Return to Left Curve no. 20 Table of Contents
IMAGOCLASMS; OR, THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIGITISATION
by Gerard Goggin
1 Spectacles of a Digitised Society
On Wednesday 31st November 1994, Guy Debord killed himself in the village of
Champot where he lived. According to Associated Press, Debord was "an avant-garde
essayist who influenced the upheavals of French society in the late 1960s",
his best known work being The Society of the Spectacle. Too few months
after the death of the French situationist and theorist provocateur, the spectacularity,
and specularity, of the late twentieth century appears undiminished. This is
evident in the prophecy that digitisation will bring wholesale transformation,
from the level of the virtual individual body to forging the wired community
and the cyber society. In this paper, I would like to examine one particularly
important version of the dream of digitisation, that of Esa Saarinen and Mark
C. Taylor in their topical book Imagologies: Media Philosophy.1
In style and design values, particularly the multi-fontal post-script images
illuminating its manuscript, Imagologies resembles Marshall McLuhan's
The Medium is the Massage; a Book of Hours for our generation.2 It represents
a thoroughgoing experiment on new communication, postmodern theories of the
media, pedagogy, culture and bodies. Dealing with a range of different technocultures,
Imagologies provokes action and reflection on videoconferencing, electronic
mail, hypertextuality, advertising, multiuser simulated environments (MUSEs)
and even reading. It describes, by creating the object of its discourse, how
the use of modems and electronic mail, television and video conferencing, computers
and new software, can result in fundamental changes to pedagogical and intellectual
practice. Imagologies argues for the fruitfulness of new communications
technologies (one of the signifiers of which is "digitisation"), maintaining
that the mass media has already had profound impacts on societies and the people
who live in them. It calls for different forms of engagement on the part of
intellectuals who are interested in innovative cultural practice and social
change. Such intellectuals, it claims, can no longer resist the circulation
of ideas by television, radio and newspapers, as shown by the fact that cultural
representations activating and activated by these forms have largely superseded
and displaced "high" culture . Taylor and Saarinen believe that new
communications technologies accelerate these changes and call up new cultural
forms as well as compelling new forms of work, education and sexuality. Consequently,
such technologies will revolutionise universities, which are otherwise becoming
outmoded dinosaurs of high cultural status and privilege. On Taylor and Saarinen's
view, the ensemble of these changes is commensurate with a philosophical valorisation
of the fragment, contradiction, non-binary logic, "triviledge", the
banal, and the image. Thus it ssues a challenge to the traditions and canons
of Western philosophy under print culture, calling for the supercession of logic,
unidirectionality and the written word.
There is no doubt that Imagologies hacks into the established power structures
in universities, publishing houses, cultural journals and intellectual circles
by virtue of its reading (and writing) of the discursive and institutional effects
of new communications technologies. Written three years ago, the book has a
certain exemplary out-of-datedness in a stream of texts and images dealing with
digitisation and its discontents, warping some of its prognostications, as Mark
C. Taylor acknowledged in his recent visit to Sydney. However, I believe that
the trope of anachronism is a suspicious one in this realm. Instead, I would
like to highlight some problems in its project shared by a surprising range
of other endeavours under the sign of new communications technologies, not least
proto-republican Australian cultural policy. These problems derive from a neglect
of questions of power around the cultural effects of new communications technologies:
in particular, in the areas of the restructuring of telecommunications and education.
I argue that such questions of cultural, economic and social power need to be
addressed, at macro and micro levels, in order to discern how new communications
technologies will be fashioned, and how these technologies might be constructed
in more enabling constellations. My reading of Imagologies simulates
Baudrillard's remark on the position of a text in relation to its object as
simultaneously both an analysis (taking from the requirement to give meaning
to the text) and also a provocation (giving an end to that meaning).3 This provocation
is intended to raise questions about the cultural politics of new communications
technologies, and is marked by a critical engagement with Australian debates
on cultural policy and cultural studies.4
2 The cyberversity and its discontents
Taylor and Saarinen's book, still not a text, and not available in electronic
form to my knowledge, tells a story of two academics who use video conferencing
to present a seminar on media philosophies between students and teachers in
the U.S. and Finland. It also tells a tale of two narratives. One narrative
is a more modest epistolary (and thereby quotidian) story in Courier font. This
story is a collection of letters written by Esa Saarinen and Mark C. Taylor
-- at first by the old postal system, occasionally by facsimile, and then mostly
by electronic mail. It tells the story of how the two male intellectuals successfully
seek corporate sponsorship and institutional space, do battle with technical
hiccups, and teach media philosophy via video conferencing and electronic mail:
in order to perform an act of inauguration, so they claim, "to pioneer
a new form of international education". The other narrative is more fragmentary
in its tone and content, theorising media philosophy and its gay science of
the image. Clashing with the eye in a Babel of fonts and directions on the page,
Brody (The Face magazine) full-fontal riffs twist straighter text into
an aphoristic Twilight of the Academy: Or, How to Philosophise with a Phone
Line . Stylistically, this
narrative mimics the utterances of a range of contemporary philosophers and
theorists, downloading ideas and hybridising them - multiplying contradictions,
not reconciling them.
