Lost in space: into the digital image labyrinth

McKenzie Wark

Sdsd

"An impending world of exotica glimpsed only peripherally..." (Alan Moore)

Dear Stieglitz, Even a few words I don't feel like writing. You know exactly how I
feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until
something else will make photography unbearable. There we are... (Marcel
Duchamp, NY May 22, 1922)

Here we are

A new and very particular kind of space is unfolding before our eyes. Like all other
kinds of space that we humans are all too familiar with, this new space is the
product, at one and the same time, of culture and technology. The theatre, painting,
architecture, photography, all of these inventions, and the developments that have
occurred within them, have shaped our perceptions of space. Since the deux ex
machina, since the quattrocento, since the arch, the cantilever, the daguerrotype,
since Cubism, since cinema, since each and every moment in which culture and
technology have met, relations of flesh to space have changed and changed again,
and along a number of axes.

Firstly, the instrumental relation of body to space: the ability to make space work
for one, or conversely, its ability to make one work and conform to its form.
Secondly, the imaginative relation of subjectivity to space: the way the spaces we
make suggest an architectonics for thought and creative action, or conversely, the
way purely poetic thought can be realised in concrete space. Thirdly,
the philosophical relation to space: our understanding of the reality of space in
relation to one's own flesh and spirit, and conversely, one's grip on this subjective
being as suggested by the spaces our bodies inhabit.

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These are three of the dimensions of our relation to spaces, or the space-species
interface, if you will. They are the product of the prevailing cultural
technologies which are themselves the accumulated product of social action and
conflict.

I want to look firstly at the experience of spaces by an individual subject - any

subject. Later sections move on to examine epistemological-aesthetic and ethico-
political relations to space, wherein most screen critics position themselves in
relation to the collective. Most would agree that our relation to space is always,
already, socially 'constructed', and necessarily so. Without the physical and
spiritual architectonics of culture and technology, space attacks us with the
terrifyingly amorphous fullness of a schizophrenic nightmare. With that said, it is
also true enough that the very constructions which make spaces spiritually and
physically inhabitable can also crush us, derange us, deform us, betray us, mislead
us, tease us, confront us, exploit us, alienate us, and bore us mindlessly.

One need never be bored for long. Every now and then the struggles within
technological culture produce a radically new technique for space creation, which
those whom it empowers adapt, and which those whom it does not empower, need
adapt to. It usually happens that the new way of manipulating space is firstly
instrumental in nature. Photography and cinema are good examples here -
instruments for recording the disposition of objects in space simultaneously, in
terms of the quanta of light falling upon them and reflected from their surfaces.
But, photography is also a window through which we glimpse a space of startling
imaginative and ontological form. Once people (particularly artists) become
familiar with the instrument, imaginative relations to this space turn up - the
Surrealist re-invention of photography by Man Ray, Lee Miller and others is a case
in point here. The ontological consequences of such a space also begin to occur to
people (like the journeyman-critic Walter Benjamin) by which time we may have
already become accustomed to it and encultured by it.

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It is with these considerations in mind that I confront that space which I believe
may indeed have unique, imaginative and ontological properties; properties
revealed through the unassuming screen of the video display terminal. A world
named computer graphics (CG for short) by William A. Fetter of the Boeing Co.
in 1960. In the words of CG artist Hiroyuki Hayashi, "CG is the 'unusual' smartly
hidden in the everyday". Ever since the first appearance of those glitzy CG
commercial television logos, I've been fascinated by the kind of space which
unfolds in them. They seem to position the viewer as if s/he is in a space ship,
hermetically sealed from the void, but hurtling through jet-black, inertia-less
space, whizzing past and through grid lines or objects or moving forms which
appear to glow with a luminescence inspired from within. The idea occurs to me
that these hallowed forms, put to work on such deliciously banal tasks as
representing a channel logo as if it were an awesome 2,000 mile long neon, might
just be the near edge of a vast universe of potential forms, in a digital space that's
big and weird and wildly new. A space with many more windows into it than the
humble TV's familiar vacuum-sealed, plexiglass porthole - and yet which is
strangely invisible ...

The computer graphics on TV seem to me to have a close affinity with the digital
retouching of photographs, video arcade games, bank autoteller machines, video
poker machines, military surveillance and strategic scenario simulators,
international stock and forex trading systems, videotext, sequencers and samplers,
computer aided design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) and even humble word
processors (like the one I'm using now). Some of these things appear more like
each other than some of the others. What I want to show is that they are connected
by more than mere analogy. They form a whole species of topological
environments - that is to say, spaces.

