Linguistic anthropologists need to look at language less as a set of objective 'mappings' to the world, and more as a field of intentionalities being played out. It might be useful to think of language truly as a code - much like the DNA code or the programming code that drives a computer - for sociocultural evolution. Whorf gave us the tools to analyze how language might shape culture and perception. But he didn't look closely at the way in which people who understand this fact might also work to exploit it, using language for guiding worldviews into new and unancticipated directions. The youth subcultures of the 90s have created oppositional discursive systems - but these don't constitute only a rejection of the larger culture, rather a challenge for it to adapt and change. Subcultural jargon is a "linguistic laboratory" because inevitably subcultural terms "filter" out to the culture at large. Linguistic systems are being 'hacked' together by hundreds of individuals, resulting in emergent evolutionary trajectories shaping the worldview and perceptions of societies. Inevitably, people wishing to shift or realign those trajectories will work around the edge of the system, or, with some more boldness, may have the daring to "go root" and challenge the meanings at the "core."

 

 2.  Technology and the Transformation of Identity

Introduction: Technology, Culture, and the Production of New Identities

In this paper, I intend to focus on a central problem of the philosophy of culture: namely, the social production of identity. Numerous philosophers have attempted to locate the locus of the emergence of subjectivity in social and cultural processes. However, they have not often linked up with other philosophers - those looking at technology - who have tried to define technology as a social process. What I intend to argue here is that in our era, technology has become one of the chief cultural processes for creating several new kinds of selves. These selves can be called the cyborg, the slacker, the virtual, the mutant, and the mediant.

Unlike other students of technoscience, I propose that the technological era we are living in is a radically different one. It's discontinuous from what might be called "industrial progress." The mechanical-industrial era of technology began to wane around the middle of the century, and it's now being replaced by what some call post-industrial technology. I prefer to think of this new kind of technology as bio-electric , because it uses processes that either originate in (or derive from) the "lifeworld" of living organisms and the subatomic forces that operate at the quantum-mechanical level. In both cases, these processes defy the expectations of the mechanistic worldview which arose in the Enlightenment, and the industrial worldview which derived from it, and instead display surprisingly different properties: metamorphosis, emergence, self-organization, reflexivity, negentropy. (Channell, 1991.)

The problem with some earlier writings on technological effects on identity is that they tend to propagate the assumptions of the mechanical-industrial viewpoint. Thus, when writers like Ellul or Mumford or Heidegger wrote about the Machine Age, and the loss of individuality, identity, autonomy, or freedom in the face of industrial society, they were assuming that this was the only possible vector for technology -- that it could only lead to depersonalization and the destruction of humanism. They assumed industrial development and modernization were on an irreversible course. Bio-electric technologies posit a different cultural vector, with different spaces for new kinds of selves. Instead of technology eradicating subjectivity, it seems to me to be morphing it into new domains.

Where mechanical-industrial technologies focused on the expansive (building ever larger engines and factories), bio-electric technologies continue to implode invisibly into the world of miniaturization, etherialization, and disappearance. Mechanical-industrial technologies were oriented toward production and transportation of matter, whereas the newer bio-electric technologies are oriented toward energy, information, and communication. The worldviews governing industrial thought were centralization, linearization, determinism, and uniformity; the emerging worldviews of the bio-electric era are dispersion, nonlinearity, indeterminacy, and discontinuity. From the Newtonian framework of the industrial world, the bio-electric era has now moved toward systems theory, cybernetics, chaos theory, ecological dynamics, and information theory.

Since I don't want to argue for technological determinism, the complex system argument I would make is that cultural changes are leading to new scientific worldviews which are creating new technologies which are producing new kinds of selves which are creating new kinds of cultures... thus producing a feedback loop. The postmodern, decentered, deterritorialized self that so many philosophers now wish to observe and discuss is the product of many intersecting forces, but none might be as important as the technological one. Here are some new kinds of selves that are appearing within this formation.

Technology and Selfhood: Are we still stuck in the sixties?

The idea that technology is a social process which causes the appearance of new kinds of selves is not wholly new. It certainly goes back to Marx and Engels, who predicted that the mind-numbing nature of factory work, the routinization of the assembly line, and the de-skilling of the division of labor (where each worker is reduced to performing one meaningless, repetitive task, and cannot see how their efforts lead to the creation of a whole product) would lead to alienation. Industrialism, they predicted, would fracture communities, isolate and atomize individuals, divide families, and diminish the self-worth of workers, who before the factory system could take pride in being able to control the entire process of creating and fashioning craft production. Paradoxically, though, they also thought that it would lead to the kind of cooperation among the proletariat which would allow them to organize and overthrow these technologies.

Some people, like Frederic Jameson, see the post-industrial era as really being one of "late capitalism." That is, while industrialization is diminishing, new means of creating capital ("flexible accumulation") are replacing it, and some processes of industrialization (particularly of mechanized agriculture) are actually undergoing dramatic intensification. This may be the case, but as I'm trying to suggest, there are new processes going on, and some of the new technologies are actually anti-industrial, in that they replace the mechanical criteria of efficiency, "bigger is better," centralization, and modernization, with different ones. This is particularly shown in the movement toward "appropriate," "alternative," "Green," and "human scale" technologies. Technology is being rethought as a continually rewoven social structure, and not just an autonomous process of 'rational' linear development.

The Situationist argument, which appeared in the 50s and 60s, was that it was no longer a problem of industrialization creating alienation - the major force alienating people was the "culture industry," the commodification of happiness, culture, and leisure. (Plant, 1992.) Leisure, rather than becoming an escape from drudgery and urban uniformity, was itself becoming boring, rote, and prepackaged. The major force oppressing the people was the media (particularly advertising), which gave them only one source of identity: identification through consumption. Rather than proletarian or ethnic identities, people in the West were coming to increasingly take on consumer identities, through their product choices: becoming Marlboro Men, Virginia Slims Women, Chevy Guys, etc. Who you were was defined increasingly by what you bought. (Hirsch and Silverstone, 1992.)

"Authentic" leisure was increasingly being replaced by prepackaged tours, prepackaged entertainment experiences, trips to the suburban shopping mall. Art, rather than a force for challenging or remaking society, became simply an elite diversion at best or a source of opiates for the masses (TV "popular culture") at worst. There was a new sense that once more individuality or selfhood was under attack. The isolation of suburban life was supposed to be rapidly eroding the communal basis of culture and identity. This left people vulnerable to manipulation, fanatical movements, and paranoia. What I think the Situationists, the Critical Theorists, and others then misunderstood was that a) the disappearance of the Enlightenment self was not necessarily a bad thing; and b) that new kinds of selves were appearing to replace it.

Where modernization and the ideal of the "modern self" came under attack in the 60s was especially in the "underdeveloped world." Concomitant with the belief that the Third World needed economic, industrial, or technological development, was the idea that the sense of personal identity had not fully developed, because people were still "submerged" in tribal, clan, or religious identities. In order for "takeoff" to occur, individuals in these societies had to "realize" that they had "unmet needs", and that promoting "rational self-interest" and the "acquisitive instinct" which would make capitalism flourish. The failure of "modernization" in many of these societies showed that the appearance of "modern selves" only led to social disintegration, cultural commodification, and Western domination.

Today, in the 90s, these things are in flux. There are more kinds of media than the monopolistic broadcasting technologies of the 50s. Modernization models of development are being replaced by dependency theory. Technology has now become an internal force for people recreating their identity, and not just an external one. (Touraine, 1988.) The quest for individuation is no longer seen in terms of the modernist project of freeing oneself from the "dead hand" of tradition and the past. Alienated selves still peer through various cracks in the post-industrial fabric. But the new selves appearing within our current technological era are not simply lost, hopeless, or alienated. The changes discussed here are not happening uniformly, all at once, or evenly throughout the globe. But they are happening, they are spreading, and they are part of the "condition of postmodernity."