These fragments push beyond the synecdoche, and the stuffy, constraining norms
of university, to something of a grand recit, the dream of the road movie
on the information
superhighway:
"The modern metropolis is being displaced by the postmodern netropolis.
I have now two phone lines coming to my house, two coming to my studio, a fax,
a university number and an email address, a pocket-size portable phone and a
mobile phone in my car. Everyone says it's impossible to get hold of me."
('Netropolis' 1).
"In one of its guises, the university of the twenty-first century will
be a cyberversity... Instead of a group narrative, it would be possible to conduct
a global seminar on the net. A group of students from all over the world could
meet regularly to discuss matters of common interest. The class could be as
large or as small as appropriate, and meetings could be as frequent or infrequent
as necessary. The lines of the cyberversity are there for those who know how
to read them." ('Virtual Reality' 4).
The two narratives are brought together at the finish in a fashion-marketing
statement: an ad for "MEDIATEXT: A collection of fabrics designed by Marjaana
Virta for Marimekko" with a photo of Saarinen and Taylor on the inside
back sleeve. Esa is attired in a snappy suit and shoes ("Esa's polka-dot
shoes are a Warhol painting that has come to life. Style -- all the way down
to his very sole" ['Styles' 7]) and Mark in boots, black jeans and shirt,
with an Indian-looking bangle; both wear glasses. Taylor is better known to
English-speaking audiences through books such as Erring, Altarity, Tears,
Disfiguring and Nots, widely acclaimed, the hagiography notes. (In a Sydney
summer school on virtual reality, Taylor wore a black t-shirt with a white decaying
letter V traversing the front. Whether this referred to Virta, virtual reality,
virtu or Thomas Pynchon's novel of the same name is hard to say.) Saarinen "has
become the best known Finnish intellectual of his generation" through media
appearances and more recently, he has "worked extensively with Finnish
businesses and organizations on creativity projects"; from an analytic
philosopher who yoked together Hegel and Finnish punk, he has been reborn post-punk
as that most reviled, and yet beguiling, of contemporary figures, the consultant
gun-for-hire, with just a whiff of the New Age. The more acceptable incarnation
of the consultant, if the body may still be my figure, is the public intellectual
with its singular public providing stability in a vertiginous multimedia talk
circuit: "I've given public lectures in factories, banks, schools,
to the Internal Revenue Service of Helsinki, for supermarket managers, lawyers,
medical
doctors, Mazda dealers, teachers, CEOs of big companies, social workers, the
Bank of
Finland, to personnel of mental hospitals... These lectures have reached perhaps
tens of
thousands of people, giving many of them their only relation to philosophy"
('Communicative Practices' 10).
In their glossalalic narrative, Imagologies conduct a withering attack
on the "expert culture" that has grown up out of the technology of
print, including how it understands reading and writing. Taylor and Saarinen
target the university as a pre-eminent node of this print culture, and hyperbolically
conduct a witty and sustained debunking of its pretensions, coming to an early
crescendo in the section entitled "Ending the Academy". Imagologies
inveighs against the fact that "[p]rofessional philosophers remain committed
to elitist culture, which dismisses low or popular culture as insignificant".
"Philosophers usually try to disguise this dismissal", they continue,
"by insisting that they are developing a "commonsense" philosophy
or a philosophy of the "everyday". But they are only willing to accept
the commonplace, the everyday, after it has been "cleansed" by the
priests of high culture who continue to rule from the cathedral of the academy.
The media philosopher, by contrast, is committed to smuggling shit back into
the house of thought ("Ending the Academy" 1)." This is the stronger
version of the claim that [i]nstitutions of higher education have not taken
advantage of the resources and energies circulating beyond the walls of the
academy. As a result, cultural analysis is separated from the very condition
of its own possibility. To overcome the isolation of the intellectual critic,
it is necessary to enter the mainstream of culture by leaving the confines of
print ('Ending the Academy' 9).
This latter statement is one I would agree with and which I think to some extent
explains the success of cultural studies as an emergent discipline over the
last twenty years. However, just at the point where Imagologies is attempts
to dethrone the importance of the university -- and its connection to repressive
cultural practices rooted in print culture -- it demands that it needs changing
more than any other institution. In a ghostly sense, Imagologies seem
to allow the university to cast a longer shadow on contemporary culture than
it warrants. Nonetheless, its prognosis for the university's transformation
is well worth close examination:
"The postmodern university will more closely resemble the decentred, disseminated
and non-hierarchical "structure" of the net than the centred, segmented
and hierarchical structure of the assembly line ...the postmodern university
changes students into consumers who are producers. The "place" of
the postmodern university is cyberspace...all education is international. Conversations
are not limited to one time or place but occur whenever participants can jack
in." ('Pedagogies' 3)
One form of a new cooperative practice and exchange that could be a beta version
of the cyberversity is videoconferencing, replete with use of email and other
technologies (including pen and paper). Such a possibility is welcomed because
it might allow collaborative teaching and learning, as well as collective authorship.
