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As Julian Stallabrass notes, "the concept of cyberspace attracts a breathless, hyperbolic writing … whether positive or negative" (Stallabrass 1995,22). Barely existent, and barely existent without a strange kind of cathexis, it hooks up to a rhetoric that might be codified according to the linked but divided investments analysed in Freud"s "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love": overvaluation and denigration (Freud 1984, 179–90). Scott Bukatman has coined the term "cyberdrool" to describe the overvaluative discourse ("Cyberspace becomes another venue for consciousness itself", says one [Benedikt, cit. Stallabrass 1995, 8]; "The Net wires the world for Hegelian Geist", say others [Taylor and Saarinen, cit. Stallabrass 1995, 9), but his own text is unable to avoid the rhetorical vortex of the scene. Terminal Identity (Bukatman 1993) self-described as "intriguingly hyperbolic" (1993, 17), rushes to announce a full-scale epistemological and ontological revolution: "a fully technologised existence … has forced a crisis around untenable definitions of the human", (1993, 5) such that a new "terminal identity" "situates the human and technological as coextensive, co-dependent and mutually defining" (1993, 22). The frisson of Bukatman"s uncontrolled exuberance derives from those peerless rhetoricians of the denigrative pole, Baudrillard and Virilio.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-25077-6_11

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