This chapter shall address the educational points of contention which arise around the emergent landscapes bound and unlocked by the concept of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a concept which concerns the adaptation of the electronic body in a post-universal educational narrative about technology. It is post-structural in that it defines survival techniques in a postmodern education system, inundated with the narratives of technology to enhance the learning experience. To focus this contemporary and complex field of inquiry, I have turned to the fictional work of William Gibson, in order to facilitate the structuration and detail of the cyberpunk argument and universe. The relationship, therefore, between the imaginative extension of computerised realities, and the learning parameters which shall be established with respect to understanding the emergence of new spaces due to the increased use of computers in society, underpins and consolidates this chapter. It is unclear whether the term 'education' may be retained in this context, if it represents the universal distribution of knowledge and understanding from a centralised source (the governmental control of a state education system). The notion of cyberpunk acts to destabilise previously understood, universal concepts, such as education; because that which emerges according to the processes described by the cyberpunks, by definition, has little to do with centrally governed, hierarchical or territorial organisation. Educational relationships in this debate, are therefore fundamentally problematised by cyberpunk (to the extent that they try to pin down learning processes to the state), which establishes its interest and use as a social movement, and which makes the theorisation of educational cyberpunk an access point in the emergence of new worlds that are being created by the use of computers and digital media in general in education: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel". Neuromancer deals with the underworld of future urban sprawl, the characters are taken from the thick, misty atmosphere of 1950's detective movies, the plot vibrates between conspiracy, betrayal and personal dislocation. The central character of Case, is a paradigm of the hacker-underground, he is controlled from the outside by corporations, warring economic factions, Artificial Intelligence and the female warrior Molly. His subjectivity is a mess of conflicting drives, threat and retreat, yet he is held together by the possibility of the journey to the limit, which is the infinity of cyberspace. In this confused realm, in contrast to the outside world, he is a master; able to manipulate and perform the data gymnastics necessary to gain the codes which regulate the space of the matrix. This is the hacker-world, as has been described by cyber-anthropologists such as Steve Mizrach, Steven Levy or Gordon Meyer. The hacker subculture invents new language to communicate the subtle innovations and categories which appear at the leading edge of computer development. It disdains organised, large scale society, which inhibits and at times prohibits the individual development of new software and hardware interfaces. This subculture attempts to provoke and provide the means to technological liberation, whereby the universal, coded control mechanisms of the state and large corporations such as IBM or Microsoft, may be decoded and subverted.

I shall address the impact and movement involved with the emergence of hacker society throughout this chapter. Organised education, with the increasing use of computers from the initial primary environment, to the higher educational regimes of 'lifelong-learning'; must take account of the social and creative edge of the use of computers, if learning may be encouraged which does not exclude the desire to hack (otherwise the power relationship which the state wishes to impose will always dominate the curriculum discourse). This proposition is perhaps in contradiction to the systematic introduction of a highly orchestrated and regulated National Curriculum 'across the board' where there is no room for the secret world of the hacker, yet opens up on a pragmatic level the workings of the micro-processes which shape the way in which computers are used within the system and a discourse which allows for micro curriculum innovation. I am positioning computers as constituting a substantial transformation in the learning process, with consequences for the nature of knowledge, reality and organised society. This substantial transformation informs society in a more widespread manner than the historical-scientific "paradigm shifts" which Thomas Kuhn described, and has efficacy outside of the biological-scientific, Parallel Distributed Processing of Paul Churchland, where the physical brain learns to compute in new ways. The substantial transformation which this chapter concerns, borrows from the post-structural understanding of the nature of change; where localised activities such as hacker-processes, innovate and disrupt current notions of the computer dominated educational whole (the digital curriculum). Viral feedback processes, distribution and dispersal tactics, intensive technological camouflage, complexity and chaos theory, strange attractors and the workings of phase space, - may be locally incorporated into discourse, with the purpose of expressing the incongruities in education that cyberpunk implies.

The movement of the 'hacker-processes', is achieved through fleeting, often distructive activity; such as the creation of computer viruses, which tap into the computerised control mechanisms of society, sit inside them, and eat away at their data and code. The genre of the detective novel works in Neuromancer to represent this action by its inculcation within the social underworld; characters and scenes are often difficult to decipher, they are hinted at through coded signals and messages, creating a definitely charged, high-tech urban atmosphere. Andrew Ross points to the cyberpunks as constructing narratives of inner city life, rejecting the polymorphous, ecotopian fantasies of New Wave science fiction writing as being 'wet', 'hippie' and 'utopian'. In Gibson's writing, the streets are inhabited by tribal subcultures such as the Lo Teks, the Zionites, the Jack Draculas, the Panther Moderns, the Big Scientists, the Gothicks and the Casuals; they integrate street knowledge with technological intelligence, to perpetrate acts of anarcho-resistance through the interstices of the cyberspace net. Distributed knowledge in this arena does not lead to a technological, smoothly functioning system of co-ordinated parts working to given social objectives such as an ordered society would provide; but it enhances the sense in which the heterogeneous centres of intensity (human and non-human), take on particular lives of their own, and work to gain power on these levels.

The violence of the cyberpunk vision is therefore striking. At every node of intersection within the technologically defined matrix, forces collide and disrupt any notion of stable interaction. Case is profoundly confused, his memories are as real as the immediate present, he often finds it difficult to distinguish between action inside and outside of the net, his life is recast in the form of a hybrid technological experience. Rather than a diachronic account of his story, with a succinctly emergent thread to take us into a wholly high-tech universe, or the opposite direction mapped out as an escape route from the technological to the 'natural'; Gibson presents a mythology without origins or denouement. The explicit erotic content of the novel is a coded irony, a shifting detachment from the theoretical pulsion to place prosthetics into the familial sphere of dream-fantasy fulfilment. It also ameliorates, but does not resist, the conjectured assessment of gadget obsession, as being a lack emanating from unsuccessful white male libidinal drives, for example, as Chela Sandoval argues in 1995. The plethora of power resources at every level, unhinges any understanding about where the technology is going, or who is in control of it. Scott Bukatman describes Gibson's cyberspace as being a profoundly dislocating field of 'solid fluidity', producing "complexity that cuts the eye" in a horizonless space. This is not to figure cyberspace as a Platonic form of complexity, or as the Cartesian co-ordination of electronic space through chaotic intersection; but suggests that the cyberspace of the cyberpunk con-joins the technological production of new realities with the micro-movements of hacker-process. This movement therefore bisects ontology with psychology; the production of 'new realities' is not an all encompassing project, but layers 'the real' with the "impossibility of isolation of the real" of which Baudrillard speaks. Baudrillard demarcates the orders of simulation which set up this impossibility as decrying civil society, as the difference upon which the law is based becomes equivalent in that obedience and transgression are inseparable. The 'crimes' of the hackers can be seen to fit into this schema, as, for example, the production of computer viruses stem from an obedience to the computer systems in which they operate, yet they transgress the normative social rules by which computer operations are usually governed. In a computerised electronic environment, the regulation of illicit activity becomes complicated by the fact that the 'expert' regulators are often the perpetrators of the activity, for example, the MIT labs were the spawning ground for many of the early hacker diversions, see, Steven Levy, (1984). In addition, the hacker 'events', are often motiveless in the usual sense of the word; they demonstrate the ability to subvert the system, rather than actually producing any real advantage for the hacker. Just as the hero of the cyberpunk novel, Case, is often left bewildered by the technological environment in which he is skilful, the hackers are not necessarily transgressive 'others' with definite intent, but are demonstrating the breadth and power of their knowledge of codes, to create often surprising social-political effects, for example, the hacker who re-routed a shipment of Hagen Daas to the north pole! This is a new type of social struggle, that emphasises brain power over brawn, and is adept at irony, sarcasm and situationalist gestures.

In this context, the term 'post-education curriculum' may be used. The extensive post-structural and post-modern discourses about the nature of education after modern and structural discursive structures have collapsed, do have implications with relation to the emergence of micro-hacker-processes. John Knight anticipates that schooling is to be re-structured in an amalgam of corporate forms of management, contemporary technologies of behaviour, and post-Fordian processes of production. Education is replaced by the (re)production of flexible units of production/consumption. This is a post-human landscape, and one in which the articulation of localised incidents, (such as hacker-events), causes oscillations which may be channelled into the sophisticated technological control mechanisms with astonishing speed and simulated effect. The "political reality of the sign", where the simulacra of reality dominate the real, acts to loosen the grip of an over-riding understanding of educational reporting mechanisms, and releases the spread of small scale coded subversions into the whole. The post-structural discourses of educational writers such as Phillip Wexler, Stephen Ball, Bronwyn Davies, Henry Giroux, Jane Kenway, Patti Lather or Peter McLaren, whose combined efforts have managed to destabilise the functioning of an individualised educational humanism; have taken the decentred, fragmented, inconsistent subject, and cast it into the technological field of learning in which it now floats. This action has happened due to the forces of post-modernism and post-structuralism, which have attended to the ruptures and discontinuities within the construction of a wholly educated self. The introduction of computer technology has increased the fissures in the construction of the self, because digitalisation increases the oscillation in the planes of becoming that go to make up the learning process. In a sense, the analogue certainties of educational humanism, are replaced by the digital uncertainties of the computerised learning experience.

