|
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: 16 February 2006 23:22
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: ~Warcraft~ and Utopia
_____________________________________________________________________
CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 29, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 033 16/02/2006 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
*************************
1000 DAYS OF THEORY
*************************
_____________________________________________________________________
~Warcraft~ and Utopia
======================
~Alexander R. Galloway~
The theme of "imagining life after capitalism" is once again the topic of
academic attention, renewed mostly through fresh interest in certain
messianic or predictive claims about the transformation of the mode of
production. Now, however, computers and the information economy play a
central role in the debate.[1] The theme of utopia, in the work of Fredric
Jameson for example, is closely tied to this question, utopia being a site
in which possible non-capitalist scenarios are worked out, worked through,
or otherwise proven not to work at all. Here, I will examine some of the
problems and challenges for the task of imagining life after capitalism,
then I will discuss two interesting areas -- networks and play -- that have
historically represented threats to or departures from capitalism. Finally,
I will describe how networks and play have in recent decades become
entirely synonymous with the present mode of production and exchange.
Various leftist utopias come to mind when discussing life after
capitalism. The more overtly political, predictive texts from Marx are
conventionally read and contextualized in this manner, as a utopia for the
"after." In _Specters of Marx_, Derrida refers to this as the messianic
thread in Marxism, a fervent desire for what is to come. This reading
posits Marxism as somewhat of a meteorological science (to use Toby
Miller's expression) for the prediction of the inevitable. This first
theory of utopia, of life after capitalism, pays chronological attention to
the word "after." Of this first variety one has no doubt heard a great deal
and witnessed a good deal less. There are promises made but forever
deferred.
However, there is a second model of utopia that is less often
identified: nostalgia as utopia. This utopia privileges life before
capitalism, minimalism and disengagement from the world system. Thus, in
the historical period in which the commodity is no longer primarily an
object, but has become an image -- the so-called society of the spectacle
that emerged in the middle twentieth-century -- one sees the emergence of
minimalism as an aesthetic project. This project grew out of the ascetic
principles and formal aspirations of modernism. The utopian longing for the
"before" also characterizes romanticism. In Friedrich Schiller's letters,
_On the Aesthetic Education of Man_, there is an interesting nesting of one
utopian aspiration within another: a future state is proposed, which
Schiller termed the Aesthetic State, yet this proposal is tightly encased
and layered inside the rhetorical shell of romanticism. (Indeed, "before
utopias" may be identified as the driving force behind classicism, or many
varieties of conservatism.)
Schiller's "play-drive," the central philosophical term in his letters and
around which his entire spiritual development of man revolves, is also the
recipient of newfound attention in recent years. This attention may be
fueled by the increasing prominence of the medium of the video game, which
has renewed interest in theories of play and games. Let me now preview the
question of play, and unpack a little of what I believe to be one of the
most compelling, if not utopias, then certainly allegories of the present
moment. This is the case of the online multiplayer game ~World of Warcraft~
launched in 2004. (The game recently surpassed five million players
worldwide.) An argument can be made that all video games are, at a certain
level, utopian projects, simply because all video games create worlds in
which certain laws are simulated and certain other laws are no longer
simulated. The freedom to selectively simulate, then, operates in a video
game as the most important scaffolding for utopia. Further, multiplayer
games instantiate (both materially and
interpersonally) a utopian space in ways not seen in previous media, for
the diegetic world itself is larger than the imaginative plane of any given
player (who indeed may even be offline while others remain online). Groups,
guilds, raids, and other in-game collaborations both ad hoc and otherwise,
what philosophers of action call "shared cooperative activity," are often
required for game-play. These social groups gesture toward a distinctly
utopian possibility for social interaction, a shift analogous to Marx's
theory of primitive accumulation and the institution of more collaborative
labor practices, which themselves were the conditions of possibility for
collective action. Like factories before them, multiplayer games require
and support a whole variety of group-based play scenarios (I will address
whether they are also labor scenarios below). This echoes Johan Huizinga's
claim -- his 1938 book _Homo Ludens_ is foundational for any critique of
play -- that play necessarily promotes the formation of social groups.
