Literature after Globalization: Textuality, Technology and the Nation-State 9781472543677, 9781441155733

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Literature After Globalization

Also Available from Bloomsbury Beyond Semiotics, Niall Lucy Fictions of Globalization, James Annesley Mapping World Literature, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Pynchon and Relativity, Simon de Bourcier

Literature after Globalization: Textuality, Technology and the Nation-State Philip Leonard

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10010 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Philip Leonard, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Philip Leonard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-5573-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Acknowledgements 1 The ends of man: electronic frontiers in an age of global community 2 A space without geography, a nation without borders: The Cybergypsies and the literature of being-in-common 3 Teach phenomenology the bomb: Starship Troopers, the technologized body and humanitarian warfare 4 ‘Secure, anonymous, unregulated’: Cryptonomicon and the transnational data haven 5 ‘A revolution in code’? Transmission and the cultural politics of hacking 6 ‘Without return. Without place’: rewriting the book and the nation in Only Revolutions Notes Bibliography Index

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1 31 63 89 115 141 163 192 209

Acknowledgements The idea of acknowledgments can be too tokenistic, too legalistic, and too suggestive of compensation to convey what needs to be said to those who have helped this book come together. Perhaps not acknowledgments, then, but an affirmation of debts that cannot and should not be returned. Those to whom I am indebted at Nottingham Trent University – those who have made it such an animated and friendly place to teach, talk, and think – include Anna Ball, Cathy Clay, Dan Cordle, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, Sharon Ouditt, Murray Pratt, Ben Taylor, Abigail Ward, Dave Woods, Tim Youngs, and Nahem Yousaf. Pete Smith helped with conceit, and Sarah Jackson put me back in touch. Thanks to Siobhan Lynch, Souvik Mukherjee, Jenna Pitchford, Mel Roddis, and Mark Sullivan for conversations about games, war, posthumanism, Deleuze, and things digital. Every department should have someone like Greg Woods. His counsel – always timely, considered, and sagacious – has been given generously and selflessly; if I haven’t expressed my gratitude enough in the past then I would like to do so now. Peter Boxhall, Tatiani Rapatzikou, Arthur Redding, and Will Slocombe provided feedback and advice about earlier versions of some chapters; this book has benefitted substantially from their suggestions. Sarah Brouillette, Paul Davies, Dick Ellis, Mark Jancovich, Akane Kawakami, John Marks, Mark Millington, and Patrick Williams have, for several years and in various ways, generously offered time, guidance, and moral sustenance for which I am very grateful. For their support during the early stages of this book’s preparation, and for encouraging me to rethink some of its ideas as they came into formation, I am indebted to Jonathan Sawday and Leslie Hill. Support from new friends made during its closing stages came from Laurens ten Kate, Peter Gratton, Maebh Long, and Andrew Hass. Thanks to Isobel Whitelegg and Abi Spinks at Nottingham Contemporary for allowing some of this book’s ideas to move beyond being just the stuff of an academic monograph. This book could not have been started without research leave granted by

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the School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University. It could not have been completed without a Fellowship from the AHRC. I am grateful to both organizations for their support. Thanks also to Laura Murray and David Avital at Continuum, and Kim Storry at Fakenham, for making this book’s transition to print so smooth and painless. Finally, but without end, thanks and love to Sam, Esme, and Theo.

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The ends of man: electronic frontiers in an age of global community Globalization, as it tends to be understood today, begins with Shakespeare. In terms that are more commonly associated with the eccentric flows and global connections of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Shakespeare describes a world in which populations and trade move easily across the frontiers that have circumscribed localities, regions, or countries and anticipates forms of social governance and cultural production that function beyond the institutions of particular states. Antony and Cleopatra, perhaps where he most forcefully invokes a universal sovereignty that connects the people of the world, in this manner envisages an attachment that is not limited to ethnic affiliation or geographical proximity, an economy that does not impose restrictions on the movement of commodities, and a polity that does not root itself in the idea of national self-determination. Embodying this departure from territorial autonomy, from the perceived self-sufficiency of the nation or state, Antony is a ruler whose jurisdiction extends beyond Rome, ‘The triple pillar of the world’1 whose flawed judgment is seen to compromise the pursuit of empire; for Cleopatra, his ‘legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm/Crested the world. . ./But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,/He was as rattling thunder’.2 Predicting an end to enmity after his victory over Antony at Actium, and foreseeing a world united, Octavius declares that ‘The time of universal peace is near:/Prove this a prosp’rous day, the three-nooked world/Shall bear the olive freely’.3 Such a peace would not, of course, unfold smoothly as the democratic federation of different states, and neither does it promise a globally inclusive or representative cosmopolitanism that would harmoniously unite diverse cultures and regions. Instead, the peace envisaged by Octavius would result from the expansion of empire and the spreading of Rome’s exceptional authority, a beneficent pax Romana that would ultimately bring civilization

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and order to a violent and unstable world. Such an imperious projection is rejected by Shakespeare, however; refusing to endorse Octavius’ vision of an enduring uniformity, and prophetically looking forward to the emergence in Europe of an alternative – Christian – metaphysics and sociality, Antony and Cleopatra testifies against the idea that Rome’s unification of the earth could successfully effect a functional world polity. Out of empire’s systematizing axioms and orthodoxies this text conjures images of fluidity and transition, of space as displacement, of the precarity of nation and state. Antony commands, ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/of empire fall’,4 presaging Cleopatra’s exhortation to ‘Melt Egypt into Nile’;5 this renouncing of home and nation leads one of Antony’s followers sorrowfully to complain that ‘We have kissed away/Kingdoms and provinces’.6 Suggesting impermanence and dislocation as the underlying condition of cultural and territorial attachment, this play thus conceives imperium as unsustainable, and disintegration as inexorably following Rome’s pursuit of universal peace. Conceiving the world as either universal polity or interrupted by an immanent flux is not, however, what places Shakespeare at the source of the global. Indeed, although Antony and Cleopatra both attaches itself to the idea of global governance and suggests that such a fidelity precludes the formation of a generalized belonging, this attachment to the world – and the crisis in European sovereignty that it inevitably triggers – does not arise ex nihilio with Shakespeare.7 Rather, globalization, as it tends to be understood today, begins with Shakespeare because it is with his vision of authority peripheralized and space standardized that Marshall McLuhan opens The Gutenberg Galaxy. Promoting the idea of an electronically connected world and introducing the concept of the global village, McLuhan takes King Lear as his point of departure for approaching the reshaping of consciousness and culture by media technologies. Lear’s proposal to devolve power to his three daughters inaugurates an era of social modernity by dividing and decentralizing monarchic authority, McLuhan writes, and this act of political redistribution results in part from the perceptual change that accompanied sixteenth-century cartography. Lear’s imperative, ‘Give me the map there. Know we have divided/In three our kingdom’,8 for McLuhan points to the emergence of a cognitive and representational technology which construes space as ‘uniform and continuous’ and, as such, triggers ‘a major shift in human awareness in the Renaissance’.9



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One important feature of McLuhan’s response to King Lear is that the movement away from national or regional cultures is not attributed simply to modernity’s informational networks or to post-industrial systems of exchange. But, as much as it denies that the world is suddenly evolving into the global, The Gutenberg Galaxy also suggests that (since it has long been formed around a negotiation of the trans-, inter- and supranational), the nation-state has not recently been compromised or entered its terminal moment. Literature after Globalization considers texts which reflect and reflect on the forms of displacement and dislocation that are often associated with the emergence of global culture: the porosity of national borders, the decline of the state as a political system, the movement of populations, workers and goods across regions and between markets, the legislation and governance of supranational organizations or transnational criminality, networked communications and digital community. But, echoing McLuhan’s reading of King Lear, the texts that are central to this book also dispute the idea of a social and cultural moment that is unprecedentedly and irrefutably global, as well as the treatment of information and communications technologies as the environment in which global exchanges function and develop at the expense of territorial or statebased systems of governance. Pointing to a movement away from early narratives of global culture – that is, after the global conceived as the collapse of national cultures in the face of synthetic transborder movements – these fictions explore recent efforts to reinvent and reassert national sovereignty against technology’s transnational effects. What follows in this book is not an attempt to instantiate the particular dimensions of globalization today; rather, it will consider what happens in the gap between the pursuit of the transnational and the commodification of the world – between the universalism that is to be found at the beginning of the European nation-state and the narrow sense of cultural particularity that is precipitated in the shift towards the global. Its concern is not to treat literary representation as the documentary recording of a sociological exchange between the global and the nation-state, but to explore how literary fictions both expose and explore the gap between narratives of the national and the global, and to consider forms of territorial, social and cultural attachment and detachment that cannot be accommodated by agonic narratives of national belonging or global dispersion. What these fictions share is not the attempt to

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preserve or re-invigorate the nation-state’s sovereign authority against digital culture’s transnational effects, but a more nuanced sense of what might be described as an amibivalent and anxious condition of national globalism.

I The idea that the world started to become borderless at some point towards the end of the twentieth century has become the stock-in-trade of recent responses to cultural belonging and, with the flourishing of an apparently new global condition, national cultures and state-based authority seem no longer to have the status they once enjoyed or to function as they once did. Information, populations, capital and commodities often appear to move easily and without restriction across national borders. Borders, according to such a perception, are turning into administrative, cartographic and cognitive conveniences, with the nation-state’s rights and responsibilities increasingly abdicated to transnational corporations and institutions or, when it resists the rise of the global, becoming an impediment to the emergence of an open and unrestricted community that would surpass attachment to the physicality of space or geography. Announcing the arrival, or at least the imminent arrival, of an unparalleled and integrative moment in history, narratives of a connected humanity emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century to become the prevailing mythos for understanding socio-cultural belonging; within this mythos, power is seen to be distributed across regions of the world, markets are no longer limited to national – or even international – economies, information is disseminated as a force for global democracy, and the social sphere has been refigured as a universal association. Transportation and communications infrastructures are similarly treated as offering the potential for a material and informational interconnectedness that has overcome distance, resulting in the compression of different locations into a global simultaneity that is mediated by the immediacy of the screen; for some, this condition can be described as ‘the end of geography’,10 for others it has resulted in ‘the death of distance’11 or a flattening of the world.12 And, again within this narrative of the world’s sudden unification, the consolidation of disparate societies, cultures and ethnicities is resulting in a single community that is conscious



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of itself, allowing all groups and regions to participate in the negotiation of organizational rules, structures for social governance, systems of exchange and notions of cultural identity. If such a conception of globalization is today commonplace then its origins can be traced to efforts in the 1990s to understand precisely what the shift away from the nation-state constitutes. For Malcolm Waters, even if we have not yet attained a syncretic merging and reconciliation of cultures, regions and populations, then we are undeniably accelerating towards the sublimation of national topologies: ‘territoriality will disappear as an organizing principle for social and cultural life; it will be a society without borders or spatial boundaries’,13 he writes. Although observing that ‘the state remains the preeminent political actor on the global stage’, Richard Falk similarly claims that: the aggregation of states – what has been called ‘a states system’ – is no longer consistently in control of the global policy process. Territorial sovereignty is being diminished on a spectrum of issues in such a serious manner as to subvert the capacity of states to govern the internal life of society, and non-state actors hold an increasing proportion of power and influence in the shaping of world order.14

This idea of the global is no longer striking, since it now figures prominently in political, corporate and media discourses – as well as providing a vocabulary for some environmentalist and protest movements – which seek to capture the specificity of the present and to diagnose both the opportunities and dangers of a world in which territorial limits are no longer determinate. Inevitably, however, beyond the most superficial treatment of the transitions and transformations that have reconfigured national and international structures, the idea that global culture promises a smooth and shared condition is, at the very least, in need of analytical substantiation. Assessments of globalization often conceive it as the synthetic interplay of socio-political, legal, economic and cultural shifts that occurred in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most immediately visible of these is the rapid and increasingly complex departure from national economies, with world capitalism evolving from its reliance on the international markets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a system in which markets

