Textual Practice
Nick Land
Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: the Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 404 pp.,
£15.99 (paperback)
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: the New Biology of Machines (London: Fourth
Estate, 1994), 472 pp., £16.99 (hardback)
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Carol A. Stabile, Feminism and the Technological Fix (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1994), 184 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £12.99
(paperback)
Gregory L. Ulmer, Heuretics: the Logic of Invention (Baltimore and London,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 267 pp., £33.00 (hardback),
£11.50 (paperback)
The observation that postmodernity has arrived - if only as autonomized hype - is no longer controversial. The crisis of modernist
institutions is both evident and general, and the source of this disorder is widely traced to the new planetary techno-commercial
system based upon deregulated markets and computer communications (now beginning a Kondratieff-wave upswing).
The convergence of markets with computer systems telecommercializes culture, converting all communicable information into tradeformat drifts of Is and Os. Considering that the academy is a modernist media apparatus about to be crashed by this process, the tone of
its analyses is strangely complacent.
Feminism and the Technological Fix is a fairly standard product
of the US cultural studies industry, and will seem very dated very
soon. Its purported project is to lever feminism away from both
ecomystic nostalgia and cyborgian ecstasy in order to anchor it in
the impending multi-cultural proletarian insurrection against capitalism. The underlying response to the postmodern syndrome is based
entirely on denial. Despite repeated classification of intellectual postures into 'technophobic' and 'technomanic' species, technics itself is
entirely ignored. There is no mention at all of computers, information, communication systems, automatic control, etc., cybernetics
is treated entirely as an ideological token for imagined seamless totalities, and 'technology' in general - it is bizarrely suggested - is
reducible to 'intentions and effects of a particular social order', that
is to say, pure expression, zero feedback (p. 71). The inevitable cor-
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ollary is an 'analysis of capitalism' that seems to consist entirely of
people being unnecessarily nasty to each other, anecdotally supported
by accounts of waste dumps on Native American reservations. A
promised discussion of the techno-commercial investments of the
female body in the area of foetal imaging subsides into an inane
rehearsal of the abortion debate, entirely lamed by the combined
effects of a reduction to ideology and a residual authoritarian acceptance - shared with the theocrat 'pro-lifers' - of government interference in reproductive issues.
The weaknesses of the book find their most interesting crystallization in a challenge posed to Donna Haraway's engagement with
Octavia Butler, where both writers are attacked for their refusal to
endorse the modernist nature/culture dichotomy in its crudest possible form. Butler's exquisitely intelligent investigations into biocultural
fusions, synergisms and horizontal interactions, which Haraway
embraces as an innovative cyborgian dissolution of 'the natural order',
are denounced by Stabile for exactly the same reason.
Where Stabile deliberately voids her discourse of cognitive
sophistication, Ulmer heads in the opposite direction, and goes into
orbit. Heuretics is a playful and inventive Derridean (or made 'out
of Derrida' (p. 211)) prolegomenon to the uploading of text into
hypermedia, involving a diverse range of (avowedly 'francophiliac'
= high or unpopular) cultural references. It floats heuretics as a
deconstructive-deconstructed research method, employing strategies
of inversion and displacement, punning and 'dream reasoning' (p.
123) to link the nodes of a virtual hyper-culture system into an
associative network.
Ulmer associates deconstruction with parallel processing, suggesting that:
Conductive (electronic) logic... supplements the established
movements of inference between things and ideas (abduction,
deduction, induction) with a movement directly between things
(unconscious thought).
(p. 127)
This understanding of the simultaneously political and scientific
impact of parallelism - or more exactly its force of antipoliticalantiscientific subversion - frees Ulmer from Stabile's rigid neokantian
distinction between 'technology' and its social reception. Ulmer
merely dissipates this advance, however, departing on a surrealist
whirl through the glitzy heights of the mediascape that leads nowhere
discernibly consequential. Obsolescent signification models of
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net-dynamics remain broadly in place. The book ends with a joke
about custard.
Despite their very different tones and preoccupations, neither
Stabile nor Ulmer address the telecommercial dynamics of postmodernity in terms other than those derived from their particular specialist locales, so that both ultimately share an implicit academic
addressee, and an endorsement of the university as a monopolistically
privileged site for social reflexion. Bukatman and Kelly are far more
successful at escaping this ghetto, and participating in spontaneous rather than institutionally contrived - cultural self-simulations. Both
Terminal Identity and Out of Control are likely to find large and
heterogeneous audiences. In different ways both writers explore the
contours of materialistic postmodernism, and both come with Bruce
Sterling pump-ups on the cover.
Materialist definitions of postmodernity periodize in terms of
the approximately 50-year Kondratieff cycles ('long-waves') that correspond to basic retooling pulses in the global economy. The crisis
of modernity is traced to the early 1970s, when the last K-wave
entered its depressive phase. With a new roller-coaster take-off just
beginning, manic postmodernism is arriving for the first time.
