example, it had been common coinage in the waste disposal and recycling industries for some years. The authors emphasize that in creating new media forms from older ones, computer technologies fit within a long historical tradition; for example, in the same way that early cinema remediated theater. Thus, they suggest: “Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print.”2But importantly, they also maintain that the reconfiguration is not trivial, since it heralds unique new forms as well as impacting on the way that older media themselves become reconfigured: “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.”3
The book’s high profile within the field is deserved, but perhaps more for its excellent clarity and ability to distil (and remediate) key concepts within digital culture than through any real conceptual originality or critical innovation. Others had raised many of Bolter and Grusin’s ideas previously, and the central tenets of retrospection and reconfig-uration had long since been underlined in wider postmodern theory. Nonetheless, their discourse has been influential and has brought to prominence inherent dialectical tensions at play within computer representations and simulations, particularly the ideas of trans-parency and opacity, and immediacy and hypermediacy. The transtrans-parency/opacity oppo-sition contrasts digital forms that seek to immerse the user/viewer by aiming to make the medium/interface disappear (in the way that naturalistic theater or film does) against those that expose and foreground the medium and interface (in the way that Brecht’s theater or Godard’s films do). Both, they note, have their own distinct pleasure principles, and Bolter later extends this thesis in his detailed examination of the digital arts on display at the SIGGRAPH 2000 exhibition, using the twin metaphors of Windows and Mirrors (2003, with Diane Gromala).
Bolter and Grusin particularly emphasize computer culture’s “contradictory impulses for immediacy and hypermediacy . . . a double logic of remediation. Our culture wants both to multiply its media and erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.”4They go on to stress the mutual dependency of immediacy (such as a live Internet webcam view) and hypermediacy (characterized, for example, by the other textual information, windows and hyperlinks that surround it) (figure 7.1). The hypermediacy of webpages and other computer displays foreground and celebrate the medium and the mediation, while the aim of immediacy is to play down or eliminate the mechanics of the interface, the medium, and the act of mediation itself. But both, they say, are opposite manifestations of the same desire to pass through the limits of representation to evoke authentic and emotional user experience. To do so, transparent computer applications disguise and deny the fact of mediation whilst the hypermedia par-adigm multiplies the mediation to promote a “satiety of experience . . . the excess of media becomes an authentic experience.”5
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Postmodernism and Computers
In the early 1990s there was extensive discussion around the inherent links between multimedia technologies and postmodernity. Jay Bolter’s Writing Space: The Computer in the History of Literacy (1990) and Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and the Electronic Context (1990) drew analogies between hypertext and recent literary and critical theory, particularly Derridean deconstruction. George Landow followed, describ-ing hypertextuality as “the embodiment of the Derridean text,”6 and arguing its close relationship with poststructuralist thought, which has grown out of dissatisfaction with
“the related phenomena of the printed book and hierarchical thought.”7Landow’s Hyper-text: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992) was an influen-tial text in the critical thrust to marry computational paradigms with postmodern ideology. For Landow, the new medium became a new message8as hypertext systems were seen to reconfigure and undermine past notions of the authority and solidity of text and the authorial voice. Landow does not merely point out how hypertext models challenge traditional literary modes, but with an evangelical zeal typical of writers at the time, he declares that the shift is so revolutionary that now “we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks.”9In the same year, Edward Barrett presented
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Figure 7.1 An example of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin term “hypermediacy,” where multi-ple screen elements foreground and celebrate the medium and the mediation: the website for Eduardo Kac’s telerobotic installation Rara Avis (1996). Photo: Courtesy of the Julia Friedman Gallery.