The Mediated Self: Electronic Media and Consciousness

The argument I wish to make here derives in part from some of the earlier observations of Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong regarding electronic media. McLuhan noted that mechanical technology, which is sequential, logical, and rational, was a reasonable derivation of the left-brain thinking which has predominated in Western societies. Movable Gutenberg type and mechanical typesetting helped make reading and literacy widespread, but it also made the text fixed, static, frozen. Since many philosophers (particularly those interested in literature) had argued that the Western individuated self arose out of literacy and the Greek concern with the individual's encounter with texts, McLuhan suggested that the printing press might have brought this left-brain, linear way of thinking (since this is the way most texts are read, in a line from left to right) to predominance in mass society, and not just among the elite scribes of medieval Europe. (Powers and McLuhan, 1989.)

What Gutenberg's machine, as many acknowledged, did, was to make books available to a mass audience, democratizing knowledge. However, as media scholars have pointed out, it also filtered many of the aesthetic qualities of earlier texts out - the fantastic hand-made color illuminations of medieval manuscripts were replaced by mechanically reproduced black-and-white prints; the calligraphy and elaboration of the written characters were replaced by fixed fonts and typefaces; custom editions and individually tailored versions of manuscripts became a thing of the past. The book went from something of color and vibrancy to, well, black on white. Gutenberg's press led to the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, but perhaps in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. The mass experience with mass-produced texts changed peoples' way of seeing and experiencing the world.

In contrast, Ong and McLuhan pointed out, electronic media (especially television and video) were more like a secondary orality than writing or mechanical type. "Electronic literacy" was a whole new kind of 'hearing.' Electronic media appealed to the holistic visual pattern-matching faculties of the right brain, rather than the analytic linguistic sequence-forming faculties of the left brain hemisphere. Whereas writing and print or type were linear, fixed, uniform, and private, electronic media were nonlinear, associational ("hypertextual"), dynamic, and public. Thus, while writing and type might be seen as the hallmark of classicism, the logos, and civilization, electronic media tended to produce a new sort of tribalism, sensualism, and the "global village." (Ong, 1982.) Electronic media required aesthetic judgments marked by quick, sudden absorption of multiple signals, rather than one's long reflection on dense paragraphs or ponderous words.

Ong in particular saw the ways where electronic media actually hearkened back to pre-literate habits, what in effect we might call "the primitive." Electronic media (especially, he said, light shows at rock concerts - today we might say raves) required communal, participatory, interactive appreciation. In oral societies, rhetoric , the power to persuade through qualities of personality, tropes and metaphors, and the voice, was more important than the possession of facts or logic. Electronic media was strongly rhetorical, noted Ong, through its almost dreamlike use of images and sounds, which is why people seized upon it so quickly for propaganda. The flow of electronic media was circuitous and cyclical, more like a rambling myth than a written narrative. For these reasons, Ong felt, there might be some awakenings of "primitivity" within Western society due to its continuing exposure to electronic media.

Following Ong, some have decided to sound warning signals of the death of Western civilization as a result of television and electronic media. Some literary scholars feel that young people in particular require written texts for proper socialization, and if they are socialized only by electronic media, then they never develop the faculties for self-reflection and self-restraint. They become more prone to violence and uncontrollable emotions, and less able to follow a linear train of argument. Worst of all, they (supposedly) never develop the sense of interiority, discipline, and conscience that is the hallmark of the mature, classical Western self. (Hayward, 1990.) From watching too much MTV, their view of reality becomes one of isolated, discontinuous moments of sensation. Rap music and hiphop appeals only to their senses, to the physicality of rhythm, and not to any supposedly "higher" aesthetic qualities.

I would take a different tack. Coming back to McLuhan and continuing somewhat with Ong, I would say electronic media produces a new kind of self which I call the mediated (mediant) self which has several new qualities. One, it is more right-brained and balanced (unifying feeling and intuition with thinking) than the purely rational Western self. Two, it is more oriented toward processing multiple synchronous inputs (signals), rather than one "stream" of data (say from a single text.) Three, it thinks through images and associations, and not just words and ideas; thus it makes more use of the unconscious as well as the conscious mind. Most importantly, the mediated self sees itself extended in various ways through communication technology: rather than being "here" or "there," it's a sort of "field" consciousness, interpenetrating with lots of others. (Rushkoff, 1994.) It's not a classical Western self, but maybe that's not a bad thing, either.

The Cyborg Self: Prosthetics and Hybridity

Viewed on its own terms, the discourse of the Enlightenment contains an interesting element of paradoxicality. At the same time as thinkers of the Age of Reason were trumpeting a new era of emancipation and freedom and rationally self-directed individuals, other people (like La Mettrie) were declaring humans to be nothing more than machines, and the idea of "free will" to be an anachronism. Cognitive science has proceeded in this second tradition, trying its best to declare human consciousness to be a self-delusion, a "virtual machine," a master computer program. Meanwhile, the first tradition, of the belief in and need to promote individual freedom, proceeds, ignoring the output of the second one.

The antithesis of the freely willed human, then, became the automaton, the machine which could only be driven by an external will, controlled by an external force. The idea of merging humans with machines seemed somewhat blasphemous, since it would mean surrendering the human quality of choice and self-control. Nonetheless, beginning in the 18th century, prosthetic limbs and other mechanical replacements for human organs began to be developed, since most Cartesians felt the body was only a machine anyway. It was only with the development of the mechanical computer in the 19th century that the idea of replacing the brain (and thus the mind or the will) also became a possibility - and a threat.

To some critics of Artificial Intelligence, this possibility has never been anything but remote, for the simple reason that the cognitive scientists simply see thought and mental activity as reducible to computation, and that organic processes as exactly reducible to mechanical ones. A new perspective of "vital mechanism" has emerged in the era of bio-electric technology, where technological systems (artificial life, neural networks, etc.) have been seen to have organic-like properties, as well as vice versa. While one group in AI focused its efforts on creating the android, a mechanical being with human appearance and abilities, bio-electric technology aims at creating the cyborg, a being where the technological and the organic blend seamlessly together. (Gray, 1995.)

The cyborg view thus does not see the human being as a Cartesian machine which can be refitted with mechanical parts. Rather, the human being is composed of systems of information, which can be replaced by other systems of information which, while artificially generated, are still derived from "natural" ones. The fact that computers can be built out of DNA, and biochips of silicon can be integrated into neural cells, suggests that technology and the organic can accommodate each other, perhaps even merge into something different from either. Perhaps both are different types of processes or information flows which "map" onto each other. Cyborgs are thus beings at once artificial and natural, born and made, produced and redesigned; they are hybrids. (Brahm and Driscoll, 1995.)

For authors like Haraway, then, the cyborg self produced from bio-electric technology becomes a metaphor for the hybrid experience of postmodern subjects. It's an alternative to essentialist nature-goddess ecofeminism, and to mechanicalist industrial technofascism. When she declares that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, she is stating a sort of socio-political stance against assuming identity politics; universalizing "womanism;" identifying women with nature, animals, and the Earth rather than artifice, writing, and culture; and equating all kinds of technology with masculinism and male dominance. The cyborg is a sort of literary trope for the new sorts of selves women have had to assume as a result of multinational capitalism and transnational exchanges.

What I am calling the cyborg self is more than a literary metaphor, however. It is the new sense of identity that comes from experience with prosthetic technologies, and implantable bioelectronic systems inscribing themselves into the body. This new kind of identity would refuse to be seen in either purely mechanical or organic terms. The opposition of nature and artifice would be deconstructed. Such an identity would transcend, maybe even refute, the ongoing anthropocentrism ('humano-chauvinism') and maybe even biocentrism of the classical Western tradition. Things like life, consciousness, will, might be recast in cybernetic terms. The body would not be seen as the fixed physical ground of identity, or the material construct driven by a distant will, but rather as something composite, an ongoing construct, an information flow, interlocked cybernetically with consciousness.

The Slacking Self: Automation and the End of Work

Automation technology has been a fact of industrial development since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and its Luddite resistance. However much automation eliminated the need for manpower, however, there were always needs for workers to run and maintain the machines. In the bio-electric era, this is changing, because now machines are developing the ability to reproduce and maintain themselves like organisms. What is unique about our post-industrial epoch is that even mental functions are being automated ("smart" machines, AI "expert" systems, genetic algorithms) and as a result, even the future of "white collar" employment has been called into question. This has led some people to debate about the "End of Work" and what that might mean for humanity. While some rejoice over a new life of total leisure, others recoil from the idea that the socializing force of "gainful employment" is vanishing. (Rifkin, 1995.)