The warp-speed acceleration of capital beyond historicity into a
virtual mode installs SF as the key to social understanding. The
residual past is swamped by an impending future, and the present
reformatted as 'the determinate past of something yet to come' (to
cite Jameson's crucial formulation, as Bukatman does (p. 111). This
event tightly corresponds to the long anticipated 'real subsumption'
of the economy into the media, and its arrival consumes the projection of history, which ceases to await an unfolding in time, and occurs
precociously in a parallel spatiality. Progress is cancelled by virtual
data-matrix, fusionally dissolving modernist culture into computerbased hyperprocesses.
Bukatman's take on postmodernity articulates itself in relation
to situationism (mediated by Greil Marcus). It describes the spectacle
as 'the centralized manipulation that constructs the citizen's social
definition and very existence' (p. 49), affirming Debord's proposition
that capital becomes spectacular at the threshold of alienation-density
where ideology and fetishism become concrete concensual hallucination. Social untruth autonomizes itself as a media mega-object.
Virtual reality takes over.
It is increasingly evident that society, ever more defined by a set
of electronic representations, is based on an accepted fiction, or a
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'concensual hallucination', to use William Gibson's definition of
cyberspace.
(P. 20)
Postmodernity recycles situationism as contemplative sociology,
cinema, and dystopian-masochistic cultural programming: the most
nightmarish movie you ever saw. Watch things speed into mayhem
on every channel. The final content of the spectacle is its own lucid
denunciation. Terminal Identity notes most of this, and is intelligent
enough to be embarrassed by the evident obsolescence of its rhetoric,
but not adventurous enough to begin sorting it out. Instead it provides a catalogue of 'relevant' (p. 55) cultural materials (including
fiction, film, comics, and CD-ROM software), accompanied by synopses of social philosophies (treated as SF descriptions), and a vigorous multidimensional defence of SF (which at times threatens to
become a plea for its respectability).
The resultant complex symptom is intriguing. Professionalized
criticism and other types of 'plex programming' (p. 55) intercut a
vastly redundant accumulation of 'terminal identity fictions' (p. 91),
tweaked into resonance with a thematic of viral media takeover,
presented as a news bombardment or 'cyberblitz' (p. 15) with minimal
and incoherent analysis. Bukatman opens the taps to a torrent of
telecommercial schizophrenia fiction (Burroughs, Dick, Delany, Ballard, Gibson, Cadigan), films, and other media products which very
clearly make the point: everything is going to hell, and it has a lot
to do with computers. 'It is the purpose of much recent science
fiction to construct a new subject-position to interface with the global
realms of data circulation' (pp. 8-9), in Burroughs' words: a terminal
identity. You are then jacked into a paranoid delirium, with unrepresentable integrated domination scattering itself hologrammatically
into the last microscopic redoubts of techno-devastated subjectivity.
Terminal identity is only attained through a destruction of the self,
which is very different from the liberatory potentials of a dissolution or transcendence.
(p. 320)
So we're all in real trouble. There is 'an uneasy but consistent sense
of human obsolescence, and at stake is the very definition of the
human' (p. 201). 'Implosion' seems to be the key word.
In Chaykin's future, the government has been replaced by the
Plex (a government cum communications network cum corporate
power).
(p. 55)
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Without the evil black pyramid looming over the urbscape the movie
can't even get started, but what is happening to the info-monopolies
inside? What is critique critiquing? Bukatman ducks almost all the
questions as to the destiny of broadcast-media power in a hypermedia
environment, and with them attention to the configuration of postspectacular control strategies. He assumes for the sake of convenience
that cyberspace works roughly like TV, facilitating the wholesale
transference of ultramodernist media critiques into digital. 'The
spectacle . . . has replaced reality' (p. 64).
As with Ulmer, the result of this elision is the subsidence of
a postmodern topic into an ultramodern format: an unpersuasive
superstructuralist recoding of cybervirus as a politico-semiological
dilemma. This is untenable. Virus is not signification, but machinery
(TGATCCGTAGCGCACTGTT or 0010101100101110100110 mean
nothing). 'There is nothing between what the code is and what it
does' (p. 376). What it chatters is how it hacks. Even when cultural
viruses simulate meaning, their functioning is irreducible to static
semiological concatenation. Machinic code is not distributed in a
structure, but in an option-space, modelled by phase-portraits or
adaptation landscapes (simulated graphically rather than theorized
symbolically). Cantor provided rigorous mathematical confirmation
for the Kantian thesis that space and time exceed the capacities of
signification. All but a vanishingly minute proportion of semiological
units are rational numbers (whole integers or digitally expressible
fractions), and rational numbers are transfinitely improbable instances
of real numbers of continuum-quanta. Discrete meaning involves
missing information, which explodes in postmodernity as chaos
(analogue-to-digital conversion malfunction). Nonlinearity infects
digital media with unsymbolizable continuum. Structuralism is
wrecked by the weather.