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are increasingly detached from particular national or geographical locations. The establishing of transnational corporations, which produce goods and deliver services in ways that are not confined to, or regulated by, particular national markets, has been central to the evolution of this worldwide economy; indeed, as Leslie Sklair observes, ‘One powerful school of thought . . . is that the transnational corporation is the dominant institutional force in the global economy and a driving force for globalization’.15 Departing from imperialism’s metrocentric economies, these corporations are often understood as neither exporting cultural values by a dominant nation to a colonized or ideologically subjugated periphery, nor producing commodities and profits in one country for the benefit of another. Rather, transnational corporations spread out across the world, reshaping themselves and their brands to fit different regional conditions, often appealing to a sense of global belonging, nomadically moving to where economic conditions are most advantageous, benefiting from the reduced national provision of public services or the state’s increased deregulation of corporate activity, and pursuing opportunities in regions that have recently moved towards the market as a model for production and exchange. Promoting these corporate institutions are the multilateral organizations and systems that have been developed specifically to enhance worldwide production, trade and finance – perhaps most recognizably the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. Providing supranational and transgovernmental regulatory frameworks, these organizations are built around the idea that sustainable development and economic governance can provide balance in a world in which trade and finance have superseded national economies. Our Global Neighborhood, the 1995 report of the Commission on Global Governance, in this spirit places particular importance on ‘the establishment of a WTO’ which acts ‘as a forum for equitable dispute settlement, for further liberalization and for curbing the use of protectionist and discriminatory measures. Its establishment will be a crucial building block for global governance’.16 The transition to, and governance of, a world market alone does not account for globalization’s multiple dimensions, and economic conditions are usually seen to be alloyed with legal, social and political structures. For Anthony McGrew, ‘As globalization has intensified, the power of national



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governments to tackle it appears to have declined and international bodies lack the authority to enforce agreed policies’.17 In a world where populations find social and cultural identification across national borders, where transfrontier affiliation is enabled by globally distributed networks, where engagement with ‘the political’ means responding to issues and problems (such as terrorism or climate change) that transcend regionality, and where the idea of participatory inclusion and consensually determined control systems is promoted as a human right, the nation-state is here seen to be attenuated by forms of association that reject the limits of territorial location, elude the regulatory mechanisms of the nation-state, and blunten the political authority that has been associated with bordered sovereignty. The perception that technology acts as an accelerant that hastens the arrival of global uniformity, as well – perhaps conversely – as the idea that global culture acts as a trigger for the efflorescence of information and communications technology, adds to this analysis of globalization’s various dimensions. These technologies are often seen to have contributed to, or perhaps even initiated, global culture by offering forms of contact, interaction and association that pay no regard to the territorial borders and regulatory mechanisms that have historically tied populations to the nation-state. Following in the tracks of McLuhan’s claim that ‘the world has become a computer, an electronic brain’18 and that ‘the electronic age’ will lead to ‘the sealing of the entire human family into a single global tribe’,19 social and cultural theory has continued to chart the eclipsing of industrial production by electronic media, and has sought to establish the global contexts of recent information and communications technologies. Anthony Giddens, for example, suggests in The Consequences of Modernity that the widespread distribution of technologies reflects the intensification of social relations across national economies: ‘One of the main features of the globalizing implications of industrialism is the worldwide diffusion of machine technologies’,20 he writes. In ‘Power Shift’, Jessica T. Matthews finds in information technologies the capacity to influence the political sphere, since these tools place knowledge and power in the hands of users: ‘Widely accessible and affordable technology has broken governments’ monopoly on the collection and management of large amounts of information and deprived governments of the deference they enjoyed because of it’.21 And in New Rules for a New Economy, Wired magazine’s founding

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editor Kevin Kelly writes: ‘Of all the endeavors we humans are now engaged in, perhaps the grandest of them all is the steady weaving together of our lives, minds and artefacts into a global scale network . . . As this grand net spreads, an animated swarm is reticulating the surface of the planet. We are clothing the globe with a network society’.22 Such a treatment of globalization, as an emergent (perhaps even attained), diffuse, technologically enabled, universally connected, politically decentralized and inclusive condition is now commonplace, and some notable events – such as the establishing of Global Public Policy Networks in the late 1990s, the founding of the International Criminal Court in 2002, the SARS health alert in 2003, the banking crisis of 2007, or the worldwide disruption of air travel after Iceland’s volcanic eruptions in 2010 and 2011 – appear to confirm that such a conception of the global as a uniform and continuous space remains relevant in the twenty-first century. Similarly, technologies of the early twenty-first century continue to be conceived in terms of their global location or globalizing effects. The notion of cloud computing, in a language long-familiar to readers of cyberpunk fiction, metaphorizes data storage and the provision of computing applications as a sublime separation of consciousness from the body and an empyrean detachment from physical space. The distributed, user-generated content that comes from crowdsourcing suggests a participatory model of network community which continues to engineer the information age across territorial locations. Creative Commons licensing is based on the idea of free and universal access to, sharing and reproduction of, intellectual property and creative production. And social media are seen as the lubricant for the global evolution of democracy, not only providing extended networks for neighbourly affiliation, but also, as the events in the Middle East during the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 demonstrate, offering forums for organizing political protest, acts of civil disobedience and armed resistance. And yet, increasingly clamorous challenges to ‘the strong “globalization” thesis [that] is now largely and uncritically accepted as the mainstream’23 are developing, contesting the idea that information and communications technologies effect a domain that is free from geographical limitations, as well as the claim that a new condition of universal connectedness, distributed power and dispersed socio-cultural belonging is emerging. Michael Hardt and Antonio



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Negri warn that, rather than promising freedom, power remains in what they describe as ‘Our contemporary interregnum’; this moment is ‘populated by an abundance of new structures of power. The only thing that remains constantly present and never leaves the scene is power itself ’.24 Certainly, claims that established inequalities persist in, and new forms of discrimination develop with, globalization can point to the uneven distribution of information and communications technologies as evidence of an order that is plainly not one which enables equitable participation in the public sphere, in emerging systems of exchange, or in new forms of association. Geoffrey Bowker, for example, observes that ‘governments in the developing world have indicated real doubts about the usefulness of opening their data resources out onto the Internet. Just as in the nineteenth century, the laissez-faire economies of free trade was advocated by countries with the most to gain . . . so in our age, the greatest advocates of the free and open exchange of information are developed countries with robust computing infrastructures’.25 Also working against the perception that the information age takes the world as its point of reference, governmental, corporate and media narratives, as well as hardware and software of the early twenty-first century (such as geotagging tools or locative devices), have more firmly started to invoke a sense of spatial attachment. Several examples illustrate this shift towards a more explicit attachment to place and a re-affirming of the bordered nation. First, there is Ayn Rand’s informational legacy. In 2000, Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and proponent of a laissez-faire individualism that grew out of his association with Rand, embraced the Internet as the engine of a self-organizing and decentralized marketplace.26 In 2010, a fan of Rand’s fiction used a GPS tracker to etch the message ‘Read Ayn Rand’ across 1200 miles of the US;27 information technology, hailed by Greenspan at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the facilitator of global finance, had, by the end of this century’s first decade, come to provide a digital inscription that is circumscribed by territorial limits. Second is Google’s 2009 launch of a Chinese-language self-censoring service which satisfied requirements stipulated by the government in Beijing. These requirements included managing the content of particular sites, blocking the IP addresses of banned organizations (most famously, the Falun Gong and the Tibet Independence Movement), and preventing access to search engines, including Google

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and Baidu. One of Google’s core principles – to promote the perception of the Internet as a universal nation with a global citizenship (‘democracy on the web works’28) – was, following this decision, therefore subordinated to protecting national sovereignty. The third can be found in Wired magazine’s departure from an eschatology in which information and communications technologies are seen to allow humanity finally to consummate itself as a universal, auto-affective and all-embracing totality.29 In 1995, the UK launch issue harnessed Thomas Paine’s call for democracy and ‘universal society’ to the notion of global citizenship which Wired associated with the emerging digital revolution.30 At the beginning of 2010, however, Wired UK enjoined its readers to ‘reboot Britain’ and offered ‘fifteen ideas for a smarter nation’.31 Finally, there is the UK Government’s 2009 ‘Digital Britain’ report which states that ‘We are at an inflection point in technology, in capability and in demand. Those countries and governments that strategically push forward their digital communications sector will gain substantial and long-lasting competitive advantage’. Within and against this context, the report proposes, strategies are needed which ‘will enable the UK to keep pace with and exceed international developments in this sector’.32 What these examples suggest is that a false antinomy needs to be identified in the idea that national culture or the nation-state are either in conflict with global culture or wholly assenting to the socio-political structures it brings; here, the nation-state is in both an antagonistic and a co-operative relationship with global culture, both contesting the attenuation of national authority that globalization threatens and participating in the opportunities it offers to national culture.

II How, given this ambivalent departure and return of space and place, of sovereignty and nationality, is the global therefore to be conceived? And how is writing to be situated in respect of this ambivalence? Although global culture’s dimensions have been variously navigated, charted, projected, remapped and even found to be incompatible with cartographic or topological tropologies, it has nevertheless remained on the margins of literary history and theory. Certainly, technological and global preoccupations figure prominently in



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fiction from William Gibson to Margaret Atwood, or from Douglas Coupland to Don DeLillo. Implicitly reversing the connection to the earth that Heidegger associates with Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes,33 Jeffrey Eugenidies’ Middlesex finds attachment ungrounded by brands that have surpassed territoriality: You used to be able to tell a person’s nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders – you don’t see them much anymore. Only Nikes on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.34

In Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, the corrosion of social values is attributed to an intensified attachment to screens: ‘This is what was keeping me awake at night’, Walter said. ‘This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet or cable TV – there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. . . All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest stimuli’.35

Despite this thematic prominence, Berthold Schoene finds it ‘astonishing’ that, in the wake of both the utopian cosmopolitanism of the early 1990s and the traumatic sense of global terror in the twenty-first century, ‘British contemporary literary history should have remained largely untouched by these massive contextual upheavals, indicative of a major, quite literally epoch-making world-political mood swing’.36 Largely untouched by British literary history, perhaps and maybe even by literary history more broadly. But not entirely so,37 and especially not in terms of what is variously understood as hypertextual, new media, or electronic writing. Often regarded as the literary expression of the global age, this writing appears to escape the regional or local constraints that are imposed by the materiality of the printed book, to offer unrestricted opportunities for distribution, and to constitute an open textuality that is universally accessible by any reader with a networked device. What such a literature also promises, though, is a reinvention of the reader’s citizenship and cultural location: no longer circumscribed by nation or ethnicity, communities of reading and interpretation now seem to be shaped by cultural codes that are formed around shared interests rather than physical