Phillip Wexler has designated post-modernism as signifying the cultural sign of a disintegrative phase of positivity's regime. After it, and already within it, new cultures are emerging which carry socially transformative forces; they challenge and disrupt the repressive control mechanisms of positivity and humanism. Social theories which adhere to these new energies are escape routes from, for example, the capitalist alienation of which Marx spoke. They are multi-variant, following collective bio-physical desires to prise apart the space into which different cultures have come and are becoming to exist. Cyberpunk is one such culture, and in an increasingly computerised society, may prove to hold a key to understanding the acceleration of computerised cultural production and the resultant curriculum content. The dehumanised, inconsistent subject of cyberpunk, passes through digital conduits, primarily to avoid being easily detected, and hence comes to resembles an avatar or trope, caught in the maze-like passages of technological information, it is a figure readily open to transformation and deformation. Subjects in digital form are easily located via the use of mathematical or cybernetic surveillance techniques, yet they also, through direct contact with the techniques in question, may develop behaviour which has mutated from any previously understood norm, and this therefore makes them virtually undetectable. Our subject of the novel Neuromancer, Case, is an extremely 'down-beat' hero, who is still recognisably human, yet he is invaded and emptied by pixels of code that are transfiguring him with alien nightmares and weird dreams. An example of this transfiguration comes when:

The issue which this transfiguration raises, concerns the type of change that is relevant and suitable to be applied in the context of cyberpunk education. Evolutionary biologists distinguish between biological change and cultural change in terms of the transmission of lineages. Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without the subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, however, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Cultural evolution seems to be characterised by the extraordinarily high rate of mutation and recombination, its power stems from what the evolutionary biologist would call lineage-crossing or anastomosis, this is the coming back together of separating gene-pools. The component part of cultural evolution, is the complex idea, or meme, as it was described by Richard Dawkins (1976). The meme obeys the laws of natural selection (with the qualification and distinction from the precise genetic processes of genes), yet acts in a different medium and at a different pace; in a computerised digital medium. Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothing fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches, or merely 'good ideas'; they are spread from brain to brain by the process of imitation as the Greek root of mimesis would imply. Such imitation, involving the crossing of lineages, quickly leads to epistemic confusion, and semantic systems of production which are continually modifying, using, coding and redistributing the memes. A speculative phylum of the cyberpunk, would have to take account of the science fictional precursors, the rebellion of street music, the work of the hackers, the information databases of late capitalism, modes of punk fashion and lifestyle; these all lead to a complex and unclearly defined 'species', which is an inevitably transitory, and asignifying subculture. This meme-phylum does not burden itself with intentionality, but it is cloaked in the systems that have produced it. In education, it is a disturbing and technologically enhanced free-agent.

The meme works to the extent that it helps to unburden cultural transmission of the legacy of humanist axiomatics. Ideas flourish and survive because they are alive, vital and arresting; and not due to a commonality of human intent or societal concern. Contrary to an underlying Rousseauist ideology in humanist social theory, which would argue that the profound nature of the liberated subject or idea can only be good and that nature itself, once emancipated, cannot but be endowed with natural equilibrium and all the ecological virtues; the meme extends the thought that the transmission of ideas may be messy, unbalanced, confused, predatory or destructive. As Dawkins states:..... "Obviously a meme that causes individuals bearing it to kill themselves has a grave disadvantage, but not necessarily a fatal one.....A suicidal meme can spread, as when a dramatic and well-publicised martyrdom inspires others to die for a deeply loved cause, and this in turn inspires others to die, and so on....." In a similar manner to the existence of a parasite, it is in the interest of the cyberpunks to keep alive the host on which they feed; i.e. conformist and regulated capitalist society. The computerised networks unto which the cyberpunks journey on their odysseys to the limit, are maintained by the corporate and state structures which they disdain. As these economic structures spread relentlessly into education, cyberpunk is in the process of increasing its potency as a transformative social force for the next generation, but not as a strict reaction against them. The Rousseauist ´humanist´ education, is disavowed in a proximal moment of feedback, as the agent simultaneously loses its human identity, and is transmitted through electronic networks as code.

The meme of cyberpunk spreads because it is a good replicator. Its appeal derives from the freedom to be found on the outer limits of society. In this 'transgressive' environment, the symbiosis of the technological with the organic unveils the cyborg face hidden beneath the pervasive renderings of the 'human'. It also underwrites the Darwinian project of natural selection with the reality of the machine which has been set into operation: "In aiming for virtual (technical) immortality and ensuring its exclusive perpetuation by a projection into artefacts, the human species is precisely losing its own immunity and specificity and it is becoming immortalised as an inhuman species; it is abolishing in itself the mortality of the living in favour of the immortality of the dead." Avital Ronell wondered about the values which an electronic culture is bound to protect. They are gathered and garnered by the push of internal velocities, by systems of presentation and by the transmission of information, which depends upon discontinuous sequencing for their comprehension; this is in contrast to linear literary culture, the digital axiom presents a discontinuity into any sequence, for example, the way in which text is transformed in html. The writing of William Gibson or his mentors such as Phillip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, represent a type of désoeuvrement

in the terms of the French literary theorists Maurice Blanchot or Jean-Luc Nancy. This is an open-ended project concerned with the un-working of the word, where the literature of cyberpunk science fiction can be seen to introduce societal concepts covered by previous literary units of production. The craving for metaphysics, sublimated in the transcendental jump encapsulated by literary idealism, is a particular area for the un-working of the word to take effect. Prioritisation of the machine in cyberpunk science fiction reaches even the micro-processes galvanised to project character or scene. Thus any distinctions between exterior and interior or the mind and the thinker; become embroiled within excriptions of a human space for metaphysics, they are hybrid technological processing units working discontinuously. In terms of education, the workings of these hybrid technological processing units, does not mean that the production of a child's intellect (learning) is going to be replaced by scrolls of computer information feeding into the mind (c.f. through the Soft Machine); but that the understanding we might place in and through these technological units (cohorts) shall not be compromised by the reduction of phenomena to naturalistic attributes. This may help to address lingering forms of technophobia, which still retain a nominal comprehension of learning with respect to individual (humanistic) ability, rather than placing and understanding learning through the empowered sense of speed which the new technology develops. The point of introducing computers into the learning process is that many of the patterns of behaviour which have been set into place by the socio-military complexes of modernity, for eamaple, writing, linearity and the text with their structures played out in factories and in offices, have become obsolete; not due to a natural proclivity towards social rebellion, but because society now encapsulates technological proto-hybrid processing units, where we find computers working and controlling everything from commerce to art. Computers are, in this sense, not part of a devisive mechanism to separate political hegemony through learning, but they are creative of a smooth plane of interaction outside of humanist education. The global spread of broadcast networks, increasingly makes the concept of a technological 'outside' unlikely; even people in unemployment, or living a rural existence in the third world, develop relationships with computer technology, for example, computer operators in the Indian region of Bangalore are in continual communication with US, Asian and European contractors. Perhaps a distinction could be drawn between completely passive machinic enslavement, and the active use of technology in creative activity, however, the habitual watching of satellite television, can result in the release of some communicative and imaginative powers, and television is being utilised productively by the Open University for the purposes of life-long learning, therefore passivity is circumvented.

The questions that cyberpunk education looks to initiate are not concerned with the ontological status of the nature of technology, but include: Who is in control of the new technology? What distribution networks are available to act as conduits for cyberspace? And, how and by whom are coding mechanisms enacted to define perimeters, borders and zones within this space? These questions in terms of social formation are assimilable by machinic processes and not by modes of production; these on the contrary depend on the processes. Deleuze and Guattari thus defined societies using the following categories: 1) Primitive societies as defined by mechanisms of prevention-anticipation. 2) State societies are defined by apparatuses of capture. 3) Urban societies by instruments of polarisation. 4) Nomadic societies are defined by war machines. 5) International or ecumenical organisations are defined by the encompassment of heterogeneous social formations. These processes exhibit variables of coexistence that are the object of a social topology, which makes the various corresponding formations coexistent. The cyberpunk of William Gibson arises from urban societies, the machinic processes of polarisation coexist with the other social formations, and feed them in errant convulsions into the datasphere. As the 'urban-cowboy' Case crosses over into corporate space or encounters the striation of the state, by working through the smooth drive of the nomadic war machine the conduits for cybernetic information. He is disavowed of previous certainty (identity) - he increasingly becomes embroiled by the cybernetic processes and he is at the same time dislocated from them by the cyberspace through which he travels. Cyberpunk education is the result of the action of urban societies, which form alliances on the smooth nomadic plane, and challenge the authority of the state through it.

