cyberspace, we will create virtual doppelgangers who will remain youthful
and gorgeous forever’ (259).
Given that the virtual community can never be ‘lived’ in embodied
form, but only imaginatively by extension, it is not surprising that the
imagined universal community is also realized in a secular quest for
liberation from the flesh itself. The intellect, rather than the body, lies at
the centre of the life world of the virtual community, where ‘the secular
and scientific myth of the conquest of nature could be fused with the logic
of commodity production’ (Sharp, 1985: 65).
Abstraction from the flesh (solipsism) and spiritual unity (universal
humanism) are at the base of a bewildering array of attempts to define a
kind of ‘cybergeist’ in some form of conceptual singularity. Solipsistic ten-
dencies to define-it-ism are a telling indication of this. Typically this entails
inventing neologisms which have the minimal reference to comparable
terms whilst claiming the maximal reference to a universal condition. The
authors of these neologisms stand out as ideologists of this solipsism,
which can attain rapturous proportions. Numerous, zine-like publications
flourished in the mid-1990s advancing home-grown concepts of cyber-
space which made little attempt to engage with concepts which already
addressed their ‘investigations’.
We have already discussed the Apparatgeist, but numerous other
examples can be given. Sometimes terms might be referring to the same
thing but talk past each other as they each rush in to claim a universal
descriptor that is oblivious to the rush of neologisms found elsewhere.
Apparatgeist, digitopia, cyberutopia, cyberia (Rushkoff), technopoly
(Postman), infomedia (Koelsch): lexical fragmentation prevails at the pre-
cise juncture where an homogeneous speech community is supposed to
find renewal.
One even finds completely needless attempts to redefine those few
terms which haveestablished themselves – such as ‘cyberspace’. An indul-
gent case of this can be found in Darren Tofts’ Memory Trade: A Prehistory
of Cyberculture(1997), an illustrated essay which feels compelled to rede-
fine cyberspace as ‘cspace’. It is worth quoting at length:To come to terms with the historicity of cyberculture we need a concept that
identifies both the ur-foundation of technologized consciousness, as well as
its extension in the current preoccupation with the creation of digital worlds.
The concept I propose is called ‘cspace’.
The concept of ‘cspace’ first announced itself as a means of abbrevi-
ating cyberspace, a nonce invention that ser ved the purpose of expedi-
ence. I first used the term when I was thinking through the connections
between poststructuralism, cybernetics and writing. Within that context, it
took on a new, aleatoric meaning, embodying many of the ideas I was
working with at the time. Pronounced in exactly the same way as ‘space’,
cspace is beautifully ambivalent, for as a form of shorthand it accommo-
dates two different meanings (cyberspace/space), yet they cannot co-exist192 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 192