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proximity. When treated as a democratizing force, hypertext is thus seen to activate readers who, navigating their own routes through texts and critical strategies, have become the authors of meaning. A frontier-traversing and distributed medium that animates or actualizes the subject-as-agent, hypertext for Jay David Bolter is where programming and writing come together, providing ‘a dynamic interconnection of a set of symbolic elements’ which are ‘not limited in size or location’.38 This dislocated symbolic system is often associated with the emergence of a literary textuality that either forges new horizons (with electronic writing, Loss Pequeño Glazier writes, ‘the making of poetry has established itself on a matrix of new shores’39) or is wholly detached from place and territory (the nomadic writing that mobilizes what Mark Amerika describes as a ‘cyberpsychogeographical drift’40). For Jaishree Odin, however, hypertextual writing – and what she more broadly terms the ‘Net aesthetic’ – allows not the expression of newly attained global identities, but the articulation of postcolonial experiences: challenging notions of unity and linearity that have been central to a Eurocentric cultural imaginary, hypertext instead provides minority writers with an alternative cognitive and cultural map which allows space and identity to be conceived as multivalent and negotiable. ‘The hypertextual and the postcolonial are . . . part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture’, she writes, ‘Both discourses are characterized by multivocality, multilinearity, open-endedness, active encounter and traversal’.41 This openness or multilinearity should not, according to Odin, be understood as the expression of a displaced and dispersed diaspora, but instead provides ‘multiple points of articulation’42 from which specific forms of embodiment can be represented and reinvented. Odin judiciously warns against allowing hypertext to disappear evanescently into a contourless datascape, since such a move would see the singularity of minority populations obscured by the world as an amorphous virtuality. But what this cautionary note further acknowledges, if implicitly, is that the global demands to be read according to a correspondingly nuanced attention both to the patterns of its hegemony and to the socio-cultural interruptions it effects. ‘Globalization’, Sneja Gunew writes, ‘is often glibly invoked as a homogenizing force but, paradoxically, it yields useful meanings only when



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analyzed within very specific locations’.43 If this emphasis on the world as an always-situated entity disputes attempts to harness globalization to postcoloniality, then elsewhere a sense of the conjunctions and disjunctions that bind and separate these experiences is being finessed.44 Suggesting a poetics that balances postcoloniality with globality, Emily Apter proposes that ‘While there are obvious historical and pedagogical reasons for maintaining geopolitical relations between dominants and their former colonies, protectorates and their client states . . . there are equally compelling arguments for abandoning postcolonial geography’; what comparative literary studies therefore needs, if it is to extend its restricted geopolitical frame, is a sense of ‘linguistic contact zones all over the world’.45 For Suman Gupta too, approaching globalization by way of existing approaches to writing and cultural location risks eliding the particular ways in which fictional texts engage thematically with global culture, but it also potentially neglects the global contexts and directions that have come to shape literary studies more broadly. It is necessary, Gupta writes, ‘to take into account unexpected, or at least unfamiliar, directions that are opened up for literary studies in coming to grips with debates about globalization’.46 Charting these emerging directions would provide a sense of how the political economy of literary textuality is changing access to, as well as the production, distribution, interpretation and ownership of, texts. And what attention to this economy reveals, Sarah Brouillette observes, is a simulacrous openness to national differences which legitimates hegemonic narratives of global diversity and universality: ‘The more literature associated with specific national or ethnic identities enters the market, the more the market, despite increasing concentration and globalization, can make claims to inclusivity and universality that justify its particular form of dominance’.47 But, as McLuhan’s reading of King Lear reveals, it is not just the recent reshaping of narratives around the idea of the global, and it is not just today’s frontier-rupturing technologies that are resulting in a sense of how literary textuality responds to concepts and contexts of the global. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, for example, locate global exchanges and technologies – perhaps even a global informationalism – at the beginning of European expansionism, implicitly endorsing Immanuel Wallerstein’s, as well as McLuhan’s, uneasiness with the idea that planet-wide affiliation suddenly materialized in an age that is

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uniquely informational. Tracing the beginnings of world culture not to the emergence of today’s technologies, but to the ethic that accompanied early capitalism, Wallerstein writes that: The world in which we are now living, the modern world-system, had its origins in the sixteenth century. This world system was then located in only a part of the globe, primarily in parts of Europe and the Americas. It expanded over time to cover the whole globe. It is and has always been a world-economy.48

This extended history of modernity’s world economy sustains Jean Howard’s treatment of England’s international trade which, between 1550 and 1650, was establishing planetary networks and already becoming global. Alongside this expansion of trade there emerged technologies which facilitated both a traversal of the globe and a sense of connectedness between the world’s populations, including ‘advances in mapmaking; the development of maritime insurance to protect investors from losses at sea; the increasingly widespread use of bills of exchange and other financial instruments that made it unnecessary to transport large sums of money to distant markets; improved navigational instruments’.49 And it is to the dramatic spaces of public theatre – to Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare – that a sense of this early movement into the world can be traced: the early modern stage ‘was affected by international trade and in its turn created narratives that made change intelligible, if not always consistently’.50 Similarly questioning attempts to situate global movements and flows as symptoms of the contemporary, Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson claim that ‘The similarities between the globalizing world economy after World War II and before World War I are far more striking than the differences’.51 Reading Kipling and Conan Doyle, Elleke Boehmer finds such similarities manifest in the communication grids that established transnational networks and facilitated nationalist solidarity among colonized populations at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries: The world of British Empire one hundred years ago, too, was wired as never before — at that time by telegraph cables, and, more metaphorically, by railway networks and steamship travel. Moreover, British and colonial subjects at the time imagined themselves in this way, as interconnected, cross-cabled, while many of their activities and aspirations were informed by the existence of



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cross-empire networks. The world order may not have been as saturated with communications nexuses as now, but, significantly, looking from the point of view of then, it was saturated as never before.52

Conceiving digital networks as the catalyst for global culture would thus neglect the worldwide (rather than simply translocal) connections that have been associated with earlier information and communications technologies. Telephony was, in its embryonic years, hailed as the medium which would unite the peoples of the world; telegraphy was greeted as a technology which would extend modernity across the regions of the world; radio, film and TV promised the overcoming of geographical disconnection and cultural dissociation.53 Similarly, the Gutenberg Press and the invention of the printed codex, as McLuhan observes, augured a new culture of communication and human connection; more generally, and substantially pre-dating its experiments with hypermedia, literary writing has long held a fascination for production technologies – printing devices, writing tools, typewriters, ink, paper – which have also have altered perceptions of geographical and national inhabitation.54

III The transnational and the proto-global trajectories of non-digital technologies do indeed trouble the view that the connections enabled by digital informationalism can be wholly distinguished from those associated with mechanization in the industrial age or with massification in the machine age. Beyond pointing to the false dawn of the global, however, it is also necessary to question the evolutionism that is often associated with the emergence of technocultural globality. Treating the information age and globalism as co-emergent is particularly fraught with difficulties, since such a treatment would assume either a progressive transition from modernity’s analogue connections to globalization’s digital networks or a cataclysmic rupture that overcomes the situated and ushers in a new condition of distributed and universal association. The danger in either case is that cultural moments become conceived as contained totalities which are to be characterized exclusively by the technologies that dominate them – and which dominate by

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virtue of the technical progress they embody. What such a conception fails to consider are the unexpected, accidental and often invisible entanglements, discontinuities and conflictual conjunctions which, despite contributing to the singularity of cultural moments, prevent the hardening of these moments into secure and uniform structures. Approaching these disjunctive singularities requires a shift towards concepts that depart from notions of episodic rupture, such as Siegfried Zielinski’s proposal for an ‘anarchaeology’ which would replace the sense of a sedimentary separation of socio-cultural moments. Questioning the categories that have prevailed in histories of science and technology, he writes that ‘Magical, scientific and technical praxis do no follow in chronological sequence for anarchaeology; on the contrary, they combine at particular moments in time, collide with each other, provoke one another and, in this way, maintain tension and movement within developing processes’.55 Complicating this historiographic shift still further, and perhaps most troubling for accounts of the nation-state’s declining influence, is the sometimes implicit appeal to the nation-state’s founding autonomy. For Wallerstein, ‘we shall have to investigate the degree and the content of this presumed autonomy’;56 undertaking such an investigation, Hardt and Negri’s Empire traces the nation-state’s genealogy to the point at which citizenship and identity became attached to territorial inhabitation and ethnic affiliation. Combining a new understanding of sovereignty and a developing sense of socio-political association, Hardt and Negri write, the nation-state came together as the conjunction of two revolutionary trajectories within modernity. First, beginning in the late Middle Ages (with Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola and Bovillus), an ontology promoting the interiority and singularity of being progressively took hold in Europe, rapidly challenging assumptions that a transcendent force orders the social sphere from without, and instead locating action and influence as a trait of the human. No longer subject to celestial authority (and its worldly manifestation in the divine body of the monarch), the self in this moment became established as a sovereign entity that possessed the capacity to engage in self-governance and participate in the shaping of worldly events. However, monumental though this shift was, especially in terms of its rejection of monarchy as a system of governance, it did not effect a smooth displacement of transcendent authority by the immanent power of the people,



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and the modernity it produced did not function as a coherent or harmonious system that allowed direct rule by citizens. New structural tensions accompanied the arrival of this different social order and it is in these tensions, rather than in the simple replacement of divine power by secular authority, that Hardt and Negri locate the formation of modern sovereignty. The insurgent intensity of the immanentist reconception of being did not, of course, proceed unchecked and for Empire its collision with reactive assertions of sovereignty’s externality resulted in a series of disjunctive syntheses (perhaps most prominently in Kant, Hegel, Rousseau) which provided a troubled resolution in the form of politics conducted through the administrative state: Modernity replaced the traditional transcendence of command with the ordering function. Arrangements of discipline had begun to be formed already in the classical age, but only in modernity did the disciplinary diagram become the diagram of administration itself. Throughout this passage administration exerts a continuous, extensive and tireless effort to make the state always more intimate to social reality, and thus produce and order social labor.57

In other words, the reconfiguration of sovereignty after the shift towards an immanentist ontology resulted in the embracing of a new transcendence: the state, after this moment, started to govern as the administrative expression of the self ’s autonomy, but it allowed participation in the social only through forms of mediation and representation which deny power to the citizen who, as a result, becomes once again subject to sovereign authority as a transcendent force. What this tension means is that the state – functioning as a constitutive feature of the nation-state – is conceived not as an operative unity, but as a critically unstable structure that shuttles anxiously between two irreconcilable versions of sovereignty. Second, further complicating this crisis, is modernity’s shift towards a system of national identification which, when combined with its newly configured system for political administration, forms the aggregated structure of belonging and governance that is the nation-state. For Empire, the formation of national identity (by Vico, Herder, Burke and Fichte) around the inhabitants of a territory, rather than its earlier construction as the extension of the monarchic body, triggered a different way to understand the bonds that apparently unite a population, and the birth of the nation demanded a departure

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from the spiritual incorporation that the monarch, as a bridge between the divine and the secular, had previously provided to social bodies. As with the recentring of sovereignty that occurred at the level of social governance, though, the nation turned away from one form of transcendent identification only to embrace another: a social and spiritual essence conceived around a common cultural heritage, consanguineous bonds, a shared language and geographical proximity. Rather than renouncing despotic rule and embracing national self-regulation as it promised, this shift saw the economy of power remaining as a systemic norm even if it was disguised by the announcement of collective and participatory belonging; ushering in not only a new social order within which market-based production could flourish, the nation-state therefore arrived as a social and conceptual structure that would smooth the tension between citizenship as a shared condition of unrestricted subjectivity and governance as disciplinary rule from above. Central to this attempted reconciliation was the treatment of ethnic, cultural and territorial affiliation not as an historically emergent condition which arose out of social intervention and validated modernity’s sense of the self ’s capacity for action, but as the realization of an absolute, a priori and hitherto-dormant human essence; national identity became the expression of a ‘primordial unity’ which came to stand as ‘a complete figure of sovereignty prior to historical development; or, better, there is no historical development that is not already prefigured in the origin’.58 Significantly, in terms of globalization’s perceived erosion of the nation-state’s autonomy, this attempt to dehistoricize and naturalize the human also demanded a sense of the nation’s universality; an organizational entity that was capable not only of determining the interior shape and order of particular spaces and populations, the nation became an organizational system that had the potential to liberate humanity across all of the world’s regions. ‘National particularity is a potent universality’, Hardt and Negri write: In the identity, that is, the spiritual essence, of the people and the nation, there is a territory embedded with cultural meanings, a shared history, a linguistic community; but moreover there is the consolidation of a class victory, a stable market, the potential for economic expansion and new spaces to invest and civilize. In short, the construction of national identity guarantees a continually reinforced legitimation, and the right and power of a sacrosanct and irrepressible unity.59



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Empire’s genealogy therefore points to a history masked by claims that the particularity, unity and autonomy of the nation-state are being sundered to transnational and globalizing forces. This genealogy does not simply identify the event of socio-political negotiation that occurs in the transition from monarchism to modernity; rather, it draws attention to the acts of external association that legitimize the internal shape of the nation-state, to the centring of the national spirit around the human both as a timeless entity and a universal category. What this means for the nation-state is that a connection to the supra- or trans-national is part of its founding ethos, that it becomes singular only through its originary relation to the different and the diffuse, even as it operates as a mechanism which seeks to conjure away the heterogeneity that inspires and initiates it. Rather than corrupting the nation-state’s sui generis character, then – rather than sacrificing an interior homogeneity to a diffuse and heterogeneous condition – global culture can here be conceived as challenging the presumption of sovereignty in a socio-cultural system that begins in, and retains an enduring attachment to, the multiple.