In contrast to the fictional character of Neuromancer, the actions of the early hackers, have expanded and dispersed into society, paralleling the spread of computer technology. One of the largest hacker-processes today involves the release of new software via the net in the form of warez. The hackers jockey for position in the race to be the first to crack the encryption of the software companies, who are continually researching sophisticated techniques to make their products more difficult to break into, see Wired magazine, summer (1997). Once the software codes have been cracked, the pirates distribute the software free on the net, utilising Ftp sites and telnet usenets, combining complex strategies to make their identities hard to trace. The sociological picture is complicated by the fact that many of the best software pirates work during the day for the companies or their associates which they unravel at night; jurisdiction is rendered continually helpless by the internationalisation of the process, by which the hackers use countries in which to download, who do not have adequate copyright laws to deal with electronic counterfeit, e.g. Iran, Libya, Bulgaria. Looking at this activity from the outside, it takes the form of a labyrinthine circuitry, depending on technical expertise and the impetus to procure the latest 'high-spek software'. The cosmopolitan dreams of the intellectual street-fighters translate into different visions of society; money is replaced by software bargaining, the power of status and hierarchy by the combinatory power necessary to 'crack that code'. In this world the computer illiterate are ignored, power is distributed in bytes.

These changes stand in a parallel and reciprocal relationship to the scientific change of the type argued for by Thomas Kuhn involving the scientific community displaying strong resistance to changes in explanation; before encountering new theories which highlight anomalies in previous understanding, or that introduce fresh ways to describe phenomena. Once the new theories are accepted by the community requiring a critical mass of consensus, that which Kuhn defined as being a 'paradigm shift' took place, the special theory of relativity being a good example in the field of quantum mechanics. The paradigm is a prototypical application of some set of mathematical, conceptual, or instrumental resources; an application expected to have distinct but similar instances, which it is the job of normal science to discover or to construct. Normal science contrasts and is in opposition to pseudo-science, which often describes fundamentally unprovable hypotheses, or uses anachronistic thinking or unscientific methodology. Normal science accumulates a store of data which is rigorously proven, it is enhanced by arguments that are logically coherent. It is in this arena of discourse (codes) and artefact that the hackers enact their night-raids. The hackers are predatory upon the latest in computer technology; these innovative breakthroughs are jealously guarded because of their commercial value to their creators and the company which has sponsored the development of the discovery, they quickly crosses over from science into being products. The hackers work to undermine the economic relationship inherent in the development of these new technologies. The existence of the cyberpunk confuses the sociological configuration of 'high-science' in terms of computer science, as it exacerbates the direct cross-over from computerised scientific discovery to economic and consensual domination by these discoveries. As an extension of this notion, the technological themes of cyberpunk fiction as theorised by Bruce Sterling, include; the field of body transformation, for example, prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery: cyberspace: DNA, and genetic alteration: and the high-tech edge of mind invasion, for example, brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligences, neurochemistry. Cyberpunk is concerned with the emerging scientific disciplines which reshape and transform ethical and social possibilities regarding the nature of humanity, they represent the cutting edge of science. Educational sociology is to this extent subverted by cyberpunk, as its scientific basis is continually caught in ironic and unstable spectacular feedback loops of covert action.

A critical encounter with the extensive use of computers in the process of education, comes in the form of that which Theodore Roszak calls the "Hidden Curriculum". The hidden curriculum makes a direct connection between the absorption of the computer into the classrooms as part of the curriculum and learning process, and the efforts of the computer industry to sell their products to the educational establishments. Roszak points out that computer literacy in terms of programming skills, is not taught in schools due to a lack of training accorded to the teachers and the inadequacy of the software on offer. Whilst some highly interactive and interesting programs have been devolved for the school environment, the majority of the lessons provided are still monotonous and quickly exhausted. Computers in the classroom in a general sense highlight the process of 'drill and exercise', which excludes more creative teaching methods as being too individualistic. In higher education, the computer is much more widespread and imaginatively utilised. This has led to speculation about the possibility of 'virtual universities'; for example, a senior educationalist, Dr. Ernest Boyer, has promoted the idea of the electronic classroom as a more efficient and rich environment in which to learn. In contrast, Roszak concludes that the 'over-hyping' of the computer's educational potential in terms of the learning process, is mostly due to sales strategy; the more interesting development involved with the digital curriculum, is the refiguring of the power relationship which humans have with their intelligent, information bearing and processing machines. This relationship is focused by the example of the hackers, who attempt to control the machine and the power structures that have gathered around it, by understanding its codes, and by manipulating its functions at various levels of society. Rather than the industrial landscapes of heavy industry, the new machines define a mental process, and a landscape that corresponds to this process. This is an inhuman power struggle, involving logic and strategy, it is a game for the control of society and the learning process embedded within society. It is also one that is consuming many of the power resources that society now wields, for example, the net was first designed as a defence project for the co-ordination of the US nuclear arsenal; presently, commercial interests, private hackers and governmental concerns are jockeying for position on the information superhighway. It could be conjectured that, the concern for the individual that was enacted through educational humanism is transformed as inhuman power sources struggle for dominance in the game for control of educational resources and the digital curriculum.

The structure into which cyberpunk literature and hacker interventions mesh, has been defined as being the 'information society'. The early hackers from MIT and their imitators worked in an environment of limited sensory perception, preferring the abstraction of numbers and code to the images of 'superficial' media society. Nigel Clark points to the mid 1980's as being a time which saw the ascendancy of literary and cinematic genres of cyberfiction engaging with the incorporation of electronic technologies in everyday life. More specifically, the works of these genres belonged to a period of convergence between computational technologies and the mass media of audio-visual communication. The cyberpunk of William Gibson, for example, attests to aestheticised and spectacular body-effects, and indicates that the cybernetic field can no longer exist as an alternative locus to the mass mediated world. Jonathon Crary agrees with this remark by indicating that television has been incorporated into a global network of electronic communications. Streams of visual data are increasingly digitally transmitted, reconfigured and generated; the personal computer provides the basis for the navigation of networks which are reservoirs and conduits of images, and it is itself a visually rendered space.

Jean Baudrillard has defined the proliferation of electronic networks in the information society by the new operations of signs. Coherence and contextualization are being lost as fragments of meaning rebound from one terminal to the next. Baudrillard describes this order as being 'viral'; the residual particles of meaning circulate without controlling forces other than their own infectious logic. In this terrain, the information transfer of Wiener and the early cyberneticists, is compromised by a bilateral impetus of variant and discontinuous message-relationships. Control of the viral order of signification is not a straightforward feedback process, but must rely on the participation of dispersal and camouflage to discover what this 'lost meaning' entails. Artificial Intelligence, which uses feedback to loop information around into its processing units of intelligent mimickry, in order to enhance adaptation of the machines to new levels of behaviour; is enhanced and taken in a different direction given the parameters of the virus. The 'viral-creative' is a conception which writes into the program that which is taken out by straightforward information relay and control. Slang and graffiti, in this context are types of unsophisticated virus; it is possible to transmit and communicate these viruses, which would seem to make it possible to control them in terms of cybernetic theory and informational categorisation context and process in terms of urban decay or youth rebellion. Yet slang and graffiti are bereft of their partial sloganised significance outside of their particular time and context. Once formalised or signified in terms of information, slang or graffiti become more stable and are not hidden. The instruments of polarisation of which Deleuze and Guattari spoke, thus sustain their impetus through being digitised and transmitted using the laws of technological information-transmission; they become incorporated in the networks, yet they also break out from them at any node of intersection or threshold, the virus infects the host. The host is in this context the educated individual, who is processed by and processing humanist concerns.

