| volume 15 (2) | June 1996 |
University of Amsterdam
Review of Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, 212 p, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Having returned from a trip to America in the mid-eighties Jean Beaudrillard wrote a small book with the simple title America. The book's epigraph cites an inscription that you can find on the outside mirror of an American car: Caution - Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. We've read Dr. Lacan's warning, so where are the desired objects of our technological mirrors now?
Finally we are back on the road again. The sorts of dangers we are facing in the days of the 'information superhighway' obviously have changed. We no longer have to be aware of the car trying to pass us. Crashes do not happen on the cross- roads in cyberspace. It is still the old American dream of open spaces, fast routes, the myth of freedom and the absence of a regulating governmental body which is haunting the postmechanical age. People who enter the internet are on a search without any destination in particular. They prefer to travel alone, but they also want to meet nice people, want to make friends 'out there', who speak the same language and share similar values. And don't forget, people out there don't like questions like 'who are you and where do you come from'? Remember to be careful. Things and people out there may not be what they seem.
Our vehicles in this world are no longer a good horse or a T-Bird, but little packages of bytes attached to your e-mail address. The worst thing that could happen to the lonesome Datenreisender in the internet is that the university computing facilities crash. Seems to be quite a safe world.
But even here something is threatening us, and again it has to do with objects and space and Dr. Lacan's prescription. Don't let the objects come to close to you; keep your distance! Don't fall in love with the mirror images, don't touch them and be as untouchable as anybody else in this world. Control your desires, otherwise you could seriously be hurt by the objects in the screen.
There are tales of the nets that provide us with those examples of proximity and danger. Like the story of a New York psychiatrist named Sanford Lewin and his on-line counter-ego Julie Graham. Julie's story, reported by Stone in considerable length and detail, begins in 1982 on the CompuServe on-line CB chat. A CompuServe user can log on those chat lines and write interactively to other users. Julie Graham first signed on in 1982. Soon she became a widely accepted member of this world of strong and long-lasting on-line friendships. After years of daily presence on the on-line services, these people had the impression that they shared their lives with each other, even though most of them never met face-to-face outside in the 'real world'. But one day it turned out that everything was a big fake. Julie Graham never existed. She was nothing but the invention of Sanford Lewin. It began as a psychiatric experiment, but after a while Lewin realised that his masquerade had gotten out of control. Julie "no longer simply carried out his wishes at the keyboard, she had her own emergent personality, her own ideas, her own directions. Not that he was losing his own identity, developing a parallel one, one of considerable puissance. Jekyll and Julie." (p76) For Dr. Sanford 'Frankenstein' Lewin there was only one solution - Julie had to die outside the net. Lewin in his role as John, Julie's husband, told her on-line friends that Julie had become seriously ill and was hovering between life and death. "The result was horrific. Lewin, as John, was deluged with expressions of shock, sorrow and caring. People offered medical advice. Some people went into out-and-out panic. The chat lines became jammed. So many people got seriously upset, in fact, that Lewin backed down. He couldn't stand to engineer her death. Julie recovered and came home." (p76) Not only was Lewin terrified by this result of his little experiment, but he also couldn't stand the fact that his Sanford persona "was being defeated by his Julie persona." (p77) In the net, everybody was overwhelmed by Julie's personality, while Sanford was a kind of net-nerd, nice but rather boring. So what do you do when the life of your images is much more fun than your own life outside the chat universe?
