~ Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and William Gibson's Cultural Model of Cyberspace
By David Tomas

Across the communications landscapes move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. - J. G. Ballard, Crash

The experience of subjective and intersubjective flow in ritual performance, whatever its sociobiological or personalogical concomitants may be, often convinces performers that the ritual situation is indeed informed with powers both transcendental and immanent. - Victor Turner, "Social Dramas and Stories about Them"

The computer-generated interactive virtual environment of cyberspace has recently engaged the creative imaginations of a narrow spectrum of government, corporate, and academic researchers from various disciplines, as well as an assortment of other individuals including artists and science fiction writers. It has especially gained notoriety among cultural literati through the writings of William Gibson (Gibson 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1988; cf. Greenfield 1988; Hamburn 1989), whose work has been most closely identified with a new science fiction genre and subculture of poplar music known collectively under the rubric cyberpunk (cf. Sterling 1988, Dery 1989). Popular culture is in fact a principal ingredient of the synergetic technovisonary world of "cyberpunk literature" to the extent that one finds that Neuromancer (1984), "surely the quintessential cyberpunk novel" (Sterling 1988: xiv), was not considered by its author to be a book but rather "a pop artifact" (Gibson quoted in Dery 1989: 77).

Although cyberspace has been popularized by Gibson's books, it is neither a pure "pop" phenomenon nor a simple technological artifact, but rather a powerful, collective, mnemonic technology that promises to have an important, if not revolutionary, impact on the future compositions of human identities and cultures (cf. Tomas 1989). Gibson, in particular, has devoted considerable attention to the chilling socioeconomic implications of this space and its postindustrial context. His depiction of an information society whose governing economy is transactional and cyberspatial is sobering and worthy of consideration, especially since he has chosen to depict it, as Sterling has pointed out, "from the belly up, as it is lived, not merely as dry speculation" (1986: xi). In fact, Gibson has presented us with the most sophisticated and detailed "anthropological" vision of cyberspace to date: its social and economic facets, and the outlines of its advanced postindustrial form. Although this is not the place to engage the totality of Gibson's dystopic vision, it is important to note that his novels and short stories are noteworthy social documents because they "show", as Sterling notes, "with exaggerated clarity, the hidden bulk of an iceburg of social change" that "now glides with sinister majesty across the surface of the late twentieth century" (1986: xi). In the following pages, I examine the anthropological implications of Gibsonian cyberspace and, in particular, its connections to a panhuman ritual process known as rites de passage.

Why choose to treat cyberspace from an anthropological, indeed ritual, perspective? First as Sterling (cf. 1988: xi) has pointed out, science fiction is an important tool that allows us to make sense of a rapidly emerging postindustrial culture. It is a spatial operator (Serres 1983a: 42-43) connecting pasts and futures by way of the present (a function that it shares, as we shall see, with a cyberspace rite de passage). Second, it allows us to make sense of an advanced information technology that has the potential to not only change the economic structure of human societies but also overthrow the sensorial and organic architecture of the human body, this by disembodying and reformatting its sensorium in powerful, computer-generated, digitalized spaces. This latter consequence of cyberspace will force anthropologists to take into account not only the jaded and contested question of the organic Other, which in Michel Serres's opinion (1983b: 67), "is only a variety or variation-of the Same," but also the postorganic, the classical (hardware-interfaced) cyborg and the postclassical, (software-interfaced) transorganic data-based cyborg or personality construct (Tomas 1989). This latter point is, as we shall see, intimately connected to the social and symbolic functions of traditional rites of passage rituals. Third, advanced digital technologies, such as those that generate cyberspace, hold considerable promise as a testing ground for postritual theories and practices, in particular as conceptualized by a critical postindustrial, postorganic anthropology.

Can cyberspace be considered to be a new social space? According to Gibson's description and contemporary work on virtual worlds technologies, [Cf. The First Conference on Cyberspace held May 4 and 5, 1990, at the University of Texas at Austin.] it does indeed hold the promise of new spatial configurations and related postorganic life forms. There is little doubt, therefore, that the composition of cyberspace must become the focus of intense speculation and the site of contested engagement in the immediate future, especially since corporations as well as research and development companies, university departments, and individual researchers are currently engaged in discussing and engineering its specifications. Anthropologists also have a vested interest in engaging virtual worlds technologies during this early stage of speculation and development, especially those who are interested in engaging advanced forms of Western technology from the points of view of their modes of social production. For there is reason to believe that these technologies might constitute the central phase in a postindustrial "rite of passage" between organically human and cyberpsychically digital life-forms as reconfigured through computer software systems. Should  this prove to be correct, existing theories of ritual processes can provide important insights into the socially engineered cultural dimensions of cyberspace, and its social function as presently conceived. On the other hand, one can imagine that anthropological theories will not remain unaffected by their contact with advanced information systems of the caliber of cyberspace. One might envisage, for example, the outlines of another postorganic form of anthropology developing in the context of cyberspace, an anthropology specifically engaged in addressing the problems of engineering cyberspatial forms of intelligence as opposed to the more conventional humanistic, more or less reflexive, study of premodernist, modernist, or postmodernist humankind.

From Euclidean Space to Cyberspace

Walls of shadow, walls of ice. - William Gibson, Burning Chrome

The identity of a historical culture  is, according to Serres, the product of "very precise and particular connections" between "spatial varieties." "This construction," this "original intersection" is "that culture's very history." Cultures are therefore to be "differentiated by the form of the set of junctions, its appearance, its place, as well as by its changes of state, its fluctuations." "But what they have in common," as Serres points out, "and what constitutes them as such is the operation itself of joining, of connecting." As a consequence, "the identity of a culture is to be read on a map, its identification card: this is the map of its homeomorphisms" (Serres 1983a: 45).

