"Cybermaterialism" and the Invention of the Cybercultural Everyday

On the contemporary academic scene the dominant “post-al” ¹ logic for thinking about contemporary culture and the social has taken its cue over the last three decades from the (post)structuralist emphasis on pleasure, difference, desire, contingency, signification, the body, and so forth, concepts which now constitute the horizon of intelligibility in the (post)modern academy. More recently, and in accordance with the (market) logic of constant innovation, newer articulations have come to supplement this discursive space, which has subsequently added to its range of concepts the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, invention. . . Whereas the earlier series can be understood as centered upon Derridean theories of the text and textuality, the latter series, while drawing upon the conceptual underpinnings of theories of the text moves beyond text-space and into cyberspace. Cyberspace is above all the trope for a new cybercultural imaginary which is reenergizing idealist social theory in its promise of a different (aesthetic) experience of culture in the form of technoculture: the high-tech digital “wired” culture which is increasingly informing, if not shaping, everyday life (for what bourgeois sociology calls the “upper-middle classes”) in the advanced industrial nations.

In this essay I argue that whether departing from text-space or from cyberspace the outcome of this ideological configuration is the continued suppression of those concepts—production, labor, need, necessity, historical materiality, and collectivity—which are necessary in producing historical knowledge of social totality as the enabling means to a transformative intervention into capitalist social relations. Although this suppression, which brackets the intelligibilities that will enable a politics of social transformation, is widely seen as progressive—not at all a suppression, but rather a sign of an advanced cognitive and political sensibility—it is, in actuality, symptomatic of the fact that the historical agenda of the ruling discourses continues to be the prevention of an interrogation into the causal conditions of material inequalities in class societies and a mystification of means by which these inequalities can be eradicated. In my analysis I will first outline the theoretical conditions of the possibility of cyberspace, which relies upon how the discourses of text-space have made sense of the social, social change, and particularly the concept of the “material,” in the present moment. Because they are exemplary post-al writings which are useful in mapping the theoretical and political coordinates of cyberspace, I first examine the writings of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Judith Butler. I then turn to some of the “new” conceptions circulating in cyberspace, foremost among which are the tendency toward articulating a revised version of materialism as “cybermaterialism,” and the theorization of a “cybersubject” as a mode of resistance to (cyber)capitalist social relations.

It will perhaps be useful at this point to briefly indicate the general contours of cybermaterialism, which is less a concerted theoretical effort than a paradigm of intelligibility for understanding recent (superstructural) changes in the mode of production. It is first of all necessary to make clear that cybermaterialism is exclusively a form of cultural materialism. That is, it is part of that regime of understanding that posits “culture” as an indeterminate, nonclosural, and, above all, nonreferential process which is resolutely opposed to the understanding of culture as historically determinate (as in historical materialism). As for its materialism, it must suffice to say here that for historical reasons a turn to materialism has become necessary for bourgeois theory, and that this turn, in the last analysis, is nothing more than what Lenin would call a “‘new’ reversio[n] to an old and decadent idealism.” ² Indeed, the limit-text of the material in cybermaterialist understandings (as in all the post-al materialisms) is the (cultural) “everyday” where the speculary effects of ideological change are foregrounded. It is, in other words, a nontransformative materialism that is deployed primarily as a device to avert attention away from the “working day”—the sphere where “the dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist” ³ —and onto the “everyday,” which is then theorized as a space of limitless self-invention. In a broad historical...