~World of Warcraft~ evokes a pre-modern hodgepodge of technologies and
narrative scenarios (given time, one might cognitively map the historical
fantasy of the game's narrative -- trace when exactly the blunderbuss was
invented, or the introduction of certain kinds of armor, for example, all
the while knowing that such a pursuit could never be "fixed" or arrived at
with any degree of precision), overtly participating in the "utopia for
the before," imagining life before capitalism. However, the functionality
of the game is pure software culture, suggesting that perhaps the more one
tries to strip utopia of its machinic core, by cloaking it in any manner of
pure fantasy or pre-modern worlds ("dungeons and dragons," "swords and
sorcery," etc.), the more informatic and algorithmic it becomes, reverting
to the software equivalent of twenty-sided dice. Indeed dice are repurposed
in ~World of Warcraft~: into the various logics of software code; random
number generation; action statistics; and particularly in terms of how
identity is defined as a set of mathematical variables such as stamina,
agility, health, and so on.
There is a great work of popular culture commentary worth mentioning at
this point, Jim Munroe's short video "My Trip to Liberty City." In this
satirical clip the game ~Grand Theft Auto~ is presented in the genre-form
of the amateur vacation video. Midway through the work, the voice-over
narrator admits something profound, that the real reason why he loves
"visiting" Liberty City, the city where ~Grand Theft Auto III~ transpires,
is that there's no advertising. The game, despite being a hyper-mediated
cultural artifact, produces an imaginary world where mediation itself is on
vacation. This is in accordance with the understanding of minimalism as a
utopian reaction to image-rich society.
A similar force is at play in ~World of Warcraft~, and brings me to the
first of two related claims: the game is a utopia for a world without
signifiers; it is characterized by a minimalist desire.
Ignoring the interface overlay for one moment, one notices that the game's
diegetic world (the imaginary narrative space within which game-play
transpires) has very few linguistic or symbolic signifiers; this is in
sharp contrast to our offline world of brand logos, advertisements,
linguistic signs, and so on. To be sure, the game is not free from
signification. There exist guild insignias, visual placards for various
vender's buildings, and indeed the entire three-dimensional model of the
game is, at root, a form of digital signification. Yet inside the diegetic
narrative, ~World of Warcraft~ projects a space of pure formal
representation, cleansed of unnecessary symbolic or linguistic
ornamentation. Brands and logos are gone, as are words and images. This is
part of the fantasy of fantasy. "Ornaments cannot be invented," wrote
Adorno on the Viennese modernist Adolf Loos. "In art the more that must be
made, sought, invented, the more uncertain it becomes if it can be made or
invented. Art that is radically and explicitly something made must
ultimately confront its own feasibility."[2] This is essentially the
conundrum of formalism in modernism: reducing art to pure form, and hence
cleansing it of all invention or contingency, causes it to remerge in some
sort of content-less but pure shape which itself nevertheless pops up anew
as "style." Removing linguistic and symbolic signifiers from the diegetic
space of ~World of Warcraft~ is an extension of this aesthetic project.
However, anyone who has played ~World of Warcraft~ knows that this is not
a game free of signifiers or of iconography at any level, and neither is it
free of symbolic or abstract representation. I noted above that this was
the case for the diegetic space of the game; nevertheless, interfaces
cannot and should not be ignored. Thus, while the diegetic world of the
game aspires to be signifier-free (even prominent in-world linguistic
signifiers such as player names or NPC quest markers are, I argue,
non-diegetic), the rest of the interface is flush with these aesthetic
forms.
