Into the Image by Robins Kevin

Author:Robins, Kevin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

THE WORLDS WE LIVE IN

We can all too easily think of cyberspace and virtual reality in terms of an alternative space and reality. As if it were possible to create a new reality which would no longer be open to objections like that which has been left behind. As if we could substitute a reality more in conformity with our desires for the unsatisfactory real one. The new technologies seem to offer possibilities for re-creating the world afresh. We can see virtual culture, then, in terms of utopia: as expressing the principle of hope and the belief in a better word. That is the most obvious response. It is the one that virtual marketing and promotion always peddles. But we can also see virtual culture from an opposite perspective: instead of hopes for a new world, we would then see dissatisfactions about, and rejection of, an old one. This would have the more apocalyptic sense of looking back on the end of the world; what would be more significant would be the sense of an ending. This is how I am inclined to see virtual culture—because there is something banal and unpersuasive about its Utopian ideal, and because what is more striking to me about it is its regressive (infantile, Edenic) mood and sentiments. It is what I have discussed in terms of omnipotence fantasies (at the individual level) and familial communitarianism (at the group and collective level). Regression as transcendence. Dieter Lenzen interprets contemporary society in terms of redemption through the totalisation of childhood. He sees a project of cultural regeneration through regression:

A regression from adults to children could cause people to disappear completely in the end, opening the way to a renewal of the world. We can see from this that the phenomenon of expanding childhood observable on all sides can be interpreted as an apocalyptic process. Correspondingly, the disappearance of adults could be understood as the beginning of a cosmic regeneration process based on the destruction of history.81

We could see virtual discourse as drawing on this mythology (as well as the more familiar metaphysics of technological progress) when it imagines the possibility of new individuals and new communities.

The mythology of cyberspace is preferred over its sociology. I have argued that it is time to re-locate virtual culture in the real world (the real world that virtual culturalists, seduced by their own metaphors, pronounce dead or dying). Through the development of new technologies, we are, indeed, more and more open to experiences of de-realisation and de-localisation. But we continue to have physical and localised existences. We must consider our state of suspension between these conditions. We must de-mythologise virtual culture if we are to assess the serious implications it has for our personal and collective lives. Far from being some kind of solution for the world’s problems—could there ever be a ‘solution’?—virtual inversion simply adds to its complexities. Paul Virilio imagines the coexistence of two societies:

One is a society of ‘cocoons’…where people hide away at home, linked into communication networks, inert….

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