We make our objects from what we make of our world, and in return they teach us: this is fetishism’s object lesson. Ellen Lee McCallum (1999: xxii)

Introduction

Matthew lives alone in a run-down, one-bedroom apartment in Melbourne suburbia. Visitors to Matthew’s home are extremely rare. However, if visitors should enter the apartment and attempt to navigate through it, as we researchers did, one does so at a risk; the sides of the walls are piled ceiling-high with old technological items—keyboards, computers boxes, typewriters, monitors, amplifiers, radios, televisions, cables, circuit boards and other artefacts. Once in the living room, visitors may proceed along a narrow path between haphazard stacks to find a desk with a computer, a telephone and a stereo. Matthew sits here up to 12 hours a day, downloading from the Internet, chatting to one or two of his online friends, or drafting a letter of complaint about something he has heard on the radio. At night, Matthew may swivel his chair to watch a documentary on a television surrounded and surmounted by non-functioning electrical goods. Negotiating a passage through the kitchen and the bedroom is similarly precarious, for they too are piled high with electronic paraphernalia.

Matthew leaves his apartment only when necessity dictates—to visit a chiropractor, to submit his fortnightly unemployment form at the Social Security Office, or to get supplies at the supermarket. When he ventures into the ‘outside world’, he often returns with an old monitor, a computer box, a TV, a typewriter, a telephone, or a fax machine, that has been discarded on the street. ‘You never know when something will come in useful, and I hate to see things chucked away’, he informs us.[1] Indeed, Matthew’s desk computer is an assemblage of parts he has found, and he is often opening the box to exchange a hard drive, replace a switch, or just poke around. Matthew is very competent at assembling, disassembling and repairing computers, particularly Macintosh computers.

At face value Matthew’s lifestyle is eccentric to say the least, and the temptation is to summarily dismiss his relation to ICTs as arising entirely out of the particularities of his life-history and his psyche, perhaps going so far as to pathologise his behaviour and his mental state. But in our research on ‘Connected Homes’,[2] we found that Matthew’s case was perhaps not so extraordinary: it was not uncommon for members of our twelve participating households to manifest what might well be considered a fetishistic relationship with ICT—for their obsessive preoccupation with having the latest and best technology, for their desire to technologise or digitalise ever-increasing domains of domestic tasks and entertainment options, for their compulsive checking of email messages and use of internet and games, in their collection, restoration and display of old ICT, and for their reconstitution of architectural space to suit perceived ICT needs (Arnold, Shepherd, Gibbs and Mecoles, 2006a, 2006b; Shepherd, Arnold and Gibbs, forthcoming; Shepherd and Arnold, under review). In this paper, it is argued that Matthew’s case exemplifies aspects of a normalised relation to ICTs, and the extremities of Matthew’s particular case serve the useful purpose of making these stark.

Through this case we contribute to an ongoing examination of our socio-cultural relation to ICTs. From this perspective, people’s personal relationships with ICTs goes well beyond the pragmatics of ‘ICT as tool’ and well beyond the acquisition-consumption semiotics of ‘ICT as status symbol’, and are constituted within a nexus of powerfully emotive states expressive of desire, possession and pleasure on the one hand, and aversion, rejection and pain on the other. In what follows, after considering the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism, we develop a discussion of psychoanalytic analyses of fetish to identify our relationships with ICTs as fetishistic, and to illustrate this relationship in Matthew’s case.

Fetishism

In late modernity ICTs join those commodities that lend themselves to fetishism and the intense affective states that fetishism involves. A broader understanding of the ICTs in our lives therefore examines not only ICTs in their capacity as interpersonal mediators, but also the intrapersonal dynamic that circulates between subject, object, and desire.

Although the notion of fetishism had its origins in the sixteenth century encounter between Portuguese sailors and West African peoples (see McCallum, 1999), the contemporary notion of fetishism has been elaborated within two principal intellectual traditions. The first of these is Marxism. For Karl Marx, a commodity is far more than a material object with a particular use-value; objects also possess a mystical or metaphysical character, the conceptualization of which resides in Marx’s idea of the ‘secret’ of commodity fetishism. This mystical quality is precisely the result of the way that ‘the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’ (Marx, 1977: 163). As a material embodiment of alienated labour, Marx identifies the commodity as a substitution through which social relations of labour and surplus value are transformed into objects in ways most palpable within capitalist production. The nature of the fetish consists in this tension between the sensuality and materiality of things on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the hidden social relations that that materiality substitutes (Marx 1977: 163-177).

The second of these traditions is psychoanalytic theory. If Marx stresses the fetishism of ‘political economists’ as a ‘substitution’ of social relations for a commodified object (Marx, 1977: 983), psychoanalytic theory posits the fetish as the sublimation of an aversion (now unconscious) for a conscious desire and action. In Sigmund Freud’s classic 1927 paper entitled ‘Fetishism’, fetish is the symptom of an ailment rarely known to the sufferer, and results from the painful experience of the young boy’s observation that his mother is without a penis and the parallel, emergent, fear of his own castration. According to Freud’s logic, fetish is intended to preserve the penis—his mother’s and his own—from extinction. Fetish, then, is a substitute for the penis that the boy’s mother turns out not to have, and is also accompanied by a repressed aversion for the real female genitalia (Freud, 1927: 152, 154). Fetish is ‘a token of triumph’ over castration, and in Freud’s view it prevents the male subject from becoming homosexual by making women ‘tolerable sexual objects’ (p. 154). By way of their fetish, fetishists disavow women’s castration, as well as the threat of their own, while curiously affirming it by constructing a fetish in which the disavowed is subtly represented, such as (to use one of Freud’s cases) the fetish for an article of clothing (an athletic support-belt) that at once covers the genitals and serves to conceal the difference between the male and female genitalia.

While some anthropological and sociological understandings of fetishism have drawn on the Marxist tradition (eg. Pietz, 1993; Taussig, 1980), in the contemporary social sciences it is the psychology of fetishism that has gained most prominence, whether or not that psychology is construed with a strictly Freudian psychoanalytic framework. In this essay and in relation to the case study in particular, we make no claims about the narrowly defined sexual nature of fetish as a penis substitute. However, we do follow the core methodological principle common to all understandings of fetish, both Marxist and psychoanalytic; that is, fetish uses an object to negotiate a binary difference between presence and absence to accomplish an immaterial end, be that prestige, emotional security or some other psychical satisfaction (McCallum, 1999: 1) and, as Freud suggests, the disavowal of what might be called ‘painful knowledge’ or ‘painful experience’ underpins fetish.

Following this psychologism, we understand that fetishism arises in the affective space that separates desire from reality, and manifests itself in a gaze that focuses on the materiality that is inscribed with the capacity to bridge that space and embrace the desired. This relation between subject and object, or desire and object, is profoundly affective, and has historic associations with leather, panties, petticoats, high-heels, corsets, and particular parts of the (usually female) anatomy such as the feet or the breast (Steele, 1996; Stoller, 1985). Although in ‘technofetishism’ this overtly sexualised fetishism is commonly understood to extend into the realm of aeroplanes, ships, motorcycles and cars (Bayley, 1986; Fernbach, 2002), the diverse literature on fetishism has, in the main, overlooked ICTs. Where this is not the case, ICTs have been pictured as simply another example of technofetishism (Fernbach, 2002) or lumped in with ‘commodity fetishism’ alongside cars, shoes, fashion and so on, with little inclination to tease out the fetishistic peculiarities of ICTs.[3] And whilst fetishistic desire is in a narrow sense associated with ‘perverse sexuality’, the literature suggests that fetishism invokes desire across a much broader spectrum of emotions, embracing desires to possess, to consume, to gaze upon, to represent, to display, to handle, to manipulate, to feel, to experience, to venerate, to exalt the desired object.

As Emily Apter (1993) describes, 19th and 20th century commodity cultures have revealed objects as provocations to desire, possession and, ultimately, fetishisation. As expanding commodity markets and advertising widely promoted consumption as a rational and necessary undertaking for the enhancement of ‘quality of life’, supposedly irrational or aberrant desire—particularly sexual desire and the practices thereby entailed—was medicalised and branded as ‘Fetishism’ by doctors and psychiatrists as early as the 1880s and 1890s (Nye, 1993). While the medicalisation of aberrant desire has contributed to fetishism’s marginalisation and its association with kinky sexuality, it also points to the psycho-sexual content that has underpinned much of the analysis of fetishism. Indeed, this form of ‘cultural fetishism’ (Stratton, 1996) includes the fetishism for consumer items that exhibit no immediate link to sexuality. Discussed in Freudian terms, Stratton explains that the cultural psychosexual formation of consumption is founded on the culturally-produced male eroticisation and objectification of the female body:

Since this desire operates in the space between what one has and what one wants, the person who is socially constructed to have an active desire, the male, will seek to reduce his anxiety by producing or acquiring what he wants (Stratton, 1996: 6).

According to Apter (1993: 4), the spectacularised female anatomy ‘is sexually domesticated through sartorial masquerades, just as the household fetishes of cars, TVs and swimming pools are shown to be sites of displaced lack’.

Contemporary discourses that theorise fetishism consistently emphasise the hidden psychosocial structure of lack, inadequacy and pain that underlies desire. Fetishism, therefore, is cast as the desire for the experience of empowerment vis-à-vis the experience of disempowerment, whether disempowerment is situated as a real or perceived effect of the modern state (or the phallus) (Stratton, 1996), the woman (Apter, 1993), or the alienation of labour from the commodities produced—which as we have seen is Marx’s original coining of ‘commodity fetishism’ (see Steele, 1996).

Without delving further into theories of concealed psychoanalytic motivation, the important point for our argument is that these fetishised ‘objects of desire’ are not simply desired in and of themselves for their personal use-value or public social status value, but are also valued because of the unconscious or unspecified experience of lack, of inadequacy, of emptiness, of disempowerment, and of loss and pain manifest in the ache of unsatisfied desire, and the concomitant desire for adequacy, fulfillment, empowerment and affective satisfaction. To possess, to fondle, to fill, to touch, to use, the fetishised object is to symbolically nullify that experience of lack and its attendant emotions. Fetishism thus follows its own logic of gratification by providing a reflection of the imaginary first form (i.e. that which is lacked—consciously or unconsciously). As Apter (1993: 4) notes, although this reflection is an inferior, degraded simulation, ‘fetishism records the trajectory of an idée fixe or noumen in search of its materialist twin—god to idol, alienated labor to luxury item, phallus to shoe fetish and so on’.

It is precisely this quality of fetishism, as a bridge between the concrete object and the intangible ‘spirit within the thing’ (Taussig, 1993: 217), which distinguishes fetishism from addiction, or obsession. In our field studies of technologies in the domestic context, we have seen various behaviours which we would customarily recognise as addiction, and the literature provides numerous examples of behaviour in the context of computer programming, single and multi-user game playing, and on-line interaction, that have been described as obsessive (eg. Berger, 2002; MacBeth, 1996; Stoll, 1995; Turkle, 1995; Ullman, 1995). Although fetishism surely shares some of the characteristics of addiction or obsession, it is the transcendental/symbolic and masquerading value of fetishism which clearly differentiates it, and gives an explanatory/interpretive power that notions of addiction and obsession lack.

But what can fetishism tell us about ICT use, and is it perhaps a more useful term than obsession? We broach this question by citing Ellen McCallum:

[F]etishism is a form of subject-object relation that informs us about basic strategies of defining, desiring, and knowing subjects and objects in Western culture. More importantly, in the way that it brings together peculiarly modern anxieties—especially about sexuality, gender, belief and knowledge—fetishism reveals how our basic categories for interpreting the world have been reduced to binary and mutually exclusive terms. (1999: xi-xii)

Drawing on McCallum, we allow that these ‘epistemological promises of fetishism’ (McCallum, 1999: xxii) offer us a strategy for analysing ICTs in the phenomenological lifeworld as fetishistic subject-object relations. The analytic ambition of an argument based on domestic-ICT-fetishism is to avoid the common perspective that locates ICTs either in dysfunctional terms of psychological addiction, or in functional terms as communications channels, mediating relations between people, or mediating people’s access to information, data, or cultural products.

Although it is impossible to avoid reference to the instrumental function of ICTs in connecting people to people, and people to data, we attempt to maintain a focus on the subject-object relation. In particular we keep our analysis trained on the emotive, affective constitution of ICT possession and use, through recording autobiographical stories of desire and lack, in which ICTs are co-protagonists. It is here at the interface of subject-users and object-ICTs that the notion of fetish acquires particular resonance. ICT-fetishism is not just the province of a few eccentrics, but is arguably a common bio-psycho-social mechanism (Berger, 2002) which underlies the ICT use of many users and the ‘displaced’ meanings thereby elicited.

These subject-object relations focus on the object (in this case ICTs) to; 1) tell a story to oneself, 2) that is about desire, 3) is autobiographical insofar as it provides the subject-self with meaning, understanding and self-knowledge, and 4) is a story that both negates and invokes lack, absence, inadequacy, pain or fear. We argue that these four characteristics of fetishised subject-object relations are characteristic of many relationships with ICTs, and that Matthew’s case is simply an example that is more starkly rendered than yours or ours. But we would also emphasise that the subject-object relation does not stand alone. As we go on to show in the case study, ICT fetishism as the hoarding of technological objects (in the case of Matthew) is inevitably interwoven with ICT use, such that the ICTs as objects of fetish cannot simply be understood as functionally equal to, or interchangeable with, other objects of fetish. Rather, the peculiar character of ICT fetish must be seen as co-constituted by both the objects and their use.[4]

Approach

This argument contributes to an emerging body of literature that attends to ICTs in terms of the emotional affects of these particular subject-object relations, over and above the functional or instrumental effects of ICT use. Complementing this focus on the affective content of ICTs is the attention given to the home as a site of empirical interest in ICT research (Blythe and Monk, 2002; Hindus, 1999; Venkatesh, 1996). While research on the efficacy of ICTs in the workplace still exceeds scholarship on the emotional affects of ICTs in the home by an order of magnitude (Hindus, 1999), the recognition of affect as a subject of research, and the home as a location of research, is welcome.

In departing from standard ethnographic methods based on participant observation and interview, this essay also contributes to our repertoire of methodological practices for research in domestic environments. Our methodological departure took the form of the ‘Domestic Probe’ – an adaption of a novel research method derived from the ‘Cultural Probes’ developed by Gaver and his colleagues (Gaver, Dunne and Pacenti, 1999; Gaver and Martin, 2000; Gaver 2001, 2002, 2004; Crabtree et al., 2003). In essence, the Domestic Probe comprised a box of equipment given to the household to use in order to record and interpret their use of domestic ICTs. The box contained: local, national and global maps to trace origins and destinations of communications; colour-coded stickers to record each ICT’s user and frequency of use; digital and instamatic cameras to record snapshots of the routine and the novel in domestic life; diaries for each household member; a scrapbook for photos and jottings; additional stationary such as coloured pencils, textas, glue, sticky-tape, scissors, etcetera (see Arnold, 2004).

In 2004 and 2005 the ‘Connected Homes’ project had twelve households around Melbourne make use of the probe. In agreeing to participate in the study, the respective householders were in effect agreeing to participate as co-researchers or collaborators in our research work.[5]

We met with each participating household three times. On the first visit we dropped off the Domestic Probe pack, explained its contents, and conversed generally about the household’s technology use. Some two weeks later we returned to be taken on a ‘technology tour’ of the home, to be led from one room to the next by one or more members of the household, during which we filmed the domestic ICTs in situ as the participants told stories about their origins, their history, their use, their strengths and shortcomings. Our third and final visit took place after three to four weeks. This time we engaged in conversation relating to the traces left by the probe in the diaries, the scrapbook and so on. In effect, the recordings or traces generated through the use of the kit provided provocative and evocative grist for the mill of conversation among the participant householders, and between the participant householders and ourselves.

This method, we felt, did not silence ‘the natives’ by treating them as objects to be observed and explained. Nor did it patronise them by treating them as sources of unprocessed, primary data only—without also asking them to join with the research and reflect on the traces, and interpret and analyse that data. Moreover, it did not frame the household participants as instrumental, rational, solution-seeking users of ICTs, but as ludic, emotive beings. We certainly did not pathologise them as ‘others’ for, disconcertingly at times, and comfortingly at others, we saw in them a reflection of our own behaviours, motivations, desires and ‘lacks’: insofar as subjects desired the latest, fastest or most encompassing technologies, insofar as they were self-avowed compulsive and excessive users of these technologies, and insofar as they collected old technological paraphernalia, displayed it in prominent positions in their houses, and identified with these objects (Arnold, Shepherd, Gibbs and Mecoles, 2006a, 2006b; Shepherd, Arnold and Gibbs, forthcoming). In this essay we focus on the particular case of Matthew— who was visited three times between 14/10/04 and 8/11/04 in his Eastern suburbs apartment in Melbourne. The case is especially illustrative of fetish precisely because Matthew’s ICT collection appeared to satiate the ‘lack’ which was all too evident in his ICT use.

Collecting and Using ICT

As described in the introductory vignette, Matthew was a collector of discarded electrical items that he found by the road-side, among other places. In particular, ICTs took his fancy, and he was unwilling to pass them by without picking them up. Matthew used some of the materials he collected for their given purpose. For instance, he assembled the Macintosh computer he used to go on-line out of bits and pieces he had found on the streets. In general, however, Matthew’s ICTs were not ‘used’ in the conventional sense, and it seemed that Matthew had a limited capacity to keep track of the bits and pieces he had accumulated over the years.

It was clear from the outset that Matthew’s enthusiasm for collecting ICTs extended well beyond the instrumental use-value of the items, even if he rationalised that all of it could potentially be useful ‘one day’. Evidently, Matthew harboured a strong emotional attachment for electronic technologies, and ICTs in particular, and importantly, this was all part of ‘home’ and was integrated in his life. When we contrasted the level of intensity of Matthew’s attachment to the ICTs with the reasons he offered for acquiring and literally filling his home with ICTs, those reasons seemed weak and perhaps arbitrary. Above all, it was the activity of acquiring and surrounding himself with ICTs that seemed to confer personal meaning upon Matthew’s lifeworld and compensate fetishistically for the absences and lacks that characterised his life. And it is precisely in Matthew’s use of items from his collection that we were able to find evidence of these absences and lacks; in effect, Matthew’s use of ICTs provided the clue to understanding his fetish.

Surrounded and perhaps protected by these materials, Matthew lived inside his apartment in virtual isolation. While he had little face-to-face interaction with other people, he had until recently spent considerable time emailing and chatting on the Internet with three online friends who lived overseas (two in the USA and one in Ireland). In particular, he developed a close connection with Fiona, living in Ireland, who Matthew counseled for two years through a suicide support forum. During this time Fiona declared her love for him, and became his online girlfriend.

But the Internet for Matthew was also full of ‘idiots’, ‘fuckwits’, ‘bastards’, ‘psychopaths’ and ‘Americans’, to mention just a few of the epithets he frequently used to describe those he encountered on the suicide newsgroup, in gaming environments such as Kings of Chaos, or on the software download sites he visited. Experiencing a world rich in friends and enemies, and telling us that ‘it’s every man’s duty to fight evil’, Matthew entered into battle with unseen actors, the most disturbing of whom was ‘The Psychopath’, an American man, Bruce, from the Suicide Newsgroup. Matthew found Bruce the Psychopath to be an objectionable individual that had to be opposed because he was constantly preying on vulnerable people’s weaknesses through nefarious and underhanded means. Bruce had also made himself unpopular with Matthew because he had revealed his intentions to act off-line and actually visit Fiona in Ireland. Matthew subsequently confessed to invoking his relationship with one of his US friends, Vivien, to make Fiona jealous. ‘I suppose I was saying [to Fiona] “if you hurt me with Bruce, I’ll hurt you with Vivien.”’ Matthew regretted having reinvigorated contact with Vivien ‘under false pretences’. ‘I’m back on Yahoo with Vivien and it’s all my own fault—I be fool.’ On the basis of these and numerous similar instances, Matthew reflected:

I want to spread good will and combat evil but I seem to do more harm than good. I should be more positive, but I’m worried that I’m accidentally going to stuff up and add to the negativity in the world.

Matthew seemed to use the functionality of his ICTs to oscillate dramatically between ‘spreading good will’, which involved forming and maintaining a small number of intense and supporting relationships, and ‘combating evil’, which involved posting abuse to ‘psychopaths’, ‘Americans’ and so on. In doing so, Matthew always tried to stand firmly on the side of truth and justice. Similarly, in the world of broadcast media, Matthew saw it as his responsibility to email the hosts of radio shows in order to correct what he saw as the dissemination of false information that prejudiced one or another underdog. To give one of several examples, when a radio commentator suggested that the Americans invented terrorism during the American War of Independence, Matthew saw fit to advise the host that while under Roman occupation, “the jews practiced terrorism”. As in most other instances of this kind, Matthew’s email was ignored, and in turn Matthew ceased to listen to the programme.

The story here (and in many other places in Matthew’s life) is one of reaching for empowerment (in a badly flawed world) through disempowerment (via turning his back on that world). But if Matthew gained a sense of vindication by boycotting the program, triumph was soon replaced by many days of self-incrimination as he sought to determine what he himself had done to cause the ‘snub’. Finally, Matthew discovered the ‘truth’ in the object – in the material particularity of his correspondence: ‘I spelt “jews” without a capital “J”, and I know he’s touchy about Jews’. He must have thought I had an agenda. Berating himself intensely (‘I’m such an idiot!’) and losing many nights of sleep over the issue, Matthew finally wrote in to apologise for the lower case ‘j’. The spelling was of itself not important to Matthew. His online correspondence used the casual and customised spelling and grammar common to online messages. But it is easy to see that the emails were important, and that every detail of the email was subject to minute and obsessive scrutiny. The autobiographical narrative at work here is telling a story of a subject-object relation in which the object’s materiality took on great significance – not of itself – but as a needle on a dial that oscillated between desire (for self-affirmation) and lack thereof.

It is evident from these and many other examples that Matthew’s use of ICTs at home constructed signifiers of connection, not only to distant others but more importantly, to the highly charged emotional world of his ‘self’. His emotional inner-life, moreover, was extremely volatile as he swung between his self-righteous proclamations of truth and fairness on the one hand, and guilt and self-blame on the other. Between these extremes, what was represented in the emails and on-line chat was his self-image as a worthy human being, adding to the net good of humanity, and the extent to which others could be trusted as allies in the cause. Matthew made use of ICTs precisely to test his capacity to establish trust, but what he risked, and perhaps invited, was betrayal. This tension between trust and betrayal revealed itself repeatedly, crystallized in the materiality of the words on the screen. The autobiographical story told by this fetishistic subject-object relation is one of lack (of trust), empowerment (testing trust) through disempowerment (telling something), and desire (for trust). The flickering but obdurate words on the screen manifested, aroused, denied, and gratified Matthew’s desire for trust, for love, and to contribute to the net good. The emails Matthew received (and didn’t receive), the sentences that scrolled down the screen in real time, were objects that invoked lack and desire.

We found that Matthew’s mediated relations with distant others could not be spoken about without a powerful affective reaction to the vicissitudes of communication-at-a-distance. For example, an important dimension of the lack of acknowledgement of self, materialised in the emails, was a lack of empathy, and this caused Matthew considerable grief. Matthew viewed empathy as a precondition for trust, but he was constantly upset by what he saw as peoples’ capacity to be deceitful. Matthew reflected on the personal dynamics of the Suicide Newsgroup at the time when he had first ‘gotten together’ with Fiona.

Vivien was a big hassle. I knew that if she knew about Fiona and myself… she would go berserk… and then one day something happened… We were all suicidal, that’s how we met… Fiona was saying something about me to Vivien, and Vivien said to me ‘what’s going on here?’, and I said, ‘nothing, there’s nothing, nothing between us’, and I told Fiona that I said that, and she said, ‘right, fine, BYE’, so I thought ‘oh, Shit! I better tell Vivien then’ and I told her, and she went ballistic, then she abused the hell out of Fiona and myself.

It was arguably the tension between lack and desire that lay at the heart of every exchange, a tension between the performative potentials of the connecting power of ICTs and the profound angst of disconnection that drew Matthew to ICTs, and compelled him to collect hardware as visible, solid, representations of satiated desire. The fetishistic collection of hardware constituted the most reliable source of satiation. But we can also see Matthew’s online interpersonal relationships in terms of fetish, and not simply as stories of online interpersonal relations (though they are this). Matthew’s stories were stories of words that appeared on the screen. They were stories of fetishised objects that were capable of materialising a position on an axis between personal lack and personal desire, in this case circulating not so much around sexuality, as around self-affirmation (or love) in the context of good and evil. The relations materialised in the emails were subject-object relations (i.e. Matthew-email relations), and whilst subject-subject relations are signified, (e.g. Matthew-Fiona), it is the internal dialogue that gives rise to lack and desire, and provides the resources to bridge the two. An interpretation that focuses on interpersonal subject-subject relations misses the significance of the fetishised object, and the object’s capacity to invoke intrapersonal dialogue as well as interpersonal dialogue. The fetishised objects were captured as much in Matthew’s hardware collection as in his objects of online interaction; and the emotional and social lacks were evidenced in his ICT use, and compensated for both in his ICT use and in his ICT collection.

Discussion

The above descriptions of Matthew’s relations with ICTs can be summarised as follows. Matthew obsessively collected and hoarded household ICTs, most of which had little or no use-value or commonly appreciated aesthetic value as they gathered dust and narrowed his physical mobility in the apartment. Living a highly reclusive existence, Matthew’s connectedness to the outside was mediated through radio, television, telephone and computer technology. By way of his computer and dial-up Internet access, he forged and maintained a small number of very intense online friends, with whom he precariously explored the parameters and limitations of trust and distrust, love and hate, good and evil. In addition to positioning himself morally, he was able to tentatively consolidate, negotiate and jeopardize his humanity in relation to other men and women online. As part of these interactions and dependencies, Matthew found himself oscillating between (often extreme) negative and positive emotional states.

At face value what we have here is a story of an eccentric person who happens to have a fixation on hoarding computer parts and electronic goods – though one may think it might as well be old beer cans, car parts or anything else – and a fixation on collecting software that is never used, and movies that are never watched. Our eccentric hoarder is also a loner, suffering from depression and perhaps mild paranoia, who has nonetheless established and maintained a small number of important friends and enemies, through on-line interaction.

The temptation is to make two strategic moves with an analysis of this case. The first is to dismiss Matthew’s experience as peculiar to Matthew; interesting perhaps, but unrepresentative of a more general population. The second is to separate out his behaviour as a collector from his behaviour in forming on-line relationships, and then pathologise the former and celebrate the later, or perhaps pathologise both. We consider that something is to be learned from resisting both moves.

Let’s consider first the extent to which Matthew’s experience is non-generalisable. Matthew acquires, but does not necessarily use the object with which he fills his world, to the point where he is uncertain about just what he possesses. The contemporary Australian household contains up to 3000 items, excluding individual books and records (Lally, 2002). Very few of these acquisitions hold any special meaning or significance (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981) – they are simply the sedimentary layers of consumption laid down by households in late modernity. The contemporary Australian car has a capacity for speed that can never be used; the contemporary home-computer has processing capacities that are never used; our mobile phones, home-theatres and VCRs have features that are never used; our wardrobes contain clothes that are not worn, and all of this reduces their desirability not a bit. To acquire objects that are not used, to fill one’s house with useless consumer goods, to derive satisfaction from acquisition more so than use, is scarcely eccentric behaviour.

Matthew acquires objects that are abandoned – discarded and no longer functioning, useful, or valuable. Matthew can see their value though, and gives them a home. It is not delving too far into amateur psychology to suggest that Matthew may see something of himself in these objects. Nor is it novel to suggest that we all acquire and then appropriate objects in the same self-defining spirit. Perhaps the most influential account of this process of identity construction through appropriation will be familiar to the reader as ‘objectification’ – a process whereby the external world of things is internalised and shapes the psyche, just as the psyche is brought to bear in building the environment that surrounds us, and in attributing meaning to the objects in the environment. Lally quotes Bourdieu’s take on objectification as the ‘dialectic of the internalisation of externality and the externalisation of internality’ (Lally, 2002: 39). The particularities of Matthew’s collection may be eccentric, but the principles at work are common.

Matthew happens to collect ICTs – machines that are built and bought primarily for communication – which are the iconic technology of the contemporary era. Again Matthew is scarcely alone in this. Whilst most of our homes are not stacked floor-to-ceiling with home theatres, plasma televisions, iPods, personal computers, mobile phones and music systems, this class of products is certainly significant in the Australian retail economy and in our domestic economies. Like Matthew, we choose to acquire media electronics and communications electronics, and CRT television sets, wired phones, mobile phones, CD players and DVD players are consumed at near saturation levels, while personal computers and an internet connection are now possessed by a majority (Philipson, 2005).

Matthew’s connection to significant others in his life are primarily mediated by email and telephone, and in this respect he stands apart from those of us who have routine face-to-face communication with friends, intimates, acquaintances and strangers. Having said that, it is also the case that for many of us, ICT-mediated communication is a routine and normalised form of socialising. Matthew’s media of choice does not stand apart from ours; rather, it is the relative exclusivity of that choice that stands him apart. And further, to choose to stay at home and allow the world at large to filter through to us via mass media such as television, and to reach out into the world at one remove through personal media such as email, is a common enough practice to cause concern to some (Putman, 1995) and to capture the interest of many (Poster, 1995). In these respects Matthew’s life is characteristic of a common experience.

To turn now to the second move. At face value, the obsessive acquiring and hoarding of hardware and software can be separated out from his use of that hardware and software to maintain on-line relationships – the former read as pathologies and the latter as achievements. Having made this move, the pathologies might be accounted for in their own terms – in reference to psychology and its theories of clinical depression, obsession, autism, or obsessive/compulsive behaviours for example. On the other hand, his achievements in the pursuit of on-line relations might be accounted for in their own socio-theoretical context – through reference to Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), and the body of theory and empirical research that focuses on online communities, online social relations and so forth.

We have no particular comment to make on the ability of Clinical Psychology to account for Matthew’s mental condition in terms of depression, autism and the like. However, we suggest that separating out the collecting from the communications, and treating the former as pathology and the later as personal achievement, is not helpful to an understanding of sociotechnical relations – either Matthew’s, or more generally. We suggest that Matthew’s experiences collecting and using ICTs, diverse as they are, are all tied in to one another, and the notion of fetish provides insights that bridge this range.