a quasi-mathematical formula emphasizing the contingent relationships between hyper-textuality and contemporary deconstructive and postmodern theory:
The equation: power of the computer to dish out information in many different combinations +
“traditional” approaches to textual scholarship + academic enthusiasm for the French school of thought which de-centres, deconstructs, and interleaves the text with other texts and readings = deep involvement with the concept of hypertext.10
In the mid-1990s Diane Gromala mapped new technologies to Lyotard’s notion of tech-nology as a language game in which myths and metanarratives are reconfigured, and went on to describe Virtual Reality as embodying notions of the reconstruction of the schizo-phrenic subject described by Deleuze and Guattari, as well as the “Lacanian mirror of mis-recognition.”11Gregory Ulmer related hypertextuality to the work of Derrida, Lacan, and Wittgenstein; and Landow returned with a later book that at one point widened the net to take in no less than seven leading critical theorists in the space of two sentences:
Like much recent work by poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, hyper-text reconceives conventional, long-held assumptions about authors and the hyper-texts they write and read. Electronic linking, which provides one of the defining features of hypertext, also embodies Julia Kristeva’s notions of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis upon multivocality, Michel Foucault’s conception of networks of power, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas of rhizomatic, “nomad thought.”12
However, a number of writers have since probed and questioned the veracity of such analyses. Robert Markley is skeptical of what he perceives as the “uncritical” and “unprob-lematical” theory propounded by the developers and advocates of new technologies. His own analysis is in stark contrast to the romantic and progressivist idealism of its propo-nents: “a radically constructivist technology that celebrates an undisguised essentialism.”13 Richard Grusin (prior to his collaboration with Bolter on Remediation) argued that writers such as Bolter and Poster too easily related poststructuralist/postmodern/deconstructive theories to electronic writing without recognizing that:
the force of the Derridean critique is to demonstrate the way in which thought and speech are always already forms of writing. Deconstruction does not need to be instantiated or embodied in new technologies; for Derrida, writing is always a technology and already electronic.14
Grusin observes a similar misreading in relation to Barthes’s poststructuralist distinc-tions between “work” and “text,” or between the “readerly” and “writerly” texts, both of which distinctions have been cited as theoretical anticipations of hypertextuality. He notes that for Barthes, as for Derrida, the “writerly” text is always “already immaterial,
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sive, and intertextual—even in print. . . . The force of the deconstructive and poststruc-turalist critiques is to illustrate the way in which this destabilization is true of all writing.”15He also takes issue with the uncritical generality of William Paulson’s con-tention that the translation of texts into digital code to enable them to appear on screen in the same format, means that electronic technologies are inevitably decontextualizing technologies:16
In so arguing, however, he reproduces the technological fallacy by ascribing agency to the tech-nology itself. To imagine that digitally reproducing texts from two different historical contexts would decontextualize them is to fetishize technology by making an idol of the “form” in which writing is commodified, and to fetishize the particular historical context in which those texts were reproduced. Electronic information technologies do not decontextualize the texts of Western culture, they recontextualize them.17
The critical squabbles reflect the yes-no, on-off, 0–1, love-hate relationship one estab-lishes when working closely with a dualistic medium that is in itself conceived and programmed as binary. The distinct polarization of critical thought in relation to new technologies and cybernetics has been inevitable faced with a medium which is at once art and science, rational (as mathematical, computational) and irrational “(mystical, per-formative, and cognitively dissonant).”18 Computer technologies are also revolutionary (synergetic, globally rhizomatic), yet conventional (essentially reliant on previous media:
text, video, telecommunications). Since the mid-1990s, critical readings of the intimate interrelationship between postmodernism/postructuralism and new technologies have grown rather than abated. Ironically, these critiques commonly celebrate the properties and potentials of these technologies enthusiastically, seemingly unaware of the dark skep-ticism and even nihilism with which technology is viewed by the very writers they cite.
