Virtual Futures. Cyberotics, Technology and Post‐Human Pragmatism

Citation

Bruni, A. (2001), "Virtual Futures. Cyberotics, Technology and Post‐Human Pragmatism", Information Technology & People, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 232-239. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2001.14.2.232.2

Virtual futures, virtual knowledge?

There are music records that arouse conflicting emotions. Perhaps the introductory track captures the attention but the closing one is tedious. Or the tracks are so diverse that the listener loses his bearings. Or the music may be so engrossing that the listener has no idea what he/she has actually heard when it ends. Finally, a music record may be so radical in its sounds and rhythms that the listener is left emotionally adrift.

Virtual Futures is not a music record, but it could be. First, because in the post‐human era whether an idea is conveyed on digital support or on paper is entirely arbitrary; second, because the essays in the book are more akin to ongoing performances than to fixed sequences of ideas. But also because like hard rock or punk‐hardcore the book seems deliberately to erect a wall of sound, an all‐out scramble where the reader has no time to catch his breath and reflect. The authors adopt a helter‐skelter style, sometimes difficult to follow in its circumlocutions and using expressions which seek to be as succinct as a bar code and as evocative as Sanskrit. They address topics entirely alien to the academic tradition: information piracy, synthetic reason, cybergothic, telepathy. These they mix with irreverence for Jewish culture, Freud’s libido, Benjamin’s fetishism, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, Donna Haraway’s cyborganization and cyberfeminism, Debord’s situationism, Kantian magnitude, Ballard’s psycho‐geographical zone, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The cyberpunk in the book takes the form of a techno‐urban scripture, social, post‐situationist, technosurrealist science fiction; but cyberpunk means also a strategy for resistance, a garage‐band aesthetical choice, a pop culture. Cyberpunk describes a social domain that has been ignored, despised, or even worse dismissed as non‐existent in the mainstream of information system and in organization studies. Which is odd, because cyberpunk is an entirely new world “in process”, a temporary autonomous zone (as Hakim Bey would say) in which rules and values are constantly under discussion and examination, and in which technology is the most fluid thing. It constitutes a privileged perspective of observation in order to understand the “hidden rhythms” of social life, as well as the new forms of communication emergent from the interaction of human and technological knowledge. It depicts a different social imagery, already covertly in use for some time, which combines techno‐pop fascinations and existential practices of everyday resistance. Thus forged is a collective imagery which intriguingly blends some of the wishful‐thinking of post‐industrial society. An unholy alliance between technology and organized dissent.

Reprising Timothy Leary’s (1988) interpretation of McLuhan’s theories, the book suggests that an anthropological mutation has occurred since the introduction of the “cold media” (McLuhan, 1964). These media are likened to synthetic experience activators which enable people to recover their imaginative‐symbolic communicative ability. Contrary to referential language, which expresses logical consequentiality, humanity has increasingly used symbolic modalities in interpersonal communication since the advent of mass television broadcasting. As Benjamin (1982) suggested, now definitively lost is the capacity to narrate, fabulate, to tell stories, to interrelate through words. Communication has become iconic, allusive, analogic, in a certain sense even mystic, given that mysticism uses the same imaginative‐symbolic categories to communicate experience (see e.g. the essays by Porush, De Landa and Land).

In a book whose authors “imagine a future that isn’t quite real, created by a technology that delivers a reality that isn’t quite real, so [that] we can talk about where we are now” (p. 46), the possibilities for interpretation and criticism increase exponentially. I shall profit from my erased and overloaded emotions and from a techno‐sensory overstimulation to continue this review in, at least, two different ways. That is, even if we are used to stories, knowledges and ways of thinking which develop in a unique sense (given some initial rationale), here we are entering a world in which nothing is fixed, nothing is “accomplished” and the proliferation of alternative understandings and meanings is intrinsically part of every (post)human interaction.

One

What is meant by discussing “cyberculture”, “anarcho‐materialism”, “post‐human pragmatism”, “speed‐politics”, in a word “cyberpunk”?

The question is difficult to answer unequivocally. The term “cyberpunk” has literary, artistic, philosophical and political connotations. Yet the feature is shared by the authors (or cyborgs) who assume the label is their intimate and (cyber)erotic relationship with technology. Walkmen, video recorders, camcorders, high definition televisions, telexes, personal computers, satellite dishes, plastic surgery, optic fibre cables: all these create an all‐embracing semiotic network, the merging of the world‐system into “a global nervous system which thinks for itself” (Sterling, 1986). The commodity‐consumption system as a whole covertly but decisively underpins the constitution of meaning in cyberpunk literary output (scientific, artistic, political, or whatever). The relationship with machines is not viewed as harmful, ineluctable, to be dodged. The Orwellian vision has faded, Frankenstein is a distant memory of modernity. The cyber presupposes a new, organic relationship with technology. It extends human capabilities beyond their physical limits. No mortal wound will frighten the mankind of the proximate future: neurosurgery and synthetic reason will implant new organs and synapses in bodies today destined for the junkyard.

Two

Cyberpunk is a vacuous as well as conceited experiment. It is essentially a techno‐urban script pieced together from science fiction/social criticism and every genre of science fiction amid post‐situationist technocultural fragmentation: the new architecture of entropy. A wall of words and a babble of language. Cyberpunk is neither mediocre nor superlative, it is “total”: a hotchpotch of fictions stolen from the proximate future in the search for a strategy to feel at ease in a reality driving itself towards experiential slippage into the virtual technologies of the near future. The real lapses into representation, and feedback is a white noise of new punctiform mediations in the substrate of the Interzone, the great error generator, where the real and the unreal exchange their meanings.

The essays in the book set out a new situationist theory and practice of uncertain outcomes: an assemblage of “dis‐orderings” which endeavour to identify and deconstruct the “essence” of the real, but do so in an utterly fictitious and ephemeral manner. Diagnoses are made of the enormous buzzing masses of data in the semiotic web of the power network, and forecasts of credit cards for new DNA and Microsoft transplants. An existential‐Nietzschean spirit mixes with su(r)fist visions, giving rise to assertions like:

“Knowledge is freedom” is true only when freedom is understood as a psycho‐kinetic skill. “Information” is chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity (Bey, 1998, p. 7).

Two ways to look at cyberpunk. For me it does not mean anything and it takes nowhere, but at least it is dialectical!