Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk more

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Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27:159–170, 2005 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 1071-4413 print DOI: 10.1080/10714410590963839 Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk David R. Cole The importance in contemporary education of critical theory as a pedagogic basis for the analysis of textual and cultural resources creates a space for educationalists to implement meaningful curriculum content. The genre of cyberpunk acts on this level, yet also activates a complex micropolitical field that will affect participants in these lessons. For example, education using cyberpunk assumes that computers shall be set into place in terms of the learning process, but contests the social functionalism of this placement as a means to enhanced, large scale capitalist organization. This is because the learning process that is initiated due to cyberpunk does not try to unify the fractured individual. Pierre Bourdieu (1980) in Outline of a Theory of Practices invoked the category of habitus to explain the subordinate relationships inherent within worker= manager, student=school administration, and child=parent complexes. He spoke of symbolic violence as being a characteristic relation of pedagogic communication, which is charged with the transmission of the ‘‘cultural arbitrary,’’ the special effect of symbolic relations in the reproduction of power relations, within a framework of legitimate authority. Power is imposed by a system of social domination via symbolic means, and through pedagogic authority, but its effectiveness in transmitting the cultural arbitrary is mediated by the strength of polarized classes and movements. The relative strength of the reinforcement given to the balance of powers between the groups or classes by symbolic relations expressing these power relations rises with the strength of various classes, and with the power of the market to confer higher value on the goods delivered by legitimate school authorities (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979, 141–76). 159 Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 160 D. R. Cole As such, the economic power system runs through schools and reflexively disseminates effects in the forms of qualifications, rewards, and jobs. Yet within the habitus, oppositional factors are subsumed by the aggregate demarcation of digital networks, which are creating a world of mediated experience that raises questions about the reality of the political sign as Baudrillard (1983) has pointed out. It could be said that working-class, gender-based, sexually-orientated or ethnic rebellion, and the translation of such desire into economic activation, does not have to be a ‘‘slippage’’ towards a centralized power elite. This was the case when the political sign reigned supreme. Heterogeneous power surges may be theorized in the contemporary arena as delineating electronic expressions of unrelated identities. Jurgen Habermas (1976) has dealt with the claims of emanci¨ pation in education as including a type of ‘‘legitimation crisis.’’ Adolescents in the industrialized west undergo a form of ‘‘identity crisis,’’ whereby the transition to adulthood is complicated by the loss of meaning in adult activity, and in particular with career structure and civil authority. With an identity unsupported by adult certainties, the emergent youth are left to float in the confusion of an unfamiliar landscape. Education cannot be expected to motivate students without the platform of traditional civil and familialvocational ‘‘privatisms,’’ as Habermas terms them. Civil privatism is defined by an interest in the performance of the steering and maintenance apparatuses of the system, without a corresponding participation in the public support and creation of such apparatuses. Familial-vocational privatism is characterized by Robert Young (1989) as developed interests in consumption and leisure, and a status orientation towards career opportunities. However, these privatisms are destroyed by commercial culture that deliriously ‘‘deterritorialises’’ subjective principles, retaining only that which is necessary for the functioning of its economic machine. One might say that the Bildung of Habermas has become and pertains to virtual capital, which is enacted by the fetishist hegemonies of appropriated memes in the media. Cyberpunk is a rebellious social landscape dependent on science and computerized education, yet it escapes in terms of empowerment. For example, feedback loops between the study of the molecular and the way individuals may be empowered in terms of their chaotic movement as part of the crowd goes some way to address cyberpunk life in the mainstream. It is not the Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk 161 individual or repressed minorities that are finding a new voice in the pack; but it is the peculiar voices of the technologically enhanced that are being heard. Barry Troyna (1994) has pointed out that the New Right has hijacked the term ‘‘empowerment’’ away from the emancipatory Left, and that empowerment is now a meaningless but robust educational buzz-word, which is part of the ‘‘symbolic political language’’ of a new phase of capitalism. However, the creation of its ‘‘empowered’’ citizens by late capitalism, and the endorsement of this process by the educational researchers of the New Right, does nothing to comprehend the power structures within which these citizens have to live or the learning