IV Just as perceptions of the nation-state’s original autonomy and integrity are no longer convincing, so reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. Even in 1932, in his correspondence with Einstein on the role of the League of Nations, Freud warns against the premature acts of mourning that we now find in obituaries of the nation-state: envisaging a supranational organization that would arbitrate international conflicts – ‘the establishment, by common consent, of a central control which shall have the last word in every conflict of interests’ – Freud nevertheless fears that national divisions will continue because a species-wide ‘introversion of the destructive instinct’60 will inhibit the reasoned negotiation of worldwide governance. For David Held and Anthony McGrew, ‘Today borders and boundaries, nationalism and protectionism, localism and ethnicity appear to define an epoch of radical de-globalization: the disintegration and demise of globalism’.61 Rather than facing its imminent obsolescence, receding in the face of an intensified transnationalism, or becoming overwhelmed by transborder movements,

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interactions and exchanges, the nation-state at the beginning of the twentieth century vigorously lives on as both a system of social governance and a mode of cultural identification. ‘Contemporary conditions offer many grounds for thinking that sovereignty must be engaged as a problem’, according to R.B.J. Walker, ‘not a permanent or disappearing condition’.62 According to Jan Nederveen Pieterse, what perhaps couldn’t be envisaged in the 1990s are the particular ways way in which nation-states have both – simultaneously – embraced global culture and sought to maintain sovereignty. ‘The 21st-century momentum of globalization is markedly different from 20th-century globalization’, and while for him this difference is evident in ‘distinct new trends in trade, institutions, finance and hegemony’,63 greater recognition that the nation-state remains functional is itself a new development. The idea that the global is shaped by its dialogue with the local has been formative in globalization theory;64 what is increasingly evident is that this dialogue with the global also extends to the nation-state, which persists and retains influence even as it engages with and becomes transformed by external forces. ‘The state is alive and well’, for Frank Lechner, ‘Its proven resilience also serves globalization’,65 and Peter Dicken similarly predicts that ‘the specific assemblage of characteristics of individual nations and of local communities will not only influence how globalizing processes are experienced but also influence the nature of those processes themselves’.66 While for Hirst, Thompson and Bromley, the nation-state has indeed lost independence and autonomy, and although the intensification of international, transnational and supranational polity will indeed require the development of governance systems that are truly global, these systems will only be possible if they engage with other institutions, regulatory bodies and administrative structures which provide legitimacy and accountability, and only if the nation-state remains as a mechanism for representing populations and maintaining territorial borders. ‘Nation-states are now simply one class of power and political agency in a complex system of power from world to local level’, they write, ‘but they have a centrality because of their relationship to territory and population’.67 Even if the nation-state that resiliently remains in this new relationship is one substantially transformed by its encounter with global flows, interactions and exchanges, such claims nevertheless challenge perceptions of a linear progression to borderless society.



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The idea that populations are increasingly displaced by the nomadic movements of transnational labour, as well as the idea that opportunities for interaction and association are intensified by technologies which detach users from their territorial and national locations, are similarly contestable. Documenting the precarious status of migrant workers, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter consider the status of transnational workers in information and knowledge economies who are both denied rights of residency and periodically return home to renew their sense of ethnic attachment. ‘Despite the increasing power of governance by supranational institutions, the nation-state and its legal organs retain a monopoly on the adjudication of rights, especially in the domains of labour and migration’, they write, ‘While informational labour is typically carried out in the space of the nation . . . the conditions of employment and materiality of production frequently sever the citizen– worker relation’.68 Although finding the resources for enhancing production, knowledge and the social sphere – indeed, for a new polity – in networked informationalism, Yochai Benkler proposes that ‘we need to consider the attractiveness of the networked public sphere not from the perspective of mid-1990s utopianism, but from the perspective of how it compares to the actual media that have dominated the public sphere in all modern democracies’.69 What such a perspectival shift partly requires is an awareness of how information networks embrace distributive technologies and reject established territorial affiliations while continuing to promote a sense of user location. Benkler finds this ambivalence in research projects which encourage individuals to devote spare computing capacity to data processing and contribute to globally distributed computation networks: two such networks are Seti@home, which processes space telescopy data in the search for alien intelligence and technology, and Folding@home, which carries out biological research. Despite mobilizing narratives of global community and altruistic service, both projects, Benkler observes, ‘assume a healthy dose . . . of agonistic giving’ by establishing user rankings which allow the reassertion of place, ethnicity and nationality: ‘Seti@home in particular taps into ready-made nationalisms, by offering country-level statistics. Some of the team names on Folding@home also suggest other, out-of-project bonding measures, such as national or ethnic bonds (for example, Overclockers Australia or Alliance Francophone)’.70

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Despite the hierarchized reward cultures that persist in existing distributed networks, Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks retains a speculative faith in network topology, finding in it an architecture for a shared and open economy that can free social production from the proprietary ethic that the market seeks to impose on all aspects of public life. To this end, he sets out the criteria that would characterize the networked public sphere: it must have a universal constituency, filter appropriate material for its relevance, ensure the reliability of information in the public sphere, appropriately synthesize diverse opinions and be independent from government control.71 Contrasting with this predictive model, which anticipates the liberation of information and exchange from market-based production as the outcome of a system that allows reasoned debate and intervention, Geert Lovink emphasizes capital’s resilient mutability, describing how the Internet was monetized after the initial rush to embrace cyberculture as a zone of movement, transcendence and liberty, as a place in which identity and location become fluid and ludic. ‘The early, mythological phase of digital culture is rapidly running out of its utopian energies’, for Lovink, ‘The Internet as a global economic model has replaced the libertarian-hippie model of a network architecture and culture that was so prominent in the early to mid-1990s . . . There are hardly any signs left of cyberspace as an autonomous, supranational, transgender sphere’.72 Even if, between Benkler and Lovink, there is a lack of consensus network culture’s capacity to deliver a political commons or an equitable system of association, production and exchange, there is nevertheless a shared suspicion that an unrestrictedly translocal, post-national or post-sovereign, digital or network community is not becoming manifest in the way that has noisily dominated debates about global connectedness.

V What these various responses to territorial and displaced belonging suggest is that the nation-state as a concept points not to a stable and enduring polity or sociality, but to a shifting and impermanent entity which, during and before the closing decades of the twentieth century, has been shaped and reshaped by transborder influences, demands, contexts, dialogues and



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exchanges. Perhaps, then, ‘globalization’ is an insufficient or misleading term; perhaps an alternative conceptual vocabulary is needed when approaching the recent re-emergence and refiguring of both the nation-state and the global. According to Lechner, ‘Globalization is a poor word to capture the expansion of a free market, capitalist, or “neoliberal” system, a mainly economic process driven by powerful groups to serve their interests’,73 and for Hirst and Thompson, ‘we should ditch the over-fashionable concept of “globalization” and look for less debilitating political models’.74 While observing that ‘There can be no denying that the hydraulic metaphor of flow has almost come to monopolize the critical discussion of the new forms of global mobility’, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson claim that it is necessary ‘to question the dominance of this concept by foregrounding particular cases and patterns of transnational connection that seem better described by other conceptual tools and nomenclature’.75 What, then, might these concepts and categories be? If the nation-state is not becoming dislodged or overwhelmed as a system of attachment, governance, or identification, then how is its persistence, position and function to be understood? And if progress towards global universality is not smooth or unhampered, then how are its dimensions and characteristics, as well as its morphology, to be understood? Saskia Sassen begins to answer such questions by pointing out a tension between a priori and a postiori reasoning in attempts to set out globalization’s defining features, arguing that an ‘endogeneity trap’76 can be seen in the invention of ‘the global’ that is then confirmed by empirical efforts to chart its institutions and practices. ‘The new is messier, more conditioned and with older lineages than the grand new global institutions and globalizing capabilities suggest’.77 It is perhaps in this spirit that global information and communications networks should be considered; information and communications technologies, the nation-state and global movements need to be seen as interoperative elements in a shifting non-structure, mutable in their shape, interrupting and enabling each other in a multivalent series of exchanges and connections that never quite congeals – and has never quite congealed – into the systemic uniformities that would be the restricted and self-identical economy of the nation-state or the general and deregulated economy of the global. If anything persists here, it is the process of transitory coalescence which produces specific and contingent conjunctions, configurations and

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attachments, whether these are within and to the nation-state or around and to the global. And if both the nation-state and the global coalesce as singularities, then the collocations and connections that shape them admit the unsystematizable, the tenebrous and the transient as constitutive features of systemic order, resulting in an ineluctably disjunctive and variable system. The question that motivates the exploration of new socio-cultural forms should not, then, ask how the global is transfiguring the nation-state, but how ongoing exchanges between singularity and universality are configured at particular moments and produce specific modes of location and translocation. Sassen turns to the concept of ‘the assemblage’ in order to understand this mutable order without relying on a taxonomic separation of different social systems. What she recommends is not abandoning the categories of the local, the national, the transnational, or the global, embracing glocalization as a syncretic and functional negotiation of different social constellations, or endorsing what Steven Weber refers to as ‘studies of global social movements [which] talk about the emergence of “complex multilateralism” to describe a form of governance that emerges in the interaction between international organizations and transnational networks’.78 Rather, these categories for her point to a series of interdependent forces that acquire specific forms of territorial attachment and socio-political authority in particular times and places. For this reason, Sassen resists reading technoculture as an assemblage that either overcomes the nation-state or allows it to be confirmed as a fixed entity that can insulate itself against the transborder exchange of commodities, populations, or information; digitalization, she writes, ‘has enabled the strengthening of older actors and spaces and the formation of novel ones capable of engaging the competence, scope and exclusivity of state authority’.79 Similarly adopting the concept of the assemblage in order to theorize the formation of space and sociality around the complex simultaneity of flow and stasis, Manuel DeLanda and Aihwa Ong look to Deleuze to understand the global not as a pure multiplicity, but as a particular conjunction of flux and fixity. Proposing a social ontology that rejects the analytical separation of territorial or socio-political entities, DeLanda describes the self-identity of the nation-state as an acquired uniformity, the product of mechanisms – often linguistic and discursive – that have lent it rigidity by managing the deterritorializing effects of