Historically speaking, these spaces are all the product of the progressive
development of digital information processing systems. Early systems dealt with
numbers, which were easy to represent and process in a binary language. Next
came language itself, and the digital storage and manipulation of text. Now sounds

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and images can also be digitized and manipulated. Digital systems bring to the
image similar capabilities as they brought to number, text and sound.

For example, computer artist Simon Penny notes that digital information
is permanently mutable: it can be changed over and over with no loss of quality.
This facility, which is merely convenient for number or text is thoroughly radical
in its implications for sound and image. 'Old fashioned' mechanical reproduction
always resulted in a slight but significant drop in quality (i.e. information content)
between original and reproduction. With digital copying, such a difference can, in
principle, be entirely eliminated. Hence, all forms of digital information storage,
filing, manipulation and interrelation take place in a medium where the
information has a totally arbitrary relation to its material support. While there is a
generation of difference between a master print and a reproduction, a master tape
and dub, there is no difference in the information content on two discs with the
same digital information on them. Digital information is becoming indifferent to
origin. Barring error or the odd crash, and within certain parameters, digital
information spaces achieve a freedom from material constraint of a whole new
logical type.

These spaces have more in common with each other than CG have in common
with photography or film. This is in spite of the prevalent tendency to assimilate
CG into the same aesthetic discourses and public spaces as video, photography and
film, which are already clinging to discourses and spaces which for a long time
have been the sacred domain of the finer arts. If, as Bourdieu says, culture is merely
"that present incarnation of the sacred", then it is this very un-Duchampian
tendency to assimilate CG to these high, dry islands of culture which perhaps ought
to be questioned.

These notes are meant as a response then, to the intersection of two kinds of space;
on the one hand, this weird, phantom, architectronic space 7 of CG (to which I
shall return). On the other, the architectonic spaceof culture, particularly the public
gallery (and by extension the journal, 8 the cinema and teaching). I have already

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suggested that the first of these two spaces (CG) is already a doubled one. We have
the porthole to look through the screen, which is one thing, but the space itself is
quite another. What we see on the screen is only an example of the potential of this
putative space. It is not the space itself. We do not even know, at this point, whether
it can truly be 'seen' at all.

'The difference that makes a difference'

Now it's time to show why the space represented by CG is different from the space
represented in photography and film. This involves looking at the images, thinking
about the processes by which these images are produced, and describing
the spaces they represent. At each of these three levels, a photograph and a CG
image appear to me to be qualitatively different things.

First, let's give them different descriptors. Setting aside the relationship of film to
photography, I will bracket them both together as the evidence of photospace.
Against this we have CG and all that. In honour of the 'techno-punk' sci fi novels
of William Gibson, 9 I will call this cyberspace.

The first thing we can say about photospace and cyberspace is that photographs
and CG represent these spaces via different processes. Borrowing from Bateson
and Wilden, 10 we can say that photographs areanalog representations of
photospace, while computer graphics are digital simulations of cyberspace. The
difference between an analog and a digital representation is the difference between
a continual variation and a binary code; between a trace and a switch, a map and a
matrix, a pulsion and a distinction. It is the difference between information which
comes in ambiguous figurations or in discrete bits.

There are also different kinds of difference. In photospace, difference can be

undecidable - made up of infinitesimal variations of shade - right down to the very
substance of the emulsion itself. This is a difference which is ultimately gestural,
a matter of degree. In principle the degree of difference may be infinitely small or
great, or perhaps not even measurable, but it is always motivated by a

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corresponding difference outside of itself. On the other hand, in cyberspace,
difference is always discrete and non-trivial, and is always part of a finite set of
differences, but its relation to anything outside itself is necessarily conventional.
Because it is made up of a set of symbolic data which are arbitrarily assigned to
values, it can make the sign of the infinite but cannot, in principle, be anything but
finite and discrete.

In a photograph, an object is represented as a continuous variation of light and

shade, created by variable quantities of light. Light actually enters into the space
where the image is recorded, but is in no way 'coded' in the process. A digital
image, on the other hand, can only be constructed out of information which is
coded. It can be made from the same patterned quantities of light that make a
photograph, or the movement of an analog device like a lightpen or a mouse, but
only on condition that it is coded as a set of arbitrary but systematic values and co-
ordinates first, before it passes into cyberspace. In the process, it is transformed
into a mathematical description of a space. Alternatively, an image can be
generated from a mathematical model, pure and simple - the product of the artist's
head rather than hand.