Lewin decided to reveal himself and thereby let Julie die. The result was almost more bizarre than in his first attempt to get rid of his stubborn and selfish electronic twin: "Perhaps to everyone's surprise, the emotion that many of those in the chat system felt was mourning. Because of the circumstances in which it occurred, Julie's unmasking as a construct, a cross-dressing man, had been worse than a death. There was no focused instant of pain and loss. There was no funeral, no socially supported way to lay the Julie persona to rest, to release one's emotions and to move on... Whatever Julie was or wasn't, she had been a good friend and a staunch supporter to many people in need." (p78)
Another boundary story. It is about a woman called Sarah who has been diagnosed as having Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). It isn't one of those funny stories about gender- switching in IRC or such, but a sad report of rape. Sarah charged an acquaintance of hers that he "raped her after deliberately drawing out one of her personalities, a naive woman who he thought would be willing to have sex with him." (p45) Usually MPD is diagnosed as a mental disorder of traumatic origin, and it seems to be an inappropriate subject for a study of communication technologies. But Stone raises the question whether there is "any room for non traumatic multiplicity" (p58) in the common clinical accounts of this disease. Actually she wants to depathologize MPD, promoting communication technologies as means of "healing trauma, but preserving multiplicity; or perhaps more pertinent, creating discursive space for a possible transformative legitimization of some forms of multiplicity." (p59) Enter cyberspace, and tell us about the others that share your body with you, because "the technosocial space of virtual systems ... is a domain of non traumatic multiplicity." (p60) But is cyberspace really an opportunity to decriminalise MPD? (p62) Stone thinks that the life of those 'multiples', "sharing a single body with several quasi-independent personalities, is emblematic of a fair percentage of everyday life in the world of virtual systems." (63) The lonely crowd of the fifties nowadays seems to have mutated into the crowd in the lonesome.
What do those 'borderland stories' teach us? Could they be of any interest to us as students of science and technology? Reading trendy papers that blow up their usually not so breathtaking findings with überhyped titles like 'Sex, Death and Machinery' or (even more pretentious) 'Cyberdämmerung at the Atari Lab', I usually follow my sociological 'Don't believe the hipe' reflex and simply trash 'em. But let's see what we can get out of it. Due to the lack of appropriate beaches in the old world, unfortunately we Europeans are usually not very skilled surfers, whatever sort of waves there are - ocean breakers or just discourse splashing. For a Californian "discourse surfer" (p165) like Sandy Stone this might be not a very promising perspective. We prefer to sit on the beach in the shadow, frightened by those ugly remains from the mechanical age like the ozone hole, and watch the surfers out there, gliding in the sun from wave to wave, always in motion 'til the sun comes down on the Santa Monica boulevard'. Could we use this beautiful picture for the enrichment of our own academic entertainment back there in cold and usually rainy Europe? Okay, we can't surf, but at least we are not afraid of the deep blue of 'high theory' as Sandy Stone obviously is. "Occasionally it's wonderful, or necessary, to dive down. The depths are heady and beautiful, and if I linger too long, rapture of the deep sets in, and I begin to think I can stay down forever. Which is the signal that it's time for air." (p165) Let's get a last deep breath of air, and dive down in the discourse on Science and Technology. Maybe thinking prevents us from sinking?
The War of Desire and Technology consists of eight chapters, all of which focus somehow on phenomena around the emergence of communication technologies. Besides the already mentioned two stories on identity and the concept of the self, Stone devotes three chapters to some early virtual communities among the first generation of computer freaks in California. These chapters are well written and quite informative, but rather like an appetiser that leaves you yearning for more coherent, detailed and conceptually ambitious readings. Especially the chapter on the Atari Lab1 is probably the most astonishing conglomeration of insider stories, cramped anecdotes and tiny fragments of the Atari Lab member's theoretical work on interaction and presence that ever passed the publisher's desk of MIT Press. Could it be that a diverse number of quite unique selves (scholars, surfers, anthropologists) "grounded in a body unit" have worked on these chapters? That of course would explain some of its variance. Squashed in between these chapters we find a coy part on "Reinvention and Encounter. Pause for Theory." Laying down the surfboard for a moment, Stone joins the theorists on the beach. What is the book all about?