Consequently, my second claim contradicts the first, but in a way that
affirms the very internal tensions of utopian desire itself: the game
performs a semiotic segregation whereby textual and iconographic signifiers
are divorced from the diegetic world of the game, which itself is saved for
so-called transparent representation. In this scenario, all symbolic and
linguistic signs migrate into a purely functional layer and are removed
from the diegetic layer. This is precisely how ~World of Warcraft~
functions. Playing the game one realizes that the vast majority of
signification exists in the heads-up-display, the two dimensional gamic
overlay which itself has a long history as an abstraction from the physical
and embodied interfaces of military aviation. The signifier has been
banished from diegetic or representational space, this is true, but the
non-diegetic or functional sections of the game are constituted almost
entirely by iconographic and textual signifiers. Thus, this minimalist
utopia represents a segregation or separation effect, a desiring utopia
where signification is understood purely as machinic functionality. For
example, spell-casting and fighting in ~World of Warcraft~ are processes of
algorithmic unfolding. Commands are issued by players and interpreted by
the machine in series. "The Utopian text does not tell a story at all,"
wrote Jameson, "it describes a mechanism or even a kind of machine."[3]
While this may seem to be an incredible claim -- utopia always describes a
machine -- one need only to examine the game-play of ~World of Warcraft~
for an example of such a utopia. (And, as I mentioned above with reference
to selective simulation, the reverse possibility must also be explored,
that all video games, as machines, might be understood as experiments in
utopia.)
Thus far, I have discussed two permutations of utopia, both of which
gesture toward some sort of absence of capitalism. The first permutation is
a post-capitalist utopia in the form of progressive political desires,
while the second is a pre-capitalist utopia in the form of romanticism,
classicism, or minimalism. Nevertheless, there is certainly a third option:
the present as utopia. As life before capitalism poses just as much of a
threat to capital, capitalism tends to foreclose the past as well as the
future. It forecloses on both as possible options for utopian practice. In
_Laws_, Plato states that in a utopian state there would be no laws at all.
There would be no abstraction of sovereignty. In a utopian state there
would be a one-to-one mapping between any instance, any infraction, any
particular case and its adjudication. However, Plato admits that in absence
of this perfection, actual states must tolerate laws. This acknowledgement
of unachieved perfection is precisely what capitalism is unable to do,
either epistemologically or even practically. It is a central prohibition
of capitalism: never to think the present as second best. As Jameson wrote
recently, it is "our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without
historicity or futurity."[4] What capitalism teaches us is that the present
moment is the best of all possible worlds, that stasis is utopia. In the
Marxist tradition this is the notion that capitalism and history are
essentially at odds, that history is implicitly a critique of capitalism,
resulting in the left's call to "always historicize."
Keeping in mind the example of the utopian visual mode encased in a
dystopian narrative of conflict discussed above, I will now examine a
narrative of conflict that is encased in problems around knowledge and
cultural imagination. This narrative is one of the most fascinating
aphorisms of political philosophy in recent years. It reveals the intricate
interplay between visions of life outside capitalism while simultaneously
illuminating how threats to capitalism are put into discourse. In the quote
below, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is responding to questions
from the press in regards to the lack of evidence connecting Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction with terrorists.
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always
interesting to me ... Because as we know, there are known
knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are
known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we
do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we
don't know we don't know.[5]
This passage can be understood in a variety of ways. First, it is possible
that Rumsfeld is making an empirical claim about what is the case. In this
sense, Rumsfeld may be lamenting the problem of
verifiability: that it is very difficult to say with certainty that
something has not happened. This is an ontological challenge, a problem of
empirical verifiability in regards to one's knowledge of the world and the
objects within it.
However, Rumsfeld's quote is also a claim about knowledge, and quite
explicitly so. While he is making a claim that one can know, he is also
saying that one can negate knowing: the unknown is something that can be
circumnavigated. (This is formally analogous to paranoia.
The paranoiac perceives the unknown in every miniscule detail of life.