Matthew positions himself, his actions and the actions of others in a moral universe, and the positions occupied in relation to good and evil invoke emotive and not just intellectual responses. He has a strong sense of morality, and a strong sense of duty that he exercises via the media at his disposal, and this duty extends to others in his universe. His expectations are high, and this causes him considerable grief. Matthew’s conscious self struggles with evil and for good, to establish the worth of his life, his identity as a human being, his quest for respect, and love and trust. All of these symbolic-emotional values swing him between pleasure and pain, affirmation and rejection. These, moreover, are struggles, quests and values that are played out and are manifest in both the collection of hardware and the online interaction. It surely is not a coincidence that the collection is of ICTs and not beer cans or car parts. It is surely not coincidental that ICTs are deployed to compose and transmit the ‘flickering signifiers’ (Hayles, 1999) in which so much angst and emotion are invested.

The ICT collection itself materialises the same desire that is played out when the ICTs do function and Matthew is online. This desire – to be good, to be worthy, to trust and be trusted, to be useful, to love – is what collecting is all about. To collect is to make a commitment, and to assert worth and value of some kind, even though it may be against the odds and not appreciated by others. ‘Useless objects’ (read – Matthew) are rescued from abandonment (or for Freud, castration), given a place in the world, given a potential, valued in some sense – not for their performance, not for what they actually do, not for their instrumentality, but for their adhering ontology as ICTs (read – as a human being). To return to Steel’s (1996: 168) take on fetishism, the ICT collection is ‘a story masquerading as an object’. The objects that crowd out Matthew’s home are an autobiography that tells a story of Matthew’s worth; of his desire to do good as he moves and acts in the world. The desire fetishised in the collection – to be good, to be worthy etc., to act and do in the spirit of virtue by recycling and repositioning objects that are abandoned, undervalued, at risk, but nonetheless have a latent potential to be good and useful and take their place in a world – is also evident in Matthew’s online interactions.

To turn now to computer mediated communication (CMC). These issues of online communication that circulate around media in the context of authenticity, trust, relationship formation and maintenance, love, identity of self and other, have been the preoccupation of CMC discourse, and much research has been conducted in an examination of the phenomena. A fine-grained review of this corpus is available elsewhere (Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2002), but for our purposes a course-grained overview will suffice. At this course-grained level we see utopic and dystopic argument and example in the CMC literature; the stories are celebratory and have happy endings, or offer salutary warnings and have sad endings. The happy stories tell of close and supportive friendships, of integrated and multi-dimensional identities, of people who create as well as maintain meaningful relationships at a distance, and of the benefits of CMC in this important aspect of our lives. Those that are not so happy tell of the superficiality of communication that lacks contextual and situational cues derived from co-presence, and lacks the moral obligation and commitment derived from shared material circumstances.

Both kinds of story are premised on ICTs as subject-to-subject communications devices that provide the mediation required to establish and maintain a relationship with an other. That is, both kinds of story construct and assess ICTs in exclusively instrumental terms, attending only to the efficacy of their function as communications devices that link subjects, and assessing the performance of that function relative to alternatives in terms of interpersonal relations. Matthew’s case might thus be written up in the CMC literature as a good news story of ICTs enabling an otherwise isolated individual to establish and maintain meaningful human relationships, or a bad news story of a troubled individual sinking deeper into social isolation as an inadequate media, superficial games and virtual relationships stand between him and real life.

Now, in a sense either of these stories may be correct. ICTs may support the conduct of meaningful relationships as a general capacity, and may have done so in Matthew’s particular case, or they may not. But, as Martin Heidegger (1962) argued, a correct understanding of technology does not exhaust a true understanding of technology. Though it is correct that Matthew uses his ICTs to communicate with absent others, and thus establish and maintain relationships with Fiona, Vivien, Bruce the Psychopath, radio producers and others, the ICTs are not only instrumental in mediating relations, and an understanding of the significance of ICTs to Matthew is not exhausted by an account of their function. They are not simply a means to an end, where the end is an interpersonal relationship. They are this, but they are more than this. Just as a fetish for motor cars does not preclude using a motor car to move from A to B, so it is that moving from A to B does not provide a true understanding of the meaning and appeal of a motor car. That ICTs are used to interact with others is correct, but this does not exhaust a true understanding of the place of ICTs in people’s lives. In view of the case study presented in this article, we contend that the notion of fetishism encompasses all of Matthew’s ICT practices – collecting and communicating – even though it is correct that collecting ICTs is in some sense pragmatic, and even though it is correct that ICTs provide Matthew with a communications medium.

The contribution made by the notion of fetishism is to move an analysis beyond the implications of instrumental function in the context of subject-to-subject relations, and into the space of the self-referential desire that adheres to a fetishised object – self referential in that desire’s beginning (arousal) and desire’s end (gratification) are both located in the subject, constituting a ‘closed system’ as it were. The hardware collection is not a means to an end. The means and the end circulate through the collection; there is no other ‘end’ available to Matthew, or apparent to us. Interpersonal relations with another are objectified and reified in the emails, and a subject-object fetish in which desire circulates between subject (Matthew) and object (email correspondence) accounts for the fixation on these emails. Their extreme significance is in relation to Matthew’s own desires and emotions, while Matthew’s relations with other people per se, are marginal to desire and its satisfactions.

The towering stacks of computer components are towering stacks of self-affirmation that push back, at least in some sense, into the empty spaces of Matthew’s sense of his life. The emails sent to radio stations, newspapers, and most importantly, back and forth to Fiona et al, are important as autobiographical footnotes that reference action as a desire to be good, worthy, and useful, and sometimes, to his extreme angst, tell (‘something’) of his worthlessness, idiocy, or foolishness. To see them as communications to a significant other, in terms of say, interpersonal relationship building, is to misunderstand their importance as significations to himself. To return to the quote with which we opened the paper, the hardware and the emails are the objects from which he has made his world, and in return they teach him: this is fetishism’s object lesson.

Conclusion

We suggest that the possibilities of fetishism have at least three important contributions to make to our knowledge of ICT use. Firstly, the discussion of fetishism takes us beyond ICTs as simply instruments of mediation between subjects, and into the realm of subject-object relations. Although subject-object relations are invariably inflected by the content of subject-subject relations, the emphasis on subject-subject relations in social studies of ICTs has tended to overstate the role of function and instrumentality at the expense of what we might call common bio-psycho-social-object mechanisms (adapting Berger, 2002). Rather than subordinate these subject-object relations and the constellation of emergent psycho-social phenomenon to instrumental outcomes, our research points to the converse possibility that instrumentality may be subsumed by the less tangible but extraordinarily powerful realm of desire and, through the ‘conquest’ of objects, fetish. Indeed, instrumentality itself may be considered the arbitrary instrument of fetish.

This brings us to our second point. In pursuing an analysis of festishism in order to better understand ICT use, we bring affect into focus in a way that disrupts our explanatory predilection for direct cause-effect relationships. Since fetishised desire works emotional affects through and into its objects, the locus of pain or (dis)satisfaction is displaced, projected elsewhere, and objectified. The analysis of fetishistic ICT use thus complicates the affective aspects of the relationships subject-subject and subject-object. As indicated in the discussion above, the affects of pragmatic instrumentality may be performed symbolically in situations where no communication or (computer) mediation occurs, such as in the collecting and hoarding of technological hardware. Given this inevitable symbiosis between ICTs as mediators on the one hand, and fetishistic desire on the other, we can appreciate the fetishism for ICTs in terms of, rather than incidental to, their instrumentality. As such, instead of reducing the ICT fetish to just any fetish (high heels, petticoats or cars), we are able to engage the multiple affordances of both effective and affective ICTs as potential variables and equivalents within the spectrum of responses, behaviours and emotions that constitute the ICT fetish.

Finally, we believe that the (story of) fetish provides description and analysis of ICT use with a fresh perspective on, and alternative to, popular interpretations of ICTs use which are quick to distinguish ‘normal’ use and users from ‘aberrant’ use and users. While reassuring (to those of use who like to think we are sane), this division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and its attendant celebration of ‘normalcy’ hides the fetishistic tendencies that arguably inhere in much so-called ‘normal’ and supposedly purely ‘instrumental’ ICT use. In our Connected Homes research, we found that the collection and display of ICTs was common; nominally compulsive email checking and internet use were common; and among teenagers in particular, arguably excessive sms-ing and computer gaming were common. Whether these common practices amount to fetishised use of ICT is, in each instance, debatable. At what point, one may ask, does an interest become an obsession, and become a fetish? The boundary between an interest and an obsession is the product of a normative evaluation—an evaluation which serves to ascribe positive and negative values to a particular action, such as in determining whether a given ICT use is ‘acceptable’, ‘healthy’ or ‘excessive.’ As we have shown elsewhere (Arnold, Shepherd, Gibbs and Mecoles, 2006b; Shepherd, Arnold and Gibbs, forthcoming), this evaluative process in an integral aspect of the sociality and control of ICT use, particularly (but not only) as parents seek to influence the direction of their children’s ICT use and media consumption. In contrast, the designation of fetish is not so much evaluative (although it may be this) as it is an analytic achievement in which a generally unconscious lack, fear, pain or disempowerment is transformed into a conscious, fetishistic action and referred to an object, through which the subject may overcome lack, gain ascendancy over fear, replace pain with sensual pleasure, or regain a sense of control over oneself and the world. Despite the obvious methodological difficulty in the idea of fetish, we would suggest that too much of what currently passes simply as obsessive and instrumental use of ICT, might well be understood through the psychoanalytic mechanism of fetish as an emotional reinvention of the unconscious self through subject-object relations.

Following McCallum (1999), fetish may thus be understood not in negative terms as a problem or a perversion but as a positive strategy in the ongoing process of subjects’ negotiating psychical satisfaction. In this essay, we have sought no more than to give a preliminary orientation as to how the concept of fetishism can apply to ICT, and how ICT as objects and ICT ‘use’ combine to tell a story to oneself, that is about desire, is autobiographical insofar as it provides the subject-self with meaning, understanding and self-knowledge, and is a story that both negates and invokes lack, absence, inadequacy, pain or fear. In so doing, we would suggest that fetish is an analytically richer term than addiction for understanding particular kinds of ICT use, and we would encourage ethnographers of ICT (as well as those of panties, cars and corsets), to explore the ‘fluctuation between thinghood and spirit’ (Taussig, 1993: 217) that enables, as Steele puts it, a story to masquerade as an object (Steele, 1996: 168).

Authors’ Biographies

Michael Arnold is a lecturer at The University of Melbourne in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. His teaching and research interests focus on information and communication technologies in the context of everyday life. For further details please visit http://www.hps.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/michael_arnold/

Martin Gibbs is a lecturer at The University of Melbourne in the Department of Information Systems. His research interests include computer gaming, IT and the law, and the sociology of information networks.

Chris Shepherd is a research fellow at The University of Melbourne in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. His research is on ICT in domestic environments and ICT for international development from anthropological and postcolonial perspectives.

Notes

[1] All of Matthew’s quotations are drawn from video-tapes of our visits, from his Connected Homes Diary, or from his Connected Homes Scrapbook. The initial interview was conducted on 14/10/04, the technology tour on 26/10/04, and the final interview on 8/11/04. All names used in the essay have been altered for the purposes of publication.
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[2] This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery funding scheme (project number DP0557781).
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[3] Steele (1996: 6) makes a similar point in respect to the fetishism of fashion, as if it ‘made no difference whether an individual chose high-heeled pumps, combat boots, or a leather jacket’.
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[4] We thank each of the anonymous reviewers for drawing our attention to this important point.
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[5] The first sample of six households was drawn primarily from around the Coburg/Brunswick area of Melbourne, and the empirical research was conducted between August and November of 2004. The second sample of six was located in the new northern suburb of Springthorpe in Melbourne. Here, we carried out the research from August to December 2005.
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‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable’. (Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 1863)

Aesthesis

Modern aesthetics has always been concerned with the human senses in apprehension of art objects.[1] In modern aesthetic experience something is discovered, perhaps an inner sense of harmony or proportion, or some essential function of the human mind in relation to the sensory experience itself. But, in a paradoxical way, modern aesthetics denies sensory experience as foundational for human creativity, setting up a distance between inner reflection and outward sensory perception whereby an art object might be judged.[2] The senses are treated as suspect, misleading humans away from truth and into error. As Hans Robert Jauss has argued with respect to the emergence of aesthetics in early European modernity, aesthetic experience is:

a new kind of seeing which functions as discovery. From the point of view of religious authority, aesthetic experience is always and necessarily suspect of refractoriness: where it is employed to bring to mind a suprasensible significance, it also perfects the sensuous appearance and creates the pleasure of a fulfilled present. (Jauss, 1982: 4)

Thus modern aesthetics has always treated the senses merely as a starting point for reflection on the beautiful, the true and the good, but never as aesthesis, as the stuff of aesthetic experience itself.

Alan Singer points out that in the British philosophical tradition, aesthetics has lost its initial meaning of aesthesis, as sense ‘immanent to formal or perceptual complexity’ first proposed by Baumgarten in the eighteenth century (Singer, 2003: 14). Instead aesthetics has become concerned with the response to art objects in terms of ‘the aesthetic subject’ (15). Aesthetics has thus steered a course away from the creative exploration of the senses, and towards the rational formation of subjective aesthetic states. It is clear then, that philosophy and critical theory have driven a wedge between themselves and the art forms and practices to which they are addressed. To become more fully engaged, critical theory needs to re-address art works in terms of aesthesis: as immanent sense.

Aesthetics denies the senses by way of a “metaphysics of presence” in which human subjectivity is elevated into ‘suprasensible significance’ (Jauss, 1982: 4) through contemplation of art objects, or indeed, through contemplation of the world as if it were an art object. In this case, aesthetics retains an interest in the intrinsic beauty of the art object as an idealised appearance made present to a perceptive viewer. The senses are subjected to a conditioning process that makes them sensitive to form and to the intrinsic merit of harmony and proportion within the closure of the art object. In other words, aesthetics depends on a model in which sensory experience is reduced to that of a subject in relation to a privileged object, thereby setting up procedures whereby this relationship might be governed and maintained in the interests of producing appropriately disciplined aesthetic responses.[3]

In recent times, however, modern aesthetics as the contemplation of art objects has given way to an identification of aesthetic affects distributed through all forms of technical objects and experiences. For instance, Jacques Rancière proposes an aesthetics of distributed sense connected to the ‘mode of being’ of the art object (Rancière 2004: 22). Here aesthetics has shifted from a reflection on the subjective experience of humans to an objectification of experience in the art objects themselves as part of a distribution of sense within capitalist modes of production and consumption. Simon O’Sullivan, following Deleuze and Guattari, has proposed a machinic concept of aesthetics as ‘aesthetic effect’[4] : ‘here we begin to modify the notion of the aesthetic, to pull away from the metaphysics of presence, away from a transcendental horizon, towards a field of immanence’ (O’Sullivan, 2006: 22).[5] The subject no longer transcends experience in contemplative self-reflection but is formed in the immanence of sense.[6] In this case, aesthetics is not based on a conjunction of the senses in some preordained subject responding to the art object, but quite the reverse, on a break with subjectivity, and a release of the senses into experience itself considered as an immanent sensory field. Here we need to think of aesthetics in terms of experiential disjuncture: as the openness of aesthesis to an immanent field of sense.

A new found interest in aesthetics as disjuncture can be found in the contemporary digital arts, reflecting on the capacity of computer generated art works to dislocate and relocate sensory experience within virtualised interactive environments.[7] For instance, digital art theorist Anna Munster proposes that there is something specific about digital art that warrants special aesthetic consideration in terms of what she calls approximate aesthetics (Munster, 2001). For Munster, digital art produces a sense of uncomfortable proximity in the viewer by ‘creating zones through which the organic and the machinic become approximate to each other’ (Munster, 2001). Munster uses the work of British artist Graham Harwood as an example. Harwood’s ‘Uncomfortable Proximity’ is an internet site parasitic on the Tate Gallery’s official website, which exhibits ‘mongrel’ images of British art masterpieces mixed with his own and his family’s images as well as waste matter drawn from the local Thames River by which the gallery is situated. The aim is to deconstruct the authority of the canonical art work by making it come in contact with the ‘lost materialities’ of its immediate surroundings (Munster, 2001) . The image is thus opened to its affective history as a situated artefact within a localised environment that includes non-artistic elements and aspects that would otherwise be excluded in official commentaries and critiques. Munster identifies in Harwood’s artwork a mode of operating with digital images that shows how the disjunctive connection between the organic and the technological can be appropriated and reworked in terms of an ethics of historical repossession. Carefully avoiding the modernist imperative to identify an aesthetic principle in the medium itself, Munster proposes that the digital introduces a ‘particular kind of mediation…[that effects] the emergence of a spatiality and duration in which relative speeds and differential relations are foregrounded in embodied experience’ (Munster, 2001) . We might say that Harwood’s digital art involves a knowing entanglement in the material milieu in which it is embedded.[8] Rejecting an aesthetics based on the transcendence of the subject to experience, Munster proposes instead an aesthetics of disjuncture where the experiencing body becomes part of a digital aesthesis: an immanence of sense in relation to its own mediated becoming.

Munster’s identification of disjuncture within digital arts indicates a key aesthetic affect within contemporary art and culture, and resonates with Simon O’Sullivan’s recent call for ethico-aesthetics as ‘the organization of productive encounters “through” art’ (O’Sullivan, 2006: 42). Her idea of approximate aesthetics leads away from the contemplation of fixed art objects and towards a critical reflection on the material practices and processes of computer based art as aesthesis, or embodied sense. However, Munster’s proposal has some limitations. Disjuncture within digital technology should be understood not simply in terms of the specific technology in which it takes place, but in terms of technological mediation more generally, where what is at stake is the presence of one body to another. Although Munster’s argument situates aesthetics in aesthesis, it nevertheless confines aesthesis to the experience of digital art, and ultimately to some special capacity of computer based experience to produce sensory disjuncture. Insofar as digital art concerns embodied experience, then it necessarily becomes an extension of modern forms of technological mediation, as the mediation of presence through images.

Mediation does not resolve disjuncture into a seamless, homogeneous experience of full presence; rather it produces false or pseudo-presence in the form of images spread through communicative fields in which bodies come into mediate contact with one another in an ongoing proliferation of sense.[9] An aesthetics of disjuncture should thus begin not with the localised affects of disjuncture within specific technologies, but with a critique of the metaphysics of presence embedded in mediated image environments. To do this I will draw on Kant’s scheme for a sublime aesthetics outlined in the Critique of Judgement.

Openness

In this section I examine Kant’s sublime aesthetics as a site for the exploration of sensory openness within technologically mediated environments.[10] My aim is to show how the sublime can be understood as harbouring sense as aesthesis, or openness. Sense returns aesthetics to experience, not in terms of the experiencing subject, but as the potential for a subject to “be” within mediated yet opened environments.

In part 1 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant identifies two kinds of aesthetic judgement: first as a reflection on the beautiful, and second as a response to the sublime, or the experience of a subject when faced with formlessness, or the immensity of a power beyond imagining (Kant, 1952: 90-91).[11] The first type of aesthetics is well-known to us today as a mode of judging well formed objects predicated on the disinterestedness of the one who judges. The second type of aesthetics, in which the subject consolidates itself in the face of its imminent dissolution in experience, is also well known. It’s worth recalling what Kant has to say about this experience. Kant writes of someone wandering into St. Peters in Rome, overwhelmed by its immensity. The visitor is beset by a certain feeling:

a feeling comes home to [the spectator] of the inadequacy of his imagination for presentation of the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum, and its fruitless efforts to extend this limits, recoils upon itself. (Kant, 1952: 100; emphasis added)

Faced with the ‘formlessness’ of what confronts her, the visitor’s imagination ‘recoils upon itself’, leading to a negative pleasure in self-realisation. Through confrontation with formlessness, the mind feels itself empowered to contemplate the ‘absolutely great’ by making it reach the limits of its own powers of reason (94).[12]

Kant’s sublime is predicated on the priority of the subject already in place and readied for experience. Experience simply becomes that which the mind transcends as it recoils back on itself in pursuit of rational coherence.[13] But this leads us into a predicament. As Jean-François Lyotard has demonstrated, in Kant’s argument sense is simultaneously inherent in, yet extraneous to reason (Lyotard, 1994: 8).[14] Sense exceeds and overflows the rational formation of subjectivity while being necessary for its inner coherence (its capacity to orient itself within the intuited world of space and time). Sense is the immanence that makes rational thought and subjective experience meaningful, but which cannot be resolved to that thought or that experience alone. Consequently, we can say that the sublime contains the possibility of a further aesthetics in which sense is taken to be immanent – as openness to experience itself. In this case, formlessness, far from being something from which the mind recoils, becomes the potential site for an exploration of what a subject might be. The formation of the subject is not in an act of self-transcendence, but all in the doing and making within the terrain of sense understood as immanence, or the perpetually open terrain of the informe as the yet-to-come.[15] Here, sense ceases to be the preliminary feeling left behind in the mind’s transcendent contemplation of the absolute, and instead becomes aesthesis or the gathering of the senses in contact with the absolute as an open-whole (i.e. the immanence of sense to itself within an open field). Later in this article, I will identify aesthesis as contact with earth: the incessant re-materialisation of signification within technologically entangled milieu.

How is it possible, then, to describe sense without a subject? In Kant’s terms sense (‘feelings’) are always for a subject, inevitably associated with subjective or inner experience. However sense is also prior to the formation of the subject: a necessary condition for subjective experience but one which exceeds any limit that subjective experience might want to place on it (hence Kant’s construal of the sublime as “formlessness” – unassimilable experience). Sense without a subject is the body in its immanent relation with the world.[16] The body, as Jean-Luc Nancy explains, ‘is the absolute of sense’ (Nancy, 1993c: 204); a reserve of virtual material outside any interiority that the body might be said to have. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms sense is ‘flesh’, or the exteriorising of the body in its radical openness to the world reduced to pure phenomena (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 127ff.).[17]

The body-as-sense is not closed in on itself in its own self-reflection, but always outside itself the moment thought tries to capture it within the scope of a definition or system. In their immanent relation with the world, bodies no longer retain an inner integrity, but “dissolve” into ecstatic sensory flows interconnected to other flows within complex environments of sensory experience. Considered in this way, aesthetic experience is neither the contemplation of the formal properties of the art object nor the mind’s recoil from formlessness, but an overflowing of sense within the experience itself. An aesthetics based on immanence invokes the opening of sense to experience as an open-whole, as a potential to make new sensory connections and modes of embodiment through experimentation and creativity. The problem posed for a critical aesthetics, then is not one of unity (how does the body remain unified) but one of contact: how does a body touch?[18] To account for this problem, one cannot appeal to a subject. One cannot think from the point of view of subjective experience because the subject has not yet formed. One must try to think of a pre-subjective, singular existence: a singularity formed at the very edge of the body’s contact with the world.

The Unary Body

In this section, I develop the idea of contact aesthetics through a critical reading of new media theorist Mark Hansen’s proposal for embodiment as the site of creativity in digital media environments (Hansen, 2004). My aim here is to show how an appeal to individuated embodied experience is insufficient for a critical engagement with new media arts and mediated environments more generally, because it presupposes the very thing that it sets out to establish: the internal coherence of the experiencing body. Rather, as I have indicated in the previous section, a critical aesthetics needs to begin not with the presumption of the internal coherence of the experiencing body, but with sense as the body’s immanence in relation to the world.

In New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansen calls for an aesthetics of new media that has as its aim ‘the redemption of embodied experience: a renewed investment in the body as a kind of converter of the general form of framing into a rich, singular experience’ (Hansen, 2004: 3).[19] At the heart of Hansen’s project is a re-theorising of the interface between the human body and the digitised image, inspired by recent works of digital art. In a key chapter of the book, Hansen analyses what he terms the ‘digital-facial image’ (DFI) or the digitally produced avatar of a human face capable of interacting with a living human being (127-159). We are all familiar with this. A face appears on a screen. The viewer-participant speaks to it. It speaks back. It may even alter its facial expression in what seems to be a direct reaction to the viewer-participant’s presence.

Unlike close-up faces seen in film, the digital-facial image has the capacity to engage with its human interlocutor in demand for contact which is urgent: ‘what becomes urgent in these cases is the forging of contact’ (137). Hansen describes a number of his own engagements with a digital-facial image, and one in particular, a computer art work entitled Dream of Beauty 2.0 by Kirsten Geisler – an image of a young female face which seems to flirt with him as he attempts to make contact. However, no matter how much he tries, the face remains distant and aloof. Hanson cannot make contact. He only experiences a sense of thwarted desire:

The bizarre feeling of inefficacy and irrelevance with which this interaction left me…attests to the affective intensity of the DFI. The longer the interaction endured, the more I was confronted with the self-sufficiency of this image; and the more I experienced my own failure to make any real contact with it, the more intense the experience became, until a point when I simply could take it no longer. (142-143)

In an echo of the Kantian sublime, Hansen is overwhelmed by the encounter, forced back on himself, even to the point where he can ‘take it no longer’. But far from dissolving his subjectivity, the experience for Hansen provides a ‘rich source for the production of new individuations beyond our contracted perceptual habits’ (143). In other words, a bodily negation produces a kind of self-individuation, which, ‘carried over to the domain of the aesthetic…opens a recursive interaction between body and artwork: by actualising the virtual dimensions of the artwork, the viewer-participant simultaneously triggers a virtualisation of her body, an opening onto her own “virtual dimension”’ (144).

Threaded throughout Hansen’s discussion is a dialogue with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. For Hansen, Deleuze’s theory of virtuality leads to ‘a liberation of affect from the body’ (134), whereas what he seeks is something else: a virtualisation of the body ‘that reveals the origin of all affectivity in embodied life’ (136). In Deleuze’s terms, affect is independent of any particular body that might contain it, whereas for Hansen, affect is a creation of what might be called the unary body, that is, a body that touches itself first before it can touch anything else.[20] Hansen thus reverses Deleuze’s account of affect by retaining the priority of the unified body as the site of an originary activity: self-affection as the source of meaning.[21]

The problem with Hansen’s approach to aesthetics is that it cannot get around the subject/object relation implied through the invocation of a unary body confronted by the face of an other. The unary body can only react through negation, thereby affirming its autonomy in terms of auto-affection. This is a problem because it presupposes the coherence of embodied experience, thereby short-circuiting critical discussion of the body’s engagement with the external world in favour of what Munster, in another context, has described as the ‘sediment[ed]…power of a coherent self’ (Munster, 2000: 9/15). This problem is manifest throughout Hansen’s book. It leads him to argue that the body creates its own images through an internal process of enframing (Hansen, 2004: 11) – a short step from affirming the cogito as the true site of image formation thereby invoking the mind/body split and the presumption of a universal order of reason as the ultimate arbiter of sensory experience. Indeed, the cogito makes its appearance later in Hansen’s book in terms of neurobiologist Francisco Varela’s Husserlian theory of time consciousness in which embodied experience is replaced by the neural-perceptual dimensions of consciousness as an internalised self-affective mechanism (248-254).[22] Nor is the problem solved through any intrinsic characteristic of digital technology. There is no special quality of the digital-facial image that circumvents the representational logic of subject/object formation.[23] Rather, if anything, it binds the body more closely to the parameters of technologically mediated encounters, subjecting it to an increasingly complex set of abstracted sensory experiences that intertwine ever more illusively with the real.

What is needed, then, is a way of understanding embodied experience, not as a function of the unary body closed in on itself, but as embodiment in general: as the embodying of the world through mediation. In this case, the unary body does not disappear. Rather it is produced, not in terms of its own auto-affection, but as an effect of the encounter; a false unity that dissolves on contact with the outside.[24] Here, the encounter needs to be understood as an eventuating; as a way of proliferating embodied experience in general. Events are not closed circuits of calculated rationality for already constituted bodies, but experiences opened out to the world. Events always contain within them elements of surprise. The surprise of the event is its eventuality, or that which ‘brings contingency, unpredictability, and chance into the world’ (Dastur, 2000: 179). Events plunge bodies into life and its finitude in death. They make the body come in contact with an absolute limit, a real-world immanence of its own potential to “be”. In Hansen’s terms events are closed off by the circumspection of embodied being, whereas, what is needed is to open them out to an entanglement in being-in-general. In the rest of this article, I examine the possibility of accessing mediated events, not in terms of how they contribute to embodied being, but as technological gestures entangled in temporal becoming and fading away; to their “eventuating” as technologically mediated experience.

Singularity

To invoke experience without a subject is to invoke the absolute: the whole being of which any given experience is part.[25] All at once, at this time, on this occasion and no other – as singular experience.[26] In Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the absolute is experienced as a sense of the sublime; an overwhelming feeling of “too much” when faced with the formlessness of immense experience. Kant offers the sublime as a way of showing how the subject-in-formation is forced back on itself : ‘the imagination…recoils upon itself’ (Kant, 1952: 100) in a self-transcendence towards the universal. Experience is put in its place, assigned a rationality, in short – obliterated. Here we see the beginnings of a long line of thought that denies singular experience in favour of subjectivity as the foundation of life. Life is reduced to self-consciousness or emotional innerness, as if it existed independently of the outside environment in which it is immersed.

What then is the absolute of experience in terms of life itself, in its singular being? One must begin from experience itself and work out from that, from the contingent, singular occurrence of an event: an eventuating that makes something happen in just the way that it does and no more. One must begin from a moment of divergence, when something goes another way, when a thing or body moves away from itself. The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard provides a way of thinking through this problem:

To be, aesthetically, is to be-there, here and now, exposed in space-time, and to the space-time of something that touches before any concept or even any representation. This before is not known, obviously, because it is there before we are.…When the law comes to me, with the ego and language, it is too late. Things will have already taken a turn. And the turn of the law will not manage to efface the first turn, this first touch. (Lyotard, 1993: 179)

The body always has a first touch: an exposure to the world at the very moment it withdraws into itself as a unary being subject to the law of reason and discourse. In an illuminating article, Neil Curtis refers to Lyotard’s first touch in terms of aesthesis (Curtis, 1999: 254).[27] Aesthesis is the openness of the body to the outside, the gesture that makes contact with the world:

When I lie under the sky, my space is that which discourses of materiality and spatial organization delimit, this is the voluminous body. When I lie under the sky I do it at certain times dictated by discourses of work and leisure, and the amount of my skin exposed is determined by class, gender, history and ecology. The presentation of my body, how I lie there, to what extent and in what style it is clothed, are discursive practices. My body is completely inscribed and textualized – and yet my hand touches the grass and the sun touches my face. (260-61)

The touch of the hand on the grass, the touch of the sun on the face is the exposure of the body to world as an absolute outside, but an outside that is right at the surface of things.[28] The hand and the face are attached to the world first as surface affects, singular exposures to the world. An aesthetics based on a ‘first touch’ remains an attractive proposition for the kind of thing I am proposing in this article. It bypasses the subject/object relation by situating contact at the interface between the body and the world. It invokes sense as gesture: a primary factum in the constitution of experience. It should be enough for a contact aesthetics.

