The ease with which systems engineers draw on the reassuringly familiar to facilitate operations must be tempered with some unease, on our part, about what is masked or covered over by this metaphorical language, as well as what it limits and excludes. Human/computer interface authority, Alan Kay (Laurel 1991:199) asserts that the metaphor, in symbolising complex functions for the naive user, "is a compelling snare which can erase any seeming distance between items." This assertion is supported when we contemplate the limiting effect of the 'page' metaphor and 'house' icon in the plethora of www locations which unquestioningly subscribe to the logic: home=page; page=home.
Quite clearly, the 'snare' of the metaphoric 'Home Page' has caused the disappearance of not only the spatial, and aesthetic dimensionality suggested by the multi-dimensional illusory qualities of the computer's translucent screen, but also of its conceptual and political dimensions. In considering things 'virtual' - whether we're thinking about environments or status of being - the Macquarie Dictionary version states that we are considering these things 'in terms of power, force or effect only.' 'Virtual' organisms or artifacts, or environments, according to this version, then, 'are not actually or expressly' organisms, artefacts or environments, but are those things in terms of power, force and effect. This argument, when applied to the representations under investigation here, becomes paradoxical, for these illusory artefacts and locations are transmutable across the interface.
By sleight of hand, of voice or of (electronic) eye, the form of the 'virtual' page achieves materiality. No longer in danger of perception as merely a virtual artefact in terms of power, force or effect only, the virtual page, on mouseup on the file menu is transmutable - from simulated form into material that is expressly a nostalgic artefact - a printed page. In the same way, the achievement of going back to the starting point of the journey, the virtual 'home' (not expressly a home, but a 'home' in terms of power, force or effect) is effected, on mouseup on the house icon, via the (universal resource) locator. Thus a simulated form transmutes into a specific locale - a domicile that is expressly a nostalgic artefact- to produce the user as a digital domestic subject in what might analogously be defined as an architectural ruin - a structure that is both there, yet not there, in the same way that 'cyber'space is both 'everywhere and nowhere.'
In responding to the question "what does it means to be virtually at home, to be at home in terms of power, force or effect, in a networked-computer environment?" I will draw on the critical constructs 'the body' 'space' and 'time' in the work of feminist philosophers and theorists such as Probyn and Grosz. The theories of feminist socio-biologist and historian, Donna Haraway; psychoanalyst, Sherrie Turkle; and sexo-semiotician, Zoe Sofia, will inform my critique of websites. The premise of the paper is that the status 'virtual domesticity' constitutes a fruitful point of rupture within the 'networked relations of power' surrounding informatics, for the in(ter)vention of feminist knowledges.
In the domestic sphere, relations of power are not only a discursive arrangement, but corporeally, spatially, and historically mapped. From the end of the nineteenth century (a time when the industrial age in the West was trying to hide its devastating impact on people's everyday lives) the front door of the house constituted the interface between dichotomously defined civic, or public sphere and domestic or private sphere. In this paradigm, the domestic sphere is located in the home, the interior 'other' to the exterior world of paid work. In this period of history, the home, with a loving woman/wife/mother/nurturer at the hearth, represented a shelter to which the world-weary worker returned at the end of the day. Like the children who were to be seen but not heard, vulgar machine-produced artefacts and the mechanisation of labour were resisted in favour of the hand-crafted. Lest the devil find work for any idle hands that might result from mechanisation, the fussy decor of the Victorian 'private' dwelling became the 'fancy' work that obliterated women from the public sphere and from financial independence.
By the 1920s, the traditional idea that a house was a shelter was revolutionised by such proposals as that by French Architect, Le Corbusier, who argued that a house was actually a machine for living. Seventy years later, in the age of micro electronics, the house is not merely a machine for living, but an intelligent 'dwelling' machine. In exploring the kinds of possibilities that are overlooked in the too-ready acceptance of the associational limits of the nominal Home Page, we are reminded of the ways in which space, historically, has been conceived or mapped have always functioned to contain or to obliterate. For the homeless, to be deprived of the right to be housed, is not merely to be refused entry to an enclosed space, but to be refused access to services and rights made available only to those who are 'housed'.