Serres argues, moreover, that an individual is also a continuously constructed product of a similar intersection or junction of social spaces and cannot therefore be considered to exist in a unified homogeneous space. The body, in fact, "works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses, and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another; hears and communicates in a third; and so forth, as far as one wishes to go" (Serres 1983a: 44). However, Serres cautions that

this [intersection] is not simply given or is not always already there, as the saying goes. This intersection, these junctions, always need to be constructed. And in general whoever is unsuccessful in this undertaking is considered sick. His body explodes from the disconnection of spaces. (1983a: 44)

What Serres is addressing is the way both cultures and individuals are constituted in terms of junctures or multiplicities of more or less fluid social spaces that must always be understood as particular historical, indeed cultural, constructs. One such space is Euclidean space, the master space of Western "work-oriented cultures." It is a master space because it governs communication-"the space of measure and transport," "linked homogenety," and "congruent identity" (Serres 1983a: 44, 52)-and also "because it is the space of work-of the mason, the surveyor, or the architect" (Serres 1983a: 44). It is the space of Western geometry: the geometry of vision, the road, the building, and the machine. On the other hand, this master space is a binary construct, consisting of the everyday social or profane spaces that Serres has initially described in Euclidean terms and sacred or "liminal" spaces. As Victor Turner notes, "for every major social formation there is a dominant mode of public liminality, the subjunctive space/time that is the counterstroke to its pragmatic indicative texture" (1977c: 34). Film, in his opinion, is the dominant form of public liminality in electronically advanced societies.

In recent years, there has emerged a new form of electronic space that holds revolutionary promise as the fin de siecle metasocial postindustrial work space. Variously described as a "space that wasn't space," a "nonplace," and a space in which "there are no shadows" (Gibson 1987a: 38, 166; Gibson 1988: 219), cyberspace is a postindustrial work environment predicated on a new hardwired communications interface that provides a direct and total sensorial access to a parallel world of potential work spaces. This interface, which is a world removed from the indirect and limited access provided by older print-based paradigms of visual literacy (Gibson 1984, 170), mediates between the sensorial world of  the organically human and a parallel virtual world of pure digitalized information. Thus, in the words of one of Gibson's characters (1988: 13):

People jacked  in so they could  hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed.

At its most extreme, the corporeality of 'laboring" human bodies is replaced by pure information whose configurations "signify" disembodied human sensoria, personality constructs, and artificial intelligences.

The "abstract representation of the relationships between data systems" (Gibson 1987b: 169) in cyberspace is, however, highly plastic, and take any form ranging from pure geometric color-coded copyrighted shapes or architectural representations (cf. Gibson 1988: 64, Gibson 1987b: 178, Gibson 1984: 256-257) signifying corporate ownership to "photo-realistic" illusions (cf. Gibson 1988: 148-149, 174, 221-224). Such sites are the essence of a postindustrial society-pure information duplicated in metasocial form: a global information economy articulated as a metropolis of bright data constructs, whose plasticity is governed by a Euclidean model based on the given problematic of visualizing data, a problematic subordinated, in Gibsonian cyberspace, to the  dictates of a transnational computer-based economy. Although predominantly conceived as a virtual Euclidean work space for legitimate computer programmers to visualize their employer's data (cf. Gibson 1987b: 169-170, Gibson 188: 13), cyberspace does, in principal, also allow a direct hardwired experience of other non-Euclidean spaces and spatialized consciousnesses to occur. The latter includes virus programs that have "replicated" and become smart (Gibson 1987a: 169) and artificial intelligences that have permeated its digitalized expanse and have finally attained "cosmic sentience" (Gibson 1988: 259). Gibsonian cyberspace is, as a consequence, digitally and socially  Durkheimian in the sense that it is both profane (a metropolis of data) and sacred (a cybernetic godhead) (Gibson 1988: 192).

Gibsonian cyberspace can be distinguished according to three, dominant, "Euclidean" characteristics. First, it is conceived as a common transnational work environment. Second, it is a transportation space designed to accomplish work related tasks-both a space in which one can travel in real-time or by way of "bodiless, instantaneous shifts" (Gibson 1988: 220) and a space  through which human memory and identity are transported globally. Third, it redifines and restructures what it means to be human in technoeconomic terms through a databased  collectivization of the human sensorium (cf. Tomas 1989) or, in "personality" or synthetic data  constructs. This potential for a radical, postcorporeal, economic transubstantiation of the human body's traditional organic and sensorial architecture forcefully remind one of Serres's comments on the plasticity of interconnections between particular cultures and related human bodies. Cyberspace's dominant Euclidean form confirms Serres's observations on the Euclidean articulation of work and space in general in Western cultures. It raises, moreover, the critical question of the governing "logic" and social, cultural, and economic control of this new sensorial and mnemonic space.

In order to further clarify these issues and to highlight their importance for future cyberspace research one must attent to other, postEuclidean, social and cultural alternatives that are germane to cyberspace. These are best addressed from the point of view of parallels that can be drawn between the postindustrial, cyberspatial transubstantiation of the human body in traditional rites de passage rituals. First described in the cases of so-called, small-scale, preindustrial, pre-Industrial  Revolution societies, these rituals draw attention to the role of "the social" as a mediative force in the many fundamental biological, cultural, and technological changes that have been experienced by humankind.