Through a combination of forces (including globalization of labor and deunionization), in most advanced post-industrial societies, the idea of full benefit-providing employment has receded from view. Many of these societies are increasingly adjusted to the idea of "flexwork" -- temporary, provisional, irregular employment, sans job security, pensions, benefits, or possibilities for career advancement. While the rhetoric of economic growth and job creation continues unabated, behind closed doors, European countries continue to discuss with horror the possibility of a growing neo-lumpenproletariat for whom there are no more jobs, or only partial employment - not enough to keep them busy or satisfied. (Handy, 1984.) There are simply not enough jobs to go around anymore. Particularly among young people, a new class of "slackers" are beginning to appear who have adapted themselves to this reality.

While some commentators (like Bob Black) look upon this as positive (after all, one of the goals of the trade union movement was a shorter workweek) - proclaiming the birth of a true "leisure society" where even the middle-class no longer needs to work anymore - others worry about a growing class of people for whom employment is not only no longer guaranteed, but even practically impossible. Structurally, full employment has not only become remote, it's become a pipe dream... so in many urban areas youth subcultures find ways to survive in informal sector economies, barter arrangements, and a nomadic, nocturnally oriented life. (Linklater, 1992.) Automation and deindustrialization have shifted the remaining amount of work over into the service and "knowledge-information" worker sectors, where unionization and labor organizing or consciousness is practically unknown.

It's not my purpose here to detail the consequences of these changes, or the ways in which various governments have sought solutions. Rather, I want to focus on how these technological changes are altering the nature of personal identity. For the Western world in particular, work has been a fundamental component of the sense of self. "You are what you do." Calvinist authors pointed to toil as not only a necessity, but even a sign of outward moral perfection and character development. Idleness was condemned as sinful, decadent, and dangerous, because without work to busy the hands and mind, the evil influences of an unbound imagination could tempt the person to sin. The Puritan Ethic emphasized renouncing pleasure and embracing the development of personal character through abstemiousness and hard work.

Work has always been a strong component of masculine identity, and the goal of "having a good job" and "bringing home the bacon" for one's family remains a potent dream for young men in many societies. Production was seen as the mirror side of consumption; if you worked hard and saved up your money, you could buy all the neat new high-tech goods that you and other workers had made to make life easier and more fun. Women since the 40s have also tried to seek self-fulfillment in the workplace, emulating the "supermom" or "career woman," since many felt confined by housework and the "quiet prison" of the home. (For both genders, work was seen as the flip side to family life and the domestic or private sphere - the chance for a public self.) Now, through "telecommuting" and "telework," many of these women are returning home, working in "electronic cottages" (some people call them "high-tech sweatshops") where they can keep an eye on the house and kids once more.

Not only among young people, but among other generations within post-industrial societies, a new sense of self is emerging which does not derive itself from work. What I call the slacking self is a self which has adapted to the impermanence of employment and has perhaps even abandoned the idea of economic growth and advancement for other goals, whether those be 'hedonic growth,' personal growth and development, creative expression, or serving others. Since work, where it can be found, no longer means the ability to provide for a future, a family, or even one's own needs, alternatives are being sought. The "slacking self" manifests itself through what some see as an avoidance or rejection of "9 to 5" existence, routinization, mindless drudgery, and a pursuit of various interests, hobbies, and associations which have no definite economic benefit. Unfortunately, as the Situationists emphasized, the world of mass labor production is coming to be mirrored by one where mass (Disney-style) leisure has also become automated, routinized, emptied of meaning, and alienated.

The Virtual Self: Hyperreality and Electronic Embodiment

Another development of the appearance of "information age" society which has been addressed by Baudrillard and others is the growth of "hyperreality" - electronically produced experiences (simulacra) which seem more "real" than real life , and thus are even preferred to experiences in the real world. While virtual reality technologies are still in their infancy, some predict that in the near future simulated VR worlds may become increasingly more immersive, convincing, and lifelike ... perhaps even containing experiences that people might not be able to obtain in their own lives. This will cause their expectations of "reality" to shift to the point where anything less than the artificial or the augmented will seem, well, unreal. Or at the very least, simply unsatisfying. For example, unrealistically proportioned female models in the media now drive male ideals of what "real" women should be like.

Although 3D real-time cyberspace virtual worlds of the Gibsonian variety are still in the realm of "R & D," there already exist multiple virtual simulation environments on the Internet. While the majority (MUDs and MOOs) are primarily textual role-playing interactive simulations, there are a number of environments emerging (such as the Palace and MTV's Tiki Lounge) where people are able to assume the identity of graphical "avatars" and move through a 3D space where they can meet and interact with the visual representations of other users of the system. Role-playing has always been a strong facet of the Internet, with people in chat rooms and MUDs routinely switching genders, races, and sexual orientations - "just because they can." In these virtual worlds, it takes on a new level, because your avatar is a visual projection of your self to others. It can project those attributes you want them to see, and hide others.

Identity on the Internet has always been a shifting terrain, but since the majority of interactions on the Net were originally textual, where your appearance, voice, and mannerisms were masked, this was easy to do, and didn't require a great deal of conscious effort. While various BBSes and other systems attempted to curtail users who sought to hide behind pseudonyms, anonymous handles, and false identities, in practice enforcing these restrictions became largely impossible. Guessing the identities of other users often revolved around intuiting clues from their use of language (largely lacking any emotional expression other than "emoticons") and seeing if this "gave away" what kind of person they "really" were. Particularly in the hacker community, people online would assume identities that were usually pseudonymous, projecting attributes of rebelliousness, machismo, and technological savvy. (Turkle, 1995.)

Now, with the visual simulations like the Palace, role-playing takes on new dimensions, because now people can choose to interact with each other as animals, icons, inanimate objects, mythical beings, fictional characters, "real-life" celebrities, "morphed" self-images, or anything else that the imagination can summon. People try to guess what things people are trying to say about themselves through these representations. Is that talking crab trying to tell me that they're really grouchy (crabby), really possessive (clawy), really fond of the ocean, or something else? Through their digital self-representations, people consciously choose aspects of themselves to reveal, conceal, alter, or augment. If from a Goffmanian dramaturgical perspective, the self is always theatrically presenting itself, the game redoubles in cyberspace. (Ross, 1994.)

Virtual reality ups the ante even more, though, because the person starts to feel like their "avatar" in cyberspace "really" is themselves. Through "cybersuits" and teleoperation, it mimics their movements, displays their affectations, perhaps even eerily matches their expectations. It comes to be seen as an extension of their own identity, as responsive to their own needs and desires as their own body. Indeed, some eager cybernauts report that within a super-immersive virtual world, they feel disembodied, like they no longer have a physical body, and they feel as if they have a new electronic body, whose limits are now only those of the digitally programmed "laws" of cyberspace. Their electronic avatar no longer has their physical flaws or personal limitations, so it gives them a new sense of perhaps having a better, unrestrained self. (Kroker, 1993.)

Attachments to one's digital representation can be as great as to any other thing which is seen as part of oneself. Players on MUDs report a great sense of loss when their "character" is killed. People playing video games experience the same thing when "they" die for the third time from an alien onslaught. What I call the virtual self is a new component of identity arising from current technology which no longer sees itself attached to any particular body or physical expression. While this is sometimes metaphorically expressed in cyberculture as the wish to "download" one's identity into a robot container, I would argue it is going on all the time right now as people devote increasing amounts of their attention, reflection, and time to their electronic embodiments and virtual experiences. The border between one's own "real" and "hyperreal" lives is starting to thin.

The Mutant Self: Biotechology and Mutating Bodies

The era of biotechnology and genetic engineering has meant that the body has itself become malleable. While the alteration of the body has always been part of self-expression in many cultures, what is now occurring in Western post-industrial societies is an attempt not merely to "write" (inscribe, make marks) upon the body as a pre-existing template, but also to "rewrite" the body itself through the genetic code of DNA. While many societies have attempted to alter the development, shape, or size of various parts of the bodies through modifications (cutting, binding, piercing, elongating, leveling, etc.), none so far have attempted to alter the genetic code itself, except insofar as they used limited eugenics (control of interbreeding) to eliminate or reinforce certain traits.