However, a problem persists. In its primacy, a first touch remains within an experience that it does not create. A milieu must first be there for contact to happen. I propose to define this milieu as the residual material of events that surge forth through time, as an experience of being earthed. The experience that Curtis describes is an experience of being earthed, that is, situated between the earth and the sky in such a way that the body senses a kind of involuntary freedom: ‘and yet my hand touches the grass’.[29] To be earthed in today’s telecommunication and computer graphic culture is to be bound to the unboundedness of materiality in its interconnection with the skies; to live life at the interface between the earth and the skies as an experience of the delayed/deferred effect of technologically mediated presence, as life lived elsewhere by being also here at this place at this time.[30] To be earthed is to be simultaneously unearthed by affects that come from somewhere else, from some other time. All experience is earthed in the sense that it is never free of an entanglement in technology and its power to produce falsity: the false sense of unary being, or the auto-affective body. In this case, the origin of affect is not in the body considered as a discrete unary form, but in the very potential for a body to “be” right at the interface between the earth and the sky; an interface mediated by technological presence. Contact aesthetics is situated at the site of this entanglement of residual technical material and potential being, as a point of disjuncture opening to the outside.[31]

Conclusion

We are now in a position to make some final comments on Anna Munster’s proposal for an approximate aesthetics. For Munster, approximate aesthetics is specific to digital art in its capacity to create ‘zones of proximity’ (11/15) in which different objects can be brought together to produce a disjunctive experience of bodily disturbance. This leads to ‘an aesthetics that connects to life as a process of composing/compositing the self’ (3/15). Munster’s argument relocates digital aesthetics away from a concern for experience as disembodiment and the abstractions of cyberspace, and places it directly into the specific locales of embodiment in which the art work makes contact with, and draws from, the experience of the world. But in so doing, she can no longer make any specific argument for digital art, since all art in modernity is, in one way or another, concerned with precisely the same thing.[32]

In their book entitled Formless: a User’s Guide, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss have undertaken a revision of the modernist art project in order to ‘brush modernism against the grain’ (Bois and Krauss, 1997: 16). Employing Bataille’s notion of the informe (formlessness as movement or slippage) they undertake readings of various modernist art works in which they detect a zone of indeterminate materiality between the purely visible and the carnal that leads them to conclude that ‘the formless is an operation’ (18). By following the movement of the informe within the art works, a certain materiality is exposed, and along with it, an entirely new space is opened up for commentary and critical analysis. Bois and Krauss’s work suggests the presence of a will-to-art in modernity which counters technological abstraction by dissolving it into its material base. This is certainly the case in Graham Harwood’s digital art works on the Tate Gallery’s web site, discussed by Munster as an example of approximate aesthetics, in which canonical British works of art by Turner and others are intermixed with waste materials found on nearby sites. However, a case could also be made for Turner’s work itself to be considered as an example of this kind of aesthetics. Turner’s art works are in fact a response to the overly formal art of the Academy; he wanted to dissolve form, to make the art work materially present to the viewer.[33] Turner employed various novel techniques to create texture to his canvasses that made them stand out as visual experiences rather than formal views. My point here is that an aesthetics based on the proximity of disjunctive affects on the body cannot be isolated to any one medium or art form, but should be proposed in terms of a general will-to-art in modernity.

What I am calling for then, is an expansion of Munster’s approximate aesthetics into a general critique of embodied experience as technologically mediated presence. The disjuncture between the organic and the machinic in digital arts that leads to an uncanny sense of distant proximity is symptomatic of all forms of modern technological mediation in which presence is delivered in the mode of its absence – as mediated imagery. Contact aesthetics engages with the image-sites of technological mediation by exposing them to their own material base, thereby releasing sense in direct contact with the outside as aesthesis. The outside is not the formless exterior of an otherwise integrated sensory interiority, but an open field of immanence that is ‘right at’ sense. Aesthesis runs through bodies in their exposure to the outside as immanent sense. As aesthesis, sense becomes available as ‘material to work with’, to create new forms or objective modalities for conditions and situations that have not yet been experienced, that are yet to come.

Contact aesthetics is both a critical intervention into the closure of formal objects and a practice of making new objects for life that has not yet arrived. It is both creative and experimental in the sense that it brings new things into life by undoing and reconfiguring the material of already constituted objects and formal arrangements. The aim is to release singularity, to make it go elsewhere, or alternatively to show how, in the historical case, singularity exceeds and undoes the objects in which it dwells. Contact aesthetics is thus situated at the very heart of life itself, as a return to singular experience in contact with an outside still in the making; as the yet-to-come to be inhabited by a not-yet-ready subject (Mules, 2002).

Author’s biography

Warwick Mules teaches and reads in cultural theory in the School of Arts and Creative Enterprise, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Education at Central Queensland University. He is the co-author of Introducing Cultural and Media Studies: a semiotic approach, and is currently writing on contact aesthetics. Warwick can be contacted at w.mules at cqu.edu.au

Notes

[1] The modern term aesthetics derives from the eighteenth century art theorist Baumgarten’s employment of the Greek word aesthesis to denote ‘a sensible image of perfection’ (Caygill, 1995: 53).
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[2] Howard Caygill identifies a tendency in Western modernity to transform aesthesis (open sensible pleasure) into ascesis (rational closure) (Caygill, 2003: 99).
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[3] See Stolnitz (1961) for an account of aesthetic disinterestedness in the eighteenth century through the ideas of Shaftsbury other others.
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[4] In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms a machinic assemblage is ‘an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 88).
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[5] The distinction between sense and affect needs some clarification at this point. Both concepts need to be understood by first subtracting the subject. Neither sense nor affect are “for” a subject, but both are the prerequisites for a subject to “be”. Sense is immanent orientation: the disposition of a body towards or away from something. To sense something is to feel its presence close at hand, to locate it as one body to another. Sense is the virtualisation of the body in an immanent sensory field. Affects are material intensities that move bodies but are themselves independent of the bodies that they move. Affect is free-floating sense, whereas sense is the body floating in an immanent field. But neither sense nor affect are free in any unconditioned sense. Rather, they always remain constrained by the assemblages and articulations through which power is expressed diagrammatically. Sense involves gesture and disposition, whereas affect involves capacity and tendency.
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[6] In his essay ‘Immanence: A Life’ Gilles Deleuze describes a transcendental field of pure immanence in which subjectivity is not transcendent but inchoate (Deleuze, 2001: 25-33).
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[7] Lev Manovich argues that new media art works have an ‘aesthetic dimension’ based on ‘a particular configuration of space, time, and surface articulated in the work; a particular sequence of the user’s activities over time in interacting with the work; a particular formal, material and phenomenological user experience’ (Manovich, 2001: 66).
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[8] A milieu is not the same as a context. A context provides a reason for the existence of any given element placed in it. Contexts are thus defined by causality and necessity. A milieu is a material rhizome made of global/local interconnections in which diverse elements exist side by side. The relation between elements in a milieu is affective, not causal. Milieux and contexts co-exist, the former as excessive to the latter.
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[9] The idea of mediation as immanent sense has been developed by Jean-Luc Nancy in his reading of Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung (Nancy, 2002: 50-51). Following Nancy, we might say that technological mediation entails the prior thought of mediation as immanent sense; as the ‘restlessness’ of being in its relation with otherness.
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[10] Problems with Kant’s concept of the sublime should not discount the seminal nature of his argument with respect to rationality and the formation of human subjectivity. Rather Kant’s concept needs to be taken as a starting point for a double critique: a critique of the critique of reason itself (deconstruction) and its relation to experience. As Iain Mackenzie has pointed out, the issue concerns the assumption by Kant of a certain unexamined correctness in the view that reason is always in harmony with itself and hence exempt from the very critique which Kant launches against the application of reason in the pursuit of knowledge of experienced phenomenon (Mackenzie, 2004: 16-19). The issue, then, is one of conducting an immanent critique of Kant’s own (problematic) critique, not to refute it, but to move through it in order to reveal a hitherto concealed plane of immanence (sense) in which reason operates but which resists reason’s transcendental gesture towards unity (31-33). Mackenzie identifies the work of Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, as an exemplary critique of this kind; as an immanent critique of both Kantian and Cartesian reason (28-29). But the work of Lyotard, Derrida and more recently Jean-Luc Nancy can also be mentioned as immanent critique (deconstruction) of Kantian critique.
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[11] See Gasche (1991: xxv) for discussion of Kant’s two aesthetics. For Kant, aesthetics serves as a bridging device to analyse the disjunctures between the different faculties in the operation of reason (Deleuze, 1984: 50).
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[12] The absolutely great is ‘what is beyond all comparison’ (Kant, 1952: 94), which is not to be confused with something measurable but large. The absolute is a limit concept and not a quantity. In his essay ‘The Sublime Offering’, Jean-Luc Nancy calls this the ‘unlimited’ that is, that which limits limits yet is not itself a limit (Nancy, 1993a: 35). The absolute is always close at hand, yet far away in its close-at-handness; an openness engendered by “the infinity of a beginning” (35). The absolute is the thought of the open-whole. These ideas can be fruitfully compared with Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura: the technologically mediated experience of distance in proximity within the scope of the absolute as originary access (Ursprung). See my article ‘Creativity, Singularity and Techné’ (Mules, 2006) for further development of this theme.
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[13] In Kant’s terms the sublime is ‘a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense’ (Kant, 1952: 98) and not the sensory experience itself. It is thus a recuperation of the coherence of the self-reflecting subject by rejecting outward sensory experience: ‘the sublime consists merely in the relation by which the sensible in the representation of nature is judged available for a possible supersensible use’ (133). Glossing Kant, Gilles Deleuze writes: ‘the faculty of feeling [i.e. sense] has no domain (neither phenomena nor things themselves); it does not express the conditions to which a kind of objects [sic] must be subject, but solely the subjective conditions for the exercise of the faculties” (Deleuze, 1984: 48).
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[14] Lyotard identifies ‘the “other feeling” hidden in sublime feeling’, (Lyotard, 1994: 232) a ‘dynamic synthesis’ of ‘heterogeneous elements’ placed in a ‘necessary unity’ (124). As heterogeneity, sense affirms experience through proliferation, as radical openness or exteriority without any inside.
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[15] The informe is Bataille’s concept. Bois and Krauss (1997) rework the informe as slippage within art technique, discussed in more detail later in this article. We might say then, that the informe is technical slippage: a kind of violent opening of closed, formal and technical systems. The informe as technical slippage replaces Kantian formlessness, as potential for new ways of being and doing.
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[16] Only bodies have worlds. A world is an environment in which a body exists. Worlds involve orientation, disposition, directionality, in short an entire geo-phenomenality.
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[17] Despite its exteriorising of sense, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh is limited by an over-riding concern for the coherence of the body in self-touching, and thus remains committed to the transcendence of self-awareness (consciousness) to experience.
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[18] Jean-Luc Nancy proposes that touch is the sense of senses; touch ‘makes one sense what makes one sense (what it is to sense): the proximate of the distant, the approximation of the intimate….Touch forms one body with sensing, or it makes of the sensing faculties a body – it is but the corpus of the senses’ (Nancy, 1996: 17).
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[19] Hansen claims to be following the lead of Walter Benjamin in the ‘Work of Art’ essay on this point. But, a more careful reading of Benjamin’s arguments here and in other essays suggests that Benjamin is not concerned so much with a ‘redemption of embodied experience’ as Hansen puts it, but with a critical intervention in the thought of redemption as it relates to embodied experience, and hence an opening of embodied experience onto the yet-to-come.
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[20] The concept of a unary body has been suggested to me by Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida, where he writes of a ‘unary photograph’ characterised by its ‘power of cohesion’ (Barthes, 1993: 40-41).
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[21] In an early essay (‘Description of Woman’), Deleuze provides a phenomenological description of the confrontation between man and woman by reversing Sartre’s intersubjective model in which the woman is understood in terms of an other projected by the man’s desire (Deleuze, 2002). For Deleuze, the other is “first” in the sense that it has a pre-individual objective materiality at the very moment it can be thought as other, a materiality of its own (an ‘essence’ of woman). Hansen would thus be following Sartre’s line in construing the DFI in terms of woman as man’s other, instead of seeing man as a subtraction from the other that woman is.
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[22] Hubert Dreyfus has alerted us to the problems associated with thinking of encounters with computer generated events based on Husserlian notions of internalised self-consciousness (Dreyfus, 1998). Invoking Heidegger at the expense of Husserl, Dreyfus proposes that we think of the event in terms of ‘the shared world…which makes communication possible’ (283), the dwelling in the world of beings in their concernful relation with one another.
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[23] See Roe (2004) for a discussion of the way computer interface experience continues to be defined by representation and the logic of print media interaction.
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[24] In effect the body becomes an image or image event: an actualisation of virtual material in a singular occurrence of imaging.
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[25] The absolute is univocity or being-in-general expressed in finite being(s). In this article I refer to this kind of thinking in a range of writings including those of Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Walter Benjamin, as the ‘thought of the absolute’ (Nancy, 2002: 23).
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[26] Singular experience does not mean the experience of the individual or individual experience; rather it refers to experience bereft of subjectivity, in its existential connection to the outside at this or that point of contact. Singularity cannot be thought without its interconnectivity with plurality, in Nancy’s terms ‘being singular plural’ (Nancy, 2000).
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[27] Aesthesis is of course the general term for the body’s sensory orientation to the world in an originating sense.
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[28] For the concept of ‘right at’ (à même) see Nancy (2000: 10).
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[29] Jean-Luc Nancy proposes that freedom is precisely the gesture of a first touch that withdraws from the law (Nancy, 1993b: 30-31). In aesthesis, freedom is sensory openness.
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[30] For a more extensive elaboration of the concept of the earth, see Mules (2005).
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[31] Paul Carter’s programme of ‘material thinking’ comes to mind as an example of the kind of aesthetic practice I am thinking of here (Carter, 2004).
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[32] Simon O’Sullivan points out that the disjunctive aesthetic effect is not confined to new media art but can be found in any kind of art within modern settings (O’Sullivan, 2006: 47).
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[33] Turner’s art practice is discussed at length in Gage (1969). See Mules (2006: 78-79) for a discussion of Turner’s art in terms of singularity, techne and openness.
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References

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Lonon: Vintage Book, 1993; 1980).

Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless: a User’s Guide (New York: Zone, 1997).

Carter, Paul. Material Thinking: the Theory and Practice of Creative Research (Carlton: The Melbourne University Press, 2004).

Caygill, Howard. ‘The Alexandrian Aesthetic’, in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds) The New Aestheticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 99-118.

Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

Curtis, Neal. ‘The Body as Outlaw: Lyotard, Kafka and the Visible Human Project’, Body & Society 5.2/3 (1999): 249-266.

Dastur, Françoise. ‘Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise’, Hypatia 15.4 (2000): 178-189.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; 1980).

Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Description of Woman: For a Philosophy of the Sexed Other’, trans. Keith W. Faulkner, Angelaki 7.3 (2002): 17-24.

Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: the Doctrine of Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; 1963).

Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001).

Dreyfus, Hubert. L. ‘Why We Do Not Have to Worry About Speaking the Language of the Computer’, Information, Technology & People 11.4 (1998): 281-289.

Gage, John. Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (London: Studio Vista, 1969).

Gasché, Rodolphe. ‘Foreword: Ideality in Fragments’, foreword to Fredrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991): vii-xxii.

Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).

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Canada proved to be the home of the most notorious Web hacker to date, “Mafiaboy,” a Montreal teen who intermittently crippled the Web sites of Amazon, CNN, Dell, eBay, and Yahoo! from 7-15 February 2000 by means of a distributed denial of service attack in which Web servers were flooded with so many requests for data that they were effectively clogged. He was charged under subsections 342.1(1) (unauthorized use of computer) and 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) of the Criminal Code (R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46) and sentenced on 12 September 2001 to eight months detention plus one year probation (R. c. M.C., [2001] J.Q. no. 4318 (C.Q. jeun.) (QL)).

Craig McTaggert (2003, at para. 81, note 112)

Introductory Remarks

On September 12, 2001, Cour du Québec, Chambre de la jeunesse, District de Montréal Judge Gilles L. Ouellet sentenced a 17-year old male hacker from Ile-Bizard, a suburban community on a small island (“West Island”) immediately southwest of Montréal, known by the handle Mafiaboy, to eight months “open custody,” a year’s probation (with restrictions on Internet usage and types of software), and a modest fine of $250 (due to bail violations while awaiting trial) to be donated to non-profit organization Sun Youth. Mafiaboy was 15 years of age when his crimes were committed. This sentence fell well below the potential two years (not to mention larger fine and longer probation) that would have been served under much less “open” conditions in youth detention. Since that time not much has been written about Mafiaboy and the case has faded from view, popular and critical alike.

During the winter and spring of 2000, this groundbreaking case of cybercrime in Canada made national headlines, preoccupied the U.S. Attorney General’s office, was brought to the attention of the President of the United States by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and tested the mettle of the heavily upgraded and retrained cyber-cops of the Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The highest profile of Mafiaboy’s hacking exploits against blue chip American Web sites took place in February 2000, even before Y2K jitters had fully dissipated. Indeed, mid-February witnessed the “high-tech summit” at the White House where President Bill Clinton announced new funding and program initiatives to battle cybercrime; counted among such problems was a certain suspect named ‘Mafiaboy’ (Schwartz and Cha, 2000). Mafiaboy’s arrest in mid-April did little to calm e-commerce nerves as a mere few weeks later saw the emergence of the latest in a series of rampaging and mutating viruses – “ILOVEYOU” – spread by an attachment through Microsoft’s Outlook Express email software.

For those interested in cybercrime in Canada and beyond, critical attention during the nervous first spring of the new millennium lurched between Montréal and Manila as first a Canadian teenager (local Montréal press underlining that he was an “Anglophone”) and then a twenty-something Filipino, Onel de Guzman, were apprehended with great fanfare. The differences, though, were striking. Mafiaboy was legally still a “youth” under Canadian law and could not be named; this fact was respected in the US and elsewhere. In one sense, the need to constantly repeat his handle accounted for the proliferation of ‘Mafiaboys’ across the World Wide Web, which also complicated the investigation. Importantly, it took US and Canadian investigators two months to identify and finally arrest Mafiaboy (on the strength of several kinds of wiretap evidence), whereas De Guzman was discovered and arrested in a mere 7 days.

Technically these episodes are vastly different, but their drama is structurally the same: it is built around the gap between authentication and identification, the time-span of which is limited before the computer event (the virus, the hack) is linked to an offline body; indeed, each time a major virus such as Melissa (1999), ILOVEYOU (2000), or Anna Kournikova (2001) circulates, the drama of detection is measured in decreasing increments, and wild speculation proliferates about the number of computers infected and users affected, not to mention costs in dollars to remedy the situation and the percentage of systems shut down (value judgments about a code’s maliciousness). The goal from the hacker’s perspective is to maintain anonymity (uphold the handle’s noncommunication with an offline identity) or defer their apprehension and, as detection time diminishes, to write program language that leaves less and less of a signature, an identification, a style recognizable by investigators steeped in tracking bugs and analyzing lines of code. This is how De Guzman was found: his strings were linked to a Filipino cell of programmers GRAMMERSoft (Greenberg, 2000). Mafiaboy’s exploits did not fall into this search for a signature in script; some critics describe the aesthetic and poetic components of program language (Aarseth, 1997:11), but Mafiaboy lacked such a style; some claimed he had no style at all. He wasn’t a programmer. He acquired an automated “rootkit” written by somebody else and then set it to work “anonymously.” Mafiaboy executed a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) – a “flood” of messages (packets) that by volume alone disabled servers unable to cope with the demands placed upon them – with borrowed script, in this case, a denial-of-service program authored by “Sinkhole” (although early press reports fingered a creation by a “mixter” called Tribal Flood Network). He planted a number of DOS agents on “zombies” – hijacked computer systems at universities, and remote-controlled the operation with his automated software, using the captured computers to inundate selected Web sites with data packets (numbered chunks of files). The sites included some of the biggest e-commerce operations such as eBay, Amazon, Etrade, Dell, Yahoo!, and CNN. The events of February 7-15 were, as Chandler (2003-04: at para. 15) remarks, “the Internet’s first big wave of DDoS attacks.”

The articles on the Mafiaboy case and related technical and social phenomena written by Kevin Poulsen, a former high-profile US hacker convicted of espionage but now a computer security analyst, are especially insightful. Poulsen (2000) cut to the quick: ‘He was just a young teen who allegedly got a hold of some pre-fab DDoS tools and, whipped into a frenzy by the .com attacks that were already grabbing headlines worldwide, launched a copycat assault of his own. He stupidly bragged about it on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). He behaved like a 15-year-old.’ A few years later, Poulsen (2003) pointed out that spammers have resorted to the ‘adolescent hacking techniques’ of those launching DDoS attacks. Poulsen’s point was the fact that the suspect turned out to be a 15-year-old teen was embarrassing in light of the so-called closing of what has been called “the knowledge gap” between the computer security industry and computer underground (Taylor, 1999: 78-81). The gap, it seemed, closed around a technically low-level and much derided kind of knowledge that fell far short of the “Mastery” that a brilliant hack (or “exploit”) would radiate (Turkle, 1984: 232). In short, the gap didn’t really close very much if this was all the security forces had learned. This is an important indication of the extent to which the case of Mafiaboy is a lesson about the artificiality of persuasive language and the limits of so-called “critical” categories.

Early in the Mafiaboy case, suspects were characterized in terms of how they took credit for their ‘hacking prowess’ (Schwartz and Cha, 2000). However, Mafiaboy didn’t fair too well in peer review, although he excelled in adolescent boasting. He was labelled a “script kiddie” or “packet monkey.” Both terms are derisive and place him down low on the skill level admired in the hacker underground; indeed, he was caught bragging to other “script kiddies.” He was “lowly” and a “kiddie” to his hacker peers because he didn’t write his own code; he was not so low as to escape notice, however, yet the fact of his discovery and arrest because of his bragging about his exploits conformed to a standard motivation for hacking in the first place (peer recognition; Taylor, 1999: 59-61), even if this was also seen as carelessness; one technician at University of California Santa Barbara, the site of one of Mafiaboy’s zombie networks, described Mafiaboy’s work as “sloppy” and he “left an obvious trail” (Vise and Cha, 2000). Investigators simply required the ability to analyze router logs of captured computers (at the University of California and University of Massachusetts) and thus trace the link back (“from…to”) to other hacked machines and a Canadian Internet Service Provider (ISP), and provide a profile of the behaviour of an account. Forensic analysis of router logs is a common practice in computer security circles. For a seasoned hacker/analyst like Poulsen, this was hardly state of the art knowledge, and did not warrant the status of a “milestone” in efforts to battle cyber-crime, as the FBI insisted. In some respects, then, the story of Mafiaboy was more virtual than reality. What makes the case compelling is that the categories and distinctions developed in the academic literature on hacker culture fit too perfectly the Mafiaboy case and circulate with ease across defense and prosecution lines, yet upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be empty containers and rhetorically hollow. The case of Mafiaboy is interesting because it yields so little, yet does so on such a grandiose stage. There is much to learn from Mafiaboy’s failures.

Why Study Mafiaboy?

While Mafiaboy was being excoriated by his peers, his lawyer, Yan Romanowski, was developing a strategy for his defense that reflects core issues in the academic literature on hackers. And it is this issue that warrants critical consideration of the case of Mafiaboy. RCMP computer crimes investigators and Crown prosecutors had already indicated to the press that the wiretap evidence they possessed of Mafiaboy’s intent to commit computer fraud and data mischief was overwhelming and beyond any reasonable doubt. Still, the legal defense strategy that emerged during the pre-sentencing hearing met the question of intent head on with the counterclaim that the accused was testing the security of the Web sites in question. The defense strategy that emerged in June 2001 was that the accused’s motive was “public service” and not malicious damage. As the trial began in late June, Mafiaboy entered a plea of guilty, with the proviso that he was a “white hat” hacker (opposed to a “black hat” cyber-criminal who hacks with malicious intent) conducting “experiments” that would ultimately help selected Web sites create better security systems. His hacks simply provided proof of security problems and at the same time were giant steps toward providing solutions to such problems; it was a simple trick: expose the fault and then deliver the solution. The point of his experimentation was to land a position as a computer security analyst. Evidence from his appointed social worker, Hanny Chung, was introduced to the court to the effect that while Mafiaboy identified with the “white hats” and wanted to share the results of his experiments in order to secure a position as a computer security analyst, his subsequent and repeated actions undermined his stated beliefs. Further evidence indicated that the accused’s father had earlier received warnings from the FBI in which it was believed that a computer in his home may have been used for illegal activities in the US; this led to the cancellation of the boy’s Internet account, rather than formal charges, due to lack of evidence. Ms Chung also reported that Mafiaboy showed little remorse, a statement hotly disputed by the defense. The effort to fend off the suggestion that the accused serve time in closed Youth Detention was met with the counter-assay of probation and community service, arguing on the basis of the non-violent nature of the actions, and that there was no reason to assume that closed custody would serve any purpose other than exposure to violent offenders, as well as evidence that the youth had learned from his mistakes. Mafiaboy’s belief that he hacked in order to test security systems was soundly criticized on technical grounds, including the unnecessary length and intensity of the DDoS attacks (more than poor experimental design, to be sure) at issue as well as repeated refusals to acknowledge posted warnings on software about the illegality of its application to public Web sites.

Although the defense was not successful, after all, premeditated criminal intent was proven and Mafiaboy sentenced, and the Judge went out of his way to dismiss as implausible the security test arguments, the effort to shift the debate away from technico-legal evidence, and psycho-social characterizations of the young hacker, onto the political stage warrants serious consideration. The case of Mafiaboy raises the question of the rhetorical limits of hacktivism, that is, the combination of hacking and activism, performed for political purposes, including service perceived to be in the public good. While this issue sits awkwardly with the characterization of Mafiaboy as an adolescent packet monkey aiming ‘high bandwidth, low-security [university] networks… like fire-hoses at innocent media giants,’ as Poulsen put it, it shifts cyber-crime into the domain of cyber-critique. The politically progressive defense strategy attempted to de-dramatize the narrative of pursuit and capture (the terms of which are outlined by Thomas, 1998: 398-99) typically responsible in media representations for elaborate yet stereotypical characterizations of hackers. Additionally, it sought to defuse the dangerous ligature between technology and the body that in prosecutions and sentencing of hackers has often included a strong element of addiction or “computerholism” (see Duff and Gardiner, 1996: 224 and Thomas, 1998: 396). A. Chandler’s (1996:250) study of media representations of hackers in the UK and US notes diverging symbolic economies – the former tending toward criminalization and pathologization, and the latter favouring cowboy and frontier motifs – but settles on one point: ‘the hacker has joined the rogues gallery of modern folk devils.’ In Mafiaboy’s case, the press repeatedly noted his baggy pants, augmented with loose-fitting jacket, Nike shoes and tees, cigarettes, and backwards baseball cap (the provision of such details have been viciously mocked on ‘tribute’ sites as tabloid-level reportage). No matter what else he was wearing, Mafiaboy struck a mediatized “gangsta” pose. Socio-semiotically, he was far from appearing as a “white hat” (problem solver) in any sense of the term. His mother went so far as to testify that he stayed up all hours of the night on his computer. His broken family and school troubles were widely documented.

Method and Key Questions

In studying the phenomenon of Mafiaboy, I was primarily interested in the media’s construction of this hacker in the Canadian context. To this end I gathered several hundred representative samples of journalistic reports (and supporting documents) available from the online editions of mainstream daily newspapers (Toronto Star, National Post, Montréal Gazette, Globe & Mail, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation transcripts from “The National”, most of which shared Canadian Press files). Due to fairly high degrees of redundancy among these journalistic sources, I included American reports from a few of the big east coast dailies (Washington Post) and diverse tech publications, as well as “alternative” constructions and assays in the US left-liberal (The Nation) and hacker presses (2600); these latter are important because they constituted direct counter-critiques of the handling of the case as it unfolded. There are thousands of “hits” for a Mafiaboy search on the Web. I selected material on the basis of the new and productive angles, details, and even tangential associations and divergences an item contributed to the overall picture. My basic operating principle was addition and the accumulation of facts and perspectives. The Judge’s decision (R. c. M.C. 2001 J.Q. no. 4318) was the yardstick against which I cross-checked facts.

Figure 1 – Key Dates of the Mafiaboy Case

Figure 2 – Other Important Agents and Events

For the sake of clarity I organized two timelines: Major and Minor. (Figures 1 & 2). The former concerned the key dates of the case itself all along the way from the precipitating events to Mafiaboy’s sentencing; the latter introduced other important events and agents – statements by notorious hackers, journalists, events concerning Mafiaboy’s father, filmmakers, etc.

From the outset the US National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) took an intense interest in the case, and information gathered by two key US-based security investigators was passed through the FBI to the RCMP early in the events timeline. The case of Mafiaboy, then, was never only Canadian; rather, it was North American with “global” effects. But the initial flurry of press in mid-February 2000 was attributable to the fact that the leading suspect for American officials was a Canadian (the parochial “Canadian connection” made national English news reports). The NIPC includes Mafiaboy as one of its “Major Investigations.” Although the bulk of the material I used was in English, I turned to more recent French sources in order to follow-up the story of Mafiaboy, who had fallen off the media map after his sentencing on September 12, 2001, the day after 9/11. As a personal note, when I attempted to place an op-editorial piece in a national newspaper the day after Mafiaboy’s sentencing, I was sternly rebuked by an editor and told that the real news was elsewhere. Circumstances of global proportions have erased Mafiaboy from the media map.

What I created for myself was a media dossier concerning Mafiaboy, which I read for content all along the timeline of events. I am not conducting a content analysis in the traditional sense of attempting to demonstrate trends quantitatively and on this basis make predictions. Much of the material was event sensitive – the breaking story, the arrest, and the sentencing produced reactive journalistic accounts with small, but significant, variations in how the story was re-presented. In the lull periods I found ideological and technical critiques, and after the dust had settled there was even a cross-media attempt at rebirth. What sort of content was I reading for? My goals were simple. I wanted to understand the construction of Mafiaboy as a hacker and cyber-criminal. I then mapped selected content categories onto the time lines. My two key content categories were “economic impact” and “main suspect attributes.” These were augmented by the “other suspects” around Mafiaboy, “security/legal opinions and counter-opinions” and finally “location.” (Figure 3) My orientation was backwards-looking rather than protentive-predictive. My analysis of content had the goal of generating contextual markers that would not only focus the analysis but actively prevent it from spilling over into the vast complexity of that moment in informational history. Of course, I do not deny that there were many other shadow markers of context at play around the case. For instance, the deflation of the dot-com bubble after its peak in March 2000 (at least in terms of the rise of the NASDAQ Composite Index) without question intensified the pursuit of Mafiaboy; the United States vs. Microsoft case was beginning to issue findings, media takeovers of gargantuan proportions were occurring, etc. The negative consequence of this strategy of critique is that it stripped the case of Mafiaboy of some of its historical contingency and situatedness, even if one could still say that such contingency stirs in any number of shadow markers.

