LCD too tight

[purple]

[[Becoming immedia: The involution of digital convergence

by Donald Theall

"Now, to the degree that ... the human elements infiltrated more and
more into each other, their minds (mysterious coincidence) were mutually

stimulated by proximity. And as though dilated upon themselves, they
each extended little by little the radius of their influence upon this
earth which, by the same token, shrank steadily. What, in fact, do we
see over and over again? Through the discovery yesterday of the railway,

the motor car, and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man,
formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues
or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event
represented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual
finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously
present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth" (Teilhard de
Chardin 1959, 240).

The publication in the 1950s and 1960s of Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin's
writings on the evolution of mind and consciousness received
considerable attention because the works marked what Stephen Toulmin
called "The Return to Cosmology" and since the Jesuit paleontologist and

philosopher had seemed to marry the theory of evolution to a natural
theology. Strongly praised by Thomas Huxley, Teilhard's theory of the
emergence of the noosphere seemed also to have anticipated the emergence

of a new cybernetic age. Teilhard, who encountered objections to his
work from the Catholic Church and the Jesuit order, had obviously been
strongly influenced by the turn of the century philosophical writings of

Henri Bergson. But the scientific and theologically trained Teilhard,
with his theory that humanity is evolving, mentally and socially, to a
final spiritual unity, did not have the knowledge of the perceptual
power of the arts and the conceptual power of philosophy, which in a
gradually developing counter-tradition, would evolve a cybernetic
"chaosmology." That chaosmology would have even stronger intuitions of
the rapidly developing digiculture with its cyberspace and virtual (or
artificial) realities.

James Joyce had already, before 1940 introduced the term
"chaosmology"
which was to be further conceptualized by McLuhan in the 1960s and later

in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. However, the rise
of McLuhanism at the opening of the 1960s provided a strong impetus to
Teilhard's theories as possible precursors for a cybernetic cosmology
grounded in a natural theology. In l962, when Marshall McLuhan discussed

his concepts of the externalization of the senses and the global village

in his groundbreaking book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, he identified them
with Teilhard's concept of the noosphere -- or as McLuhan glossed it,
the "technological brain" (described by Teilhard as "the ‘thinking
layer,' which ... has spread over and above the world of plants and
animals, and thus worlds beyond the biosphere" [Teilhard 1959, iii. i.
182]).

While references to Teilhard's writing appear frequently in
McLuhan's
proclamation of the end of the era of the primacy of the printing press
(not the death of the book), the first time McLuhan cites a quotation
from Teilhard -- the epigraph to this essay -- is in his discussion of
the outering of the senses. That passage concludes with the
paleontologist noting that the discovery of electromagnetism is the most

recent and far-reaching extension of the radius of influence of the
"technological brain" achieved through social evolution. McLuhan further

observes that Teilhard has seen into the heart of contemporary panic,
since by 1962 the world, instead of tending towards a huge Alexandrian
library, has become "a computer, an electronic brain" (McLuhan 1962,
32). Viewed from the year 2001, the concerns of McLuhan and Teilhard
with a world that has become an electromagnetically produced
"technological brain" appear somewhat anachronistic, for there is now
not only a potential for merging the Alexandrian library with the
electronic brain, but still further a potential for their eventually
becoming intertwined with a multisensory "virtual reality."

In raising this image of Alexandria, McLuhan ironically, but
also
unconsciously, echoes the intimations of a future which Borges
satirically anticipated in the "The Total Library" (Borges 1981, 35).
McLuhan frequently revisited such visions of the future in his various
writings, which have now led to his being denominated one of the prime
prophets of cyberspace, the wired world, and/or digiculture. While
Teilhard envisioned the evolution of mind and its impact on the
processes of contemporary society -- the emergence of the ultrahuman
from the compression and connectedness of people's minds in an
electromagnetic shrinking world -- he did not, and probably could not,
foresee the full extent to which the electromagnetic era would lead to
the metamorphosis and transformation of the book. Nor could he have
foreseen the para-electronic "library" as information databank being
able to encompass the book within a totally new set of technologies,
just as the book in its origins had been transformed from ogham and
runes to papyrus to parchment to paper to print to mass-produced print
and images. While McLuhan in the 1950s intuited this process, he only
gradually and then partially began to perceive that electromagnetic
transformations of the book, through convergence of media and the
accompanying merging of the senses, could, in the long term, offset the
potential of the postelectric media to suppress the "Gutenberg" effect;
the forestalling of the end of the book became transformation in the
evolution of the book.

