Plant - Ghosts in the Machine (Review) (New Statesman 1995)

Record: 1 Ghosts in the machine. By: Plant, Sadie. New Statesman & Society. 11/17/95, Vol. 8 Issue 379, p38. 2p. Abstract: Reviews the book `The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age,' by Alluquere Rosanne Stone. (AN: 9512120709) Database: Business Source Alumni Edition Section: books GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE THE WAR OF DESIRE AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE CLOSE OF THE MECHANICAL AGE Alluquere Rosanne Stone MITPRESS,£15.95 Alluquere Rosanne Stone has become a well-known player in both the actual and virtual zones, wherever questions of identity or sexuality meet the realities of interactive media and digital telecommunications. In this, her first full book, she tells some good stories and makes some excellent observations about the postwar emergence of virtual systems. She brings Habitat--a graphic-interface world barely known outside Japan--to the attention of her western audience, and deals well with the fascinating corporate manoeuvres of the virtual industrial world. Compuserve, Atari, MIT's Media Lab, and Leicester's own W Industries are among the star performers in an often gripping account. There are some very nice touches in this book--as when Stone refers to a nonexistent publication by one of her most influential teachers, Donna Haraway. There are also some interesting paradoxes. Although Stone is based in the mid-west, her painful moments of California dreaming travel poorly across the pond. For an international writer--not to mention a global cyborg--this can be a strangely parochial text. It has enough injokes and references to the white western digital community to make any outsider want to stay that way. There is also a striking lack of thought about the demands and opportunities of writing itself. As Stone would doubtless agree, one of the great lost opportunities of the digital age is the unthinking transfer of material from old media--such as books or photographs--to new formats. When, for example, encyclopaedias move from paper to CD-ROM with a minimum of thought about what the new medium makes possible, they ruin the chance to rethink the orders of knowledge and communication. It's like using a synthesiser to play Bach when it could be making jungle or hard-core house. The transfer of speech or performance to text has to be thought out as carefully as the move to digital media. Stone is a great performer. She has also written some wonderful texts. But although she blurs the boundaries between writing, speech and performance, this book is arguably weakened by the extent to which it might as well be a transcript of her spoken voice. Thanks, not least, to this tendency, Stone's personality is remarkably strong in these pages. Again there is a great irony here. For someone trying to track and exacerbate the disruptions of identity, here is a singularly unmistakable voice amid the new anonymities and fractured selves of the digital age. Such self-indulgence is contagious. Now I feel compelled to get personal: I know this woman, and like her very much. I enjoy her on stage, I admire her honesty, her courage and her style. Perhaps this is why I feel a little let down by a text that could have been much better than it is. There is nevertheless great intelligence here, and Stone has an edge or two on many of her hyped peers in hyperspace. Her references to McLuhan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and De Landa are brief but often

thoughtful, and it is refreshing to read an account of this zone that deals with socio-economic questions without all the moralistic traps that ensnare so many of her counterparts. Her attention to multiple-personality "disorder" takes her readers into territories that make the virtual spaces of the Internet very real, and not a little scary. She has good reason for her references to vampires and the loa of cyberspace. It is simply a shame that she didn't surrender more control to such posthuman entities in the composition of this book. As it stands, The War of Desire and Technology is a fast, fun and informative text that guides its readers into an otherwise obscure neck of the the virtual woods. ~~~~~~~~ By SADIE PLANT Sadie Plant is a Research Fellow in new media at Warwick University Copyright of New Statesman & Society is the property of New Statesman Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.