An example of such an individual is the English educationalist Fred Inglis when considering the implications of television networks, wrote that "....technological forms quickly admit new kinds of knowledge and information. But the social forms - the hierarchies of decision and authority - critically limit access to those people whom the executive choose to admit." The virus could well be considered as a new educational type of knowledge, and one which is integral to the digital networks that are prevalent in our society and the education system. Yet the production of viruses also has social concomitants, for example, the hacker networks trading in warez, shroud themselves in the guise of 'secret-societies', and these secret societies are on the increase, which is of special interest for the education of the next generation. The information and expertise necessary to crack the software codes, is not distributed freely, but is concentrated on the cutting edge of the process to enable 'the hack'. However, the security necessary to avoid prosecution is of a different order to the hierarchies of decision and authority that Fred Inglis wants to preserve. The proto-war machines of the software pirates, avoid centralised and sedentary power structures, as they are continually dismantling their social formations and relocating through necessity to avoid prosecution. On a larger scale, the nomadic wanderings of the technological savants, are mirrored by the micro-movements of hacker-processes; both being guided and using the global spread of digital technology, and the complex webs of capital and communication therein. Therefore, the spread of the viral-creative has social implications in the dismantling of hierarchy and 'admission' to decision making contexts, as the social formations (nomads), are by necessity much more fully integrated with technological development. The new knowledges are not specific to particular digital technologies or to any elite executive groups, but they are spread through techno-social assimilation (techno-tribalism). The way in which this assimilation happens defines the viral-order of the new educational regimes. It is the hegemony of dispersal and speed, it is the knowledge about how to destroy the state system from within.

The challenge of the cybernetic-hackers, casts light upon the relationships of social power that have been wrought through history due to Knechtschaft (slavery) or the Greek style city state or polis. By positioning information society in terms of postmodernism, which means that society and the information at its core, are not directly representational, we create a space for secret societies to exist, for example, the replicants in the film Blade Runner, knew what it is to live in continual fear. As the highest technological formations of society, they came back to destroy their creator. This is a movement of hidden-fear. The situation concerning secret societies and hidden fear, is highlighted by the proposition to represent the computer-virus as a piece of knowledge suitable for education, and something which is possible to 'teach'. Certain formulas could be envisaged which would replicate the actions of known viruses; yet once formalised, the virus loses its stealth, and it would be ineffective as a potential tool for the hacker. Viral infection, through the itinerant nomadism of its topology, remains beyond representation, and outside of the capture of the state; which will, however, be continually trying to nullify and capture it. The problematic and task for the cyberpunk theorist working in education, is to, 1) construct a knowledge which follows technological singularities that are in states of critical excitation and that are attracting educational, commercial and governmental interest, 2) to comprehend technological subjects which know nothing of history or the subject these are in the electronic palaver, and 3) to make explicit the micro power relationships between the recursive and the emergent; this is the way in which cybernetics feeds back on itself, yet emerges new social and technological processes through learning. Gibson's vision of this process develops in his cyberpunk trilogy, with Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gomi or ´rubbish´ holds a particular and recurrent fascination for William Gibson. In this passge, it is being rendered through the setting of Mona Lisa Overdrive in London. The cyberpunk, is a Japanese tourist primed with technological vision, and she is able to critically distinguish between forces of renewal and those of degeneration. The monolithic and random 'towers of London', present arcane institutions; they are out of touch with their environment, they are unable to deal with the social reality in which they are set. According to this fiction, the action of social change happens on the street and in the shadows of the towers. Rather than a concerted attack on the structures of traditional English power society, the point that concerns ‘learning about cyberpunk’, is coherently expressed in terms of the heterogeneous power sources to be found, for example, in the theorisation of 'the mode of information' as has been demonstrated by Mark Poster. The mode of information constitutes a variety of multiple, dispersed, decentred, unstable subjects which contest the culture of identity; and provide a terrain where it is possible to map the claims of the 'others' who may have been overlooked in modern political and social life. When the transgressive subject of cyberpunk and the mode of information, alights in the field of rationalism, provides no grounds for stable understanding, but marks routes to follow the forces of cultural production such as gomi, that are continually reforming and undoing themselves; exposing ruptures and discontinuities in the society which they inhabit. For example, when Kumiko finds her data-thief in the East End, Tick; he conforms to the thin, nervous physiognomy of a console jockey working outside of the law and mainstream society. Yet the resources available in this strata of English society, do not solely define a criminal underworld. The incorporations of gomi, simulation, technological knowledge of codes and the astute survival techniques of the urban sprawl; produce a heterogeneous power base, which has the ability to take co-ordinated action in the data world of cyberspace. This contrasts strongly with the lone 'cowboy' Case, the American hero making his dysfunctional journey to the limit. Tick and his compatriot Slick live less cosmopolitan lifestyles than the corporate American dropouts, yet through their ingenuity and innovation, they are able to access and work within the same cyberspace.

It could be said that the London underground of William Gibson, presents a virtual Gemeinschaft (community) that excludes the stagnation of rigid hierarchies of status, continual appraisal, testing, deadline and clocktime mentalities, or the psychological profiling commonplace in corporate environments. Cyberpunk arises from different locations to the straightjacket of mainstream capitalist endeavour and organisation as represented by an organisation such as IBM or Microsoft, yet conversely it demonstrates routes for future economic development and expansion. As Deleuze and Guattari have noted, capitalist organisation in its entirety, operates less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding to the physiosocial concept of work, and more and more by a generalised 'machinic enslavement', such that one may furnish surplus-value without performing the factory version of work; in effect, surplus-value becomes virtual-value that is processed and used through capitalism, for example, children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc. Capitalism now operates less on a quantity of labour than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling; in fact every semiotic system. In effect, we become employees by simply turning on the television, or booting up our computers, this is our entry into the system of capital as surplus-value because we are already users and buyers of the technology. In a Marxian sense, machines themselves are becoming productive of surplus value and not the controllers of the machines; and the global circulation of capital through technological conduits challenges the distinction between variable and constant capital. Whereas the nature of capital has changed, the intent of capitalism as schizophrenia remains the same. Deleuze and Guattari describe the integration of world capitalism with the operations of machinic components, as constituting a 'smooth space', where capital reaches its absolute speed in the cybernetic transaction, which contravenes the classical paths to striation in order to be more effective. It is in this smooth space (cyberspace), that the cyberpunks enact their night-raids. The striation of society effects and is effected by the working of capital in that taxes are levied, interest rates are set, schools are funded. Yet this territorial system, which is regulated and directed from a state fulcrum, is increasingly impinged upon by the instantaneous capital transfer of digital trade, for example, Britain was effectively taken out of the ERM by the speculation of a currency dealer on the Wall Street exchange, or the Nick Leeson case on the Singapore futures market which brought down a major London merchant bank. As capital becomes implicated in this smooth space, it becomes increasingly more difficult to separate societal capital from global 'smooth' capital, as transactions are dependent upon digital networks which do not respect national boundaries, or social organisation worked out in 'real space' or in 'real time'. Educational institutions do not have to lose out in this situation, they just have to procure finance from sources other than the state; perhaps this defines a tendency towards private schools financed by the stock exchange or computer companies. If the machinic processes of computer-capital convergence continue at the current speed, and with the current volume of global impact, commercially funded school systems will soon be inevitable, in that all capital will participate in smooth digital transactions, and the state system of finance will be submerged and a part of it.

Educational debates focusing on these and related issues, have concentrated on the crises within public education and the consequences for the notion of emancipation. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux characterise neo-conservative arguments by their convergence of the economic order with educational regimes. The position of schools as liberal instruments of the democratic process, that was instigated in America by John Dewey; is undermined by the conservative functionality of schools as suppliers of human capital. The emancipated and educated 'citizen' is substituted for a repository of the skills and knowledge necessary to gain employment in a fluctuating and unstable workplace. The dominance of computerised economics, necessitates the introduction of computers into the classroom at an early stage, the students becoming ever increasingly competent with their digital machines. Yet the clear objection to the computerisation of the process of learning, is that nobody knows what the employment situation will look like in the future, as machinic capitalism continues to gather speed, even computer jobs can disappear overnight. Perhaps it is more adroit on the part of educators, to advocate preparation for unemployment or 'machinic enslavement', as Deleuze and Guattari have indicated; due to the diminishing need for labour given the progress of machinic envelopment. The teaching of the liberal arts will not be wasted in an environment of increased leisure, and an expanded knowledge base serves to deliver lively conversation and better social contacts in a world of culture. The smooth space through which capital is taking over knowledge, also allows a space whereby liberal and humanist educators may discuss the developments of late capitalism. However, the control of this process has crossed over into the intelligent functioning of machines. The educational debate is being processed by computers to the benefit of capital.