Every little thing is a clue into an intricate conspiracy against the
paranoid individual.) However, Rumsfeld goes beyond this and says something
much more profound, which is that the utter negation of knowledge is in
fact always a double negation. One must negate knowledge twice. This is,
using his terminology, the "unknown unknown." Consider imagination and the
process of thinking:
imagination is a cognitive, or knowledge-based process, that itself is
oriented toward the creation of knowledge. It is a doubling from the get
go. Thus, the absolute negation of imagination, of utopian thinking, also
has to be a double negation. One cannot close the book on utopia. One must
forget how to think, about utopia or anything else. Jameson makes a similar
claim in _The Seeds of Time_ when he states that it is easier to imagine
the end of the earth and the end of nature than it is to imagine the ends
of capitalism. For Jameson, the real problem is the crisis of imagination,
not simply the crisis of the earth. Now instead of paranoia, one is in the
grip of schizophrenia. (In computer science this is analogous to the
difference between zero and null, zero is the known unknown while null is
the unknown unknown. Null is the absence of a value, while zero is, in
fact, a value, it refers to the number that comes below one and above
negative one.) Rumsfeld is in fact saying the opposite of Jameson, or at
least diverting from Jameson significantly, that it is indeed very hard to
imagine and predict all possible methods for destroying the earth and
nature. Indeed, Rumsfeld's own warcraft is to be an "imagineer"; his task
is to imagine all possible destructions of the empire, all possible
dystopias. This is why the unknown unknowns are key for Rumsfeld, but also
why they are potentially very threatening. To recap, Rumsfeld's aphorism
makes claims about: what is the case (the verifiability challenge); what
one can know and what one cannot know; and how it is possible not to know
what one does not know (a riff on the Socratic conceit).
To expound upon the third claim one must examine the status of dystopia
and its location in current society. Again we return to
Jameson: "dystopia is generally a narrative, which happens to a specific
subject or character, whereas the Utopia text is mostly non-narrative and,
I would like to say, somehow without a subject-position."[6] In Rumsfeld's
consideration, the unknown unknowns, the moment when knowledge is negated
twice, are always already a narrative for the annihilation of the state.
The point here is that the double negation of knowledge, the unknown
unknowns, are for Rumsfeld never utopian, but instead, consigned in advance
to the work of dystopia. Utopia is understood as a deficiency in one's
ability to imagine annihilation, not a deficiency in one's ability to
imagine liberation or anything else more pleasant. ~Warcraft~ looks tame
when compared to Rumsfeld. Thus it is clear that while Rumsfeld and Jameson
are engaging similar issues, they are on opposite imaginative planes. In
light of September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld's diagnosis must be understood as an
illumination of a crisis of
imagination: Americans were unable to imagine that terrorists would use
planes as missiles. Following this logic, if American officials had been
able to imagine that terrorists would use planes as missiles, they would
logically have been able to foreclose on that possible future. (This is
precisely the same claim that was made many years ago about Pearl Harbor
and the U.S. entrance into World War II:
the crisis of Pearl Harbor was that American military leadership could not
imagine that kamikaze pilots could threaten the fleet.) The aphorism from
Rumsfeld thus aptly fits into the third mode of utopian thinking, mentioned
above, which is the utopia of the present: the yearning for the present, or
the ongoing project of the maintenance and sustenance of the present as the
best possible scenario. Thus the unknown unknown is a threat first and
foremost because it is a deviation from the maintenance of the present, and
therefore quite difficult to bring into imagination as utopia or any
another mode of thought (because it is a double negation of thought
itself), but second, and this is the contradiction, the very process of
attempting to imagine the unknown unknown drags into the light its
opposite, the end of imagination itself and the end of humanity in the
annihilation of Ground Zero. So the moment when Rumsfeld triumphs by
cracking through the barrier of the unknown unknown is the same moment when
the state cracks and crumbles. Or, when Rumsfeld succeeds, he fails.
The previous section concerns communicating the threat to capitalism, and
how various kinds of threats are put into discourse, or indeed are
prohibited from being put into discourse. Let me return to the question of
networks and play, mentioned above in the context of ~World of Warcraft~.
Historically, networks and play have represented either a departure from or
a direct threat to capitalism.