While Western society has developed somatic technologies which already render the body reshapeable (hair dyes, plastic surgery, colored contact lenses, hair waxing, liposuction, etc.), the use of recombinant DNA technology heralds an era where individuals will have their bodies reshaped before they are ever born. The technology may be in its infancy, but the ultimate goal of efforts such as the Human Genome Project is that once there is a full map of the genetic code, genes for various traits can be isolated. Although project directors insist their primary efforts are aimed at eliminating hereditary diseases, there's certainly no reason why genes for purely "plastic" traits such as skin color, nose shape, height, and so forth won't be discovered as well. And no reason to expect that eventually parents won't want these traits in their children controlled as well; some already use a technique of sperm separation and artificial insemination to control the biological sex of the child.

Though such reductionist efforts may find barriers to their success - biologists such as Barbara McClintock have long pointed out that somatic traits are often created by "ensembles" of genes which turn each other on and off - and, further, although it has long been known that somatic features such as height and especially "intelligence" are the result of interactions between heredity and environment - it can be expected that biotechnology will nonetheless produce some striking developments in this area within the next few years. The first transfers in other kingdoms of life have been the isolation of particular species characteristics (such as bioluminescence, etc.) to other species... this is probably where the first human experiments will begin, with the effort of extending regeneration or immunity or some other animal characteristic to humans. (Cutcliffe, 1992.)

This generation is the first generation to be made strikingly aware that heredity is no longer purely destiny, and that the human race is making great strides toward directing its own evolutionary process (now that natural selection - famine, plague, disasters, etc. - have been defeated on so many fronts.) At the same time as the riddles of the genetic code are being unraveled, numerous environmental factors (chemical pollution, climate change, and atomic radiation being the primary ones) are causing mutations in many species, the rapid extinction of many other life forms, and, some are afraid, drastic changes to human heredity as well. (Paepke, 1993.) As one example, a recent study noted that in some post-industrial societies, sperm counts in males have dropped 20 to 25 percent. Cancer results from a lethal form of cellular mutation, and it is quickly becoming a number one killer of people in the advanced societies.

Other technologies of human self-modification are quickly being disseminated to the populace. Reproductive technologies are extending the age of childbirth. "Smart drugs" (nootropics) are being used to enhance memory and concentration, while other antioxidants are being used to reverse the aging process. Even death itself is being challenged through the use of cryonics organizations, where some claim frozen bodies await a future restoration by a society hundreds of years in the future. Nanotechnology is being developed to make changes and repairs at the cellular level; chemical implants are being used to deploy hormones, antigens, neurotransmitters, growth factors, and other biological compounds at sites where they are "needed." There is a simultaneous sense that the human body is facing numerous threats from the environment which are causing unknown changes, and at the same time it's coming under increasing technological control. (Murphy, 1992.)

These changes in post-industrial cultures are leading to the manifestation of what can some have called post-biological humans; others merely the "End of Man"; but I prefer to call the mutant self. The mutant self is based in an identity which realizes that its physical template is in flux and could change dramatically at any point. Mutant selves are "essentially" anti-essential, because nature is no longer seen as the primary determinant of one's physical makeup. (Branwyn, 1995.) The classical Western self (at least as this ideal was carried forward from ancient Greece) was based on a body which was believed to be "sound," in harmonious "proportion," and not "grotesque" or "distorted" in any way. Since the unaltered body was in a "temple" and in the "image" of Divinity, it was supposed to be inviolate, impermeable, perfectly balanced in all its "humors." The new mutant self is a fugitive self, formed out of a body which questions canons of somatic taste and proportion, and "erupts" out of the confines of restrictive ideals of human shape.

Conclusions

The disappearance of the Western classical self and/or the modern industrial self has some social thinkers terribly worried. For these thinkers, it may mean the downfall of democracy, of civility, or of common norms and values "we" all should agree on. A world of mutants, cyborgs, virtuals, slackers, and mediants may be ungovernable... each moving in their own way further and further from the classical idea of "Man." The premise of self-governance was built upon the idea of orderly, uniform selves ... or, as Foucault suggested, disciplined selves. The appearance of these new kinds of selves heralds the end of simple democracy, and perhaps the beginning of new kinds of "radical democracy" which takes radical difference as axiomatic and the diversity of life as preeminent.

If, as Aronowitz and others have suggested, identity is formed as a sort of moving "bridge" projected between the social trajectory of individuals and the historical trajectory of the society in which they live, these new identity formations are a response to the way in which technoscience is transforming almost every aspect of post-industrial culture, from religion to sexuality to aesthetics to ethics. (Lyon, 1994.) If group relations and social systems produce identities, then these particular kinds of identities arise out of a culture where technology is causing many familiar structures to be "disappearing through the skylight." Change of all kinds is accelerating exponentially, as information flows to all corners of the globe.

What kinds of identity politics will these new sorts of selves lead to? Certainly Donna Haraway has articulated a cyborg politics of sorts for neo-feminists; and outside the academic world, Gareth Branwyn has been setting forth manifestoes for mutants. Likewise, today's slackers take their inspiration from "Generation X" writers such as Rushkoff and Coupland and movies like the Austin-based Slacker. Organizations like the EFF and CPSR are busy setting out the perhaps unmanageable task of creating virtualist politics for the governing of electronic frontiers. And mediants look to "mental environment" crusaders such as AdBusters to clean up the electronic pollution clouding the new global media consciousness.

The identity politics of these new kinds of groups may be almost unrecognizable because one of the features of these new kinds of identities will be that they are all internally heterogeneous. If ethnic identity was derived from similarity, then mutant identity will have to come out of a mutual recognition of common divergence from existing human morphologies. Like the punks of the 70s, the only thing most mutants will have in common will be the realization that they are becoming something radically different from the norm of their society. Many kinds of identity politics come out of a belief in shared oppression or victimization; but these new kinds of technologically produced identities may share nothing other than the sense that they inhabit new, unexplored realities.

What I have attempted to do here is to take this amorphous constellation known as the "postmodern self" and give it some sense of definition. These new identities are decentered, destabilized, and fragmented, yes, but they also have identifiable features, knowable trajectories, and psychological attributes. Rather than simply yield to a sort of passive schizophrenia, in the post-industrial world, people are assuming these new kinds of identities - not fully consciously, because most would agree that one's identity is never purely autonomously chosen - which will challenge existing preconceptions of subjectivity and subject formation. The "return of the subject" in philosophy has been marked by these weird new kinds of subjects, full of unexpected anti-Cartesian irregularities.

These five kinds of selves are not mutually exclusive, and we can expect that post-industrial citizens will display some or all features of these identities all at once. Thus, in the future, we can expect personal identity to become more associative and "field-oriented," more hybrid and technologized, more oriented toward electronic expression, less oriented toward work, and less somatically grounded. Many of today's subcultures (cyberpunks, ravers, modern primitives, zippies) are experimenting with these new kinds of identities already, as a sort of rehearsal or practice for when they will be more common. As always, these subcultures are showing in microcosm where large sectors of society will be heading in the future.

 3. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Editors of Technoculture

Interviews by Robin Moor

I talked with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross separately, in the virtual space of the telephone. It was decidedly low-tech, recorded with a $3 suction-cup microphone from Radio Shack; transcribed longhand; Macintoshed; edited via transcontinental fax.

Penley was charming and soft-spoken. Read her with a southern accent. Widely known for her many books on film and feminism, including Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction, she is an editor of Camera Obscura, the nation's snappiest film/feminism journal. Her favorite TV shows are Roseanne, and Northern Lights, and she dreams of one day having a show about university cultural critics, to be titled Ivory Towers. She currently teaches at UC Santa Barbara.

Andrew Ross looks totally cute on his hip-pomo book covers (No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism). In virtue reality, though disembodied, he was equally attractive. Read him with a slightly hoarse, sickly Scottish accent (he had the flu). I had techno-difficulties (gotta move up to the $20 suction mike) with Andrew. "I'm going back to bed now," he said after our interview. He teaches at Princeton.

