Introduction to 'Beyond the Symbolic Order'
Ideologies, literary genres and theories are post-constructed categories, reflecting either present or past changes in the world around us; they are the means people use to accept and neutralise the threat of change, the destabilisation of the existing social order, chaos. They are fantasy-constructions, which serve ' as a support for our ' reality' itself' masking ' some insupportable, real, impossible kernel' --jouissance (Zizek 1989:45). Nowadays, though, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to perform their task, since they have to keep being reconstructed on continuously new bases, in a world that ' is changing so rapidly that we can hardly track the differences, much less cope with them' (Rushkoff, 2). We are living in the Information Age, during which computer technology dominates and constantly changes our lives, leading us to the oncoming age of ' Chaos' (Rushkoff, 23). Our reality, the existing symbolic order, is in danger of being ' overflowed' by the real -- information, which ' serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything -- which is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance' (Zizek 1989:84). Our overwhelming fear of drowning, in today' s sea of endless information, is nothing but a mask for the nausea and despair we experience, each time we encounter the decaying body of our symbolic order. Our obsession with the threatening aspects of information technology is an attempt to prevent the advent of a psychotic world, to construct a new symbolic order, to conceal the fact that information ' in itself ... is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness...' (ibid., 173). This is why it is now the computer that must function as the ' big Other' , as the Name of the Father, if it is to be ' possible for the subject to locate himself again within the texture of symbolic fate' (Zizek 1992a:169). It would seem that the computer is the only ' nodal point' -- point de capiton which can ' quilt' the multitude of ' floating signifiers' , stop their sliding and fix their meaning (Zizek 1989:87) so that we can continue to overlook the real of our desire (Zizek 1993:17). This though can only be a temporary patch for the sustenance of our reality since the age of chaos, the onslaught of the psychotic universe, is not only unavoidable but also imminent. The gradual disappearance of ' the reality principle' (Baudrillard 1983:311) has been accelerated, by the invention of virtual reality: ' by the mirage of virtual reality, ' true' reality itself is posited as a semblance of itself, as a pure symbolic edifice' (Zizek 1992b:214). Our categories can no longer conceal ' the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus saving the reality principle' (Baudrillard 1991:25) since they too are dissolving, merging with one another, mutating into a new organism. In a short while there will be no distinction between ' high' and popular culture, or between theories, ideologies and literary genres, since already: ' Cyberpunk science fiction can be read as a sort of social theory, while Baudrillard' s futuristic post-modern social theory can be read in turn as science fiction' (Kellner, cited in Featherstone 9). In the end there will be nothing left, our entire system of beliefs and thought processes, will be radically redefined and ' The next generations, raised on the Web as their primary medium, won't even know what consensus reality is' (Leary 1997:94).
As always then it is the children that can provide us with a way out of this impasse, since they already have no need of the concept of a symbolic order. They believe that the universe is by definition ' psychotic' , for them the ' collapse of ' fiction' ... and ' reality' ' (Zizek 1993:81) occurred long ago, in the realm of videogames. These kids ' have grown up on five generations of videogames' (Herz 1997:1) which is why they are ' acclimated to a world that increasingly resembles some kind of arcade experience' (ibid., 2-3). While though, today' s ' screenagers' (Rushkoff, 13), thrive in the ever expanding, chaotic world of ' digital multimedia, virtual reality, and hypertext' (Leary 1997:65), the older generations are having great difficulties in completing the transition to this new era. Rewiring a person' s mind is not easy but if we are to survive the end of this world, we must imitate the children and learn from their natural adaptive skills. We must ' accept change as a constant' (Rushkoff, 3), embrace chaos, and learn to view it not as ' mere disorder' but as ' the character of discontinuity' (ibid., 23). We need to divorce ourselves from ' Today' s epidemic of apocalyptic thinking' (ibid., 254), which limits our potential for growth and perceive our turbulent culture as the next evolutionary step towards ' a higher level of organisation' (ibid., 267), in our effort at imitating nature. Obviously, this is no easy task for the generations that are securely attached to the concept of reality as ' the great touchstone for the world' s ethical systems' (Slouka, 12). They are as of yet unable to consider that ' psychosis is to be ' within the register of ethics' : psychosis is a mode ' not to give way as to our desire' , it signals the refusal to exchange enjoyment for the Name of the Father (Zizek 1992a:77). They are still in dire need of the ' reality' concept, which is why they have to go through a transitional stage, reconciling themselves with the concept of chaos, through the use of a familiar medium, that of a literary genre. Since what they have to come to terms with is actually computer technology, the harbinger of chaos, it is only fitting that, cyberpunk the newest form of science fiction, be the missing link between this age and the next. After all, it has always been through science fiction that we have learnt how to assimilate the rapid changes brought about by technology: ' the more pop term cyber-punk refers to the personalization (and thus the popularization) of knowledge/ information technology' (Leary 1991:252-3).