Nevertheless, are networks not foundational to market circulation and
hence the very fabric of capitalistic exchange? Yes, certainly. Yet, at the
same time, threats to capital are also often understood and articulated as
networks. This is particularly true of the specific graph form known as the
distributed network, which is characterized by horizontality, a rhizomatic
structure, and bi-directional links (called "edges" in graph theory). Hakim
Bey's notion of the nomadic fits in here, as does Deleuze and Guattari's
rhizome; also relevant are the "grass-roots" movements (to use a synonym
term for the
rhizome) or the new social movements of the 1960s and '70s (in addition to
the so-called anti-globalization movements). These are all specifically
defined as networks. But, at the same time, Al-Qaeda, and any number of
terrorist groups, are also often defined as networks. On closer examination
of this protagonist/antagonist scenario, it becomes clear that the
opposition to the network is never a network; it is always a center, a
power center, whether it is the World Trade Center, or America itself as a
kind of hub or authority point for a global empire. In short, the
historical tendency is that networks exist in opposition to centers and
that networks are the unknown unknown of capitalism.
In recent decades, this has all changed. In recent decades the
powers-that-be have become conscious of the above. Today's revolution in
military affairs confirms this, as does the retreat from Keynesian
economics of the 1970s and the evolution into a post-Fordist economic model
after that decade's energy crisis. The powers-that-be have developed a new
awareness and are adopting flexible, network structures at very core
levels. They are adopting flexible network structures not as an apology or
concession, not as a sacrifice, but as essential techniques for the very
processes of sovereignty, control, and organization. In other words,
distributed networks have ceased being a threat to control and have become
the model for control. What was once the problem is now the solution.
Today, this is one of the core challenges for imagining a life after
capitalism:
one can no longer rely on networks as a site for imaginative desire.
The second example is the question of play as an unknown unknown.
Play conventionally operates in a very unique and interesting position in
the history of western thought: play is an irreducible, heterogeneous,
unquantifiable, absolutely qualitative human endeavor.
Conventionally speaking, play is entirely divorced from any kind of
productive activity. Play is defined as a negative force that is often a
direct threat to production. Play is leisure; play is the inversion of
production. Play is an uncapitalizable segment of time.
One may return to Friedrich Schiller on the play-drive: the play-drive is
a pure moment, and it is a very necessary moment, Schiller would claim, for
man's development, but one that is entirely outside the formal, or the
abstract, or all the kinds of human drives that lead to the creation of
society as a whole. Huizinga, the twentieth-century intellectual historian
and critic, makes a similar claim. For Huizinga, play is entirely central
to both human action and the creation of culture: however, he is also
unwavering in his claim that play is totally outside the base unfolding of
production.
Huizinga writes that play is external to any kind of material gain (if
material gain exists, one no longer is dealing with "play" but instead its
double, sport). For Derrida, who in most regards could not be more
different from Huizinga, play is one of the few philosophical concepts that
emerges mostly unscathed. This is rare in the work of Derrida, particularly
when the philosophical concept is not a Derridean neologism. Surprisingly,
for Derrida play remains an absolutely utopian and positive concept.
But today it would be entirely naove to believe that play retains its
anti-capitalist or anti-work status. One finds traces of this in Adorno in
the _Aesthetic Theory_ where he dispenses with Huizinga and Schiller alike.
