Richard Kahn

Robins & Webster, Times of the Technoculture

Chapter 10: Virtual Culture

R&W seek to be critical of the new virtual culture, claiming that it is a pacified and managed space. They seek to examine 3 claims made about VC: I. That virtual technologies have created a new, dynamic space of knowledge, II. VC has brought about a new virtual politics through enhanced communication and community, and III. VC is futurist and so progressive.

A new knowledge for space

R&W critique Lévy's Cyberculture as typical of 90's literature that suggests that there has been a quantitative technological revolution in knowledge which produces a new complex relation to that knowledge.

This new space symbolized by WWW: a) open, fluid & dynamic, b) space of creative disorder, c) information deluge, and d) de-contextualization of knowledge — it undergoes a de-territorialization leading to the transcendence of situated knowledge.

It is claimed that this knowledge flux supersedes totalizing perspectives, or centralized mastery.

At the same time, there is a new techno-oral culture — cyberspace as the bearer of developing identities

Technology supports direct & immediate contact among members
Knowledge sharing increases collective intelligence among groups
Co-operative learning…virtual e-campuses where classes pool resources and teacher becomes animator of collective intelligence

R&W claim vision is of global value convergence, culture harmonization: the web becomes the common nexus for divergent views.

• Technoculture seeks to elaborate politics of the Third Way

High-tech communitarianism which reconciles political idealism and corporatism

R&W think technoculture's is a partial, misguided and complacent vision. Seek a critical narrative from the standpoint of the world we are asked to abandon.

• They question the assertion that the new de-territorialized technological space is a 'better' space than the embodied, situated space of the past.

Richard: R&W have a misunderstanding of de-territorialized knowledge as 'virtual' or formal as opposed to embodied territory. Their use of the concepts lacks complexity and is superficial

• R&W ask why does the technoculture's social & political vision have so little concern for knowledge in the actual? What is the significance of this devaluation and displacement of the embedded & substantive knowledge cultures? (225)

• The move to create a 'global collective intelligence' is the attempt to create a global political economy

Transcendent technoculture lit. serves to promote & legitimize prevailing corporate ideology & globalization
Disembedded / Embedded

Deterritorialized / Territorialized

Corporate Network Space / Rest of the world

Third Way politics involves a diminished commitment to place (226). It is also an elitist norm: Zygmunt Bauman's comparison of cyberspace to medieval Latin scholarship and diplomacy

Cyberculture exists only in terms of self-referentiality — it simply communicates with and within itself

R&W conclude: the relation between extraterritorial & new territorial knowledges and cultures must be considered…this means recognizing the diversity and richness of knowledges that now co-exist in globalized societies.

Virtual politics: a politics without a people

R&W claim that Third Way politics displaces political-economic perspective with technological — there is a disavowal. (228)

• By selling a technological revolution to the masses, it is possible to create optimistic political rhetoric that moves away from the critical rhetoric that concentrates on "reality"

Political speeches & manifestos downplay harsher realities of division & conflict by appealing to social consensus and cohesion.

Mattelart: social problems are formulated as communications equations

New Labour and Gore: electronic agora — everyone gets to have a say

Third Way politicos think a fundamental change will occur when we can enjoy a one-world conversation

Post Reagen & Thatcher, politicians are seeking to promote social and political cohesion. Communitarianism of Etzioni — touch, active concept of community, town hall democracy, etc.

Politicians think this neo-communitarianism promotes transparency, mutualism & trust (231)

It is a politics of membership & shared interests

R&W are against the idea that communication leads to social harmony — to know the good is to do the good.

It is part of a 200 year old ideology that promotes social order & control

Technocommunitarian agenda tends to promote conservative & nostalgic ideals — e.g. Odone: "take over space once filled by the family, the churchyard or the village marketplace." The net is conceived as a 'village pump' — this makes affairs seem as simple as neighborhood problems

The ideal society is imagined in terms of communicative interaction within communities of affinity, irrespective of physical location.

Virtual culture and its ideology of communication sustain the illusion of consensus & unanimity among those with 'common interests'

New technology disavows the conflicts & antagonisms of the real world. What if they are actually the conditions of possibility for civic and democratic culture?

Sivanandan: virtual community is a community of interests, not people. It is the disembodiment that sustains interests

'Real world' teaches how to co-exist w/ those who frequently challenge and confound our views

Techno-communitarianism is the neutralization of politics in the name of social club management. It is a politics without passion, without power, without antagonism, without people

Enclosing the future

R&W downplay the forecasts of futurologists who are correct mainly b/c they are engineering and financing the future which they see. The claim is that a brand new future is before us, discontinuous with the past. R&W want to point out that it is continuous.

• Promotion of interactive consumption and virtual community — this is a conservative agenda for the future

R&W then want to say that by constraining the future to needs of the dominant class's present, the future is being enclosed via the transformations associated with the global network society.

• There is a drive to subjugate more elements of life to a logic of rationality and control

• Developments of the '90s are about making social order ever more intensive (sujugation of possibility) and extensive (globalization)

• Trend is to change both space (closing it) and time (Virilio: one time dominating many local times)

• Obsession with the future is the attempt to control it, make it like the present

R&W ask Is there an alternative to the Road Ahead?