Destined to become an even greater home-companion than the radio, the teleputer and the tele-obsessed form a 'therapeutic' relationship. Object relations versions of psychoanalysis, within which Turkle's analysis of psychotherapy at the interface (1995:111) might be contextualised, goes beyond the cognitive to the emotional, and beyond the conscious to the unconscious. Within psychotherapy, the emphasis is upon the body and its pleasures and pains, so, in Turkle's view, an empathetic relationship with a computer (as an intelligence) would require the computer to have human understanding, and therefore a body. To complete the exchange, computer-generated and linked media products become objects of incorporation, transmuting the user as data into the cybernetic space beyond the screen. Like emigrants, the teleworker and the cyber-traveller suffer the strange effects of having the centre of their worlds dismantled as they move on into a lost, disorientating unknown and 'unreal' world of fragments. Cyberspace, as virtual reality makes an accident of the real.
Phallocentrism's strategic polarisations, which link the public with the male and the private with the female, are rendered obsolete by the leakage of the repressed through the porous boundaries of the 'smart' house. Yet the cybertraveller is secure in the knowledge that a simulated heartland in the form of a dull grey pixel blanket is just a mouseclick away. The connection, however, is not completely innocent: when the separation between time and place threatens to leave us stranded somewhere between absence and presence, there is something comforting in preserving a sense of 'home', even if it is reduced to an embossed surface which covers over the deep layers of sedimented meaning beneath it. Netscape's signified - the desire for a heartland - is expressive of the repressed other of the experience of a new spatiality (via the expanding universe of digital reality) and a new temporality - (multiple bodily time zones). Its signage exposes the non-neutrality of the dominant culture's spatial constructs, and questions the discipline of computing science's claim to objectivity.
It is against this background that I want to discuss two websites which raise many of the issues of concern in cyber circles. The first, Terra Vista [HREF 4] is a project by predominantly male computer programmers and 3-D data designers to a construct a virtual city. The 'other' is Annie Sprinkle's Public Cervix [HREF 5] , the Home Page of a self-defined 'post porn modernist' feminist performance artist who uses images of her own body, ostensibly for 'sex education' purposes.
The division of these two representations into the binary oppositions public/rational (Terra Vista) and private/irrational (Public Cervix) would seem, on the surface, appropriate. However, like Sofia, I would argue that the regressive elements of Terra Vista, for instance, suggest otherwise. Sofia's (1993:91) table "A Semiotics and psychoanalysis of Ihde's genres of technics" categorises the object relation of genre of virtual reality microworlds as 'background' and their process as "defensive fantasy mastery," indicating "obsessional" neurotic and "delusion(al)" tendencies. Within the same paradigm, Annie Sprinkle's Public Cervix would be categorised as an "embodiment" relationship, her process as "projection of self, life," indicative of "Narcissistic (projective identification)" and "fetishistic (disavowal)" tendencies. In addition to this analysis, Probyn's (1990:183) constructs "Locale", to refer to place, "Local", temporality, and "Location" (theoretical positioning) provide a useful discursive arrangement for an alternative reading of the two projects as locations of 'cyber-civics'. In these two cyberspace locales, cultural civility can be seen to be destabilised by the gendering of spatio-temporal operations. In this sense, these sites are both discursive and nondiscursive arrangements which hold gendered events. In the case of Sprinkle, signs and indexes are scrambled, and boundaries transgressed.
