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. Gingrichâwe 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 realityâthe organicâand those that “constitute their own object,” referring to “purely optical and sound situations detached from their motor extensions.”
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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 miniâpersonality 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 Godâagainâis 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 clearly 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 jokeâsorry, Bob Dylan just blew into my headâthere 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 powerâor access to construction materialsâare 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 finishedâwhich is why we (and various its) keep working.