While the data which one inputs into cyberspace must be of a certain type, there
are a number of ways to output an image which correlates to that data. For example
a number of types of video display or a plotter could be driven. A machine tool
could be guided. Or one could output on a number of different types of printer, or
as a print or film. In each case, there is a radical separation between the internal
space which is cyberspace and other spaces. As computer artist Adam Wolter
points out, even in a real time manipulation of an image on a screen with a mouse
(familiar enough to most home computer users), "The mark that is made is in a
shimmering electronic pseudo-space and the hand is (usually) still in the real
world". 11

A photograph or film is a mapping of the contours of light falling on a 3-D surface,

as recorded in a chemical emulsion which is a 2-D surface. The link between the

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referent space and the image space is an infinitely variable quanta of light. The
referent space always precedes the image space. CG images, by contrast, need no
such precedent in physical space. Indeed, it is only with a great deal of
mathematical development that CG images have come to simulate such
commonplace things as perspective, texture and shading. 12 But CG can spatially
represent any kind of array of difference: different quantities of light, heat, stress,
neural activity, radioactivity, radio waves, radar, demographic or geological
patterns, trajectories, flows of money - anything - or nothing at all. It can make
images of spaces which have never existed, can never exist, or which will exist at
a future date.

For example, an interactive, walk-through model may simulate a building prior to

its construction. That may not sound like much - so could a drawing or plan. But
drawing or plans, like photographs, are just surfaces (though arrived at by different
processes). CG is more than a mere surface, it is a mathematical structure, which
in this instance could be a drawing, plan and model all in one, in anticipation of
the referent building which has yet to be built. More than an analog, it is a homolog.
Where one might plan a building, build it and photograph it, in that logical order,
one can now plan a building, 'computer-graph' it, and then build it - having
disturbed the logical order of sign and referent, and perhaps altered the relation of
signifier to signified.

This coding and separation gives cyberspace a flexibility and mutability which
photographic practices don't ordinarily possess. There are, of course, analog
methods for manipulating analog images; colour timing, pushing the film speed,
dodging and burning in while printing, but even so, an analog representation can
never fully differentiate itself from its referent. It can only modify its contours. In
this sense, the camera doesn't 'lie' outright, it fudges and finesses vis-·-vis its
referent space. It exaggerates or understates, masks or unmasks - but that is all. In
this respect, there is a certain, comforting, moral integrity about photospace which
appeals to some interpreters, Barthes and Berger for example.

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This difference between an uncoded analog and a coded digital is a crucial one, as
it affects our perception of the fidelity of the objects we see in the space of the
representation. For example, a photograph is legally admissible as evidence.
Experts may be made to testify as to the fidelity of the Zapruder film of the photos
or Lee Harvey Oswald with his gun, but the mere fact that forgeries are detectable
indicates a certain residual sense in which photospace is, in fact, directly connected
to the referent space.

Now, it seems, all this is about to change. With the introduction of digital
retouching of photographs, it may no longer be possible to tell whether an image
is in fact an analog of an event. (This situation is dramatized in the dystopian
film The Running Man, where the powers that be give up attempting to create
propaganda in the space of live TV by manipulating events in the referent space -
the set of the 'Running Man' game. They turn instead to simulating the desired
effects in the cyberspace of computer graphic animation).

A characteristic feature of cyberspace is that things can disappear in it without a

trace. Anyone who has accidentally 'lost' their own writing in a wordprocessor has
experienced this most primal aspect of cyberspace. Had the photo of Oswald with
the gun been faked digitally, perhaps there would have been no possibility of
questioning its authenticity. When we look at an image from cyberspace, we look
at an image from a non-place, an atopia, an inaccessible space which obeys quite
different laws from our own. Photospace, on the other hand, always appears to
obey the same laws, and this is the sense in which the camera doesn't lie. This
makes possible two wonderful oxymorons: documentary photography and art
photography. As traditionally conceived, the former is interpreted in a dystopian
framework, the latter in a utopian one. (I'm thinking of the horror of Capa and the
purity of Stieglitz, respectively).

Of course, there are plenty of aesthetic photographic practices which demonstrate

that photographs in a sense do 'lie' about their referents. Yet in order to show that
the camera lies, one has to presume that it is an instrument which has a truth effect

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in the first place. This is the case, for example, with the Surrealist photographic
practices which Krauss 13 examines. The practices of doubling and cropping in
the work of Man Ray and Lee Miller show us the analog turned back against itself:
the solarisation, the double, the familiar rendered strange through cropping, nature
twisting itself into a sign, the genuinely miraculous chance occurrence captured on
film, and so on. Yet in all of these practices, dissimulation assumes the active
labour of the practitioner, whereas in cyberspace, it is more strictly a property of
the medium itself.