The videoconference in particular appeals to Imagologies because it is
the TV made interactive. Cultural revolution transpires as we move from mass
broadcasting on a distributive, one to many model to the each to all model of
video telephony. On this video party line, Imagologies proffers the notion
of the exemplary wired intellectual as the "imagologist". Pedagogically,
this means that you can have an equivalent impact to the current affairs host
or the soapie star, or Mr Bean, depending on the moment:
"For my students in the teleseminar, your image - how you appeared when
you made a point - always proves as important as any point you made...Contrary
to the canons of Platonism, image is the medium of understanding." ('Pedagogies'
9).
Instead of striving for enlightenment goals in a steady Fordist university career
structure, the imagologist is the trickster figure of Esa Saarinen:
"An artist of philosophy? A salesman and politician, developer and visionary:
what is called for in the field of philosophy is management by wondering
around." ('Ending the Academy' 3).
Here is the intellectual as a flex spec image consultant, equally at home in
The Phenomenology of Spirit as she is on Donohue or the Midday Show.
Socrates with a roving mike.
The problem with Taylor and Saarinen's version of the imagologist as a solution
to the ills of the postmodern rapidly digitising academy is that the dominant
discourse of education at the moment is that of marketing, already transforming
pedagogical practice. In this sense, Imagologies posits an opposition
something which is similar to that held by those fighting a rearguard action
against the restructuring of education, particularly the humanities: between
culture and the market, high culture and the mass media. This opposition is
a flawed one, as a number of commentators have shown in Australia5 and elsewhere
(it is more obviously difficult to sustain in the U.S.A. given that universities
have always had a greater diversity of industry, alumni, philanthropic and state
funding than in Australia).
In Australia, an alternative account of changes to higher education can be developed,
highlighting the cultural effects of the continuing changes in funding, institutional
structures and disciplinary arrangements (an account which shares some similarities
to other OECD countries). Over the last ten years, the move towards a greater
market based approach to higher education has seen the humanities in large part
pushed to the accounting margins of universities. A greater dependence on large
corporations and government departments for funding of research and staff positions
has made it difficult for many practising intellectual and cultural dissent,
who are to some extent being starved of resources for research, teaching and
publication. At the same time, new technologies have been used to "work
smarter" such as computers for students to wordprocess their essays, photocopiers,
computerised library catalogues, CD-rom bibliographies, video. Most recently
electronic mail has achieved surprising ubiquity in academic circles in the
last two or three years, (with personal home pages of World Wide Web rapidly
becoming a mark of the cognoscenti).
I give this sketch of changes in higher education in Australia because it admits
of a quite different understanding to Imagologies. On the basis on this
analysis, I seek to develop an argument that Imagologies 'strategic move
to take philosophy to the streets -- or tollways of the information superhighway
-- is a road to nowhere. The market is in the academy and increasingly the academy
is in the market, with the massification of higher education after world war
II. From this it can be inferred that universities are far more complex institutions
than Imagologies'inside/outside polarity suggests. While I would mark
my distance from Ian Hunter's account of the "governmentalisation"
of higher education, he nonetheless gives a dramatic sense of this complexity:
"far from constituting an ethical and theoretical cockpit from which all
of social life might be guided, the university is in fact a shell for a divergent
array of programmes, functions, knowledges, norms and objectives."6 These
developments do have a certain global nature but this needs to be analysed carefully.
Moreover, this globalisation brings real problems, as well as opportunities.
In this, I would the move to the market and the long march of commodification
does need to be resisted -- in different ways that Marxists have traditionally
conceived. Embracing the market wholesale, albeit with a digitised patina, will
not be the anarchic, freewheeling, liberatory experience that Imagologies suggests.
3 A Genealogy of Contemporary Telecommunications
One of the organising tropes in Imagologies is "compu-telecommunications".
