicate a form of
"gnosis, mystical knowledge about the nature of things and how they came
to be what they are" (Turner 1977a: 107). In cyberspace, the classical
hardware interfaced cyborg and the postclassical data-based cyborg or
personality construct meet with new posthuman intelligences that engage
in revelatory and pedagogic activities reminiscent of the activities of
shamanistic figures who mediate between traditional sacred and profane
worlds. Such mediations between human and posthuman, analogue and
digital spaces, suggest that cyberspace must be understood not only in
narrowly socioeconomic terms, or in terms of a conventional parallel
culture, but also and more importantly as an inherently original and
inventive metasocial operator and potential creative cybernetic godhead.

On the Metasocial in Postindustrial Society

"Yeah," the Finn said, turning out onto the long straight empty highway,
"but nobody's talkin' human, see?" -William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

Turner has proposed a distinction between "liminal" and "liminoid," or
"ergic- ludic ritual liminality and anergic-ludic liminoid genres of
action" (1974: 83) that acknowledges an important, indeed decisive,
difference between types of society called "tribal" and "post-tribal" or
pre- and post-Industrial Revolution societies. This distinction is
especially expressed in the opposition between work and leisure.

It would seem that with industrialization, urbanization, spreading
literacy, labor migration, specialization, professionalization,
bureaucracy, the division of the leisure sphere from the work sphere,
the former integrity of the orchestrated religious gestalt that once
constituted ritual has burst open and many specialized performance
genres have been born from the death of that mighty opus deorum
hominumque. . . . Disintegration has been accompanied by secularization.
Traditional religions, their rituals denuded of much of their former
symbolic wealth and meaning, hence their transformative capacity,
persist in the leisure sphere but have not adapted well to modernity.
Modernity means the exaltation of the indicative mood; but in what Ihab
Hassan has called the "postmodern turn" we may be seeing a return to
subjunctivity and a rediscovery of cultural transformative modes. . . .
Dismembering may be a prelude to remembering, which is not merely
restoring some past intact but setting it in living relationship to the
present. (1980: 166-167)

The transition from the liminal to the liminoid is broadly marked by a
transition from the ritual collective to the secular individual,
individualistic, or individualizing. While the ritual collective is
"centrally integrated into the total social process, forming with all
its other aspects a complete whole," the secular individual develops"
most characteristically outside the central economic and political
processes, along their margins, on their interfaces, in their 'tacit
dimensions'" (Turner 1977b: 44). Liminal behavior is constrained by
obligations associated with status, while liminoid behavior is
characterized by relative contractual freedom (Turner 1974: 84; Turner
1977c: 50). The "liminal" is also distinguished by wide social and
cultural affect in contrast to the more idiosyncratic orientations of
the "liminoid." Finally, the liminal is more prone to "the inversion or
reversal of secular, mundane reality and social structure" because of
its overtly socially integrative functions, while the liminoid
phenomena, on the other hand, "are not merely reversive, they are often
subversive, representing radical critiques of the central structures and
proposing utopian alternative models" (Turner 1977b: 45). In conclusion,
Turner notes that

liminal genres put much stress on social frames, plural reflexivity, and
mass flow, shared flow, while liminoid genres emphasize idiosyncratic
framing, individual reflexivity, subjective flow, and see the social as
problem not datum. (1977c: 52)

There are, however, connections between the two that suggest that they
are not exclusive products of each type of society, that "in complex
societies today's liminoid is yesterday's liminal" (1977b: 46). In this
case, it might be true that the dismembering aspect of the liminal is
continued in its fragmentation into different genres of social activity.
As Turner points out:

In complex modern societies both types coexist in a sort of cultural
pluralism. . . . The liminoid is more like a commodity indeed, often is
a commodity, which one selects and pays for-than the liminal, which
elicits loyalty and is bound up with one's membership or desired
membership in some highly corporate group. One works at the liminal, one
plays with the liminoid. (1974: 86)

While this is not the place to enter into details concerning Turner's
important distinction between liminal and liminoid, one might
nevertheless query the uncritical celebration of a return to
subjunctivity, with its implied displacement of a politics of the
present in terms of utopian potentialities. For example, our experiences
of "tribal" rites of passages have taught us that "voluntary sparagmos
or self-dismemberment of order, in the subjunctive depths of liminality"
(Turner 1980: 164), is achieved in relation to a set of actual
positional states. This is also the case with "post-tribal" cyberspace.
Not only does it have, in its Gibsonian version, a determinate Euclidean
form and particular economic functions that are linked to actual
socioeconomic formations (the military/industrial complex), but its
principal mode of access and exit is by way of sophisticated
communications equipment (cyberdecks or matrix simulators), the use of
which is predicated on privileged or differential institutional access
and specialized hardware and sofware expertise. In the case of
legitimate programmers this access is clearly defined in terms of
corporate filiation. Thus, a dominant Western spatial paradigm,
corporate capitalism, differential access to technology, and specialized
knowledge and expertise imply, at the very least, a more complex set of
relations between so-called postmodern cultural phenomena-for cyberspace
can also become, as we have seen, a culturally creative arena- and a
given postindustrial economic context.

