Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber

Chapter 4: Surfing Technics: Direction and Dispersion in the Age of Information

c h a p t e r 4 Surfing Technics: Direction and Dispersion in the Age of Information R. L. Rutsky Samuel Weber’s writings generally take as their point of departure the most significant works of Continental thought, from Freud and Lacan to Derrida and Heidegger, Kant and Hegel, Benjamin and Adorno, and others . Yet, what is unique about his work is that, in the course of careful readings of ‘‘high theory,’’ Weber frequently moves from these theoretical texts to topics such as the Gulf War, the ‘‘War on Terror,’’ the media, and contemporary technologies, topics that are generally regarded as involving more pragmatic, ‘‘real world’’ issues than the supposedly airy heights of Continental philosophy. Indeed, Weber’s work is, in large part, a sustained effort to disrupt such distinctions between the theoretical and the practical , the philosophical and the political, and between the ingrained figures (for instance, ‘‘the heights’’ versus ‘‘the down-to-earth’’) that support them.1 This is also to say that Weber’s work is not a matter of applying theory to ‘‘objects’’ in the world2 —an approach that inevitably represents the relation of theory to practice as a unidirectional passage from high to low, thereby reinforcing the distinction of theory from practice. If Weber’s work takes its departure from theoretical considerations, it never indulges in metatheoretical pretensions; neither does it, on the other hand, pretend to have moved outside of theory, beyond theory, to some more authentic locale. Rather, it is theory itself that moves: a theoretical 102 103 Surfing Technics movement that proceeds not toward a particular destination or end, but that ‘‘takes off from’’ its ‘‘objects,’’ so that its own trajectory is continually deflected, displaced, by what it encounters. If this movement may be said to have a direction, it is not a direction that is predetermined, plotted in advance. This ‘‘indeterminate’’ quality has in fact led some critics to depict deconstruction—and theorists influenced by deconstruction—as aimless or lacking in direction, particularly in regard to social and political issues (politics being defined precisely in terms of clear positionality and direction of movement toward a known end). Such criticisms, however, inevitably return to the entrenched binary positions (politics versus theory, direction versus lack of direction) that deconstructive work such as Weber ’s attempts to disrupt, to unsettle. Indeed, one might say that the theoretical movement of Weber’s work is unsettling because it neither relies on a fixed direction nor lacks all direction. Rather, Weber’s work moves, not simply at the direction of a subject presumed to know, but through a process of interaction: an interaction with the other, with alterity, that continually displaces, redirects, and detours it. I have taken up this question of—or perhaps, as Weber has suggested, this ‘‘quest after’’3 —movement and directionality because I believe that it has an important bearing on contemporary issues of technology and media. Weber has, of course, written extensively on these issues, and his writings repeatedly move around and through a rhetoric in which place, movement, direction, and dissemination are ‘‘brought-to-the-fore.’’ His texts are strewn with terms and concepts such as emplacement and displacement , setting-in-place and unsettling, bringing-forth and going-on, destination and dispersion. Yet, in his work, these concepts are themselves unsettled, cast into ambivalent and shifting relations. In taking these works as my own point of departure, I hope to point out how our notions of media and information technologies continue to be defined by figures of direction and becoming lost, navigation and drift, solidity and fluidity, concentration and dispersion. I also hope to show how—following in what Weber refers to as ‘‘the wake of deconstruction’’—we might figure our relation to the world of information and new technologies not simply in terms of our ability to navigate it, to place or secure ourselves in relation to it, but in terms of movements that, like those of information itself, are complex, fluid, and often unsettling. What follows will, therefore, necessarily be disjunctive and partial, shifting from one direction to another, much as one might attempt to surf on a wave—or in this case, on a wake—as it moves across the water. 104 R. L. Rutsky Information The figures of directionality and its conventional opposites, drift and dispersion , are present in the very formations of information theory, on which...