In the 1950s the roots of such a visionary understanding of the
long-ranging implications of the electromagnetic and then the digital
revolutions came from a diverse group of sources. These sources were
primarily associated with the creative or critical practice in the arts
and humanistic studies rooted in cultural history:

(a) radical and avant-garde modernist art and poetry subsequent to
1850,
most specifically French symbolism and such European art movements from
1900 as vorticism, constructivism, dadaism and surrealism;

(b) the particular critical integration of theories of human
evolution,
of the evolution of creative intuition and expression, including the
book and the consciousness of the unconscious through the dream, as
realized in contemporary poetry and art such as the vision of James
Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake;

(c) an increased knowledge of the history of the humanistic arts of
communication and their transmission (that is, the history of the
trivium -- grammar, logic, rhetoric -- and the history of early
education) from the classical world until the Enlightenment;

(d) the new appreciation after 1850 of the history of the
alchemical,
the occult, and the gnostic, which led to observations such as W. B.
Yeats saying that "The visible world is no longer a reality and the
unseen world is no longer a dream" (quoted in McLuhan 1964: 35).

McLuhan, who built his own prophecies from quixotic
interpretations of
all of the above sources, linked his own views to Yeats' observation of
the merging of the seen and unseen worlds being paralleled by a merging
of reality and dream. These views concerned the contemporary reversal,
under the impact of electronic media, of the real world into science
fiction and the accompanying reversal by which the Western world is
going Eastern, as the East goes Western. Played off against the science,

epistemology, and technology of the new cyberneticians (Turing, Wiener,
Shannon, Weaver, and the Macy seminars; the ecology of mind of Gregory
Bateson and the Palo Alta group; and the autopoesis of Varela and
Maturana), the aforementioned history of the arts and of the humanistic
tradition could provide contexts for partially understanding the nature
of the future through knowledge of past transformations of modes of
communication and expression and of ways of storing and processing data.

Simultaneously it could also provide insight into the significance of
the ongoing metamorphoses of relationships between matter and
consciousness. Because Teilhard did not have a mastery of this specific
body of artistic and humanistic knowledge, his account of the
technological brain was for McLuhan the "the lyrical testimony of a very

romantic biologist" which while "perceptive" and "prophetic," yet had "a

shrill vehemence" accompanied by "an uncritical enthusiasm for the
cosmic membrane that has snapped around the globe by the electric
dilation of our various senses" (McLuhan 1962: 32).

McLuhan, denying he was either an optimist or a pessimist, while

asserting he was an apocalyptic, claimed to discover a more complex,
critical, and historically contextualized focus for his understanding of

the electromagnetic and its outering of the senses from his "partial"
readings of the work of symbolist poets, avant-garde artists of the
first half of the 20th century and the later works of the
anti-apocalyptic Joyce -- Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. From these
sources, and particularly Joyce's work, McLuhan launched an intuitive,
perceptual, and artistic critique of the emergence through
electromagnetism and technology of cyberculture or digiculture. Of
particular interest at the moment is the way in which he positioned
himself as a balance between the optimism of Teilhard and what he took
to be the pessimistic "gnosticism" of the cyberneticists (Wiener, etc.).

Simultaneously he seems to have positioned Joyce as a balance between
the optimism of the Bergsonian élan vital (the basis of creative
evolution) and what seemed to be the devolutionary eternal return of
Nietzsche. Probably through his suspicion that Joyce was of the "devil's

party" (along with Milton and Blake), McLuhan ultimately favored the
Viconian Joyce, declaring Giambattista Vico, with his progressive
cyclicity, to be a Baconian and the last pre-electric grammarian.