The desire for a return to order and rationality in cyberspace is graphically demonstrated in the cyber-city of Terra Vista, where computing scientists are prominent public figures, and programmers and Virtual Reality Markup Linguists have taken on the role of virtual town planners and architects. Terra Vista was originally "vCity 1.0"[HREF 6] after resident author Adam L. Gruen's draft novel of the same name. Gruen says "About the narrative and its peculiar hobby-horse gait ... ostensibly, the story is about a crisis that erupts when someone places virtual reality pornography in the vCity. If fact, this is a book about why vCities should exist, not merely how." Desirous of demonstrating mastery over systems, tools and codes such as VRML, they have mapped their meeting-place in a more creative way, by undertaking the construction of a sim-city-as-shared-heartland project. The first site constructions have been civic buildings - the Post Office and Library. These (master)pieces, identified by their signage, and are listed as orientation points - a necessity in the otherwise disorienting voids surrounding these purely visual simulations. Priority has been given in Terra Vista (over the real business of arguing over town planning regulations and codes) to the construction of the Court House. It was the city fathers' decision to prioritise the construction of a court house as a matter of urgency to deal with vandalism and other unruly, 'uncivilised' behaviour by virtual tourists in this digital cultural construction. These structures, while not having any aesthetic appeal according to old cannons, and apparently not of monetary worth as either real estate or virtual data banks, have value to the builders in terms of time and energy invested and in terms of intellectual property. The creators' concerns to protect their (private yet nominally public) virtual property has resulted in a return to notions of crime (civil disobedience) requiring some form of surveillance and punishment. (Perhaps the next building will be the virtual jail!) Surveillance, an act with which we are familiar in the context of Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", can occur in the negative sense (the 'watch house'; under the eye of the master, in custody, under detention or under suspicion) or in the positive sense with care (vigilance, solicitude, heedfulness, conscientiousness, watchfulness, alertness, etc.).
The disembodied city of Terra Vista is a fantasy of mastery, and as such, according to Sofia, suggests a rejection or disavowal of the knowns of the terrestrial/maternal axis. The proposition that "vCity's" crisis be that of pornography tends to confirm Sofia's analysis. Grosz' (1995:104) examination of the relationship between the body and the city finds two pervasive models of interrelation: either "the city (as) a reflection, projection, or product of bodies; where bodies are conceived in naturalistic terms, pre-dating the city, the cause and motivation for its design and construction", or its inversion: "cities have become (or may always have been) alienating environments that do not allow the body a 'natural,' 'healthy,' or 'conducive' context. In both models, the city is defined according to the mind/body split, as the product, not of "the muscles and energy of the body, but of the conceptual and reflective possibilities of consciousness itself."
Semiotically, technological embodiment, as object-relationship in "Public Cervix" involves what Sofia (1993:93) defines as the trope of metonymy, where "a part (of the body or the sensory spectrum) is selectively invested at the expense of the whole." Relating to oneself as an object, suggests Foucault (1988:417) is a diving practice which involves "the means by which a human being turns himself (sic) into a subject: how men have learned to recognise themselves as subjects of sexuality." His notion of 'technologising the self' concerns the use, by individuals, of techniques by which they can themselves effect "a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thought, their own conduct, and this is in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves." What is occurring alongside the mapping of virtual worlds is the mapping of virtual identities. 'High' 'Low' culture representations like Sprinkle's ironically simulate the cultural forms they critique. Her Home Page deconstructs pornography at the boundaries of public and private. It proclaims a new un-civil civic role for the private across the interface. How would the citizens of "vCity" respond to the suggestion of a virtual workshop on sexuality by Sprinkle? As a feminist intervention, Sprinkle's project highlights the paradox were women, as the unwilling subjects of much pornographic material, are easily recruited to the ranks of censorship on the basis that pornography is the cause of violence towards women; while recognising that the mainstay of visual and written pornography is male desire for submission.