The flip side of the photograph as document, as evidence, as fact, are the romantic
practices which make the camera the instrument of paradox and the undecidable,
the 'non-communicable', which is to say the uncoded. It presents us with evidence,
clues, possibilities; all requiring interpretation and judgement after the fact, by the
prosecuting attorney (See! Oswald with his gun!) or the post-Surrealist aesthetician
(See! The unformed! The indecideable! The incommensurable!) Either way, the
camera is simply a machine which steals light from the world.

It is this analog nature of the photograph which I think Barthes is grappling with
in Camera Lucida. The photograph, which "reproduces to infinity" what has
"occurred only once", is a thing which, "in effect, is never distinguished from its
referent..." By nature, the "Photograph... has something tautological about it; a
pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe".

Geist in the machine

Cultures have historically operated with concepts derived from available

technologies. Everything from potters' wheels to camera obscuras, to steam
engines to cinema to computers have been regarded as what David Bolter calls
"defining technologies" 15 - technologies which act as the conventional standards
according to which phenomena are explained. An old technology will become the
explanatory machine for a new technology. A new technology will become the
explanatory machine for a new social phenomenon. Old explanations will be
reworked on the lathe of new explanatory machines. Explanatory machines can be
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accessed by different disciplines and can feedback into the cultural slipstream, to
the point where the original connection with the machine itself is lost.

Machines make good metaphors because machines create spaces. Spaces which
have rules and functions that are logical and clear, and thus make good
metaphorical clones for phenomena which are neither logical, nor clear. A simple
machine can stand in as a metaphor for a complicated social process, or even for a
new machine that is little understood. One sympathises with Barthes when he
describes a camera as a "clock for seeing", 16 but one might as well describe a
Fairlight video synthesizer as a calculator for reading.

Another convenient example comes from Steven Heath's book, Questions of

Cinema. Heath shows how Marx formulated his theory of ideology by using the
camera obscura as a metaphor - the metaphor for a process of inversion
(incidentally, a metaphor which describes an analog process). In Marx & Engels
words:

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upsidedown as in a camera

obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as
the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process. 17

Heath then shows how Freud used the metaphor of developing a positive from a
negative image to decentre the subject who is 'subjected' to ideology: "The camera
obscura becomes a series of chambers with negatives and positives, movements
and repressions, screenings for and from the eye of consciousness" 18 (a more
complex set of analog processes). For Heath, this suggests that there is an affinity
between Marxism, psychoanalysis and the cinema.

What I'm interested in here is not the ins and outs of this particular theoretical
conjucture, but Heath's casual assumption of an analogy between the processes of
subjectivity and the processes of film. One can see the analog metaphor of the
photographic reversal flowing like waves of light, right through into Heath's
descriptions of narrative and suture: "In the intermittance of its images (Benjamin's

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'constant sudden change'), film is a perpetual metonymy over which narrative lays
as a model of closure, a kind of conversion (metonymy is the figure of desire in
pyschoanalytic theory) into the direction of the subject through the image-flow..."
And "...the film ceaselessly poses an absence, a lack, which is ceaselessly bound
up in and into the relation of the subject, is, as it were, ceaselessly recaptured for
the film". 19

From the shifting patterns of light on emulsion, through the continuous mapping
of positive to negative, flip-flopped from original to lateral inversion, onto the the
explanation of image, desire and suture in terms of "machines for the shifting
regulation of the individual as a subject", 20 the trace of the analog metaphor flows
on endlessly. Thus, even in the theories constructed to explain photospace and its
representations, we find the form of its mode of representation. Perhaps
photospace is becoming unbearable today precisely because it is both an
instrumental and imaginative space, and a space which serves as an ontological,
metaphorical base. A certain exhaustion has set in. 21 The fit between
psychoanalysis, Marxism and cinema seems so neat, precisely because analogic
machine metaphors run right through the lot. Photography is a defining technology
which suffers no lack of exposure.

More pre/post/erous talk ...

What is it about cyberspace that makes it so indifferent, so appalling? In order to

address this issue, a change of model might be in order. The first section of this
paper spoke of three axes of the individual subject's relation to space: instrumental,
imaginative and ontological. Now it's time to move onto collective, discursive
relations to space: the ethical-political and aesthetic-epistemological axes. If I
might hazard a supposition, I would say that there is something quite different in
the relationship of the ethical-political axis to the aesthetic-epistemological axis in
cyberspace as opposed to photospace. 'High falutin' as that sounds, it is really a
very simple idea. The following diagrams might help:

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Here is a model of photospace. This model is actually how I read some recent
articles on modern photographic practices or the 'photomodern' by Terry Smith
and Tony Fry. 22 The photomodern has a dystopian and a utopian mode, as in Nazi
propaganda photographs and certain practices for picturing post war, modern
English architecture, respectively. In both cases, the ethical-political framework
intersects with the aesthetic-epistemological one. Both writers are able to
concentrate on the one axis, then the other, showing their relationship to each other,
but keeping them relatively distinct. In both cases, we are left with interesting case
studies of how certain avant-garde political and aesthetic practices intersected at a
particular stage in the history of the 'modern', or rather, how they perceived this
intersection in moral and cultural space at the time.