It is a very productive figure, acting as a switch between economic, cultural
and symbolic registers of contemporary cyberspace. However, by neglecting some
key macro and micropolitical questions of existing and new communications technologies,
Imagologies puts too much emphasis on technologies determining social
relations, cultural practices and symbolic systems without looking at the interplay
between these different elements. Taylor and Saarinen lean too heavily on these
technologies as causing some sort of radical break with previous educational
and cultural practices, as well as subjectivity, without considering some of
the intricate negotiations and exchanges that condition, and indeed, construct
these technological systems. Consequently, new communications technologies may
be far more constraining, and yet also perhaps enabling, even from the point
of view of the state, than Imagologies imagines.7
To trope compu-telecommunications differently would require an archaeology of
its cultural formations. One starting point is the multiple and overlapping
effects of telecommunications restructuring, stemming in part from the "growing
the market" that investors in converging industries expect from new services
such as pay television, interactive homeshopping, mobile phones and wireless
personal communications devices. The clash of cultures, audiences and institutions
of the telecommunications, broadcasting and computing industries has been accompanied
by the worldwide push for greater competition in telecommunications around the
world, implicated in other global economic policies such as structural adjustment,
neoliberalisation, and "free" trade agreements. Marketing has displaced
engineering as the dominant discourse in telecommunications companies -- people
using telecommunications are now "customers" rather than "subscribers"
and up and coming workers in the industry are expected to show "customer
focus". Changes in the conception of consumers and markets have led to
a greater focus of "niche" and "segment" markets -- recognising
that mass marketing do not meet the needs of individuals or communities. This
is not necessarily in the interests of a number of different publics -- particularly
those who are "residential consumers" of telecommunications at present
or those who are "citizens" with a stake in the content and carriage
of telecommunications.
At the same time, greater capital investment, to acceleration digitalisation
of telecommunications, has seen wholesale staff cuts and attacks on the terms
and conditions of workers.8 Globalisation of telecommunications has meant that
more labour intensive work, such as the keyboarding of information, takes place
in low-wage countries. For instance, as the official Australian telephone directory
is the property of Telecom Australia, companies wishing to produce a pirated
electronic version use Singaporean workers to re-key the information. Maria
Fernandez, a Nicaraguense who lives and works in the U.S.A. studying the cultural
impact of information technologies on developing countries, notes that many
components for computing hardware are assembled by migrant women in factories
in Silicon Valley in California. Since the enthusiasm generated by the North
America Free Trade Agreement, many of these have moved to the maquiladora belt
south of the U.S.A.-Mexico border.9
Such developments impinge on the chapter on economics in Imagologies,
'Electronomics', but are not adequately theorised. Imagologies recognises
the role of capital in globalisation and pushing the boundaries of the nation
state: "Capitalism requires constantly expanding markets...International
capital is realizing what previous revolutions have failed to accomplish: the
abolition of nation states" ('Electronomics 9,11). (Mark C. Taylor's quip
on tour that "cyberspace is where your money is", citing cyber-rancher
and Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow, gives a droll twist to this).
However, following something of a rhizomic logic, Taylor and Saarinen's other
theoretical position draws on the discourses of post-industrial theorists, on
the one hand, and post-Fordists, on the other. Imagologies links postmodernism's
"preoccupation with difference" with a "shift in manufacturing
methods and strategies" ('Electronomics' 3). They claim that the "interface
of computer and machine transforms the very nature of manufacturing and, by
so doing, changes not only working conditions but also the structure of social
relations...by changing the relation between production and consumption"
('Electronomics' 3). Taylor and Saarinen add the caveat that there is no radical
break between industrial and post-industrial society, yet most of the text seems
to assume such a break. What emerges from these discursive surfaces is a technological
determinism inadequate to power and inequality.10
This can be seen from the position that Taylor and Saarineen take on the important
debate on how to ensure universal and equitable access to new communications
technologies. The prevailing view, and one that is suggested in Imagologies
, is that with a virtual cornucopia of competition, converging technologies,
and the creative energies unleashed by the catalyst of new services, the problem
is primarily one of ensuring open access to technologies. That is, assuring
certain conditions are met, anyone should be able to access telecommunications
infrastructure to communicate, exchange material and engage in commercial and
non- commercial practices. They should also be able to build their own telecommunications
infrastructure, for instance, as shown by Bill Gates' proposal to create his
own communications network by launching satellites, or to "value-add"
by operating information or entertainment services. To some extent, this is
the position taken by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wired magazine
in the USA in their very important work on free speech issues in cyberspace,11
especially on the U.S.A. government's attempt to intervene into encryption technologies
via the so-called "clipper chip", in order to give itself unparalleled
powers to intercept communications.
The contrary view is that such universal access will not be delivered solely
by mandating open access to compete in the marketplace, and then waiting until
diffusion of technologies trickles down, becoming more affordable. Rather, universal
and equitable access to telecommunications will need explicit state intervention
to be achieved. It is only by reaffirming this notion of universal access --
or universal service as it has traditionally been termed in telecommunications
-- that the Jerusalem of the breakdown of the divide between producers and consumers,
broadcasters and audience, through new communications technology, might be reached.
This has implications on the symbolic level also -- on the question of the cultural
implications and representations of these new technologies. In this sense, there
needs to be a focus on the public infrastructure that will give access to anyone
who wants to use Internet, for example. Imagologies assumes the ubiquity
of this technology -- but its authors do not consider how this will be achieved
when many people in the U.S.A. and Australia, not to mention poorer countries,
still cannot afford access to the telephone, let alone the connection and usage
fees for the Internet. Who produces the software and the "content"
for use in cyberspace is also a debatable question, as Telecom alliance with
Microsoft demonstrates. The role of community based media in providing alternative
access for creating video, text and audio material is crucial -- the individual
conceived as homo economicus is likely to be able to find the resources to do
this on her own. In Australia, there has been a concerted push from a coalition
of community and public interest groups to put aside bandwidth and funding for
community media. This is only a very small start and a great deal more resources
need to be made available to ensure greater diversity in what gets watched,
produced, written and created by whom in cyberspace -- as well as existing broadcast
and print media.
