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Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragnatism

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Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragnatism VIRTUAL FUTURES Virtual Futures explores the idea that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia. This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between humans and machines. Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture, and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc, and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the rise of post-human pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the post-human, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, the post-human is described by others in the collection as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology. This view of technology and information is heavily influenced by Anglo- American literature, especially cyberpunk, Pynchon and Ballard, as well as the materialist philosophies of Freud, Deleuze, and Haraway. Virtual Futures provides analysis both by established theorists and by the most innovative new voices working at the conjunction between the arts and contemporary technology. Joan Broodhurst Dixon is a philosopher of science. She recently completed her doctorate at the University of Warwick. Er J.Cassidy is doing research on the relationship between Deleuze and Pynchon at Warwick University. He co- ordinated the “Virtual Futures ‘94” and and ‘95 Conferences at Warwick University. Please note that the Hebrew characters on page 52 are incorrect and should read aleph and tav . VIRTUAL FUTURES CYBEROTICS, TECHNOLOGY AND POST-HUMAN PRAGMATISM Edited by JOAN BROADHURST DIXON & ERIC J.CASSIDY ROUTLEDGE London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Editorial Matter and Selection Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J.Cassidy. © 1998 Individual chapters the respective authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Virtual futures / edited by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J, Cassidy. p. cm. 1. Technology—Social aspects. 2, Technology— Psychological aspects. 3, Computers and civilization. I.Dixon, Joan Broadhurst, II. Cassidy, Eric, T14.5.V57 1998 97–19274 CIP ISBN 0-203-98367-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-13379-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-13380-7 (pbk) CONTENTS List Of Contributors vii Preface: Virtual Futures ix Eric J.Cassidy Acknowledgementsxiii PART I: OVERLOAD THE INFORMATION WAR 2 Hakim Bey PART II: CYBEROTICS THESES ON THE CYBEROTICS OF HISTORY: VENUS 12 IN MICROSOFT, REMIX Stephen Pfohl COMING ACROSS THE FUTURE 39 Sadie Plant ALL NEW GEN 48 VNS Matrix PART III: CYBERCULTURE SINGULARITIES TELEPATHY: ALPHABETIC CONSCIOUSNESS AND 57 THE AGE OF CYBORG ILLITERACY David Porush VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS AND THE EMERGENCE 85 OF SYNTHETIC REASON Manuel De Landa PART IV: ANARCHO-MATERIALISM CYBERGOTHIC 103 Nick Land vi FROM EPIDERMAL HISTORY TO SPEED POLITICS 116 Matteo Mandarini BLACK ICE 132 lain Hamilton Grant PART V: POST-HUMAN PRAGMATISM AUTOGEDDON 145 Stephen Metcalf FROM PSYCHO-BODY TO CYBER-SYSTEMS: IMAGES 153 AS POST-HUMAN ENTITIES Stelarc Postscript: Ground Zero 164 Joan Broadhurst Dixon CONTRIBUTORS Hakim Bey is the author of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, and Radio Sermonettes, amongst other works. His novel Crowstone: The Chronicles of Qamar was hailed by William Burroughs as a new sub-genre of literature. Joan Broadhurst Dixon is a lecturer at the University of Derby. With Eric J.Cassidy, she organized the first “Virtual Futures” conference. She was editor of Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious, and is currently working on two books, one on Deleuze’s philosophy of science, and one entitled Time, Consciousness and Scientific Explanation. Eric J.Cassidy is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy and literature at the University of Warwick, England. With Joan Broadhurst Dixon, he is the original organizer of “Virtual Futures,” and was one of three organizers in 1995. He has written extensively on the schizoid discourses of Pynchon, Ballard, and Deleuze, in an attempt to trace their influence on the information age. He is also a past guest editor of Pynchon Notes. Manuel de Landa is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and the forthcoming Phylum: A Thousand Years of Non-linear History. He is a video artist and computer graphics artist living in New York City. Iain Hamilton Grant is the translator of J.F.Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and J.Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death. He has written extensively on the early Lyotard, postmodernism, and the materialist rhizomatic structure of information culture. Nick Land is a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England. He is the author of The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, and the forthcoming Schizotechnics. He has published numerous viii articles on Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, and the dark side of digitalization. Matteo Mandarini is a post-graduate philosophy student at the University of Warwick. Stephen Metcalf researches cultural studies at the University of Warwick, England. A self- described ex-human writer of noise, his work has been featured at “Virtual Futures” and he is a regular contributor at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. Stephen Pfohl is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College, USA, where he teaches courses on social theory, postmodern culture, deviance and social control, and images of power. He is the author of Death at the Parasite Cafe: Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern; Predicting Dangerousness: The Social Construction of Psychiatric Reality; and the forthcoming Venus in Video: Cybernetics, Male Mas(s)ochism and the Parasitism of Ultramodern Power. A video-maker, performing artist, and member of Sit Com International, Pfohl was the 1991–2 President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Sadie Plant is the author of The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in the Postmodern Age, and the forthcoming Beyond the Spectacle, a theoretical discourse on machines, markets, women, and drugs. David Porush teaches in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA. He is the author of the critical study The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction, and the short story collection Rope Dances. He has published numerous essays in scholarly journals. Stelarc is a performance artist based in Melbourne. VNS Matrix are Australian cyberfeminists. They are the authors of the interactive All New Gen and perform CorpusFantasticalMOO, a strictly imaginative computer- generated space. They are Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Julianne Pierce, and Josephine Starrs. PREFACE Virtual Futures Eric J.Cassidy It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it, Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked, It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. (William Gibson, Neuromancer: 284–5) Many of the issues surrounding contemporary technology are conditioned by cultural beliefs as well as temporal dynamics. The reaction to emerging technologies is usually—and simplistically—divided along a horizontal axis of paranoid technophobia versus an enthusiastic endorsement of the “revolutionary” powers of “innovation.” The general theme of such discussions can be summarized by the assorted political and ethical responses to the questions of technology and capitalism. Crudely summarized, the “left” political response is usually populated by a mongrel assortment of anarchists, pacifists, Luddites, and those benign curmudgeons or academic humanists that the Unabomber found so touchingly harmless. On the right we find the increasingly popular sentiments of post-human pragmatism, a neo-extropian blend of pseudoscientific rationalism that embraces a range of techno advocates, including futurists, ravers, Wired magazine, and the “chaos” clique of scientific research in non-linear dynamics. This political and
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