Bukatman's discussion of terminal fiction spaces, navigating
through fractal geometries, decentralized urban sprawls, and virtual
data-zones, continually transects 'a new and decentred spatiality...
that exists parallel to, but outside of, the geographic topography of
experiential reality* (p. 105). Yet rather than tracking this escape
of experimentation into space — as with explorations of the 'picture
plane' and the cinematic field, or of (O-dimensional) sonic intensities
— he seeks to restore authority to signs, and thus to the (political and
scientific) order to linearized reproducible discrete differences. None
of which detracts from the value of Terminal Identity as a unique
constellation of future-crash cultural materials.
If Bukatman tends to portray domination without subversion,
Kelly tends - very strongly - to the reverse. Out of Control is a
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marxohumanist nightmare with a smile on its face, schizomarketization dissolving into microbotic swarms, matter gone insane. Complexification burns-out planning into anarchy as machines and
software came to life, exhibiting a 'supercompatibility between evolution and computers' (p. 296). The economy evaporates out of bureaucratic control (any government that tells you it isn't frightened by ecash is either lying or very stupid). Autoreplication crisis floods in
from all sides, as computer revolution commoditizes the means of
production, auto-subverting the bourgeois monopolization of effective fixed capital and immanentizing class war to the economy. The
K-wave upswing can be expected to stimulate a bottom-up antagonism to power that is continuous and cybernetically cumulative,
rather than episodic and self-cancelling. Bukatman depicts this acceleration as situationism smearing into Baudrillard hyperreal neon reification so dense it switches into AI and starts profit-hunting on
its own - yet critical transcendence perpetually reinstalls itself, vagueing-out his thesis into hyperreal buzz ( . . . something about capitalism and the media). Kelly (unencumbered by academic brain-death)
gets down into the machinery and remains locked tightly on target:
postmodern techno-natural self-organization = autonomizing micromarket dynamics. God is dead, and everything happens bottom-up.
Top-down organization is inhibition.
For a European audience steeped in cynicism, class-hatred and
semi-numbed suicide-blues, Kelly's Californian gee-whizzery can
grate, but this is a book from the edge, packed with virus, and worth
reading carefully. Its topic is so new that terminological obstacles
perpetually impinge. The most compact description of the field might
be 'hyperevolution': the self-assembly of option-space search
strategies, or navigation of auto-complexification pathways in massively distributed systems. Kelly himself makes a large number of
alternative suggestions, and continually re-starts his investigation in
different terms, as he hops between ecology, computer networks,
market dynamics, biological evolution, robotics, artificial life, textual
machines, and other zones of decentralized intelligence: 'networks,
complex adaptive systems, swarm systems, vivisystems, or collective
systems' (p. 21). All such systems can be modelled as searches through
a possibility- or option-space of virtual states, 'solving' problems by
folding themselves into self-guiding machines.
[CJontrol is a spectrum. At one end there is the total domination
of 'as one' control. At the other is 'out of control'. In between
are varieties of control we don't have words for.
(p. 329)
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One definition of complexity is resistance to compression, so
that any attempt at summary is (productively) problematic. The
looming shape emerging from Kelly's book is dependent upon the
entire shaggy sweep of his discussion, as it tracks the tangled 'horizontal causality of massive swarms' (p. 391). The computerization of
the economy and of biological science - to begin with a key 'three
body problem' - involves: (1) new techno-economic feedbacks at a
number of levels, qualitatively changing the system dynamics of both
commercial and technical systems; (2) parallelization of networks,
individual computers, and software, with a strong trend to increasing
self-organization and simulation capacity; (3) the abstraction of evolutionary theory into dynamic software, the emergence of experimental
evolutionisms, the radical peripheralization of natural selection as
core evolutionary mechanism; (4) powerful regenerative feedbacks
between robotics, computer-aided design and manufacturing systems;
(5) increasing convergence between artificial intelligence, artificial life
and spontaneous network effects; (6) commercial biotechnics based
on sophisticated molecular genetics, network models of intra-genomic
control and mutation guidance, and usage of biochemical components
in technical information processing systems; (7) revolutionization of
economic theory due to the multilevel impact of networks on its
research tool-kit and object, increasing feedback density between
business and economics, micro-economic absorption of computerbased economic self-simulations, and explosion of software
trading.... This list could be continued for several pages without
exhausting even the high-intensity dynamics. It has evidently become
impossible to sustain a wide range of modernist distinctions: between
nature and culture, natural evolution and cultural history, commerce
and technics, models and objects. Computers melt everything
together, and academic disciplines no longer make sense. There are
no experts in cyberspace.