4 (H)e-mail
Imagologies highlights the potential of e-mail (or email), representing,
as it does, the contemporary resuscitation of correspondence, of letters. Much
of the potential of E-mail is based on the connectivity of the Internet, the
world-wide network of computer networks which use a common communications protocol.
Much of contemporary academic activity is being transformed by e-mail and its
ability to enable communication across spatially dispersed locations. Electronic
mail relies on computers, phone lines, and modems in many cases. It has opened
up new modes of academic socialisation such, as the electronic discussion list
and the new modes of self-presentation evident in the calling up of the name
of the "institutional author" in a electronic address.
Imagologies claims that "[e]mail transforms the teacher-student
relationship"
("Pedagogies", 8). Taylor remarks that students,
"...are much more willing to approach me on the net than in person. Though
I have regular office hours, students rarely come to me with their questions...
But they do not hesitate to contact me on the net. I have always insisted that
more education takes place outside than inside the classroom. Unfortunately,
the dialogue between teacher and student usually ends at the threshold of the
classroom. Email erases that threshold by allowing discussion to go on any time
of day or night." ('Pedagogies' 8).
This is supported by early research on interaction through computer networks
undertaken in the late 1980s, which found that when the "visible signs
of social status are hidden, less dominant, less secure individuals, with lower
status, tend to talk more."12 However, other research suggests that the
inaccessibility of computer technology prevents, for instance, women's organisations
from realizing the potential benefits associated with computer networking, and
that women who participate actively in networking culture experience more negative
experiences than their male counterparts.13 With the proliferation of e-mail
and computer mediated communication at present, new ways of establishing social
and professional status, and creating and enforcing power relations, are being
initiated. Some electronic discussion lists have different conventions from
others, depending on whether writing on a list is closely linked to academic
or professional preferment. I have been a member for a year of so of the electronic
forum of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Mostly this
is a salon of genteel inquiries of the Notes & Queries kind -- in fact,
it may threaten to put this sort of hard-bound literary magazine out of business.
The only time that it seemed to loosen up was in its discussions of movies of
Romantic texts, such as those of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Jane
Austen's novels. This contrasts with another Internet list of which I am a member:
the Centroamerican discussion group. It is more typical of other human rights
and solidarity discussion groups, generating furious alternation between heated
partisan debates and fact swapping. Given the extraordinary proliferation of
such lists and fora, the mores are likely to be just as diverse.
As well as giving birth to the always available teacher, no doubt of some comfort
to Australian Vice-Chancellors chipping away at security of academic tenure,
e-mail affords the possibility of the epistolary non-book written in non-time:
"Now that I'm wired to the net. I see real possibilities for writing the
book
we've discussed. Email will enable use to work in real time -- while we are
actually engaged in our experimental global classroom... This will be a book
written for an age in which people do not have the time to write or read
books."('Video Vision' 4).
The handshake of the fax/modem replaces the handshake of authors agreeing to
collaborate on a book. What lurks in this stream of zeroes and ones, of course,
is the la petite morte (encore) of the author. The nature of copyright
and the legal status of the author, as well as the mores of quotation need to
be renegotiated with the digitisation of information that allows it to be more
easily transmuted, recycled and reproduced. In Australia, the Copyright Convergence
Group, a government taskforce, in late 1994, recommended that a broad technology
neutral right to authorise transmission to the public should be introduced into
the existing Copyright Act. The death rites and after-lives of the (digital)
author are just beginning to be negotiated.14
5 The Everlasting Digital Body
One of the images that haunts Imagologies (the ghost in the reading machine,
to cross Koestler with I.A. Richards) is that of the body. Imagologies
do a number of different takes on the body in their sections on 'Telerotics',
'Virtuality', 'Body Snatching', 'Cyborgs' and 'Shifting Subjects'. Their basic
proposition is that cyberspace calls for and calls up different sorts of bodies.
In a Baudrillardian register they plead that
"As the real disappears into the hyperreal, the body becomes an obsessive
preoccupation... The operation of the simulacrum transfigures the body."
('Body Snatching' 9).
With a more Deleuzean inflection they intone that "[c]ompu-telecommunications
deterritorializes every thing and every body ('Body Snatching' 4). Another take
on the body is by seizing the cyborg. Significantly, they do not allude to Donna
Haraway's formulation of this in her "A Cyborg Manifesto", a text
which carries baggage from both socialism and feminism that would sit uneasily
with Imagologies.15
Imagologies does make a few tantalising remarks about new communications
technologies and gender. For instance:
"Something very interesting is beginning to happen in the students' email
conversation. The women in the class are more uneasy about the "out-of-
body" experience they are having than the men. Cynthia and Kaisu are
obsessed with email and yet are deeply disturbed by the evaporation of the
material and the absence of the face-to-face. The men in the class are much
less bothered by all of this." ('Body Snatching' 7).