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk, however we choose to define it, is without a doubt an incredible achievement and the most controversial ' genre' of our era; it has been elevated to the position of the revolutionary vanguard of science fiction, and yet it has also been accused of being nothing but a promotional gimmick. One thing though should be made clear, whether innovative enough or not, the cyberpunk writers are not limited in their vision because ' they refuse to consider the possibility that people may develop along with their technology' (Rushkoff, 93); they simply serve, quite efficiently, the needs of a specific generation. It is precisely their ' message ... that the more things change, the more they stay the same' (ibid., 93-94) that is providing the older generations with a recognisable reality framework and the courage necessary for their entry in the age of chaos. Cyberpunk sets forth the possibility of viewing the computer as a positive entity: through it we can accomplish the ' digitalization of all information' hence ' the almost perfect materialization of the big Other...a complete symbolic redoubling of reality will take place' (Zizek 1997:164). If anything then it can be the means for sustaining or reconstructing the dead symbolic order -- an illusion, but also the first step towards a more progressive vision of the world. It is based on this illusion that cyberpunk writers have succeeded in reassuring a very insecure generation that life can exist even within a psychotic universe, and that they are just not ready yet to visualise the blueprint such a world is based on. Cyberpunk' s success and increasing popularity has been, of course, entirely dependent on the concept of cyberspace without which there would be no cyberpunk phenomenon. Cyberspace itself naturally is an illusionary world that exists only within the space of a fictional computer network. It should come as no surprise then, that even sixteen years after cyberpunk' s first appearance, in ' an article in the Washington Post dated 30 December 1984' (McCarron, 263-64), it is still evading definition and most importantly resisting categorisation. Critics are still unable or perhaps even unwilling, to determine whether, as a literary discourse, it is ' is a movement or a subgenre' (Delany, 175). For our convenience, I choose the term ' subgenre' , because it is the one most of the critics espouse and because any attempt at defining or containing cyberpunk will prove futile. After all if cyberpunk is to complete its mission it must remain unchained -- freely floating, which is why everyone is trying to prevent ' cyberpunk from settling down, from congealing, from totalizing into something rigid and restrictive' (ibid., 178). Apparently, though, cyberpunk is in no danger of regimentation since it has surpassed our wildest aspirations by transgressing the boundary between 'fiction' and 'reality'. The term is no longer used to describe just a literary medium but it now also refers to an 'underground subculture' struggling under the pressure of an unprecedented media attention, for self-definition (Herz 1994: 8). What began as a fictional category, a response to the needs of a specific generation:
cyberpunk may be... a school phenomenon in the community of SF readers and writers, a generational phenomenon in the history of SF, a barefaced marketing device, ...the ' supreme literary expression of late capitalism" ... it... must be... a convenient name for the... writing that springs up where the converging trajectories of SF poetics and postmodernist poetics finally cross (McHale, 149),