That moment has passed. These one way streets no longer intersect. As Lyotard
would have it, they are not even logically compatible. 23 Welcome to the smash-
up derby of the language games! Now, it would appear that besides the problem of
these discursive axes not intersecting, we have the problem of them running askew.
One cannot speak about one without speaking about the other, and yet one cannot
speak about both at once. Every 'political' statement appears questionable from an
epistemological point of view, and vice versa, and so on. Every aesthetic game
plan appears morally loaded, yet the goal, grounding and rationale of neither
appears clear, and so on. Yes, here we are again... (You've heard this before,
right?)... The postmodern blues! Here is a diagram of it:
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Perhaps the new instrumental space of cyberspace is a contributing factor to our
collective relation to, and perception of, this state of affairs. Because of the analog
nature of the photographic image, and because of the judicious weight of the
discourse which interpreted those ambiguous little atoms of significance ("only
that which narrates can make us understand" 24 ), the utopian or dystopian sides
of photospace appeared equally tied to the poles of representation and the real. A
certain wholeness and unity was achieved precisely through the double struggle of
the political and the aesthetic, united in the analogy of labour and the labour of
analogy, in a cumulative process of mediation. Hence, clockwise on the map from
twelve o'clock, one could specify four practices: 'social realism'/'culture industries'.
Between dystopia and the real: 'totalitarianism'/'reification'. Between the real and
the utopian: 'socialism', the 'class struggle', and the 'masses'. Between utopia and
representation: the 'revolutionary avant-gardes'. Like this :

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All this now appears to be anachronistic. The analog technologies which provided
the images, the metaphorical cement and the evidence for explanatory narratives
is not what it used to be.

In a very illuminating essay, 25 Bill Nichols takes us back to Walter Benjamin to

explain the disappearance of this scenario, and indeed, section XIII of Benjamin's
famous essay on 'Mechanical Reproduction' does confirm the metaphorical
analogy of photospace with certain collective practices. Says Benjamin: "...the
camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions
and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions".
It "...extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives...it manages
to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action". Benjamin here wants
to show that film opens up an "unconscious optics", parallel to the "unconscious
impulses" of psychoanalysis (an early precedent for an homology we now know
only too well). In film "an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space
consciously explored" which, no doubt, is what gives it its cachet of Boys
Own radical materialism. 26 Yet, cyberspace presents quite a different picture on
this point. It need not "extend", "intervene", "explore" or "assure" in relation to
visible space at all - let alone "penetrate". It may have a strictly imaginary relation
to any referent space. It suggests no knowledge of bad "rules" and good "action"
which are applicable in a referential space. Instead, it suggests a transition to a
quite different relation between cultural technologies and the real, based on
arbitrary coding and manipulation: the cut-up, the perfect edit, the program, the
model, the game, the lattice, the network, thealgorithm.

On the ethical-political 'front', the labour of love gives way to the cynic-in-
difference. No longer is the bad, threatening, negative space tied to the good,
promised, positive space via the metaphor of labour and the machine, by the
movement of mass and the mass movement. We've become bored with these
explanatory machines, even though they still walk on iron heels upon the face of
the earth. On the epistemological-aesthetic street, we still have the hoary old issues
of representation and the real. If anything, the modernist obsession with this axis

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has intensified: witness the exhumations of the Surrealists by Krauss, Mallarm by
Barthes, Duchamp by Lyotard, Roussel by Foucault, Joyce by Kristeva (well, by
everybody...) Perhaps this is precisely because the united front of representation
and the real is no longer cemented together by the threat and the promise of the
dystopian and utopian? So what takes its place? Where do we go from here?

