At the same time, resistance to these changes has been growing and organizing. We are seeing the rise of fascist militias in every state of the Union. The Christian right had the electoral savvy to direct a whole Republican Revolution. Goodbye, Mr. Gingrich—we won’t miss you. Nationalist movements based on race can provoke millions to direct action.
These phenomena confound pristine notions of Left and Right. The militias espouse quite a bit of the populism that used to be part of leftist jargon not long ago. The Christian right learned networking and resistance techniques from the old left. A new black political class has turned sixties idealism into nineties cynicism without changing a syllable of the old rhetoric. Politically correct legislation of sexuality in the workplace lies in tatters in the aftermath of a dose of presidential reality. In academia, never mind Right or Left, the battle wages incessantly over self-preservation and self-promotion. This is a game of make-believe in which ideological directions are invoked solely for the purpose of giving some sorely needed dignity to the endless struggle for crumbs. There is certainly a market here for a Virtual game that could train academics for the Battle of the Hallways the way pilots train for flight in a simulated environment. It would feature the “as-if book,” a book intended not to be read but to become a line in a resume.
Language and reality are at odds almost everywhere you look, from legislation to cultural criticism. In this gap between language and reality, television and cyberspace flourish. The image factories care for neither memory nor visionary revisionism. In the realm of the Image all is postmodernly equal. Politics is now the art of manipulating images that are impervious to textual criticism. A politics without memory tends to become authoritarianism, or as is the case now, corporatism. A politics without vision tends toward the same result. Interactivity and networking may help circulate ideas in a certain kind of defense against visual propaganda, but the very medium they are employing renders them ineffective. Marshall McLuhan was so right. The medium is the message.
We are witnessing the mingling of public and private, mingled and mixed according to the way images mix, timelessly, seamlessly, without translation or the necessity for translation. Images bypass the critical locus through which words traditionally pass. Neither time nor analysis nor contemplation nor translation stand between our direct perception of this metamorphing spectacle. There is no longer any “inside,” whether the “inner self” or “inside information,” there is in fact no longer any distinction between the inside and outside, or between the private and the public.
Meanwhile, the reality of our democracy pushes on, wildly, untranslated, waxing and waning in confrontations that are very serious, yet barely rate the attention of our cultural critics, trapped between old ideas of Left and Right, or bogged down in theoretical mumbo jumbo.
How did we get here?
What was once, not very long ago in narrative time, an artistic hope has proven to be only an alarm signal, the cry of the canary in the mine. There was a hope, in the heady days of the late fifties and mid-sixties, that the image might lead an autonomous but neighbor-friendly life with critical thought. There was, for instance, the matter of abstract painting, which was presented as a modality of thinking in process, thinking deconditioning itself, untranslating itself. The end product, never very important to the artistic activity, was an image that invited activity more than contemplation, an activity that presupposed wresting some freedom from increasingly oppressive contexts, including translation. This is still a commendable, though hardly possible, utopia. It is the equivalent of taking a vacation, which is only a dream in the intensely confrontational time crisis of the fin-de-millennium.
What Gilles deLeuze calls “the powers of the false” can no longer be divided, as deLeuze does, into the “organic” and the “crystalline,” or images that stand in for a preexistent reality—the organic—and those that “constitute their own object,” referring to “purely optical and sound situations detached from their motor extensions.”15 The organic image presupposes a narrative bridge between the real and the imaginary, while the crystalline subverts this narrative because it “replaces the object, both creates and erases it.” The crystalline image, and deLeuze quotes Robbe-Grillet here, is the cinema “of the seer and no longer of the agent (de voyant, non plus d’actant).”
This avant-garde cinema, along with abstract painting and other ambitions of decontextualization, have been buried under the debris of their own products. The speed with which even the purest squiggle is commodified testifies to the triumph of the image principally in the elimination of the necessity for translation. In other words, not only do images not need translation (which wasn’t always the case) but they always speak in translation. The original of this translation, which is the creative act, resolves itself in the secondary language. I say that this wasn’t always the case because the image, until television and advertising, was an object of contemplation that demanded translation.
Virtuality is television squared. The interactivity that would seem to distinguish it from the unidirectional flow of television takes place on the other side of the screen, inside television itself. We have literally stepped inside the little screen to play by the rules of the little people in there. The passivity of the TV watcher now seems like a form of freedom, compared to the compulsory activity of the cybernaut.
The Internet right now appears to be a kind of crack in the Empire of the Image. The Internet is still, by and large, textual, and even images follow language in this first of what will certainly be many forms of Internet. The Internet, at present, stands in relation to the image exactly where language stood in relation to the image in, let’s say, 1914, when the Dada movement first exploded the narratives of the previous century.
But the Internet is only virtually textual, image-disguised-as-text. The virtuality will become more apparent as the medium becomes more sophisticated. It would be unwise to consider the current text-based Internet as anything more than a primitive model. On the one hand, everyone is thrilled by its utopian promise; on the other, it insidiously extorts our time and energy.