The cyberpunk education which this chapter is theorising, assumes that computers shall be set into place in terms of the learning process, but contests the social functionalism of this placement, as a means to enhanced, large scale capitalist organisation; this is the repetition of the same. Rather, the enhancement and concentration that I am focusing upon, exists in the micro-processes of the digitally mediated tribal subcultures, which are creating economic and communicative landscapes that broker understanding on the grounds that they will not be included in outmoded Enlightenment models of the whole which brought together notions of truth/knowledge/ethics/idealism/rights, etc. Pierre Bourdieu has invoked the category of habitus to explain the subordinate relationships inherent within worker/manager, student/schools administration, child/parent complexes. He speaks of symbolic violence as being a characteristic relation of pedagogic communication, which is charged with the transmission of the 'cultural arbitrary', the special effect of symbolic relations in the reproduction of power relations, within a framework of legitimate authority. Power is imposed by a system of social domination via symbolic means, and through pedagogic authority; but its effectiveness in transmitting the cultural arbitrary is mediated by the strength of polarised classes and movements. The relative strength of the reinforcement given to the balance of powers between the groups or classes by symbolic relations expressing these power relations, rises with the strength of various classes, and with the power of the market to confer higher value on the goods delivered by legitimate school authorities. As such the economic power system runs through schools, and reflexively disseminates its effects in the forms of qualifications, rewards, praise, well paid jobs etc. Yet within the habitus, the sites of power formation and refusal, the oppositional factors may be readily subsumed by the aggregate demarcation of digital networks, which are creating a world of mediated experience and they are raising the question about the reality of the political sign as Baudrillard has pointed out. Working class, gender based, sexually orientated or ethnic rebellion; and the translation of such desire into economic activation, does not have to be a 'slippage' towards centralised power elites; as is the case when the political sign reigns supreme. Heterogeneous power surges may be theorised in the contemporary arena as delineating electronic expressions of unrelated identities; this is the case with the electronic palaver and techno-tribalism. The economic translation of these power sources, may not be straightforward, as so many resources are still tied up with the multinationals and with the remnants of monolithic empire building; yet it is impossible not to remark on the implicit tendency in social-economics, to reposition market forces not in terms of 'the masses', but rather in terms of the economic activity itself - this is the surge in the importance of the digital-markets.

Jurgen Habermas dealt with the claims of emancipation in education as including a type of Legitimation Crisis. Adolescents in the industrialised west undergo a form of 'identity crisis', whereby the transition to adulthood is complicated by the loss of meaning in adult activity, and in particular with career structure and civil authority. With an identity unsupported by adult certainties, the emergent youth are left to float in the confusion of an unfamiliar landscape. Education cannot be expected to motivate students without the platform of traditional civil and familial-vocational 'privatisms' as Habermas terms them. Civil privatism is defined by an interest in the performance of the steering and maintenance apparatuses of the system, without a corresponding participation in the public support and creation of such apparatuses. Familial-vocational privatism is characterised by developed interests in consumption and leisure, and a status orientation towards career opportunities. Both privatisms are washed away by a commercial culture that deliriously deterritorialises effective subjective principles; retaining only that which is necessary for the immense functioning of its economic machine. In the face of such a process, the call for a 'critical theory of education', by which emancipation may be delivered through 'democratic communication processes', seems weak and ineffectual. Youth culture is now massive business, the entrenchment of the leisure industries in their young markets, where adult lifestyles are questioned and subverted, will not be deflected by the intensification of a critical and historically formative education (Bildung). Cyberpunks can no longer be re-educated in favour of civil or familial ways; the headlong rush into new digital worlds is far too brutal and interesting. If anything, the Bildung has become and pertains to virtual capital, which is enacted by the fetishist hegemonism of appropriated memes.

The self-styled cyberpunk social critics Arthur Kroker and David Cook, present an apocalyptic assessment of the current situation, without offering modernist educational 'solutions' to the complex 'problematics' involved ...... "We're living through a great story - an historical moment of implosion, cancellation and reversal; that moment where the will to will of the technosphere, or the dynamic expansion outwards of the technical mastery of social and non-social nature, - traces a great arc of reversal, connecting us again to an almost mythic sense of primitivism as the primal of technological society." This is a description of the post-modern carnival that invokes the mediascape of hyper-imaging and hyper-primitivism; it includes intensities requiring the exteriorization of the mind and the externalisation of mythological fear turned radical for their continuation. It is a kind of inauthentic virtual simulation of Shakespeare's theatrum mundi, yet without the tedium of the epithet. Kroker and Cook point to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the price to be paid for the hysterical concatenation of the bourgeois ego in terms of self-preservation, is self-liquidation. In this analysis, every moment of historical progression is accompanied by historical retrogression, which is taken to a different level and speed in the post-modern world. The incessant noise of the mediascape, is characterised by Kroker and Cook as emotional primitivism and myth, it is bought and sold by the artificial intelligence of a serial culture under the sign of quantum technology. This is the type of inverse relationship which is concentrated by the ideas of the cyberpunks. The development of high technology has sat on the back of a reversion to instinct and emotion. By being flung into the future of accelerated digital economics, the past irrupts in the sense that the social vacuum is plundered by any residues of primitive energy not rendered useless (i.e. forgotten), by the artifices of civilised thought. This is the reason that postmodernism is considered by many as constituting a nightmare of rationality. Everything that has been repressed by the cool reflections of the trompe-l'oeil of the real, now turns in an almost Nietzschean moment of nihilism, and it is in the process of finding its sporadic digital home. The oscillations of the intricate exchange mechanism between the future and the past, reverberate with solicitous but not historical power processes; Kroker and Cook variously term them as 'species-will' or the DNA of post-modern psychology, displaying the "aesthetics of hyper-realism" (see the Excursus for an educational interpretation of this process). Through these processes, social-life is folded into dense mazes, Kafka's prisons of justice and flight offer no escape, only dead ends on a zero plane of digital envelopment. Such conjunctions of cyberpunk characterisation, owe much of their heritage to Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard. McLuhan theorised the post-modern period as a historical extension of our nervous systems outside of the body. Information systems for McLuhan present the ultimate in human use of tools, in that not only is physical work rendered by machines, but the entire history of human activity is programmed electronically. "Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull, and its nerves outside its hide." McLuhan watched 1950's science fiction and horror movies; his theorisation concerning the plethora of electronic media, and their subjugation of the populace seems to have been realised, yet social stratification has entered a digital phase, which is by degrees ironic and reflexive, represented by the 1 and 0 of the complex digital plane. The moment of rupture, where the subject becomes passively caught in swathes of technological (digital) dreams, has materialised in a totalising psychological and historical and educational sense. His much vaunted description of the modern classroom as a feudal dungeon, which must take account of the language of forms in the electronic media if it is to survive; has veracity in that transformation is inevitable. The transformation that is being proposed in this thesis, is the process of techno-tribalisation, and its introduction into the digital curriculum and the classroom. McLuhan's theorisation is primed on a parallel trajectory to the civil-familial formula of Habermas; in that the 'taking account' of the language forms of the media, and their deconstruction or post-structural underwriting, is not sufficient to repel influence of the techno-tribal-sphere. The piecemeal reclamation of the grounds for education, is no defence against divergent and hostile materialisms, galvanised by the necessities for speed and money. Throughout this thesis, post-structuralism is being used to underwrite education with immanent and micro-power processes, yet I am extending this theorisation beyond the domain of competing language forms, which are easily decoded and recast in terms of linear narrative, i.e. being merely about language. I propose that we must dispense with the classroom, and reclaim the streets. This is inline with the cyberpunk mentality of appropriation. The most powerful kinds of technology serve as potent weapons to enact social change through education. The type of social change that will happen conforms to the techno-tribal formations that are arising due to digital envelopment.

The optimism of a PC/telecommunications revolution in education, which would contribute to the universal distribution of knowledge and allow students to access the many digital uses of computers; has been put forward in terms of a solution to many social ills and learning difficulties. However, this does not address the underlying processes involved with the learning system on the digital plane, and these are deep seated and socially tramsformative. The cyberpunk perspective makes us aware of the desire which appropriates technology for its own uses, and does not contribute to a unified socially cohesive whole. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus spoke of the workings of anti-production, which are the negative structures that uphold the carcass of the state. Society is characterised by two movements according to this schema; one towards capitalism, the other towards schizophrenia. Both are organised and maintained by the state, which is fulfilling its need to become-immanent and to cause generalised decoding and the replacement of the mechanisms of coding and overcoding (in primitive societies) with its own axiomatics, and so to control society through its many organs, for example, the education system and the learning process at its core. Anti-production provides the scaffolding for this movement by eliciting fixed points in society; these include conventions, institutions and impulses that represent a framework for possible social relations, but are themselves unaffected by whatever happens according to these relations. Anti-production permeates the capitalist complex, according to the universal history of debt as was described by Nietzsche; it sits within the notion of schizophrenia because of the Oedipus complex, which takes as given the psycho-analytic analysis of repression via the figure of the schizo, and therefore cannot follow the fluctuations of schizophrenic desire in whatever direction they might head. These fixed points are played out through the rhythm of bells and breaks in the school day; the relationship between teacher and pupils, has set parameters that are socially and governmentally defined.

