Syntax: @move <anything>

In what follows I engineer my way into the teaching machine by splicing together three different circuits of discourse, feminism, pedagogy, and virtual reality, invading the technohegemonic as both engineer and "virtual bricoleur," or in cybercrud terms, as a "cyborg surveyor" flying the surveilled coop. What I propose is pure excess, admittedly, but a spatial excess in which things happen.
In 1991, Lynn Worsham "redrew the lines" of feminist pedagogy by suggesting a "functional analogy between dominant culture and spectacular subcultures" which begin as movements "away from consensus and take shape as symbolic challenges to the inevitability and the unquestioned status of the meanings and values governing society" (85). Using Dick Hebdige's analysis of punk youth subcultures, Worsham argues that subcultural style "communicates a 'refusal' of a way of life, a refusal that also affirms identity for a subordinate group" (85). So, too, the emerging cyberfeminist subculture communicates a refusal, but does so by reconceiving identity and affirming spatiality.
What exactly is virtual reality? Veronica Hollinger defines virtual worlds as computer-simulated realities that augment "uppercase Reality" by working to "decenter conventional humanist notions of an unproblematical 'real' " (207). A virtual environment is constituted by a network of "consensual loci" (Stone, "Virtual" 609), or windows which unfold into nested pockets of electronic space called cyberspace. Participants in cyberspace are able to defy physical laws of gravity and embodiment by flying and/or becoming other objects coded into the matrix. Although high-end technology is still years away from creating a virtual world capable of full embodiment, the low-end text-based versions now available offer exciting potential applications in medicine, architecture, physical rehabilitation, flight training, education, and entertainment. (In part three of this essay, I explain in detail how text-based virtual reality, one of the currently available low-end technologies, is employed to evoke alternative writing practices and identity formations in writing classrooms.)
The main trouble with virtual systems is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. But, Haraway reminds us, "illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins" (151). In pedagogical terms, in cyberspace one can be unfaithful to the totalizing legitimation tactics of consensus politics and identity formation. Why? In a virtual reality, identities are formed in radically different ways, due, in part, to a different way of constructing experience. The key question is how virtual identity formation subverts real-world gendered power relations. According to Allucquere Stone, when on-line personaes shift in and out of virtual systems, their warranting, or grounding in a physical body is meaningless ("Will" 84). Stone claims that although gendered modes of communication remain relatively stable in cyberspace, "who uses which of the two socially recognized modes becomes more plastic" (84).
For example, it is not uncommon to see instances of "computer-crossdressing" where on-line personae in an electronic conference represent themselves as the opposite sex. In addition, in a MOO (multi-user dimension, object-oriented), players may not only manipulate their gender codes, they may morph themselves into other species, other personae, or even apply to be members of different classes like Wizards, Androids, or Immortals. The commands available to Wizards (sometimes called the janitors) of a MOO represent alternate (and more powerful) levels of identity, movement and communication than are available to lower classes of players. Wizards have the ultimate power over all commands and player activity in the MOO. Thus, Wizards may "shout" in the MOO and text is displayed throughout the virtual rooms to everyone online; whereas all other players must rely on remote emoting or communication (you "send" someone a hug or smile, or you "page" them from one room to the other), or simple dialogue among players in the same virtual room. Michael Joyce describes this kind of discursive disembodiment as "exoskeletal virtuality," or as a "return of the rhetorical practice of ekphrasis: language longing to become and even transcend image" (4-5). As a wizard of my own MOO, I can attest to these powerful ways of shape-shifting and discursive modes of deploying multiple identities.
One can imagine, then, how high-end virtual reality will radically change (and expand) our dependence on postmodern explanations of power relations and feminist pedagogies that remain entrenched in technophobic logic. Stone foresees that when high-resolution images of the human body are encoded into virtual worlds, "a man may be seen, and perhaps touched, as a woman and vice versa -- or as anything else" (85). Either way, people will still meet face-to-face, she says, "but under new definitions of both 'meet' and 'face'" (85), more of an interface-to-face. Even Stone's notion of "cyborg envy" redefines the psychoanalytics of gender-specific pathology as virtual personae fantasize about penetrating the interface and merging with the system.