Living in a metaphor: Cyber this and that
This book "is about science fiction, in the sense that it is about emergent technologies, shifting boundaries between the living and the non living, optional embodiments ... in other words, about the everyday world as a cyborg habitat." (p38) It comes to mind that this book is not about science fiction but an example of the new genre fiction science, that is the scientific study of cultures living in a fiction. Enter the inevitable Oberguru William Gibson.[2] "As Gibson maintained from the beginning, to a certain extent cyberspace does exist now, as a metaphor for late-twentieth-century communications technologies, for instance, as data banks, financial systems, computer networks, military simulations and ATMs... Many of us live at least part-time in cyberspace already. We call it computer-conferencing, or phone sex, or virtual this and that...." (p35).
Let's suppose there are people living in this metaphor (and obviously Stone considers herself as one of them). Suppose, too, that it's promising to think about computer mediated communication in terms of entering a sort of 'space' where one can 'meet' other 'entities'. What then does this world tell us about the current state of the 'postmechanical age'? The book is "only partly about cyberspace. It is also about social systems that arise in spaces enabled by and constituted through communication technologies ... new social forms that arise in a circumstance in which body, meet, place, and even space mean something quite different from our accustomed understanding." (p38) If we agree with Stone so far, we can also agree that "the kinds of interactions we can observe within the spaces of prosthetic communication are ... emblematic of the current state of complex interactions between humans and machines." (p36) Questions: In what sense are these 'social forms' new? In which way do those things like body or place there 'in cyberspace' differ from 'our accustomed understanding'? (Just as a reminder: Sociologists like Goffman or Garfinkel challenged these accustomed understandings ages before the first personal computer saw the light of day, and they didn't need any Gibsons to come up with a vocabulary of their own for their findings.)
Third question: What precisely does it mean to speak of social forms that are 'constituted through communication technologies'? It seems to me that this is a core question. Referring to positions from authors like Brenda Laurel and Sherry Turkle, Stone describes computers "not only as tools but also as arenas for social experience." (p15) Confusingly enough she also talks about computers as 'prostheses' (with which she fell in love with). "In this frame of understanding, computers were prosthetic in the specific sense of the Greek term prosthenos - extension." (p12) So a 'prosthetic community' is such an extension of other forms of communities, more used to us, but not better or higher or superior - just different. Thus the concept of the computer is not numbers but other people. "Computers are arenas for social experience and dramatic interaction, a type of media more like public theatre, and their output is used for qualitative interaction, dialogue, and conversation. Inside the little box are other people." (p16) Unfortunately Stone does not even attempt to explain how they get in there, how these people overcome channel limitations and what it really means for these new social forms to be 'constituted through' a technology. Does it really hold that social systems like the few Stone describes are based on technologies? Why do some folks dig phone sex? Because they have a telephone? Or because they have sexual desires? Or maybe because they are socially isolated?
How far do we get with the assumption that social communities or cultural groups in general are not constituted through a technology, but through common interests, shared values, a common language or shared symbolic belief systems of whatever sort? Technical artefacts usually are part of these cultures; we interact with them and live in our cultures under the assumption that there are working techniques among us. Just as Anselm Strauss puts it, cited by Stone as an epigraph of her work: "A group constituted around a common symbolic structure is a 'culture area' of its own, the limits of which are set neither by territory nor formal membership, but by the limits of effective communication." (pxi) If we carefully read Stone's Sanford Lewin example, first we see no techno- logically constituted culture, but rather normal white male and female adults in their thirties, most of them college graduates with good salaries and their usual kind of happy-go- lucky lifestyle. Communication among these people works not because they all have a computer and a modem, but due to the fact that they already live in a common 'culture area' that is based in the social structure I just labelled as 'educated middle-class', etc. That life provides them with things to talk about, with interesting events and all those human experiences that you can't make 'on-line'. Julie's on-line friends began to become suspicious because obviously Julie had no life outside the net: "(Julie) was always off at conferences, where presumably she met face to face with colleagues. And she and (her husband) spent a lot of time on exotic vacations, where she must also be seeing people face to face. It seemed that the only people who never got to see her were her on-line friends." (p74) Those examples make me think that the relation between net-life and life outside could be just the other way round. Stone, however, just read the quotation of Strauss to mean 'no territory' and assumed that means an open space, thus misconceiving communication-in-space for culture area. Consequently, she establishes a new territory - the inside of the machine - taking the technological prosthesis for the cultural arena itself. If you want to join them, enter the space behind the screen. I doubt that this kind of technological reification of culture is a very promising way of researching these now technologies.