Anti-Oedipus attempts to con-join capitalism with schizophrenia, but not make them identical; in that the generalised coding of social activity by capital, produces a plane of immanence or smooth space (the war machine), where dysfunctional action is required to enable the development and exploitation of surplus value, for example, American companies now extensively use prison labour and relocate to the third world 'sweat-shops' to cut costs. The tedium of the working day, with its breaks, interruptions and repetitions, is rehearsed and played out through the school system; this is the schizophrenic necessity of capital, the foundation of the capitalist political economy on the subjective essence of wealth as was theorised by Marx. In this context, production becomes an end in itself; it is a cosmopolitan, universal energy, which overthrows every restriction and bond, yet encounters limits and barriers that are interior and immanent to itself; this is the production and anti-production that oscillates through the process of learning that our schools are demarcating. These limits and barriers are subsequently reproduced on a larger scale, involving police states, security and surveillance systems, the vigilance of the citizens, perhaps even war; look at the way in which the school monitor is reproduced on a larger scale through 'citizenship'. The point here is that capitalism does not work without growth, it creates schizophrenic flows of sign-signifiers, which are checked and regulated by the despotism of paranoiac overcoding, that are continually attempting to designate some social unity as the break up of the signs accelerates, as Deleuze and Guattari remarked; "What modern state, whether it is democratic, liberal, fascistic or socialist, is not haunted by the Asiatic model of the Urstaat?" The proposition represented here is that the state has one primal model that all states tend towards; the education system that is organised by this model of expansion and diminution is a reproduction system for the ebbs and flows of the primal state. The Asiatic state pivotally concerns the control of nomadic forces, as the Asiatics had to continually ward off the attacks of the Mongols.

Our system of education may be approached from such a perspective. Firstly, the obsession with the markets, economic considerations and efficiency, creates an environment of production, in which pupils are streamed, elaborately reported upon, and encouraged to excel to the limits of their ability. The achievement of qualifications, technical skills and pertinent knowledge, can all be seen to be universally beneficial from this perspective. However, the functioning of such a machine of production, can but focus the ability of society as a whole to develop stringent and impossible criteria for the judgement of pupils where the machine does not work. Schizophrenia and capitalism in this sense are complementary (and necessarily so). The temptation to perceive educational failure in terms of psycho-analytic structures such as the Oedipus complex, with its repression and catharsis, or categories such as schizophrenia, psychosis or neurosis; is the working of anti-production in education. Instead of following the flow of desire, which might possibly exceed or divert regulated expectations, which had been determined for the pupil at a particular state of development; irregular individuals are pinpointed as being in need of attention by specialists, this particularly concerns violent, unstable, overtly sexual or continually disruptive behaviour. Resources, expertise and educational research are poured into the characterisation of the irregularity, which, once it has been understood, has the attention to it withdrawn, and the pupils are reintroduced into the mainstream educational machine. The mainstream education of children oscillates in such an economically determined social environment, and suffers from the stagnation of anti-production in terms of the way in which the organization of the school day breaks up productive activity, and limits the time that groups are able to devote to intensive social production (especially of an artistic nature).

In contrast to the 'suffering' of anti-production in mainstream education, stands the jouissance of Jean-François Lyotard as was represented in his Libidinal Economy. This theorisation marks the libidinal intensity of capitalist exchange, which is 'scrambled' in that the economy of desire cannot be attributed, because the effects of each instance are indescribable. However, the scrambling of desire does not mean that it is alienated by another political order, or that the moment one escapes critical relations, external references are extinguished in a movement towards 'the politically subversive outside', which is being reinvented by the internet, see, chapter five. Lyotard in effect offers a middle path, which would place the cyberpunks, for example, not in terms of technologically deranged others, but rather from a vantage point of intensification, the plane of immanence where social codes are mixed up and redistributed (digitalisation), in effect – they are errant forces in the signs of capital. This means that cyberpunk is coded and fixed within the regime of capital, yet this procedure is mixed up due to the intensification of it parameters. Therefore, the outcomes of the placement are often entirely unexpected (as shown in the fiction of William Gibson or the Japanese ‘manga’). One objection to this scheme is the simple rendition of the structures of power and domination that capitalist exchange has given rise to, for example, the success of the 'empire'. Yet, the model of exchange of the cyberpunks, in effect, conforms to the dispositif of hysteria, because it locates the human-machine units as cyborg ulteriors to the flattening of power relations in the accelerated capital environment of post-modern activity. This may be represented through the smooth space of which Deleuze and Guattari have spoken. The question at stake does not concern the slavery of the machine, or the machines of the slaves (there are no slaves or masters in this smooth space), but asks more directly; where does the deepening of intensity occur in our relations with technology? As Lyotard makes the point; "... the mad destruction of the organic body, the hysterical masochism, the decomposition of personal identity constructed by peasant traditions, the dissolution of the families and villages, the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs; these are all born and drawn out by jouissance, by the very enjoyment of their immolation." Lyotard has loaded his critical and constructive apparatus in Libidinal Economy with a certain amount of irony, which is pertinent in that jouissance acts through self-reflection. An application of this self reflection was the violent clashes between miners and the police during the 1980's, which gives rise to the suggestion that the disturbance of a rigorously enforced, gruelling and basically exploitative lifestyle, would not be given up without the expression of détente as well as the joy of immolation. This détente (almost military resistance) was accelerated by the overtly war-like tactics of the unions, and was ultimately strengthened by the government's resolve to carry out its economic restructuring of the landscape (Thatcherism). Every terrorist knows that the best campaigns are operated incognito, which is why the cyberpunks ride cloaked in the folds of technological immersion, and resist the inclination to organise on mass; they try to avoid becoming targets for the paranoiac forces of repression in society. The question of sophisticated high-tech terrorism, marks the sites of resistance in the current field of human-machine relations, and brings to the fore the issues of tactics and strategy that are to be played out through the learning process and in education. Baudrillard's Order of the Simulacra, is a sustained engagement with such an intersection of drives and the will to power. As Baudrillard explains, when the robot works, its functionality marks the end of the theatre and the beginning of human mechanics. The entire industrial system of production radically opposes the principle of theatrical illusion, which supports an immanent logic of the principle of operativity. Humans and machines can proliferate as automata; freed from all semblance, they grow increasingly similar in a system of production. As the hegemony of the human-machines incurs cycles of production and (re)production, the counterfeit of the Renaissance, with its natural law and play of forms, is replaced by the market law of value and it calculations of forces. The unity of the processes of capital form in the sphere of simulacra and code. As Benjamin and McLuhan have noted, production itself has no meaning, its social finality is lost in the series, where the 'real' message lies, which is that of simulation. The (capitalist) code is realised scientifically through the 'metaphysics of DNA' as Baudrillard terms it, and in the political sphere via the circularity of the media. Non-simulated response is impossible given digital tactility, where all communication is integrated into 1 or 0, for example, polling booths, and the way in which the media through digital recursion produce dual movements between parties, responses and codes. The action of the polling booth, which is supposedly private, is simulated into perhaps one of the most public of events via exit polls. The production of a two party system in western democracies, attests to binary regulation, which upholds the unitary market by simulated opposition; this is the distribution of the digital code as immanent. The binary series is reproduced and distributed as if it were a definitive model, as if it were a genetic code for the involution of the same. Education is implicated in this process. The purpose of the placement of the cyberpunk objection to binary regulation, is that it offers an alternative to the dualist universe. Whilst learning the binary coding mechanisms through the digital curriculum, the cyberpunk opens up difference as context and style within the learning mechanisms of the new technology.

A space is therefore opened up, a digital arena, a magnetic field of code with its modelled polarisations, diffractions and gravitations, with the insistent and perpetual flux of the smallest disjunctive units. This is qualified by the hyperrealism of simulation (according to Baudrillard). The hyperreal effaces the contradiction of the real and the imaginary, irreality no longer belongs to the dream or the phantasm, to a beyond or hidden interiority, but to the hallucinatory resemblance of the real itself. This is well represented by William Gibson and the fictional world of the cyberpunks. Science postulates that a process can be reproduced exactly within given conditions, with an industrial rationality which produces a universal system of equivalences. At the end of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only that which can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced; i.e. the hyperreal. Analogous to the effect of an internal distance from the dream, allowing us to say that we are dreaming, hyperrealism is the play of censorship and the perpetuation of the dream, it is in the process of becoming an integral part of a coded reality that it perpetuates and leaves unaltered. Baudrillard speaks of the 'aesthetic' hallucination of reality which we are all living within, the cool game of experience overrun by countless fictions and the inexhaustibility of serial hyperrealism (digital envelopment). The cyberpunk education of this chapter is the challenge to experience this hyperrealism not as exhaustion, but as a stimulation to creativity.