In The Possessed Individual, Arthur Kroker presents a searing analysis of technological theory in French postmodern thought. He maintains that recent French theories encap-sulate the essence of the contemporary American “hologram”:
To reflect upon the French, is to finally understand America flipped inside out, with its ideologi-cal software (the rhetoric of technology) on the outside and its dynamic hardware (the actual forces of technology) on the inside. Read Baudrillard as a clinical diagnosis of the disappearance of America into digital reality; Barthes as a theorist of the empire of the (American) sign; Deleuze and Guattari as a description of the rhizomatic flows and decodings involved in becoming-America;
Foucault as a historian of the genealogy of (liberal) nihilism that finds its apogée in American bour-geois subjectivity; and Lyotard as the most eloquent of all American pragmatists. No longer, there-fore, French theory as a mirror of technology, but a reflection from beyond its dynamic horizon of the virus of technology in the empire of the American postmodern. . . . The French mind is a theoretical autobiography . . . of the rhetoric of the American (technical) way.19
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Kroker concludes that writers such as Baudrillard, Barthes, Virilio, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari characterize technology in terms of a cynical power that oppresses and possesses the individual. Continental postmodern thought views technology as a predatory seducer and a terminal virus that comes alive to “eat” space, time, and culture and to confirm “the death of politics, the death of aesthetics, the death of the self, the death of the social, the death of sex.”20 It is a “catastrophe theorem” of technological nihilism replete with the “cold abstractions” of simulacra (Baudrillard), driftworks (Lyotard), and chrono-politics (Virilio).21
This leads us to a simple question. When postmodern and poststructuralist thought conceptualizes technology in such negative terms, are the pioneers of virtual performance who adopt these technologies really in accord with this dark fatalism, masochistically engaging in the destructive power and “terminal” ontology of technology? Do perfor-mance artists consider the technological tools they work with to have a negative and destructive force? We seriously doubt it, and hence our misgivings over the prevalent the-orization of digital performance in relation to continental philosophy. Admittedly, some artists do indeed “critique” technology, articulating its dehumanizing potentials, its panoptic power relations, its darker subtexts and implications. But equally as many, and we believe, far more, celebrate and embrace technologies as positive developments, not least for their artistic and performative possibilities.
Jean Baudrillard and the “Real”
I am a nihilist.
—jean baudrillard22
Jean Baudrillard is the high priest of technological nihilism, a soothsayer of the apoca-lypse, and genuinely one of our favorite writers. But that does not mean to say we believe everything he writes. He is a brilliant aphorist, a seductive and compelling writer of high
“drama,” and a consummate critical “performer” who mesmerically barnstorms the contemporary media-theory stage delivering explosive monologues on some of the most important issues in art and culture. But like many virtuoso theater performers, he unfor-tunately has a slight tendency to “go over the top.” Heidegger noted in 1953 that “every-where we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it,”23and reading (and believing) Baudrillard certainly ensures that any self-denial of this “fact” is no longer an option.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981) brought the ancient word simulacrum back from the past and related it to media’s “evil spirit of simulation.”24Baudrillard demonstrated how in our postmodern world, “it is the simulation that is effective, never the real.”25Then, like a stage magician, he turned reality upside down: “The very definition of the real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.”26He capped it all off, to tumul-tuous applause, with a thrilling and gymnastic piece of philosophical pyrotechnics: “in
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short, there is no real.”27“Simulacra” and “the real” have become sacred critical mantras ever since, although many learned professors still remain unsure precisely what they mean.