process that it is endorsing. Empowerment in the cyberpunk context becomes laced with a different perspective, in that, for example, the old structures of bureaucratic and hegemonic power are technologically diversified or hidden. Cyberpunk is a socially critical movement to the extent that it provides a space for the technologically-connected microformations to emerge. It develops communication between the micro and the macro, without a reversion to political or historical dialectics, but through the profusion of the digital panoply in education. Here it acts as a conduit for an interdisciplinary and nonrestrictive plane of interaction between subjects that are otherwise isolated by working for and towards the power elite. The free movement on this plane uses the construction of a digital infrastructure to enhance the challenge to restricted notions of lifestyle, education, and society through connectivity. The commentator Andrew Ross (1991) has pointed to the cyberpunks as constructing narratives of inner city life, rejecting the polymorphous, ecotopian fantasies of New Wave science fiction writing as being ‘‘wet,’’ ‘‘hippie,’’ and ‘‘utopian’’. In William Gibson’s writing, the streets are inhabited by tribal subcultures such as the Lo Teks, the Zionites, the Jack Draculas, the Panther Moderns, the Big Scientists, the Gothicks, and the Casuals; they integrate street knowledge with technological intelligence to perpetrate acts of anarcho-resistance through the interstices of the cyberspace net. Distributed knowledge in this arena does not lead to a technological, smoothly functioning system of co-coordinated parts working to given social objectives such as an ordered society would provide; but it enhances the sense in which the heterogeneous centers of intensity take on particular lives of their own and work to gain power on these levels. Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 162 D. R. Cole The violence of the cyberpunk vision is therefore striking. At every node of intersection within the technologically-defined matrix, forces collide and disrupt any notion of stable interaction. For example, in Neuromancer (Gibson 1984), the character of Case is profoundly confused; his memories are as real as the immediate present; he often finds it difficult to distinguish between action inside and outside of the net; and his life is recast in the form of a hybrid technological experience. Rather than a diachronic account of his story with a succinctly emergent thread to take us into a wholly high-tech universe, or the opposite direction mapped out as an escape route from the technological to the ‘‘natural,’’ Gibson ´ presents a mythology without origins or denouement. It also ameliorates, but does not resist, the conjectured assessment of gadget obsession as being a lack emanating from unsuccessful white male libidinal drives, as, for example, Chela Sandoval has argued (1995, 407–421). The plethora of power resources at every level unhinges the understanding about where the technology is going, or who is in control of it. Scott Bukatman (1993) describes Gibson’s cyberspace as being a profoundly dislocating field of ‘‘solid fluidity producing complexity that cuts the eye in a horizonless space’’ (150). This is not to figure cyberspace as a Platonic form of complexity, or as the Cartesian coordination of electronic space through chaotic intersection, but to suggest that the cyberspace of the cyberpunk conjoins the technological production of new realities with the micro-movements of hacker-process. This movement therefore bisects ontology with psychology; the production of ‘‘new realities’’ is not an all-encompassing project, but layers ‘‘the real’’ with the ‘‘impossibility of isolation of the real’’ of which Baudrillard (1983) theorized in Simulations. Baudrillard demarcated the orders of simulation which set up this impossibility as decrying civil society; the difference upon which the law is based becomes equivalent in that obedience and transgression are inseparable. The ‘‘crimes’’ of the hackers can be seen to fit into this schema, as, for example, the production of computer viruses stem from an obedience to the computer systems in which they operate, yet they transgress the normative social rules by which computer operations are usually governed. In a computerized electronic environment, the regulation of illicit activity becomes complicated by the fact that the ‘‘expert’’ regulators are often the perpetrators of the activity; for example, the MIT labs were the spawning ground for many of the early hacker diversions. In addition, the hacker Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk 163 ‘‘events,’’ are often motiveless in the usual sense of the word; they demonstrate the ability to subvert the system, rather than actually producing any real advantage for the hacker. This is a new type of social struggle that emphasizes brain power over brawn and is adept at irony, sarcasm, and situationalist gestures. In this context, the term ‘‘post-education curriculum’’ may be used. The extensive poststructural and postmodern discourses about the nature of education after modern and structural discursive structures have collapsed do have implications with relation to the emergence of micro-hacker-processes. John Knight (1995) anticipates that schooling is to be restructured in an amalgam of corporate forms of management, contemporary technologies of behavior, and post-Fordian processes of production. Education is replaced by the (re)production of flexible units of production= consumption. This is a post-human landscape, and