I know this thread has fizzled, or imploded, or whatever, but I just read this bit as well as much of the thing John StC posted as I could stomach. Do Kroker's substantive claims differ from those of McLuhan? I jut checked out his Panic Encyclopedia, which is not particularly substantive, but *does* have a section entitled "panic Urine".
frances
On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Ok, so who is Arthur Kroker? I just bought a book on the street by him &
> > Michael Weinstein called Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class
>
> Ah, Canada's very own Baudrillard, eh? Well, let me rev up the
> literary-hermeneutic Marxist chainsaw (rrrrrrrrrrmmmmRRRRRR) and do some
> carving. Warning: this post is a bit long, so hit the delete key if
> you're not into lit-critique. First, some text from the afore-mentioned
> tome, scammed off of CTHEORY's website:
>
> > The Hyper-Texted Body, Or Nietzsche Gets A Modem
> > (Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein)
> > Why be nostalgic? The old body type was always OK, but the wired body
> > with its micro-flesh, multi-media channeled ports, cybernetic fingers,
> > and bubbling neuro-brain finely interfaced to the "standard operating
> > system" of the Internet is infinitely better. Not really the wired body
> > of sci-fi with its mutant designer look, or body flesh with its ghostly
> > reminders of nineteenth-century philosophy, but the hyper-texted body as
> > both: a wired nervous system embedded in living (dedicated) flesh.
>
> Basically, this is what you'd get if you crossed David Cronenberg with
> a bunch of detergent commercials, and allowed the resulting life-form to
> dabble in Post-Structuralism. The Internet has no operating system, of
> course, but that's the least of our worries. In general, po-struc
> ideologies use telecom and media metaphors in a very devious,
> depoliticizing way: instead of informatic class struggle, all you see is
> this multiplying or hyperreproductive Body growing flesh all over the
> place, a kind of idealized professional-class subject which then inhabits
> the Matrix of the Net (immemorialized by the Japanese anime flick "Akira",
> where this Body is positively threatening and ultimately has to be
> destroyed; "Akira"'s politics are actually pretty neoconservative).
> Instead of the merciless and incessant expansion of capital, the
> K&W see only the glistening use-values of cybernetic or info-processing
> machinery; not for them the retro sweatshops of Second World Taiwan and
> Third World China, where all this stuff is actually manufactured.
> One bright spot is how K&W shift the argument away from the body in the
> machine, and towards the wired system in the body
> -- a nice scansion, really, of the cultural aporia facing
> Canadian intellectuals, who get the full brunt of the American media
> typhoon but don't have the upwards mobility of the US punditry, and
> therefore tend to fantasize about that magical connection which will bring
> them to the Cosmic All (or at least a functioning TCP site, same
> difference). Still, this promising beginning soon goes haywire:
>
> > But the wireless body could be, and already is, something very
> > different. Not the body as an organic grid for passively sampling all
> > the drifting bytes of recombinant culture, but the wireless body as a
> > highly-charged theoretical and political site: a moving field of
> > aesthetic contestation for remapping the galactic empire of technotopia.
> > Data flesh can speak so confidently of the possibility of multi-media
> > democracy, of sex without secretions, and of integrated (cyber-)
> > relationships because it has already burst through to the other side of
> > technotopia: to that point of brilliant dissolution where the Net comes
> > alive, and begins to speak the language of wireless bodies in a wireless
> > world.
>
> This notion of the wireless body forgets that the body was never wired in
> the first place, and is never identical to the tools and products which
> late capitalism creates. Substitute "mobile phone" for "body" in the above
> passage, and it almost makes sense: this brave new info-tech-telecom
> infrastructure will make the Revo possible, and we will break through, not
> to genuine multi-culturalism or North-South solidarity, no, comrades, far
> more important, we'll all get to speak *wireless* in a wireless world!
> Again, the thought stops exactly where it should start: the problem of
> interpreting this brilliant haze of images and icons, of dealing with the
> concrete language of the mass media is short-circuited by a speculative
> stampede of images hastily ripped off from the latest CNN videofeed. K&W
> thus get to be more American than the Americans, while throwing a sop to
> those poor, dullard Canucks who still fret about the archaic content
> of those bodies -- when we know it's only form that counts, right?
> It should be pointed out that Canada has some pretty cool media activism,
> and there have been attempts to finance public TV and film and rein in
> imports from the US, but of course K&W don't seem to be really interested
> in *changing* anything concrete about the media. This suggests
> that this magic Body is hardly an innocent bystander in the
> global class struggle, something confirmed by the telling
> detail of "sex without secretions": as if the real body was
> somehow still scandalous or obscene. Of course, there's a
> gender ideology here as well: the notion of being "plugged into" the Net,
> of a kind of permanent techno-erection of glistening data. In the end, we
> don't even get the visual satisfaction of the mundane porno site or S&M
> photos (watch out for those hairpins!); the thought just sits there,
> downloading a concept which never arrives.
>
> > Always schizoid yet fully integrated, the hyper-texted
> > body swallows its modem, cuts its wired connections to the information
> > highway, and becomes its own system-operating software, combining and
> > remutating the surrounding data storm into new virtualities. And why
> > not? Human flesh no longer exists, except as an incept of the wireless
> > world.
>
> Everyone gets to be their own IPO in what amounts to a subspecies of video
> McLuhanism. It figures that the highest ideal of this essentially
> neoliberal mediatic ideology is not abolishing the principle of
> ownership, but becoming *self-owned* -- an electronic manumission, as it
> were, for the lucky few of us who read and write theory and have the
> leisure time and cultural capital to specialize in Web-jargon.
>
> > The hyper-texted body, then, is the precursor of
> > a new world of multi-media politics, fractalized economics, incept
> > personalities, and (cybernetically) interfaced relationships. After all,
> > why should the virtual class monopolize digital reality? It only wants
> > to suppress the creative possibilities of virtualization, privileging
> > instead the tendencies of technotopia towards new and more vicious forms
> > of cyber-authoritarianism. The virtual class only wants to subordinate
> > digital reality to the will to capitalism. The hyper-texted body
> > responds to the challenge of virtualization by making itself a monstrous
> > double: pure virtuality/pure flesh. Consequently, our telematic future:
> > the wireless body on the Net as a sequenced chip micro-programmed by the
> > virtual class for purposes of (its) maximal profitability, or the
> > wireless body as the leading-edge of critical subjectivity in the
> > twenty-first century.
>
> The whole thing just gradually decays into the standard Net-libertarianism
> of society as an unlimited shopping spree, held back only by that
> ancient coven of evil, the partisans of Monopoly. And what the hell are
> "fractalized economics"? Have they never heard of the *stock market*, for
> Pete's sake? Fred Jameson once said around 1991 or 1992 or so that
> critical theorists ought to avoid two words: "power" and the "body", and
> replace these, wherever possible, with "capital" and "class". This
> wireless body -- does it have a name? A tax bracket? Does it have good
> days and bad days? A vested pension? Trade union rights? What factory does
> it work for? What's its wage-rate? We never find out. In the name of
> smashing capitalist monopoly, K&W unfairly monopolize their own role as
> mediators of discourse, who have a responsibility to use their talents
> to listen to what those bodies, the bodies of real working-class people,
> all over the planet, are saying (or would say, if they had the chance).
> Bodies don't just talk, they heal, wound, suffer, bleed and even,
> occasionally, rebel (and the Zapatistas show that there's more than one
> way to out-Web the Webbers). Well, if the people lead, the media theorists
> will follow.
>
> -- Dennis
>
>