What exactly are we doing in cyberspace? Well, one thing we are doing, besides reading and writing e-mail to and from people with offices next door, is surrendering the awkwardness of the body and in so doing, perfecting ourselves. Even better, we are insulating against any confrontations with reality by building our own little personality cults. These are called personal Web pages. Each one of these Web pages is a miniature personality cult, literally, if we look at the scale of, let’s say, Stalin’s personality cult, which was writ large on billboards and mountainsides. Seeking perfection through a mini–personality cult testifies to the continuing siren song of utopia, which is to say, the persistence of ideologies.
Like most people, I am of two minds about the Internet, though you may not think so after all I’ve said. One of my minds is thrilled, despite my better sense, by its utopian promise. The other mind, thank God—again—is resolutely skeptical. My utopian streak is personal and generational. I came of age in the sixties, and optimism is our generational disease. We believed that the world was going to get better through our efforts and, some might argue, it has. It has certainly gotten wilder, and it is both amusing and horrifying to see how some of our baby ideas grew up.
The skeptical mind is equally stubborn. I grew up in communist Romania, where the promises and language of utopia were used to create hell on earth. This mind cautions that utopianism is only a clever form of hypnosis whose real work is the extortion of energy from human beings. In the name of utopian sentiment we can be made to sacrifice our liberties and, in the end, our bodies. This mind is suspicious of rationality, of abstraction, of anything that calls for going against one’s self-interest. This mind is against the deferral of pleasure for the sake of some future goal, and it defends the perimeters of the physical body as fiercely as any animal defending its territory.
These two minds are irreconcilable though they clearl
y coexist.
The Christian philosopher Teilhard de Chardin posited in the 1940s the idea of a spiritual-affective atmosphere he called “the noosphere,” which surrounded the planet just like the atmosphere. Within the noosphere, our thoughts, feelings, and yearnings linked up with everybody else’s in a continual thickening of substance. This was a kind of lowering of the heavens into earthly existence, an ombudsman afterlife, or, if you are Catholic, a purgatory. The development of this spirit-world-within-matter was necessitated by an increasing evolutionary pressure within us to join in the process of creation, or the “evolving Christ” as Teilhard de Chardin called it.
The noosphere is now somewhat perceptible through the pedestrian tools of access to the Internet, which is a rudimentary representation of this afterlife. The Internet as it exists now is only potentially “noospheric,” because it still consists mainly of raw information unfolding within a partial global conversation. The voices within this exchange belong to the world’s affluent minority. Eventually though, utopists tell us, everybody will be participating. When this happens, we will be living simultaneously on earth and in spirit.
The afterlife accessible through technology will make life more spriritual for everybody, creating, in effect, a utopian community. This community will see to any number of our material needs, but it will also ensure a kind of immortality in virtual space (virtual beings don’t die) and an access to other, potential levels hitherto denied mere mortals.
It’s a pretty picture, but let’s look at the cost. In the first place, the advent of cyberspace will necessitate the abandonment of the physical body. In exchange, we will acquire a virtual body that can be as sensate, or even more richly sensate, than our current body. Virtuality can enhance the senses, without the psychological complexity of real sensual enhancement. You can have guilt-free orgasms with any other virtual beings, just as you can experience the peaks of the Himalayas without dying on the ice.
However, virtuality is rational, and herein lies its horror. The virtual body is designed by mathematics and, no matter how seemingly lifelike the design is, it cannot replicate the workings of the mysterious complexity of life. Reality demands both pain and failure: Success can only have substance in this context. An organism cannot be called “successful” solely through design. Life needs adventure, it is predicated on the irrational urge to journey physically toward danger. No simulation or virtuality will work here because their outcomes are predictable. Nobody will accept a utopia that contains the possibility of pain.
Cyberspace is hypnotic, a quality inherent in other media, such as television and advertising. We have long ago ceased to think critically about television, no matter the whining of pundits. Television bypasses critical sense, it speaks directly to the emotional vortex in one’s stomach. Advertising is, likewise, a medium for which we have no defenses: it speaks directly to the human desire to be comforted and transformed within the cultural norm. Both those media are firmly in control of that infinite desiring mechanism that can be quenched only by having more. Addiction, in short. “User’s manual,” indeed. Cyberspace adds a new twist to the addictive power of those media by creating the illusion of a dialogue between addictions that can pass for free will. The actual content of cyberspace now is a combination of image banks and shopping opportunities disguised as information and dialogue. The data banks are display windows: The information is free but possessing it sets in motion the urge to shop its source, or its meta-content. Internet dialogue is directed either toward sex (shopping “the body without organs”) or toward networking product-development.
Still, there may be nothing wrong with the infinite (infinitely depressing to me) cycle of consumption-production, if it produces more wealth and makes more people happy. This wealth does, however, come from somewhere: namely from the physical energy of the people wired into cyberspace. The fact that Americans watch eight hours of television a day is now being superseded by those other Americans I mentioned who spend twelve to fourteen hours in cyberspace every day. These new cyber-beings do not need communal spaces (cities, schools, or churches), sweaty relationships to physical beings, nature, or animals. They need nothing from the outside. An absolute interiority has taken command of them. In exchange for their sacrifice of the outside, they have gained a sensory paradise, a virtual existence and afterlife.