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migration, trade and transportation. However, globalization is to be conceived not as the arrival of a heterogeneous (non-)order which departs from the interiority of the nation-state, but as a singular coding – a ‘variable repetition’80 – of the relations of exteriority which incessantly shape populations, territories and social structures. If this suggests an endless reconfiguration of the same components or the same social and conceptual economy – the substitution of a social ontology built on essences and totalities with one based on multiplicities and intensities – then it is the irresistible and iterative interruption of stasis that for DeLanda incessantly unsettles this economy. For Ong, this constitutive – technologically energized – mutability displaces the global onto space and geography, rather than effecting rupture or dispersion: ‘The proliferation of technologies across the world produces systems that mix technology, politics and actors in diverse configurations that do not follow given scales or political mappings’, she writes, ‘particular assemblages of technology and politics not only create their own spaces, but also give diverse values to the practices and actors connected thus to each other’.81 The lexicon that accompanied both the massification of computing, information and communications technologies and the perceived emergence of an informational global neighbourhood – the information superhighway, cyberspace, telemediation, virtuality, the digirati and so on – seems to have fallen victim to the vicissitudes of the media cultures that they signify. More importantly, for DeLanda, Ong and Sassen, the wider conceptual vocabulary that developed around online culture in the 1990s has also become obsolete: we should no longer understand ourselves as incipient cybernauts who are beginning freely to traverse the smooth space of the celestial datasphere or embryonic nomads in an unstructured environment that liberates users from the restrictions imposed by spatial attachment, but as residents of a networked domain that is arranged around nodes, junctions, and points of convergence where information congregates, dwellers in a physical and logical topology that enables the transition of information, communication and commerce. The overheated caricature of information culture’s inhabitants as netizens inhabiting a decentralized global village is, similarly, far removed from the idea that we are being woven into the fabric of a new social system, with the consequent striations, inequities, differences, conflicts and exclusions that sociality implies.

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VI These efforts to rethink the ontological status of the global and to challenge the idea that a worldwide community is being established technologically – as well the idea that ethnos and cosmos are formative before and beyond the appearance of an electronically connected planet – is shared by Jacques Derrida, whose thinking shapes much of this book. Echoing some familiar approaches to the displacing effects of global technologies, Derrida points to the dislocation of citizenship and social belonging that is resulting from the informational contraction of space: For the political no longer has a place, so to speak, it no longer has a stable and essential topos. It is without territory, uprooted by technology, by the unheardof acceleration and extension of telecommunicational distances, by irresistible processes of delocalisation. Here is a topic for meditation on our Athenian inheritance but that also goes beyond it: the political today is no longer circumscribed by the stability that ties the state to the earth, to the territory, to the terrain, to the terrestrial frontier, or to authochthony.82

And yet, Derrida does not simply read globalization as the dislocation or deterritorialization that he appears to diagnose here. As early as 1968, in ‘The Ends of Man’, he questions apocalyptic announcements of the decline of the human and the arrival of a new condition of difference and heterogeneity – announcements that today are reiterated in accounts of the global present as an unprecedented telos. If, according to this essay, ‘The thinking of the end of man . . . is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in the thinking of the truth of man’,83 then the thinking of the end of the nation-state might similarly be found at the beginning of a European polity that is defined territorially. More recently, Derrida has extended this questioning of a progression towards telos to notions of the transnational and the global. Thus, Specters of Marx’s call for a ‘new international’ (which would demand a reconfiguration of the international legal framework and the multilateral organizations that regulate world order) in Learning to Live Finally becomes associated with ‘“alterglobalist” imperatives’ which require moving ‘Beyond “cosmopolitanism”, beyond the notion of a “world citizen”, beyond a new world nation-state’.84 Suggesting an affinity between his own work and the movement which



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challenges institutions which promote a free market that extends across the world, Derrida here begins to endorse ‘alter-globalism’ as a counter-narrative to neoliberal declarations of a transborder inclusivity.85 More substantially, in his 1999 UNESCO lecture ‘Globalization, Peace and Cosmopolitanism’, Derrida reassesses the world as an ontological entity, picking out social, cultural and legal themes which, he feels, suggest forms of the universal that can challenge hegemonic notions of the global. Around these themes – work, forgiveness, peace and the death penalty – are inscribed narratives of sovereignty, of human rights and of humanity itself which, although today manifest unevenly across the world, ‘have the potential to universalize and thus to split, or if one prefers, to expropriate the Euro-Christian heritage’86 from which the notion of the global emerges. The idea that the end of work is a feature of post-industrial society – with material labour and mechanized production increasingly replaced by automated production and ‘virtual’ work conducted through computing technologies – has become ‘a sort of widespread doxa’,87 Derrida writes, with the consequent anxiety that work is vanishing for most, with the notable exception of those who inhabit the knowledge sector. Although agreeing that ‘techno-scientific mutations’88 are indeed affecting working cultures, Derrida questions the assertion that these mutations are unprecedentedly supervening the body’s presence in working environments or represent a shift towards practices that are exclusively technological and unequivocally global. Marx and Lenin, Derrida notes, connected the reduction of the working day to state-free equilibrium, Jacques Le Goff finds in the Christian Middle Ages injunctions both to extend and shorten the working day, and even in Augustine’s City of God the prelapsarian world is one without work. Alongside this question of precedence is the issue of distribution, and Derrida observes that changes in working cultures and practices are regionally discrepant. Without naming it as such, Derrida here points to the notion of a digital divide, extending uneven access to computing technologies to unequal experiences of work; this discrepancy, he writes, is overlooked by those who try ‘to hide or hide from themselves the zones of the world, the populations, nations, groups, classes, individuals who in their massive majority are the excluded victims of this movement of the said “end of work” and “globalization”’.89 If work has not been an enduring presence in the human imaginary – if it has been absent from

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both the past and the future – then apocalyptic announcements of globalization’s threat to functional humanity would appear to be premature, and to construe working technologies as a dangerous supplementarity would be to ignore global production’s reliance on workers who are excluded from today’s technological ‘mutations’. Work therefore provides a sense of the world as globalization’s prehistory and exposes a technological divide that schismatically separates populations. Forgiveness similarly is ambiguously structured: rooted in an Abrahamic heritage, a discourse of responsibility is developing around the will to recognize and seek absolution for national and international crimes, drawing in ‘an endless procession of repentants’90 and further establishing the world as the context of human inhabitation. Peace requires a new world contract which would provide a more representatively international alternative to the supposedly humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. And it is international and supra-state organizations that are bringing pressure to bear on nationstates which retain the death penalty as punishment for capital offences. Such ambiguities expose tensions between discourses of the national and the international which need to be approached from several related directions. First, Derrida expresses his misgivings about the term ‘globalization’ as an index of universal belonging, and across a number of interviews and essays he voices his preference for the term mondialization – which evokes a world occupied by populations and spaces which are coded by national, regional, social, cultural and religious traditions – over that of globalization – which suggests the smooth consistency of a geometric totality.91 ‘The concept of world gestures towards a history, it has a memory that distinguishes it from that of the globe, of the universe, of the Earth, of the cosmos even’, he writes, ‘the world begins by designating, and tends to remain, in an Abrahamic tradition (Judeo-Christian-Islamic but predominantly Christian) a particular spacetime, a certain oriented history of human brotherhood’.92 Second, there are what Derrida describes as ‘homo-hegemonizations’,93 the many revenants that return to haunt celebrations of global self-presence. Rather than developing mechanisms for consensual and participatory inclusion which extend to all populations and regions, globalization has instead delivered new systems for maintaining structural imbalances and the reassertion of sovereign authority; what needs to be observed, he writes, is the:



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linguistic-cultural hegemony (obviously I’m alluding to the Anglo-American hegemony), which increasingly asserts itself or imposes itself on all modes of techno-scientific exchange, the Web, the Internet, academic research, etc., promotes powers that are either national and sovereign states, or supranational states, this time in the sense of corporations or new figures of the concentration of capital.94

Derrida here most visibly challenges utopian announcements of authority dispersed and power disseminated evenly by globalizing technologies, finding power and authority continuing to gravitate towards the locations preferred by the market (including the scattered centres of transnational corporations), and the nation-state preserved as a sovereign political actant. Third, beyond recognizing new conjunctions of power and capital or the persistence of territorial association and state-based governance, it is necessary to consider territorial or ethnic hegemony as a self-rupturing ambivalence, and Derrida finds Europe’s foundation in Abrahamic notions of fraternal citizenship to be decisive in this matter. That English, as the prevailing language of the Internet, benefits Anglophone countries and that the centres of information culture remain largely in the West, would suggest that globalization needs to be understood as a unilateral expansionism rooted in European values and norms. But if equating globalization with Westernization or Europeanization has become routine, then what interests Derrida is how Europe’s fascination with the world has not only resulted in territorial invasion and ideological domination, but also reveals a foundational logic in which filiation and disaffiliation are indissociable.95 As much as Europe has attempted to ground itself in the language of self-determination and ontological particularity, it has also, and in its earliest narratives of regional belonging, reached across territorial frontiers by seeking to conceive the universal; animating Europe, Derrida writes elsewhere, is ‘the universal project of a will to deracination’, which ‘tends at least toward liberating itself, from the start, from its linguistic, territorial, ethnic and cultural limitations’.96 It is this will – this inaugurating ethico-political responsibility – that provides an opening, and a point of resistance, in the apparently monolithic drive towards global homogeneity: if global culture is indeed the expression of a European drive to universalize, then it is the expression of a territorial and cultural singularity that has always been constructed as an impossible

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interiority. Perhaps, then, globalization begins with Shakespeare not only because (as McLuhan observes) we find in his plays an early sense of modernity’s transterritorial technologies, but also because Europe here is seen to emerge as a dislocated attachment to place.

2

A space without geography, a nation without borders: The Cybergypsies and the literature of being-in-common The technocultural globalization announced by McLuhan avant la lettre did not become more substantially articulated, or capture the public imagination, until the 1990s, when the set of discursive practices that now shape ideas about technology and its global location took hold, eventually forging an everyday and often unconscious sense of the world as a connected, perhaps even unified, system. At this point, the global village envisaged by McLuhan seemed finally to have arrived, and the idea that the world had become global suddenly seemed incontestable. However, the symbolic order that has become firmly attached to the current information age is rooted in an anxious and often conflicted articulation of precisely who comes together and exactly what is shared online. Certainly, the parameters, the location, the constituency and the consistency of this new socio-cultural entity remain uncertain, even though many of the most celebrated efforts to describe it agree that network culture does not simply evince a desire for togetherness or the pursuit of informational affiliation, but points instead to an appetite for connection across national borders and beyond regional attachment. Put otherwise, network culture seems to promise a new era of global community. Much of the attention given to this connectedness emphasizes the opportunities for, as well as threats to, civil liberty that it brings, finding free expression and the unrestricted flow of data central to the communities that have been developing around late-twentieth century network technologies. Digital rights advocacy groups, such as the Free Software Foundation, have sought to protect the right to distribute software by resisting Digital Rights Management (DRM), promoting copyleft, developing the GNU Public License and supporting the ethic of sharing that has been furthered by the Creative Commons organ­ization. Similarly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has