In addition, they privilege certain feminised concepts of their media philosophy
such as the mediatrix and the matrix in a novel fashion.
But at other points, their text seems to reinscribe some conventional images
of masculinity, cutting and pasting William Gibson's cyber cowboys jacking into
the matrix:
"The ecstasy of communications is fucking at a distance. 'What did you
do before the orgy'; 'Jack in - Jack out - Jack off'; 'The mediatrix is the
boudoir where doors are never closed'; In simcult porno becomes interactive.'
As video gives way to virtual reality, audience participation grows. Playboy,
Playgirl and Hustler as interactive, multimedia hypertexts!" ('Telerotics'
6, 8, 9, 10).
Moreover, in their embrace of the body, Taylor and Saarinen never really engage
with some of the crucial issues in relation to the masculinist construction
of cyberspace -- a topic given increasing attention recently. For instance,
Zoe Sofoulis's critique of high tech psychology:
"Assumptions about how you're supposed to relate to technology have been
very much male defined and have got even more so in the recent developments
in electronic technologies. And so women who don't have that same fetishistic
unambivalent love of technologies, or even, men, somehow feel that they're not
competent in the equipment or that they don't have the cutting edge type of
approach to it."16
The Australian performance group VMS Matrix think and enact "how the female
body interacts with technology, how the female body can have a presence within
cyberspace and what the future body is"17. One of their hybrid theatrico-populo
creations, All New Gen, is an "anarcho-cyber terrorist with multiple
guises whose main aim is to virally infect and corrupt the informatics of domination
and terminate the moral code"18 -- in playing along you get to "become
a component of the matrix, joining ANG in her quest to sabotage the databanks
of Big Daddy Mainframe". The recent Sydney based electronic magazine Geekgirl
is another noteworthy intervention.
In the construction of the technoculture of new communications technologies,
questions of gender, class and ethnicity need to be taken up in more detail
than is the case with Imagologies. Connections made between the symbolic, political
and economic dimensions of this technoculture. Otherwise, there will be little
done to counteract the phenomenon observed by the editors of Women, Information
Technology and Scholarship that "many campus discussions [and it might
be added discussions elsewhere] about new information technologies are actually
discussions about the reconstitution of race, sex, and class hierarchies in
the new systems."19
6 Rosebud's Digitised Return
While I was writing an earlier version of this paper, Paul Keating launched
his cultural policy for Australia: Creative Nation, with its centrepiece
of the marvel of new technologies shaping a post-Arnoldian aesthetic, one which
draws equally on commercial and republican discourse. In a speech with more
mixed metaphors than Percy Bysshe Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Keating's
voice activates gems like the following:
"Creative Nation does not attempt to impose a cultural landscape
on Australia but to respond to one which is already in bloom. I hope that in
time this statement will be seen as the day we drew a line under our post-colonial
era -- and said good-bye to it.
We emphatically believe that cultural issues should be at the core... That,
it seems to me, is one of the responsibilities of a mature country -- and one
of the imperatives in this era of globalisation and the information revolution."20
Keating cites with approval Robert Hughes designation of Australia's cultural
prowess as "relaxed uprightness of carriage." One of the Prime Minister's
surprises was the announcement that Rupert Murdoch had agreed to transform Sydney
Showground into a entertainment precinct with film, TV and video production
houses as well as restaurants and cafes. Brushing aside community uses of the
area, Keating, Murdoch and the New South Wales State government hailed a potential
"Hollywood by the Harbour", with News Corporation's movie production
company 20th Century Fox establishing a movie studio. At the rhetorical heart
of this multimedia pitch for an Australian cultural policy is an advertisement
for a transnational corporation.
One of the important moves, in contemporary policy discourses on culture is
to reinvent all hitherto existing cultural forms as "content" to be
subject to "carriage" over the telecommunications network. The advantage
of this conceptualisation of "content" is that it becomes eminently
commodifiable: "Australia has the opportunity to become a world leader
in the production of content."21 This carriage and content distinction
is central to the important but flawed doctrine of freedom of the press, the
idea that a separation can be made between those who own cultural apparatuses,
such as newspapers, television and computer networks, and the programs, articles
and, ultimately cultural representations they carry. Yet in Keating's formulation,
it involves a breathtaking flattening out of a diverse and contradictory range
of cultural artefacts and cultural forms. In launching the report of the Broadband
Services Expert Group in 1995, Keating further developed the idea of Australia's
need to embrace content by figuring the future as an "encyclopaedia salesman";
that is, a masculine figure who yokes the dream of the omnibus knowledge artefact,
and its link with the French Enlightenment project, with the homely capitalist
striver selling the book door to door to ordinary people:
"If I might offer an image from the past -- the future at our doorstep
is a bit like the encyclopaedia salesman, standing there proffering solutions
to our educational shortcomings... So long as we buy it [the encyclopaedia]
for the content and not just the leather binding; so long as we bought it for
what it says to us, rather than about us: so long as we were interested in the
content rather than the appearance."