became the ground upon which the Internet culture was constructed, in reality. It would seem that cyberspace is no longer a figment of our imagination, it can be whatever we desire it to be, the Internet, Virtual Reality or both. The term was firstly employed by the ' cyberpunks' themselves, the people who actively participate in the Web, in an attempt towards self-definition. It has consequently been used by the critics as well, in such an indiscriminate manner, that it is now difficult to differentiate between the ' fictional' and the ' real' category. Nevertheless, the increasing popularity and metastasis of the term has fuelled yet another wave of paranoia: ' Cyberspace, I realized, represented the marriage of deconstruction and computer technology -- a mating of monsters if ever there was one' (Slouka, 30). What critics like Dr Slouka prefer to ignore is that, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not ' monstrosity is in the eye of the beholder' (Herz 1997:167). Besides, how could we really define monstrosity since ' previous to signifying something, previous even to serving as an empty vessel of meaning, monsters embody enjoyment qua the limit of interpretation, that it is to say nonmeaning as such' (Zizek 1992a:134). It would seem that perhaps it is only today' s ' screen manipulators' (Herz 1997:20), the kids that have grown up playing videogames -- that are equipped with the innate ability of seeing beyond the pre-established categories.
The ' cyberpunk phenomenon' cannot be interpreted or affected by critical assaults, because it is not a ' symptom' but the ' fantasy' that functions as ' the ultimate support of reality' (Zizek 1992b:218): ' symptoms are cyphered messages to be interpreted, fantasies are to be gazed at, they resist interpretation' (ibid., 222). As a fantasy, cyberpunk ' forecloses the view into the abyss of the real' (ibid., p. 218), by gentrifying jouissance, transforming the death drive into desire: ' fantasy is the very screen that separates desire from drive: it tells the story which allows the subject to (mis)perceive the void around which drive circulates as the primordial loss constitutive of desire' (Zizek 1997:32). Cyberpunk then as a fantasy transforms our drive, blind insistence upon perceiving the world and ourselves as digital or genetic information, that is as pure nothingness, into the desire for an object we lost, when we entered the symbolic order. In this case the object petit a, ' which sets our desire in motion' and guarantees ' a minimum of jouissance within the space of desire' (ibid., 39), is cyberspace. It is because cyberspace does not really exist, it is ' a hallucination, an artificially induced visualization of the global data system' (Bukatman, 166), that it can function as the object cause of our desire. The object petit a, is after all a pure void, ' which just materializes the curvature of the space of desire' (Zizek 1992a:49) and ' prevents the circle of pleasure from closing' thus introducing a certain displeasure (ibid., 48). Cyberspace' s ' sublimation ... elevation into the dignity of the Thing' is achieved through the ' artificial objects' [directives] ' that suddenly hinder our access to' it (Zizek 1994:95), i.e. access denied. It is then that it ' starts to function as a kind of screen, an empty space on which the subject projects the fantasies that support his desire' (Zizek 1993:133) thus providing the premises for our symbolic castration. In effect, we exchange ' jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense' (Zizek 1989:75), deriving pleasure from the knowledge that we are nothing Ð subjects, for jouissance ' pleasure in pain' , ' the circular movement which finds satisfaction in failing again and again to attain the object' (Zizek 1992a:48). But even though this fantasy frame has for the moment, prevented the advent of a psychotic world it is going to be traversed sooner rather than later. Prior to its collapse therefore, let us explore the origins of this fantasy, the birth or invention of cyberspace in William Gibson' s novels.