Kelly understands that signs have been eaten by electronic hyperspace. As priestcraft is cooked in IT writing melts back into travel.
The Borgesian library - containing all possible combinations of textual elements and thus all possible texts - is an option-space, and
has passed from the status of an impossible 'fantasy' into software
implementation as a virtual machine. Artificial evolution involves
searches through such a library, whose elements might be ASCII
codes, mathematical functions, pixels, DNA codons, or other
assembly unites. One strategy for such searches is a random walk,
such as that of simplified classical ('neo-Darwinian') natural selection,
based on the (phenotypically mediated) differentially intensive culling
of ROM-genomes buffeted by noise. This is the least intelligent viable
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evolutionary strategy, with zero heuristics, no hyperevolution, and
minimal communication of adaptations. Work in population and biochemical genetics, microbiology and ecology indicates that real
biological systems vary positively from this mechanism, complicating
it with spontaneous emergences, sexual and intragenomic selection,
transgenomic transfers (e.g. bacterial omnisex and retroviral recoding)
saltation, mutational heuristics, co-evolutionary dependencies, symbioses, convergent speciation, and alloplastic feedback. 'Deep, pluralistic evolution, like intelligence, is an emergent property of a
community of dynamics' (p. 387). It is not a question of a dichotomic
difference between evolution and design, but of a range of variagation
between evolutionary machineries, or experimental pathways: selfinnovating evolvability.
It is similarly misleading to reify an ideal of 'market dynamics'
as a transhistorical or essential law of economics. Markets are not
formal environments, but concrete adaptive systems, integrating
emergent intelligence into their most basic 'principles' and changing
phase. '[T]he rules for changing entities over time change over time'
(p. 471). This capacity to learn enabled distributed economic systems
to begin processing-out Keynesian macroeconomic management
during the late 1970s, modifying the parameters of the global economy (rather than merely augmenting its content) and provoking
the Dengist-neoliberal catastrophe. The 'internal' history of modern
commerce is inextricable from its nature, so that the dimensionality
and curvature of geosocial option-space changes along with its population. You never step into the same market-place twice.
Biology, economics and computer science are undergoing an
immense and convergent upheaval as they change phase, or postmodernize. Machine-based intelligence is able to process complex nonlinear equations and simulate systems that were previously intractable
to any but the most reductive analysis, and the resultant sophistications then feedback into 'market-oriented' and artificial life programs that accelerate computing techniques in turn. The trends thus
induced, towards parallelism, evolution, experimentation and deterritorialization blend with wider techno-economic processes that are
themselves involved in ever denser interaction. Love it or hate it, 'out
of control theory' is destined to be a key ingredient of telecommercial
hypermanic culture, and is currently developed to an immeasurable
greater sophistication than any conceivable source of critique.
One overall 'message' of these books is that the academy is
seriously malfunctioning as a source of intelligent debate about the
dynamics of the current conjuncture. Its traditions of authoritarianism, disciplinary rigidity, retro-orientation, and in-group posturing,
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along with its incapacity to dissipate institutional entropy due to its
top-down structure, conspire to disable the traits of connectivity,
flexibility, and responsiveness that are increasingly crucial to effective
research. Expect the whole rotten apparatus to cave in soon.
University of Warwick
Scott Wilson
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Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.), Bataille: Writing the Sacred (London and New
York: Routledge, 1995), 195pp., £40.00 (hardback), £14.99 (paperback)
Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 223pp., £35.00 (hardback),
£10.99 (paperback)
Arkady Plotnitsky, Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy
(Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 426pp., £44.95 (hardback),
£17.55 (paperback)
Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity: Anti-epistemology after Bohr and
Derrida (Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1994), 324pp., £47.50
(hardback), £16.95 (paperback)
These books represent a small sample of the interest in Georges
Bataille that has blossomed in the 1990s. Once known, in Britain and
America, primarily for his fiction Bataille is now widely recognized
as one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century. Over
the past twenty years, as his Oeuvres Complètes have been compiled
in France in the 1970s and 1980s, the breadth of Bataille's writing
and influence has become apparent across the disciplines in, for
example, the fields of literature, art, art history, philosophy, critical
theory, sociology, economics and anthropology.
The essays in Carolyn Bailey Gill's book, largely the proceedings
of the first conference on Bataille in Britain in May 1991, concern
themselves mostly with literary and art historical questions: Leslie
Anne Boldt-Irons, Marie-Christine Lala, Allan Stoekl and Susan
Rubin Suleiman contribute essays on Bataille's fiction; John Lechte,
Briony Fer and Susan Wilson discuss Bataille's relationship with surrealism and avant-garde art theory. In other essays Jean-Michel Besnier and Alphonso Lingis take a historical perspective on Bataille's
political-intellectual position and anthropology, while Michèle
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