And fourth: How can we observe "the identities that emerge from these interactions - fragmented, complex, diffracted through the lenses of technology, culture, and new technocultural formations"? (p36) If we follow Stone's advice, all we need to do is use the capture file facility of your internet software, and catch those stories like the one of Sanford 'Julie' Lewin. And there are quite a few Julies already around in cyberspace. "I want to see how groups of friends evolve when their meeting room exists in a purely symbolic state. I want to see how narrowing the bandwidth - that is, doing without customary modes of symbolic exchange such as gesture and voice tone - affects sharing and trust, and how inhabitants of virtual systems construct and maintain categories such as gender and race. I want to see how people without bodies make love." (p38)
Overcoming the bandwidth problem, however, has been an intensively researched aspect of computer mediated communication over the last decade. That research has made a significant contribution to a better understanding of the construction of the self and his or her body in everyday life in the same way as for example considering the construction of transsexuality helps to uncover the 'normal' construction of gendered bodies. Stone's work follows this route of research for a while. Unfortunately when it comes to the interpretation of her empirical findings Stone reveals a very different point of view. Cyberspace is borderland, tells us borderland stories, but according to Stone this borderland is also the promised land of liberation and collectivity. Insofar as cybersociety "involves communicating with other people through narrow-bandwidth media, it is about negotiating the tensions between individual subjects, virtual collectivities, and the physical bodies in which they may or may not be grounded." (p35) Surfing the net and meeting more and more people "who engage in social interactions without ever meeting in the customary sense of the term ... has given me increasing opportunities to watch others try on their own alternative personae." (p2ff.) In places like CompuServe chat lines, these people "out at the margins who have always lived comfortably with the idea of floating identities" (p2) meet others "inward from the margins ... who are beginning, just a bit, to question. What it is they are questioning is a good part of what this essay is about." (p2)
They are questioning the concept of presence. Stone raises a variety of related questions that "include repeated transgressions of the traditional concept of the body's physical envelope and of the locus of human agency." (p16) Stone wants to make us see the variety of possible connections "between bodies and personae/selves/subjects". (p86) Therefore she tells us about the woman who has been diagnosed as having MPD as well as Sanford Lewin's story. Her subjects, however, are not MPD patients but people living in "technological communities" - a different ballpark entirely. She defines multiplicity as "sharing a single body with several quasi- independent personalities", and, to Stone, a "fair percentage" of the inhabitants of virtual systems exhibit this new technological MPD. (p63) The empirical findings Stone offers to underline this statement are by no means very convincing. Can anyone in any of these stories be considered as 'multiples', in Stone's sense? Sanford Lewin comes closest, but pretending to be someone else on-line is clearly different from being mentally confused about your personality.
Are there other possible cases? Does 'a fair percentage' of Stone's examples match the profile? Watch the reactions of the betrayed victims of Levine's masquerade. They are embarrassed, shocked and very, very disappointed - a rather strange way of reacting to something that, if we follow Stone, is supposed to be an everyday event in virtual systems. Again Stone is a victim of her own techno-narcissism. She is obsessed with Levin and Julie, because she identifies with both of them, but she doesn't look at the larger community of which Lewin was just a very small part. "I tend to see myself as an entity that has chosen to make its life career out of playing with identity." (1ff.) That may be a pleasure for her, but obviously nobody else in the community under study tends to agree.