Specifically, I wanted to answer two clusters of questions. First, what sort of hacker was Mafiaboy? This involved journalistic speculation and investigation into and about his personality and skill level. The literature on the construction of hackers as criminals (“crackers”) is well-established, and it reveals that such constructions are unstable because characterizations are plagued by historical associations with advanced educational expertise (gifted programmers), counter-cultural activities (Yippie phreaks), and teenage male hijinks (mischief-making), not to mention recent developments in the 1990s that situate hacking as a political practice (see Taylor, 2001) linked to the anti-globalization movement (“hacktivism”). Additionally, around the label “hacker” swirls the relational identity of computer security analysts working against so-called cyber-criminals, but from among whose ranks some of the most notorious have been recruited. This difference has been described as “manufactured” in order to erase the ‘uncertainty of the day-to-day exigencies of the IT world’ (Taylor, 1999: 116). While hackers may serve as reminders that computer systems are inherently prone to problems and that they must be subject to vigilant surveillance and technical upgrading, there is a ‘practical limit to how far this usefulness can be recognized and acted upon outside of a punitive framework’ (Taylor, 1999: 117). The enormous similarities between security professionals and hackers are foreclosed by an emphasis on differences, hurried along by the introduction of anti-hacking legislation around the world and stigmatization of the hacker subculture. In one astute Montréal Gazette report, the journalist observed of investigators at the Computer Investigation and Support Unit at RCMP headquarters in Montréal that they ‘share traits with the hackers they hunt down’ and noted that snapshots of a hacker’s room proudly displayed by one investigator ‘resembles his own office’ (Travers, 2000). Security staff are passionate about computers (‘they work at home, in their basements…’) while hackers are obsessed with computers. The CISU office itself was said to resemble a ‘hacker’s lair.’ This very passion for computers is a cornerstone of the hacker ethic: “free-rhythmed” creativity and intense sociality because of the strong desire for recognition, despite stereotypes that suggest otherwise (Himamen, 2001: 39 and 52). There are of course rather famous capitalist hackers. The hacker ethic of passion and openness offers an alternative to the “wired cage” of the new economy. Neither hackers nor high-level security analysts are “microserfs” in any sense of this pejorative term (Coupland, 1995).

At the same time the hyperbolic criminalization of hackers has been particularly virulent in Canada in recent years as the category of “cyberterrorism” has emerged in strategic studies discourse and circulated through conservative media channels, thereby symbolically uniting the hacker and terrorist. This is one shadow marker that is worth pursuing. What makes the Mafiaboy case so compelling, I am arguing, is that in 1999 then director of the FBI Louis J. Freeh was quoted in the ‘Report of the Special Senate Committee on Security and Intelligence,’ posted on the Web site of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS/SCRS), to the effect that Canada was a ‘hacker haven’ (CSIS, 1999). In addition, it was rumored that the putative leader of the hacker group Hong Kong Blondes, Blondie Wong, ‘is believed to live in Canada’ (Bronskill, 1999). This was undoubtedly based on the availability of a Cult of the Dead Cow publication of a dialogue between Blondie Wong (Director, Hong Kong Blondes) and Oxblood Ruffin (‘Foreign Minister’, cDc) that took place in a Toronto bar in 1998 and outlined Wong’s personal history in Canada (Ruffin, 1998). The dialogue between these two ‘Canadians’ was largely a political discussion of how hacker cells could help to put back together again human rights and trade policy by exposing and pressuring American corporations doing business in China; indeed, for Ruffin (2004) hacktivism means ‘using technology to improve human rights across electronic media.’ In the late 1990s the concept of cyber-terrorism circulated widely across several discourses. For my purposes, the most notable feature of this notion was the slippage it created between hacktivism and terrorism. To be sure, in the age of anti-terror legislation the equation has been simplified: hacking+actvitism+cyberspace=terrorism.

In 1999 Canadian headlines were screaming ‘Now terrorists can strike by e-mail’! (Rose, 1999) At the same time, strategic studies scholars were imagining the next face of war as cyber-biotech terrorism (see the essays in Kushner, 1998). As I mentioned above, there is a definitional slippage that allows for the collapse of hacktivist and terrorist. Two examples are in order. Denning (2000:15) explained that despite bleak prospects for changing policy through the marriage of hacking and activism, hacktivism nonetheless constituted an impressive set of ‘operations that exploit computers in ways that are unusual and often illegal, typically with the help of special software.’ Her typology included virtual sit-ins and blockades; automated e-mail bombs; Web hacks and computer break-ins; viruses and worms. Cyber-terrorism is defined by Denning as ‘politically motivated attacks that cause serious harm’ (2000: 24). ‘Serious or grave harm’ includes severe economic hardship, loss of resources like power or water, injury or death to individuals and groups. The elision of politically motivated hacking as a disruption to normal services and the inclusion of any such services under the rubric of serious harm proved irresistible to some journalists and academics alike (see Rose, 1999; and Stephens, 1998). By contrast, Taylor (2001) emphasizes the factor of ‘technological ingenuity’ shared by hackers and hacktivists, while embedding the emergence of hacktivism in the history of hacking, simultaneously drawing on established orientations like ‘technological curiosity’ and the ‘deliberate re-appropriation [subversion] of the original purpose of any technology,’ with civil disobedience. Taylor writes (2001: 2): ‘hackers have become more politically aware and…activists have become more technologically knowledgeable.’ The lynchpin is a burgeoning subculture, largely composed of youth but with multi-generational and sectorial tendrils, known as the anti-globalization movement. On the one hand, Mafiaboy’s DDoS attacks fit under the general heading of automated e-mail bombs. According to some reports, the serious economic harm he caused was more than a billion dollars US! Hence, by definition, he would be both a hacktivist and a cyberterrorist. He was only once seriously, yet non-specifically, labelled “terrorist” (hackers like him were described as both vandals and terrorists). Moreover, Mafiaboy was also recuperated as an anti-corporate crusader by a leading Canadian journalist aligned with the anti-globalization movement. Taylor (2001) also focuses on the potential of hacktivism to concentrate on an anti-corporate political agenda. Mafiaboy’s DDoS attacks on Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay and other e-commerce giants makes him available for inclusion by this political persuasion (Web histories enshrine February 7, 2000 as the day the Net’s big names were stopped in their tracks by a Canadian teenager). Ambiguity still exists about what sort of hacker Mafiaboy was since his inclusion under the hacktivist label for his anti-corporate exploits must reckon at some point with the centrist and largely neutral idea of “public service” based on an established point of hacker privilege: understanding and manipulating computer systems, period. But were these hacks nothing but, in the bilious language of Oxblood Ruffin, ‘script kiddie antics in [hacktivist] drag’? (Ruffin, 2004) After the fact the RCMP has even come to refer to Mafiaboy as ‘unsophisticated’ (RCMP, 2002). It is at once both a long way and no distance at all from the figuration of Mafiaboy as cyber-terrorist and public servant. These labels are truly labile. Neither is appropriate, as I will show.

Second, what were Mafiaboy’s crimes and how should the damage of his actions be assessed? There are general and specific issues at stake here: specifically, monetary estimates about the extent of the damage to potential sales caused by disabling the Web sites of major multinationals, and more generally, the social effects of the acquisition of computer skills. Are hacking skills taught in high school computer classes? Further, if we can understand what kind of hacker Mafiaboy was, it will then be possible to better situate his defense of experimentation toward security employment. Mafiaboy’s defense presupposed the evolving relationship between the hacker community and the security sector. The most celebrated may be apprehended, arrested, charged and convicted, but this very process has become more and more readily translatable into employment in the corporate IT security sector, or at least in terms of expert reportage on it. While Taylor writes of the differences manufactured between hackers and security, Thomas (2002: 87) focuses on the social relations between the two groups within the context of specific operating systems – with UNIX-based systems the relations are “symbiotic” whereas in the case of Microsoft products such relations are based on “extreme hostility.” Numerous examples could be cited to make these points. This neither means that a rapprochement between hackers and computer security analysts is taking place nor that the old hard and fast divisions and non-negotiable animosities are being buried. Rather, I prefer another explanation.

Mafiaboy may have also discovered the incommensurability of his imagined future as a hacker legend and corporate security employee, and his everyday reality as a computer loving teen whose curiosity passed over into mischief with data, and beyond. The choice of unreality over reality is common to group fantasies among youth subcultures. It’s a magical resolution of the contradictions of breaking security systems in order to be welcomed into the computer security fold and of living a dream of peer recognition and celebration, employability and even personal freedom, but alone, before the screen, still a teenager, living with one’s parents, in the suburbs. The early studies of Birmingham school cultural studies relating to youth subcultures, especially those of John Clarke et al. (1997), explain the “magical” resolution of the contradiction, by means of subcultural styles and group relations (“lifestyle”), by means of contestation of the dominant culture. Subcultural lifestyles can be quite “unlivable” or what we might say today, unsustainable, even if for a time, late at night, on the weekend, they offer marvelous imaginary, symbolic, solutions to economic exploitation, parental constraints, and vagaries of social mobility, which push reality into the background, at least until Monday morning. Hacking is no different in this respect, and Mafiaboy’s wishfulness did not stand up to the youth justice system, to the reality of high school, to the prospects of a McJob. But this was not lost on the Judge. Still, this does not mean that late at night, in his bedroom, before the screen, with his cyber-mates, Mafiaboy had not won for himself a space from the dominant culture (although hackers consider bragging on IRC to be totally “lame”; see Thomas, 2002: 139). But in this space he would not find an enduring solution to his predicament, especially through the symbolic mantle of untouchable Master hacker. His attempts at a more concrete solution through the demonstration of his skill certainly played in the media for a duration, but did not play out as a viable answer to the problem of career choice and entry into a profession. Everything in-between was still there.

Reading Judge Ouellet’s decision in this light makes a great deal of sense. The Judge responded like a seasoned decoder of youth subcultures. He argued, in fact, that his strategy was not to dwell on intent, for there was too much evidence to deny that, but, rather, on motivation. He considered the defense argument that Mafiaboy was only “conducting a test” the results of which would win him a position and/or permit him to develop better firewalls as ‘un prétexte ou d’une excuse que d’une réelle motivation.’ ['a pretext or an excuse rather than a real motivation'] (R. c. M.C. 2001: para 3). But in the language of the Birmingham school, Judge Ouellet then took up the power of the imaginary solution against its unlivable reality: ‘Bien sûr, en arrière plan, il n’est pas exclu que l’adolescent ait pu entretenir ce rêve ou pensée magique qu’en réalisant ce qu’il considérait comme un exploit, comme un “grand coup,” il verrait ses talents reconnus et que tous se précipiteraient pour lui offrir de l’emploi. Mais dans la réalité de tous les jours, la véritable motivation de l’accusé était de tester ces sites, non dans le sens de conduire une expérience, mais dans le sense de défier et vaincre ces systèmes, pouvant s’enorgueiller d’une éventuelle réussite et en retirer crédit aux yeux de la communauté des ‘hackers’ principalement.’ ['Certainly, in retrospect, it cannot be ruled out that the youth cultivated this dream or magicial thinking that, in carrying out what he considered to be an exploit, "un grand coup," his talents would be recognized and this would lead to job offers. But in everyday reality, the real motivation of the accused was to test the sites, not in the sense of performing an experiment, but in the sense of attacking and conquering these systems; boasting about his eventual triumphs would enhance his reputation in the eyes of the hacker community'] (para 4). The Judge’s explanation for Mafiaboy’s true motivation was peer recognition and he even goes so far as to state that an experiment would not have required an elaborate network of zombies. Nonetheless, the Judge’s reasons for the sentence acknowledge the imaginary solution and the skill required to carry it out.

My two key questions (or clusters of questions) are posed within the reasoned framework for a return to the case, that is, the issue of the rhetorical limits of hacktivism, a defense that is stretched to the limits of intelligibility.

Events Analysis

One of the most obvious aspects of the Mafiaboy case was that he could not be named under Canadian law (not even the boy’s initials, M.C. have entered into circulation, despite the obvious resonance “master of ceremonies” has in rap music culture and for the constructions of Mafiaboy in the fashion sensitive media as a gansta bad boy). In positive terms this meant for hackers that his handle or alias remained front and centre. In hacker culture the handle is privileged and the real name can be dismissed (Thomas, 2002: 132). This question of privilege “calls attention to the act of authorship,” Thomas explains (2002: 135) and calls it into question: an author is what a hacker, upon retirement (or arrest), will become, thus claiming for one’s own the acts committed under the handle; but while active the hacker remains anonymous, keeping apart online and offline identities. The hacker disappears once a connection between them is made. Mafiaboy retained his handle yet also disappeared; indeed, whether he was a legitimate author in the first place is open to question, at least by his peers. For one of the signs that the hacker underground is dead is, according to Thomas (2002: 139), that it is no longer really underground but accessible to anybody who can buy access to it. Mafiaboy’s actions, utilizing DDoS attacks, is a sign of the underground’s death and loss of vitality. A further sign is that the trappings of hacktivism can be used as a defense of actions that only offer a post facto justification.

In my Minor Events timeline I included the comments of well-known ex-hackers, the two Kevins, Mitnick (2000) (aka Condor) and Poulsen (aka Dark Dante), both of whom are enshrined on 2600’s virtual wall of fame. Both criticized Mafiaboy on technical grounds. But the counterpoint to these criticisms, as well as those leveled by security experts and law officials, was Naomi Klein’s posting ‘My Mafiaboy’ (2000). Klein’s posting in the form of a letter to Mafiaboy takes exception to the quick verdicts of Mitnick and others in favour, with tongue in cheek, of another reading: ‘At the risk of sounding like a “hacktivism” groupie, let me just say that some of us were able to decipher your encrypted cri de coeur.’ Klein’s defense of a mythic Mafiaboy who ‘hacks in peace’ is a masterstroke of political agitation and she is obviously willing to sound like a hacktivism groupie, but in a specific register of her own choice (with requisite mention of classic examples like the 1999 campaign against Etoys that involved Flood Net software and virtual sit-ins; see Grether, 2000). In recasting Mafiaboy as an anti-corporate freedom fighter within the anti-globalization movement, Klein expresses her belief that Mafiaboy was ‘committing an act of love…not for the integrity of a particular line of code, but for the Internet in general.’ And she also ironized the effect on hackers of the Internet’s commercialization: ‘In our culture of instant millionaires, computer hacking has evolved into an extreme job application process: Find a weak point in a system, hack it, then offer up your high-priced security services to fix it.’ In short, the imaginary solution of a Mafiaboy is an effect of the Internet’s commercialization. But Klein’s playful justification of Mafiaboy’s actions is parodic and an attack on dot.com millionaires and capitalist hackers. Mafiaboy did and did not receive the Klein ‘imprimatur’: his role was to condense and conduit the ills of a commercialized Internet. My timelines end with the proposal by producer Caroline Héroux, with screenwriter Martine Pagé, for Communications Claude Héroux Plus, of a grant proposal to Téléfilm Canada for a film based on the exploits of Mafiaboy. However, under the terms of Mafiaboy’s sentence, he is not to profit in any way – ‘directly or indirectly in terms of fame, reputation or financial gain’ from his crimes. To date, this proposal did not receive funding.

In Figure 3, ‘Canada’s Mafiaboy,’ I deploy five core categories in order to sort the contents of media reports. The most general is ‘Location,’ which simply indicates the passage from Toronto to Montréal, and from urban to suburban locale. The initial assumption that the ISP was in Toronto was refined as information became available and the focus shifted to Montréal but within the same company. The shift to Montréal was put in stark relief by statements reported in the press about how low, in national terms, computer use was in Québec[1] . All the while the security experts and investigators who came forward with information (correct or otherwise) were all from the US. The combination of Palo Alto expertise (Michael Lyle) and French Canadian locations proved to be a point of some contention when members of hacker quarterly 2600 set out to show that they had spoofed Lyle. As they explain: ‘When the name”mafiaboy” was first mentioned months ago, a couple of us hopped onto IRC using that nick. Sure enough, within seconds, we were being messaged by people who believed we were the person responsible. Amazingly, the person who fell for it the hardest is the very person now being quoted widely in the media as having caught the perpetrator.’[2] The lengthy IRC logs provided by the magazine include a few clues dropped: the use of “oui” and an explanation of why the takedowns were done as something to do on a “snowday.” As 2600 explains, ‘we were amazed when the blame actually landed on someone from Montréal.’ Fiction had become fact. In the absence of verification of the dates of the IRC logs (dated Feb 10), the 2600 spoof rings less loudly (but is a part of the journal’s steadfast belief in freedom of expression, that includes denial-of-service attacks as well), but nevertheless makes a clear and essential point about how easy it is to become a suspect – “change a nickname.” Indeed, what counts as “credible evidence” is also called into question by 2600 – for them it is fictitious. The 2600 strategy is to force the disclosure of evidence by any means necessary, calling into question the claims of private computer security investigators. That anybody using the handle Mafiaboy was suspect is shown in my reference to a young boy, Mafiaboy2, mistakenly contacted about the case in mid-February and forced to issue a denial. While Lyle was pursuing a certain Mafiaboy, De La Garza (among others) was chasing another suspect, “Coolio.” The 17-year old Coolio was contacted by security investigators and FBI agents in early March on the basis of a rumour about his exploits for which he jokingly took credit (AP, 2000). Although other suspects surfaced over the course of events – such as Nachoman and Sinkhole – the supposition that remained even after Mafiaboy’s apprehension and arrest was that the attacks of the week of February 7th involved more than one person. Mafiaboy’s friends became suspects, and the rhetoric about the “real culprits” waxed and waned according to the degree to which one valorized or criticized Mafiaboy’s computer skills. The prevailing belief among security investigators was that amateurs like Mafiaboy are likely “mentored” by more serious criminals, a position published by the RCMP, for example (CP, 2002). As the characterization of Mafiaboy became progressively negative, and his “exploits” firmly recognized as derivative applications, the search for other suspects heated up. To be frank, Mafiaboy would not and could not get any respect.

What can be learned from the qualities attributed to Mafiaboy? The overall effect is incoherence and incommensurability of terms. Two emphases are evident: downplaying the technical skill required to carry out the attacks, which occasionally permits a boilerplate description of the criminal whiz kid to slip past. Recourse to stereotypes of the cultural moment is not uncommon in the press. However, a further effect of the repeated use of the Mafiaboy handle was a barrage of soft demographic observations: the smart affluent bored white teen Anglo bad boy from the suburbs. Within these constructions could be found qualifications – that Mafiaboy wasn’t a computerholic; that he was self-taught, thus diffusing a potential panic about the uncontrollable effects of computer training in high schools. The distinction that emerged between white hat and black hat hackers – the former seeking system flaws in order to repair them and the latter seeking the same in order to exploit them – compromised Mafiaboy’s position when taken in the context of hacker subculture. It is simply not possible for a script kiddie to be counted as a white hat because of the derivative nature of the hacks in question (the title is unearned; Thomas, 2002: 42-4). Perhaps one can only say that Mafiaboy lived the label of white hat imaginatively and communicated this dream to his attorney. By the same token, compared with the low level knowledge of untrained end users (a derogatory term sometimes in the form of ‘luser’; see Rose, 2003:58) of computers, Mafiaboy did possess arcane and detailed technical expertise, yet this would not have had currency in the hacker subculture where ‘hackers make their reputations by releasing these bugs and holes in basic “security advisories”, by publishing them in hacker journals, by posting them online at places like The L0pht… or by publishing them on mailing lists such as Bugtraq…’ (Thomas, 2002: 44-5).

The question of spectacular and hyperbolic assessments of the economic damage caused by Mafiaboy’s DDoS attacks warrants a final note. Estimates of losses are just that – estimates arrived at by speculation and extrapolation: revenue losses, losses in market capitalization, costs for upgrading security holes, and repairing consumer confidence. These are potential losses rather than real losses or damages. The movement from millions through hundreds of millions to billions was never justified nor explained. Certain impressive numbers were produced by third parties like the Boston Yankee Group but they lacked foundation. The big numbers were consonant with the shock of the new (not the first DDoS attack but the first big wave against established names) and the space they grabbed as the major events unfolded in a highly charged atmosphere of highs and lows. But the big numbers did not enhance Mafiaboy’s reputation among his peers. The big numbers did, however, attract a united North American intelligence response.

Concluding Remarks

Ultimately, the Judge did not accept Mafiaboy’s explanation of why he hacked. Indeed, his peers were not impressed, either, and would not accord him the status of white hat. But Judge Ouellet did not balk at utilizing Mafiaboy’s interest in computers as a way to deal with the issue of recidivism. He rejected draconian suggestions by the Crown and social worker that Mafiaboy not be permitted to visit the Web sites he attacked and even use a computer for a certain period. Judge Ouellet turned the boy’s attention in the direction of finding more interesting and constructive challenges, such as gaining proficiency in multiple computer program languages. The end point was to have Mafiaboy himself discover this: ‘s’il parvient à acquérir la maîtrise de différents langages de programmation ainsi que la capacité d’utiliser et /ou de créer des logiciels d’avant garde, il pourra alors réaliser que ce qu’il considérait (et considère possiblement encore) comme un tour de force, n’était en fait qu’une action qui, bien que nécessitant des connaissances et des habiletés peu usuelles chez un adolescent de 15 ans, demeure à la portée de beaucoup de gens possedant des connaissances de base du fonctionnement des réseaux informatiques.’ ['if he can learn to master different program languages as well as the ability to work with and/or develop innovative software programs, he might then realize that what he considered (and may possibly still consider) a tour de force, in fact was only an action which, though requiring knowledge and technical skills not commonly possessed by 15-year olds, is within the scope of many people with basic knowledge of information networks'] (para 14). By focussing Mafiaboy on the question of the knowledge requirements for the real, lived passage from precocious 15-year old to skilled programmer, Judge Ouellet encouraged him to make use of his longstanding interests and talents. For the Judge, then, Mafiaboy did not hack in peace with a view to the public good; only “mythically” and “magically” was he a white hat. This decision was also reached in the hacker subculture proper, with the exception that the case itself illustrated the depths to which the underground had been dragged.

What makes the case of Mafiaboy valuable are the limits of the hacktivist justification; a good example of a bad usage. The defense arguments that Mafiaboy hacked in the “public service” broke down into a kind of imagined self-interest towards the goal of finding solutions to security flaws on storied ecommerce Web sites; they are rendered incoherent when taken together with the abilities of a script kiddie. Mafiaboy was not producing tools in the public or private service; he was not mounting a critique of global capitalism with a mass action; he was not freeing access and thus empowering Web surfers. At the same time he was not exploiting system holes for profit; neither was he damaging software nor hardware. His crimes were “temporal” in that he denied access to Websites for a certain time. Judge Ouellet even notes (para 7) that the big numbers posted as potential losses were not pursued by the vendors as damages – not one corporation came forward before the court to seek damages and it is this lack of cooperation that concerns him, especially in light of the phantasmagoria of media speculation about the case. This opinion has, I believe, oriented the RCMP toward building better contacts with ISPs, the tendency of which is not to report incidents of hacking but simply to quietly close accounts. The Mafiaboy case is cited as primary example of the need for a winning strategy (RCMP, 2002) given that ‘before [the big wave of DDoS attacks] four Internet accounts registered to Mafiaboy’s residence were terminated for hacking activity by three separate ISPs. Hacking activity from these accounts was never reported beyond the individual ISPs.’

Mafiaboy’s motives were “private” in as much as they concerned his own career, and his means were not very elegant and traceless. These latter considerations ran him afoul of the “digitally correct,” that is, those who would dismiss any DDoS attack on the basis of its lack of sophistication (Jordan and Taylor, 2004: 90ff). This position would a priori exclude even those well-respected political mass actions by means of Flood Net software undertaken by the Zapatistas (Taylor, 2001). Mafiaboy’s attacks were hardly MIT calibre pranks, either (Peterson, 2003). But Jordan and Taylor (2004: 77-79) contrast digital correctness with mass action hacktivism.

DDoS attacks are primary examples of mass action hacktivism. However, they are only part of the story, as Jordan and Taylor explain. Refining our understanding of “distributed,” the authors split this category into two: on the one hand, automated, server side operations by means of distributed zombies under centralized control; and, on the other hand, client-side, non-server concentrated, coordinated attacks by tens of thousands of individual computer users (all of whom have downloaded software at a particular site with a few clicks). One important difference between automated and client-side DDoS attacks is that the former requires a much higher level of technical skill than the minimal skills required by the latter (indeed, in this instance all sorts of hardware and connections are being used, some not very up to date and slow). This makes client-side DDoS inefficient, but mass, whereas the automated, Mafiaboy-type attacks require a higher level, but not ultimately, a sufficiently high level of technical ability to garner respect. Only the mass client-side attack has “ethical” status because it is seen as a genuinely activist response, such as the Electrohippies Collective action against the World Trade Organization’s Web site during the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999 (Jordan and Taylor, 2004: 77).

In the end, the case of Mafiaboy reveals the rhetorical limits of hacktivism as a defense for an automated DDoS attack, yet does not disqualify him from hacker status for, after all, as almost everyone involved acknowledged in one way or another, to hack is to believe, at the simplest, in one’s action, and this is an ‘idealization’ (Jordan and Taylor, 2004: 9) often lived virtually. Yet if this means that the critical distinctions that define the hacker underground are open to widespread abuse and appear empty, at least in the case of Mafiaboy, what does this say about the underground’s ability to control its own boundaries? That hacker notables denounced Mafiaboy’s actions, parodied and even baited security analysts, shows us that the subculture has its border rangers but is fighting a difficult battle to win back its means of identity formation and control the terms of membership. That some of its key defenders are now on the other side, having passed through magical thinking and into security analysis and expert technical reportage, some via prison, suggests that legitimation has its burdens, that is, the burden to try and exclude from the ranks those who pretend to the code of belonging, even if parts of the code have become fuzzy in the process and are now available to all those who would like to try them on for size. Under these conditions the time, energy and collective willpower required to expose a poseur places an enormous burden on the ranks and resources of hacker subcultural groups.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the assistance of Scott Thompson, research assistant in my Technoculture Lab, for his work on the Matrix-style figures accompanying this article. We thank the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Lakehead University, for their ongoing support. I would also like to thank Dr. Paul A. Taylor (Leeds University), as well as the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, for their helpful comments.

Author’s Biography

Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. His recent work has focused on the intersections of administrative technology, race, and alcohol in historical context. He is currently working on ‘Phreaking the Maple Leaf’ – Canadian hackers, phreakers, and anti-surveillance cyborgs.

Notes

[1] Is there anything to be learned from the newspaper wag who pointed out the irony that Mafiaboy was operating in Québec, one of the provinces where Internet use lags far behind Canadian usage rates? Couldn’t the opposite be asserted – that an “underdeveloped” location provides greater opportunities given lax governance of ISPs and weak industry oversight mechanisms, for rogue elements to operate successfully over a greater period of time? Neither hypothesis is very satisfying, to be sure. But that doesn’t change the obvious. From 1999-2003, Québec households lagged well behind the Canadian average in every category of sites from which the Internet is accessed, according to Stats Can, and was second last overall (in front of New Brunswick) with regard to any location (home;work;school;public library;other), and third last in access from home (in front of Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick) (2005). Perhaps these matters are less relevant than the metropolitan figures. Montréal exceeded the Québec average for access from any location (58.7% of households as compared with 54.9%), but was below the provincial figure for access from home (48% – 44.5% in 2003). Both these numbers rank far below Canadian figures for the same year (all locations 64.2% and home access 54.5%). One would be wise to look for two factors at work: the failure of ISPs to reach the mass home market, and cultural ambivalence toward home Internet access, as well as rates of computer ownership with or without such access, not to mention demographic issues, dense and sparse clusters of access around university centres, etc. (Statistics Canada, 2003)
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[2] See the provocation ‘Is Mafiaboy Real or a Creation of the Media?’, http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/327
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A perennial issue for digital politics has been the debate between those who claim a liberatory role for digital technologies and those who see them as instruments for a more effective oppression. We prefer to avoid such abstract oppositions and ask more specific questions: what kind of digital technology, used in what way by whom, for what purposes in what contexts, may support the efforts of those who work for a better, more open society? To focus our enquiry we look at the intersection of digital systems and “planning”. “Planning” in a general sense is a fundamental human activity in all societies exercising the “rationality” that has come to define humanity since the ancient Greeks. Yet the dominant form of planning in western societies today employs a specific form of ‘rationality’ which has emerged only recently, labelled ‘Occidental rationalism’ by Weber (1930:26), which insists on crisp, clear categories and a linear, reductive logic. Starting with Weber himself there has been a continuous tradition of critique of this form of reason, which we will categorize as linear reasoning.

In spite of the many inconvenient or worse consequences of this form of rationality as applied to human societies, it has maintained an unassailable position because it has been seen as inseparable from science, which has been presented as based on the same principles of rationality. Digital technologies have developed within science, and naturally incorporated these principles of reason in their conceptual foundations. This gives a special value in this context to what have been called chaos and complexity theories. These also developed within science, yet contain a highly developed, fully scientific alternative to linear rationality (see e.g. Law, 2004). These theories allow us to take full cognisance of the fluid, dynamic, turbulent situations which constantly challenge the reductive linearity of modern planning. They also allow us to re-think the possibilities for digital technologies in non-linear planning processes, going beyond the unholy alliance of linear digital technologies and linear planning.

By non-linearity we mean that what we are dealing with is a sequence of states at different points in time which are not characterisable in terms of linear causal relationships. Instead they manifest a variety of complex, reciprocal relationships and feedback loops. In mathematics, a system is understood to be linear if there is a constant proportional relationship between changes in one quantity and those in another. By contrast, behaviour within a non-linear system cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. While the equations describing such systems can sometimes be solved straightforwardly, making precise prediction within the system possible, this is generally not the case. It may be possible to make do with linear approximation and extrapolation (the traditional planning approach), but such simplifications inevitably break down over sometimes quite short time-frames. We are not proposing that it is desirable or even possible to model mathematically the dynamics of cultural relations within the geographical region we are interested in to the degree which would make a formal planning “system” operational. What we hope to achieve here is to demonstrate that we can gain insights from domains of non-linear dynamics where more formal methods have proved to have some traction on problems of prediction and control.