However, the distinction between liminal and liminoid, the collective
and individualistic, does sharpen the focus on who will control
cyberspace's governing socioeconomic logic-governments, corporations, or
free-lance entrepreneurs? It does so because the issue of collective vs.
individual control, which is not as clearly demarcated in the context of
traditional rites- of-passage rituals, is effectively foregrounded in
the contractual, marginal, subversive, and individualistic realms of the
liminoid. This question can be extended to the design and operation of
alternative hardware/software artifacts (the latter extending to the
design of personality constructs and artificial intelligences) that
might be used to mask or foreground cyberspace's governing logic and
minimize or maximize social and cultural diversity. Thus, although
problematic, Turner's attempt to account for pre- and posttribal ritual
forms is valuable in that it serves as a corrective to uncritical trans-
or ahistorical accounts of ritual processes; and the distinctions that
he makes between liminal and liminoid allow for a more refined
understanding of cyberspace's potential postindustrial forms and
functions. At least, with this refinement and corrective in mind, we
have an initial framework for addressing the complex issue of control in
posttribal rituals of the caliber of cyberspace.

Gibsonian cyberspace exhibits liminoid characteristics connected to its
economic functions as articulated in a complex open-ended postindustrial
society. First, it exhibits a specific logic that structures the matrix
in the name of an transnational information economy. This logic,
replicating the binary (0-1) logic of computer languages, is visibly
articulated in the matrix, sculpted in the copyrighted forms of data
that structure, in turn, social activity. Walls of data, rather then
walls of brick and glass, divide a hardwired, or postorganic, humanity
into economic protagonists-those included and those excluded from, say,
the dominant military/industrial complex. Those, in other words, that do
and those that do not have direct access to information, hardware
technology and software expertise. The latter include the
"industrial-espionage artists and hustlers," computer or console cowboys
like Bobby Quine in Gibson's short story "Burning Chrome":

Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind's extended electronic
nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix,
monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of
information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold
spiral arms of military systems. (1987b: 170)

Cyberspace's binary structure governs the activities of anonymous
corporate programmers, and individualistic console cowboys or jockeys
who are always trying to gain an edge on liminal corporate artificial
intelligences who are in the business of continually upgrading corporate
ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics), but who periodically mutate
into independent creative entities. This structure, as expressed in the
walls of data, is therefore, on the one hand, literally considered as
datum, while on the other hand it is considered as problem. Second,
although primarily a work space, and thus not a space of "play" per se,
cyberspace has the potential to become inventively and playfully
antistructural in the sense proposed by Turner:

Anti-structure . . . can generate and store a plurality of alternative
models of living, from utopias to programs, which are capable of
influencing the behavior of those in mainstream social and political
roles (whether authoritative or dependent, in control or rebelling
against it) in the direction of radical change. (Turner 1974: 65)

Bearing in mind the often complex relationship between the structuring
functions of hardware and software systems and their potential for
creative flexibility, one can nevertheless note that cyberspace's
antistructural potential is best exemplified in the creative activities
of console cowboys, in particular Bobby Newmark, who have transcended
the economic dualism of the matrix in order to contemplate its creative
logic, a logic rendered intellible through the machinations of
artificial intelligences of the caliber of Wintermute and Neuromancer.
The activities of individuals such as Newmark and panhuman intelligences
highlight cyberspace's inventive potential and its ability to sustain
collective and individual activity, work and play, normative and
spontaneous behavior in a manner that might directly and strategically
challenge its economic logic. Thus, there is evidence to suggest that
cyberspace might not only be a paradigmatic, postindustrial
liminal/liminoid space-an "eye and eyestalk which society bends round
upon its own condition, whether healthy or unsound" (Turner 1977c:
40)-but also a possible generative site for other creative logics and
sensorial regimes.

Conclusion: On a Postorganic Anthropology

The world before television equates with the world before the Net-the
mass culture and mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to
recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something
other than human. - William Gibson, "Rocket Radio"

Serres's conception of the social is radically modernist in the sense
that it takes into account the fracture and fluidity of cultural and
individual identities whose junctions are organic human bodies, while
positing the social realm as a topological construct governed by a
Euclidean master space and inhabited by the mythic figure of the weaver.
The weaver is, however, a holographic mytho-logical form to be found
wherever information is being produced, transmitted, received. Its
mytho-logic is, therefore, eminently cyberspatial, in the sense that its
communicative function is digitally replicated throughout cyberspace.
Serres's weaver is concentrated in particular in the prescriptive roles
of artificial intelligences such as Wintermute, Neuromancer, Continuity,
and Colin-entities that ensure that cyberspace retains its potential as
a generative locale for other, more unusual, spatial configurations and
cyborg intelligences.

Gibson's powerful vision is now beginning to influence the way virtual
reality and cyberspace researchers are structuring their research
agendas and problematics. [Cf. Tim McFadden's "The Structure of
Cyberspace and the Ballistic Actors Model-an Extended Abstract"
presented at The First Conference on Cyberspace, University of Texas at
Austin.] But if cyberspace represents, at the very least, the birth of a
new postindustrial, metasocial spatial operator, it wil remain for most
part stillborn if its parameters are engineered primarily to function,
following Gibson's dystopic vision, as a virtual world of contestatory
economic activity. In order to counter this vision, one must actively
and strategically seek alternative spatial and creative logics, social
and cultural configurations. If such creative flexibility is critically
foregrounded in current research agendas, cyberspace will indeed become
a site of considerable cultural promise, and a locale for a new
postorganic anthropology.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jody Berland for comments that have contributed to
the clarity of the argument presented in this chapter.

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