| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 89 === Ever since the term “cyberspace” was coined, man’s relation to cyberspace has become problematic because it appears to be a relation not to the spatial world of a landscape, but to the non-spatial world of datascape. Since the datascape of cyberspace is made almost exclusively of non-material information and signs, it is commonly regarded as a spaceless space that defies the rules of the offline world. One of the most significant consequences of this premise may be the turn to subjectivity in thinking about our relation to non-spatial datascape. The proposition that cyberspace is non-spatial sets the basic tone for many a discourse explaining man’s relation to cyberspace, and has much to do with what is believed to be new subjective and social possibilities. This thesis attempts to address the issue of the relation of cyberspace’s spatiality to subjectivity in terms of extended and existential spatialization.
Taking the relation of man to his world as our point of departure, we will devote our first chapter to the conceptual frameworks of Descartes and Heidegger both of whom have interesting things to say about the issues in question. Descartes is the one who gave us the picture of a differentiation between man and the world. While man is read as the thinking and doubting cogito of rationality, the world is inscribed as the thingly space of extension. Man’s subjectivity, therefore, becomes incompatible with both the substantiality of things and the spatiality of the world. In Heidegger’s hands, this picture is refined to avoid an implicit conflation of subjectivity and substantiality in Descartes, and to manifest a mutual constitution between subjectivity and spatiality. Extended things become handy; the non-spatial cogito become the spatial Da-sein; and the physical space of the world becomes practico-existential. Our own observations on this conceptual shift from cogito to Da-sein would also be presented. And our main concern is to point out that man cannot be completely identified with either cogito or Da-sein, but has to be taken as being both a thing and no-thing whose dual spatiality lends access to extended and existential spatialization on which hinge man’s socialization, his participation in cyberspace, and the spatiality of cyberspace.
The second and third chapters will deal with the social impossibility of cyberspace. Chapter Two will review a few discursive patterns invested with high claims for the non-spatial nature of cyberspace in fostering the newly (re)formed subjectivity and sociality. Certain setbacks in online practices raise the question how different online subjectivity and sociality could be from their offline counterparts. Chapter Three will attempt to answer that question by introducing the notion of extended spatialization to help read the social impossibility of cyberspace.
The fourth and fifth chapters will consider the question of what possibility cyberspace may disclose with regard to man’s subjectivity. Chapter Four will use the mechanism of social identification to discuss how man, being the lack of thingly identity (and substantiality as well), may negate his being a thing and cause extended spatialization to open up. The Heideggerian reading of death will be introduced here to establish the link between man’s no-thingness, pure possibility, and absolute freedom, a link necessary for our understanding of existential spatialization. Chapter Five will venture into a comparative study of three online phenomena--information anorexia, hacktivism, and dataholism--to show how existential spatialization of cyberspace can allow man’s being no-thing to be disclosed online and why this disclosure can only last shortly.
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