In this spirit we want to explore issues and possibilities for digital technologies to assist in a kind of revolution in one particular place, the spot on the planet where the two authors currently live, Western Sydney. Western Sydney, like similar regions, is “chaotic”, highly complex and unpredictable, incomprehensible without reference to multiple regional and global articulations, constituted by countless internal networks, actual and virtual, which give it a distinctive footprint in cyberspace itself. Our aim is not simply to describe this situation but also to dream: dreams that are shaped by this particular place and time, however much they also aspire to transcend them. (See Lally and Lee-Shoy, 2006 for an elaboration of this argument that the ‘postsuburban’ conditions of Western Sydney require a multiscalar and network-oriented response.)

Within the planning regimes of local government we focus on ‘cultural planning’. Cultural planning is ambiguously related to the broader enterprise of planning in New South Wales. It tends to be big on beautiful ideas and small in budget. Cultural planners as a profession show admirable levels of idealism, dedication and creativity on modest salaries with meagre resources, striving to benefit their communities.

We hope to find new uses of new technologies to help to enfranchise this valuable class of people and their communities as digital citizens. This is also a useful site for chaos-inspired interventions. In practice, cultural planning acts as a residual category to contain all the issues left over from linear planning. If it were less isolated from information resources, it might play an urgently needed role in re-framing the planning process itself, to cope better with what Law (2004) calls the ‘mess’ of social life.

Digital Utopias as Planning

Discourses of digitality are prone to euphoric, utopian claims about the brave new world just around the corner or almost already here (see e.g. Negroponte, 1996; Gates, 1999). So is Big Planning. Both use linear thinking to project a small number of features isolated in the present into a simplified future constructed in their terms. Digital prophets have as bad a record at prediction as Big Planners. But prediction is not the only intellectual use of utopias. Thomas More invented the word in the 16th century to project an ideal country to critique his own (1556/1999). Every utopia has this double face, both plan and critique, apparently looking to a future which normally never comes, yet also encoding critiques and guidelines for change. It is in this combination of prediction and critique that we can begin to find more complex approaches to digital planning. The complexity we are referring to tends to shift things from the linear to the non-linear. Although the projection may seem linear in the utopias involved, non-linearity often lurks in the critiques or dreams.

This complexity can be seen even in the countless digital mini-utopias constructed by IT advertisements. We illustrate with a typical example, a 2005 advertisement for Microsoft Office. The picture shows an office with paper everywhere on a desk. An old-style computer print-out runs onto the floor. Two men sit with dinosaur heads stuck onto their bodies, one with arms crossed, the other holding his head in frustration, both in evident despair. A brightly coloured third dinosaur brings a pile of paper to one despondent dinosaur, like a female secretary. The heading says: ‘The I CAN’T DEAL WITH ALL THIS DATA era is over’. These dinosaurs are then challenged:

Microsoft® Office has evolved. Have you? Is information overload a daily challenge for you and your team? Today’s Microsoft Office has improved screen layouts, time-saving features and email management tools to help you better manage your workload… It’s time to evolve the way you work. Discover how at Microsoft.com.au/office. (Daily Telegraph May 24, 2005:16)

The intended point is that the latest version of Microsoft Office supersedes all previous versions, but this point is complicated by the way the text uses the grand trope of evolution, with digitality the marker of progress. This supposed process plays itself out on different scales, producing complex and contradictory concepts of evolution, which give different takes on digitality. At the largest scale is the evolution of species, from dinosaurs to humans in one mighty leap. This mirrors an implicit progression, from the pre-digital era to the digital office, and now an evolution within the digital era which is the focus of the advertisement.

In this two-stage progression, stage 1 of digital evolution saw computers producing two kinds of problem: failures at the interface with human users, and excessive data. The productivity which seemed digital technology’s evolutionary edge over print turned out to produce unexpected problems. Chaos and disorder were paradoxical products of this symbol of order, desk top computers and office software. By stage 2, human users have reclaimed control, thanks to the latest Microsoft Office, though the claims are modest and evolutionary. ‘Improved’ screen layouts help to ‘better’ manage workloads. This is not a new concept and certainly not a new brand. This utopian vision of an office saved by Microsoft is carried through images of its opposite, the frustrations of digitality as experienced by the current generation of users. This critique of the limitations of linear systems (of the past) comes not from an anti-digital Luddite but from a major digital player.

Similar complexities can be seen in more academic proposals for a digital utopia. Pierre Lévy also uses the evolution trope as he proclaims a new stage in humanity associated with digital culture:

The development of digitally controlled cognitive prostheses is transforming our intellectual capabilities as clearly as the mutations of our genetic heritage. The new technologies of communication through virtual worlds have altered the formulation of the problem of the social bond. In short, hominization, the process of the emergence of the human species, is not over. In fact it seems to be accelerating. (1998:xxiv)

Lévy’s vision seems simple and positive, but some ambiguities lie in wait under his words. ‘Digitally controlled’ sounds fine, but who is doing the controlling? In a stage-1 Microsoft Office office, workers wonder whether they are controlling the ‘prostheses’ or are being controlled through them, whether digitality itself to some extent controls them both. These bewildered workers have their capabilities transformed, but not enhanced, even according to Microsoft. In stage 1 of the digital, the ‘social bond’ is rendered problematic by this technology, with only the female dinosaur performing her traditional gendered role, untouched by evolution or distress. The linear acceleration Lévy claims in the rate of hominization is complicated by an uncoordinated rate of change in the technology that passes from one “era” to the next in a decade. If linear thinking in the past produced unexpected complexity, what guarantee does Lévy have that it will not do so in his future?

However, Lévy’s vision, as utopian possibility, with its design features in a blueprint for the future, again carries a critique of the present as much as a proposal for the future. He calls the utopian possibility ‘collective intelligence’, a capacity for individuals to share in the production and use of knowledge on a greater scale than has been possible before.

First, we will have at our disposal simple and practical means for knowing what we are doing as a group. Second, we will be able to manipulate, much more easily than we are able to write, the instruments for collective utterance. (1998:xxviii)

His language here as elsewhere moves ambiguously between prophecy and proposal. What interests us here is the implicit critique of the past and the limited parameters – tending towards multiple forms of exclusion – it specifies for future designs. His ‘we’ may be problematic, but here it is grounded in the ‘group’ constituted by this broad and complex collective act of knowing, which Lévy insists should be as inclusive as possible. For these purposes, the vagueness involved is productive. The means for knowing must be ‘simple’ and ‘practical’, but this is precisely because the world to be known and the social structures of the knowers have become more complex.

There is a paradox here so crucial that instead of trying to eliminate it (as linear rationality would dictate) we propose to include it in our basic design specifications. ‘Simple’ means for knowing must at the same time recognize and do justice in a ‘practical’ way to the extreme complexity facing those who seek to plan and act intelligently in the world today.

The Microsoft ad seems to be about computer systems, but also carries surprising messages about digitality and planning on the micro-scale, the dangers of mere linearity and the need for these systems to be set in a more complex framework, in order to deliver the claimed simplicity. Lévy’s vision is poor prophecy but invaluable in setting goals for developments in digital technologies and uses, as they serve multiple human purposes in a complex, chaotic world. That is how we intend to use his ideas in our own more practical project, to adapt existing digital technologies to serve the needs of a single complex community.

Planning and Digitality in a Complex World

So far we have referred to chaos and complexity in everyday terms, as self-evident properties of the modern world which is the object of planning, mediated and acted on by digital systems. It is time to clarify how our approach to digital planning relates to Chaos Theory more specifically. Chaos Theory is used in a wide range of sciences, and has been widely expounded in popular science (see e.g. Gleick, 1988; Hall, 1992), with some attempts to use it within the social sciences (Hayles, 1990; Guattari, 1995; Gates, 1999; Coronado and Hodge, 2004). “Complexity”, a complementary term for a heterogenous set of ideas related to Chaos Theory, has also proved popular (see especially Thrift, 1999; Urry, 2003; Couldry, 2000; Law and Mol, 2002). But in the social sciences the deployment of Chaos Theory and “complexity” remains problematic. There is no orthodoxy to refer to, no consensus to fall back on.

As a symptomatic instance, Lévy is aware of Chaos Theory, but sees it as a parallel development in science, not a body of theory that is at the heart of understanding his new world and its new forms of knowledge, its new species.

The deterministic chaos and fractal objects studied by the natural sciences echo the fads, erratic behaviour and randomness that now characterize the human world. (1998:199)

In footnotes he refers to the ideas of Prigogine, Lorenz and Mandelbrot, which provide a good starting point for our own brief inventory of concepts and analytic tools to apply to digitality, to the subjects and objects of the technology and to the planning process. We are not suggesting here that it is only the precise methodologies (the mathematics for example) drawn from these ideas that are useful to digital planning (although they might be). Rather we draw, sometimes loosely, sometimes more precisely, on the principles involved in order to bring some significant innovations to cultural planning.

Chaos theory implies an ontology in which the world is characterised by significant non-linear complexity. This makes the principles behind Chaos theory very useful within the contemporary social world. Here there is a wide-spread sense that levels of complexity today are rising in every aspect of the contemporary world, in the social sphere and in the semiosphere of circulating meanings, affecting and affected by events in cyberspace. Practices derived from the principles of Chaos theory can therefore provide significant re-orientations to the way planning is understood and carried out. Such practices can perhaps begin to answer some of the dilemmas of planning, recognised before the development of Chaos theory. For example, Ashby’s famous Law of Requisite Variety (1961) is a salutary check on linear utopian projects: a control system must have the same ‘variety’ as the system being controlled. Given that a plan is a mechanism of control, this implies that its supporting information system must incorporate the variety of what is being controlled, a diverse society. This variety minimally encompasses the three main elements that make up the planning process: planners, the world they plan for, and the technologies they use to understand and manage it.

In this spirit we will introduce a brief tool-kit of concepts drawn and adapted from theories of chaos and complexity which we have found especially useful in thinking about key issues of planning and digital systems.

1. Far-from-equilibrium dynamics. Here the key theorist is Ilya Prigogine, (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984) who proposes that natural systems (including social and biological systems) exist in three fundamentally different conditions, which have very different properties. Systems at or close to equilibrium have simple structures, little or no movement, and are highly predictable. Chaotic “systems” are so random that they are barely systems, though they still have typical behaviours. Between these two extremes are systems which are far from equilibrium but at the edge of chaos, not beyond. Systems in these conditions are typically non-linear, and cannot be precisely described or predicted. Causes can have disproportionate effects, and they can act over surprising distances.

One phenomenon which illustrates far-from-equilibrium properties well is the so-called ‘butterfly effect’ proposed by Edward Lorenz (1995). According to the metaphor, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in the Andes may “cause” (or more precisely, introduce a tendency in a chaotic system whose outcome is) a hurricane in Beijing. The point of the metaphor is not that Andean butterflies should all be exterminated before they do more damage. It is that in a chaotic situation, it is not clear till after the event just what might prove a decisive input, or what its effects might be.

There are two major implications for planning and digitality. If Prigogine is right, then the further from equilibrium a situation is, the more inadequate linear planning will be, especially over time. The extrapolations common to Big Planning and digital utopianism will be increasingly misleading. “Butterfly effects’” will defy the predictions of linear planning. Yet they are not alien to computers. On the contrary, they were first identified through computer modelling.

However, Chaos Theory also offers a framework for more positive and constructive responses to chaos. Prigogine is not pessimistic about far-from-equilibrium conditions. He claims that all complex forms in sociology and biology emerge in far-from-equilibrium conditions (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984: 13-14, 312). Close-to-equilibrium forms are easy to predict because they are so limited in scope and complexity. Far-from-equilibrium forms can be richer and more functional than any reality projected by linear logic. They can also be planned for, using a non-linear logic and a non-linear form of planning, based on a non-linear analysis of non-linear data. Digital systems, suitably adapted, can contribute to this kind of process. Although, because non-linear events are not predictable in the same way as linear events, this significantly shifts our understanding of the forms and assumptions of planning as a cultural process.

2. Fuzzy logic. Contradiction and indeterminacy are two basic features of complex, far-from-equilibrium systems. The engineer Lotfi Zadeh devised a new kind of logic to deal with situations which could not be resolved by classic Aristotelian (binary) logic. Fuzzy logic is designed to deal with contradictions, where an element may be classified as both A (in some respect or to some degree) and not-A. Paradoxically, in the hands of engineers this logic leads to better control systems, not less capable ones, and the same is true of planning. Computers programmed with fuzzy logic can perform complex tasks better than with linear logic (Kosko, 1984: 38-39). Zadeh connected his account of fuzziness with an idea paralleling Prigogine’s, that different rules apply under different conditions of equilibrium:

As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour diminishes until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics. (1973: 28)

In other words, there are unavoidable trade-offs between the precision with which we can describe the planning context and the relative significance attributed to the various components of that description. This observation has direct implications for planning in complex situations, and for the form in which data must be encoded to support it.

3. Complex, dynamic change. Another characteristic of the situation planners now face is greater dynamism. Change is faster and less predictable than the simplifying assumptions of linear planning can take account of. Tsoukas and Chia (2002) argue that traditional approaches to organizational change have privileged stability, routine, and order. Structuralist epistemologies, they suggest, have a blind spot about change, and as a result, change has been treated as exceptional rather than inevitable:

It is now realized, across scientific fields, that we are lacking the vocabulary to meaningfully talk about change as if change mattered–that is to treat change not as an epiphenomenon, as a mere curiosity or exception, but to acknowledge its centrality in the constitution of socio-economic life (2002: 569).

This reasoning can be illustrated through the example of Saussure, writing about the relation between “synchronic” (same time) and “diachronic” (across time) structures. In a famous argument he claimed that ‘never is the system modified directly. In itself it is unchangeable’ (1917/74:84). That is, change happens all the time, but never synchronically, ‘in language’, only from a point of view outside language, in diachrony. Linguistic and other systemic forms of change cannot be studied by structuralist methods

Saussure recognised this as a dilemma for structuralism, a problem he bequeathed to later structuralists. In 1926, in a different field, Werner Heisenberg both recognized and pointed to a resolution of this dilemma, in his ‘Uncertainty principle’. This mathematically demonstrated, for conditions at the quantum level, that ‘it is not possible to describe both momentum and position of a particle at the same time, with a given degree of precision’ (1989). Scientists typically limit the application of this principle to the processes of measurement within the quantum world. However, the principle may have a wider application. Ilya Prigogine (Prigogine and Stengers,1984:222-4) has famously suggested that Heisenberg’s proof applies to all cases where two dimensions can be shown to be interdependent. This happens often under far-from-equilibrium conditions, when change of position is rapid, and direction and momentum are unpredictable. The case of Saussure illustrates how widely applicable the principle is. By making synchrony and diachrony radically interdependent he was bound to find it impossible to be equally precise about diachronic and synchronic facts, though linguistic change demonstrably happens in everyday space and time.

Applying the principle derived from Heisenberg to planning, we can conclude that whenever structures and change processes are radically interdependent, as they typically are in complex conditions, there is an unavoidable trade-off between the precision with which the current state of things and their rate and direction of change can be described. The paradox is that, traditionally, both must be described for planning to be effective. In practice, this means that some degree of fuzziness in interdependent dimensions is essential to an effective planning process.

4. Against binaries. Binaries play an ambiguous role in digital thinking in relation to planning. On the one hand basic digital code is binary, yet the power of computers can create highly complex structures out of these basic binary forms, in which simple binary forms can no longer be recognized. At the same time, the binaries that shape so much planning do not come from digital binaries but from pre-digital traditions. As Derrida (1976) amongst others has shown, potent binaries have their roots in a past which more often than not pre-dates the digital. Threeness has a venerable history of disrupting this common dualism. A proposal within Chaos Theory that can help to counter dualism comes from work of the French mathematician Henri Poincaré on what he called ‘three body systems’ (1943). Poincaré demonstrated that a system of three bodies in an interdependent system (he had in mind the sun, the earth and the moon) is inherently unpredictable, so that over infinitely many repetitions the system never settles down to a stable, predictable state. A lesson from Poincaré is that as soon as more than two complex, inter-related but independent factors come into consideration, precise prediction becomes impossible. This principle can be applied in the design of planning information systems, to guard against falling into the trap of binaristic linear thinking, by forcing the consideration of the interplay between at least three independent but inter-related dimensions of whatever problem is under consideration.

5. Scales and fractals. The issue of scale constantly confronts planners, who typically find it difficult to cope adequately with a reality which exists on many scales simultaneously, where sometimes structures on the largest scale seem to influence all others, but where those influences constantly meet and interact with structures and events on lower levels, any of which can spawn unexpected “butterfly effects”. In the planning domain, the co-existence and interaction of policies and programs at different levels of government – international, national, state, regional and local at least – illustrates the difficulty. Similarly, planning processes are inherently political, and governments can change overnight. The often hotly contested interaction of issues and priorities at different levels of scale, from the global down to the neighbourhood, can offer seemingly intractable challenges to planning in geographically localised domains.

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals (1992) provide a powerful model for certain kinds of multi-scalar processes. Although multi-scalability is not always, strictly speaking, fractal, there is still much to be learnt in principle from Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot’s version of fractals existed first in mathematical space, and then on computer screens, but they have been seen to have many real-world applications. Fractals are ‘self-similar’, usually irregular shapes reproduced at different scales in a manner that can be analysed mathematically.

Fractals – at least the general principle involved, in that although there are always important relations between different scales, these do not always involve self-similarity – can be used to provide a richer understanding of strategies of zooming across different levels. Zadeh has suggested that fuzziness is itself produced by movement across scales, requiring what he calls granularity of description (optimum precision for a given structural level). Fractals at more than one level above or below a given level may be only perceivable fuzzily. Within the domain of information architecture, the concept of “granularity” is used in a similar way, to denote the way that digital objects are often nested (files within folders, for example) (Hagedorn 2000: 4). In describing the development of a classification scheme to make the work of nurses more visible, Bowker and Star (1999) illustrate how hierarchical classification schemes or thesauri, as socially constructed informational structures, must negotiate the sometimes difficult politics of clarification and ambiguity at different levels of granularity.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle suggests that the seductive clarity and beauty of a single fractal (computer-generated examples of which have become hugely popular) may be less illuminating than fractal momentum, a trajectory through different levels of fractality. Applied to planning, the articulation between levels may be impossible to describe with the same precision as that with which discrete levels are able to be described. Yet these relational characteristics remain critically important. For instance, Lévy’s description is at the global macro-level. For planning purposes we need descriptions at intermediate levels that finally make contact with virtual communities formed around local sites, not only comparisons, but also a dynamic picture of possible movements across them.

Cultural Planning in the Greater West

The region we are interested in, Greater Western Sydney (GWS) in New South Wales, Australia, illustrates many of the issues and problems facing cultural planners in the global world today. From some points of view this region is well placed in terms of cultural planning. The NSW Government’s Strategy for the Arts in Western Sydney, released in November 1999, required Councils to undertake cultural planning as a precondition for participation in its funding schemes, providing a major impetus for cultural planning. Of the 14 Local Government Authorities (LGAs) making up the GWS region, over half already have a cultural plan in place, with the remainder either developing or intending to develop one. In 2004, after extensive consultation, this government issued its Cultural Planning Guidelines for local government. These are plans for the planners, emanating from above, though implementation is primarily the responsibility of lower levels of government.

This planning process is good of its kind, but that kind is inevitably linear, producing a utopian vision of a planning process. Yet the “Greater West” has many characteristic structures and processes of a far-from-equilibrium situation. The region for many years was neglected by planners, or viewed through negative, inappropriate stereotypes, a crisp logic imposed from outside and above, unable to see the forms of community that emerged over time. It is divided into Local Government Authorities, (LGAs), 14 boxes, each with a crisp boundary around it, in spite of the fact that rivers, roads and communication systems ceaselessly cross all these boundaries, bearing people and things, images and ideas throughout the region, connecting with other regions and the rest of the world. The functional reality of the region is already a network of networks in constant process of forming, not the static, autonomous entities shown on maps which form the basis of the planning function. Not all these networks are fully represented in cyberspace, but the forms of cyberspace already correspond better to a set of forces and ways of understanding social forms and processes than any older, more static map of LGAs and their boundaries. In this respect, Lévy’s vision of a digitally-formed territory which is both a knowledge space and a complex social form is already emerging.

The Australian economy has opened up, increasingly integrated into the “global” market, accompanied by changes that impact on communities and people at many levels, needing a dynamic, multi-scalar map, with fractal theories as a guide. The fortunes of Sydney, as Australia’s “global gateway”, have surged, and with them tensions in the relation between the CBD and the West, and potential costs or opportunities of this expansion. Western Sydney has the fastest population growth in the state. Not only does infrastructure and service provision (including cultural infrastructure and services) need to keep pace with this rate of growth, but the planning environment has become especially volatile and unpredictable, putting a far higher demand on information sources, requiring new strategies for making forecasts, predictions and interventions. In popular terms, Western Sydney is ‘hot’: some parts hotter than others. There are many markers that this is a far-from-equilibrium situation, where planning must expect the unexpected.

Home to a diverse population of around 1.85 million people (over 42% of the Sydney metropolitan population), the “Greater West” is now the third largest economy in Australia (DSRD nd). Linear planning agendas developed from the top down are inherently inadequate to manage the development of such a complex, dynamic region, or even to understand fully what has happened. There is an especially acute need to encourage the flow of ideas and initiatives vertically as well as horizontally in and for the region. Without tapping creativity and knowledge from below, the region will be unable to realise the positive potentials within the inevitable transformations accompanying continued strong population growth and the need for urban consolidation.

Over the past 10 years, cultural planning has increasingly featured in local government planning in New South Wales, but it still plays an ambivalent role. It is both enabled and constrained by an ambiguity in the key term ‘culture’, which is then framed by more or less linear understandings of social processes. Previously ‘culture’ had a relatively crisp meaning, referring to the arts, seen as a minority sector of community activities, mainly viewed through the lenses of an elitist conception of the nature and role of Art. It was seen in a linear, top-down way, as a good thing which should benefit the ignorant populace.

In cultural planning’s “new era”, this understanding of “culture” co-exists with “culture” as defined far more fuzzily, as something more complex and amorphous, pervasive and inclusive, the meeting point for various forces and interests from below (“the community”) as well as from above. This is “culture” as a non-linear formation, which allows “cultural planning” to address some of the planning needs for the complex, non-linear problems of regions like Western Sydney. The NSW Cultural Planning Guidelines for Local Government, issued in 2004 in a glossy booklet, is a manifesto for this concept of culture. It emphasises the scope of cultural planning as being ‘culture in its widest sense’, that is, as ‘about what matters to people and communities’ (2004:7). This definition gives cultural planning a broad brief: it is ‘a strategic process which illuminates and gives significance to both the material and values dimensions of culture in a community, in a way which informs a council’s thinking, policies and programs’. In this form, cultural planning seems a potential major player in local government planning processes:

When harnessed to local government’s strategic objectives, cultural planning can help councils tackle social exclusion, contribute to urban regeneration, create employment opportunities, build safer communities, improve community well being, and encourage healthier lifestyles. (2004:7)

This discourse is as utopian as Lévy’s, admirably complex in its scope. It reminds us of fractals in that it mentions four strongly related levels of scale, from the NSW State Government through local government authorities, their cultural planners and communities, and includes more than three dimensions, society, urban environments, employment and health. But for this vision to engage with the far greater complexity of the many problems of the many communities and integrate cultural factors into broader planning processes, it needs explicit mechanisms of articulation, and rich, accurate, comprehensive, user-friendly information about cultural, social and economic resources across this region. Otherwise, the promise of inclusiveness, complexity and responsiveness to communities will remain mere rhetoric.

Cultural planners have a significant place in developing and implementing cultural plans in New South Wales, but outside that narrow domain their role is limited. We illustrate with the employment process for cultural planning, using a 2004 advertisement for a Cultural Planner by one of the larger councils in Western Sydney. ‘[X] City Council is seeking an enthusiastic and highly motivated professional to develop a city wide Cultural Plan.’ The successful candidate will put together a Cultural Plan, following the NSW Guidelines. The position is offered at Band 3, level 2, Grade 2, $AUD934.20 per week ($US700.00). It is a contract position, for 18 months. Applicants are assured that ‘flexible work arrangements would be considered for the right applicant’.

This flexibility is typical of the conditions of ‘precarious labour’ in the New Economy. These terms contrast with the requirements of the plan that is to be produced, which should cover 3 to 5 years. The selection criteria consist of 7 points, most with further dot points. The first 6 criteria create a picture of the desirable attributes of the Cultural Planner: high level communication skills, project management skills, negotiation and consultation skills, high level skill in Cultural Planning, and ability to work in a team environment. Item 7 in the skill set is ‘Demonstrated computer skills’. It has two dot points: ‘Experience in a range of office software, particularly Word’, and ‘Demonstrated competency in email systems’.

This last item is a signal, especially revealing because so unconscious, of the low value attributed to digital skills and resources for this position. A “Microsoft Office dinosaur” would be well-qualified for this job. X Council is not out of step, here. The NSW planning guidelines make no mention of databases. The emphasis is on “consultation”, using the old technologies of speech and writing to gather up some more subjective data. These are indeed important for a planning process that reflects and responds to the complex needs of a diverse community: important, if the planners are able truly to take them into account.

This creates a paradoxical situation for Cultural Planners. The “soft” data they can provide are largely missing from the data sets familiar to urban and land use planners who run programs at state and local levels. Yet in terms of the dominant (linear, crisp) mind-set in the planning community, “soft” data does not rate strongly compared to “hard” data. Figures on social and economic data are now available electronically through the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and other sources. Many of these are collected in linear, crisp categories, and give only one dimension of the issues, well-adapted to linear decision processes. However, there is already an increasing awareness of the value of “softer”, less linear data. The ABS is developing statistics around such fuzzy concepts as “social capital”, broken down into some general categories such as gender, class and ethnicity, and even place. At the same time, social, environmental and land use planners, in Councils and Government, have access to all the hard data, but do not find it easy to integrate it with “soft” data, whether what is currently available or what they would need to collect themselves. Working at higher levels of geographical scale and social aggregation, they do not attach great value to planners working at more fine-grained and spatially differentiated levels, like our Council Cultural Planner, who would have a better feel for the picture created by the “soft” data. Neither kind of planner alone can plan across the complex intersecting levels and strands that “new era” cultural planning demands, and already proclaims itself able to manage.

The Cultural Planning utopia of the NSW government can be interwoven with something like Lévy’s digital utopia, expanding the scope of information and the scale and complexity of the virtual community of planners and communities in each locality. Two utopias in this case may be better than one, or none. A third utopia might be even better, especially if all three were used as the basis for critiquing the present, and mobilizing for the future.

Towards a Digital Cultural Atlas for a Chaotic World

Our own utopian project starts from one piece of digital technology, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), using some ideas from Chaos and Complexity to push this technology to be more adequate to the demands of cultural and general urban planning for the Greater West. The exemplary user we have in mind is a cultural planner, networked with other planners and with others in the vast, far-from-equilibrium community they relate to. We wish to explore options which exist virtually for such a class of persons, assuming only a realistic level of skill, and access to computer technologies and the resources of the Net.

GIS is currently capable of representing information about the Sydney region according to a spatial grid, in the form of a map. Many planning systems in local government (apart from cultural planning) rely heavily on these tools for spatially representing the matter they deal with. This visual form is a great advantage of this technology, making information available to users in a rich, human semiotic mode. It allows zooming from the regional level to the level of particular buildings or streets, if these can be located in the base maps, plus any other kind of data that has been coded for location. The typical GIS interface organises information in different layers. Layers can be readily added, and can be switched on and off to avoid confusing the user with data overload. Layers may be grouped into themes, enabling related data to be viewed together without compromising legibility due to screen clutter. All these capabilities are consistent with Lévy’s criterion, that complex information should be communicated in ways that are ‘simple’ and ‘practical’ (for humans not yet fully ‘hominized’).

We are currently undertaking an Australian Research Council Linkage-funded project to construct a GIS-based information system for cultural planning which builds on these capabilities for spatial representation, but goes beyond them in ways that make the complexity and dynamism of local communities visible and tractable for planning purposes. Our “digital cultural atlas” builds on the traditional idea of an atlas as a series of maps, often giving multiple images of the same spatial domain, along with related information on economics, politics, demography, and indexed to allow ease of access to information. The digital cultural atlas extends on this traditional model, however, in translating the mapping capability to the digital domain of GIS, incorporating powerful search and indexing modes, and linking to networked information (both spatial and a-spatial, including the wider resources of the Internet).

In contrast to the traditional GIS with its ‘bird’s-eye” top-down view, our interface design incorporates multiple panes, capable of representing both quantitative and qualitative data, accessible via an information architecture encompassing both spatial and semantic modes, so that different but related data sources and formats can be present simultaneously. Hyperlinks connect GIS-accessible data to other online sources, including text and non-text digital objects from anywhere in the world via the global reach of the Internet. The global and local can thus weave together on any scale, responding to the intelligent interest of the searcher, whether cultural planners or those they seek to communicate and collaborate with. This is “manipulation” in Lévy’s sense, in which the difference between reading and writing is functionally blurred, as reading processes immediately produce text, and traces of their own processes which can also be communicated to others.

The ideas derived from Chaos Theory we described earlier have been applied to the process of framing and designing the system’s information architecture and user interface.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Far from Equilibrium theory frames the use of these systems. GIS maps are synchronic, giving physical reality at a given moment in time. In itself GIS is inherently ill-equipped to represent change. As a planning instrument this is a crucial limitation, since plans deal with a dynamic world which has already changed and will change even more over the lifetime of the plan. The GIS is best at showing only what cannot be planned, only what has to be planned around. Yet change happens unevenly on different scales, and it is valid to include information about things which change only slowly as though they do not change at all.

Even though change is difficult to display in itself, it can be represented through animation or other signifiers of movement, which can help planners even when fuzzy and simplistic. A sequence of maps, for example, can show the evolving spatial distribution of population over time, or the changing locations and service catchments of cultural institutions and other cultural infrastructures.

In a correlate to Heisenberg’s principle, we recognise that it is inherently impossible to represent time and change, with any degree of complexity, in a synchronic map. It can, however, be done fuzzily through representing at least two systems, each fuzzily readable alongside the other. Demographic data is available in readily mappable form via the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The 5-yearly census collection, for example, provides a spatially fine-grained and thematically comprehensive diachronic overview. Comparison between variables is difficult, however, once more than two or three variables are involved, as a glance at the tabular format in which the ABS generally publishes its data will attest. A more sophisticated understanding of the complex composition of local communities can be gained by allowing the user to move readily between multiple and/or composite views of different variables for the same area, such as different dimensions of cultural diversity (place of birth, language spoken, religion) and their interaction with socio-economic variables such as income and educational attainment. Similarly, the same variables at different points in time can be juxtaposed by showing them in different panes of the same screen, or animating a sequence of them.

