Peter Lunenfeld (ed.),
The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
ISBN 0262122138 (hb)
ISBN 0262621371 (pb)
320pp
US$35.00 (hb)
US$17.95(pb)

(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)

Uploaded 1 March 2000

The dust cover describes The Digital Dialectic as an “interdisciplinary jam session”- an honest enough warning for any reader about the strengths and weaknesses of this collection. As the principle riff of this jam session, “dialectic” is used loosely to mean many things. It ranges from the application of ideas in practice, deconstruction, Marxist analysis and romanticism. The abstract cover design favours neither one of these. Alternative covers might have illustrated specific nuances of digital dialectic, such as decaying computers, blossoming screens or Luddite mayhem. In an effort to accommodate a wide range of dialectics, the book as a physical object is left with little meaning at all.

Peter Lunenfeld’s introductory chapter, “Unfinished business” concludes that cybernetics is the “alchemical science of our age”. Like the volume itself, this brand of alchemy “forbids us to rule out anything”. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thinking that Hegel saw as the enemy of dialectic, in his metaphor of the night in which all the cows are black. Without the struggle between opposites, there is no progress. Of course, there are other less mountainous paths, such as the rhizomic trajectories of Gilles Deleuze, but that would imply a different theme. As in any jam session, the rest of the volume is mediocre with occasional glimpses of brilliance.

Many of the chapters seem designed for the conference floor. Michael Heim’s “The cyberspace dialectic” lacks the tightness of his previous writing, and favours a confected mysticism of “virtual realism”. Carol Gigliotti’s “The ethical life of the digital aesthetic” is a broad review of some of the political dimensions of the Internet, but not particularly dialectical. Bob Stein’s chapter on ethics also does not go beyond well-meaning catch phrases. Erkki Huhtamo’s “From cybernation to interaction” is a diverting history of early fantasies of computing but lacks analysis. Brenda Laurel’s “Musing on amusements” is also entertaining, but seems to scrape the bottom of the barrel analytically. Each of these contributions would have made engaging presentations at the 1995 conference in Pasadena, from whence they came, but I doubt they would have caused many arguments.

Some pieces are more characteristic of the Wired soft-sell and lack the kind of intellectual scepticism that give thinking its taste. William J. Mitchell’s “Replacing place” has no place in a collection on the dialectic. While an expert in surfing the trends of new media, Mitchell is not at all concerned with their undercurrents. George P. Landow’s chapter on hypertext is yet another pitch for a brand-concept. On the other side of the millennium, the icing on the digital revolution seems a little stale.

Two chapters offer a glimpse of the kind of book that Digital Dialectic might have been. N. Katherine Hayles’ “The condition of virtuality” deals with the spirit/matter duality. It contains an analysis of recent electronic forms of bibliography such as Myst and Roman Verostko’s algorythmic art. These works illustrate her case that information inevitably requires material instantiation – a significant argument that warrants more unpacking.

Lev Manovich’s “What is digital cinema?” best exemplifies the adventure of dialectic. Though limited to the history of cinema, the structure of his argument could be extended to digital media as whole. Manovich’s argument takes a deconstructive turn that finds in digitisation of film a recovery of its repressed painterly qualities: “cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting.”

One of the ironies of digital evolution is the way we return to the primitive mysteries of representation. The advent of GIF animations, for instance, took us back to the zoetropes more than a century ago. Like the puppetry in Being John Malkovich, it is sometimes the more crude media that best convey the primal mystery animation. It would be very interesting to see what Lev Manovich could do given free reign between the covers of his own book.

After reading Digital Dialectic, it is difficult not to conclude that the dialectical process cannot be jammed into a collection of chapters. Like a series of three minute symphonies, the collection left me hankering for a more substantial treatment. A contemporary dialectician like Slavoj Zizek takes 500 pages to get going on his annual analyses of the virtual/real divide. These chapters lack what Hegel has described as the “labour of the negative”. They too often end on a sweet alchemical note that might warm the hearts of a conference audience, but leaves the armchair reader unsatisfied. It would be terrific if Leonardo Books could use this collection as a seed-bed for further publications and allow some of its authors to grasp the opportunity of a full volume.

Kevin Murray