one in which the articulation of localized incidents (such as hacker-events) causes oscillations that may be channeled into the sophisticated technological control mechanisms with astonishing speed and simulated effect. The ‘‘political reality of the sign’’ (Baudrillard 1988, 173), where the simulacra of reality dominate the real, acts to loosen the grip of an overriding understanding of educational reporting mechanisms and releases the spread of small scale coded subversions into the whole. The poststructural discourses of educational writers such as Phillip Wexler, Stephen Ball, Bronwyn Davies, Henry Giroux, Jane Kenway, Patti Lather, or Peter McLaren, whose combined efforts have managed to destabilize the functioning of an individualized educational humanism, have taken the fragmented, inconsistent subject and cast it into the technological field of learning in which it now floats. This action has happened due to the forces of postmodernism and poststructuralism, which have attended to the ruptures and discontinuities within the construction of a wholly educated self. The introduction of computer technology has increased the fissures in the construction of the self, because digitalization increases the oscillation in the planes of becoming that go to make up the learning process. In a sense, the analogue certainties of educational humanism are replaced by the digital uncertainties of a computerized learning experience. For example, Phillip Wexler (1995) has designated postmodernism as signifying the cultural sign of a disintegrative phase of positivism’s regime. After it, and already within it, new cultures are emerging which carry socially transformative forces; these cultures Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 164 D. R. Cole may challenge and disrupt the repressive control mechanisms of positivism and humanism. Cyberpunk is one such culture and, in an increasingly computerized society, may prove to hold a key to understanding the acceleration of computerized cultural production and the resultant digital curriculum content. The dehumanized, inconsistent subject of cyberpunk passes through digital conduits, primarily to avoid being easily detected, and hence comes to resemble an avatar or trope, caught in the maze-like passages of technological information; it is therefore a figure readily open to transformation. Subjects in digital form are easily located via the use of mathematical or cybernetic surveillance techniques, yet they also, through direct contact with the techniques in question, may develop behavior which has mutated from any previously understood norm, and this makes them virtually undetectable. Evolutionary biologists distinguish between biological change and cultural change in terms of the transmission of lineages. Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without the subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, however, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change (Gould 1991, 65). Cultural evolution seems to be characterized by the extraordinarily high rate of mutation and recombination; its power stems from what the evolutionary biologist would call lineage-crossing or anastomosis; this is the coming back together of separate gene-pools (Dennett 1995, 355). The component part of cultural evolution is the complex idea, or meme, as it was described by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). The meme obeys the laws of natural selection (with the qualification and distinction from the precise genetic processes of genes), yet acts in a different medium and at a different pace in a computerized digital medium. Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothing fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches, or merely ‘‘good ideas’’; they are spread from brain to brain by the process of imitation as the Greek root of mimesis would imply. Such imitation, involving the crossing of lineages, quickly leads to epistemic confusion and semantic systems of production which are continually modifying, using, coding, and redistributing the memes. A speculative phylum of the cyberpunk would have to take account of the science-fictional precursors, the rebellion of street music, the work of the hackers, the information databases of late capitalism, modes of punk fashion and lifestyle; and these would together lead to a complex and unclearly defined Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk 165 ‘‘species,’’ which is an inevitably transitory and asignifying subculture. This meme-phylum does not burden itself with intentionality, but is cloaked in the systems that have produced it. In education, it is a disturbing and technologically-enhanced free agent. The meme works to the extent that it helps to unburden cultural transmission of the legacy of humanist axiomatics. Ideas flourish and survive because they are alive, vital, and arresting, and not due to a commonality of human intent or societal concern. Contrary to a basis in Rousseau’s ideology in humanist social theory, which would argue that the profound nature of the liberated subject or idea can only be good and that nature itself, once emancipated, cannot but be endowed with natural equilibrium and all the ecological virtues (Baudrillard 1994, 84), the meme extends the thought that the transmission of ideas may be messy, unbalanced, confused, predatory, or destructive. As Dawkins (1982) states, ‘‘obviously a meme that causes individuals bearing it to kill themselves has a grave disadvantage, but not necessarily a fatal one. A suicidal meme can spread, as when a