Adorno claims that Schiller's notion of play is nostalgic, in that it is
entirely removed from the circuit of production and capital. "Playful forms
are without exception forms of repetition,"[7] is Adorno's lament. (This is
not such a radical claim, as many theorists of play agree that repetition
is an essential aspect of it. Indeed, for Freud, play is articulated
through repetitious activity. In the "fort/da" game, which is an act of
play, the game is "constantly repeated" by the child who "never cried when
his mother left him for a few hours."[8] For Freud, neurosis is only ever
experienced as a repetition. The common interpretation of the "fort/da"
game is that it is a game of presence and absence, essentially a game of
peek-a-boo. However, in Lacan, one sees a slightly different reading of the
Freudian scene: the game is not about the cotton-reel, it is about what
Lacan calls the "ditch"
or the gap between the reel and the child. Lacan argues that "the game of
the cotton-reel is the subject's answer to what the mother's absence has
created on the frontier of his domain -- the edge of his cradle -- namely,
a ditch, around which one can only play at jumping."[9] Lacan claims,
contrary to Freud, that it is not the mother who is miniaturized in the
cotton-reel, but that a part of the child is detached from himself
[detached in the form of the ~petit a~] and miniaturized there. For Lacan,
the game is not about the return of the mother but is simply about
repetition and alternation; the game "is a here or there, and [its] aim, in
its alternation, is simply that of being the fort of a da, and the da of a
fort."[10] So, fort/da is not only a game of peek-a-boo, but also a game of
fish.
The string is the thing, not the cotton-reel it retrieves. If fort/da were
simply about appearance and disappearance (or even Lacanian subject
formation), there would be no string, just as the game of peek-a-boo has no
string. But the string exists. In short, fort/da is a kind of network game,
the string being a link in a miniature network. The string is the edge and
the cotton-reel is a node. In this sense, the game of fort/da is a game of
connectivity. The string is connectivity, and the story it tells is how
connectivity trumps presence. It is a relational game, in which the
creation of links -- sending and pulling, linking and retrieving -- is
paramount. A thoroughly modern youngster, the child playing the fort/da
game is a spinner of mesh-works, a weaver of webs.)
Adorno argues that play activities are forms of repetition, and on this
many agree, but he goes further to assert that "in art, play is from the
outset disciplinary [and] art allies itself with unfreedom in the specific
character of play."[11] For Adorno, play has been co-opted by the routine
of modern life. "The element of repetition in play is the afterimage of
unfree labor, just as sports -- the dominant extra-aesthetic form of play
-- is reminiscent of practical activities and continually fulfills the
function of habituating people to the demands of praxis, above all by the
reactive transformation or physical displeasure into secondary pleasure,
without their noticing that the contraband of praxis has slipped into
it."[12] Thus, in the work of Adorno, play is not a vacation from the
pressures of production, but rather the form-of-appearance
("afterimage") of that mode itself, with repetition, displeasure, and
competitive interaction being but symptoms for deeper social processes.
Recently, many writers have written on how play and creativity have moved
from the periphery or the outside of capitalism (if it was ever there to
begin with) to the very center of productive activities. For example, see
Alan Liu's recent book _The Laws of Cool_, which examines the
commodification of immaterial labor, or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
work on immaterial labor (the "labor of Dionysus," as their first full
length collaboration is titled, concisely evokes the relationship between
labor and play). In other words, the trend today should be not toward the
further development of a labor theory of value, but the formulation of a
play theory of value. As someone once told me: in contemporary life the
tool used for labor, the computer, is exactly the same tool that is used
for leisure. I'm not sure this has ever been the case before.
After trying to understand how to imagine a life after capitalism, and
seeing how this is both done and undone in everything from ~World of
Warcraft~ to the stratagems of Donald Rumsfeld, what one sees is how two of
the hitherto most useful tropes for communicating a life after or outside
capitalism -- networks and play -- are slowly shifting from what Rumsfeld
calls the unknown unknowns, which is what they were fifty or a hundred
years ago, to the known unknowns, and perhaps simply to the known. Is
~World of Warcraft~ labor or play?
I'm not entirely sure. What is clear is that the possibility of life after
capitalism is often articulated today through a utilization of the very
essence of capitalism. Play is work and networks are sovereigns. And
finally that virtual worlds are always in some basic way the expression of
utopian desire, and in doing so they present the very impossibility of
imagining utopia; this is not simply a knee-jerk ontological paradox, that
code-utopias, being immaterial, formal, and virtual, are by definition not
"real," but that the very act of creating an immaterial utopian space at
the same time inscribes a whole vocabulary of algorithmic coding into the
plane of imagination that thereby undoes the play of utopia in the first
place. The key is not to morn this transformation, but to examine cultural
and media forms themselves and through them (borrowing a line from Jameson)
to pierce through the representation of social life both how it is lived
now and we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived.