Another productive source of fuzziness is within the classification schemes of the information architecture itself. In the discussion of granularity above it was suggested that as system-builders we need to be mindful of the political dimensions of information architecture. As Mitch Kapor has recently written, architecture is politics (2006). The recent proliferation of social networking sites such as CiteULike, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr and many others gives a strong indication of the power of “tagging”, or community-generated classifications (also known as ‘folksonomies’) (Hammond et al, 2005). Within our project, we aim over time to complement a formal categorisation structure which articulates with standards-based classification systems (such as those used by the ABS) by implementing functionality which allows users to tag or annotate resources themselves. In this way, the fuzziness of naturally proliferating and idiosyncratic user-generated semantic categories and terminologies can enrich the system and provide a mode of resistance to the homogenising and hegemonising tendencies of digital linearity.

Three body analysis suggests that it is productive to organize bodies of data into broad themes, to avoid binaries or one-sidedness. A single-variable map is attractive to planners precisely for the reason that it is likely to be misleading, momentarily removing the multiplicity of factors that drives every complex real-life system. A single map can represent different aspects of physical space in a single frame (e.g. buildings, roads, parks and natural features), but planning also requires an ability to represent and manipulate the complex, undecidable interactions between different orders of reality.

With this in mind, our database is organised in terms of three broad categories or modes, all of which we understand as interdependent and crucial to any planning process or decision: the socio-economic, the cultural, and the subjective, against the background of the spatial. The socio-economic mode includes harder and softer data (demographic data, economic statistics etc.). The cultural mode includes a range of resources throughout the region, covering by the broader sense of the term, and also its artistic forms. This kind of information is relatively easy to collect and assemble, since councils maintain directories of community resources and relevant databases such as catalogues of public art or heritage collections. The subjective mode gives access to a multiplicity of diverse voices and perspectives, available as video or audio streams, in transcripts, or in other digital forms. This is the kind of information that is most often invisible in planning, because it is hard to collect and manage and in the past has been hard to integrate into planning processes. A rich source of this kind of information, however, can be accessed through working with the materials captured by cultural development organisations working in close collaboration with diverse local communities. Western Sydney hosts many such organisations, one of which is Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE). This community-based new media organisation, working with a range of emerging, refugee and minority communities, is one of our partners in the digital cultural atlas project, and is providing a model for knowledge transfer of the accumulated cultural intelligence the organisation has generated over several years, as we evaluate and selectively digitise their archival materials. In order to make these levels of complexity available to direct perception by cultural planners, a single screen contains panes providing representations in these three modes.

Principles similar to fractality in the multiscalar landscape can be incorporated and made perceptible for planning and cultural development purposes through the GIS’s support for zooming in and out. A zoom juxtaposes images at different scales, and can generate a loosely defined kind of fractality. Here the “fractals” are patterns in the structures of cultural relations within the region represented, more or less replicated at different levels (vertical fractals) or the same level (horizontal fractals). For example, by mapping the networks of the many collaborative partnerships and projects between Western Sydney’s cultural organisations, the interactions and relationships between these “cultural mode” resources can be demonstrated to have similar structures at different levels of geographical scale, from the region-wide catchments of the major cultural institutions to the locally-dense networks of organisations working within a single LGA. Similarly, and productively from the point of view of advocacy and planning, at each level of scale these “cultural mode” network structures can be shown to be reflected in the richer qualitative structures of the subjective mode, by demonstrating how the collaborations have built shared cultural development knowledges and methodologies.

Available technology to add spatial coding to diverse data sources is fairly intuitive to use. A PDA or similar device which allows spatial location data to be collected via GPS and linked to other information are now relatively inexpensive (around AUD$1000), and allows metadata and annotations to be collected by a roving cultural development worker. As an adjunct to the cultural atlas infrastructure, we are currently implementing a mobile digital multimedia infrastructure which will allow for custom data collection, incorporating audio-texts and still or video images from community members and organisations into the GIS database on an ongoing basis.

Conclusion

This article may seem caught in the same contradictions as it critiques. We try to plan an instrument for planning, in an environment we claim is non-linear and inherently unpredictable. We want to use digital technologies, in spite of being aware of the systemic gaps between digital promise and accomplishment. But these contradictions are only problematic in terms of a crisp, binary logic. The problem we see is not with planning or digitality as such, but the taken-for-granted linearity of current planning and digital paradigms. So we do not offer a single grand plan for a Digital Revolution or a new planning millennium. On the contrary, our propositions are highly local, looking at planning issues and digital resources in a specific site. The process we propose involves participation at every step, with different groups and interests, all of whom we value. We see it as essential to incorporate the fears, desires and aspirations of many groups within a large, diverse region, irrespective of whether or not they see themselves, now or in the future, as members of a single virtual community. We work with a dialectic between “planning” processes which already exist but could be different, and technologies which likewise already exist but which equally could function very differently.

We do not know what this complex virtual community might look like. Nor do we know whether it can acquire the ‘collective intelligence’ Lévy talks of, in any practical way. Nor do we know what new forms and uses of technology might be driven by the evolving needs of these new users. But we do not despair just because we cannot predict or control this future, these futures. One lesson of Chaos Theory is that no-one else can, either. The will to predict is always doomed and counter-productive. Life, whether social, cultural or digital, is inherently complex. The best planning and most effective digital systems will always reflect those two principles.

Authors’ Biographies

Dr Elaine Lally is Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director of the Centre for Cultural Research. She researches in the areas of art and technology as material culture, and the role of arts and culture in regional development (especially in Western Sydney). She is currently undertaking two ARC-Linkage funded projects, including the Digital Cultural Atlas. Dr Lally is author of At Home with Computers (Berg 2002).

Professor Bob Hodge has a distinguished international reputation and is widely published in the areas of social semiotics, cultural theory, postmodern studies, and Latin American studies. He has been a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities since 2002, and was awarded a Centenary Medal for his contribution to the academic fields of communication and cultural studies.

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Explorations of new technologies and dance, led by Mark Coniglio, Scott de Lahunta, Antonio Camurri and others, focus on the difficulty of locating gesture-as-such. One key to developing sensitive software is understanding — and embedding into the software program — what a gesture is. In a recent paper, Scott de Lahunta suggests that the best way of coming to an understanding of gesturality is to work collaboratively with dancers such that ‘the choreographic and computational processes are both informed by having arrived at this shared understanding of the constitution of movement.’[1] A similar tendency is expressed by Mark Coniglio when he suggests that live performance work must ‘delve beyond direct mapping and the metaphor of a musical instrument; to building systems that could better sense qualities of movement; to represent something of the “gestalt” of movement’[2]

An engagement with the technogenetic body demands an encounter with the syntax of the moving body. For the practitioners of dance and technology the exploration of movement is intrinsically related to how to locate where a movement begins and ends in order to map its coordinates within a sensitive system. Yet, the question “What is a gesture? (and how can the computer recognize one?)” may not actually lead in the direction proposed by Coniglio and de Lahunta. Rather, it may direct the techno-dance process toward establishing a kind of grammar of movement that would — paradoxically — be more likely to tie the body to some pre-established understanding of how it actualizes. “Mapping” gesture risks breaking movement into bits of assimilable data, of replicating the very conformity the computer software is seeking to get beyond. Instead of mapping gesture-as-such, this paper therefore begins somewhere else. It seeks to explore the technogenetic potential of the wholeness of movement, including its “unmappable” virtuality. The unmappable — within a computer software program — is the aspect of movement I call pre-acceleration, a virtual becoming — a tendency toward movement — through which a displacement takes form.[3] If a vocabulary of gesture is to be reclaimed as part of what can be stimulated in the encounter between dance and new technology, it must be done through the continuum of movement, through the body’s technogenetic emergence in the realm of the virtual becoming of pre-acceleration. Gesture-as-such (defined as extensive displacement of body parts divisible from a wholeness of movement) causes an imposed stability and holds back the potential of a sensing body in movement’s capacity for innovation.

Scene 1: The Dance

A dancer walks across the stage. She wears sensors on her arm. Behind her is a large screen. Connected wirelessly is a software program that orchestrates input and output according to a computational relationship between displacement and its transformation into sound and video image. As she moves, the software generates a reaction in the environment. The movement has to extend beyond the body’s virtual center: the software can more easily detect displacement that occurs at the body’s extension. The displacement must be registered by the program as a gesture-in-itself. An almost-virtual or pre-actual movement out of which a displacement is born (a pre-acceleration of the movement) cannot be detected by the software. A visible (fully actualized) movement is necessary for software detection, usually a displacement either of a limb or of the whole body across space. Depending on the software, this movement triggers an image or recomposes a sound (slows it down, speeds it up, generates it). This usually happens in the “real time” of the dancer’s movement. The spectator is invited to participate in this intermedia experiment.

The challenge is how to keep the participant’s attention on the quality of the movement. In a situation where the dance modulates sound and image in real time based on extrinsic movements of a dancing body, attention shifts from the qualitative to the quantitative. Because of the system’s prosthetic apparatus and its emphasis on subjecting the dancing body to its parameters, the participant’s attention tends to be drawn to the workings of the system rather than to the movement’s qualities. We catch not the dancer’s preacceleration in its present-passing, but the ways in which her movement stimulates a transformation of the video image. We want to know when and how the music modulates and due to which kind of movement. We watch the dancer for this shift, trying to locate the specificities of the technology and its gestural syntax. This concern for the technology soon situates the dancing body as a pre-formed organism onto which the technology is grafted. The question shifts from “what can a body do” to “what can technology do.” The experience of the dance performance is directly related to the limits of the system. The body movement is reduced to bits. Gestures are “pulled out” (prehended) from the movement rather than contributing to its experiential wholeless. Attention is distracted from the subtleties — the virtual pre-accelerations of the moving body — and what stands out is actualized displacement in the service of the software. The dancer responds by accentuating the extremity of the movement to help the system catch on.

This dance-event is typical of many of those situated at the nexus of dance and new technologies.[4] In such cases, technological experimentation involves a body whose movements trigger a system that can read certain kinds of displacements and translate them. These technological systems operate prosthetically and are often attached to the human body. They operate on the basis of the more-than, “enhancing” a dancing body’s capacity to create spacetimes of experience. These dance/new technology experiments emphasize how digital technology can foreground previously untapped dimensions to the moving body, creating a body that is sensually emergent, alive with image and sound. But are these new technologies really opening up the body to its technogenetic potentiality? Can the vocabulary of the prosthetic actually re-generate the moving body toward sense modalities otherwise untapped?

The prosthetic suggests a vocabulary of the more-than. Within this vocabulary, the “than” — the body, usually — can only be thought as an already-formulated entity. Concepts such as the machinic (Deleuze and Guattari[5] ), the Body without Organs (Artaud[6] ), the posthuman (Hayles[7] ), and originary technicity (Derrida[8] ), explicitly challenge the notion that the body could be reduced to a than-ness that would need to be supplemented to create a body that was more-than its organic envelope. They suggest that a body is always already more-than, refuting the logic of the “than” that would need to be prosthetically enhanced to reach its “more than” state. Refuting the “than-ness” that supposedly becomes prosthetically enhanced, these concepts suggest that the “more than” is the very condition of the becoming-body.

What we “see” in dance/new-technology performances is often a prosthetically-enhanced body. Such a body performs its improvisation supplementarily, contributing technologically to the stage-space through a transformation of video and sound. This transformation tends to occur at the level of representation. We see a change in space (the image shifts), but do we feel space differently? The logic of the prosthesis as it is mobilized in this kind of dance trend rarely moves beyond the limits of interactivity.[9] It produces mediations between different systems whereby one portion of the system is always already pre-constituted. In most cases this means working with a stable body-concept. It is the than-ness of a body that is supplemented by the shifting technologies. From stable to unstable and back, but never really metastable. New ecologies of experience are rarely created under these conditions.

Experiential transformation is rare. It depends on the capacity to create events that are “new” enough that they catch our attention and familiar enough that we can relate to them. “Relate” is the key word here: we must feel them in their eventness. To simply watch an event — to remain a passive spectator to its inner workings — does not result in experiential transformation. Transformation must entail a shift in affective tone such that the participating spectator feels the performance, responding to it through an emphasis as much on its duration — its capacity to create experiential spacetimes — as through its content. New technology and dance performances do suggest the capacity to produce platforms of interaction that can call forth new kinds of process that will in turn create new kinds of events. Yet their “process” is limited by the dimensions of the software which tends to call forth a docile body, both in the software-conformist dancer and in the technologically-attentive spectator. Affective transformation depends on evolution in the machinic system such that both bodies and technological systems are altered. Transduction: the process develops according to a dynamic not of interactivity but of relation.

The body-system reconstitutes itself as infinitely more-than, an n+1 that is in excess always of what either the body or the software could do alone. Transduction (a change not only of state but of dynamic) can only occur through an embedding of a kind of analog process into the dimensions of the technology’s potential. The shift is affective as much as it is quantitative. The analog is key to this process because unlike the digital, the analog always has chance embedded in its open system. The body is always more-than. This more-than takes the form of virtual effects contaminating the body’s actuality. This virtuality is not available to digital computation, which must conform to actual ones and zeros. By bringing the analog into the digital mix (by intermixing new technologies with dancing bodies such that the dancing body is emergent with the technology rather than simply added to it), the technical system might tend toward ontogenesis, toward technogenetic evolution.

Evolutionary systems that build on accumulation rather than on one-to-one effects are still very rare in the dance world, where the analog continues to pay tribute to the digital. The body is restricted to its “thanness.” The complex analog body is reduced by the prosthetic system to a passive interactivity, forced to conform to a pre-established definition of what a body can do. The body must move for the software. Here’s the paradox: moving for the software means learning to move the software. The choreography is determined by the software, which qualitatively limits what a body can do. Where technology was supposed to open the body to a wider relational potential, it actually reduces its capacity to move spacetime. The dancer learns to traverse space rather than creating it. The dancer is moved to interact with the software in a closed system of cause and effect. What tends to emerge: a pedagogical exercise in moving software. For technogenesis to occur, the dance must surprise, moving beyond a closed-circuit interactivity toward relational eventness. For this to take place, recompositions of potential (movement taking-form through virtual recombinations shape-shifting into displacements) are necessary, activated not by an external source, but by the very ontogenetic system that is the sensing body in movement.

This is not a plea to return to a pre-technologized body, or to abandon a technologically-enhanced dancing body, but, rather, to explore the potential of technogenesis in relation to the sensing body in movement. To begin to address this question, a vocabulary of process is necessary. Process here means working with enabling constraints that create the conditions for ontogenetic emergence. To experiment with a digitally enhanced post-technologized body beyond the dichotomy of the organic/prosthetic is to ask what a body can do such that it is not the prosthetic that enables it — as a tool supplementing the imposed than-ness of the body — but the very more-thanness of the body that comes to the fore. It is to move beyond the prosthetic as an external category to the ways in which bodies make sense: to ask how technogenesis creates new modalities of sense.

Technogenesis — ontogenesis of the bio-technological not as a technical additive to the biological but as an emphasis on the originary technicity of the human — suggests a working vocabulary where the body is posited not as a stable category, but as a creative vector of experiential space-time. This requires that we think the body in movement (that we never dissociate bodies from the flux of micromovements of which they are composed), that we conceive of bodies both as worlds and as creators of the worlds that world them. To think a body in movement is not to locate the body in a pre-formed world but to conceptualize moving worlds as instances of interrelating bodies. Technogenesis defines bodies as nodes of potential that qualitatively alter the interrelations of the rhizomatic networks of spacetime in which they are ephemerally housed. These networks are not distinct from the bodies they instantiate: they are themselves sensing bodies in movement. Sensing bodies in movement are not discrete entities but open systems that reach toward one another sensingly, becoming through these relational matrices. As these bodies individuate relationally, they evolve beyond their ontological status, becoming ontogenetic. Technogenesis is the dynamic becoming of the sensing body in movement.

Scene 2: Whitehead begins to dance

To move is to create (with) sense. A body perceives through difference. A change in environment provokes a sensory event. In Alfred North Whitehead, perception is both sensuous (sensed) and non-sensuous (a direct perception of the past in the present). To perceive is not simply to accumulate sense-data, it is to directly sense relation as the virtual activity inherent in the taking-form of objects and worlds. It is not that a “subject” perceives a world, but that the world is pulled into subjectivity and vice versa. This activity of “pulling” suggests that there is no subject-position that precedes experience. Without an initial perceiving subject, a pre-formed body cannot exist. Worlding occurs in the process of a world becoming subject or a subject becoming world. Or, to extend the analysis, subjects are transitory individuations in a processual worlding whereby certain actualities take form in a nexus of “contemporarily independent” events.[10]

To understand the stakes in this argument, it is necessary to think actuality in terms of the stop-gap of perception: about a half second. What we perceive, we perceive always at a delay[11] such that this perception is already composed of the holes of experience. I do not perceive an object per se, the objectness is prehended (drawn out from a pastness in a way that is qualitatively new) as an event that spacetimes me. Through the prehension, “I” am subjectified as an instance of that particular object-event. This object-event constructs me — individuates me — as much as it is individuated by me. This experience is an actively creative one: “I” must assist the perception, fill up its holes, give it form. This giving-form happens as “I” (as individuating event) fill in the gaps of perception, giving the object a contour or a background (that I may not directly have perceived), situating it in a worldness that cannot be separated from it. As “I” do this, “I” am also individuating (moving beyond any kind of discrete “I-ness” or “than-ness”) on a plane of becoming that Whitehead calls an actual occasion. “I” am not detached from this process and yet “I” am only composed by it to the extent that it will initiate my infinite re-composition.

To explain this strange refraction of experience, whereby “I” individuate in direct engagement with the individuating world, Whitehead turns to two concepts which sound very familiar — appearance and reality — , redefining them through his vocabulary of process and event. He does this to attempt to dislocate the notion that experience is a subset of an already formed body-world. For Whitehead, the world only pre-exists in so far as its pastness (its virtuality) can be activated in the present. To activate does not mean to conceive the past as a world strangely available to an unsuspecting present. Activation here is much closer to a Bergsonian concept of active recollection.[12] It suggests that the present — which, as I mentioned above, is composed of a very short duration — is propelled by an experiential pastness. What we call the present is composed of strands of pastness recomposing and perishing through it. This does not mean that all presents are predetermined. Quite the contrary: the present is always new, but its newness is compelled in large part by experience as it is reactivated or re-collected from the past half-second of experience. To reactivate is never simply to relive. There is no world that will remain the same after reactivation. Reactivation will always, to some degree, mean invention.

To arrive at the difference between appearance and reality, Whitehead turns to the concept of “actual occasions.” The actual occasion is similar to the Deleuzian concept of the event. It refers to ‘drops of experience, complex and interdependent’ where each actual occasion is ‘analyzable in an indefinite number of ways’ (1978: 18,19) and must be perceived as such. Focusing on perception (prehension) as an activity allows Whitehead to by-pass the passivity of a vocabulary of preformation (where perception is contained by a pre-formed world). Prehension is perception as event.

An actual occasion is the expression of a particular prehension — or set of prehensions — that converge into what Whitehead calls a “subjective form.” The “subjective form” is not the form of the object itself, but the very ontogenetic process out of which its objectness — its eventness — comes to the fore. We never prehend an object as such. The objectness of the prehension forms in the eventness that is the actual occasion. Objects emerge in relation as events of experience. As an object begins to take form, its process “concresces” such that it becomes more stable (and recognizable as such). This (meta)stability (the object having reached its eventness or “subjective form”) is the beginning of the perishing of the actual occasion, whereby an opening is created for adjacent experience. As the actual occasion perishes, it populates the nexus of pastness out of which new experiences will emerge. The nexus as such cannot be perceived. But parts of it can (and will) be reactivated in future-past actual occasions.

This virtual nexus is how Whitehead defines reality. As the actual occasion perishes to give way to the next actual occasion (having reached its “concrescence” through the becoming of its “subjective form”) the actual occasion melds into a reality virtually populated by all of the positive (having been actualized) and negative (having remained inactivated or virtual) prehensions that make up our experiential worlds. This nexus of perished actual occasions — reality — can be thought as a wealth of potential out of which possible worlds emerge. Reality is therefore always more than and less than appearance: less than what appearance can be, and more than appearance is. Reality must be activated and can only actualize in the portions that appear. And even then, it is not strictly “what it was” but “how it can become.”

To think the body in these terms is to focus on the body’s unactualized potential as an aspect of its becoming that cannot be realized as such, but can be called forth, adding novelty to its open system. The taking-form of an individuating body is an “appearance” of the body within a vastness of unrealized potential. Technogenesis occurs at the threshold of emergence of the becoming-body where reality is pulled into appearance and something is added to the mix. This something is a movement-with that provokes a body to become in excess of its organ-ization.

Novelty — or creativity — occurs always in the present. Because the present takes form on the threshold of appearance and reality, the present must be conceptualized as operating in the midst of virtual causality becoming actualized. This virtual causality is the capacity to prehend that which is not yet actual (the virtual, or pastness) such that this non-sensuous perception emerges sensuously (in appearance). Novelty emerges through the causal relation between reality and appearance. Reality contributes to appearance by bringing experiential pastness into the present. This experiential pastness transduced into the present brings a certain causal (pre-experimented) element to the event of perception. Whitehead calls this aspect of perception “causal efficacy” in order to remind us that what we perceive first is not an object but its pastness or its capacity to exist in relation. This causal aspect of perception is the directly perceived relation between objectness and world. Activating perception means activating the relation that underlies the object’s very capacity to be perceived. To prehend an object is therefore first and foremost to prehend how it fits into experience. Causal efficacy is the active causal link between objectness and experience that allows the object to take form experientially.

The pastness of experience — reality — creates the potential for future connections. This futurity-in-the-past assures an active linkage between perception and event that makes prehension intelligible. The perception of a chair, for instance, is a sitting perception. What is experienced in the prehension “chair” is not first its sensuousness — its woodness, its redness, its softness — but the causal relation between chair and world. The “object” will initially be perceived as the relational potential between chair and sitting whereby the sitability will in fact become the object. Of course, the chair may not fulfill this expectation: the chair may be missing a seat, may be purely decorative, may be a mirage. The pastness that allows for perception’s intelligibility can fail us, and when it does, new worlds — new actual occasions — will in turn make new kinds of activation — new kinds of appearance — possible.

In most organisms[13] , to causally prehend is only one aspect of perception. Whitehead describes a concurrent “second” process, which he calls “presentational immediacy.” In this “second stage” (though never quite second, since in higher organisms it can barely be thought separately from causal efficacy), perception is enhanced by the quality of experience. Now the redness of the chair emerges, a quality that is, strictly speaking, completely unnecessary to the experience of sit-ability. Yet, presentational immediacy is lost without causal efficacy[14] : despite the heterogeneity of its experiential dimensions, “pure” presentational immediacy cannot comprehend or delineate an event. Pure redness remains meaningless in this context without the causality that constitutes chairness. Qualitative difference must be associated with causal efficacy’s capacity to create a relation between event and world. Pastness is necessary for perception, even if that pastness does nothing but invite the creation of an object-world relation to be deformed in the next prehension. Novelty emerges from the productive constraints of the pastness of worldings in the present-passing. Presentational immediacy is what adds nuance to the mix. Without presentational immediacy, the world loses a key aspect of its potential subtlety. As with the intertwining of appearance and reality, what we know as perception is similarly a complex intermixing of causal efficacy and presentational immediacy.

Appearance is the active pulling out of experience from reality, the “giving form” of the nexus in the future-pastness that is worlding. Reality must in a certain sense “precede” appearance: what appears is always less complex that reality itself. Yet reality can never be prehended as such, and, in that way, remains undifferentiated. Appearance and reality thus exist on a continuum: perception happens always for the first time through the duration of appearance, and yet this duration is only possible because of the activation of reality. To experience is always to exist durationally: it is to co-live the present as a pastness of emergence that will only be known in its future-pastness-becoming-present. There is no moment that precedes the prehension out of which perception occurs: the future and the past co-exist through the present.

With prehension foregrounded as the key to the eventness of experience, appearance and reality can no longer be delineated as hierarchies of objectivity and subjectivity. Rather, we begin to conceive the eventness of an actual occasion as that which embodies different layers of duration that lead toward nodes of perception. Sensing bodies in movement emerge ontogenetically from such durational interweavings.

Scene 3: Dancing the Ground

A dancing body is an example of a sensing body in movement. A dancer prehends spacetime, actively perceiving and moving worlds such that new kinds of experiential spacetimes are constituted. These worldings are pullings out of an experiential ground that shifts with each of the dancer’s movements. The dancer senses and creates spacetime in one and the same movement, individuating with each shift in ground. The ground thus becomes part of the shifting through which these individuations develop, emerging as a key aspect of the actual occasion that is the taking-form of movement. As it enters into movement, the ground is reconstituted as novelty, intertwining with the capacities of what a gravitational body can do. The ground emerges as an enabling constraint: the dancer will always reach the ground again, but this reaching will be inflected by a towardness that will continually change the dimensions of the space as the ground emerges into a verticality, a vorticality, a hardness, a horizontality. The ground moves (with) the dance. The ground in relation to movement takes part in the creation of becoming-form (a curve, a spiral, an arabesque) whereby movement achieves its subjective form, a subjective form always intrinsically related to a moving ground. The ground thus contributes to the dance as a form-finding element in the dancer’s shape-shifting process, operating not as a stable entity but as an active determinant in the process. The ground is a compositional aspect of a dancer’s movement, reconstituting the ways in which spacetime potentializes the moving body and vice versa. The ground does not simply ground, it dances.

A dancing ground is a technogenetic element in the dance. A technique of composition, the ground becomes a condition of emergence for the ontogenetic body. Techniques conceived this way are technologies composed with, for and through a dancing body. They foreground the more-thanness of the body. A body is not a technique, but a technique can create a body. The dancer’s body is qualitatively different from a body walking to the bus stop because of the variety of techniques that make up the dancing body. The dancer moves not toward a destination, but toward her capacity to shapeshift. This is a key aspect of technique: the dancer learns to continuously relocate the ground as an element of experimental spacetime, creating momentum with and through the ground toward gravity-defying revectorization.

To ground, when dancing, is to alter the composition body-floor such that the ground actively relocates in relation to dynamic movement. Movement is never a movement-in-space. It is a movement-of-space that qualitatively alters the durations of experience. To say that the ground is “beneath her feet” is to misunderstand the very mobility of groundedness.

There is link to be made here between the dancing and the walking-to-the-bus-stop body, even if the same kinds of technique are not foregrounded. The shiftiness of ground may be less palpable with respect to a walking body rushing to a bus-stop, but is nonetheless virtually present: you might, for example, experience a “loss of ground” due to a shift in the level of the sidewalk that causes you to lose your balance. The dancer is trained to defy the ground as stable surface, whereas the walker depends on the ground’s stability. But that does not mean that the ground necessarily conforms to the expectations of the walker.

Shifting grounds are but one way in which a body creates spacetime. Dancers — like all other movers, only more obviously — breathe space,[15] perhaps folding the space into the duration of a textured tactility felt on the skin. Dancers walk space, such that the dimensions of spacetime seem to compress. They sound space, such that the vectors inflect, curving experience. By creating such occasions of experience, the sensing body in movement alters experiential spacetime such that spacetime is felt in its emergence.

This emergence is already a technogenetic experience. It would be impossible to speak of experiential spacetime if we confined ourselves to the envelope of an organ-ized body. This emergent process is technogenetic because it recomposes the body. This recomposition takes form through a multiplicity of techniques.[16] For Simondon, a technique is a technology of emergence (an ontogenetic technology or a technogenesis) through which new complex systems are composed. These techniques can be thought as associated milieus of potential. Associated milieus are in-between environments — ecological becomings — that emerge through the very technogenesis that gives them form. The associated milieu is the compositional matrix for the machinic body, in-forming the body through transductions that open the body-becoming to the metastability that provokes it to become in excess of its organism. Techniques matter form such that bodies become experiments in the making.

Can digital technologies create techniques capable of such technogenetic transduction? Transduction here is understood as a movement through and across systems of emergence through which individuations occur. This is not strictly a horizontal process, but a durational one whereby what is transformed becomes a worlding rather than an effect on an already-constituted system. Transduction alters the very conditions of a process. Can digital technologies create ontogenetic conditions for emergent body-worlds? Is it possible for new technologies to perceive the virtual effects of the taking-form from reality to appearance, to feel the incipience of movement, to sense-with the sensing bodies in movement, “catching” the body in its passing? Can new technology engage the virtuality of pastness, making its effects felt? This is not simply a question ‘of the superiority of the analog’[17] but a question to technogenesis itself. Can technology play the virtual?

The virtual — pastness — is played by a dancing body through the body’s pre-acceleration — the incipience of a becoming-movement that takes form when the body-world relation is moved. This non-sensuous perception — a pre-displacement that is felt like a movement on its way — is at the heart of the complexity of experience. It is this complexity that challenges digital technologies. Technology becoming technogenetic involves shifting the terms of prosthetic “more-thanness” such that the “more than” becomes the experiential starting point for the sensing body in movement. Rather than beginning with the “thanness” of the body, technology must work at the level of perceptual (sensuous and non-sensuous) emergence. Technology has to become body. By working ontogenetically — toward technogenetic emergence — rather than prosthetically, technology must becomes capable of actively making sense such that it creates new sensing bodies in movement. No longer held back by the limits of the software, movement might then be able to make the technological process appear rather than simply moving to its parameters.[18] To add nuance to these experiential experiments, technology must also make its failures felt, its lagging behind, it system collapse, its loss of ground. Making the digital analog need not be the goal: technogenesis becomes evocative when its techniques make transduction felt, foregrounding the metastability of all moving systems.

For such technogenesis to take form, Whitehead’s distinction between appearance and reality must be taken into account. The appearance of a technogenetic body cannot be based on a body (an organic body, a dancing body) that pre-exists its ontogenetic emergence. The body must not be danced and then supplemented: it must dance its supplement. It must dance its novelty such that it introduces within the movement the mutability of the body’s rhyzomatic networks of actuality and virtuality. A body is never wholly actual: it is always virtually what it will have become as it interweaves the organic and the technogenetic, where the organic is as much a technology of the senses as the senses are technologies of the organic.

A sensuous perception creates a novel extension that disturbs the machinic assemblage that is a sensing body in movement. To sense — to experience the world amodally[19] — activates the body’s relation to the world and opens the body to its technogenetic potential. This occurs in the dancing body when the movement causes the room to space differently through an accumulation of tactile sensations coursing through the air. Felt affectively as a change in the dynamics of the environment, this kind of movement takes form with and through the dancer’s body as a molecular reorganization of duration such that the dimensions of the felt are reexperienced in conjunction with the reassembling of a dispersing, re-cognizing becoming-body.