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fought efforts to restrict access to data and provided legal support for those who have found themselves in the grey zone of copyright law relating to the protection and distribution of information. And in 1998, the Open Source Initiative was formed to promote non-proprietary software developed by a community which views collaborative and peer-to-peer production as the fuel that energizes the digital economy. The aim of such organizations, for Lawrence Lessig, ‘is to build a movement of producers and consumers of content . . . who help build the public domain and, by their work, demonstrate the importance of the public domain to other creativity’.1 For such organizations, this architecture of production and consumption – this gift economy2 – is threatened by corporate attempts to limit the flow of information (by converting it into a marketable commodity) which combine structurally with authoritarian efforts by governments to escalate network regulation, thereby intensifying control of both the digital economy and the social sphere that is being built around online interaction. Certainly, for Richard Stallman, co-founder of the Free Software Foundation, digital copyright legislation is increasingly used in the US as a bureaucratic control mechanism: ‘even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them “for their own benefit”’, he writes in Free Software, Free Society, ‘the U.S. government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties’.3 Not all challenges to state regulation are framed by narratives of social emancipation. Open Source advocate Eric Raymond, for example, rejects what he sees as the Free Software Foundation’s pious and ersatz altruism in favour of an anarcho-capitalism which, resisting monopolistic intervention by state actors, would allow programmers to build a business ecology catalyzed by collaborative software production. But despite the sharply divergent social ethics that motivate these organizations and commentators,4 their mutual disquiet over government practices and national legislation slides rapidly into a shared petition to abandon the nation-state as a regime of restricted cultural production. In this manner, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow claims that ‘By creating a seamless global-economic zone, borderless and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state’, concluding that ‘What the Net offers is the promise of a new social space, global and antisovereign’.5 Against attempts by national



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governments in the 1990s to manage and control information and communications networks, the civil libertarian defence of digital rights has often, then, looked to the global co-ordinates forged by network technologies as evidence of a developing community that is eroding the relationship between cultural belonging and attachment to territory or geography. Although concerned primarily with the vexed relationship between autonomy and sovereignty, such efforts tend to assume the worlding of the world as a self-present entity, treating the effects of international communication and information traffic not only as the attenuation of national belonging but also as the shift towards an integral and indivisible planetary order. Global community here becomes understood as the world bound together by network connections, apparently restituting an original unity which, having suffered an unspoken Babelesque fall into regional and tribal divisions, has become scattered across the earth and confounded by linguistic confusion. Supplemented by the informational collapsing of space and by the instantaneity of digital mediation, the human is, from such a perspective, re-acquiring its essential commonality. Capturing this sentiment, 24 Hours in Cyberspace gathers together images taken across the world on the same day in 1996 with a view to documenting ‘how the online world is changing our lives’. Cyberspace, for this collection, ‘is no longer an abstraction; it is now the real world . . . it is a place where we meet, and to which we venture alone . . . We have yet to reach the borders of this brand-new place, and we may well discover that it has none’.6 Similarly affirming such a romanticism in her 2010 address on the Internet as both an independent medium and a space for the enhancement of liberty, Hillary Clinton offers the homiletic: ‘We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas‘.7

I In Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold extends Marvin Minsky’s notion of ‘telepresencing’ to what had, since the early 1980s, become troped as global ‘cyberspace’.8 This new environment and the instruments – headmounted displays, datagloves, haptic devices and immersive hardware – that allow

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users to enter it are seen by Rheingold as manifestations of the perceptual and cognitive transposition imagined in Gibson’s Neuromancer, a novel to which he returns repeatedly when describing the current and near-future shape of both VR and the spatial transcendence he associates with it. Already, he writes, a sense of the networked world is developing in business and computing cultures, with data transmitted and information exchanged anywhere on the planet: ‘All over the world, people are communicating with one another by typing words into computers and sending them out as data through the telephone network’.9 Rheingold reiterates this sentiment in The Virtual Community, describing the virtual world as one that is beginning to acquire a sense of itself as an interactively connected totality, and (in a lexicon that pre-dates the language of network culture) he attributes the emergence of this transnational condition to ‘computer-mediated communication’ (CMC): ‘Just as several different technologies converged over the past ten years to create CMC – a new medium with properties of its own’, he writes, ‘several different online structures are in the process of converging and creating a kind of international culture with properties of its own’.10 Among the various properties that constitute this new cultural condition is the remodelling of those who compose the social sphere: as a result of network technologies and the exchange of information over networks, the emergence of shared and public consciousness – for Rheingold a ‘multibrained organism of collective expertise’11 – was announced in the closing decades of the twentieth century, seemingly realized at the beginning of the twenty-first century as an omniscient informational cloud. This new corporeality – what Hardt and Negri later describe as the new sovereign order and the ‘new physiology’12 of the global political body – was, in early accounts of online sociality, therefore seen to effect a gravitational shift away from the mechanisms and structures of the nation-state. Built around transnational encounters and affiliations, this biopolitical shift should also, it would seem, be understood as an ontological and political transformation in which subjectivity and citizenship are increasingly detached from physical location and governmental jurisdiction. Transfigured by a new-found capacity for contact and communication, cognition and perception will, according to such a view, not only become separated from the body, but will also soon abandon their embeddedness



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within geographical space and take up residence in what Barlow describes as ‘the new home of Mind’.13 For Nicholas Negroponte too, the generalized dematerialization of the body by digital technologies promises unprecedented levels of freedom, and the environments of what he describes as the coming ‘post-information age’ (the age in which unidirectional transmission is replaced by the multilateral exchange of information, the interoperability of systems and the active role of users in the production of content – in other words, characteristics that are now often associated with Web 2.0) will supplant structured regimes which constrict the free movement of data between users and populations. Enhancing this collective cognition, Negroponte writes in Being Digital, the collapsing of time into a global present will result in a further transformation of the digitally connected. Just as physical investment in the old repositories of knowledge will diminish with the increased digitizing of data, so the overcoming of spatial distance will result in a communicative immediacy: ‘In the same ways that hypertext removes the limitations of the printed page, the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence on being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place will itself start to become possible’.14 And, echoing the idea that network technologies were transforming the social sphere as a seamless, sovereign-free and transfrontier space, Negroponte finds in digital culture the movement towards an ordered and self-present uniformity – a self-regulating digital economy – in which ‘the planet becomes a single media machine’.15 Those inhabiting this smooth and uninterrupted totality will, Being Digital suggests, come together in a domain that will ultimately not only depart from physical substance but will also attain a state of connected self-presence: ‘The digital planet’, Negroponte writes, evoking notions of immaterial extension in medieval angelology, ‘will look and feel like the head of a pin’.16 Dispersed cognition, communicative immediacy and autonomous association are often, in early responses to network culture, therefore understood to initiate both an epistemic shift and a refigured ontology. Furthermore, they are also seen to produce a different form of sociality – indeed, to offer the possibility for community – which allows affiliation across national borders, between regions and outside of territorial space, perhaps even allowing the world finally to become inclusive and unified. Rheingold’s anthropology

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of early online cultures certainly finds such utopian possibilities in the networks that he documents as participant-observer. In order to understand how interactive online assembly might develop at the end of the twentieth century, he turns to Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere as a place which (beyond and potentially resisting governmental or institutional order) is constituted around the unrestricted gathering of citizens, the formation of public opinion around reasoned and participatory dialogue, and the open communication of political decisions. ‘Those of us who are brought into contact with each other by means of CMC technology find ourselves challenged by this many-to-many capability – challenged to consider whether it is possible for us to build some kind of community together’.17 What will allow such a community to come together is not a common attachment to physical place, but the ‘collective goods’18 that are held by members of online groups: the social capital generated by co-operative network relations, the shared exchange of ideas, and the provision of mutual support – in other words, what Arjun Appadurai later describes as the stuff that binds ‘communities of imagination and interest’.19 If for Rheingold the potential for electronic community lies in its capacity to foster a space outside of (and, at times, against) the state’s authority, then for Negroponte digital belonging will enact a far greater devastation on the nation-state than simply enabling a territory-free public space: ‘Like a mothball which goes from solid to gas directly, I expect the nation-state to evaporate without first going into a gooey, inoperative mess, before some global cyberstate commands the political ether’.20 No longer able to serve the local interest of populations or to function independently, the nation-state’s obsolescence is here seen to be inevitable, becoming substituted by a digital community that will serve local interests across global networks. ‘As we interconnect ourselves’, he predicts, ‘many of the values of a nation-state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities’.21 This idea of virtual community is also the centre of gravity in Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies, a memoir which tracks the birth of multi-participant domains in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, and documents the compelling sense of attachment to electronic association (or ‘cyber-sociation’22) that these domains often engendered. At the centre of this text is a poignant story of how such an addiction resulted in offline relationship problems for Bear, the



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pseudonymously-named advertising copywriter who acts as Sinha’s textual persona in The Cybergypsies. Finding himself drawn ever further into bulletin board groups and multi-user dungeons (especially Shades, the Micronethosted, text-based role-playing game and chat environment that developed in the mid-1980s out of the first MUDs at Essex University), Bear becomes captivated by the opportunities for friendship, as well as the risk of conflict and deception, that this domain offers to its members. This experience of intimate and antagonistic communion is so intensely compelling that it takes the form of an electronic enchantment, a delirium which results in Bear describing his account as the legacy of ‘an earlier generation of cranio-speleologists’,23 with his confessions becoming those of a different form of user, the cyberspatial equivalent of de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater or Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Offering an electronic, rather than a narcotic, portal to the imagination, the domains inhabited by Bear allow him to experience the ecstasy that is now often associated with network culture. Dialling into these environments is seen in The Cybergypsies to effect a detachment of cognition from the body; one consequence of this discarnate state, Bear observes, is that networks encourage the idea that death too can be surpassed: ‘The net . . . is full of immortality seekers: Kabbalists who claim immortality is a state of mind attainable by meditating on the letters ‫ ;במוכסז‬cyborgians who want to replace human bits with robotic spares; extropians seeking to evolve beyond the mortal and human’.24 This movement from the human to the posthuman is also conceived as a transition from place to displacement, and The Cybergypsies seeks to corroborate the notion that online connection turns users into itinerant ghosts whose ethereal migration is not constrained by the topology of national belonging: The night . . . is full of invisible pathways, crisscrossing the globe, bounced off the stratosphere by orbiting comsats. Along them wander odd gypsy folk, ceaselessly exploring, always on the lookout for new systems, new people, new information. They congregate, these travellers, at the oases and caravanseraies of cyberspace: this bulletin board, that multi-user game . . . You bump into them at online parties in San Francisco or Stockholm. You hear rumours they’ve hacked a High Street bank, or were last heading Amazonwards to track down illegal mahogany cutters with satellite-linked bulletin boards. Faster than the

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Shunning the light and invisible to the world of physical association, these nomadic cartographers of electronic space are not, however, scattered chaotically over cables and airways but, gathering together in networks based on support, amity and shared interests, ‘They are a community’.26 And, just as for Rheingold and Negroponte, Sinha’s text suggests that global community will develop out of these initial settlements, turning cyberspace’s disparate camps into a single mapped territory over which no sovereign authority rules. For these accounts of network culture’s arrival in the 1980s and 1990s, then, digital technologies can unite the world’s physically and geographically dispersed – perhaps even diasporic – populations. Finally realizing the Platonic or early Christian dream of immaterial transcendence, the Cartesian separation of the mind from the res extensa, and Enlightenment visions of humanity’s essential commonality, networked environments are seen to allow the world to communicate and commune with itself; indeed, no longer providing a rarefied domain inhabited exclusively by the technocratic few, these environments are seen either to offer or to promise global community for all.