Genesis
The concept of ' cyberspace' was invented by William Gibson, in his first and most successful novel Neuromancer, and has consequently bestowed upon him the honorary title of the father of cyberpunk. In reality though, it seems that it was Neuromancer, that gave birth to William Gibson and the cyberpunk phenomenon; it is the one book everyone has read or heard of, it is cyberpunk' s Bible. Its brilliance lies in the fact that not only does it provide us with an irresistible vision of the psychotic world but also with the possibility or rather the hope of reconstructing a new symbolic order. It is in Neuromancer then, that the end of the world has occurred there is no longer any Real, jouissance, around which the symbolic order can be constructed. Instead it is now ' the symbolic order itself that is reduced to the status of floating islands of the signifier, white iles flotantes in a sea of yolky enjoyment' (Zizek 1993:40). The whole world has already been digitised, both the city and the human being do not exist, they have become ' simply another simulation, reduced to data and transformed into the hyperreality of the hologram' (Bukatman, 148). In this psychotic world then, jouissance, the gratification we derive from the exchange of information whilst being ourselves nothing but information is the ' aquarium of the real' (Zizek 1993:40). Thus the ' isolated islands of the symbolic' (ibid.) can only be cyberspace and the physical spaces and beings that remind us of our past, that belong to an obsolete but much cherished discourse, the noir thriller. Cyberspace and the noir discourse constitute the fantasy frame through which the human being attempts to relinquish his death drive by learning or rather by being reminded of how to desire. In this fantasy frame then, cyberspace plays the role of the object petit a, ' a pure void which functions as the object-cause of desire' (Zizek 1989:163). This is of course the perfect role for cyberspace because it is ' A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operator, ...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system' (Gibson, Neuromancer, 67). The second part of this fantasy frame, the noir elements -- relics of our past -- are present in order to sustain the subject' s desire in the absence of cyberspace. These memorabilia are the spatio-temporal distortions within the Sprawl axis: ' the anarchic sectors' (Bukatman, 169), ' the abandoned zones of the inner cities' (Ross, 146), or ' the Zone -- within the Zone --' (McHale, 155) and the figures of the detective, the femme fatale and the psychopath. The entire book is focused on rekindling the subject' s ability to desire because as long as the subject desires there is still hope for the construction of a new symbolic order since the subject is not as of yet a ' subject' , he has not surrendered to the drive. The paranoia, which pervades the whole universe, then is quite clearly ' an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real ' illness' , the ' end of the world' , the breakdown of the symbolic universe' (Zizek 1993:19). At the end of the novel, this fantasy frame is traversed because cyberspace, after its ' subjectification' , is constituted as the new Master Signifier, Nom Du Pere, ' the big Other' . It seems as if the death drive has been successfully transformed into desire and a new symbolic order has been created in which both the human and the AI will be conferred ' a place in the intersubjective space' (Zizek 1992a:77).
The creation of this symbolic order though was nothing but an illusion as we discover in the next two parts of the trilogy Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Cyberspace right after its constitution as ' the big Other' , collapsed, it split up into different entities because it encountered the Other, its Other. What cyberspace, as an entity lucked was the ' dimension of imaginary identification, of the ideal ego' (Zizek 1992a:157), that is the image that would represent what it would have liked to be. The universe then is still psychotic but cyberspace no longer functions as the object petit a, it has now assumed a psychotic position and is lethal. The object petit a, that sets people' s desire in motion is now constituted by the media celebrities, simstars, that emerged in order to embody and thus disguise information-jouissance. These idols seem to have been entirely digitised, dematerialised and have thus been elevated to the dignity of the Thing. Therefore, the fantasy supporting this reality is now constituted of the sublimated media idols and the noir discourse. Obviously this world is still in need of a symbolic order, which cannot be constructed as long as cyberspace is psychotic. This world is now even more perilous since it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between cyberspace and real space with real people choosing to periodically inhabit this digital world. Cyberspace is struggling to heal itself, it is ' striving for a homeostatic balance' (Zizek 1989:132) but it is still lacking a Master Signifier that will help organise its multiple selves. This is why cyberspace needed to be inscribed on the brain of a woman -- media idol, who would consequently join her lover in death, in cyberspace. This was the only way they could provide the matrix with ' an other' , which it could ' imitate ... at the level of resemblance' (ibid., 109), so that it could acquire not only a face but also a shape.