That which is at stake in the theorisation of the hyperreal by Baudrillard, is parallel to that which is at stake in the theorisation of cyberpunk in general, i.e.- the euphoria of computer simulation. Baudrillard is sketching the orders of the 'technological-other', the aesthetic according to digital overload and submergence, the blind but brilliant ambience of the simulacra that sets up orders of existence, and becomes a pertinent and effective 'reality-diffractor'. Terrorism in this context is a predominantly urban affair, where the fusion of signs, cultures and multi-dimensional segregation (linear and lateral), annihilates the propensity for national or religious causes, as in Islamic terrorism, right-wing militias or the IRA. Urban environments are not sites for revolution, in the old sense of the word, but are where the hyperrealism of simulation is turned against itself, where the logic of indeterminacy becomes extermination; this is a useful tool for the educator, teaching about the profusion of signs and determinacy in the urban environment. For example, graffiti is a type of urban terrorist rite, territorialising decoded urban spaces, which are thereafter exported through the arteries of transport in the case of the New York underground, invading the white city with the songs of the ghetto. Voodoo (c'est Voudoun ça), delineates a similar movement; it is an attack on the white digital panoply, and a sign of extermination for teachers extolling the differences in culture that are existent and potent in urban environments. The terrorism that arises from urban polarisation may be taught as a cyberpunk challenge to top-down regulation. The style and hipness of the cyberpunk, is an alternative to the historic and dialectical struggle of the masses against ruling elites.

Count Zero, the last of the Gibson novels which I shall consider in this outline of cyberpunk education; concerns a deeper and in some ways more dangerous 'other' to the power structures of contemporary society, an 'other' which is perhaps more immanent than the schizophrenia of Deleuze and Guattari, and in some ways more capable of extensive action than the terrorism of the hyperreal of Baudrillard. The hacker of Count Zero is a teenager from the projects called Bobby Newmark, who meets a strange woman in cyberspace; she is surrounded by a peculiar aura, and she saves him from flatlining (death), but without any explanation. Angie Mitchell's (a different character in the novel) head has been 'rewired' with a neural network, which enables her to 'channel' entities from cyberspace without the use of a deck; in effect, she becomes POSSESSED by other spirits on the net. Bobby meets Beauvoir, a member of a voudoun/cyber sect, who tells him that the entity he met in cyberspace was Erzulie, and that now he is a favourite of Legba, the lord of communication. Beauvoir explains to Bobby that voudoun is the religion of the age because it is pragmatic. "It isn't about salvation or transcendence, it's about getting things done" through the conjunction of cyberspace with voudoun. In Neuromancer, the AI Wintermute had tried to unify the matrix; when it fractured, the AI became disassembled and reorganised by Haitian Loa. The Loa present members of the dystopian cyberpunk urban reality with the high-tech information weapons to fight a war against the Yakuza, a Japanese gangster conglomerate. Thus Gibson draws the battle lines for the computerised era; they are between passion, magic and voudoun sensuality on one side; and power, corruption and corporate influence on the other. As the initiate in urban voodoo, S. Jason Black, has described, the workings of the voudoun fit well into the current environment. The rites, rituals and invocations of this ancient tradition have been preserved by the Haitians, and have resisted the influence of the dominant and exterminatory Catholics, by the invention of secret codes, practices and circles of sorcery. The power to 'get things done', springs from a confrontation with the Inquisition and the French, where the symbolisation of the magical African realm was honed, retracted and intensified; in defiance of the insane, purge orientated push to Christian purity. Voudoun; encapsulating the intimacy of blood rituals, complex drum beats and trance manifestation, is now practised in many urban settings and holds the clarity of power augmentation to be uploaded onto the matrix (these ideas are taken up educationally in the next chapter, when we move into the combinational nexus of the rave, shamanism and aesthetics).

The patron Loa of the cross-roads is Legba, whose vèvè or mystic diagram is an elaboration of the four-armed cross; providing links with the cross-roads, Christianity, and the four cardinal points as defined by the solar maxima. Legba is the interpreter for the gods, and the lord of communication and travel; he conducts people between this world and the next, also commanding roads/paths and barriers/partitions; he is associated with the garden and the graveyard. Legba is also something of a trickster (as Bobby Newmark finds out), often playing pranks, and causing confusion. At any voudoun ceremony he is always the first Loa to be invoked, as without his permission and guidance, the rest of the ritual cannot proceed. In a landscape of vast, global communications networks, it is not surprising that Legba has been designated by Gibson as being the Lord of the Matrix. At any given moment, immense intersections of data are packaged and re-routed by cybernetic devices, and as Timothy Leary has noted, cybernetic from the Greek kubernetes, means "helmsman". The introduction of such a rich cultural and passionate 'life' into the technologically clean but blind digital environment, entirely coincides with the profusion and direction of the unscientific cultural messages which the new technology increasingly affords (see chapter four).

The rite of possession, or the method of voudoun to access the Loa; works in the digital matrix to reroute cultural activity away from the 'Rising Sun' of the east (Japan), and into the lunar continent of the Heart of darkness, (Africa). The turning away from the west-east axis of economic activity, and into the paradox of African life, is an immense weather change, gathering pace with typhoons, hurricanes and vortices. This unfamiliar landscape stretches like an eerie desert, a prehistoric experience, a weird message scrawled in blood in the sand. In terms of educational research, the conservative presumptions of an ethical perspective and systematic knowledge, are irreparably 'blown out of the water', by the high-tech appropriation of the communication networks by the Loa. As researchers in North America have found out when examining the communities of Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic students, it is not just that the quantitative and qualitative methodologies are no longer appropriate to comprehend the spread of information on the ground; but that access is denied from the outside so that the researchers are barred by the students in secret societies. The conceptual clarity of the research data gathering mechanisms, presents an empty power structure which does not work in the context of the urban ghetto to understand how religions such as voudoun function in their urban homes.

In Count Zero, Gibson is engaging with the other side of the educational establishment. He is exploring the side where sorcery is not a strange counterpart to well established and documented practices, but it is experienced as working in that it produces real power effects for the practitioners and community. Anthropologists such as Dr. Robert Lawless, who has carried out field research in Haiti on the magical work of Legba, have found that they skim on the edge of insanity; in that the mystical tradition which he was looking to unravel, does not stop at the observational or linguistic level, but crosses over to the extent that researchers often become possessed themselves, and their 'data' becomes increasingly interspersed with personal invocations and voudoun rites; this is where voudoun sit inside of the process. The 'super-ego' of the scientific-humanist is bypassed, and the recipient of the Loa spells becomes dispersed on an ulterior matrix of greater intensity and multiple personalities, whihc defines the tendency towards madness. Psychological categories become no longer adequate to explain the break-out from the security consciousness of the western mind that the researcher experiences. Eastern traditions, drugs, techno-rave music, increased sexual promiscuity; these may all help the subject to cope with the new found power which the Loa affords, yet the riot of passion and magic will only be satiated whence the cyberpunk programme has fully run its course and the realisation of the upload into cyberspace of the ancient host of gods is complete. Just as the replicants in Blade Runner deal with slavery by returning to destroy their creator, the Loa of the Matrix have a special gift in mind for their former white 'masters'; i.e. the process of over-running economic activity with voudoun gods.

This is, however, too clear a picture of the forces at work in cyberpunk, but it is a good fiction and a useful educational tool in the (re)working of the digital curriculum. The urban sprawl of Gibson is a complex avant-garde construction, designed to impinge upon many aspects of the contemporary psyche. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. speaks of cyberpunk as the apotheosis of postmodernism. On one side, cyberpunk is pure negation of manners, history, philosophy, politics, body, will, affect, or anything which is mediated by cultural memory; on the other it is pure attitude, involving all that is power and subculture, a techno-future of artificial immanence, devoid of the 'lessons of history'. Csicsery-Ronay suspects the self-conscious 'hipness' of the cyberpunks, as betraying commercial mores without enough critical awareness to stave off the prying grasp of advertising executives or the blandness of popular culture (but why bother?). The fusion of cybernetics with punk via the post-modern sensibility of putting everything on the surface, loads the field of style with an ultra-transitory imperative. Cybernetics represents the hardening and exteriorization of certain vital forms of knowledge, the crystallisation of the Cartesian spirit into material objects and commodities. Yet this is already paradoxical; simultaneously a sublime vision of human power over chance and a monotonous augmentation of the multinational's mechanical processes of expansion, characterised by uninterrupted positive feedback. Punk is a sarcastic reflection of the social engineer's dream gone wrong, it is the machine as savage and intractable; thus it could be said that cyberpunk encapsulates paradox and sarcasm, in a digitally mediated self-reflexive moment of technological delirium.