II The idea that electronic communications and digital technologies transcend geographical location and unite remote populations now resides firmly in technoculture’s conceptual pantheon, and yet the affiliation evoked in The Cybergypsies is ambivalently rendered, reflecting a wider uncertainty about the shaping of planetary community by network connections and digital culture. Indeed, in its account of both the opportunities and effects of online sociality, Sinha’s text evinces several tensions that electronic association brings to perceptions of geographical, spatial and national belonging. Perhaps most evident of these tensions is, as Hardt and Negri observe, that ‘the



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nation becomes the only way to imagine community! Every imagination of a community becomes overcoded as a nation, and hence our conception of community is severely impoverished’.27 At least conceptually, it would seem, with this overcoding, the nation-state remains intimately woven into communications and information networks as both the historical foundation for, and a category that persists in the description of, distributed systems, even as these systems are seen to be triggering a supra- or post-national condition. The prevailing archaeology of the Internet confirms this impoverished sense of global community, locating its origins not in visions of interactive electro-mechanical devices that would record the sum of human knowledge (especially, perhaps, Vannevar Bush’s memex) or in the emergence of electronic archives (such the establishing of Project Gutenberg in 1971). Rather, its emergence is commonly understood as a technical solution to the vulnerability of centralized military infrastructures, with the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s development of packet-switching technologies and interactive military communications networks in the early 1970s. According to such a history, distributed networks should not be associated with a shift towards global connectedness, but are rooted in the protection of national territory and, more specifically, were developed to preserve US territorial and political sovereignty.28 For Fareed Zakaria, the values surrounding which network culture need to be understood as the expression of a particular tradition and a particular national culture: ‘The Internet is profoundly disrespectful of tradition, established order and hierarchy, and that is very American’,29 he writes. Evgeny Morozov, documenting the US Government’s support for the use of Twitter in Iran and Google Earth’s funding by the CIA’s commercial and investment company In-Q-Tel, points to the troubled perception of ‘information sovereignty’ among governments (especially in non-democratic states) that ‘are only now beginning to realize how tightly their own communications systems are tied to American infrastructure’.30 More broadly, Manthia Diawara questions the privileging of regional values across the wired world, observing that Africa is ‘isolated from nation to nation but united in looking toward Europe and America for the latest news, politics, and culture’.31 If such responses identify a digital divide that bluntens declarations of global unity, they also tend to obviate consideration of how these regions and

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nations jeopardize their claims to exceptionality when attaching themselves to the universal. But they also neglect the way in which network culture is itself – as Hardt and Negri suggest – conceived as an independent national territory, rather than as either a domain that allows planetary inclusion or a mechanism for shoring up a hierarchy of nation-states. ‘It’s a large country’, one early commentator on the Internet remarks, ‘We ought to apply to the U.N. as the first nation in cyberspace’.32 Despite finding ‘organizations and institutions’ (including the nation) to be moving ‘inexorably beyond standardization and centralization’, Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth and Alvin Toffler propose a constitutional document that would guide regulation for cyberspace as ‘the land of knowledge’.33 Similarly, Cameron Bailey observes that ‘The Net nation deploys shared knowledge and language to unite against outsiders’,34 and the development of digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and Ven, suggest that the Internet is beginning to function as both a national culture and a national economy. For Zygmunt Bauman, everything can be surveyed and rendered visible in the new informationalism: ‘on a planet criss-crossed with “information highways”, nothing that happens in any part of the planet can actually, or at least potentially, stay in an intellectual “outside”. No terra nulla, no blank spots on the mental map, no unknown, let alone unknowable lands and peoples’.35 But what Bauman also suggests here is that networks remain cartographically shaped around different territories and populations – that the world, although continuous, is not consistent. Finally, for Timothy Luke, an uneasy adjacency joins and separates online culture and the nation-state: As a ‘meta’ factor, informatic networks share actions and structures in common with territorial nation-states, but the online operations of this meta-nation is a deterritorialized domain of domains, which as a regime of cybertechnics is always already behind, beyond, or beside the nation-state system . . . As a ‘nation’ it is natio: a site of beginnings, and a means of being reborn(e), only now as bits in a profusion of data fields that are always everywhere, nowhere and somewhere in the territorial regime of nation-states.36

Death and rebirth, rather than terminal decline, are here seen to be the fate of the nation-state when it goes online: network distribution leaves the nation in bits, both dispersed and the site of another aggregated belonging, both



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beyond space and reterritorialized as another national habitus. In a state of uneasy externality with the structure it apparently renounces, and separated from the territorial nation-state by the conjunctive liminality of the frontier, this informatic realm establishes its sovereign independence by becoming a dependent contiguity. In The Cybergypsies too, although online community is construed as a movement away from co-ordinated space (‘I can even supply the grid reference 51°58’N, 1°35’W, Ordnance Survey SP296039. It was at this place, at 4.10 on a cold afternoon fifteen years ago, that a wormhole in cyberspace opened up and sucked me in’37), what Bear experiences is not a departure into a diffused world that overcomes national space, but admittance into a environment that is figured in terms of national culture. ‘The cybergypsies’, Sinha writes, ‘are a worldwide nation whose games and bulletin boards span the globe’,38 and what Bear becomes sucked into is ‘the republic of Cyberistan’, a sovereign space which has ‘already declared its independence and applied for membership of the United Nations’.39 As well as endorsing the idea that this space deserves international recognition, these remarks also point to Barlow’s ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ which (written as a protest to the US Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996) proclaims the arrival of a global space – ‘a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media’40 – that is modelled as an alternative to the tyrannical regime of nation-state governance. In cyberspace Barlow finds an informational liberty that resists efforts to colonize this new domain, eluding attempts to impose sovereign authority or the enforcement of social organization; to the governments seeking regulation of this domain without dominion, he triumphantly proclaims, ‘You have no sovereignty where we gather . . . Cyberspace does not lie within your borders’.41 However, quite apart from the uncertain status of the constative and the performative in such a declaration (‘one cannot decide . . . whether independence is stated or produced’,42 Derrida observes in respect of the American declaration of 1776) or the assumption of prior legitimacy and right of representation that is central to it, Barlow strangely turns to the social logic he denounces in order to understand placeless gathering in cyberspace. Terms for conceiving this emerging zone are lacking, and in the resulting conceptual vacuum Barlow, like Bear, struggles to avoid the lexicon of the

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nation-state when describing the dimensions of this alternative space. With its own vernacular, a constituent population, an emerging social contract and system of self-governance, and a founding declarative act, cyberspace is marked off and detached from both embodied and territorial existence even as it remains firmly adjacent to the nation-state. Taking the form of a nation that has ambitions to establish itself as yet another nation (one that would, as Bear remarks, claim a seat in the UN), cyberspace can no longer be conceived as a borderless departure from national belonging or a distributed world connected by bits, but as a nation added to a worldwide community that remains, at best, international. For this reason, Daniel W. Drezner observes, network culture needs to be understood not as an anarchic zone beyond territory or regulation, but as a space that is incorporated into national and international politics: the Internet has generated multiple areas of governance, including the development of technical protocols, censorship, e-taxation, intellectual property and privacy rights. For many of these issue areas, states express divergent interests, halt cross-border Internet transactions that contradict their preferences, and use international governmental organizations (IGOs) and treaties to advance their preferences.43

III Unsettled by the nation-state’s spectral persistence, online community also often rests on an inconsistently articulated idea of delocalized harmony, and cyberculture’s prevailing mythopoiesis – that heterogeneous groups and locations are forming into a worldwide unity – sits uneasily alongside the equally formative notion that networked systems are resilient and socially transformative because, dispersed, discordant and heteromorphic, they depart from coherent structurality. At the same time that the world is seen to be drawing itself together as an interactive totality, an ethic of unregulated association and an architecture of unordered connectivity are also often identified as abiding features of network culture. Even if ‘a global society of the connected’ were eventfully to develop, Esther Dyson writes, ‘it would be a stretch to call it a community’.44 More acutely, the idea that the regimented hierarchy of local



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and centralized systems is being replaced by a nodal informationalism has been situated in the context of wider challenges – such as those animated by Guy Debord, Hakim Bey and Deleuze & Guattari – to the idea that communications systems can establish a smooth and consistent connectedness. Read in this manner, nodal lines of contact suggest a molecular departure from hierarchically coded systems and the arrival of disparate and inconstant relations of movement that coalesce ephemerally in the disjunctive, eruptive and autonomous abstraction that is cyberspace.45 Problematic though it is to collapse these responses into a coherent theory of distributed networks,46 they do point to a refusal to conceive communications networks as functional totalities. But it would be a mistake to associate the idea of network disjuncture only with the techno-anarchism that draws its inspiration from Debord, Bey, or Deleuze & Guattari. Resistance to the idea that the world is becoming technologically united can be found even among its advocates, where assertions of global self-identity are often hesitant and always insufficient, with network association conceived as an imaginary simultaneity, at once an emerging systemic unity and an internally differentiated heteromorphology. Negroponte’s prediction that the post-information age will produce a single media machine is thus haunted by his description of the Internet as ‘a network of networks’.47 For Rheingold online groups are, at a time when the public sphere is being eroded and commodified, providing the environment where public assembly is returning. But although he describes this environment an embryonic ‘electronic agora’,48 he also suggests that network culture’s nodal topology departs structurally from the marketplace convergence that this concept implies. This departure occurs not only because the spirit of this agora is that of a gift economy which rejects the expectation of reciprocal compensation,49 but because its multivalent constituencies escape the homogenizing mechanisms of the control society. This refusal of order and control has been central to thinking about the forms of community that electronic spaces and digital culture offer. Neither comprised of the parvenu herd that has gravitated to interactive networks nor a new location that falls within a unified social field, online community has often been associated with the subcultures that gather outside and against the social mainstream. Rheingold discovers this alternative assembly in the homebrew computing groups of the late 1980s and early 1990s – Fidonet,

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BITNET, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) groups and early MUDs – in the grassroots, dissident and free-thinking counter-culture that suffuses the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL) (‘The Whole Earth Crowd – the granola-eating utopians, the solar-power enthusiasts, the space-station crowd, immortalists, futurists, gadgeteers, commune graduates, environmentalists, social activists – constituted a core population from the beginning’50), and on Usenet, where in this period he finds ‘the world’s fastest growing techno-anarchic community’.51 Embracing an ethics of mutual support, and promoting a hierarchy-levelling production and democratic distribution of code, such spaces according to Lovink expose a politico-ethical gulf between massified Internet of the late 1990s and ‘the values of Internet pioneers from the pre-dotcom age’.52 The Cybergypsies shares this sense of pre-Internet or pre-World Wide Web (what Sinha elsewhere terms the ‘prehistoric’ or ‘primaeval’ net53) environments as forums for subcultural association. Despite documenting a descent into an addiction that threatens relationships and compromises professional abilities, katabasis is not The Cybergypsies’ only rhetorical mode, and this text is as much a chronicle of the growth of online activism and mobilization as it is a story about a craving for contact through cables and over airways. In response to inaction by the UK and other governments when faced with evidence of genocide in Northern Iraq or catastrophic corporate negligence in Bhopal in the 1980s, Sinha’s text documents the conjunction of advertising campaigns for Amnesty International with the use of online newsgroups as a medium for gathering and disseminating material that was not visible to the informational mainstream of that time. Groups such as Greennet, established in 1987 as a ‘forum for radical discussion and action’,54 are seen in The Cybergypsies to provide health, environmental, human rights, and development activists with a place to assemble and to mobilize dissent: ‘Within months these groups, many of whom had been unaware of one another’s existence, are planning joint actions and learning the value of co-operation’.55 And it is on Greennet that Bear establishes a newsgroup dedicated to Kurdish social and cultural life, although: even on Greennet demands for Kurdish autonomy are met with resistance. The moderator of the mideast newsgroups says there is no need for a mideast.kurds, that Kurdish affairs are already covered by mideast.news, mideast.forum and mideast.gulf. We plead, he refuses to listen. We argue that the Kurds have been