Being a bit skiddish about interviewing "cultural critics"," they both assured me that Technoculture was aimed at a general audience (sub-PhD slobs like me), and that they got interviewed by "all kinds of people" (leaving me to wonder which kind I was.). To thank them for the interviews, I sent them each one of my signature T-shirts: "Postmodernism? Couldn't Care Less!"

Robin Moore

SCIENCE IS A PRIZE IN A CEREAL BOX

Penley and I started by discussing her visit to the Biosphere II project, the subject of a chapter in her forthcoming book on how American culture and institutions tend to turn into science fiction or use ideas and images from science fiction to gain cultural legitimacy.

CONSTANCE PENLEY: Canned cultures like Biosphere II are interesting because they are just one place where the ideology is more important than actual information. Real science projects have to be project themselves like this to be popular. For example, NASA has modelled itself on Star Trek. All along they're had a hard time getting people to support the manned space program, because all the scientists know you get so much more information from the unmanned flights. So they've tried to change that by tapping into people's love of Star Trek. They named the first shuttle the Enterprise, by popular acclaim. They hired Nichelle Nichols - Lieutenant Uhuru - to run a recruiting program for women and minorities in the astronaut program. The Challenger crew was modelled on a kind of Star Trek crew: a mixed race, mixed sex crew. It all kind of blew up in their faces - literally. But enough about me. Now, what do you think about me?

Mondo2000 : What's your take on Mondo 2000 and the whole sexification, of technological culture? Do you think Mondo's made high tech ideas more accessible? Or, do you think it goes too far in glamorizing technology?

CP: I like projects that go too far. I think it's time to froth at the mouth. I find myself liking things these days that I normally hate... like Oliver Stone films - ugh, he just takes important American political events and turns them into male myths. But I loved "JFK". This time the insanity went the right way. Right when people are feeling Iran-Contra is never going to move and no one's ever going to take the rap for it, here comes someone making a film and putting movement on conspiracy, coverup, etc. Now that kind of frothing at the mouth and being a little too shrill - I love the way it breaks the smug complacency of what's supposed to pass for political discourse in this country. So I see some strategic and tactical advantages to going a little too crazy, a little too far.

M2: Do you feel Mondo achieves some of what Donna Haraway wants in terms of visualizing ourselves in a technological future, especially with regard to women? Does Mondo help us to open up to a playful, oblique, more real future?

CP: Yes, although it's not for nothing that the chapters in Technoculture are very case-study oriented - almost anthropological analysis of each group - ACT UP, the slash fans, hackers,... We do it case by case, to try to understand and make arguments for how we might make new imaginaries of technology, new imaginaries of body and of social formation. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's better. We also tried in these examples to give a sense of agency, not to celebrate the movements in and of themselves.

M2: Yes, I think you achieved that: it's clear that each group is affecting the technology that they are also reacting to. It's not a set of passive relationships. It's about people changing their world of and with technological tools and ideas. Creating rather than just absorbing culture.

M2: I loved it that you included the Processed World people in Technoculture. They really have such a great spirit - the humor and graphics. They're really underappreciated and under- known.

CP: Oh yes, and the context was perfect.

M2: Did you know that they're doing a project on Sex and Work? It will be any and all intersections of sex activity, labor issues, the workplace: people who have sex for a living, people who use work time to have sex, etc. It will involve video and other interviews of people all around the country.

CP: We always find issues of sexuality and sexual difference around technology.

M2: Is that because of traditional cultural positions, or is it a natural opposition because technology is felt to be cold... a sort of fetishism about machines?

CP: No, it's not at all a natural opposition. I teach a science fiction film course where right from the beginning, all kinds of anxiety about technology gets projected onto women's bodies. In the class we go from Melies' Trip to the Moon, Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, Godard's Alphaville, and through Bladerunner. Just take Metropolis: all these fears about emerging technology get projected onto the body of the woman becoming a robot. And the number of exploding or radioactive women in science fiction film is phenomenal! When I was doing all this Challenger explosion and Christa MacAuliffe research, one of the things I was doing was collecting all the kids' sick jokes about it. What was the very first one I heard? "What were Christa MacAuliffe's last words?....'Hey guys, what's this button?'"

M2: It's too consistent to just be a pattern of scapegoating women...

CP: Right when technology was very much on the rise, and when women's political power was increasing, I think was fear of technology being out of control and fear of women being out of control - the two get conflated.

M2: It clearly fits into Christian ideas of sin - the apple as techno-knowledge. There's this difficult body and it's the woman's body: it's weird, it bleeds, it does all these illogical things. And then you can blame anything about a machine that turns out to be illogical - or even unpredictable by someone's faulty calculations - on the woman's intervention. I'm interested in what you say about women's power increasing simultaneously, because a lot of the way technology seems to have been conceived of is as an equalizer, physically. That strength had been one of the things that had kept women down.

CP: Well, of course, that has been shown to be absolute nonsense.

M2: Yes, but it was what people's idea was - that people with weak muscles would have the same abilities in society, and be able to do work which was formerly back breaking. Therefore there was this idea that industrialized labor offered humans more opportunity, and was somehow morally better.

CP: Household technology was certainly developed for that reason. But now all these studies have shown that it just makes it possible for women to do more housework!

M2: And jobs now too!

CP: And high-tech jobs, too! When women were given a chance to compete in that arena - when women were tested in the early phases of the astronaut program in the 60's, they were better in every single skill! There was a famous article in MS. magazine in 1973 about this study which was just suppressed for years. Women had more stamina, more dexterity, more psychological stability... every single criterion for being an astronaut, women did better.

M2: Well you know, that's funny because everything I remember hearing about why women weren't astronauts - "although they helped in every other way, on the ground, etc." - was some weird thing about menstruation! They weren't sure what impelled the flow - if gravity was necessary. And I thought - I was 12 years old - they can send a man to the moon, but they don't understand tampons? Wouldn't it be worth it, on the verge of a new age, to find OUT??

(Footnote: (Jude - I was unable to check up on the Ms. article. But...) Aroused by this, I called OB/GYN at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Dr. Richard Jennings was kind enough, and frank enough, to answer my questions. (1) He said the reason women were excluded from the early space program was that after the basic search and tests had been conducted, President Eisenhower decided that 1500 hours of training at the Test Pilot school would also be required - and the academy at that time excluded women. Of course, no one forced the academy to start accepting women in the name of science and opportunity - although there were Congressional hearings in the early 60s on the subject. (2) About menstruation in space, he said "Even if there were a problem - and there isn't - there still wouldn't be a problem." Not only can flow be arrested with pills or endometrial fibulation (extraction), but the imagined problems of retrograde (backflowing) menstruation has never been found to have any consequences. "So do they just bring tampons along on the space flights?" I asked. "Basically, yes," he said. (He referred me to an article he wrote on the reproductive functions of men and women in the space environment in Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, vol 45, #1, p. 7. (1989) Also, for info about the hearings, Jeri Cobb's autobiography - Women into Space, Prentice Hall , 1963) (3) He also gave me a very interesting history of the prejudices in aviation against women - which doubtless were inherited by NASA. There was a series of accidents in the 1920's involving menstruating women pilots - things like the wings of the plane coming off. Which obviously could not have been the pilot's fault - nevertheless these events were exploited by journalists and led to widespread negative feelings about women in flying machines - an irrational fear of the hex. (references: Journal of Aviation Medicine, vol 5, June 1934; Also same journal, December 1941, vol 12, p. 300) (Jude - I would be happy to check up on all these references but was unable to for various stupid reasons yet - like that the Reader's guide to periodical lit starts with Ms only after 1974! just say the word, I can do it all Monday - after the women's march. Or would this subject be a good sidebar for something in a later issue?)

CP: Men should think that they might have had to pee some time - there are fluids in their bodies, too.

M2: But I remember thinking, well it's science, it must be true. Of course, if the study was suppressed... that's amazing. We haven't come that far after all.

Andrew Ross

M2: What do you think about Mondo?

