On Narratives of Promiscuity

[links that may or may not make this less opaque to follow]

All the talks of crises of accumulation lately have us feeling slightly anxious about our anxiety over cyborg metaphors and anxious landscapes generating tix sales for globalization porn, in ways that feel more than a little counterproductive to the business of archiving mid-nineties Utopia fever for what had not yet become the business-as-usual of Amazon.com and near mergers. Consider the following field notes, then, in hopes of conversation, against the background foreclosures of despair here beneath the reign of a constantly mean density.

 

What we can’t help noticing in the smattering of readings taken up this week is what can’t help but strike us as a (meta- or not, your call) narrative of attitudes toward and hopes for the internet traced more or less along the following arc: the mid-nineties moment of hopeful dissolution of boundaries between everything fixed into everything potentially becoming anything else; passing through the 00’s tempered correctives descending from ontological desires into the ontic sewage of, yeah, who owns whose plumbing/metaphors; arriving in a kind of synthesis called hybridity that wants to go on hanging its hat on hope without losing sight of the city supplying the hat (natch) tree. (In what follows we deal only in the first (major) phase of that narrative.)

 

This side of that mid-nineties moment, that is, it’s hard to take without a grain of home mortgage equity loans seriously Paul Virilio’s exuberant proclamation “Cyberspace is a new form of perspective… without a single precedent or reference: a tactile perspective” (106). All to the goods, we suppose, except we seem to recall accounts where the loss of felt connections to historical referents and our corresponding loss of affect attending the triumph of the virtual over the Real isn’t so much a good thing. Certainly the “dematerialization of media on the one hand and reification of meanings on the other” (23) Benedikt sees enabling the frictionless exchange of information electronically (in place of the cumbersome business of personal encounters directly experienced in the shadows of our nostalgic architecture) has gone by the same name in other stories less happy about the migration of the haptic into the virtual. This aint, we’ll repeat, to naysay what the hopes hope for, nor to deny the possibility that new technologies promise new possibilities. It’s just to recall that not all narratives of the spectacular shift from the “actuality of physical doing” to an “education-stratified, literate reality of symbolic doing” (26) feel equally free to conclude in the strong Platonism wherein it seems to us Benedikt takes shelter in “the arising shape of a new world, a world that must, in a multitude of ways, begin, at least, as both an extension and a transcription of the world as we know it and have built it thus far” (32). Here Plato meets colonialism: This world sux and figuring ways to make it suck less harshes my tele-contact high; I’ll try that one, please.

 

And yet such narratives, replete with casual invocations of spectacle and the virtual as though they were equivalent accounts of the conditions of freedom, depend upon just such a “freedom” from referents and conceptual rigor underwriting the utopian clamor for a freedom that these days looks less and less like one. This is what every Smith in the Matrix knows: “We are here because we are not free.” But we know this because Hollywood told us so, which is to say history has a funny way of explaining itself after the facts. How else to make sense of Scott Bukatman offering in 1993  the “terminal space” he derives from Neuromancer and Blade Runner as analog to the dictum “cyberspace is a method of conceiving the inconcievable—an imaginary solution to the real contradictions of the Dataist Era” (99) inside which spectators become (italicized in the original) “pure gaze” as though this were a good thing? We can appreciate the exuberant hopefulness of these accounts of ‘everything is drifting free of everything’ as historical affects, in other words, but we struggle to reconcile their hopes with the terms of the hoping. Much as we would like to see the movie that takes as its hero Merleau-Ponty while passing the name-checked oracles Debord and Vaneigem en route to cashing in on the vocabulary of mode of production with Daddy Jameson looking on, we fear the imaginary solution that explains the frictionless exchange of these nouns drained of conceptual values Bukatman’s contradictions call into question is left up to us:

 

“A standing joke about cyberspace is that, in an era of ATMs and global banking, cyberspace is where your money is. So cyberspace is a financial space, a space of capital; it is a social space; it is responsive; it can be modified; it is a place of testing and the arena for technological rites of passage (Tomas)… Whether a real space or a ‘consensual hallucination,’ cyberspace produces a unified experience of spatiality, and thus social being, in a culture that has become impossibly fragmented. On the other hand, we should note that cyberspace is a ‘technological utopia, a sort of computer simulation of the future, or of the possible, within the framework of the real—the framework of the existing mode of production” (101).

 

Yes indeed. The question, then, is—call it dematerialization, deterritorialization, promiscuity (that “strategy of accretion and re-articulation without regard to proper boundaries,” as Tyler Curtain defines it), hysteria (as Plant re-mobilizes it, finding the “possibility of another mode of production” Irigary found in “the point at which association gets a little too free, spinning off in its own directions and making links without reference to any central core” so that “Her very inability to concentrate now connects her with the parallel processing of machines which function without unified control”), or the schizophrenia all implicitly or explicitly embrace—can the dissolution of difference into the hopeful stew of exchangeability (of bodies, gender, theoretical accounts) any longer be taken seriously as a strategically useful explosion of the core into all periphery, all the time? And would we really even want to? It’s easy to be glib, that is, about what from 1996 can’t help but seem nonsense to us in 2008: “Global telecommunications and the migration of capital from the West are undermining the pale male world and the patriarchal structures of the south and east, bringing unprecedented power to women workers” (Plant 349). (Although even in 1996, we wonder, would these phantom empowered women workers have included e.g. the unmentioned bodies belonging to those phone sex workers whose virtual properties alone Allucqure Rosanne Stone was interested in in 1992?) But it’s harder to answer what it was, back then, that made it seem briefly that the emergence of “a public,” in Curtain’s words quoting Michael Warner, as “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” (325) could be an answer to anything other than problems of discourse?

 

That’s asked less tongue in cheek than it’s been made to sound. Indeed it strikes us as a very live, not to say real, question. In our own words, that is, the question remains: this side of the consolidation of the internet’s potential into this or that instance of frictionless exchange and dematerialization of media—not to mention the infection of our critical vocabularies and the resultant poverty of concepts for asking this by more of the same—what useful horizon beyond the grim ones and zeroes of our present impoverished imaginings are we able to (ouch) think?

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Upon reconsideration it occurs to us Benedikt perhaps meant the “new world” that he foresaw cyberspace making in synthesis with the material world, whereas we initially took him to mean a “new world” overlaid and in place of the irksome material and materiality of this one. We stand by the reading in context, but admit it’s open to interpretation.

~ by Tim on May 12, 2008.