To feel time is to create space in the present. This requires an activation of pastness in the presentness of experience. It means we move spacetime into a passing present such that duration becomes experience. Whitehead calls this direct perception of “pastness” non-sensuous perception.[20] Non-sensuous perception underscores the fact that perception begins relationally with an emphasis on the pastness that allows us to “know” the world. This pastness (that can be durationally as immediate as the present moment passing) enables us to form causal relations between past events and current circumstances such that we feel the world ecologically before we know exactly what it is. To feel ecologically is to directly perceive the relations out of which spacetime will be composed. Once these relations perceptually begin to take form, objects can be “pulled out” or prehended. Perceiving ecologically does not suggest giving meaning to form, but forming environmentally. To say we perceive nonsensuously — or ecologically — is to emphasize how the world creates modalities of perception even as our prehensions are creating worlds. Ecological durations are not linear — they are richly layered, their nexus ripe with reality, their environments populated by appearances. Whitehead calls forth this notion of non-sensuous perception in order to sidestep the tendency to think we make sense only with sense-data, challenging the theory of sensory-reception whereby an impulse “out there” is processed by a mediating brain/body function that makes sense of a pre-existing world.

We perceive not an object-as-such but how the object merges with experience. We feel its pastness even as we call it forth in its present appearance. This is non-sensuous perception. As mentioned earlier, instead of perceiving the chair-as-such, we perceive its sit-ability: the object becomes its sitability — the object is its experiential function. The sitability of the chair is rendered more complex by the analogous perception (presentational immediacy) that adds novelty to the concept of sitting by associating it with qualitative difference. ‘The creativity is the actualization of potentiality, and the process of actualization is an occasion of experiencing’ (Whitehead, 1933: 178). Objects are novel because their conjunctions are new, not pre-existing the object, but immanent to it. Objects, prehended, are individuations within an ecology of practices wherein perception is key.

Yet, perception is never limited to the perception of even such complex objects. It is always also an activation of a virtuality — a conjunction or a relation — out of which an event (an objectness, an individuating body) is composed. Non-sensuous perception is an activity of relation whereby the composition of an event takes place through a re-uptake of the virtual (pastness) into the actual (appearance). Through non-sensuous perception we directly perceive relation. In Whiteheadian terms, we prehend the affective tone — the relational concernedness — of an object.

A sensing body in movement is activated both sensuously and non-sensuously. Perception occurs on a continuum of relation. To make sense technogenetically, the coupling dance/new-technology must ask how a technology can make relation felt. This may be done, for instance, by working with a delay through which the room is durationally recomposed. Imagine, for instance, a dancer cutting across the space, shifting spacetime’s tactile borders through a succession of movement-layers that compile a thick database that eventually alters the sound in the room. The sound is not altered by a given movement, but by an overload in the system. The sound can now be perceived as a sensory experiment technogenetically emergent with perception’s own half-second delay. Experience is overlaid rather than delineated through a representation of movement=sound in a distinct one-to-one relation. Now, the system recomposes the room even as the dancer composes with the system. The coupling causes the room to shift, to move, to breathe. As this happens, the intensity of a shift in spacetime is perhaps felt. This is felt not through the sound shifting as such, but through a slight difference in affective tone. The room reverberates around its colour, its sound, its becoming-form. Now, the spectator feels a concern[21] for the space. This concern provokes a new kind of attention: a perception of the in-between. Relation is felt even if only in its effects. A new composition begins to unfold, one that may be related to an ontogenetic shift in the participating body of the spectator. Technogenesis. Two bodies recomposed at different durations in the sensing spectrum.

If technology can recompose a body beyond the level of sensuous perception — beyond the directness of an operation that makes something seen, such as an arm movement translating into a video image — technology becomes technogenesis. What is sensually transmitted — what the audience knows it can see or feel — is the datum of the experience. This is necessary to create an event, but limiting if restricted to its representation. What is crucial is the capacity to make the non-sensuous as well as the sensuous felt. The concern that comes with experience — its affective tone — calls forth more than the bits moving through the program or the movement becoming image, image becoming sound. In a technogenetic event, more than displacement or representation must be perceived. What must also be felt — by the dancer first and foremost, but also by those participating in the performance as spectators — are the microperceptions through which the displacement is activated. Many of these perceptions are nonsensuous because they work at the level of the barely there, below the threshold of sensuous perception. Rather than the sensory perception itself, what we feel is the relation out of which it will emerge. The perception thus exists chiefly as concern. This affective experience cannot be separated from the creation of spacetimes the technogenetic event calls forth. Technogenesis contributes concern to the event which does not end with the performance: the affective tone’s residue lingers, provoking adjacent forms of experience, many of which remain virtual. Technogenesis always involves more that the datum, more than the sense-presentation, more than the present. Technogenesis makes the process felt, foregrounding the duration of the individuating machinic body.

Technogenesis cannot be pre-mapped. How then can it work alongside a technological system whose parameters are so often set? The ontogenetic coupling of digital technology with the originary technicity of the individuating body must take this into account. Rather than mapping the technology — as a prosthesis — onto a moving body, it is necessary to incite the movement to appear out of the technological process that is the machinic assemblage of individuation.

To make the movement appear does not mean to restrict the movement according to the parameters of the technology. It does not mean to delimit gesture to limbs moving (because the motion sensor can better detect a large extrinsic movement, rather than a virtually invisible one). We require operations that traverse the spectrum of the technology’s potential metastability in relation to a becoming-body. When technology begins to operate along this spectrum it forms an associated milieu[22] with the experiential in-betweenness that is the becoming-body. Technology not mapped-onto but emergent-with a body-becoming might make different durations felt along the strata that is the sensing body in movement. This would happen first not at the level of reality but through the presentness of appearance. The technology would have to function not as a system that takes over the moving body, but as a complex interface through which the technogenetic body can be moved to appear. The effect of this (dis)appearing body would eventually populate the nexus such that certain aspects of the technogenetic body could remain dormant, real yet virtual, embedded in a pastness accessible through activation. There is no doubt this already happens — but still too rarely. Techniques for technogenetic emergence must become part of the technology’s interface. These techniques would thereby create new associated milieus never distinct from the ontogenetic body. For the associated milieu is always also the becoming-body, a technogenetic recomposition. Technogenetic technology would no longer be inserted into a body-system: it would be emergent with it.

Scene 4: Bus-Stopping the Ground

Let me return to my example of walking to the bus stop where I suggested that the ground’s recomposition of the dancing body was simply an extreme example of the shiftiness of the everyday walking body’s relation to ground. Whereas the dancing body specifically dances the ground, walking to the bus-stop is usually conceived as an activity that presupposes a stable ground. Yet, even walking to the bus-stop challenges the ground. It does so by immediately reconfiguring the body-ground series into a transportational vector. In advance of the walking, the bus-stop already appears as the propulsion for the walk. The ground-in-itself is backgrounded in favour of transportational (bus-oriented) momentum. The perception ground-body in this case is directly intertwined with the capacity for transportation. The ground still “contributes” to the walking, despite the fact that the transduction of ground into the steadiness of the walk involves a backgrounding of the ground in this instance. The backgrounded ground thus becomes a participant (rather than a coordinator) in the transportational vector that carries the movement. The ground “appears” only insofar as it is expressed as something else (steadiness of movement, for instance). This backgrounding does not mean that the ground is not active, but rather than it is not felt as such in the prehension.

The prehension “ground” is indissociably linked to the transportability of its becoming-function. It is not that ground is transport: it is that it appears in the function of transportability. As long as nothing gets in the way of this focus, the ground will continue to be backgrounded in the transportational vector ground-walk-bus-stop. But things are bound to get in the way: you smell the garbage in the alley, which causes you to lose your footing and trip. Through malfunction, you lose your ground and the ground appears, foregrounded, horizontalizing you, altering your sense of spacetime. Suddenly, ground no longer contributes steadiness-in-movement. Face-down, you prehend hardness. The bus-stop is momentarily backgrounded. The event has shifted and with it the ground. Now you see your reflection in the puddle and this makes you feel self-conscious. You prehend a selfness that was neither part of the transportational vector nor of the appearing groundness. A new actual occasion begins to take form where the ground is once more backgrounded. You remember your lateness and you quickly rise and resume your walk. The ground re-enters the transportational vector, contributing to the hurriedness of the movement that will take you toward busness. The hurry is foregrounded now, but this does not mean that the ground has remained stable.

Each event creates a different ground. Spacetimes of experience are always linked to shifts in ground. Ground is part of the technogenesis that makes events felt. It is by adding new elements to the system that the system becomes metastable. Every appearance grounds differently. And every worlding makes sense: it creates sensory openings through which we move, and opens the way for movements through which we technogenetically invent worlds. These are not prosthetic openings, but the very making sense of the more-than that is the ontogenetic body.

What is real and what appears exist in a complex network of movement that senses, relays, organizes, discards, opens, closes. Each of these terms is relational. And each of these terms involves a gesture toward appearance. The key is remembering that gesture is never in-itself: it is relation, sensuous and non-sensuous, equal to emergence. Every experience occurs because it is prehended from a nexus that continually evolves, replete with potentiality. Beyond the current prehension lies the potential for the creation of new ecologies of experience. What a body can do is characterized by its capacity to make sense beyond a vocabulary of the prosthetic. An ontogenetic body has an infinite potential for technogenesis. New technologies must dance the body.

Author’s Biography

Erin Manning is assistant professor in studio art and film studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) as well as director of The Sense Lab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her artwork is primarly devoted to painting and scupture. She dances Argentine Tango professionally and writes about it as relational movement. Her dance background includes classical ballet and contemporary dance. Publications include Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her current book-project is called Moving the Relation: Sensing Across the Arts and deals with technogenesis and movement.

Notes

[1] The quote continues: ‘This means descriptions (what we think of as co-descriptions) of movement that can exist in both its own terms (as in physical) as well as in the symbolic abstractions that are necessary in order to use these techniques of gesture modeling, simulating, learning, following etc. with the computer’ (deLahunta, Scott. ‘co-descriptions and collaborative composition’, opening presentation at Choreographic Computations (a NIME06/IRCAM workshop), Paris, France, 4 June, 2006).
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[2] In deLahunta, Scott. ‘co-descriptions and collaborative composition’, opening presentation at Choreographic Computations (a NIME06/IRCAM workshop), Paris, France, 4 June, 2006).
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[3] For a more detailed exploration of preacceleration, please see Manning, Erin. ‘Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet,’ in Choreographesis Ed. Lynn Turner. (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2007).
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[4] This is not to suggest that thought has not been given to these issues. Many very interesting and innovative software composers are currently working with dancers and choreographers to explore the potential of creative continuums between software and innovative dance. In his recent dance/new-technology composing, Scott de Lahunta calls this “choreographic compositions,” suggesting that the choreography of the dance is entwined in the double process of composing software and creating movement. The exploration of new technology with dance has a history that can be traced to the 1960s with choreographer Jeanne Beaman and computer scientist Paul Le Vasseur who created computer generated choreography using an IBM 7070. This platform randomly chose a sequence of events from a list of movements. John Lansdown, an architect, similarly explored the potential of using the computer as an autonomous composer, rather than to support or augment the existing creative process. Merce Cunningham’s methods are also well-known: the 3-D human figure animation software LifeForms continues to be used today and has been developed in innovative work by Trisha Brown and William Forsythe. According to de Lahunta, what is new about the recent current of dance and new technologies is how systems are being built in correspondence to a choreographic creative process with an emphasis on the ‘shared understanding that emerges through the collaborative process. This is what we think to be both technically and creatively innovative’ (deLahunta, Scott. 2006. ‘co-descriptions and collaborative composition’, opening presentation at Choreographic Computations (a NIME06/IRCAM workshop), Paris, France, 4 June.). This paper does not seek to deny this important research, but to ask how such a process can or does become technogenetic.
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[5] For more on the machinic, see Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987). See also, Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains, Julian Pefanis. (Indiana: Indiana UP, 1995).
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[6] For more on Artaud’s concept of the Body without Organs, see Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987).
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[7] For a reading of the posthuman, see Hayles, Catherine. How we Became Posthuman (Chicago: Chicago Up, 2000).
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[8] Beardsworth is influenced by Jacques Derrida in his usage of originary technicity. It comes up in many of Beardsworth’s texts. For an example of how he uses the term, see http://tekhnema.free.fr/3editorial.htm
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[9] For an analysis of interactivity, see Massumi, B et Dove, T. ‘The Interface and I: A Conversation Between Brian Massumi and Toni Dove’, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts (É-U), 1:6 (February-march 1999), pp. 30-37.
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[10] For more on the ways in which actual occasions are always contemporarily independent events, see Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933).
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[11] On the half-second delay of perception, see Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933). See also Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
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[12] For an evocative reading of active recollection in Bergsonian thought, see Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1991).
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[13] Whitehead defines organisms according to the perceptual capacities, making a difference here between what he calls “lower grade” and “higher grade” organisms..An example of a lower grade organism engaged in perception would be the causal relation between flower and sun. See Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933).
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[14] For a case study of perception without causal efficacy, see Erin Manning ‘Taking the Next Step: Touch as Technique’, which explores the complex perceptual disorder in patients who suffer from post-encephalitic syndrome. Forthcoming in Mark Paterson Ed. ‘Re-Mediating Touch’ Special Issue of The Senses and Society (Oxford: Berg Press, 2007).
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[15] The idea of breathing space was evocatively brought forward by Michael Schumacher dancing in Christopher Salter’s new piece entitled Thresholds. In this piece, Schumacher recomposes spacetime through the tactility of breath.
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[16] See Simondon, Gilbert. Du Monde d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1969).
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[17] See the chapter of the same name in Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
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[18] Stelarc’s work is evocative in relation to technogenesis. For a stimulating reading of his work, see ‘The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason’ in Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
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[19] The amodal suggests that we sense across sense modes. The concept of “amodal completion” is developed by Albert Michotte. See his essay in Thines, Costall, Buttersworth Ed. Michotte’s Experimental Phenomenology of Perception (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991).
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[20] See Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933) pp. 180-181.
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[21] The concept of concern is central to Whitehead’s work and connotes a capacity to feel the affective tone of the becoming-world as a direct experiential perception. Whitehead writes: ‘The occasion as subject has a “concern” for the object. And the “concern” at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it’ (1933: 176).
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[22] For a more in-depth analysis of the associated milieu, see Simondon, Gilbert. Du Monde d’existence des objets techniques Paris : Aubier Montagne, 1969.
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References

deLahunta, Scott. ‘co-descriptions and collaborative composition’, Opening Presentation at Choreographic Computations (a NIME06/IRCAM workshop), Paris, France, 4 June, 2006 [unpublished].

Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-Image trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1991).

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987).

Hayles, Katherine. How we Became Posthuman (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000).

Manning, Erin. ‘Taking the Next Step: Touch as Technique’, in Mark Paterson Ed. ‘Re-Mediating Touch’, Special Issue of The Senses and Society (Oxford: Berg Press, forthcoming 2007).

____. ‘Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet,’ in Choreographesis ed. Lynn Turner. (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2007).

Massumi, Brian and Dove, Tony. ‘The Interface and I: A Conversation Between Brian Massumi and Toni Dove’, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts (É-U), 1:6 (February-March 1999), pp. 30-37.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Affect, Movement, Sensation (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).

Michotte, Albert. in Thines, Costall, Buttersworth Ed. Michotte’s Experimental Phenomenology of Perception (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991).

Simondon, Gilbert. Du Monde d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1969).

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978).

____. Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933)

Introduction

The virtual idol, a computer-generated media celebrity, is a figure representative of a cultural milieu in which arrangements of data seem interchangeable with physical materiality. We are currently in an historical moment when form, information and data are widely understood to be rendering matter, physicality and flesh increasingly redundant. Popular and academic accounts of the body as discourse, behaviour as genetically programmed and digital information systems as rendering spatial relationships and physical interaction irrelevant, for example, are all dominant discourses of the ‘information age’. This mode of understanding is perhaps a prerequisite for the appearance of the virtual idol, a figure animated by digital data, an immaterial substance into which seemingly anything – even the body itself – can be translated.

The virtual idol seeks to simulate a particular kind of human body: the celebrity who is already heavily mediated and virtualised through her relationship with and dependence upon technologies of representation and the careful construction of a public persona. The celebrity is a particularly appropriate subject for digital simulation given that the careers of living media celebrities already follow a trajectory which carries them towards virtualisation, and the virtual idol’s blurring of the boundaries separating the biological and digital bodies highlights a contemporary propensity to see little difference between the two.

The virtual idol might seem like nothing more than curio, or the product of an increasingly cynical – or desperate – celebrity industry. However, in this essay I wish to situate the virtual idol within a larger history of thought on the relationship between the living body and its technological simulation. Simulations of the living body not only reflect contemporaneous understandings of what the body is and how it works; they also inform these understandings, serving as models for further investigation and speculation.

The Virtual Idol

As suggested by its name, the virtual idol is a computer-generated equivalent of the Japanese aidoru, or idol, a pop star cum actor who can be taken as an extreme example of corporate attempts to prefabricate celebrity. According to Hiroshi Aoyagi, ‘becoming a female idol is to be wrapped up in a package of toylike femininity designed by idol manufacturing agencies to attract consumers and enlarge profits’ (2005: 86).

The fact that the management of girl idol group Tokyo Performance Doll sought to internationalise the market for the group’s songs by selecting a group of young Chinese girls to form Shanghai Performance Doll – singing translations of Tokyo Performance Doll’s songs – further illustrates idols’ status as mass produced and interchangeable value-added commodities (Iwabuchi, 2002: 102; Aoyagi, 2005: 238).

While a number of different accounts of celebrity arose during the late 20th century surge in scholarly discussions of the phenomenon, they were broadly unified by a rejection of explanations which depended upon the celebrity’s exceptionality or uniqueness, seeing celebrity rather as a constructed phenomenon produced by a specialised industry or industries(see Rojek, 2001: 29-49; Turner, 2004: 41-45). However, a central problem for the production of celebrities is that, ‘[u]nlike factory-built products, celebrities have minds of their own and the capacity for independent action’ (Turner, 2004: 35). In 1996, HoriPro, one of Japan’s largest talent agencies, hit upon a novel method of neutralising the dangers of aging, scandals and tantrums for its stable of idols. It commissioned Visual Science Laboratory, a Japanese computer graphics company, to create a computer rendered and animated celebrity intended to reproduce the living idol’s appeal while adding to it the fascination of an entirely artificial, technologically produced body. The result was Kyoko Date, the world’s first virtual idol.

The Charm of the Virtual

Speaking of the relationship between the human body and new technologies, Fortunati, Katz and Riccini note that, while new technologies are most certainly ascribed an economic value, the human body is often seen as having comparatively little economic worth.

The human body, because it is placed outside the rationale of value, is seen as something whose value is so incommensurable and therefore immeasurable that it ultimately does not cost anything and so is socially devalued. As nonvalue, it therefore always costs less than technology (this is the reason for the slowing down of robotics). (2003: 3)

This incommensurability is made abundantly clear by the relative economic worth ascribed to computers and the developing world bodies which assemble them; however, the parenthetical remark concerning robotics requires clarification. For ‘robotics’ perhaps it would be more accurate to substitute research into androids, that subset of robots which reproduce the human form; this would seem to be the spirit of the quote given the parallel with the human body, and the creation of robots which do not mimic the appearance of human bodies (for example those which are used to assemble cars or microchips) is a highly successful and economically important industry. It is the attempt to create a robot whose actions closely reproduce those of a human body which has for many years failed to deliver something approximating the fantasy which motivates it.

However, in this regard I would argue that Fortunati et al. are failing to appreciate an important dimension of attempts to create androids. It is true that there is little economic imperative to create mechanical replacements for human bodies – after all, the world is full of human bodies which do not need to be designed and built at great cost – but this only raises the question of why such research has taken place at all, rather than requiring explanations for its lack of success. The quest to build a machine which could walk began before the invention of the steam train (Asendorf, 1993: 105), and yet Honda’s ASIMO, the first bipedal android capable of reliably nimble perambulation, only attained this capacity in the 1990s (Honda, 2006). The slow progress towards ASIMO was not the result of a lack of economic imperative, but rather the fact that reproducing the countless adjustments of balance necessary for human beings to teeter about on two long legs for many years seemed an insurmountable engineering challenge. Again, this invites the question of why this problem was pursued for so long when robots can just as easily be fitted with wheels, or a far less challenging four legs.

The Artificial Body

The first direct ancestor of the modern android was the 18th and 19th century clockwork automaton, whose appearance in Western Europe was soon followed by the Japanese clockwork karakuri doll after the arrival of clockwork technology to that country (de Panafieu, 1984: 127; Screech, 1996). The existence of these automata was in no way justified with recourse to ideas of economic significance or industrial productivity; they were created for no other reason than the pleasure of seeing a machine simulate the appearance and movements of a living being. While the android might have acquired a set of economic justifications since that time, Fortunati et al.’s comment only draws attention to the weakness of these justifications. While robotics have been pursued most vigorously in Japan, a country whose past rapid economic growth and resistance to immigration can be seen to have created an economic imperative for new sources of labour, there is a great gulf separating the robotic arm on a car assembly line from ASIMO. The fact that the most impressive and lifelike robot bodies are creations such as Sony’s AIBo (Artificial Intelligence roBOt) animals (Sony, 2005) and Honda’s ASIMO, automata which have no real productive use, only serves to accentuate this fact. The AIBo’s claimed raison d’étre is its usefulness as a companion, but the argument about the incommensurability between the value of the human body and its robotic simulation is surely doubly true when the human body is substituted with that of a dog or cat. In the case of ASIMO, it has been argued that androids have a superior capacity to function in the home, helping to care for Japan’s increasing proportion of elderly citizens. However, the ASIMO project was initiated in 1986, a time when Japanese technological research was driven more by bubble economy hubris than concern about physical frailty, and the economic impact of a rising average age was only just beginning to be recognised.[1] During ASIMO’s various public appearances, its capacities are shown off through economically insignificant activities such as dancing and balancing on one leg, rather than opening jars for arthritic old ladies or carrying them upstairs to bed. At the 2005 International Robot Show in Tokyo, 80 year-old Joe Engelberger, the founder of the world’s first industrial robot manufacturer, was reported to have complained about the state of robot research, which he characterised as preoccupied with making ‘toys’ or ‘dolls’ which mimic human bodies rather than producing machines capable of practical application (Cameron, 2005: 21). The fact that both the AIBo and ASIMO have been used primarily in corporate advertising for their respective producers, demonstrating their technological resources and know-how, rather than being seriously marketed as consumer goods, further makes the suggestion of an economic imperative in their development seem no more persuasive than claims for the aerodynamic properties of fins on 1950s cars. This is not to argue that such robots can have no productive function, but only to note that their use value seems marginal to their fascination. Just as 1950s industry can be seen to have made reference to technological fantasies of streamlined speed with its fins, the android can be seen as resulting more from wider discourses concerning technology than the pragmatic justifications attached to it after the fact.

The virtual idol provides an excellent case study for investigating the less pragmatic considerations underlying the development of such technological artefacts. Also largely a Japanese phenomenon, like the android it can be seen to resonate with wider-ranging fantasies of simulating the human body.[2] In addition, misleading claims about the practical value of simulated bodies are less applicable in the case of the virtual idol than the android as the economic imperative which drives the creation and marketing of virtual idols is a public fascination with the idea of such simulations of the human body in themselves, making the more laboured justifications required of ASIMO unnecessary.

Simulation and Representation

The advent of the virtual idol has already been noted by news services such as the BBC and CNN as a technological curiosity (for example, ‘Virtual Pop Star’s Chart Bid’, 2000; Williams, 2001). However, such popular accounts understand the virtual idol as simply and unproblematically a representation or simulation of a biological original. With all Japanese virtual idols to date being female, often the predictable outcome is the repetition of easy assertions concerning the virtual idol as a passive, compliant fantasy woman. Given the geographical epicentre of the virtual idol phenomenon, these assertions are then readily assimilable into stereotyping accounts of Japanese patriarchalism and the emotional infantilism and romantic ineptitude of Japanese men.[3]

But is it appropriate to understand the virtual idol simply as representation of a biological original? If the virtual idol is simply a commodified representation of femininity, how can her existence be justified given that the same purpose can be – and has been – served through the use of still or moving photography to supply men with fantasy ideals? In line with Fortunati et al.’s comment, images of living women are vastly more economical in terms of the time and resources required to produce them, and they continue to enjoy more popularity than their computer-generated equivalents. Furthermore, while the virtual idol can simulate a media career, creating an artificial image and performing in a contrived and carefully circumscribed way according to the dictates of her managers and minders, how different is such a mediated persona from that attached to living pop stars and media celebrities? All celebrities bear only a tenuous connection to living, biological bodies, although those bodies ultimately guarantee their status and continuity.

Clearly what is missing from such accounts is a consideration of what makes the virtual idol different from both living celebrities and other representations of the female body, which is that it is constructed from digital information and has no direct living or material original. In a 1997 issue of The Face largely devoted to the fame of British proto-virtual idol Lara Croft, a commentator explains Croft’s status as ‘that of a Seventies car advert: a half-naked woman being used to sell the machinery beneath her’ (Sawyer, 1997: 70).[4] However, such accounts are clearly insufficient in that computer generated women are analogous to both half-naked woman and car, bringing together sexy body and technology. Furthermore, the 1970s car is capable of exerting sex appeal even when not draped with a bikini-clad nymph; the ‘muscle car’ is attributed with its own spectacle of sexual desirability, whose very name figures it as something approaching a body in its own right. In this sense, then, the desirable car is not so different from the android in its fascinating technological evocation of the human body; it may lack the capacity to climb stairs, but it does possess a more persuasive claim to practical value.

The Virtual Body

The virtual idol is clearly situated at the intersection of machine and body, but what remains unclear is how this intersection came to be so firmly established in popular conceptions of technology. When seeking to explain the desire to see the human body simulated using technology, of obvious importance is the manner in which such simulations seem to literalise contemporaneous understandings of how the human body is constituted.

The European automaton appeared at a time and place in which materialist accounts of the human body sought to explain its functioning in mechanistic terms (de Panafieu, 1984: 130-31). The automaton’s ability to simulate the human body seemed to confirm the legitimacy of these accounts of the body, but the desire to create such artefacts in the first place also reflects an existing faith in their accuracy.

[T]he automaton has close links with the living creatures in all its different manifestations, but especially in relation to the medicine and physiology of the period. It dissects the living and imitates them sufficiently well to generate a gratifying illusion about its own nature; it proposes experimental protocols that link up with the old topics of the body, animals and man … as machines. (Beaune, 1989: 436 emphasis in original)

The problem, of course, is that such limited referencing of the human body invites a belief that every human capacity might be simulated in the same way and thus that the human body itself is not qualitatively different from the automaton, being superior only in its greater complexity. Christine Woesler de Panafieu makes the argument that automata do not reflect an attempt to replace the human body with technology (a conclusion which is often drawn from attempts to reproduce the body through robotics or remove its input through automatism), but rather result from an attempt to show that technology and the human body are in fact one and the same thing (de Panafieu, 1984: 131). Rather than being an effort to tame or replace biology, such pursuits seek to remove any distinction between biology and machinery by demonstrating that the human body is simply a more complex machine and thus not in any way opposed to other machines or privileged in relation to them. The obvious appeal of such an idea is that it panders to a belief that current scientific knowledge can explain every one of the body’s mysteries, rather than often being mystified by the body’s functioning and capacities as is more truly the case.

Given that any representation of the body makes only a selective reference to the living original, changes in modes and styles of bodily representation can be seen to reflect those corporeal attributes most prioritised or valued at a given historical moment. As already noted, the 18th century automaton can be seen to reflect an understanding of the body based upon materialist and mechanistic accounts, but this principle can be extended more broadly. For example, it has been noted often enough that the older tradition of classical and neo-classical representations of the body reflects a prioritisation of the qualities of wholeness, smoothness and exteriority, and thus served as an aesthetic reflection of the humanist subject as self-contained and differentiated.

The relationship between the classical form of bodily representation and the rise of a particular conception of the body lies at the heart of Bakhtin’s account of the grotesque:

The new bodily canon presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual … The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade. (Bakhtin, 1984: 320)

This account is taken up by Stallybrass and White in their description of the classical statue:

[T]he classical statue is the radiant centre of a transcendent individualism, ‘put on a pedestal’, raised above the viewer and the commonality and anticipating passive admiration from below … The classical statue has no openings or orifices … [T]he bourgeois individualist conception of the body … finds itsimage and legitimation in the classical. (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 21-22)

Such representations both reflect contemporaneous conceptions of what the body is, and perhaps seek to blur the distinction between original and copy by encouraging the living body to take on desired attributes through the influence of its simulacrum.[5] It can be seen as a kind of sympathetic magic which, through the influence of a lifeless representation of the body, seeks to produce living bodies which more closely approximate that representation.

This kind of reversal, in which the copy is seen to affect the appearance of the original, existed long before Barbie dolls or Lara Croft were accused of encouraging dieting or plastic surgery. Western art, medicine and science have for some time been obsessed with investigating the nature of the living body through its representation, and accounts such as that of art historian Nicholas Mirzoeff see this obsession with representation as resulting from a desire to assuage anxieties concerning the nature of the lived body.

Representations of the body are one means of seeking to complete this inevitably disjunctured entity. The coherence of the represented body is, however, constantly undermined by the very incompleteness these images seek to overcome. The body is the object of whose materiality we are most certain, but the indefinable potential of that inevitably incomplete materi­ality remains a constant source of unease. (Mirzoeff, 1995: 21)

N. Katherine Hayles has characterised a dominant contemporary understanding of the body as one of ‘virtuality’, ‘the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns’ (1998: 69; 1999: 13-14). Hayles argues that this perception is only made possible by the post-war development of a duality between information and materiality, a duality itself only made possible when electronic media allow the ‘dematerialisation’ of communication, and given additional impact by the importance of such communication to the conduct of modern warfare. Implicit in the post-war appearance of information theory, which reduces communication to the transfer of something abstract and contextless, immaterial but mathematically quantifiable (Hayles, 1998: 72), such a conceptual framework is also implicated in forms of knowledge as disparate as genetics and socio-biology, on one hand, and Foucauldian accounts of the body as produced by discourse, on the other.

