Re: <eyebeam><blast> Cyberpower

[Tim Jordan <t.jordan@hps.unimelb.edu.au>]

It's a too, too hot Melbourne night, so I will have to be short as I'm
short of brain cells. I'll get more complicated when the promised cool
change arrives.

> Perhaps then
>when you cite Marx and you shift to another level of analysis in your
>fourth and fifth theses, you intend merely the deepening and broadening
>of a common experience, whereby the individual, reflecting on his or >her
>inscription in a historical process, comes to question what before
>seemed a progressively greater conquest of freedom, and now appears a
>more powerfully charged implication in the larger patterns of a
>civilization's development. 

The connections of the individual and the social in cyberspace can be
read this way and there is something whole and self-consistent about
such a reading that is satisfying. But I read these two views on
cyberspace as co-existent and, to a large extent, equally valid. The
social and the individual (and the imaginary) are part of an attempt at
a plural or multiple analysis of life in cyberspace, that doesn't
attempt to reduce one 'level' to the other. The fascinating part of
cyberspace is that it simultaneously seems to revive the hope of
progressively greater freedom (a forum for true democracy? etc.) and to
confirm the increasing dependence of individuals on corporate and state
controlled technology.

>You point to the ways that a fantasy of
>individual omniscience fuels an increasing dependence on technological
>tools for the management of information. At the end of your fifth
>thesis, when you speak of the irony of this situation, you are
>essentially quoting Foucault from the conclusion to his book on the >will
>to knowledge - or reinventing him. At this point you have gone far
>beyond the specifics of the internet, to deal with matters fundamental
>to the modern experience over centuries of development.

Yep, well spotted it's a barely changed quotation from Foucault- what a
friend of mine calls 'Acker praise'.

For the rest of your post, I find it fascinating and will respond
tomorrow--when the air is cool and children can again sleep.

Tim Jordan


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