It is surely false to claim, as the Prime Minister does, that the encyclopaedia,
and future cultural forms do not tell us about ourselves. Such a claim begs
all sorts of questions about different cultural practices and artefacts, as
well as the different sorts of embodied subjects who have conflicting visions
of the future.
The championing of content also allows the national state to survive in some
cultural respect, it seems, by becoming some sort of best practice purveyor
of, for instance, avant-garde dance on CD-Rom. (The Federal government has committed
itself to spending just under $100 million dollars over the next few years fostering
Australian multi-media.) The "forms" are produced overseas -- by American,
European and Asian corporations -- and Australians provide the "content."
Presumably this might happen with Citizen Murdoch's film studio in the Showgrounds.
Murdoch and his growing list of strategic allies, U.S.A. telecommunications
giant MCI being the latest, can dictate the length of a movie, how it is to
be distributed in movie theatres, CD-Rom and perhaps over the Internet, and
just pop in a bit of local "content." Think globally, act locally.
Competition is introduced into telecommunications -- with the privatisation
of Telecom Australia on the cards in the next few years -- while any effect
that this may have on local culture is denied, with the claim that there can
be an absolute split made between content and carriage. This ignores the fact
that multinational companies are vying for a shaping of all aspects of contemporary
communications.
Taylor and Saarinen's Imagologies is in many respects written against the grain
of such fin-de-siecle state mercantilism. It represents a determined
attempt to take cultural forms seriously, and to look at what Marxists might
call the ideology of those forms. However, in other respects it shares the assumptions
of the U.S.A. and Australian Government's enthusiasm for employing new communications
technologies in their service. Take this quote from Creative Nation for
example:
"Information technology, and all that it now offers, has crossed the technical
rubicon into the realm of consciousness, to the realm of culture... If as a
nation, we can create a vibrant multi-media industry, we will go a long way
to ensuring that we have a stake in the new world order yet retain a distinctly
Australian culture." (Creative Nation 1994: 55).
The first sentence in particular shares some of Imagologies' enthusiasm,
though Imagologies would be resolutely opposed to the clever country
posturing. Yet a manner similar to Creative Nation, Imagologies moves
too quickly from a technical factoid to a cultural conclusion.
As a matter of some urgency, we do need to engage with the politics of the new
media , and the economic, social and cultural movements that they shape and
are shaped by. Such an engagement does involve the use of philosophy in one
of the senses that Imagologies gives it:
"Debate, rational discourse, the public use of reason in the open society
of the media age must make full use of philosophy as a critical resource as
well as a synthetic, non-instutionalized and non-disciplinary project ."
('Telepolitics' 3).
But it also requires uses of philosophy in diverse analyses and practices that
highlight questions of power. One emblematic example of such a praxis is that
of VMS Matrix mentioned above. Another is that of the Walpiri people in the
Tanami region northwest of Alice Springs, well known for their pioneering work
in Aboriginal television and VCR. They now operate a seven-site satellite-based
video conferencing network for cultural, educational and business purposes.
The success of their video conferencing network has led community advisor Peter
Toyne recently to suggest the establishment of a national remote area broadband
network under Aboriginal control.22 Rather than resembling imagologies, such
practices might be better termed imagoclasms.
NOTES:
1 London and New York: Routledge, 1994. As there is no consecutive pagination
in Imagologies, I refer to page numbers in different sections of the book.
2 "Pop is a 'cool' art: it demands neither aesthetic ecstasy nor affective
or symbolic participation ('deep involvement'), but a kind of 'abstract involvement',
an instrumental curiosity -- one preserving something of childhood curiosity
or the naive enchantment of discovery (and why not? Pop can also be seen as
popular illustration, or as a Book of Hours for consumers), but above all one
triggering those intellectual reflexes of decoding, deciphering..." (Jean
Baudrillard, "Mass Media Culture", in Revenge of the Crystal,
ed.
and trans. by Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis, Sydney, Pluto Press and Power Institute,
1990, p.86).
3 "Interview with Jean Baudrillard", The Evil Demon of Images,
Sydney, Power Institute, 1987, p. 41.
4 Stuart Cunningham's Framing Culture: Criticism and Policy in Australia
(North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992) and the Meanjin issue on "Culture,
Policy and Beyond" 3/1992 are important markers in these debates.
5 For instance, Simon Marginson notes that "it is difficult to sustain
an argment that the role of universities has never been 'economic', in the sense
that there are explicitly economic dealings between higher education and industry,
and that many students are quite evidently interested in, at the least, the
relationship between their own university course and the labour market"
(Education and Public Policy in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993, p.126).