Andrew Ross : Well I have some comments that are more or less critical in Strange Weather, and they're mostly around the question of humanism - a tradition that is pretty corrupted at this point. What Mondo preaches about are unfettered limitless possibilites of the species, and to me that's not what I call a very socialized idea. That kind of radical humanism is more likely to benefit a small minority rather than the majority of the species. But I am interested especially in Mondo's contribution to the New Age of smartness - a New Age which is signified by the displacement of smartness onto objects - not just smart drugs, but smart buildings, smart bombs, smart bars, smart yellow pages, smart highways, and so on.

M2: What were your political goals in writing Technoculture?

AR: Well we were tired of hearing, especially from the left, that technology is hard domination. It's important that we're not under the illusion that that's the whole story. There's a need to tell other stories, too. There's this one story about disempowerment, which tends to perpetuate existing power relations. It gives the powerful more power, because it leaves the powerless feeling helpless. And that story becomes dominant very easily. But we also felt the need to avoid the open celebratory tone that Mondo has. We imagined most peoples' stories were somewhat in between, and would give it a balance. Certainly another goal was breaking open access to technologies. That was the basic idea, and to expand the definition of technology itself - into social and cultural practices.

M2: What kind of questions would you like to see people asking themselves in regard to their place in technoculture? I know for myself I always compare to human scale: does this technology help me do something I want to do? What effect does it have on human relationships? For example, how would you evaluate VR? Would you use a standard measure or testing stone?

AR: Virtual Reality is a good example because at the moment it has not been decided what it's going to be used for and so there's a lot of flak and buzz around about it. The situation is not unlike the early development of TV technology. No one knew exactly what TV was going to be used for either. VR has already had something of a half life in the world of research and military development and it's currently feeding into the special effects boom in Hollywood entertainment. The Lawnmover Man is a good example of how humans who don't have access to smart technology are seen as morons who can then be transformed into omnipotent deities by having their intelligence boosted (special warning for Mondo 2000 readers!).

AR: One other thing that seems interesting is that if machines are getting smarter then it's also true that they look a lot dumber. All smart machines these days come in dumb boxes- uncommunicative containers that say nothing about their content or their function. The golden age of industrial design, at least from a fine art perspective, is long gone!

M2: At least older machines, like typewriters or ovens, had "faces" in a human sense. Look at the old radios! There was an attempt to base the interface on visual human analogies. In architecture, much of it now seems to be designed in flagrant disregard of human scale - either for expedience or for the intimidation factor.

AR: Well I think both of those are very much at work. [a short series of beeps] Oh, my phone's running out of energy. Could you call me back in, say, 2 minutes? [I do] Military- industrial design has long outstripped human scale - since most information technology now is produced for the purpose of surveillance which takes place at the same time that it's being used. So humanism or human scale is not always the best response to that situation. So we have to give up the idea that the human body is the measure of all things. In addition the scale factor is further false because our intelligence bears little relation to that artificial intelligence installed in that smart machine. What has happened is that the smart machinery has coopted the function of the intellegentsia or the knowledge class in the same way that industrial technology once coopted the know-how of artisans and laborers. Smart, after all, is not the same as intellectual. Smartness is cost-effective intelligence. It is planner-responsive, user- friendly, and unerringly obedient to its programmers' design.

M2: Whereas I think what's useful about human intelligence is the mistakes we make on the way to finding a "solution," and the ability to use illogic or humor or offer other questions. How will we remind ourselves of what technology lacks if we abandon the criteria of humanism?

AR: Let's put it this way -I'm not suggesting abandoning the human scale entirely, because that way lies eco-fascism and the GAIA hypothesis - a hypothesis under which humans are no more important as a species, and a lot more worthy as objects of genocide, than fruit flies. On the other hand, the new measure of appropriate technology has to involve agents other than humans. If we're going to think about a smart world, in ways other than the definitions offered by the designers of smart technology, then it has to be along the lines of a model of environmental coexistence. And politically speaking that is what the earth summit in Rio this summer is all about.

4.  The Symbolic Invention of America-as-Utopia

Utopo-genesis: Introduction to America-as-Utopia

In the symbolic invention of America, Europe exercised some of its greatest powers of Utopian imagination. Some of the earliest so-called 'Christian communities' in America were attempts to realize the Utopian principle in America: these early communities were, as Mark Holloway puts it, attempts to realize Heaven on Earth. It was believed that in America Europe could create the Utopia never realizable within the ossified and sterile traditions of its own lands. While there would be Utopian experiments in Europe - the Paris Commune, the Fourierist Phalanxes, etc. - it would only be in America that the great European divines would attempt to found their New Jerusalem with such idealism, zeal, and moral fervor. It is almost impossible to understand some of America's most enduring features - by this I mean what today America has come to mean, white Euro-Protestant North America - without studying these communities' peculiar qualities: relentless perfectionism, constant innovation, a cooperative spirit, and the search for spiritual and physical purity which stretches from the Puritan regime to aerobicizing at the gym. But, in reading the writings of the spiritual reformers who founded those communities, one finds a message that in 1950s America would have found little resonance: that communism is the most pious, natural, and proper state of mankind.

America as the Vehicle for Europe's Utopian Imagination

By "Utopian," I mean something other than the merely fantastic. Early in the 16th century, there were suppositions that what had been discovered by Colombus was Avalon, Atlantis, the Fountain of Youth, the Earthly Paradise, St. Brendan's isle, Antillia, Prester John's Kingdom, or the Isles of Hesperia. When it was recognized that what had been found was truly a new continent, the medieval mind of Europe surrendered its imaginary geographies, only to allow its modern significatory imagination to go to work in constructing Utopia where it had not been found. Thomas More would write his Utopia with a placid Carribean island in the background of his imagining; so too would Thomas a Campanella, with his City of the Sun , and Johann Valentin Andraea with his Christianopolis : lands more than mythical, almost tantalizingly realizable. Francis Bacon wrote his New Atlantis, suggesting that America was at once very old (heir to the traditions of the first civilization, Atlantis) and very new, a new "philosophic continent" within whose outlines lay modernity and freedom from the shackles of scholastic thought. Almost all these early 16th century Utopian writers saw America as a place where the regeneration of the age promised by the Rosicrucians and other groups might come about, home to bold experiments in the investigation of nature and society. Some, like Bacon, saw it as more ammunition in the war of the moderns against the ancients, and Colombus as the empiricist pioneer par excellence , sailing for unknown lands of the unfathomed world.

This Utopianism would not fade during the Enlightenment, although perhaps its roots might change. As reports of the native Americans showed them (read: constructed them) to be everything Europe was not but wished it was - free of guile, deception, disingenuousness, and corruption - the myth of Rousseau's Noble Savage was born: innocent, docile, unfettered, with his simple regality enough to endure the complexities of life. Through the concept of the Rousseauian State of Nature and 'Primitive Communism,' the Savage who knew not property, warfare, strife, deceit, or arbitrary authority would "fire" the imagination of the philosophes such as Montaigne and Voltaire. The great Law of Peace created by the Iriquois League of Six Nations was seen as the apogee of the Noble Savage's work, and inspired many of the early inhabitants of the American colonies, especially William Penn's Quakers. The colonists, while seeking to imitate the freedom and spontaneity of America's autochthons, proceeded to displace them from their lands at an amazing pace, a duality that has not been ignored by many of the Native Americans that have found their voice in 1992. (Do we not destroy our prototypes when we believe we have the finished model?)

Also, during the Enlightenment, sects such as the Scottish Rite Masons, Carbonari, and the Illuminati began to offer models of the ideal state which were seen to threaten both crown (monarchy) and cross (Church), "prince and pope." Some of these came out of Hermetic or Neoplatonic elements in the 'Rosicrucian' occult tradition of Europe, and many of the elements can be found even today in the symbols of the Republic, such as the Great Seal and its motto, "New Order of the Ages" (Novus Ordo Seclorum.) Few people realize how much of the symbolism on the dollar bill, from its many 13s down to the Eagle of Liberty, comes out of Masonic ritual, or how much of a role Free Masonry played in the French and American revolutions. (Some commentators located the anticlerical roots of the Revolution in the Masonic promise to avenge the Templars. Did not one revolutionary cry out at one point, "Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!") America was seen by many of these secret societies as a place where their ideal state might meet its fruition, and their belief that America was a place with a unique destiny in regenerating the world is echoed in phrases such as "Light unto the nations", "Manifest Destiny," and "Philadelphia." (Brotherly Love: the 'Philadelphians' were a secret French sect to which many of the "founding fathers" had been initiated.)