In terms of the real, perhaps a heterotopia. In 'Other Spaces', Foucault provides us

with a topology and typology of heterotopias, or spaces which sit just on the limit
of urban culture's spaces. Drawing on the experience of certain information
technologies, he sees this heterotopic terrain as held together by relations of
juxtaposition, and arranged topographically in series, trees, networks and lattices.
"In our era, space presents itself in the form of patterns of ordering. An ordering
in which antagonistic, totalising opposites still exist, but as a sort of residue "which
institution and practice dare not erode". 27 Hence, the persistence in our moral and
political conception of space of oppositions such as public/private, pleasure/work,
and cultural/utilitarian. Foucault sees these as occurring within a more general,
more heterogeneous patterning. Hence, his classificatory list of heterotopias which
include:

Heterotopias of crisis: boarding school, military service, the honeymoon, which,

at certain times, remove people from urban space for reasons connected with the
experience of sexuality. (The drive-in motel for illicit, sexual liaisons also belongs
here).

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Heterotopias of deviance: psychiatric clinics, prisons, perhaps even the cemetery.

Heterotopias of juxtaposition: the theatre and the garden, where, as Aldo Rossi
also points out, many scenes or types occupy the same space or alternate in time.

Time accumulators: public galleries, museums, libraries, all with an eye on

preservation and accumulation, an infinite (19th century) horizon.

Momentary heterotopias: fairs, carnivals, shows, bienniales, expos which in a

sense do the opposite to those listed above.

Chronic heterotopias: Disneyland, Sydney's Darling Harbour, which

institutionalise the carnival and make a permanent space for it, connected to
tourism.

Imaginative heterotopias: such as the colony. (We might also interpret the the left's
historic relation to revolutionary states in this manner). Interestingly, Foucault also
puts the ship under this heading, as a 'vessel' for the imagination, "a floating part
of space, a placeless place".

This idea of the placeless space as a heterotopia is interesting because that is

precisely what cyberspace is, though in a different manner to the ship. If the
continuous motion between points on an empty sea is what defines the ship, then
relational difference in a logical, inaccessible space is what defines cyberspace,
particularly when it is a network, linking terminals in difference places and times
into a unified environment.

Perhaps what the ship was to extensive, analog space, cyberspace is to a digital
conception of moral, aesthetic, political and knowable spaces. We could interpret
the various species of both art and criticism, creativity and knowledge today on
this model of the juxtaposition of heterotopias and atopias. It is also interesting
that a number of recent films deal explicitly with the peripheral interface between
the atopia of cyberspace and the human world of heterotopian spaces: Demon
Seed, Terminator, Running Man, Alien, Electric Dreams, Tron, The Last

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Starfighter, Short Circuit, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Robocop, to name just a few. The
anxieties about cyberspace expressed in these films are by no means limited to the
film medium. A number of media and institutions are currently attempting to
rationalise uncertainties about new, digital, cultural technologies.

Imagineers of human souls

Within a heterotopic framework of multiple juxtapositions, particularly where this

'heterotopology' is in turn confronted by the atopia of cyberspace, the ethico-
political axis of criticism becomes a complicated and many sided business. The
interaction of cyberspace with a heterotopian landscape adds a further
complication in the form of new relations between culture and science, or more
strictly speaking, technology. The era of information is only the 'end of ideology'
to the extent that it signals the proliferation of ideologies.

Old categories become confused. For example, it sometimes happens today that a
radical right meets a conservative left. A grand ideology, be it socialism or
liberalism, was never a coherent narrative in the first place, but is, in any case, now
in the process of being cut up and edited in the interests of a pragmatics and a
rhetoric of self-preservation for the interest groups and class blocs that stand
behind them. 28 Cynicism multiplies and fills the vacuum once occupied by the
so-called grand narratives. 29 Three particular cynicisms are of interest here: the
old militia, the new pragmatics and the inhumanities.

The old militia: Lyotard's Postmodern Condition is perhaps the best known work
which deals with the politics of knowledge in the era of digital information
technology from the point of view of the cynicism of the 'old militia'. That the text
is a cynical one wasn't obvious to all and sundry from the text itself, although it
does state that it "makes no claim to being original, or even true". 30 This statement
is amplified in a recent interview: "I told stories in the book, I referred to a quantity
of books I've never read, apparently it impressed people. It's a bit of a parody". A
parody of the form of the government report. It is in fact a government report to
the University Council of Quebec and yet "it belongs to the satiric genre." 31 (For
17
evidence of this, one only need point to the pun on 'translating' which Lyotard
perpetrates on the fourth page - a dry, obfuscatory wit indeed!) 32

This satiric impulse stems from Lyotard's commitment to "the responsibility to

resist". 33 From the assertive, military metaphor of the avant-garde, the militant
intellectual retreats to that other military metaphor, the more defensive 'resistance'.
Resistance "against the great narratives themselves, against the way thought is
treated in the new postmodern technologies insofar as they express the most recent
application of capitalist rules to language." 34 Resistance in the name of a language
which does not communicate, which is autonomous, not instrumental, which
resists the performance principle, commodification and exchange value.
Resistance on the part of fine artists, general philosophers and pure scientists, the
pataphysicians of non-communicable phrases, beyond the law. 35