This utopia starts to look more and more like the communist utopia: an upper-class gulag. There are no barbed-wire fences, but the outside is just as resolutely out of reach. The question is, in the end, ecological: What is the effect of a designed afterlife on a physical planet? Can it sustain virtuality, or the disappearance of humans into cyberspace, or does it become an uncontested source for the raw materials needed to keep the cyber-trippers happy? What do the animals have to say about it?
The notion of what a “human being” is has undergone some severe jolts for over a century now, and there are few agreements on the matter. Most of us agree that it is some kind of “construct,” but what exactly has been and is still constructing it is a matter of debate. There are those among us who think that life is but a joke—sorry, Bob Dylan just blew into my head—there are some among us who think that there is no such thing as a human being at all, that all of it, humans, nature, and technology, are under construction, and that only relations of power—or access to construction materials—are worth our (post) humanist attention. A human being is already virtual: The projection of whatever pulls her strings. But whatever it is or isn’t, it is not finished—which is why we (and various its) keep working.
There is no disagreement on this: Human beings are unfinished. Theologians and Marxists can shake hands on this one. God has a plan, Marx had a plan. Those plans are called utopia: only there will human beings be completely finished. God’s garden needs a lot of weeding and Marx’s utopia proved to be Wal-Mart, but never mind: The utopian urge is there and it isn’t going away.
The new virtuality is a competitor. It competes not only with reality, that old virtuality, but with all those other utopias, as well.
Reality is scary. Rendering it innocuous underlies most of the contracts we keep trying to honor but which we did not write. Rendering reality unconscious is the job of most social virtuality—which works for Bill Gates.
And then there are those among us—among whom I once found myself—who find virtuality satisfying because it seemingly multiplies and transforms identity to the limits of one’s imagination. This was once a poetic desideratum: Human beings are so loathsome, splitting them up might make them less harmful. I think of Fernando Pessoa’s “heteronyms,” for instance, or my own invented personae in early poems, and find them now—like abstract painting and underground cinema—only awkward forerunners of the huge industry of the imagination.
The constant calls for “creativity” and “content” now issuing from the ever-hungry maws of the new media are nothing less than calls for the drafting of our entire society for the purposes of writing poetry or, if you prefer, formatting what’s left of reality, for broadcast.
Siegfried Gideon, in his classic book Mechanization Takes Command, described the gradual conquest of the world by mechanization and foresaw the abrupt end of the mechanical age. We can see that the virtual is taking command, but it’s hard to foresee what lies beyond its imagined infinity.
There are also young people who like to use technology to an opposite means: to enhance the senses, to exacerbate physicality, to provoke whatever is most human and untechnological in themselves. To imagine as little as possible. Techno-raves and Ecstasy are two of these aids to superphysicality. What is their politics?
Which brings me back the two MUDders I met in Seattle. The existence of the outside world scared them. And for good reason. At the world’s largest shopping mall in Minneapolis—the Mall of America—I saw two other cultural studies scholars strapped into Virtual Reality gear. These two pudgy cybernauts had an amazing array of expressions on their faces as they dodged dangers, fought evil, and gener
ally triumphed in heroic fashion over untold programming. Watching them at a distance of about two feet were three tough-looking Chicano hombres wearing gang colors and grinning like bobcats who’d come across two captive turkeys.
That scene gave me great hope—thank god for the barbarians. We do miss the barbarians, don’t we? Cavafy had it so right: “Now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution.”16
The V-Chip
Why bother putting the V-chip in everyone’s TV when you can put it directly into everybody’s brain? It would be like a flu shot and afterward you’ll never want to watch violence or sex again, you’ll be going to church every Sunday and always looking on the sunny side of life. You’ll be nice all day long and at night you’ll sleep unless it’s the time of the year when you must procreate. In fact, the V-chip could be programmed to get TV direct into the brain so you won’t need a TV set anymore. The nice, violence- and sex-free shows will just pour in behind your eyebrows and entertain you from within. And the commercials won’t even bother you because they’ll go directly to your money and make you spend while you watch. No need to move at all. You can even vote out of the V-chip by just wiggling your toes, once for the Democrats, twice for the Republicans. The V-chip, which by now is an E or Everything-Chip, can also contain health information that will keep your cholesterol and blood pressure in check so that you can live forever and do as much good as you can while consuming as much as possible without any ill effects. And there will be a timer to remind you that it’s time to put on deodorant. When your chip gets old you can choose to have it replaced or you can just fade away with the chipless masses of the Third World. The chipless people of the world will die sweaty in sinful cities by their hobo fires. These cities, full of temptation and outlaws who’ve ripped the chip out of their heads, will eventually have to be eradicated. By contrast, the eternal suburb of the chip people will be just like heaven, all harp music and singing puppy dogs and malls as soft as a pillow, void of pain and art. All the cravings for violence and sex that the media woke in us will be collected for the government by private storage companies who will scrape them off your V-chips every month or so. They will be stored in big pools of a new strategic reserve to be released by the army if a new Hitler or something shows up. Thank you for the V-chip, Mr. President. Tomorrow will definitely be another day.
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 22