If Bergson was a more important precursor than Darwin of
Teilhard's
"natural theology," it was Joyce who produced a vision of
electromagnetic and digital evolutionary involution. Building on Bergson

and Whitehead and revising their cosmologies as a "chaosmo[logy]," Joyce

developed a comedically modified interpretation of Vico's Scienza Nuova,

beginning from the "increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks;
luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever" (FW 613.19--20) (Toulmin 1985:
119, 123). As his antihero, HCE, falls into an inebriated sleep, he is
imagined to be the "last pre-electric king of Ireland" (FW 380.12), a
protoptypical King Roderick O'Connor. Joyce's dream, nearly a quarter of

a century earlier than McLuhan and years before Teilhard, explores the
transformation of mind through the transformation of electromagnetic
technologies. The immediately preceding episode in which HCE's
school-age children are studying their lessons ("Triv and Quad"),
examines the relations of mind, memory, meaning, and cultural production

in which, "After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding
... (the memories framed from walls are minding) ... " (FW 266.18--21).

By relating fundamental matter as implicit in sound, light, and
heat to
mind and memory, Joyce, in his post-Bergsonian vision, explores the
roots in gesture -- for "in the beginning was the gest" (FW 468.5) -- of

the evolution of postelectric consciousness. As they are maturing, the
children's learning is guided by "Mimosa Multimimetica, the
maymeaminning of maimoomeining!"; that is, "the meaning of meaning"
through a multiplicity of modes of mimesis and mimicry (FW 267.1-3).
This is a quest that produces a virtual world of "Singalingalying.
Storiella as she is syung. Whence followeup with end-speaking nots for
yestures" (FW 267.7--10) that can be realized through meaningful signs
which are equally words and speech tending to postelectric codes --
white light, spectral color, and motion: "Belisha beacon, beckon bright!

Usherette, unmesh us! That grene ray of earong it waves us to yonder as
the red, blue and yellow flogs time on the domisole, with a blewy blow
and a windigo. Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud" (FW
267.12--16).

Here the convergence of media is projected into the remote
historical
past. From the mnemonic and its encounter with "end-speaking nots" and
"yestures" emerges the basis of that semiotic foundation of the "meaning

of meaning" that Ogden expounded from Malinowski, Peirce, and others
("Multimimetica, the maymeaminning of maimoomeining!") When postelectric

mimesis (virtual realization) takes place in an electromagnetic context,

the original multimedia nature of communication, recognized by the early

grammarians, rhetoricians, and their commentaries on poetry, will be
seen as essential to constructing virtual realities. Joyce thus involved

all of the previously mentioned artistic, humanistic, and historic
strands, embedding them within his "critico-satiric" play with a helical

theory of evolutionary history derived from Vico in interface with
pre-psychoanalytic and other alternative theories of dream and the
emergence of consciousness of the unconscious that counterpointed the
emergence of psychoanalytic theory.

Such a vision at the same time explored, anticipated and queried
the
extreme, uncritical optimism Teilhard later associated with his account
of the noosphere, while still providing a foundation for McLuhan's
theories. Vico's history is relevant to the issue at hand, since his
"new science" was based on the history of language rather than
etymology. Further, Vico's "new science" does not strictly depend on a
four-part structure because his account consists of three ages (Gods,
heroes, men) plus a ricorso which is quite distinct from the three ages
that precede it and each ricorso, as it introduces the next cycle of
ages, does not imply going back to a totally new beginning. Each
Viconian ricorso, as Joyce interprets it, returns the course of
historical life from a decadent age of men to begin the "seim anew" (FW
215.23) in an age of gods, which retains in memory the previous cycle.
This is why Vico's vision is helical in structure rather than an
ever-repeating cyclical one. The Wake both utilized and satirized Vico.
The New Science's emphasis on a poetic wisdom had strong affinities with

Joyce; his helical theory of history provided an appropriate
counterpoint to progressive evolutionary theories, and even allowed for
a possible vision of an aWakening into a new cycle based on the
postelectric age. However, Joyce wished to move beyond Vico's Homeric
poetic wisdom to a post-Homeric, post-Cartesian, technoscientific poetic

vision confronting the emergence of a new cognitive-sensory
hypertextuality.