It could be said that cyberpunk presents the moment that Zoe Sofia calls the "collapse of the future on the present". The expansive, progress riddled writings of science fiction (SF), projecting the scientific-humanist virtues of technological control by liberal values, are folded back on themselves in the dissolution of rationality through autonomous technology. Cyberpunk feeds on the horror genre in film and literature as much as the SF heritage. The fears of contemporary society involving the invasion of the body and the mind by the drama of pollution and curse, are enacted by it through the hybrid strangeness which extreme forms of prosthesis, body mutilation and cerebral disfiguration can achieve. Knowledge is fundamentally problematised in that the most outward representations (images) are shaken from any epistemological certainties by the discontinuous event of reprocessed simulation (hallucination). The epistemological foundations of knowledge are attacked by the outward strangeness that the theorisation of cyberpunk may achieve. The ‘knower’ or rational subject is often unknown in cyberpunk literature, because we are never sure about which level of the phenomenal world, or a simulated world, or a simulated phenomenal world, or a phenomenal simulation of an already simulated world, (permutate ad infinitum), that we are working within. A good example of such fractal perception, comes in the shape of Fools written by Pat Cadigan, which winds inexorably into ever more complex realities. I shall deal fully with virtual reality in chapter three. The scientific mind in cyberpunk fiction, is at once a victim and a conduit for the disruption of perceptual reality as we know it. In this context, the primitive fear of the other, is replaced by the dread of the unknown; this is the fear of increasingly stranger realities dispersing over a technologically constructed world. Molecular biology is discovering fascinating and bizarre operational possibilities, as research plunges into the prolific world of bacterial colonies. At this level, structures are not in any way stable, or organised into definable 'organisms'. They seem to positively flourish under chaotic conditions, proliferating at dizzying speeds with immense innovation of form and replication. Quantum mechanics has already indelibly marked the universe with the paradoxes of time and space, which suggests that on a molecular level the perceptual world as we know it, is an oscillating flux of discontinuous energy relations, literally surrounded by a vast abyss of nothingness. Both disciplines cannot function without the simulations of computers, which have the power to package the data of new discoveries on the molecular front, and to transmit them in the lateral sense of the transplantation of dislocation. Unification does not happen in the comprehension of the molecular world, which works more effectively to open up the space into which the assumptions of the macro can fall; this is the influence of cyberpunk on the inter-disciplinary study of science and dysfunctional knowledge through fiction. The concomitant power relations that cyberpunk establishes with the scientific community in terms of heterogeneity and micro powers, are existent to the extent that mainstream state sponsored science is subverted and re-routed into sociologically techno-tribal formations, for example, the post-apocalyptic landscapes of the eighties.

As such, cyberpunk is defined but not exhausted by 'involuted science'. A breathtaking instance of involution occurs in Greg Bear's Blood Music. A genetic engineer working in a conventional scientific-industrial laboratory, experiments in the production of enhanced lymphocytes that display 'unusual' behaviour. When he is fired from the company, he hurriedly injects a batch of the new cells into himself. He soon notices that his body and behaviour are altered, the cells, which he calls 'noocytes', restructure him from the inside for advanced functioning. He is pursued and caught by the authorities, and despite the most extreme efforts of the security systems to isolate the subject, the noocytes break-out of the restriction of the human form and spread like a plasmatic runaway ebola virus. America becomes a weird mass of flowing energy forms, the whole planet and ultimately the universe are subsumed by the 'noosphere'. The point of the tale is to disseminate a movement in cyberpunk thought, which indicates that the most interesting developments in scientific research, hold efficacy outside of the confines of the laboratory. Yet this efficacy does not need to be drained by the tedium of public ethical debate, note, for example, the current dispute over the exciting developments in cloning (1997-9). Given full reign by the humanities and educational structures, the leading edge of molecular science, could lead to thrilling and unexpected social landscapes, and in many ways the full comprehension of the cyberpunk learning process. This would circumvent educational linearity through the understanding that there are no moral or ethical equivalents to the discoveries of science. The cutting edge of science, where knowledge is continually problematised, does not serve as a rational basis for the ordering of society, but opens up the thought that the powers that are being unlocked by science are powerful, dysfunctional and potentally destructive. This is a non linear plane of communication, where feedback loops between knowledge and social functioning are emergent.

Cyberpunk is a social landscape dependent on science, yet escaping from it in terms of empowerment. For example, feedback loops between the study of the molecular and the way individuals may be empowered in terms of their chaotic movement as part of the crowd addresses cyberpunk life in the mainstream. It is not the individual that is finding a new voice, or those of previously repressed minorities; but it is the peculiar behaviour of the intellectually unconsidered, e.g. bacteria, viruses, amoeba, which are empowered by the extraction of discoveries on the micro level, and their placement onto the digital plane (non linear), whereby they may find communicative power. Barry Troyna has pointed out that the New Right have hijacked the term 'empowerment' away from the emancipatory Left, and that empowerment is now a meaningless but robust educational buzz-word, which is part of the 'symbolic political language' of a new phase of capitalism. However, the creation of its 'empowered' citizens by late capitalism, and their endorsement by the educational researchers of the New Right, does nothing to comprehend the power structures within which these citizens have to live or the learning process that it is endorsing. Empowerment in the cyberpunk context, becomes laced with critical insight, in that, for example, the human structures of hegemonic power do not impinge upon the functioning of non human viruses and bacteria. The 'societies' thus formed through cyberpunk are more akin to blotches on a Petri dish, than to the replication of the Greek polis (city state) or to the Roman Imperial Empire. Cyberpunk is a socially critical movement to the extent that it provides a space for these new micro formations to emerge; it develops communication between the micro and the macro, without a reversion to political or historical dialectics, but through the profusion of the digital panoply. It is enacted through education by the introduction of cyberpunk into the digital curriculum. Here, it acts as a conduit for the inter disciplinary and non restrictive plane of interaction between subjects that are otherwise isolated by the workings of the power elite to the benefit of a capital minority. The free movement on this plane uses the construction of a digital infrastructure to enhance the challenge to restricted notions of lifestyle, education and society.

The ambivalence of capital is often expressed through its indifference to human relationships. Critics have tried to re-establish the grounds for human contact in cyberpunk, in that the cyberpunk fictions tell us about what happens when societies break down, and the familial relations of the community are ruptured. Yet to determine cyberpunk as a reflection on social reality, underestimates the tendencies which are prevalent through it; i.e. cyberpunk is not just the rhetoric of the New Right in literature and film. Perhaps the most dominant tendency that cyberpunk expands, is the one towards digitalisation, which places it squarely for consideration as an inter-disciplinary subject in the digital curriculum. Information theory and computer science misunderstand the workings of biuniversalisation and binarisation (digitalisation), in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. The installation of a computing control centre, without which no message is discernible and no choice is decided; routes the channels of transmission into arborescent structures, (from the work of Pierre Rosentiehl and Jean Petitot). The memory or computing-body in this context works as a recording surface, where the introduction of discrete elements into the flows of analogue society, constrains the continuum of reproduction with the immanent force of 'on' and 'off' (the rupture of the digital). It forms binary chains of, as Deleuze and Guattari have expressed it, "desiring-machines". The desiring-machines are series which take the multiplicity of social relations and subjects them to a recording plane, whereby the coupling may be understood, for example, a mouth as eating-machine or breathing-machine or speaking-machine, action which is reproduced in and via the learning process.

Transcribed to this cyberpunk education, the removal of a computing control centre, releases the movement of knowledge and instruction away from the funnelling of the political sign in the name of the state. Digitalisation produces strata, (and epi- and parastrata) that are represented in technological society by the investment of capital in certain domains and not in others. The immense gulfs in wealth and skills that are prevalent in such an environment, also gives rise to the actions of machines (e.g. PCs connected to telecommunication systems), and produces ever widening societal gaps in terms of financial power (the virtual classes). Deleuze and Guattari figure this tendency in terms of a machinic phylum that is being constructed to circumvent content and expression. The machinic phylum causes and is caused by dislocation inside the strata (which are not connected in a linear fashion anyway). The 'surface effects' of the stim programmes, (stimulating cranial-jacks), for example, are the cyberpunk equivalent of a multiplicity of transducing machines, working feverishly in the apprehension of negentropic formations. They are producing a machinic phylum that circumvents the distinction between content and expression, as the jacks are directly wired into the brain: the cyberpunk in the learning process ironically figures the collapse of society whilst being in a smooth, interior connection with his or her technology.

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