Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro (eds),
Prefiguring Cyberspace: An Intellectual History.
Power Institute, Sydney / MIT Press, Cambridge MA. 2002.
ISBN 1 86487 491 0
322 pages
Au$49.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Power Institute)

Reviewing anthologies is tough. No only do you have to at least mention every one of the eighteen essays and ten artist’s statements, but you have to describe the editors’ project and whether they, and their contributors, have achieved it. And maybe add a thought or two of your own. A book is more straightforward: you agree with it or not, and instigate a dialogue with the author. But an anthology is already a polylogue of people who, in one way or another, should already be talking among themselves when the reviewer steps into the cocktail party and starts trying to catch the dynamic and intervene in it at the same time. So a swift race around the tables to introduce the people at the party (don’t worry if you don’t get all their names at first), and then an assessment as to whether you should gatecrash the conversation.

At the first table, the conversation is about AI and robotics. Erik Davis, whose Techgnosis mysticism has never really been my thing – wide open to the criticisms Adorno raised of the 1940s vogue for the occult – nonetheless gives a revealing examination of Descartes that hauls back from the cogito so despised by post-structuralists a narrative of Descartes’ vertiginous struggle with the demon of methodical doubt. In order to get the penny to drop, do you have to remove the floor from under your feet? Catherine Waldby, whose book on the Visible Human Project was something of a landmark, does the decent thing with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but there’s little new to add. Elizabeth Wilson (not the UK feminist) does an excellent job, trumping Alan Hodges’ famous bio with an original account of affect in Turing’s first designs for testing artificial intelligence (the problem, as Weizenbaum pointed out some years back, comes when humans fail the Turing test). Evelyn Fox Keller builds on her earlier work to provide a vivid account of the struggle for biology, between code as command structure and code as networked system, Her analysis of the dangers of teleology as perceived by biologists is a salutary nostrum against the more mystical leanings of some other guests. Samuel Umland and Karl Wessel use a little-known essay by arch-paranoid Philip K Dick as a launch-pad for an entertaining, if not entirely convincing, distinction between artistic holism and scientific autism. And Zoe Sofoulis concludes the group with a politicisng elucidation of Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto stressing its roots in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory.

At the virtuality table, meet Gregory Ulmer, of Applied Grammatology, Teletheory and Heuretics fame. He begins with a promising project, to map rhetorical categories onto new media interfaces, but lapses into analogical thinking of the kind Umberto Eco mocks so acidly (though in fairness, Ulmer does admit he has space only to assert rather than to argue). John Sutton leavens the now familiar account of Renaissance mnemotechnics in Frances Yates with some serious (and bizarre) new scholarship – and welcome reference to Coleman’s and Caruthers’ excellent histories. His distinction between the messy brain of Descartes’ anatomical studies and the ordered filing of his opponents is an informative light on computer memory architectures. It was an inspiration to invite the Canadian Donald Theall to write, not on McLuhan, but on one of his intellectual mentors, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. But Theall pulls something else out of the bag, out-McLuhaning McLuhan with an analysis of Finnegans Wake that successfully situates Chardin, Joyce and McLuhan as Bergsonian rather than Darwinian evolutionists (or for that matter followers of Vico’s cyclical historiography). Since I first heard the recording of Joyce reading from Anna Livia Plurabelle, I’ve loved the Wake, yet it’s one of the few literary works I like to read others explicating, and Theall is a master. On the other hand, readings of science fiction can be deadly. Not so Mackenzie Wark’s ebullient essay on Ray Bradbury. Unlike Theall, who quotes approvingly Guattari’s scorn for “scriptural machines and their mass media avatars” (Chaosmosis: 104), Wark is happy to trace the cultural flows working through pop fiction, as indeed is Scott McQuire, handling the more self-consciously arty, but still pulp, Neuromancer. Tracing Gibson’s urban imagery through early modernism, McQuire rounds off the section with a tough critique of transcendence as a tactic for coping with contemporary media-scapes, especially in the context of media and political racism.