In the Wake Joyce recognized the apparent paradox of his
preoccupation
with time, mind, and memory in relation to a machinic world that is part

of a "chaosmos" presided over by "blankdeblank, god of all machineries"
(FW 253-33). This is a delirious (délire) deity whose dreams are crafted

by each and every person (i.e., Everybody), each of whom is a "harmonic
condenser enginium" (FW 310.1) and enunciated by poets and artists, who
assemble abstract machines. So Joyce considered himself to be "the
greatest engineer." But as Joyce's self-directed, comic comments on his
role as engineer indicate, the engines he assembled are the "abstract
machines" of the "musicmaker" or the "philosophe." Possibly his
awareness that he was assembling such machines grew naturally out of his

early realization, in 1923, of the radical complexity of his work (he
described it as "complex," "duplex," "perplex," "stuplex," etc.) and
beginning in 1927 from his thinking of himself as a great engineer, so
that by the late 1930s the conscious recognition of the interplay of
machinic motion, complexification, and chaos led to his inserting into
the evolving text the words "gossip will cry it from the housetops no
surelier than the writing on the wall will hue it to the mod of men ...
every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected
... [is] moving and changing every part of the time" (FW 118.20--22).

In describing his dream action or the poetic action of a (or
more
specifically his) manuscript discovered by a hen in a midden heap,
Joyce, moving beyond the interplay of the cosmos and random chance, sees

the experimentation with language in the Wake as directly related to the

technoscientific thrust towards convergence of media. This is a
convergence that Joyce -- along with many avant-garde contemporaries
such as Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus group, and the Giedions realized had
been intuited in early multimedia aspects of the medieval cathedrals.

That this was an important foundation for Joyce's composition of
the
Wake is confirmed in that one of his earliest fragments or "vignettes"
(1923) composed in the design of the Wake -- the debate between the
Archdruid (Berkeleyan philosophy and idealism) and the Saint (matter and

medieval realism) -- eventually, as the process of composition
progresses over the years, comes to take place in a setting mediated by
television cameras, newspaper coverage, and film journalism, and
gradually comes to be more and more associated with discussions of the
nature of light, the spectrum, and optics. From its earliest moments
there was an intuitive sense of the Wake uniting the poetico-artistic
and the technoscientific in the midst of late 19th and early 20th
century developments leading to the convergence of media and ultimately
to the emergence of a world "beyond media."

All of these concerns are intrinsically involved with problems
of
virtuality and actuality, of the possible and the real, and of the
monism of mind and body that were implied in the philosophy of Berkeley
and his theories of vision, which resurfaced in the interest of
contemporary cosmologists such as Alfred North Whitehead. What Joyce
undertakes through parody and comedy is to transform Vico's equating of
memory, understanding, and imagination, as well as the transformation of

his helical, evolutionary history of humankind into a pre-postmodern,
poetic vision of the interplay of the future and the past in the
evolution of mind, resulting from the emergence of the postelectric,
electromagnetic and electrochemical world. Joyce's hero, HCE, Here Comes

Everybody, prefigures an evolutionary process of becoming "machinic"
("Harmonic Condenser Enginium") (FW 310.1). Teilhard and McLuhan see
invention as one of the key elements at the heart of this processual
evolving of consciousness. Joyce locates that invention in the very
nature of the "language" he is inventing -- developed from the nature of

language as code and gesture, for in a "mock" portrait of himself as
Shem, the sham poet , it is said:
... and him, the cribibber like an ambitrickster, aspiring like the
decan's, fast aslooped in the intrance to his polthronechair with his
sixth finger between his cats eye and the index, making his pillgrimace
of Childe Horrid, engrossing to his ganderpan what the idioglossary he
invented .... (FW 423.5--9 [italics mine]).
By approaching his subject as an "ambitrickster" and learned satirist
such as Swift ("the decan's fast aslooped ..."), Pope (in whose Dunciad,

the description of Dean Swift as asleep in his easy chair) or Byron (who

wrote "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"), Joyce -- avoiding the tendency
towards linearity in Teilhard -- is able to encompass semiotic
ambivalence and the complexity of the helical-cyclical nature of the
cognitive-sensory evolution of consciousness, from which the convergence

of modes of expression emerge. While Teilhard sees humanity moving into
a posthistorical period of the ultrahuman, Joyce's vision is only partly

reflected in McLuhan's assertion that:

... we live in posthistory in the sense that all pasts that ever were
are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will
be are here now. In that sense we are posthistory and timeless. Instant
awareness of all the varieties of human expression reconstitutes the
mythic type of consciousness, of once-upon-a-time-ness, which means
all-time, out of time.

It is possible that our new technologies can bypass verbalizing. There
is nothing impossible about the computer's ... extending consciousness
itself, as a universal environment. In a sense, the surround of
information that we now experience electrically is an extension of
consciousness itself (McLuhan 1999: 88).
Joyce, unlike Teilhard and McLuhan, confronts the "ambiviolent" nature
of the "chaosmos" and simultaneously sees that the physical and somatic
bodies are involved in this moving beyond. The process of being more
parahuman than posthuman is constituted in a "pre-posthistory" that
still involves the historical, for in time there is no present, since
the present is always already immediately past at the moment we
contemplate it and the future necessarily implicates the past.

Grasping the complexity of the "chaosmos" underlies the
necessity of
such phenomena as the Joycean "collideorscape" (FW 143.28), which is a
medley of verbal, gestural, visual, harmonic, and optical elements that
a "fargazer seems[s] to seemself to seem seming of" (FW 143.26--27).
This is important since the identity of invention-imagination and memory

within the time-space world of the virtuality of the cultural product is

essential to moving beyond the book. As Joyce's dream action moves
towards its conclusion it is described as "Our wholemole millwheeling
vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon" (FW 614.27--28) of
which it can be said as of a dream, a speech act, a miming gesture, or a

traditional book:

What has gone? How it ends?
Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with
all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend.
Forget, remember! (FW 614.19--22)

Such a machine composed through matter, mind, and memory, in whatever
medium it may be assembled has the "sameold gamebold adomic structure"
which must ultimately have an electromagnetic foundation "as highly
charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it" (FW 615.6--8).

Although Teilhard intuited the significance of the emergence of
the
contemporary electromagnetic world through memory and mind becoming
conscious of itself (unlike McLuhan, and even more so Joyce, Deleuze, or

Guattari), he does not examine the metamorphoses of modes of
communication, which seem to be an essential component of the
electromagnetic evolution of consciousness. Joyce partly shares with
Deleuze and Guattari a world in which metamorphoses are accompanied by a

fluidity of signifiers, since becomings are states of virtualization
prior to actualization: man can become woman and woman, man; where Shem
can become Shaun and Shaun, Shem; where wo/man can become insect (i.e.,
earwig) or insect, wo/man; where the tree can become stone and the
stone, tree; where the river can become mountain and mountain, river.
The fluidity and complexity of Joyce's language is indispensable for
crafting this verbal poetic vision of the "chaosmotic" evolution of the
digital universe. Guattari, in his Chaosmosis, offers an explanation for

the importance of such linguistic experimentation as Joyce's language or

the semiotic experimentation of avant-garde artists such as Duchamp and
Klee:

[they reverse] subjectivity['s being] standardized through communication

which evacuates as much as possible trans-semiotic and amodal
enunciative compositions [by] slip[ping] towards the progressive
effacement of polysemy, prosody, gesture, mimicry, and posture to the
profit of a language rigorously subjected to scriptural machines and
their mass media avatars (Guattari 1995:104).