dramatic and well-publicized martyrdom inspires others to die for a deeply loved cause, and this in turn inspires others to die, and so on‘‘ (110–11). The meme of cyberpunk acts in a parallel fashion. Using the analogy of a parasite, it is in the interest of the cyberpunks to keep alive the host on which they feed: i.e., conformist and regulated capitalist society. The computerized networks, unto which the cyberpunks journey on their odysseys to the limit, are maintained by the corporate and state structures which they disdain. As these economic structures spread relentlessly into education, cyberpunk increases its potency as a transformative social force in the parameters of the learning process, but not as a strict reaction against the forces of economic growth. Rousseau’s ‘‘humanist’’ education is, however, disavowed through the learning of cyberpunk in a proximal moment of feedback, as the agent simultaneously loses its human identity and is transmitted through electronic networks as code. The meme of cyberpunk spreads because it is good at replication. Its appeal derives from the freedom to be found on the outer limits of society. In this ‘‘transgressive’’ environment, the symbiosis of the technological with the organic unveils the cyborg face hidden beneath the pervasive renderings of the ‘‘human.’’ It also underwrites the Darwinian project of natural selection with the reality of the machine which has been set into operation. ‘‘In aiming for virtual (technical) immortality and ensuring its exclusive Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 166 D. R. Cole perpetuation by a projection into artifacts, the human species is precisely losing its own immunity and specificity and it is becoming immortalized as an inhuman species; it is abolishing in itself the mortality of the living in favor of the immortality of the dead’’ (Baudrillard 1994, 84). Avital Ronell (1993, 60) has wondered about the values which an electronic culture is bound to protect. They are gathered and garnered by the push of internal velocities, by systems of presentation, and by the transmission of information, which depends upon discontinuous sequencing for its comprehension. This mechanism is in contrast, but complementary, to linear literary culture, because the digital axiom presents a discontinuity into any sequence; for example, the way in which text is transformed in hypertext. The writings of William Gibson or his mentors, such as Philip K. Dick (2001, 2003) and William S. Burroughs (1968), rep´soeuvrement in the terms of the French literary resent a type, of de ´ theorists, Maurice Blanchot (1983) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1988). Desoeuvrement is an open-ended project concerned with the unworking of the word; in the context of the literature of cyberpunk, the unworking of the word introduces discontinuities that were not addressed by previous literary genres such as science fiction. For example, the craving for metaphysics, sublimated in transcendence and encapsulated by literary idealism, is a particular area for the unworking of the word to take effect. Prioritization of the machine in cyberpunk reaches the microprocesses galvanized to project character or scene. Consequently, any distinctions between exterior and interior, or the mind and the thinker, in cyberpunk become embroiled within excriptions of a human space for metaphysics; they are hybrid technological processing units working discontinuously. The questions that cyberpunk education looks to initiate include: 1. Who is in control of the new technology? 2. What distribution networks are available to act as conduits for cyberspace? 3. How and by whom are coding mechanisms enacted to define perimeters, borders, and zones within this space? Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 These questions in terms of social formation are possible to assimilate by machinic processes and not by modes of production; on the contrary the modes of social production depend on the processes. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) thus defined societies using the following categories: 1) Primitive societies as defined by Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk 167 mechanisms of prevention-anticipation; 2) State societies as defined by apparatuses of capture; 3) Urban societies, which are defined by instruments of polarization; 4) Nomadic societies as defined by war machines; and 5) International or ecumenical organizations as defined by the encompassing of heterogeneous social formations. These processes exhibit variables of coexistence that are the object of a social topology and which make the various corresponding formations coexistent. The cyberpunk of William Gibson arises from urban societies; yet the machinic processes of polarization coexist in this environment with the other social formations. In other words, the ‘‘urban-cowboy’’ Case crosses over into corporate space or encounters the striation of the state by working through the smooth drive of the nomadic war machine and by using the technological conduits for cybernetic information. He is disabused of previous certainty (identity) in and through this process; and he increasingly becomes embroiled by the cybernetic processes which are at the same time dislocated by the cyberspace through which he travels. Cyberpunk education is, in this sense, the result of the action of urban societies; the desire for learning in a polarized environment forms alliances on the smooth nomadic plane and incorporates other societies as it encounters them. A critical encounter with the extensive use of computers in the process of education comes in the form of that which Theodore Roszak (1986) called the ‘‘Hidden Curriculum.’’ The hidden curriculum makes a direct connection between the absorption of the computer into the classrooms as part of the curriculum and learning process and the efforts of the computer industry to sell their products to the educational establishments. Roszak pointed out that computer literacy in terms of programming skills is not taught in schools due to a lack of training accorded to the teachers and the inadequacy of the software on offer. Whilst some highly interactive and interesting programs have been developed for the school environment, the majority of the lessons provided are still monotonous and quickly exhausted. Computers in the classroom in a general sense highlight the process of ‘‘drill and exercise,’’ which excludes more creative teaching methods by being too individualistic. In higher education, the computer is much more widespread and may be imaginatively utilized. Roszak (1986) concludes that the over-hyping of the computer’s educational potential in terms of the learning process is mostly due to sales strategy; the more interesting development is the refiguring of the power relationship Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 168 D. R. Cole which humans have with their information bearing and processing machines. This relationship is focused by the example of the hackers, who attempt to control the codes of the machines and the power structures that use them by manipulating intention and function at variant levels of society. Unlike the industrial landscapes of heavy industry, the new machines define a mental process and a landscape that corresponds to this process. This is an inhuman power struggle, involving logic and strategy; it is a game for the control of society and the learning processes embedded within society. The structure into which cyberpunk literature and hacker interventions mesh has been defined as the ‘‘information society.’’ The early hackers from MIT and their imitators worked in an environment of limited sensory perception, preferring the abstraction of numbers and code to the images of ‘‘superficial’’ media society. Nigel Clark (1995) points to the mid-1980s as being a time which saw the ascendancy of literary and cinematic genres of cyberfiction engaging with the incorporation of electronic technologies in everyday life (121). More specifically, the works of these genres belonged to a period of convergence between computational technologies and the mass media of audiovisual communication. The cyberpunk of William Gibson, for example, attests to aesthetics and spectacular body-effects, and indicates that the cybernetic field can no longer exist as an alternative locus to the mass-mediated world. Jonathon Crary (1984) agrees with this remark by indicating that television has been incorporated into a global network of electronic communications (284–85). Streams of visual data are increasingly digitally transmitted, reconfigured, and generated; the personal computer provides the basis for the navigation of networks which are reservoirs and conduits of images, and it is itself a visually rendered space. Jean Baudrillard (1992) has defined the proliferation of electronic networks in the information society by the new operations of signs. In this context, coherence and contextualization are being lost as fragments of meaning rebound from one terminal to the next. Baudrillard describes this order as being ‘‘viral‘‘; the residual particles of meaning circulate without controlling forces other than their own infectious logic (15–16). In this terrain, the information transfer of Wiener and the early cyberneticists is compromised by a bilateral impetus of variant and discontinuous message-relationships. Control of the viral order of signification is not a straightforward feedback process, but must rely on the participation of Downloaded At: 00:18 27 April 2011 Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk 169 dispersal and camouflage to discover what this ‘‘lost meaning’’ entails. Artificial Intelligence, which uses feedback to loop information around into its processing units of intelligent mimicry in order to enhance adaptation of the machines to new levels of behavior, is enhanced and taken in a different direction given the parameters of the virus. The ‘‘viral-creative’’ is a conception which writes into the programs that which is taken out by straightforward information relay and control. Slang and graffiti, in this context, are types of unsophisticated virus; it is possible to transmit and communicate these viruses, which would seem to make it possible to control them in terms of cybernetic theory and informational categorization context, and the processes of urban decay or youth rebellion. Yet slang and graffiti are bereft of their partial and transitory significance outside of the particular time and context. Once formalized or signified in terms of information, slang or graffiti become too stable and they are not hidden. The instruments of polarization of which Deleuze and Guattari spoke thus sustain their impetus through being digitized and transmitted using the laws of technological information-transmission and camouflage; they become incorporated in the networks, yet they also break out from them at any node of intersection or threshold (contagion). The host is in this context the educated individual, who is being processed by and processing humanist concerns. 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