In fact, the argument between materialists and transcendentalists is becoming a central theme of the anthology.

The brashest posse at the party are the artists, decked in bright colour illustrations, and in the case of Francesca da Rimini, playing games with type. Ten mainly Australian artists working across the board, from a-life to robotics, immersive VR to games. VNS Matrix, Patricia Piccinini, Simon Penny, Jon McCormack, Stephen Jones, Troy Innocent, Char Davies and Justine Cooper give snappy one-page statements. Stelarc’s is interesting for one small change: the reference to “the (my) body” is a rare admission from the man with three arms that there might be a connection between mind and body, precisely the question when the big theme of the human animal/god is in question[1] .

Heading up the futurological speculators in the final group, presumably stationed by the drinks, is Margaret Wertheim, best known for her spiritually-inspired work The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. Arguing that internet utopias have shifted from the social justice of Thomas More to the techno-elite of Francis Bacon, her allegiance is clearly most with the hermetic vision of Campanella’s City of the Sun. Beside her, Bruce Mazlish lays out Butler’s Erewhon, for its extension of Darwinian evolution to embrace machines.

Butler, Mazlish argues, was an unhappy agnostic whose oscillation between Darwin and Lamarck nonetheless left him with a powerful vision of the possibilities of machines as a new phylum with their own evolutionary potential. Marinetti’s early twentieth century futurist manifestos, defended against the usual charges of fascism, provide John Potts, sound artist, with an entrée to anarchist utopias, this time butting up against the gnostic personal salvationism of the Extropians, and wondering how to square escape from the social with the wish to improve it. More science fiction follows, this time Arthur C Clarke addressed by Russell Blackford, in whom the struggle between hard science and mysticism is defended against critics like Tom Moylan, who charge Clarke with an asocial futurology in hock to ideologies of the status quo – techno-capitalism. Richard Slaughter of Foresight International tackles Toffler’s Future Shock. A major figure in futures studies, Slaughter thanks Toffler for setting out the stall, and argues that futures studies have advanced subsequently, in particular in the development of effective strategies of analysis and communication, while pressing the case for a futurology that addresses not only empirical data but internal change, individual and collective. Ostensibly talking about Vernor Vinge’s singularities, Damien Broderick expounds his notion of the spike, a sudden, imminent, technologically determined leap into the future suffering blithely from all the faults annotated by other contributors, including unquestioned competitive individualism and the presumption of “the clean, comfortable environments most of us inhabit fairly happily”(281). Though for this reader, Broderick’s is the least explicable chapter, it is in any case essential to include the technotopian in a survey of cyberspace, as indication of a limit point. But sad that the section closes without an address to catastrophist readings of progress (Virilio for example), or to collectivist understanding of mind as something belonging not to brains but to species (as computing belongs not to beige boxes but to networks). Mark Dery’s typically droll Coda brings a chillier perspective, an anti-nostalgic look at the fading futurism that once gilded the image of air travel.

This is a skilfully designed book, not only in the visual sense. Each section begins with a founding figure of the Western tradition – Descartes, Plato, Bacon; each concludes with a key text from the 1980s, when the significant outlines of cyberculture were first laid out by Haraway, Gibson and, in this instance, Vinge. By luck or design, Keller gives an important flavour of Kant’s work in defining the distinctions between mechanism and organism. Understandably, given the current fashion for ignoring dialectical thought, Hegel’s equally significant ruminations on the topic are significant by their absence, and though it is good news that Heidegger only gets one entry in the index, the lack of even one reference to Marx seems grudging, given the importance of his theses on technology as dead labour.