Later, Baudrillard directed his attention to digital technologies, with a similarly devas-tating dramatic flourish: “The coming of the virtual is itself our apocalypse, and it deprives us of the real event of the apocalypse. Such is our paradoxical situation, but we have to push the paradox to the limit.”28
In Disneyworld Company (1996), Baudrillard uses the replication of Disney “worlds” as a metaphor for the commodification and virtualization of society. He suggests the Disney Corporation would like to cryogenize the planet, just as Walt Disney himself is allegedly cryogenized in liquid nitrogen, waiting for resurrection. As he continues to colonize the world from his suspended animation (“the virtual reality of death”), the irony is that if he is ever reanimated, he will find “there is no real world anymore.” Instead, humans have become figurants (extras) in the spectral space of virtual reality, and the New World Order operates like a Disney world where “everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality.” Just as Benetton appropriated documentary news images of the intense human dramas of AIDS, Bosnia, and apartheid, reality has been transfused into a “New Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiser-ation end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification [le recrache tel quel ], in a prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion.”29
Disneyland has come in for more than its fair share of critical bludgeoning, and its insidious appropriation and virtualization of the real has been similarly evoked in Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (1986), where he calls it “an immense robot . . . [where] vis-itors must agree to behave like robots.”30He also laments how automata of crocodiles and pirates hold more allure for visitors than real exotic animals or corporeal actors. Mark Dery calls Disneyland “a sexless, microbe free monument to a normative future where the sole interface between the technocratic elite and the technologically illiterate masses is the point of purchase.”31He notes the unremitting surveillance in Disneyland and the consequent unthinking, passive obedience of its visitors, who curiously applaud machines at the end of robot performances. He continues caustically, “on the other hand, such behaviour makes a strange kind of sense: The image of the happy shoppers mechan-ically applauding technology freezes the essence of the Disney theme parks in a single snapshot.”32
But how sinister actually is Baudrillard’s simulation and virtuality, as encapsulated in the metaphoric specter of Disneyland? Marie-Laure Ryan is a rare and brave voice to take issue with cultural critics who use the Disneyland tourist as a “beloved scapegoat”
and easy target for ridicule. She argues that, rather than confirming some dangerous new human attraction to simulations at the expense of a loss of desire for the original, there is a much older and Aristotelian paradigm at play. In the Poetics, Aristotle describes a “universal pleasure in imitation . . . we take delight in viewing the most accurate
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possible images of objects,”33and Ryan links this to the whole notion of simulation, fakes, doubles, and the nature of fictionality itself. She suggests that
we enjoy images precisely because they are not “the real thing,” we enjoy them for the skill with which they are crafted. This pleasure presupposes that the readers or spectators of artistic texts do not fall victim to a mimetic illusion; it is because they know in the back of their minds that the text is a mere double that they appreciate the illusionistic effect of the image, the fakeness of the fake.34
Fictional representations take many forms, and Ryan makes clear that she sees little significant distinction between a high-tech Disney fake and the simulations of literary fiction. It is an optimistic and reassuring position, in contrast to Baudrillard’s. However, the assumption that consumers of cultural products distinguish between the virtual and the real is a—if not the—crucial point of contention within cultural and technological theory, and a fundamental issue in understanding many of the critical positions that have been taken on digital performance. Ryan suggests that a visitor to Disneyland and its cul-tural outposts does not fall under some sort of wicked spell like a character in one of its own fictions, but Baudrillard and his many followers insist with rabid, relentless fury to the contrary. Indeed, Baudrillard’s position is considered so extreme that writers such as Hakim Bey contends that he has gone beyond his own critique of “Too Late Capitalism”
to become a symptom of it himself.35In a lighter tone, in July 2003 one Amazon.co.uk customer’s themed inventory of recommended books entitled “List of Nihilism” high-lighted Simulacra and Simulation. The list’s compiler, who adopted the pseudonym pil00 and the slogan “I sound out false idols,” offered an acidly down-to-earth, two-sentence review of Baudrillard’s most famous work: “Sorry, Jean, it’s all in your head. Turn off the telly and go for a long walk, son.”
What we find problematic about the uncritical adoption of Baudrillardian and related postmodern philosophy into the theorization of digital performance is its totalizing position in announcing not a gradual and attritional breakdown, but a total erasure of previous historical understandings of notions of technology, society, the self, the body, consciousness, and the “real.” In its urgency to adopt a definitive and frequently apoca-lyptic position, it wipes the historical and phenomenological slate clean. We dispute the theorization of a totally irreal world where signification has collapsed, where simulacra have replaced entities, and where technologically possessed zombies without will or purpose have replaced humans.
The cynical power of technology is nothing compared to the cynical power of human instinct, intellect, and reason. The media image may have exerted an increasing influence or power on human consciousness, but that consciousness has not undergone
The cynical power of technology is nothing compared to the cynical power of human instinct, intellect, and reason. The media image may have exerted an increasing influence or power on human consciousness, but that consciousness has not undergone