Gebser Reprogrammed Gebser Reprogrammed: Suppose An Emerging Cyber Consciousness William Miller Ohio University
Abstract Gebser's vision of an emerging integral consciousness may well have been the product of his own mental/rational grand theory. A child of his time (as are we all) he wrote before witnessing the effects of television and the computer, the Web/Internet, virtual communities and virtual identities, the rise of the information society, and post-modernity. Drawing on insights from Marshall McLuhan, Howard Rheingold, Paul Virilio, Arthur Kroker, and the consciousness brain/mind theories of Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennett, perhaps instead of the integral we can posit an emerging cyber consciousness of virtual realities and virtual identities, cyborg-like machinic bodies, technological extensions, and hyper-experiences of instantaneity and virtual space. Instead of the integral's Picasso, for an image of this emerging consciousness we might well turn to the cybernovel Neuromancer.
In the opening pages of William Gibson's classic cybernovel Neuromancer, we learn how Case, the novel's hero, spent much of his time "jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." 1 His consciousness is merged into the matrix, into that massive electronic field that Case had been neurologically modified to experience as a real physical space. More striking is the experience of Dixie McCoy, one of Case's former teachers, who flatlined—died—(they refer to him as the flatliner) and now exists only as a ROM construct within the matrix. His consciousness exists in the electrical potentials and flows of computer chips. My title says—let us suppose. . . So now let us suppose that what if instead of Gebser's vision of an integral consciousness, what is emerging is something he couldn't have foreseen at the time he wrote—a cyber consciousness. We are all children of our times. Gebser too. Those who heard my earlier papers know that I have a difficulty—a Lyotardian, Foucauldian, postmodern difficulty—with Gebser's sweeping master narrative, his totalizing, universalizing grand metatheory. Even while I salute the enormous effort he put into his project, I think he much too much massaged his data. It's all too neat, too coincidentally perfect. Structures trace their trajectories from zero through one, two, three and four dimensions, from none and pre- through unto a-perspectivals. Everything fits into its proper place in the categorical tables. 2 We must be suspicious of such order. (And while we can credit Gebser with giving us useful categories for speaking about modes of thinking, let's not forget that categories
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