Deflating Hyperspace

[Dave Monroe]

--- James Kyllo <jkyllo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very interesting
> 
> but this:
> 
> > And the variant term, "cyberspace," coined by
> > science-fiction writer William Gibson in the
> > early 1980s to stress the close connection to
> > information technology, is simply ubiquitous.
> 
> is odd.  Hyperspace and cyberspace are very
> different concepts aren't they?

I edited that article to keep it 10K or under ...

-----

"It's very similar to what was happening in the 19th
century," Charnesky says.

"What's different," he adds, "is that before, all they
had as examples of hyperspace was this idea from
mathematics, and the metaphors it engendered.
Hyperspace is like ghosts, like spirits, like God.
Whereas we have computers -- this magnificent
technology. The spatial metaphors from this technology
are already part of the popular culture."

What's the same as 100 years ago, Chernosky argues, is
the value being granted the term. "There's an
assigning of importance," he says, "that goes above
and beyond the meaning of the word itself."

Anything affiliated with computers has instant cachet,
the argument runs, so we invoke its terms in all kinds
of contexts, appropriating their legitimacy. "We use
them to win arguments which we wouldn't win on their
own merits."

But why does hyperspace have this power? What does it
mean to us, that we invoke it? It means a lot of
things, but what it stands for, Chernosky suggests, is
transcendence -- the world beyond immediate sensory
experience. Linked to geometry -- queen of the queen
of the sciences -- in the 19th century, the concept of
hyperspace gave popular culture an acceptable way to
talk about transcendence at a time when traditional
religious concepts were falling before the onslaught
of modernism. Linked to our supreme technology of
today, it again provides a bridge between seen and
unseen, the rational and the super-rational. The
concept of hyperspace allows us to think about
transcendence in terms we can accept and understand --
or think we understand.

Chernosky has found, in the work of the French
philosopher Deleuze, a useful model for exploring the
cultural function of hyperspace.

"What Deleuze gives me," he says, "is the concept of
the abstract machine, which is a way of looking at a
configuration of ideas, bodies, things, and trying to
find their structural relationship. What's going on
underneath.

Things, in Deleuze's view, are things because they are
named. And they are named within a philosophical
framework peculiar to a given age. Things, then, are
culturally-determined "codings"; and within the
framework there is consistency, so everything makes
sense. This consistency suggests a single "machine"
under the surface, doing the encryption.

Within such a system, Chernosky says, "the physical
process that erodes and stratifies rocks, for example,
might be seen as involving the same machine as that
which creates a class structure in a capitalist
society.

"This is my claim -- that the 19th- and 20th- century
uses of hyperspace involve the same abstract machine."

In both cases, he contends, hyperspace mediates
between realms of discourse that otherwise would not
communicate. And in both cases, hyperspace is used as
a "sign" for transcendence. What we gain by noticing
this similarity is the insight that "lots of people
are using this new idea to bolster the same old
arguments."

Back in the 19th century, Charnesky relates, "after
the theosophists had used hyperspace to establish a
bridge between their idea of higher planes and the
geometrical concept of mirror images, the
spiritualists moved in.

"There was a series of highly publicized experiments,
with a famous medium, involving knotted ropes."

The ropes were carefully tied and laid in the medium's
presence. A seance was commenced. Suddenly, there were
trumpets and smoke and hullabaloo, and the ropes, lo
and behold, had somehow disappeared. Then, just as
suddenly, they were returned -- except that the
original knots came back precisely reversed. This
mirror effect was reported to be the result of having
passed through the afterworld, explainable as
hyperspace.

"It was a real scam," Chernosky says. "And it only
worked because its victims were familiar with the
geometry."

Today's politicians, with their talk about the promise
of technology, he goes on to suggest, often effect a
similar rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

"Instead of reversing knots, they are going to reverse
American society, from bad to good, by invoking
hyperspace -- or in this case, cyberspace.

"The knot is, say, the problem of the inner city. Newt
Gingrich says we can turn the problem inside out
simply by giving all these poor kids computers. You
introduce the technology -- or merely invoke it -- and
the problem will go through hyperspace and be
reversed. And it isn't just Gingrich. Bill Clinton
talks the same way. We all do, the way we talk about
the Information Superhighway." ...

http://www.rps.psu.edu/dec95/hyper.html

-----

Cf., e.g., ...

Davis, Erik.  TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism
   in the Age of Information.  NY: Harmony, 1998.

http://techgnosis.com/techgnosis/techgnosis.html

http://www.techgnosis.com/

Historians inform us that the West's mystical heritage
of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and
apocalyptic visions crashed on the shores of the
modern age. In this view, technology has helped
disenchant the world. But the old phantasms and
metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear -- in
many cases, they disguised themselves and went
underground, worming their way into the cultural,
psychological, and mythological underpinnings that
form the foundations of the modern world. As Erik
Davis shows in his new book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic,
and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Harmony
Books, 1998), "mystical impulses sometimes
body-snatched the very technologies that supposedly
helped yank them from the stage in the first place."

Taking his cue from Arthur C. Clarke's famous remark
that any sufficiently advanced technology would be
indistinguishable from magic, Davis will peer into the
history of phantasms to open up the digital
imagination. He will discuss the ancient Art of
Memory, and trace this mnemonic techne through Dante
and Renaissance magic into the hypertext hieroglyphics
of the World Wide Web. Davis will also explore the
metaphoric role of magic in computer games, from
Adventure to MUDs to the latest RPGs, arguing that
this curiously persistent topos reveals a great deal
about the semiotics of computer interfaces and the
nature of virtual worlds.

http://atc.berkeley.edu/bio/Erik_Davis/

... but cf. also in Pynchon such elements as the
"mirror world" (V.), the "interface" and/or "other
side" (GR), various mattresses (Lot 49), carpets (GR)
and tabletops (M&D), u.s.w., et soforthiam ...


 
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