It is these three elements - Renaissance longing for a renewed Golden Age of harmony and plenty; Enlightenment longing for a return to the use of 'natural reason' best found in the American indigenes; and "Rosicrucian" longing for revenge against temporal and spiritual authority - that all confluenced in the 17th century, that time of the birth of the first Utopian communities in America, places of experiment for man's perennial quest to perfect and purify himself. Protestantism had revived the notion that Catholic teaching was some long, slacking adulteration of the 'pure' apostolic Christianity, and so in America many Utopian sects sought deliberate imitation of the primitive, apostolic Church. It was thought that the Christian communes would provide what modern man sought for, solace, peace, and brotherhood. Contrary to what some have suggested, the physical continent America - meaning its climactic, geographic, and demographic features - was far from paradisial, despite what Transcendentalist poets might say after the fact. We can only see the roots of American Utopianism in the invention of 'symbolic America' and the creation of America as a signifying entity.

The Nature of the Communities

Of course, the socialism of these early communities was the kind that Marx, rightly or wrongly, would deride as 'utopian,' suggesting that it was idealistic and impractical. Rather than seeking to create an ideal government or reform the world, the Christian communists withdrew from the sinful, corrupt world to work their miracles in microcosm, hoping to imitate the elect state of affairs that existed among the Apostles, who were said to hold all things in common. Most of these communities saw themselves as islands of redemption in a world awash with temptation, sin, and avarice; the Elect could come and perfect themselves, if they were prepared to heed the Lord's call to chastity, poverty, simplicity, hard work, purity, and brotherly love. This is not to say that these Utopian experiments did nothing to contribute to social reform: many aided and abetted the abolitionist (anti-slavery), suffrage (women's rights), and nonresistance (conscientious objection to war) struggles, if indirectly. But, by and large, they held the view that, like the Fathers of the Church, a monastic, contemplative life apart from "Caesar" and the powers of the world (the State) was desirable.

The most interesting of these communities are the ones founded in the 17th and early 18th centuries. These are very different from the secular or Deist cooperatives of the 19th century, or the temporary cooperative agreements of the early Puritan settlers in Massachussetts. The ones that I am speaking of are the early communities known as the Woman in the Wilderness (founded by German Pietists in 1694), Irenia (founded by Moravians in 1695), Bohemia Manor (founded by the Labadists in 1683), the Ephrata Cloister (founded by Sabbatarians in 1732), Bethlehem (founded by Anabaptists in 1740), and Mount Lebanon (founded by the Shakers in 1787.) These communities all share certain salient features: they were all founded by sects considered apostate or heretical by the Lutheran or Calvinist Protestant Churches of Germany and central Europe; they were all founded in or around William Penn's Quaker "experiment of toleration" (what is today Pennsylvania); and each involved a migrant community who followed over a European charistmatic founder to inaugurate their experiment (i.e. they were not 'native' developments.)

The various religious sects involved in founding these Utopian communities established certain near-universal belief patterns. For one, they all held a special reverence for the Old Testament and were ardent Hebrophiles, many seeing themselves as the "New Israel" sited in the New World (among the Indians, who they considered the "old" or "fleshly" "lost tribes" of old Israel.) Because of this, many kept the Jewish sabbath or other aspects of Old Testament law. For another, they all rejected 'common' marriage, most replacing that institution either with celibacy or the taking of 'spiritual wives,' although some sects practiced 'complex' marriage, i.e., the sharing of women. Most were milleniarians or adventists who expected the Second Coming of Christ shortly after their arrival in the New World. All the communities were 'quietist' or pacifist, refusing to pay taxes, vote, go to war, or hold any sort of elected office; they abstained from all worldly power and institutions. They also subscribed to the moral perfectionism that Weber called the Protestant Ethic, i.e. the idea that salvation here on Earth could only be vouchsafed through hard, laborious work. (Few accepted Calvinist predestination, although they believed that in forming their communities they 'assumed' the election and Grace of the Lord, becoming the 'saved'.) Most were also inspirationalists, manifesting the 'charismatic' or 'pentecostal' enthusiasmos of the Apostles (such as the turbulent shuddering of the Shakers); some were also antinomians who even felt that the Grace of the Divine negated all earthly and manmade laws.

All of these communities were founded on certain assumptions. Many of them believed Europe and the Christian Church had fallen into a period of irreversible decline, largely due to the distancing the 17th century Church had from the 'pure' apostolic Christianity of the 1st century. (Constantine and the Roman Church were said to have inaugurated this decline, by allowing the Church to hold property, exert temporal power, and establish hierarchies.) They felt that in the New World Christianity and the Christian "race" could be made regenerate, and purify itself once more, in expectation of the Second Coming of Christ. Most of these sects felt the Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation would be coming soon, and that the Divine Judgement was imminent. Like Noah fleeing in his Ark, they felt they would be spared this judgement for their holiness and fidelity to the Law in their new land. Only in isolation from the fallen, sinful, irredeemable world could they become the elect of the Lord's salvation, they felt.

The Christian Communities as Counterculture

In these ways, the early Christian Utopian communities were not all that different from other sectarian movements, such as the Mormons, Quakers, or Baptists. What did make them unusual were three features: the equal status they afforded women; the communal sharing of all property; and their eclecticism. In the Christian communes (especially those of the Shakers, who perceived the Divine as bisexual), women were often granted significant political and material equality, all those who worked had an equal share to the earnings of the community, and there were strict rules for the admittance of new members to the sect (very important, since many were celibate and had no "natural increase".) These features made them, as one commentator noted, a "counterculture" within early America itself, a counterpoint to the thrifty individualism and industry that characterized the new urban centres. They had many mystical elements: the structure of the Woman in the Wilderness was based on numerological considerations, with the mystic number 40 integral to both the construction of buildings and the population of the commune, and their ritual combined primitive Christianity with Rosicrucian and theosophical mysticism.

These sects of these communities were often at odds with many of the precepts of the established Protestant churches at the time. The Pietists felt that the Lutheran church had become too "papal" itself, and too focused on ecclesiasical hierarchy. The celebration of Sunday as the Sabbath, the practice of infant baptism, the denial of "inward illumination" or inspiration (and the charismatic 'gifts of the spirit' that followed), the relationship between Church and State, and the nature of the sacraments were often points of difficult contention. Most of these sects - Shakers, Moravians, Pietists, Labadists, Anabaptists, etc. - were radically democratic and took very seriously Luther's suggestion that "every man be a priest." Some of them so eschewed the use of force and coercion that even if a member was declared banished or expelled, they would not use force to make him to leave, although other methods (such as anathema) might be attempted. In many cases, they were on friendly terms with the indigenes of America - the Ephrata Cloister made one of the first attempts at providing a written translation of the Indians' language.

The parallels between the 1690s communities and the 1960s communes have attracted the attention of many authors. The renuniciation of legal marriage, the sharing of property, the rebellion against organized religion, the disaffection and alienation from the outside world, and the fierce opposition to war and the State, which was seen primarily as an agent of violence, are common features. But the hippies of the 1960s might be surprised at the practices of austerity, celibacy, and monasticism of those early communities: there was little dancing, singing, music-playing, artmaking, drugtaking, or lovemaking there. If transported 250 years into the future, the Ephrata communists might look askance at the hippies' eschewing of hard work and ethic of "if it feels good, do it." The common thread between these communes was Utopianism: a belief that paradise could be recreated in miniature, because people could be made regenerate if their environment was improved.