How about the opposite reading of this borderland story? How about this interpretation: 'Attempting to be oneself and defending this achievement against its tendencies to dissolve over time is emblematic of a fair percentage of everyday life in the world of virtual systems.' This interpretation might be more helpful to explain why Julie's friends where so desperately fighting for her. Being a friend of Julie, sharing common experiences with her - all that meant a lot to them. They simply fought for themselves when they rejected to accept that Julie was a complete fake. If they would have had a variety of net-selves right at hand, why then did they have so much trouble with their 'being-friend-of-Julie'? I think that most people still have only one self, and that one self means a lot to them, because it's the only one that has shared quite a long time with that body in front of the computer. Adding a net-self to that body may be playful and fun, but could it reach the intensity of the old relationship? It's like in Coppola's One From The Heart when Frederic Forrest says to departing Terri Garr: "You can be on that beach in Paradise, but you'll still be carrying all your shit with you." And why should people want to get rid of their cultural identities? That's what makes them really interesting and very special and very unique people.
I propose to take these short cuts presented by Stone as first insights into the souls of Haraway's cyborgs, a kind of psychopathology of the desire for identity in cybersociety. Apparently Stone considers herself a cyborg feeling quite at home in cybercommunities. But it takes a lot of distance to one's own culture in order to get something out of it that might be considered 'anthropological fieldwork'. It is precisely this complete lack of distance that makes this book a failure according to its own standards. For an novelist who introduces her work with a statement on 'How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis' this might be forgivable; for an anthropologist it's not. "The floppy disk has become the cyberanthropologist's field notebook; in virtual social environments nothing escapes its panoptic gaze." (p190) Capture filing the nets may be a cosy way to a promising field site (you don't need to apply for visa, you don't need any vaccinations and you can always escape just by turning off your computer), but ethnography just doesn't work without any distinction between 'us' and 'them', even if this distinction is (like in most studies of science and technology) just a construction for the sake of encouraging one's awareness of the strangeness of our own culture. Even a 'discourse surfer' cannot surf on her own board, be the wave and ride it.
Apparently Rosanne Stone is a culture narcissus in the sense of someone in love with her or his own self-constructed culture. It seems to me that Stone's attitude toward cyberspace is the same as that of Julie's friends. Every contrary finding that Julie might not really be what she seemed was rejected by those who were strongly engaged with her. Stone in the same way rejects everything that might not fit into her idea about reality in cyberspace. Consequently everything in her book turns out to be identical. The subjects are Cyborg (Haraway), Cyborgs are technology, technology is a prosthesis community, cyberspace is a prosthesis, prosthesis are (parts of) bodies, and bodies are cyborgs, etc. Devoting one's work to the maxim "no causes, no effects, mutual emergence" (p21) sounds nice but should not invite sloppy theory.
Finally I want to cite the best paragraph of the book. "Electronic communication technologies, discourse networks, and social formations continue the trend toward increasing awareness of a sense of self; toward increasing physical isolation of individuals in Western and Western-influenced societies; and toward displacement of shared physical space, both public and private, by textuality and prosthetic communication - in brief, the constellation of events that define the close of the mechanical age and the unfolding or revealing of what, for lack of a better term, we might call the virtual age." (p20) Unfortunately Stone is too much obsessed with the world 'inside the net' to be able to think about these new social forms with regard to "what we can learn from them about social problems outside the worlds of the nets."(p38)
Notes
1. "The Atari Lab was a unique, controversial, and explosively short-lived organization for basic research in virtual reality and interactive multimedia in the early 1980s. It was a child of the Atari Corporation, one of the first manufacturers of personal computers and interactive game software." (p124)
2. I suggest from now on to stay abstinent from quoting William Gibson. Defining technological territories along the line of being 'inside' and 'outside' of some technological space simply was from the very beginning misleading and confusing sociological research on communication technologies.
author's address: gerald@chem.uva.nl
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