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Prefiguring Cyberculture:
An Intellectual History
Edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio
Cavallaro
MIT Press, London/Power Publications, Sydney
Reviewed by Ashley Crawford
Ricocheting from such subjects as The Matrix to James Joyce, Prefiguring
Cyberculture is a dazzlingly ambitious compendium. As in any collection
of essays, it is a mixed affair, however, given its scope, and despite
the occasional lapse into impenetrable jargon, it is an important
addition to the burgeoning world of cyber-theory.
Prefiguring Cyberculture is a strange hybrid. Published
by both MIT Press and Power Publications in Sydney it is a pleasing
blend of some of Australia’s best writers in the field alongside
some major international names. And while by necessity it leaps
and bounds in subject matter it is held together by the careful
steerage of the editors.
Ostensibly a book that can be categorised as Media Studies, Prefiguring
Cyberculture embraces a dazzling array of intellectual and
popular culture subjects, from Cartesian philosophy to science fiction.
There is an odd pantheon of gods in this realm of study: Plato,
James Joyce, Alan Turing, Rene Descartes, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan and most especially Philip K. Dick
haunt these pages with regularity.
Contextualising cyberculture in a broader cultural history has been
an obsession of co-editor Darren Tofts for some time. His 1998 book,
Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture, delved into
similar issues as Prefiguring Cyberculture with the premise that
many of the themes popularised by Gibson’s Neuromancer
and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner have long ranging precedents
through literature, theology and philosophy. As Tofts notes in his
introductory essay, Prefiguring Cyberculture concerns itself with
“disturbing, incomprehensible change,” the concepts
of “artificial life, or disembodied virtual space, or the
prospect of a future in which intelligent machines, rather than
human beings, dominate life on earth.” Tofts notes that while
this may be the stuff of popular culture today, it also reflects
“much older encounters with change, of apprehension for the
transformative impact of technology.”
The editors have broken up the essays into sections which embrace
artificial life and intelligence, virtual reality and ‘cyberspaces’,
artists statements and ‘postmillennial speculations.’
Most of the essays here are accessible and even riveting. Elizabeth
Wilson writes on Alan Turing, who created the theoretical test to
prove Artificial Intelligence – the Turing Test. Wilson manages
to give the reader an insight into Turing’s theories and at
the same time allows considerable insight to his troubled personality
and the ongoing relevance of the issues he raised in the 1940s.
Erik Davis, in his essay ‘Synthetic Meditations: Cogito in
The Matrix’, manages to make Rene Descartes sexy and although
his piece gets bogged down in the theoretical minefield of Slavoj
Zizek’s work, he manages to end up critiquing The Matrix with
Cartesian theory, no mean feat.
Margaret Wertheim’s discussion of Thomas Moore’s 1516
text Utopia, in the context of new communications technologies,
takes some bizarre but relevant inroads into theology, communism,
the dot.com boom and the lyrical waxing of such cyber-figures as
Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand, founder of
the WELL discussion group on the Net. Wertheim, the author of the
Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, tackles her subject with informed journalistic
flair.
One of the highlights of the collection is Donald F. Theall’s
fascinating essay on James Joyce. Theall is one of the world’s
leading scholars on Joyce and has been a leading voice in linking
Joyce’s language with the cyber-world of today. In ‘Becoming
Immedia: The Involution of Digital Convergence’ he leads the
reader through fascinating links between the writings of Tielhard,
McLuhan and Joyce, positing the Irish writer as decidedly prescient
in his descriptions of new and, at the time of his writing Finnegan’s
Wake, even unheard of communications technology and the merging
of media.
Similarly, Scott McQuire’s analysis of Gibson’s Neuromancer
allows a fresh reading of the cyberpunk classic. McQuire interrogates
Gibson’s distinction between urban space and data space, a
realm that Gibson has investigated further in his recently released
novel, Pattern Recognition.
Prefiguring Cyberculture finishes up with the fire-cracker hot essay
‘Memories of the Future: Excavating the Jet Age at the TWA
Terminal’ by Mark Dery. Author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture
at the End of the Century, Dery is arguably the hottest critical
writer planet-wide when it comes to the archaeology of the future.
Taking as his launch pad a description by British writer J.G. Ballard
of the rusting gantries of Cape Canaveral, Dery takes a roller coaster
ride through the architecture of travel as a motif for a broader
critique of our lost futures.
At the end of the day this is an indispensable tome jam packed with
extraordinary insights from well-informed writers. Prefiguring Cyberculture
is a roller coaster ride of historical and popular culture references
that hammer home Tofts’ premise that both cyberculture - and
its attendant technofear - have a long history indeed.
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