The Founders behind the American Experiments

The divines behind the creation of paradise in the New World were often a highly eclectic bunch- the mystic Johannes Kelpius, the poet and scholar Conrad Beissel, the magister Christoph Schegel, Jean de Labadie, and Mother Ann and the 'Universal Friend.' Many of these people were determined zealots and idealists; but almost all were highly educated. Kelpius was a graduate of mathematics in Altdorf University, and also an enthusiastic mystic and millenarian. Beissel was a baker who travelled in Pietist and inspirationist circles, and would study at Heidelberg University, a hotbed of 'Rosicrucian' activity. Schlegel was a Lutheran theologian who is known to have been an associate of Johann Valentin Andreae, the author of one or more Rosicrucian manifestoes. Ann Lee (known as "Mother Ann" to the Shakers) came from the Camisards of France, a sect thought to descend from the Cathars persecuted during the Albigensian Crusade in 13th century France, and who believed the Messiah would come in the form of a woman. Jean de Labadie was a nobleman who was successively a Jesuit-trained Catholic priest, a Huguenot dissenting preacher, and a Separatist who came to start his own sect. Surprisingly, his Labadists looked at Surinam as a possibility before settling on Bohemia Manor in Pennsylvania.

The fact that they were charismatic and intelligent was not unusual. So were the founders of many of the 'open' communities in America, such as William Penn, Roger Williams, and John Smith. What was unusual was that they wanted to create a whole new reality in America, a counter-reality that was to be strikingly different from the world from which they came. The Pilgrims, Puritans, and other colonists might have escaped the persecutions of the Old World, but they did not reject wholesale its social systems and cultural elements in the way the founders of the closed Christian communities did. In the mystical poetry of Beissel, one can see a desire for a clean break with the Old World and its dens of corruption. Their idealism survived undaunted, despite the way many of their communities collapsed or dissolved. Within their closed circles would come charlatans, exploiters, and conmen, who saw ways to make the communes' public wealth into private gain. Because of this, some, like de Labadie, became strict, ruthless authoritarians, forced to dissolve their own systems of egalitarian decisionmaking and assume a strong hand in the guidance of their communities.

The personalities of the Utopian founders were very determined. Since many of their communities had short lives (many of the communalists would find swamps and deserts for their common lands, rather than the verdant fields they had been promised) and often disincorporated within one or two years, they would often lead a band of traditionalists to start over elsewhere. On those occasions where some dissidents within the community began holding property in private, they might take their followers and leave so as to "do it right this time." Upon their death, it was only rarely possible to find a successor who equalled them in determination and authority. Ephrata was fortunate to have Peter Miller to follow its Beissel, and for that reason survived for several generations. The greatest impact of these early Utopian founders may have been the way they shaped the ideas of some of the other American "founding fathers." William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams are known to have visited and been impressed by Ephrata and the wisdom of its leaders.

The traces of the early Christian communes are only faint today. They have left behind traces in material culture (Shaker furniture), literature (Ephrata appears in Byron's poetry), and local folklore. But, by and large, their place in social memory has been erased by more successful communal experiments in the 19th century such as Oneida, New Harmony, Icaria, and Brook Farm. These later communities were often established on a different basis - their founding ideas were universalism, unitarianism, deism, or outright agnosticism - and were more focused on practical, social considerations than on 'moral' ones: hence their longer physical and symbolic survival. The importance of the early communities is that they are the earliest expression of Europe's Utopian imagination, and hence perhaps most representative of its archetypal roots and unconscious influences. The writings of the founders of these communities would prefigure the speeches many later reformers, zealots, and prophets, ranging from Thoreau to Martin Luther King. In many cases, they shaped American cultural life: the first volume of music and first printing press in America were made by the Pietists of the communes.

The Utopian Imagination at Work Today

Back in the 1970s when space had the American imagination enthralled, figures like Gerard K. O'Neill and Buckminster Fuller began to imagine the next wave of Utopian experiments. Their remarks appear in an amazing book released by And/Or Press and the New Dimensions Foundation in 1978. These experiments would be attempted with the realization that, if heaven could not be realized on earth, perhaps it should be put where it belongs: in the heavens. O'Neill talks about space colonies in precisely these ways, as places where new Utopian experiments in self-governance and economic life can be attempted; and in an interview, when asked what type of men would settle in these colonies, he makes analogies to the people who sailed with Colombus or came with the Pilgrims to the New World. If America created one world, for O'Neill settling in space will be a new way to create a thousand more, and discover others: our next confrontation with alterity will be with other races that, unlike the native peoples of America, may not even resemble us at all. O'Neill sees it as axiomatic that America will lead this march into space, recognizing that the Utopian imagination that created it never found the complete fulfillment within its shores, and thus turns to the next unconquered frontier.

If O'Neill wants to build his high-tech space Utopias, his enthusiasm is perhaps exceeded only by Timothy Leary, the psychedelic priest who wants the human race to SMI2LE (Space migration, exponential intelligence, and life extension) by the 21st century. Leary is notable for pointing out that "it will not be the bureaucrats, engineers, and technicians who settle out in space: instead it will be the 'heads'." In other words, today's counterculture, the drug-taking dharma bums, will be the ones to escape out into space, even as Europe's counterculture sought their own "head trip" in America with Ephrata and the Woman in the Wilderness. Leary sees a connection between the 'dropped out', 'freaked out' youth disaffected by the world of the 1970s, and the world-weary, alternative-cosmos-seeking "trippers" of the 1690s. And are not their California communes and "Jesus freak" tent-cities the first step in the recreation of Paradise, asks Leary? Leary even sees a eugenic spin to all this: the spacegoers will be the 'mutants' of our race, they of chemically enhanced intelligence and neuroatomic awareness, even as the Utopian pioneers of America were the advanced 'mutants' within the European body politic. And if Leary has not been explicit enough in his analogies, he adds, "The North American experiment is the greatest success in evolutionary (my emphasis) history. Each gene pool sends its seed west, as a form of self-selection... the Pilgrim mothers and fathers wanted a place to live out the collective kooky, freaky reality that they shared. Californians are a new species (my emphasis) evolving away from other Americans."

Others add their emphasis to this point. "Edmund G. Brown, Jr." talks about closed systems and the psychological impact of the closing of the frontier on America, and how logical it is that California's aerospace industry will leads us into the next one. (This is Jerry Brown, returned from Zen meditation, but before his incarnation as a populist presidential candidate.) Buckminster Fuller talks about the explorers of the Age of Discovery as the first World men, and the explorers of the Space Age as completing their realization by seeing the Whole Earth from space, unconnected, without borders. Many others see the problems of "Limits to Growth" - pollution, overpopulation, the energy crisis, world hunger - as just like the "parochial" problems that they claim some Portuguese and Italians invoked to hinder Colombus from his journey. Once out in space, we can solve (or escape?) them all. Those who do not want to make the evolutionary leap into space migration are implicitly linked to the 'naysayers' and 'doubters' who did not trust Colombus. The point here is not to dismiss the links, but to see the reasons why these connections between 1492 Spain and 1992 America are being made. The Utopian imagination of Europe lives on, and space offers it the next sphere of experimentation.

I say "Europe," because some of the greatest doubters of the promise of space are the African-Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans of 1992- the "Other America" - who wonder aloud why the great nation which plans to settle on the moon cannot feed its people right here on Earth. The problems which threaten our planet - environmental destruction, atomic warfare, economic collapse - and force the Europeans to look for the next one to move onto - many of the "other America" see as the results of the Euro-Americans' own handiwork. Some see the fetish of technology- the technology that will supposedly bring us out into space and fix our planetary ills - at the very root of these problems. The Utopian imagination is doublesided. The same ideal that brought the alternative-reality-seekers, rebels, troublemakers, heretics, and "mutants" of Europe over here to found paradise also led many of them to hewn down its "sinful" wilderness, to destroy its "Satanic" indigenes, and develop a xenophobic ethic which saw sin in the hearts of all men, and often brought about purges, like of the witches of Salem. Is not the perfectionism of the Utopians still alive, as thousands of Americans starve and poison themselves each year to attain an impossibly perfect body? Are the flesh and spirit still not at war in our debates over pornography, etc.? If there is a conclusion to be drawn, it is that the relentless quest for Utopia may not find itself in any spatial geography, whether it be new continents or outer space; perhaps it is in the geography of the human heart.