The work of constructing preferred futures toward which we can move, which has occupied the feminist intellectual, demands that cartographies are constantly redrafted. As an intellectual style, Braidotti's nomadism is not so much about being homeless but about "a refusal to settle, not into a habitat, but into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour ... the nomadic state is defined by the subversion of set conventions rather than the literal act of travelling" (1994:5). Our @ homeness, as a statement of our will to virtuality, locates us within a set of power relations and among a range of forces which produce certain effects. An analysis of the discourses of cyberspace which include economic, social, and cultural discourses, reveals the constructed nature of virtual subjectivities around notions of @ homeness, or @ homelessness, and among relations of power which effect those subjectivities. As a site, or location, the Home Page is both illusion and object. Its illusory features are the interconnecting symbolic elements which enable us to recognise functional correspondence in computing operations. They are also the features through which we might formulate knowledge about our existential condition of substitutability, that is, our condition of being @ home, not necessarily actually, but @ home in simulation, at home in terms of the relations power, force or effect. As a function of cyber-communication, the Home Page makes an accident of the domestic sphere as we have previously understood it, and of the dichotomous frameworks such as public/private. Dichotomous frameworks are no longer adequate for dealing with the separation of space and time experienced by the postmodern traveller. Probyn's great insight that we should look at our contemporary experiences of travelling in the postmodern within a tri-partite framework of the local (temporal) the locale (place) and location (strategic positioning) are useful in analysing our experiences of being thrust through the now permeable boundaries of the public and private structures of the workplace and the home. Separation of time and place can therefore be viewed not as structures but as performances of strategic positioning as places that held gendered events. From this perspective, public and private spheres of industrial capitalism could be recognised as the sites where performances of masculinity or femininity took place.
If we understand the "Netscape" interface as a hyper-expression of the historically repressed in a transforming present/future then the Home Page, through its inter-connection of a set of symbolic elements links identity with the desire to reveal a private or interior self. In this case, the prefix 'hyper', which was previously understood as meaning extravagant or excessive, is now understood within computer-networked forms of communication as descriptive of the interactive interconnection of a set of symbolic elements, not 'over and above' but 'within' the relationship, e.g. 'hypertext' links. The use of the house as symbolic element can be read as the return of what is repressed in the virtual. The image of the house is symbolic of the misrepresentation of virtual domesticity through a return to the ideal pleasures of the material, and of gendered events that responded to the pleasures offered on the basis of our preparedness to enact the gendered identities formed in the definitions of desire that encircle us. What will be the effect of our will to virtuality? The European Electronic Media guerrillas Adilkno (Advancement of illegal knowledge, 1995:27) predict:-
"The Net as ideal treadmill for self-styled identities will create no revolutionary situations, nor bring the world to an end. Cybernetic emptiness need not be filled, nor will it ever be full (of desire, abhorrence or unrest). Until telematic energy finally disappears into the flatland of silence in the face of blinking commands."
Just as the intensification of a single factor such as electric energy pointed to the obsolescence of house walls, so does the extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation point to the obsolescence of other forms of containment. In perceiving the technologically illiterate decision-makers as digital vagrants of enormous threat to the electronic dream, Negroponte points to the obsolescence of an old elite, now effectively locked-out of the 'new consciousness' that is the potential of cyberspace.
Fraser (1995:70) reminds us that the politics of identity (a political position that opposes nonrecognition and/or misrecognition as a form of oppression) have become an overriding concern of those cast as 'others' as a result of the threat of invisibility under the globalising tendencies of new communications technologies. It is possible, according to Probyn (Butler, 19 147) that if we can reconceptualize identity as an effect (i.e. produced or generated) rather than as a category that is foundational and fixed, then the way can be opened for agency to occur. However, it is unfortunate that identity-based claims tend to predominate as prospects for redistribution appear to recede.
To dwell in cyberspace is to assume a virtual domesticity cleared of the constraints of the historical coincidence between 'place' and 'time' we have merely replaced the post-code with the url (universal resource locator) code, and the street directory with the Global Positioning System, which, through the spatio-temporal coordinates provided by the satellite, can record the relationship of the computer's room to the rest of the world. Domesticity now can be perceived as the unfolding story of a life being lived. Virtual domesticity as the actual traces of life being lived suggests that, in some sense, virtual can be actual. The "Netscape" Home Page, complete with its sinister/homey 'cookie' container, ultimately, is expressive of the doubled sense of freedom and degeneration that is our experience of the expanding functions of digital technology.
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