These reconceived boundaries are provocative, yet they also unavoidably introduce new ways to include and exclude, not to mention new forms of domination. What makes cyberspace somewhat different in terms of real-world power relations, however, is that the protocols for encoding inclusion and exclusion are being debated now, before the technology has completely evolved. In short, Stone writes, cyberspace, in its 'real' form, is a "hotly contested financial, cultural, and ethical frontier" ("Virtual" 609). Why is cyberspace a virtual model for feminist pedagogy? What is writing in cyberspace? How does it redefine the classroom?
Cyberspace is a radical redefinition of the political, which in turn implies a corresponding new theory of pedagogy. In the same way that the Greek polis defined education as a progressive evolution of ethos toward virtue, late twentieth-century politics has produced Freireian resistance pedagogy, social constructionism, historicism, Marxist feminism and other narratives of teaching as pedagogical dispersals of power. Similarly, virtual systems reconceive politics and pedagogy, but they do so in terms of speed and spatial relocation. If, as Stone suggests, "social order [is] implied spatial accountability -- that is, knowing where the subject under law is" ("Virtual" 613), then virtual worlds undo the stability of the subject's political "address." William Bricken explains how by describing cyberspace as the "calculus of inclusion." That is, cyberspace is based upon "boundary mathematics" and the "subjective experience of environmental closure" (9-10). Bricken argues that since cyberspace is "electronic information which mediates by inclusion the experience of participants; it is being inside symbolic structure" (emphasis mine; 10). In cyberspace, we experience a dynamic interaction with information which erodes the distinction between description and process, as well as the whole notion of spatial "address." Conventionally, Bricken states, "representation is passive to interpretation, we do not change words when we read them. In cyberspace, we interactively participate within a representation, treating it as an experience" (10). In other words, "space (and experience) are pervasive rather than dualistic. . . . In cyberspace, the actual pervades the virtual. . . . Pervasion permits both/and inclusions rather than either/or dichotomies" (11). Thus cyberfeminists do not have to choose to be either here or there, we can be everywhere at once, and everything at once. Cyberfeminist teaching evokes a techno-ethos that is both heterogeneous and bi-modal, amphibious and amodern.
Compositionists seem to agree that electronic classroom conferencing has upset power relations in terms of institutional status, personal charisma, rhetorical skills, gender and racial cues, and public/private protocols. But many in the field prefer to remain 'critical' enthusiasts, opting to maintain a more neutral stance toward the technology and its revolutionary potential. Thus, many institutions and teachers have yet to commit themselves fully to the radical potential for alternative pedagogical models offered by technological space. In his book Fragments of Rationality, Lester Faigley points out that many of the critiques of postmodernity see it as depthless and filter it through a lens in which "we see the experience of life as spectacle with nothing real but the orgy of promiscuous images and runaway technology, an era of radical superficiality where commodities form a language of signification and where we are so saturated by simulations that meaning has evaporated" (165). Faigley wonders, then, why (if this is so) so little change can be seen "in the classroom conditions for teaching college writing" (165). He goes on to recount several ways that technology is changing the way we teach writing, namely, through "the use of nonsequential writing known as hypertext" (165) and through networked computers that utilize various forms of electronic written discussion groups, both locally within the classroom and globally within the larger electronic communities available to students, such as e-mail. Faigley spends most of his analysis explaining the value of classroom networking and dedicated writing programs like Interchange (a DIWE component -- Daedalus Integrated Writing System) in which students participate in discussions using software that helps break down hierarchical relations among the students and between the students and teacher. Such programs, he discovers, allow for a rapid switch from teacher-controlled discussion to student-controlled discussion.
By the time Faigley's book was published in 1993, the speed with which new software was being produced and the easier access to global electronic communities such as MOOs made it imperative to explore new spaces still. In fact, the undergraduate writing center (within the Division of Rhetoric and Composition he directs at UT-Austin) has added an online writing lab (OWL) directed by Sara Kimball. Based on a MUSH environment (multi-user shared hallucination), distant cousin to the MOO, the TexasOWL also offers the same kind of identity exploration and examination of personal and academic writing practices as in a virtual classroom, though the dominant activity there is tutoring. All this is not to say these environments (spaces) are free of power dynamics and other modes of domination.
