Uncanny Networks: Dialogs with the Virtual Intelligentsia (review)

I barely know where a review of this book should begin or end: its fixed covers are deceptive, insofar as many of the 30-odd interviews and exchanges with author/media theorist Geert Lovink (Holland, Berlin, Budapest, and now Canberra) are available online, as are mountains of interviews, essays, positionings, entire books, by interviewer and media theorist/ author/philosopher/artist interviewees. (I won't therefore wonder about the point of publishing—as someone here observes, there's no money in it anyway.)

The theme is the future of a "society of speed" that precludes reflection, with its isolated artists and unaccountable companies, its missing Big Debates, and which ends up with "the eternal recurrence of the same." What counts now, says Mr. Lovink, is doing, rather than strategizing the end of the hegemony of global neoliberalism: "ideas are cheap, what's valuable is their implementation." In contrast to the unreflective qualities of speed society, these are unhurried, thoughtful, intellectual, jargon-free exchanges, antidotes to the "amorphous nanothoughts that fill the infosphere," as Peter Lunenfeld puts it. The "vapor theory" (Lunenfeld) of the 1990s is gone—that "gaseous flapping of gums about technologies, their effects and esthetics, usually generated with little exposure." Instead (in Mr. Lunenfeld's case, applicable to others as well), the emphasis is on "figuring out what makes right now so compelling."

There's no issue here about setting ideas off against one another in the dream of finding a grand scheme. Media theory, as reality, is too diverse. But this raises a media puzzle in itself. Michael Heim, "the philosopher of VR," thinks this century is going to unearth traditional metaphysics. We are facing "presence." He asks: "What is it to be, in a human being?" The answer seems to be about building a zen-like complement to high-stress, mind-brain, visually focused Western technology, an idea that calls to mind Anton Ehrenzweig's ideas about dedifferentiated "low-level" vision, a foil to Gestalt (i.e., symbolic) perception.

More practically, this calls to mind the need for a new kind of search with soft boundaries, and a new way of compositing the amount of raw data available to anyone who wants to try to think through any subject at all: there are no Gestalts looming on the futurological horizon.

Slavoj Zizek's views seem unique in their grand pessimism. He believes new media seduction will be over as soon as it is acknowledged that "the self has always been virtual." Satisfaction is best delivered by potentiality, a view also held by Edgar Allen Poe. (Mr. Zizek also says: "In psychoanalytic theory the notion of symbolic castration is often misunderstood.") But I think in this case he is wrong. The French may have practiced Minitel seduction as an end in itself (the game is to chat up someone at a wrong number, seduce, and then not meet), but it's hard to imagine an American or Japanese craze for acts of the imagination substituting for the poking, prodding, and sucking of "the harvesting machines of the virtual reality scanners," as Arthur Kroker puts it. The new "virtual class" has a suicidal urge to feed its flesh into image-processing machines, exteriorizing in order to bring on those techno epiphanies. And if the arts, as Gayatri Spivak says, isn't a field of expression, but rather one of impression, acting on the individual, rather than communicating some sentiment, then Mr. Kroker's harvesting machines have a natural future as the New Novel. Bring them on.

The interviewees are internationally diverse (India, Hungary, Japan, Brazil, etc.). Among the Americans is Paulina Borsook, formerly of Wired, about which she has things to say, but Mr. Lovink's general thrust seems...