Through its transversality as a satire of "subjectivity
standardized
through communication," Joyce's Wake re-establishes polysemy, prosody,
gesture, mimicry, and posture. In a sense it revisits the concerns of
the "Oxen of the Sun" section of Ulysses and thus retraces an
evolutionary semiology in which the imaginary simulations of poetry and
the arts are transformed, as different modes and media converge in a
electromagnetic, technological simulation of cyberspace. Brenda Laurel,
in her Computers as Theater, argued that cyberspace, as the simulation
of virtual worlds, should be construed in terms of a theory of dramatic
mimesis (Laurel 1991). Having posited dream, hallucination,
inebriation, and delirium as generators of virtual worlds, Joyce in his
"Phoneix Playhouse" (or children's nurseryroom) section of the Wake (FW
II.i) relates his work as the "Feenichts Playhouse" (FW 219.1) to
Bergsonian motifs of time, duration, memory, and creative evolution with

a specific allusion to Bergson's élan vital:

Time: the pressant.
With futurist onehorse balletbattle pictures and the Pageant
of Past History worked up with animal variations amid ever-
glaning mangrovemazes and beorbtracktors by Messrs Thud and
Blunder. Shadows by the film folk, masses by the good people.
Promptings by Elanio Vitale. Longshots, upcloses, outblacks and
stagetolets by Hexenschuss, Coachmaher, Incubone and Rock-
narrag. Creations tastefully designed by Madame Berthe Dela-
mode. Dances arranged by Harley Quinn and Coollimbeina.
Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties
of the late cemented Mr T. M. Finnegan R.I.C. (FW 221.17--27).

The full significance of Joyce's satiric counterattack against
Lewis's
attack on his Bergsonism only becomes clear when it is recognized how
Bergson's discussions of memory, duration, the embodied nature of the
brain, and creative evolution contributed to an early understanding of
the semiological evolution taking place in tandem with the technological

evolution of the postelectric era. If Teilhard's work appears to have a
relevance to the chaosmology of a world of complexity, it is partly
because of Bergson's influence. In this excerpt from the Wake, there is
an interplay between a theory of time -- how the present which is always

already past makes urgent (pressant, Fr. = urgent) the future -- and the

avant-garde poet's or artist's technological vision, arising from past
history. In "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies" this is realized
through the intermixture of artistic modes ("the onehorse balletbattle
pictures and Pageant"), the cinematic (the "film folks") and the élan
vital ("promptings by Elanio Vitale"). The imaginary dream theatre of
the children's nurseryroom is the Wake, as this excerpt asserts (since
it asserts that the "Feenichts theatre" is the Wake for which "the
jests, jokes, jigs and jorums" are those of Finnegan).

The Joycean vision of the transformation of the primitive into a

complex and chaotic technoculture is a prophecy of cyberspace which
foresees, but in a more pre-postmodernist mode, the affiliation
between
the theatre and cyberspace which Laurel developed, arguing that
Aristotlean poetics provided an account of drama that was the most
appropriate way to understand the human--computer interface and its
generation of the virtuality of cyberspace. The Wake (being also a
"mime") is a drama, "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in
cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids" (FW
219.16--18). The fluidity of its "language" parallels the fluidity of
electromagnetic media such as cinema and its extended cinematic
successors, subsequently moving towards the convergence of media in
digiculture. If Bergson influenced Teilhard and Whitehead and ultimately

Bateson, the major Bergsonian discovery in Matter and Memory in 1896 of
a movement image in the physical reality of the external world and a
time image in the psychic reality of consciousness, influences the
construction of the language and structure of Ulysses and particularly
of Finnegans Wake (Deleuze 1986: passim).

Bergson had come to see that duration was virtual coexistence,
as
Deleuze points out in his study of Bergsonism (Deleuze 1988). By the
time of his writing of the Wake, Joyce had developed a "synthetic"
language which, within itself, encompasses past-present-future in the
virtual coexistence of a remembered dream. At various moments he links
this very specifically to electromagnetic media, such as the conclusion
of a TV battle between two figures -- Butt and Taff:

[The pump and pipe pingers are ideally reconstituted ...
All the presents are deter-
mining as regards for the future the howabouts of their past
absences which they might see on at hearing could they once smell
of tastes from touch. To ought find a values for. The must overl-
istingness. When ex what is ungiven. As ad where. Stillhead.
Blunk.] (FW 355.1--7).