The cynicism of this position lies in its total obstinance. The irony of it is that it
really is quite conservative. Lyotard invests such hope in experimentation in
language, but this experimentation is to be carried out by already established
categories of 'expert', categories of expert which were established early on in the
history of modernism - the fine artist, the pure scientist, and the general
philosopher. Hence, Lyotard's work can be read as a defence of the vested interests
of these groups, in the name of 'experimentation' and 'resistance'. Lyotard defends
the old in the name of the new - a brilliant and highly cynical manoeuvre! Lyotard
is the figure of the militant who, in the face of cyberspace and the new categories
of expertise that go with it, moves from an avant-garde to a rear guard position.

The inhumanities: 36 no amount of resistance can prevent information

technologies from generating new relations of knowledge to power, and new
relations of technology to culture. The history of cyberspace to date offers ample
proof of this. The development of the first generation of computers was tied to the
need to process the calculations (involving many variables) needed to build the
bomb. 37 Even computer graphics, a seemingly innocuous application of the
power of digital processing received a heavy impetus from military funding. 38

18
The purpose of computer graphics was originally to make sophisticated simulation
of combat situations possible. In particular, cyberspace is an excellent medium in
which to train military personnel in the strategy of nuclear war, given that a nuclear
exchange is the last word in atopia, in that there can be no practice runs.

Cyberspace has been closely allied to the theory and practice of political atopia.
That is to say, with topologies which can exist only in a logical space, and which
interact with the heterotopia of social space and relations only 'peripherally'. There
are three classic examples of cyberspace: nuclear deterrence, foreign exchange
(forex) trading and, prosaically enough, CG. Respectively, these can be thought of
as flows of (i) information strategy; (ii) information-value, and (iii) information-
image, all of which are immaterial flows - the hope of the 'post-industrial' west...
39

Information-strategy: it is no accident that the hardware and strategies of

deterrence take place in cyberspace. This most disturbing and fascinating of
atopias is built out of speculative data concerning future events, not experience of
past ones. The simulation necessarily precedes the referent (which in this case must
always be deferred). The epistemology of pure war and the aesthetics of pure
simulation presuppose one another.

Information-value: similarly, there is a neat homology between money and

cyberspace. Money is a pure, arbitrary, quantitative sign. Numerically, it is always
discrete, never irrational. In cyberspace, money moves away from its analog
functions: as a measure of labour time, for example, and towards its digital ones -
pure, transitive exchange.

Information-image: similarly with the image. Once separated from its referent by
the almost limitless possibilities for manipulation, the image becomes part of a
pure economy in an abstract space. A space almost completely free from inertia
and resistance - a vacuum. As with deterrence or forex systems, the atopian
separation of the image from the real is no barrier to its return upon the real. For
example, the architects responsible for Sydney's Darling Harbour scheme have the
19
entire project stored in a cyberspace, walk-thru model, where everything from the
plumbing to the fittings is colour-coded. If one model of power in the modern sense
was the struggle to realise a utopian space against a dystopian world, one model of
postmodern power is the schematic realisation of atopian models within a
heterotopian world.

All of these applications have their origins in a new formation of power-knowledge

which has grown up within and alongside the traditional institutions of knowledge.
This new set of discourses began with systems analysis, 40 but has gradually
increased in extent and influence so that its offshoots can be found everywhere
from graphic design to expert systems. Taken together, I call these complexes of
power-knowledge the inhumanities. This is not meant as a moral slight. Rather, I
want to juxtapose the prosaic, practical and heterotopic aspirations with the
humanities and the arts: those islands of the poetic, the affective and the utopian.
The inhumanities are not so much hostile to such values as indifferent to them.
They represent the very summit of "enlightened false consciousness", 41 and are
pretty impervious to critique. The inhumanities do not always recognise a separate,
human sphere outside of their own, governed by different authorities and
competences. The inhumanities are about bridging the cultural and the
technological. Derrida's reply on behalf of the humanities in "No Apocalypse, No
Not Now", 42 beautiful as it is, is too late. The apocalypse is already over. The
inhumanities have taken us into an age of apocalypse management, or "optimizing
the unavoidable". 43

On a less millenarian note, perhaps our understanding of present cultural

technologies and practices would be enhanced by a change of language, by a move
from one metaphorical tool box to others: from analog to digital; from photospace
to cyberspace; from mapping to modelling; from image surface to image structure;
from engineering to imagineering; from intervention to access; from utopia and
dystopia to atopia and heterotopia; from the iron heel to the interface.
Experimentation in language necessarily entails involvement with new
technologies, not resistance to them. In the words of Alan Moore:

20
This oblique and shifting cathode mosaic uncovers the blueprint for an era of new
sensations and possibilities. An era of the conceivable made concrete and the
casually miraculous. 44

So here we are ...