The pantheon, indeed, seems to be shifting. Plato, not Aristotle; Descartes, not Kant (with the honourable exception of Keller’s pages); the excision of the dialectical tradition from Leibniz to Habermas (with the exception of Benjamin) – no Lukacs, no Debord, no Adorno; and the absence of the cyberneticists and complexity theorists. Among other absent cybertheorists there are the aoir.org discussions, Ascott, Balsamo, Barbrook, Escobar, Fernandez, Flusser, Fusco, Gelernter, Hayles, the Krokers, Lash, Lessig, Lovink, Morse, Mosco, Penny, Plant, Poster, Robbins, the Sarai group, Sobchack, Stone . . . And again with the exception of Sofoulis’ impressively insistent recall of Haraway’s commitment to third world feminisms and McQuire’s arguments about racist immigration policy, little recognition of the truly global and intercultural dimensions of cyberspace.

But what the book achieves, that has not been done elsewhere, is to raise exactly this thought: what else should we be looking at in order to understand the rhetorical and institutional structures of cyberspace as they have evolved so rapidly in the last twenty years, or in the unbelievable ten years since Mosaic gazumped Gopher. Sofoulis insists the material power of discourse is evident throughout in the common theme of the importance of rhetoric, in the formal, almost grammatical sense of structured language. The language of boundaries, for example, appears to be characteristic of cyberculture, which Slaughter argues “skates so perilously close both to technological narcissism on the one hand and to nihilism on the other” (275). Slaughter is right to insist on the persistence of the spiritual – the Madrid bombings the evening I write this are clear enough evidence that whoever did this awful thing possesses a truth that is more valuable than any human life. We should be scared of the truth, precisely because it motivates its owners to acts of self-righteous horror: the truth will not make you free, it makes you a slave, whether you are an Israeli trooper or George W Bush. And yet the longing for some kind of spiritual dimension isn’t resolved by ignoring or demeaning it. Materialism needs to find ways to understand (the sociology of religion) and to satisfy the need that spreads across vast populations for fundamental grounding.

It is in this dialectic that the book is at its strongest and its weakest. The argument ping pongs within and between essays, but there is no-one to grasp the nettle, to define the issue, and to make it sufficiently inclusive to reach beyond the kind of people who would read this book in the first place. The seven deadly sins are still deadly in cyberspace as they were in real life. Missing are both an ethics and an aesthetics capable of satisfying the unstill urge to believe, to reach beyond the present, to understand, and to dream. The book will achieve its goals if it inspires another trawl through the history of thought, looking at this phantom limb not in order to prove that it doesn’t exist but to understand why we feel that it does, and what we can use it for. The spiritual emotion is not about certainty but about uncertainty, about the indefinable that is defined only by the fact that it is absent, and that it is not absent because it is lost but because it does not yet exist. In this sense the last section of the anthology collates the previous ones into a common theme: what is futurity?

The answer the book brings is that it is itself a modern invention, that belief in planning the future is modernist, and that profound doubts about what such planning implies are become entirely appropriate to our times. As Benjamin Franklin pointed out, there’s nothing certain about the future except death and taxes. Not surprising, then, that much of the struggle to understand where our cyberculture came from arrives at discussions about what happens after death, in one or another of the idealist and spiritualist modes. Beyond the dark roads of suicides, most people want to live. Not surprisingly we all clutch at any straw, from a plastic Jesus to digital upload. More interesting and practical to focus on taxes – who or what will take a levy from us? What state? What corporation? What obligations do we owe to our society, and, more pertinently, to its futures? Toffler was right in at least one respect – it is the job of teachers to prepare students for a future that doesn’t exist, and that they will have to build. Tofts, Jonson and Cavallaro have put together a mighty inspiration for this most future-oriented of all professions.

Sean Cubitt
University of Waikato, New Zealand.

References
Erik Davis, Techgnosis : Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, 1st pbk. ed. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998).
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (London: Bodley Head, 1970).
Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology : Post(E)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore,: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
Gregory L. Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Gregory L. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).

Endnotes
[1] It turns out that Stelarc (the man who never refers to himself) did not write this phrase which was inserted by the copy editor. Story has it that he was far from pleased!
Created on: Wednesday, 5 May 2004 | Last Updated: 5-May-04