Notes:
------
[1] An early draft of this essay was delivered at the "Communicating a
Life After Capitalism" panel during the May 2005 International
Communications Association conference in New York. A conference titled
"Life After Capitalism" was held at the CUNY Grad Center in August 2004.
[2] Theodor Adorno. _Aesthetic Theory_, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997. p. 26.
[3] Fredric Jameson. _The Seeds of Time_, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996. p. 56.
[4] Fredric Jameson. "Politics of Utopia," _New Left Review_ 25,
January/February 2004: 35-54. p. 46.
[5] Donald Rumsfeld, "DoD News Briefing -- Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen.
Myers," United States Department of Defense news transcript, February 12,
2003.
http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/2002/t02122002_t212sdv2.html
(accessed June 7, 2005).
[6] Jameson. _The Seeds of Time_, p. 55-56.
[7] Adorno. _Aesthetic Theory_, p. 317.
[8] Sigmund Freud. _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_, New York: Norton,
1961. p. 13.
[9] Jacques Lacan. _The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis_, New
York: Norton, 1998. p. 62.
[10] Ibid. pp. 62-63.
[11] Adorno. _Aesthetic Theory_, p. 317.
[12] Ibid. p. 318.
--------------------
Alexander R. Galloway teaches media at New York University and is founder
of the Radical Software Group.
_____________________________________________________________________
*
* CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and
* culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in
* contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
* theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris),
* Bruce Sterling (Austin), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc
* (Melbourne), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray
* (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen
* Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough),
* Maurice Charland (Montreal), Gad Horowitz (Toronto), Shannon Bell
* (Toronto), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Richard Kadrey (San
* Francisco).
*
* In Memory: Kathy Acker
*
* Editorial Assistant: Ted Hiebert
* WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
* WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman
_____________________________________________________________________
To view CTHEORY online please visit:
http://www.ctheory.net/
To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit:
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/
_____________________________________________________________________
* CTHEORY includes:
*
* 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
*
* 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture.
*
* 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape.
*
* 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers.
*
* 5. Multimedia theme issues and projects.
*
*
* The Editors would like the thank the University of Victoria for
* financial and intellectual support of CTheory. In particular, the
* Editors would like to thank the Dean of Social Sciences, Dr. C.
* Peter Keller, the Dean of Engineering, Dr. D. Michael Miller and
* Dr. Jon Muzio, Department of Computer Science.
*
*
* (C) Copyright Information:
*
* All articles published in this journal are protected by
* copyright, which covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and
* distribute the article. No material published in this journal
* may be translated, reproduced, photographed or stored on
* microfilm, in electronic databases, video disks, etc., without
* first obtaining written permission from CTheory.
* Email [log in to unmask] for more information.
*
*
* Mailing address: CTHEORY, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050,
* Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 3P5.
*
* Full text and microform versions are available from UMI, Ann Arbor,
* Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale Canada, Toronto.
*
* Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/
* Documentation politique international; Sociological Abstract
* Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political Science and
* Government; Canadian Periodical Index; Film and Literature Index.
*
_____________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________
ctheory mailing list
[log in to unmask]
http://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ctheory
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by the
NorMAN MailScanner Service and is believed to be clean.
The NorMAN MailScanner Service is operated by Information Systems and
Services, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
====
This e-mail is intended solely for the addressee. It may contain private and
confidential information. If you are not the intended addressee, please take
no action based on it nor show a copy to anyone. Please reply to this e-mail
to highlight the error. You should also be aware that all electronic mail
from, to, or within Northumbria University may be the subject of a request
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and related legislation, and
therefore may be required to be disclosed to third parties.
This e-mail and attachments have been scanned for viruses prior to leaving
Northumbria University. Northumbria University will not be liable for any
losses as a result of any viruses being passed on.
************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************
|