21
Notes

1. My perspective on cultural space owes a lot to three sources. Walter Benjamin, of course; Michel
Foucault's Discipline & Punish; Birth of the Clinic and Madness & Civilization, and the writings of the
architect Aldo Rossi, who is perhaps less well known. His early work Architecture and the City (Opposition
Books, 1986), is a seminal critique of modernist architectural thought, modelled on Renaissance treatises.
His Scientific Autobiography (Opposition Books, 1986), a later and more mature work, cannot be
recommended too highly. Needless to say, this perspective, while a very general one is quite arbitrary,
eclectic, and provisional, and should not be read as excluding other equally valid perspectives on the
problem of subjectivity, space, culture, technology and politics.

2. Cf. "Spirit Freed From Flesh" in Intervention, nos.21/22 (1988) for more on the idea of cultural
technologies.

3. Cynthia Goodman, Digital Visions (Times Mirror Books, 1987), p.20.

4. In Koichi Omura et al., Computer Graphics in Japan (Tokyo: Graphic-sha Publishing, 1985), p.100.

5. In Artlink, v.7, n.2/3, 1987.

6. Pierre Bourdieu. Preface in Distinction (London: RPK, 1986).

7. The term is Ross Harley's from "Alphabye Cities", Art and Text, n.28, (Sydney, 1988).

8. Cf. "Lost in Space", Photofile, Winter 1987.

9. Neuromancer and Count Zero are brilliant explorations of the meeting of atopic and heterotopic spaces.

10. Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind and Anthony Wilden, System and
Structure(London: Tavistock, 1983).

11. Adam Wolter, Artlink, v.7, nos.2/3 (1987).

12. Cf. Digital Visions, op.cit., and Joseph Deken, Computer Images (Thames & Hudson, 1983).

13. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L'Amour Fou (Cross River Press, 1985).

14. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Fontana, 1984), p.5

15. David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
Cf. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Granada, 1984).

16. Barthes, op. cit, p.15.

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17. K. Marx & F. Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p.42, cited in
Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp.1-2.

18. Heath, ibid, p.3.

19. Ibid, p.13.

20. Ibid, p.102.

21. This can, of course, be interpreted in a positive light. The exhaustion of the metaphorical structure of
photographic practice frees practice from certain, discursive constraints: post Photography photography...

22. Tony Fry in Transition n.20, (May, 1987); Terry Smith in War/Masculinity (Interventions Publications,
n.19, 1985).

23. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985).

24. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p.23.

25. Bill Nichols, "The Work of Culture in the age of Cybernetic Systems" in Screen Vol.29, No.1, (1988).

26. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations (New
York: Shocken Books, 1987).

27. Michel Foucault, "Other Spaces" in Lotus International, nos.48/9 (1986).

28. Cf. Paul Rabinow, French Modern (Cambridge, Mass: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

29. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

30. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984).

31. Interview reprinted in Eyeline n.3 (Brisbane, Nov. 1987).

32. The Postmodern Condition, p.4. The paragraph in question begins "The nature of knowledge cannot
survive unchanged..." and is a brilliant collection of paranoid non-sequiturs.

33. Interview reprinted in Praxis M No.14, (Perth 1987).

34. Interview in Diacritics (Fall 1984), p.18.

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35. Cf. Lyotard's brilliant essay(s) "Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix" in Cultural Critique n.5,
(1986/7).

36. Cf. "On Technological Time: Cruising in Paul Virilio's Overexposed City", Arena n.83, (1988), and
"The President's Rectum" Art & Text, n.36, (May 1990).

37. Robert Junck, Brighter than a Thousand Suns (Penguin, 1974).

38. Robert Rivlin, The Algorithmic Image (Microsoft Press, 1986).

39. Cf. "On Technological Time", ibid.

40. Cf. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Simon & Schuster, 1984), for a history of systems
analysis and its influence.

41. Sloterdijk, op.cit.

42. Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, No Not Now", Diacritics, Summer 1984, pp.20-31.

43. Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolutions: Confessions of a Computer Programmer (Penguin, 1985),
p.80.

44. Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, The Watchmen (DC Comics).

24