Virtual Realities and Their Discontents

This study sets out to discover why "cyberspace provokes often-rapturous rhetoric but resists critical analysis". Taking a variety of approaches, the authors explore the ways in which virtual realities conserve and incorporate, rather than overthrow, the assumptions and values of a traditional, logocentric humanism: the Platonic division of the world into the physical and metaphysical in which ideal forms are valued over material content. Cyberspace, David Porush suggests, represents not a break with our metaphysical past but an extension of its basic theistic postulates. Richard Grusin argues that the claims for new forms of electronic communication depend upon the very notions of authorship - and subjectivity - they claim to transcend. N. Katherine Hayles examines debates about cybernetics in the 1950s to demonstrate that the history of mind-body ideas in the age of computers and feedback loops is itself conflicted. David Brande analyzes cyberspace as an extension of the logic of late 20th-century capitalism, while Robert Manley explores the entangled roots of cyberspace in the philosophy of mathematics.