Old rituals for new space

A summary of:
Thomas, D. (1991). Old rituals for new space: rites de passage and William Gibson's cultural model of cyberspace. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 30-48.

In this chapter, Tomas looks at cyberspace “from an anthropological, indeed ritual, perspective” (32), using William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and others) as a kind of relic encapsulating a culture, arguing that “science fiction is an important tool that allows us to make sense of a rapidly emerging postindustrial culture” (32). He emphasizes in particular a rite of passage from the secular/profane social ordering to a liminal period: “This phase is marked by a time of ritual metamorphosis that mediates between the initiand’s or group’s previous and subsequent state” (37).

What’s important for our purposes is Tomas’s argument that “one of cyberspace’s more fundamental social functions is to serve as a medium to communicate a form of ‘gnosis, mystical knowledge about the nature of things and how they came to be what they are’ (Turner, 1977a: 107)” (41). Tomas relies heavily on Turner throughout this chapter. Here again: “Turner has proposed a distinction between ‘liminal’ and ‘liminoid,’ or ‘ergic-ludic ritual liminality and anergic-ludic liminoid genres of action’ (1974: 83) that acknowledges an important, indeed decisive, difference between types of society called ‘tribal’ and ‘post-tribal’ or pre- and post-Industrial Revolution societies” (41). In English, this means, “The transition from the liminal to the liminoid is broadly marked by a transition from the ritual collective to the secular individual, individualistic, or individualizing;” (42) “Liminal behavior is constrained by obligations associated with status, while liminoid behavior is characterized by relative contractual freedom” (42). In other words, post-Industrial Revolution = the age of selfishness.

How this relates to Gibson’s Sci-Fi novel is the following: “Gibsonian cyberspace exhibits liminoid characteristics connected to its economic functions as articulated in a complex open-ended post-industrial society. First, it exhibits a specific logic that structures the matrix in the name of a transnational information economy. This logic, replicating the binary (0-1) logic of computer languages, is visibly articulated in the matrix, sculpted in the copyrighted forms of data that structure, in turn, social activity. Walls of data, rather than walls of brick and glass, divide a hardwired, or postorganic, humanity into economic protagonists – those included and those excluded from, say, the dominant military/industrial complex. Those, in other words, that do and those that do not have direct access to information, hardware technology and software expertise” (44). Is this a longwinded way of describing the modern knowledge economy?

I like this quote from Gibson’s “Rocket Radio”: “The world before television equates with the world before the Net – the mass culture and mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human” (in Tomas, 45). The point here, and it’s something I realized early on, is that there’s no turning back to an earlier time, to a naivete. Even if the Internet were to die, we would still understand our world from the perspective of people who at one point had the Internet; and with that comes a worldview that cannot be denied simply by taking away the toy.