• Logic of mastery (capital logic) vs. logic of autonomy (democratic, emancipatory, revolutionary project)

• If there is an alternative it will require new political objectives and new human attitudes

• The otherness of the unknown future is the vital medium through which the process of creation & self-creation is possible (236)

We need an open time for the creative disorder of the radical imagination

Chapter 11: Vitual Pacification of Space

The technoculture promote the new significance of virtual network spaces. There is a general sense of emancipatory possibility. Virtual culture is conceived in terms of human-technological-spatial linkages — relational assemblies (e.g. Actor Network theory). The forms of society are expanding.

R&W agree that new technologies will sustain new patterns of communication and community. They want to critique what the nature of these new spaces, however.

• R&W think new comfortable spaces of collaboration, dialogue, understanding, intimacy, reciprocity…informed by a sensible imagination of mutuality and consensus are banal, pacified spaces (239)

• New spaces should be critiqued as pathologies instead of promoted as progress

We lose experiential reality and significance
New spaces are driven by a desire to suppress the complexities, difficulties and divisions that characterize real geographies

• Against 'friction-free', R&W promote 'friction' and 'inertia' spaces — spaces that withstand and provoke

Distance as Value

The elimination of distance (e.g. real-time globalization) is a key agenda of the new technocultural spacial agenda.

• Removes limitations of real geographies

Communicate with anyone
Form groups based on interest & affinity rather than mere geographical accident

• Mitchell's City of Bits is typical technocultural literature in this respect

Virtual overcomes the limits of the physical

Post-geographical

Pantopian ideal — Serres: "all places in every place and every place in all places", an unlimited multisensory panopticon

R&W: this exorcism of distance only makes sense under cybernetic logic of mastery that seeks experience of the world via interface

• Distance is bad, other and intimacy is good, self becomes the simplistic basis for a new political vision

R&W also critique this vision as not being "new" at all, but rather as continuous with negative aspects of Enlightenment and its concept of 'mobility.'

• Similar to Rousseauist dream of complete social transparency and immediate communication

What is alluring about this is that it is a dream…the suspension of being beyond worldly conditions. What motivates the Rousseauian project is the desire to be free from all difference and otherness
Rousseau self-travelled: actually shunned the company of others

• Real world is given up for a world free of problems that prevent mastery. Virtual culture is a retreat from the world (245)

• Communications technologies have neutralized space…attempting to deprive both nearness and distance.

• It removes us via an interface, e.g. automobile

• It is consensual in nature and so therefore endorsing and legitimizing

R&W think social and political life can never be about confirmation and endorsement — it needs distances (249).

• Encounters should be transformative in nature

• Democracy is the dialogue premised on division (250)

• Democracy is neither a compromise between interests nor the formation of a common will — agonistic.

Global cities: towards a structured space of conflict

Techno-urbanism seeks to surpass the actual historic urban environments that have existed over 3000 years

• There is a tendancy to reduce problems of future living to technical matters to be achieved on/via the global network

• Techno-urbanism is not disjunctive with urban history but must be seen within the context of that history

Urban Modernism — two aspects (conservative & progressive)

• Conservative aspect is symbolized by rationalistic planning that seeks to impose order on the confusing (or unwanted) aspects of urban reality

Le Corbusier and the Radiant City: regulate and control urban space via panopticon, relate every part to the whole, functional aesthetic

• Virtual planning merely reproduces this modernism

Promise of insulation from urban reality. Mitchell: as "networks improve…there will be fewer reasons to go out," it will allow us to "stay well away from dangerous places like battlefields or the south side of Chicago"
Anti-urban phobia and prejudice

• Progressive urban modernism accepts the city for what it is…puts a value on embodied, situated presence (254)

Radical experiential possibilities of contact and encounter are priveleged in the urban scene

Musil's romantic "streets puls(ing) with disorderly and chaotic life"

Benjamin's Naples — "dispersed, porous and commingled"

Passage is eventful and meaningful in the city. It makes discontinuous and transformative thought possible

Look to the contemporary city — is there a new politics of the city to be found there?

The possibilities of a new urbanity are emerging from urban globalization processes.

• Modern city (Radiant) ————> Global city (megalopolis)

• Whereas the techo-urbanist global network applies only to the few, affecting destructive transformations (colonization) upon those that aren't apart of it, the new global cities are places of colonization themselves — articulating the contrasts of displaced and mobilized millions

• The new global city's mixtures and permutations, combined with strange energies, are bringing about the dissolution of previous models of urbanity (256)

New city challenges deep-seated fears of disorder, chaos and contagion

Time is a medium of possibility — it should be complex, irreducible, varied in its rhythms. The new city has multiple times

The global city is the place we live with those whom we regard as others, aliens, or strangers — with those that we do not understand or do not agree with or do not like

• Contemporary politics must be concerned with distributing these disparate energies, not just acknowledging them

Mouffe: antagonism into agonism: an enemy to be destroyed becomes an adversary to be tolerated
City must be a place for disputation

Order's other

Virtual spaces provide an anaesthetic solution through the technological naturalization of social relations and the pacification of social space.