The virtual (that is, the ideally reconstituted) dwells in duration
("the presents are determining as regards for the future the howabouts
of their past absences") and is embedded in the reality, but not the
actuality, of the senses and synesthesia. As the "probapossible
polegomena" to his "ideareal history" (FW 262.R1--2 & 5--6) illustrates,

the "Ideal Present Alone Produces Real Future" (FW 303.L.12--4).

As a sidereal history (a virtual chaosmology) as well as an
"ideareal"
(ideal + real, i.e., a virtual history) Joyce critiques, transforms, and

contemporizes the poetic science of a Viconian "ideal eternal history."
This is an "ideareal history" realized only through the
mythico-mathematical language that is "an autocratic writings of
paraboles of famellicurbs and meddles muddlingisms, thee faroots of
cullchaw" (FW 303.19--21).

Joyce's poetic history is a history moving through the virtual
of the
fictional via dream, inebriation, hallucination and delirium, to the
wo/man-made electromagnetic virtualities converging in cyberspace. Such
satirico-comedic Viconian histories are ones in which an "alshemist"
poet can write "over every square inch of the only foolscap available,
his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present
tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded
cyclewheeling history ..." (FW 185.35--186.2). They both illustrate the
ongoing cultural production of consciousness and yet allow for localized

regressions of decadent consciousness through a ricorso or eternal
return. This is "History as her is harped ... Mere man's mime. God hath
jest. The old order changeth and lasts like the first" (FW 486.6--10).
The "ambiviolence" of an electromagnetic world of virtuality, its
implication by the Bergsonian durée, its reflection in language and
convergent modes of cultural production, and its links to Joycean poetic

history, are the subject of another one of the original vignettes -- the

earliest fragments of the composition of Work in Progress from which the

Wake evolved -- an episode entitled "Mamalujo" (FW II.4).

These four comic annalist-historian-evangelist-psychoanalysts
(Matt
Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougall [FW 384]), in
one aspect the tellers of the Wake as a Swiftian "Tale of a Tub":

... used to give the grandest gloriaspanquost univer-
sal howldmoutherhibbert lectures on anaxarquy out of doxarch-
ology ... accord-
ing to the pictures postcard, with sexson grammaticals, in the
Latimer Roman history ... (FW 388.28-32).

The four, the "mamalujo," as eternal historians (the four evangelists)
also being evolutionary historians as well as "howldmoutherhibbert"
lecturers (the Hibbert lectures being devoted primarily to philosophy
and theology) are a satiric anticipation of the natural theology of
Teilhardian evolution that Joyce could have derived from a combination
of Bergson with H. G. Wells and/or Huxley. Theirs are the "grandest
gynecollege histories ... on which purposeth by spirit of nature as
difinely developed in time by psadatepholomy, the past and present ...
and present and absent and past and present and perfect" (FW 389.9--17).

A history told through "picture postcards" and developed by
pseudo-telephony is then a mode of virtual electromagnetic history, even

if it is a parodic one. In fact, this is the very "ambiviolence" of the
Joycean vision regarding the simultaneity of the evolutionary and the
cyclical modes of Viconian "science" as a helical theory of history
applied to the emergence of the contemporary world. Throughout the Wake
the complex play with compounds of tele- and their relation to the
convergence of media builds up to its culmination in the climactic
merging of TV, film, cathedrals, and dream, with visions of the work
itself as an imaginary electromagnetic machine: "the vicociclometer, a
"tetradomational gazebocroticon."

The Joycean dream as a "wake," as well as a prelude to an
awakening,
anticipates how Guattari, half a century later, speaks of "a-waking" as
a way of understanding the presence of multiple heterogeneity of media
in chaosmosis:

The heterogeneity of components (verbal, corporeal, spatial ...)
engenders an ontological heterogenesis all the more vertiginous when
combined, as it is today with a proliferation of new materials, new
electronic representations, and with a shrinking of distances and an
enlargement of points of view, informatic subjectivity distances us at
high speed from old scriptural linearity. The time has come for
hypertext in every genre, and even for a new cognitive and sensory
writing that Pierre Lévy describes as ‘dynamic ideography' (Guattari
1995: 96--97).

