Mark
Slouka, in War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on
Reality, laments the "death of reality and the death of time"
associated with the cyburbs. He mourns their loss. But Vitanza notes that Slouka
himself is "a dead man writing! We are all dead men and women," he
says, "flatliners, dead Humanists, writing and perhaps as strolling through
a bad B-movie, which might get dis/entitled 'the night
of the writing dead'" (78).
No doubt about it, stasis theory is toast in the In Be-Tween.
Autopoesis, too: toast. Both are on their way to "an incipient third statelessness
that Katherine Hayles would call virtuality (in which emergence, or evolution,
becomes unpredictable; in which human becomes post-human" (85). Virtuality:
sham: simulation. This is the cyberterritory of the In Be-Tween, the synchronicity
or simultaneity of deadtime. The deadtime, ironically enough,
of speed.
-ddd
But not necessarily of dead meat,
even if we are "leaving Meatspace" (79). Deadtime is the In Be-Tween;
it is the time of passing, Vitanza says, echoing Virilioof pass-ing;
it is "the cyberterritory ... of the Will Have Been" (79). Deadtime
is a nontranscendental "time beyond" (78).
Virilio describes it as the time you experience when you fly to Paris from NY,
and, as you pass over the pole, you see both "the setting sun and the rising
sun ... dusk and dawn in a single window" (Pure
War 6; Vitanza 78-79).