Every epoch has beliefs, widely accepted by contemporaries, that appear fantastic to later generations … One contemporary belief likely to stupefy future generations is the postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construction. Coincident with cybernetic developments that stripped information of its body were discursive analyses within the humanities, especially the archaeology of knowledge pioneered by Michel Foucault, that saw the body as a play of discourse systems. (Hayles, 1999: 192)

This complaint intersects with a number of other critiques of Foucault’s account of the body. In the late 20th century, Foucault’s account was questioned from within sociology on commonsense grounds, but more recently, in ‘the Deleuzian century’, the most effective challenge is a philosophical one highlighting its perpetuation of a classical distinction between form and matter in the shape of discourse and materiality.[6] Paul Rabinow suggests that even Foucault himself came to acknowledge the limitations of an approach which focused exclusively upon discourse:

Deleuze convincingly claims that Foucault lost his wager that it would be the language of the anthropological triad – life, labor, language – that would open the way for a new episteme, washing the figure of Man away like a wave crashing over a drawing in the sand. Foucault himself acknowledged that his prediction had been wrong when, a decade after the publication of The Order of Things, he mocked the ‘relentless theorization of writing,’ not as the dawn of the new age but the death rattle of an old one. (Rabinow, 1992: 236)[7]

Whether originating in the sciences or humanities, virtualising accounts of the body see the self as most importantly a construction of information, leaving the materiality of embodiment as little more than a by-product or regrettably inescapable excess. The kinds of conclusions invited by such an understanding of the body can be seen at their most striking in marginal perspectives such as those of transhumanists who plan to download their identities as pure data into a computer and discard their bodies, but a more general, commonsense understanding of the body based upon this perspective is visible all around us, seemingly confirmed by, for example, the experience of modifying or replacing one’s identity while interacting with others in an internet chatroom, or the promise of genetic research to allow modification of behaviour or appearance by altering the syntax of genetic code.

Technical artefacts help to make an information theoretic view a part of everyday life. From ATMs to the Internet, from the morphing programs used in Terminator II to the sophisticated visualization programs used to guide microsurgeries, information is increasingly perceived as interpene­trating material forms. Especially for users who may not know the material processes involved, the impression is created that pattern is predominant over presence. From here it is a small step to perceiving information as more mobile, more important, more essential than material forms. When this impression becomes part of your cultural mindset, you have entered the condition of virtuality. (Hayles, 1999: 19)

This development can be contextualised within a longer-term shift in the relationship between body and representation, as noted by Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace:

[F]undamentally human (and humanist) themes remained at the centre of Western art from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. But by 1880 or so, something extraordinary was beginning to happen – [t]he centres of attention in avant-garde art moved decisively into areas other than the human figure rendered within the broad spectrum of naturalism … At more or less the same time, hand-drawn illustrations of what was called ‘gross anatomy’ – that is to say, the features discernible by the naked human eye – ceased to undergo significant development.

That these developments in art and medical imaging occurred over the same time span is not coincidental. The kinds of truth for which artists and medical researchers were mutually searching lay not just within and under the surface appearance of things, as they had for generations, but at different levels of reality, more abstract and often ever-more minute. (Kemp and Wallace, 2000: 16-18)

The advent of new technologies of representation such as photography, cinema and X-ray imaging penetrated and fractured the unified classical body, breaking it into multiple spatial layers and temporal moments. Later, in the era of morphing special effects, digital photomontage and functional MRI scans, posthumanist representations of the body can be seen to have exploded the unified classical body into countless fragments of data and shifting perspectives.

Quite clearly, the virtual idol is a body which exists in a state of virtuality. Just as neo-classical representations of the body reflect understandings of what the body is or should be from their time, the virtual idol is an artefact which reflects current conceptions of the body and their relationship to previous ones.[8] The virtual idol is a new kind of automaton which marks the movement from the industrial to the post-industrial age; whereas, in the machine age, the body was imagined to be a machine, in the information age it is imagined to be information. This is part of a wider shift: where once mechanistic accounts sought to reduce the workings of nature to a collection of mechanisms, today the discourse of genetics seeks to reduce the workings of nature to arrangements of data.

This vision of the body as computer data is summoned by Lev Manovich’s exhortation to see the computer generated body, not as an imperfect representation of the body as it now is, but rather as a representation of the body as it will be in a virtualised future (an exhortation which reflects the power of the discourse of virtualisation in its hyperbole):

[The s]ynthetic computer-generated image is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality … [W]e should not consider clean, skinless, too flexible, and in the same time too jerky, human figures in 3-D computer animation as unrealistic, as imperfect approximation[s] of the real thing – our bodies. They are perfectly realistic representation[s] of a cyborg body yet to come, of a world reduced to geometry, where efficient representation via a geometric model becomes the basis of reality. The synthetic image simply represents the future. (Manovich, 1996: 64)

This new kind of body – one consisting entirely of digital code – brings with it a new set of perspectives on how the body does, and might, function in a state of virtuality, just as the clockwork body reflected and informed materialist perspectives in its day. The advent of new digital technologies has had an important impact on popular conceptions of the status of information as a dematerialised substance, and the virtual idol as digital body generates a set of questions concerning the attributes of a truly virtual body in the digital age.

Digitalisation has led to an unprecedented sense of the dematerialisation of cultural texts, and of their near-infinite translatability and appropriability. Still images, music, text, video can all be translated into a common format, one which allows them to be infinitely duplicated, near-instantaneously disseminated, and re-authored by anyone who comes into their possession. This has been seen as empowering consumers by providing them with the capacity to produce and distribute their own material or retrofit existing material to their tastes, but has also caused consternation amongst intellectual property holders as their ability to dictate consumers’ mode of interaction with their properties has weakened. While ‘real life’ media stars are already highly virtualised, and digital formats give consumers tremendous power to, for example, illegally duplicate or remix Beyoncé’s latest song or re-edit still or moving images of her body for their own ends, the fact that the virtual idol exists only in digital format, and can be marketed, not simply as a manipulable end product, but as the encoded potential for action which allows her copyright owners to animate her in the first instance, introduces a further level of complexity in the relationship between digital information and body. Rather than simply buying audio-visual representations of the virtual idol, consumers can actually buy instances of the virtual idol’s manipulable body itself, which are no less real or original than those used to produce her movies or songs.

Yuki Terai and Interactive Celebrity[9]

The virtual idol Yuki Terai was launched in 1997 by Japanese company extage.[10] One year earlier, HoriPro had launched Kyoko Date, achieving short-term success with the release of pop songs and ‘appearances’ on radio. (Obviously, when appearing on radio, the only component of the Kyoko Date persona being presented to the audience was Kyoko’s voice, which was produced by a living human being, not a computer.) Unlike HoriPro, however, extage was a company largely concerned with technical education and the publication of magazines and reference books aimed at computer animators, rather than being experienced in the management of media personalities. Yuki Terai had already been created by manga artist Kenichi Kutsugi and introduced in the form of a two dimensional, monochrome comic book, and extage, recognising her value as an appealing and already fleshed-out character, set about establishing her as a pop star, pinup, and advertising spokesmodel. She has since enjoyed considerable success, releasing DVDs, photo books, and music CDs, and has secured a mainstream profile by appearing on TV shows and advertisements and even as a centrefold in a Japanese men’s magazine. extage’s strategy has thus been to market Yuki to a mainstream audience using familiar media formats such as books, calendars, TV broadcasting, CDs and DVDs.

However, Yuki is also marketed by Japanese software publisher eFrontier, publishers of Shade, a 3D modelling programme. The target audience for eFrontier’s marketing of Yuki Terai is far more specialised, and the format in which she is presented much less familiar to most consumers.

Yuki Terai is both the product of, and of most direct interest to, the Japanese otaku subculture. Otaku (most commonly translated as ‘nerds’ or ‘geeks’) are a subculture heavily invested in manga, anime, and computer games. Otaku produce a great deal of amateur fan art and, while this mostly takes the form of comic books, many otaku are also amateur computer modellers, and many professional Japanese graphic artists and computer animators and modellers have trained themselves in their craft through fan activity rather than educational institutions.[11] Aidoru otaku constitute a subset of otaku whose fandom is directed at living idols (Aoyagi, 2005: 205 ff.), and the virtual idol combines their and other, more general, otaku obsessions. Texts produced both by and for otaku are often concerned with bishōjo, or pretty girls, and one forerunner of the otaku interest in the virtual idol can be seen in the kisekae computer programme, a kind of digital paper doll set originally aimed at young girls, but which was soon appropriated by otaku (often reimagined as a kind of interactive pornography) (Hamilton, 1997: 4).

Amateur otaku computer graphics artists therefore represent an important market both for the magazines and reference books of extage, and the software published by eFrontier. While extage’s marketing of Yuki Terai focuses on mainstreaming the appeal of a computer generated pin-up of initial interest primarily to the otaku subculture, the rendering and animation software published by eFrontier is only really marketable to industry professionals and otaku enthusiasts; software packages such as Shade are costly and complex, and it is unlikely that a more mainstream demographic would devote itself to the production of computer animation rather than simply its consumption.

However, the existence of a non-professional market for this software, one representing widely differing degrees of ability and proficiency, invites the provision of packages catering to those users without the skill or time to create elaborate projects from scratch. As a result, eFrontier sells the actual data from which Yuki Terai is produced for use with the Shade programme, providing amateur computer graphics artists with resources similar to those used to professionally model and animate Yuki for a mainstream audience and thus the capacity to pose and animate her body in the same way.

eFrontier and extage therefore market Yuki Terai in quite different ways and to different demographics; consumers of extage’s more mainstream Yuki products are likely to include otaku enthusiasts, but the Shade data packages which allow her posing and animation are unlikely to reach a non-otaku audience.

The differences amongst consumers is also tied to a difference in the format in which Yuki is presented in each instance, and the kinds of consumption practices they invite. While extage can and does present Yuki Terai in consumer digital formats such as CD and DVD, these digital products are intended to be as fixed and predetermined in their use as her presentation in other formats such as books and television broadcasts. extage is addressing Yuki to a mainstream consumer audience content to receive pre-produced Yuki Terai texts (the most interactive these texts get is a computer programme in which Yuki teaches the user to touch type). However, the more specialised consumers of the data files sold by eFrontier seek to be involved in the authoring of new Yuki Terai texts, and are therefore interacting with this media celebrity in a novel way, one not possible with living celebrities; the mainstream consumers of extage’s Yuki products are purchasing Yuki Terai texts more-or-less identical to texts relating to living celebrities, but eFrontier’s customers are actually purchasing Yuki herself, in a form no less original or flexible than the form owned and utilised by extage to produce its mainstream Yuki texts. This capacity introduces novel methods of consuming celebrity, ones which draw the figure of the media celebrity more directly into debates concerning the new modes of reception and production made possible by digital formats.

Central to recent debates surrounding digital formats has been the degree to which they allow manipulation of intellectual property by consumers. Of particular concern to producers of films, music, and software has been the degree to which control over the distribution of material in digital formats has been lost. The capacity to translate digital files into new and more readily transportable formats such as MP3 and DivX and then circulate them through file sharing networks such as Napster, Kazaa and BitTorrent has been a cause of anxiety.

This anxiety results from digital formats’ capacity to remove intellectual property rights holders from any direct economic relationship with the dissemination of copyrighted material. However, selling the code for Yuki Terai’s computer model is the equivalent of, not simply making one’s own copy of Beyoncé’s latest song or video clip, but making one’s own copy of Beyoncé’s body. The virtual idol makes the body itself a work of art in the age of mechanical – or rather digital – reproduction.

Given the struggles for control over digital formats which have taken place (and are still taking place) between intellectual property rights holders and consumers in the digital era, it might seem surprising that eFrontier is making the data for Yuki Terai’s body available at all. Certainly it might be expected that extage would want to maintain a monopoly over the body of its own media starlet, and thus control over which kinds of media texts she appears in. The potential conflict between these two models for disseminating Yuki Terai was apparent at the beginning of her career.

An early coup in the marketing of Yuki Terai was her appearance in a mouthwash commercial for Japanese pharmaceutical giant Lion in 2000, in which Yuki’s computer generated body was composited into live video footage.[12] However, three days before the Lion advertisement was first aired, Japanese men’s magazine Friday, having experimented with eFrontier’s Yuki Terai data for Shade, put together a story on the potential to produce pornographic images using this software, complete with example illustrations. The potential damage to Yuki’s advertising career would have been analogous to that caused by sexually explicit photographs of a living pop star being published shortly before the launch of a lucrative celebrity endorsement. Disaster was averted by the last-minute efforts of extage CEO Mr Tonomori, who managed to have the Friday story toned down before publication by the magazine’s editor (who had fortunately attended the same university as Mr Tonomori), and use Friday’s concessions to placate Lion. However, the incident illustrates the tension between Yuki Terai as a piece of intellectual property and media celebrity whose persona and representation is under extage’s control, and Yuki Terai as a set of data which can be utilised by the general public for whatever ends it desires. Given that any celebrity is highly mediated and is likely to be recorded and consumed in digital formats, the capacity to appropriate and alter bodies which have been digitised is much more widely available than this (for example, digital images of a living celebrity could be re-authored to create pornography, or digital recordings manipulated to create utterances or song lyrics which have never passed the living original’s lips). However, the lack of an original body for Yuki Terai, and the commodification of her body itself as saleable digital data, raise a further set of questions about the degree to which a body might be ‘pirated’.

Vocaloid and the Separation of Voice from Body

Related questions are raised by another piece of software intended to simulate the human body, although in this case audibly rather than visually. While Yuki Terai is visually computer generated, one area in which she has remained the product of a biological body is her voice, which is provided by a singer selected through open audition. However, eFrontier is currently exploring the possibility of providing amateur users with the ability to digitally manipulate both Yuki Terai’s body and voice using new software technology.

Yamaha has already developed a software technology called Vocaloid, which uses a combination of sound synthesis and a library of sampled voice recordings to allow users to type lyrics into an editor, set the notes being sung, and manipulate a variety of other variables in order to generate a vocal performance in the absence of a living singer. eFrontier is investigating the possibility of combining this technology with its Poser character animation software to produce a package which would allow users to both pose and animate Yuki’s body, and control her voice.

Because the Vocaloid software makes use of a library of sampled singing, the technology is sold to end-users as particular, individualised voices, each one gaining its own character from the particular session singers sampled to create it. The first of these ‘vocal fonts’ were ‘Lola’ and ‘Leon’, generic female and male African-American backing singers. However, the following two Vocaloid instruments were different from Lola and Leon in their association with particular, real-life singers.

British music production software company Zero-G followed Lola and Leon with ‘Miriam’, a Vocaloid vocal font created using samples of British singer Miriam Stockley (Zero-G, 2005). Japanese music software company Crypton Future Media has also created a Japanese vocal font, ‘Meiko’, which makes similar use of the voice of singer Meiko Haigō (Crypton Future Media, 2004). While the Vocaloid technology is not yet at the point of convincingly simulating singing, the ability to uncouple a particular person’s voice from their body raises further questions about the relationship between new media formats and the mediation of personality. Miriam Stockley and Meiko Haigō have nothing approximating intellectual property rights over what their vocal fonts might say (‘corporeal property rights’, for example), and would be unable to challenge the use of these voices to express ideas to which they objected.

In ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Roland Barthes differentiates between the raw material of the voice, which is produced deep within the body, and the shaping of sounds which takes place in the throat and face, arguing that ‘it is in the facial mask that signifying breaks out, producing not the soul but enjoyment’ (1986: 272). The Vocaloid technology effectively separates these two components of song: the ‘grain of the voice’ is harvested from the living body to produce the raw material of the sample library, which the software then shapes into signifying enunciation independently of that body. This can be seen to take further a trend in electronic music identified by Barbara Bradby, in which new technologies have changed some women from ‘lead singers’ to ‘female vocalists’: freelance session performers hired on by (usually male) producers so that their voices can be recorded and utilised for individual projects (Bradby, 1993: 168-69; see also Dickinson, 2001: 339). This shift from women as members of a band to women as a raw material to be sampled and manipulated using new technologies has reached its logical conclusion with Vocaloid, which promises to render the bodies and personalities of women such as Miriam Stockley and Meiko Haigō redundant to the production of music.

For its part, extage seems unconcerned by this tension between Yuki Terai as a media personality which it markets, and Yuki Terai as a set of data available for use outside the sphere of extage’s control. While extage seeks to secure mainstream success for Yuki, it is nevertheless building on a base of otaku fan interest, and this subculture is also important to the success of extage’s other products. The Friday incident notwithstanding, other risqué appropriations of Yuki Terai’s digital body are likely to occur only within the confines of the otaku community, in forums outside the view of mainstream consumers, and so have little impact on her mainstream profile. At the same time, however, her popularity in these forums sustains a core fan base which underwrites her financial viability.

Conclusion

In a cultural milieu in which the living body is understood to itself be undergoing a process of virtualisation, the kinds of economic relationships and relationships of power and control which surround the virtual idol can be taken as a more general indication of issues relating to an understanding of the body as data. Visions of the body as information generally lend themselves to fantasies of either self-determination (as in the case of genetic engineering, in which the manipulation of information allows us to modify appearance and behaviour) or liberation (as in technophiliac dreams of enacting new personae in cyberspace). However, the creation of virtual bodies as commodities suggests the possibility of entirely new structures arising to circumscribe the virtual body and leave it at the mercy of larger forces. If we take the dream of the Extropians to one day convert human consciousness into data and download that data into superhuman artificial bodies as an example (see, for example, Terranova, 2000: 273; The Extropy Institute Website, 2004), we might want to ask questions about the kinds of industrial structures and economic relationships which would underlie such a transmigration of the soul, even if it were possible. Who would build these new bodies, and how much would they cost? Would they be designed with a view to planned obsolescence, requiring that their transhumanist recipients periodically pay for an upgrade? Looked at from the perspective of such economic relationships, this quasi-religious vision of freedom becomes a future in which we are so comprehensively gathered into market relationships that our very bodies are the copyrighted intellectual property of private companies, who we must pay for the right to be embodied on a continuing basis. The very life functions of our bodies would be the proprietary technology of large corporations. The new kinds of relationships which arise when bodies are translatable into data which is subject to intellectual property laws are already appearing in instances where biotech companies are copyrighting the genetic code of individuals with rare inherited disorders, taking possession of the information which essentialising accounts see as the underlying determinant of personal individuality and uniqueness. (Meanwhile, American Idol contestants are required to sign a contract which hands over ‘the rights to [their] names, voices, likenesses and biographies…, everywhere and forever’ [Mole, 2004: para. 10]).

The very existence of Yuki Terai is an indication of the hold the idea of the virtual body has over the popular imagination, and is one more illustration of the experience of virtualisation, in which the materiality of our bodies seems to become saturated with data, even to the point where it appears to be dissolving into a pool of information. Furthermore, her position as a media celebrity amongst other, living, media celebrities highlights the fact that – in some areas at least – the differentiation of the living body from those fragments of it which have been converted into digital formats is becoming increasingly difficult. The commercial structures which maintain her, and the ways in which her audience interacts with her computer-generated body, give an indication of the extent to which a new kind of body might be assimilated into the logic of digital data. Information might want to be free, but the varied industries which produce intellectual property aggressively seek to maintain their control; the more the human body is understood to be constituted by data, the more subject to these commercial structures it becomes.

However, it must be remembered that the virtual idol is a purely virtual body, one created wholly as a construction of digital data. As with the clockwork automaton of the 18th century, there is a danger that the ability to fabricate such a body will generate a misconception that the living body has no qualities or attributes which are not reducible to the principles underlying its construction, resulting in the further entrenchment of limiting understandings of the body. The human body is no more pure information than pure mechanism, and the fascination of the virtual body ultimately says more about contemporary frameworks used to discuss the body than it does about the reality of our embodied experience.

Author’s Biography

Daniel Black lectures in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. His current research is focused on issues relating to the influence of bodily aesthetics on the design and use of new technologies, as well as the evolution and utilisation of the human face as an instrument of communication. Daniel.Black at arts.monash.edu.au

Notes

[1] For example, a Japanese report on population aging’s economic impact produced for the United Nations in 2004 cited no research in this area earlier than 1987 (Shimasawa and Hosoyama, 2004: 4). In addition, the name ASIMO, bestowed in honour of Isaac Asimov, author of I, Robot, highlights the project’s origins in science fiction fantasies.
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[2] Some attempts to establish careers for virtual idols have been made outside Japan (Black, forthcoming).
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[3] Which is not to say that virtual idols are not reflective of the conceptions of femininity which inform them. Clearly their status as idealised representations of the feminine makes them highly informative in this regard, and I have discussed this aspect of the virtual idol elsewhere (Black, forthcoming).
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[4] The machinery in this case being the Sony Playstation.
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[5] Bakhtin relates the bodily canon he discusses to those ‘[s]imilar classical concepts of the body [which] form the basis of the new canon of behavior’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 322-3, n 8), which seek to modify the appearance and behaviour of living bodies in line with the values underlying neo-classical representation.
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[6] See, for example, (Shilling, 1993).
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[7] For a Deleuzo-Guattarian critique of this privileging of linguistic frameworks, see (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 111-12). The passage to which Rabinow refers is (Foucault, 1984: 127).
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[8] For more detail on the design of the virtual idol, and its relationship with neo-classical, industrial and digital aesthetics, see Black (forthcoming).
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[9] The details of Yuki Terai’s career used in this article are largely based on information kindly provided by Mr. Takeshi Tonomori and Ms. Masami Ukon of extage/Works and Mr. Taiyo Fujii of eFrontier in an interview on March 28th, 2005.
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[10] extage is a larger holding company which owns Works Corporation, the direct owner of the Yuki Terai character. For convenience, in this article I have simply used the name extage, rather than describing extage’s corporate structure in detail or differentiating between it, Works Corporation, or Orario, another extage company concerned with educational products relating to computer graphics.
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[11] For a detailed account of otaku artistic production focused upon manga, (see Kinsella, 2000: 102ff.)
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[12] While a particular Japanese television advertising campaign can usually be expected to run for up to six months, Yuki Terai’s Lion toothpaste commercial ran for nine months due to its popularity.
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Simply put a transversal is a line that cuts across other lines, perhaps across entire fields – bringing the fields together in a new way, recreating fields as something else.

A contributor to this issue of the Fibreculture Journal, Gary Genosko, takes this question of transversality into an understanding of the dynamics of institutions (in his exemplary work elsewhere on Félix Guattari – see Genosko, 2002). Here the concept of transversality suggests something like the unavoidable contagion of transference between analyst and analysand, only now at the level of the group. This leads to the reforming of institutions when new lines cross between older disciplines, older fields, older cultural practices. Although transversality is arguably a part of all fields, it is often something taken to be guarded against. However, I have suggested that, in tune with the object of study, that is media technologies that connect more and more aspects of the world to each other, transversality is the unavoidable discipline we must follow in new media studies – whatever we call it. This requires a particular kind of rigour, one that combines a range of specific disciplinary rigours with the ability to bring these into new harmonies. These usually feedback in turn to transform the disciplines involved. If anything “scares the horses”, institutionally speaking, about new media, it is perhaps this unavoidable transversality and the new rigours it requires.

Since what I began by calling new media studies does indeed still “scare the horses” sometimes, it might be useful to take up the horse metaphor briefly from the point of view of transversality. Genosko points precisely to Guattari’s metaphor regarding horses as an illustration of transversality – and what scares Guattari’s horses is in fact their inability to see each, the difficulty of forming new harmonies. ‘Guattari’s horses … illustrate’ what Guattari calls ‘the coefficient of transversality’ (Genosko in Guattari, 2000: 118). As Guattari writes -

Imagine a fenced field in which there are horses wearing adjustably blinkers, and let’s say that the “coefficient of transversality” will be precisely the adjustment of the blinkers. If the horses are completely blind, a certain kind of traumatic encounter will be produced. As soon as the blinkers are opened, one can imagine that the horses will move about in a more harmonious way. (Genosko in Guattari, 2000:118/Guattari, 1972: 79)

Genosko concludes that ‘Blinkers prevent transversal relations; they focus by severely circumscribing a visual field. The adjustment of them releases the existing, but blinkered, quantity of transversality’. Again, removing the blinkers, increasing the ‘coefficient of transversality’, requires a certain rigour. In our field this is perhaps simply a matter of appropriate responses to the way new media technologies keep removing the blinkers for us in the world at large.

It is exactly this rigour that this issue of the Fibreculture Journal celebrates. In doing so, it perhaps shows us that, despite the difficulty with names, thinking across the field of new media studies has matured, as unstable as this field might necessarily be. In this issue, the articles all operate via transversal lines that follow the use of new media technologies in areas such as dance (Manning), computer hacking and the law (Genosko), city planning (Hodge and Lally), aesthetics (Mules), celebrity (Black) and even the question of the technological fetish in everyday life (Arnold, Gibbs and Shepherd). They demonstrate the maturity of “new media studies”, precisely because they tell us in so much detail what the cultural processes discussed have actually become, as they play out in everyday life (and not perhaps as they play out in the rhetoric surrounding new media technologies, within and outside the academy). In articles by Erin Manning, Bob Hodge and Elaine Lally, Warwick Mules, and Daniel Black, the authors open up new issues concerning new media technologies, with a new depth and precision of analysis regarding the body and the very real virtual. This also becomes a question of what new media technologies – seen as transversally working with the human body, the virtuality of the world – might become in the future, and how we might thinking this becoming with a greater ‘coefficient of transversality’. The articles by Gary Genosko, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs and Chris Shepherd also help us to see in a less blinkered manner. Both provide well-researched correctives to academic and popular thinking about the lived realities of new media as taken up in culture.

The desire for less blinkered approaches to new media technologies is not just a rarefied fancy from the further reaches of theory. New media are now the mainstream (and as these articles demonstrate, they are becoming the mainstream not only in “media”, traditionally considered, but elsewhere as well – in dance (Manning), in city planning (Hodge and Lally), in questions of aesthetics (Mules), in the production of what Daniel Black calls the celebrity of the ‘virtual idol’, even at the junction of the law and cultural studies (Genosko). The mainstreaming of new media means, of course, that new media studies, as transdisciplinary, or simply unstable, as it still might be – is now well and truly established. It is arguably now the study par excellence – and the way new media have become a necessary consideration in so many other fields, from anthropology to medicine, is another aspect of new media’s unavoidable transversality.

This issue of the Fibreculture Journal celebrates both the instability and the maturity of that which we cannot quite call “new media studies”. If there are any unifying concerns here they might include a mature understanding, not only philosophical, but practical and indeed technical, of the virtual. In this vein, Hodge and Lally propose a reconsideration of city planning in the light of chaos theory, fuzzy logic and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle”. Their revolutionary approach is indeed one of a new kind of rigour in planning – one sensitive to ongoing change, the complexity and specificity of the levels of planning involved, and the relations between these levels of planning. All this is considered in the light of much more accurately mapped details of the everyday life of the population. This sensitive approach to real geographical and cultural processes is echoed in Manning’s approach to the use of technologies in professional dance. Here Manning writes of the necessity of rethinking the body itself as ‘technogenetic’, and of not sacrificing the dancing body to a more deterministic understanding of the dance’s relation to software demands for a clarity of gesture. Via an accessible and thorough account of Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of perception and time, Manning is able to provide the philosophical tools for completely rethinking the relations between dance and technologies.

In their article on city planning, Hodge and Lally quote the following:

It is now realized, across scientific fields, that we are lacking the vocabulary to meaningfully talk about change as if change mattered – that is to treat change not as an epiphenomenon, as a mere curiosity or exception, but to acknowledge its centrality in the constitution of socio-economic life. (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 569)

The articles in this issue of the Fibreculture Journal can be seen to be building this vocabulary with which to rigorously address change. Manning’s understanding of the body as ‘technogenetic’ (Manning) is significant within this vocabulary. “Technogenetic” means both technical and generating changing at the same time. Here technics is considered not along the easy path, as that which is predetermined, or predetermines. Rather technics is considered precisely as that which, extracting actual events from their immersion in virtuality, is a technics of new forms of indetermination at the same time of determination, of a making different at the same time as a making possible. Reconsidering the body in relation to new media technologies is never going to be easy when technogenesis is taken into account. Yet this is what many of the articles in this issue achieve.

Here, in a detailed consideration of Yuki Terai, ‘the world’s most successful virtual idol’, Daniel Black considers ‘an historical moment in which structures of data have seemingly supplanted physical materiality’ and ‘the human body is coming to be seen as gathered into structures of information ownership and exchange.’ Warwick Mules enters into a dialog with another prominent thinker of the materiality of new media aesthetics (and Fibreculture Journal editor), Anna Munster (2006). Mules undertakes ‘an expansion of Munster’s approximate aesthetics into a general critique of embodied experience as technologically mediated presence.’ This leads Mules to what he calls a ‘contact aesthetics’, which ‘is both creative and experimental in the sense that it brings new things into life by undoing and reconfiguring the material of already constituted objects and formal arrangements.’ In tune with the theme of a rigourous transversality, the aim of this contact aesthetics is to ‘release singularity’. Arnold, Gibbs and Shepherd take body-technology relations into an entirely different direction. They consider not the functionality of information and communication technologies, but the affective relations created between these technologies and the humans who engage with them. In a thorough depiction of “Matthew”, a collector and hoarder of information and communication technologies, they show that it is not enough to think of our relations with new media technologies in terms of the new functions they provide. Rather, there is a kind of fetishism that makes us question basic assumptions about the everyday use of new media – the roles they play in everyday lives, and the new forms of economy they provide. Genosko’s article on “Mafiaboy”, a teenage hacker from Montréal who famous ‘ brought down several blue chip American Web sites’ in 2000, also deals with the everyday realities behind common misperceptions of cultural events involving new media. In a very thorough content analysis of the case, as played out in the media and the courts, Genosko thoroughly documents the way in which this apparently dramatic piece of hacking was in fact somewhat overdramatised, something perhaps surprisingly well understood by the perceptive judge presiding over the case, but not by several of the world’s major law enforcement agencies or media outlets. Here again, there are some very interesting transversal lines that have to be considered in order to understand who “Mafiaboy” really was, and what he really did.

If all these articles reconfigure thinking about the body and the everyday in relation to new media, this is perhaps because there is so much at stake when considering the results of the mainstreaming of new media technologies upon questions of embodiment. It is precisely here that the rigours of transversality need to be applied.

Once again, as editor I am very grateful for the generosity and hard work of the entire editorial team of the Fibreculture Journal – Esther Milne, Gillian Fuller, Ingrid Richardson, Ned Rossiter, Anna Munster and Lisa Gye. I particularly thank Lisa Gye for her continuing and impeccable work on the Fibreculture Journal site. I would also like to thank, on behalf of everyone working on the Fibreculture Journal, the Editorial Board and other experts in their fields for their work on refereeing articles as they came in. You know who you are – and we could not do it without your dedication and thorough feedback. Last but not least, I would like to thank the authors – they have all given a great deal of their time, and often the best of their thinking when it is perhaps difficult to remain committed to the kind of rigour and imagination we are pleased to have published here.

Andrew Murphie, University Of New South Wales, December 2006

References

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____. ‘The Life and Work of Félix Guattari: From Transversality to Ecosophy’ in Guattari, Félix The Three Ecologies trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, (London: Athlone, 2000).

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Munster, Anna. materializing new media: embodiment in information aesthetics (Hanover and London: University of New England Press, 2006).

Tsoukas, Haridimos, and Robert Chia. ‘On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change’, Organization Science 13.5 (2002): 567-82.