This is the merging of media that Joyce intuited which had led
to the
"junction of informatics, telematics, and the audiovisual moving
ultimately "in the direction of interactivity, towards a postmedia era."

Eventually through combinations of speech, gesture and tactility -- a
movement beyond the orality/literacy principle -- communication with
machines will be initiated through multisensory, intuitive and cognitive

machines. Joyce, like Deleuze and Guattari, did not speak of evolution
when dealing with this becoming that produces a secular approximation of

what Teilhard has described as his vision of the emerging noosphere.

Joyce intuited what Deleuze, specifically with respect to his
philosophy of cinema, was to conceptualize as the importance of the
progression (a becoming or involution) in modern media from the
movement-image to the time-image and beyond to "immedia" (i.e., a state
beyond media or of "paramedia"). Since Deleuze marks this point of
transition primarily in terms of the pre- and postwar films --
considering directors such as Hitchcock and Welles to be transitional
moments -- the publication of Finnegans Wake at the outbreak of World
War II marks not only the poetic recognition of that transition, but the

anticipation of its movement beyond media (i.e., to "immedia"). In a
sense, even earlier, one could speak of Ulysses as developing from the
mode of the movement-image with its interest in space--time
relationships where the movement and the time are linked to a state of
affection and action, to gradually moving beyond to a psychological
time-image ("Sirens," "Cyclops," "Oxen of the Sun," and "Circe") and
then to a mental state of relations ("Ithaca") to be returned through
Molly's soliloquy ("Penelope") to an eternal return which eludes the
ever-insistent, unfolding time-images and relational states that have
led towards the virtuality of Molly's dream.

These chapters of Ulysses, which were a result of Joyce's
revisions,
occurred almost simultaneously with the rise of dadaism, vorticism,
constructivism, and abstract expressionism, and the early days of the
cinema, mark the beginnings of the development from the early narrative
Ulysses to the polysemic complexity of the Wake. This development
interprets modernity in the impact of the past in the generation of the
future. It evidences Joyce's realization that the machines of cultural
production are revivifying for an electromagnetic era, "the hieroglyphs
of engined egypsians" (FW 355.23) -- a theme which had appeared in the
question and answer catechism of Bloom and Stephen's encounter in the
"Ithaca" section of Ulysses:

In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?
The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic
hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of
modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions
(Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic). (U
17:769-73)

What Joyce is playing with in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is
unique
and yet central to understanding the convergent evolution (i.e.,
involution or "becoming immedia") of an electromagnetic, virtual
semiotic machine that is accompanying the multisensory becoming mind and

understanding. It has echoes of, yet essential differences from
,Teilhard in that he presents this process as implicit in a historical
movement going back to the originary moment of mind and memory, for "In
the beginning there was the gest." This pre-history of cyberspace and
digiculture has been discussed elsewhere, but essentially it is
summarized in taps, tips, types, topes (topoi,[topics] and tropes])
contributing not only to the multiple, ambiviolent "typtopsical
raidings" of the alphabets of printed texts, but of all modes that
"typtopsical" codes produce. The crucial ground of this then is the
intersection of memory and human history -- Joyce's "ambiviolent"
revision of Bergsonian creative evolution -- which requires the complex
treatment of space, time, movement and "information" that has led to the

vertiginous ontological heterogenesis of "hypertext in every genre" and
a "dynamic idiography."

In contradistinction to Bergson, Vico, Teilhard and even
McLuhan, the
Joycean (and for that matter the early avant-garde artists's) perception

of digiculture and its virtual realities is not only grounded in the
grammatico-rhetorical view of art as techne, and drama as the pinnacle
of the poetic, but also in the long historical process of becoming
conscious of the inter-relationships of mind and unconsciousness within
the interplay of matter, memory and mind. In Joyce's vision Teilhard's
noosphere becomes a far more complex interplay of mind, matter, memory,
and history, which ultimately leads to the techno-scientific discovery
of the electromagnetic and intuits the significance of its emergence for

establishing new modes of sense and meaning through the convergence of
multiple means of communication and expression.

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Bob Dobbs