Unfortunately, "consensus terrorism" (Coupland 21) is as common in the online world as in the offline world, but the space and character of human interaction, textuality, and subjectivity suggests that the social is radically redefined in the net. In other words, "online sociality" alters the proximity among "delegated virtual personae," and virtual collectivities are formed in a network of undifferentiated pockets of space in which everything is writing, or computercode (Stone "Virtual Systems" 620, 611). Given these reformulations of politics, pedagogoy, and identity, feminists in the composition classroom may feel they are about to lose some their most valued conceptual critical tools, namely, agency and empowerment. I argue that such is not the case. Agency is merely transferred into a mode of shape-shifting and morphing; it is not denied altogether, it just becomes less visible.
Stone explains that "prior to prosthetic communication, an agent maintained proximity through texts bearing the agent's seal, and the agency the texts implied could be enforced through human delegates; but in the era of electronic speech, proximity is maintained through technology, and agency becomes invisible" ("Virtual" 616). Although classroom politics in a virtual community still reenact real-world power relations, different ways of resisting dominance are available. For example, temporary autonomous zones (an anarchic strategy for real or virtual situations coined by Hakim Bey) may be formed and dismantled so rapidly that something like telepresence exists, but more in the form of "ghostings," "lurkers," "whisperings," "rants," or "flames." In other words, the ability to transgress boundaries like male/female, public/private, and inside/outside radically enables movement that modernist/socialist notions of agency do not.
In the techno-matrix, then, it's not a question of agency, but of shape-shifting and speed. Still, Stone urges us not to forget the extreme suffering of the "electronic subject" with real AIDS, or the despondent network persona who erased thousands of his previous messages in a "virtual suicide" only to commit real suicide two weeks later. Nor should we forget that virtual communities of like-minded people are also available to neo-Nazis skinheads and white supremacists. All the more reason to invade the technohegemonic machine by flying uninvited straight into the space of violence. According to Haraway, "there's always the desire to want to work from the most dangerous place, to not locate oneself outside but inside the belly of the monster" (Penley and Ross 6). Haraway's manifesto invites us to locate ourselves "in a technostrategic discourse within a heavily militarized technology" (6). It is all too easy to overlook the icy neon of the virtual downside.
To be specific, it should trouble us that virtual systems, while appealing as an alternative pedagogical model, are completely founded upon the industry of military technology and late capitalist democracy. [4] Paul Virilio reminds us that "all of us are already civilian soldiers. We don't recognize the militarized part of (our) identity, or (our) consciousness" (qtd in Kroker, Possessed 48). It seems critical, then, to contest the machinery from within, to fly into the no-fly zone of commercial and military production of "battlefield management" software mounted in "ruggedized chassis" (VITec brochure for VITec-60 Image Computers, 1991), which is nothing more than camera-ready war-speak for producing digitized images of targets destined for incineration by "smart" missiles. What Kroker calls the "will to virtuality" also borders on "cyber-authoritarianism" (Data Trash 3-4). In his estimation, virtual reality is a "euphoric space where subjectivity drains away into televisual memories" (2). Thus, surfing the edge of techno-erotic paganism may sound like an adventure, but, Haraway warns, the funhouse is also "a house that can kill you" (Penley and Ross 18). For Haraway, being scared is good, but being paranoid is not.
Andrew Ross agrees and adds that although leftist critiques of new cultural technologies often point to the "monolithic social control that can be achieved through networks of surveillance" (126), he cautions that technoskeptics who find "unrelieved domination" everywhere simply reinforce the "siege mentality" of a victim's position (128). Against such cryptotechnophobia (Coupland 172), Ross argues that "we cannot afford to give up what technoliteracy we have acquired in deference to the vulgar faith that tells us it is always acquired in complicity" (132). It may be more productive, Stone suggests, to temper our enthusiasm for virtual systems by questioning the computer developers (usually young men) as they articulate "their own assumptions about bodies and sociality and [project] them onto the codes that define cyberspace systems" ("Virtual" 616). In other words, just as in the 'real' world, cyberfeminists must question how the social structure of cyberspace is constructed and by whom, and become wizards as well.

[Introduction] [@dig] [@move] [@gender] [Conclusion] [Biblio]