6 The concept of "governmentality" comes from the later work of Foucault,
see Hunter, "Personality as a Vocation: the Political Rationality of the
Humanities", in Accounting for the Hunamities: the language of culture
and the logic of government (Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies,
1991) p.46.
7 My position is informed to a large extent by work in alliance politics from
the perspective of residential consumers of telecommunications. For the past
three years, I have worked with the Consumers' Telecommunications Network, a
national coalition of community and consumer groups in Australia, representing
residential consumers of telecommunications.
8 For an account of this in the U.S.A., see Boy Luthje, "On the Political
Economy of 'Post-Fordist' Telecommunications: the U.S. experience", Capital
and Class 51(1993):81-117.
9 "Women and Information Technologies", transcript of an edition of
The Coming Out Show, written and produced by F. Martin and R. Cross,
(Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio National, Sydney 1994).
10 In making this claim, I am aware that Taylor and Saarinen are drawing on
the work on cultural practices and technologies that is affiliated with that
of Heidegger on technology, and Derrida on writing and technology. Exemplary
texts in this tradition are Avita Ronell's Telephone Book: Technology-Schizophrenia-Electric
Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), Gregory L. Ulmer's
Teletheory: grammatology in the age of video (New York: Routledge, 1989)
and Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature: essay on the reading mind
(Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
11 One of the key figures in the EFF, Lotus software mogul Mitch Kapor, muses
that "life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson
would have wanted: founded on the primacy on individual liberty and a commitment
to pluralism, diversity and community" (Mitchell Kapor, "Where is
the Digital Highway Really Heading?: The Case for a Jeffersonian Information
Policy", Wired [July/August 1993]: 53).
12 Sara Kiesler cited in Rosemary Huisman, "The Scholar and the Machine:
Computer Technology and the Humanities", Arts 15 (1990) 35.
13 See inter alia articles by Balka and Doucette and Kaplan and Farrell in the
Arachnet Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture special issue on Gender
Issues in Computer Networking, July 26 1994, Vol 2.3.
14 Highways to Change: Copyright in the New Communications Environment: Report
of the Copyrights Convergence Group, August 1994. Celia Lury's Cultural
Rights: Technology, Legality and Personality (London and New York: Routledge
1993) renovates Walter Benjamin's work on the effects of mechanical reproduction
on the work of art in relation to authenticity and originality in postmodern
culture.
15 The concept of "governmentality" comes from the later work of Foucault,
see Hunter, "Personality as a Vocation: the Political Rationality of the
Humanities", in Accounting for the Hunamities: the language of culture
and the logic of government (Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies,
1991) p.46.
16 Martin and Cross, p.3.
17 Martin & Cross, p.19.
18 Jyanni Steffensen, "Girls in Cyberspace", RealTime 2 (Aug
1994): 17.
19 Women, Information Technology and Scholarship, ed. H. Jeanie Taylor,
Cheris Kramarae and Maureen Ebben, Center for Advanced Study, Urbana, Illinois,
1993, p.3. The literature on gender issues and cyberspace is already quite extensive,
with commentators disagreeing on fundamental issues, such as the construction
of femininity and masculinity, and levels and character of women and men's use
of new communications technologies.
20 Address by the Prime Minister, the Hon P J Keating at the Commonwealth Cultural
Policy Launch, Tuesday 18th October 1994. I am aware when reading Keating rhetorically
of the persuasiveness of the wonderful readings of John Forbes (in his poem
"Watching the Treasurer") and Meaghan Morris (Ecstasy and Economics:
American Essays for John Forbes, Sydney: EMPRESS, 1992).
21 Keating 1994, p. 10.
22 Peter Toyne, "The Potential Impacts of Future Telecommunications Developments
on Aboriginal People in Australia" (in Planning for an Information Society
Project: Population Group Discussion Papers and Policy Issue Discussion Papers,
Melbourne: Telecom Australia, September 1994), pp.6-16.
Gerard Goggin is Policy Advisor at Consumers' Telecommunications Network and
is a D.Phil. candidate in the English Department, University of Sydney. Versions
of this paper were delivered to the 2nd International Conference on Religion,
Literature and the Arts, and Mark C. Taylor's Seminar on Postmodern Art, Literature
and Religion, both held in Sydney in January 1995. My thanks to Deirdre Coleman
for detailed comments on this paper and to Jim Tulip for his encouragement.
I would like also to recognise the debts I owe to many people in Consumers'
Telecommunications Network and particularly to Christopher Newell for ongoing
collaborations on the politics of new communications technology.
Contact Details for the Author:
Gerard Goggin
3/122 Hewlett Street
Bronte NSW 2024
Australia
Ph. +61 2 387 3416
Fax. +61 2 318 2031
E-mail: ggoggin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU
This paper is copyright and is not to be cited or otherwise reproduced
without the permission of the author.