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denied their own country, must they be denied a voice in cyberspace? . . . Finally, he relents and mideast.kurds is born.56

Such episodes can be understood as further evidence of a time before the corruption of online community or a nostalgic account of those whom Fred Turner describes as ‘the New Communalists’.57 However, the significance of Sinha’s text extends beyond this technocultural version of subaltern history since it begins to open up a schism between affiliation and universality, pointing to a cultural and ethnic particularity that can be encompassed by neither broad and regionalizing classifications nor an inclusive sense of the global. Here, the global and the network become discrepant categories: humanity’s immanent identity does not finally become manifest as a newfound self-presence because informational connection across national frontiers is instead seen to result in a disaggregated network association. Community develops for these groups as a fragmented, dissonant and democratic activism which functions as a counter-narrative to the hardening of planetary networks around a corporate, institutional, or governmental sense of the informational – a minoritarian being-together that develops, often without intentionality, against majoritarian trajectories of global power. Inhabiting the unruly margins of the connected world, these groups do not allow the emergence of a universally transcendent consciousness and cannot produce a coherent social order. Going online for these communities becomes a renouncing of the universal and a detachment from the global. Rather than granting netizenship to all, what both Rheingold and Sinha therefore suggest is that membership of the electronic agora provides collaborative association only for those who belong to the heterological spaces of the technological counterculture. Indeed, for Dyson, such exclusivity is an innate organizational characteristic of any act of group affiliation: ‘there should be a way of determining who is in the community and who is outside it. Otherwise community is meaningless’.58 Two incompatible utopianisms are therefore conflictually shaping declarations of online community: an exceptionalist micropolitics of translocational assembly and the idea of an open and inclusive globality. This conflicted conception of the connected and self-communing world has persisted, even if the opportunities for online activism celebrated by

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Rheingold and Sinha have largely mutated into an attenuated sense of civic engagement and social transformation. Online group formation and informational participation in an era dominated by Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, or Twitter look very different to the electronic communitarianism, network mobilization, or even digital revolution imagined by many CMC visionaries and Web evangelists of the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the end of the twenty-first century, Lovink observes, network radicalism had already been eclipsed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism and dotcom venture capitalism, illustrated by Wired’s translation of a rebellious enthusiasm for virtual community into a libertarian mania for commodified technologies. ‘Stripped of all possibly disturbing “dark elements”’, he writes, ‘the hegemonic Californian cyberculture is turning the internet into a medium without qualities’.59 In The Net Delusion, Morozov observes that if the 1990s saw a stripping out of cyberspace’s anarchic or rebellious ethic, then the first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed an apparent repoliticizing of network culture and a return to its activist pre-history. But for him, this is a commodified form of engagement which needs to be treated as a satisfaction-driven counterfeit commitment, providing a sense of public responsibility – and an opportunity for political catharsis – through the minimal requirements of online petitions and protest group membership. With this narcissistic slacktivism or clicktivism, ‘aspiring digital revolutionaries can stay on their sofas forever – or until their iPad’s batteries run out – and still be seen as heroes. In this world, it doesn’t really matter if the cause they are fighting for is real or not; as long as it’s easy to find, join and interpret, that’s enough’.60 This online engagement is self-deceiving, Morozov explains, because the scalability of network membership inevitably changes group priorities and dynamics, bluntening the force of issue-specific protests by turning them into a contentfree consensus, and allowing only an attenuated interventionism. Lovink and Morozov document a notable shift in the trajectory of network politics, but there are nevertheless problems with their claim that a resistant counterculture has been progressively mainstreamed. For example, Morozov’s diagnosis of a ‘net delusion’ suggests that online activists are labouring under a false sense of what is truly transformative in the social sphere. However, even if this delusion is false, it is not unmotivated and should perhaps be understood as the expression of an underlying discontentment. In other words, to



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describe this behaviour or action as delusional suggests a recognition among aspiring rebels that action is dangerous and unbearable, a haunting sense that online community is yet another beautiful lie, or a repression of the fear that online protest groups offer yet another safe and seductive fantasy of social and symbolic value. This transvaluation of political values – this desublimation of the desire to be socially consequential – requires both recognition of and resistance to the possibility that online activism’s lofty and loudly proclaimed principles are insubstantial and have little impact. What Morozov points to, then, is not the decline of the political, but an uncertain shuttling between a potentially transformative will to intervene and the ineffectuality of online activism. Indeed, as Rita Raley explains in Tactical Media, this interventionist energy becomes manifests in media and electronic acts which cannot be dismissed as a casual and ultimately narcissistic feigning of commitment. Organizations such as the Critical Art Ensemble, for her, ‘alter our perceptions of normalized social practices’ and ‘change the way we see the otherwise “transparent codes” of Empire’.61 To emphasize the corruption of network culture’s founding ethics and politics is therefore to risk placing rupture over repetition. Although a shift from the hippie or post-left radicalism of virtual communitarianism to either market-facing technolibertarianism or a disengaged online interventionism can indeed be identified, treating these movements as one intentionality overcoming another occludes the subtle equivocations that characterize these transitions, overshadowing the continuities that persist across apparently separate models of technological association. And, across these different moments, the perception that information and communications technologies are unifying the world endures, even if – in a remarkable volte-face – this unity is now often seen to be in a state of peaceful co-habitation with the nation-state.

IV What also persists across these apparently divergent approaches to network sociality is an ontology that construes the self as an axiomatic and indivisible centre around which communities, cultures, and societies aggregate. Shared by

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‘the New Communalism’ and Wired, by network activists and dotcom entrepreneurs, by slacktivists and anarcho-libertarians, by Rheingold, Negroponte, Dyson and Clinton is the idea that online association can enhance the subject’s autonomy, providing a space that allows the user to realize its immanent capacity for independent action. Dyson certainly struggles to offer a coherent sense of network culture’s distinctiveness when she claims that its inhabitants have not changed: ‘the Net puts the same people in a new situation. In doing so, it makes everything different: power shifting away from the center toward individuals and small organizations, more fluidity and continuous change, increasingly irrelevant national boundaries’.62 Exalting the self is what has allowed virtual communitarianism to be appropriated and reshaped, since its enthusiasm for the subject’s connected potential – for reasoned participation in the public sphere, for the intersubjective mutuality of support, for the extension of self that it believes is community association – makes it compatible with various conceptual models that find social liberty in the enfranchisement of the sovereign subject. For Rheingold, the inhabitants of early online groups are drawn to each other in pursuit of pre-existing interests, as if beginning from an associational degree zero when dialling up to join networks – networks which are beginning to manifest the Enlightenment vision of ‘a living web of citizen-to-citizen communications known as civil society or the public sphere’.63 The self who seeks communion here seems to predate its contact with others, a solitary figure that becomes a citizen – and forges the social as ‘a community of individuals’64 – through participation in the representative democracy that is emerging online. Negroponte too points to a Copernican revolution whereby the self is becoming the centre of the digital universe: ‘In being digital I am me, not a statistical subset’, he writes, ‘Me includes information and events that have no demographic or statistical meaning’.65 Being digital will not, then, entail ontological displacement, the entry into a smooth post-human virtuality, or the movement towards a Gibsonian distributed cognition where only mavericks and loners escape the deadening hegemony of reality virtualized. Rather than either suffocating autonomy or liberating the subject from regimes of auto-identification, the future he predicts will instead effect the individual’s emancipation as a unique (and narcissistic) consumer; not only will the limitations of territorial proximity and national belonging melt



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away in the face of the newly empowered digital self, but the massified and pacifying broadcast media will also be surpassed by the user-centric informationalism of the post-information age. Claims that technology might act to inhibit the individual or distort human nature are, then, shrugged off by both digital culture and counterculture; Heidegger, Huizinga, Marcuse and Veblen seem to be unwelcome at this triumphalist celebration of the self. No longer construed as a force for mechanization and technical servitude, imposing greater levels of disciplinarity, conformity and uniformity on diverse populations, between communities and across social environments, technology has instead become associated with heroic individualism; intrinsic to this internally constituted and auto-affective subject is a capacity for autonomous action, rather than a dependence on shared interaction. When expressed in the language of network culture and social media, this apotheosis of the individual graduates into delicious’ injunction to ‘Discover yourself!’, Google’s principal core ‘philosophy’ to ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow’, Bebo’s ‘lifestream platforming’ as self-empowerment, and Facebook’s mission ‘to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected’.66 A curious and not entirely congruent metaphysics needs to be identified here, since the subject as sui generis user somehow precedes, is preserved in, and is consummated by social networks. In The Cybergypsies, it is, perversely, the complexity of networks and digital communications that allows the self to become manifest; a strange and ambivalent logic seems to underscore this text, whereby the simplicity of the human is possible, becomes operative, or can make itself visible only when it is mediated by instruments and devices. This raises the question of whether the pure state of the human (which, as Homo Faber, supposedly predates its articulation in, and transmission by, communications technologies) is indeed pure, or whether this purity exists only through its ecstatic corruption by technology. As much as it might appear to indulge in fantasies of humanity’s elemental state, The Cybergypsies suggests that technologies (including languages) do not work as prosthetic additions to the human, but are instead integral to its functioning. In other words, pure communication arrives only when the human enters into a more intimate relationship with machines. More specifically, in terms of territorial belonging, it is only by encountering

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the centrifugal force of networks that this user joins humanity’s newly discovered universal community, with the planet’s unity experienced as an infinitely inhabitable totality and global connection achieved as an endlessly restless and proliferating fluidity. Shared associated, then, has somehow become an interactive non-self-dissociation. At least since Heidegger, the ontological tension that shapes such a disconcertingly unresolved conception of being and being-in-the-world has become more visible. For Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘being-with or being-together’ is ‘the primordial ontological condition’67 in which the self acquires a singularity that emerges only through a co-appearance or ‘compearance’ (com-parution)68 with others. Rather than conceiving subjectivity as the inert facticity that forms alliances, as a plenitudinous self-possession that is formed prior to its encounter with others and predates its extensions by federated association, Nancy understands community as the place where both the subject and the social are produced. Although this process might appear as yet another version of social determinism, for Nancy it results not in the syncretic merging of distinct entities into an indistinct mass but in a ‘singular being [that is] is neither the common being nor the individual’.69 This singular subject is not, then, preceded or produced by the finitude of the social, since the social is composed from singularities that are simultaneously shaped by their systemic distribution. This is Being ‘ex-posed’, for Nancy, a ‘nonimmanence of co-appearance’,70 rather than the epiphany of self-identity; instead of announcing the demise of the subject or the extinction of the human, this is subjectivity as parousia, an ecstatic entity that arrives as a ‘coming to presence’.71 For Hardt and Negri, such an ontological crisis points to a wider historicostructural transformation that denies a prioricity to the globally connected subject. Although, they claim in Empire, the nation-state initially represented a departure from monarchical subjection, offering action and self-governance as a condition of citizenship, the nation-state’s association with liberty has increasingly been compromised by the idea of the world as a unified territory that is inhabited by a single population. Following such a conceptual shift, the nation-state can no longer be understood as providing a foundation for immanent action but has become yet another mode of transcendent rule, the new constraining figure that is being superseded by the global as the site of



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socio-cultural emancipation which can liberate citizens from the disciplinary regime of territorial identification and release them into unfettered movement and unrestricted association. The material and signifying practices that are produced around the equation of universal citizenship with global networks only reconstitute the self as agent, however, rather than allowing the citizen to accomplish the autonomy that has resided incipiently within it. To combat this ontological revisionism, Hardt and Negri introduce the concept of the ‘multitude’, which: affirms its singularity by inverting the ideological illusion that all humans on the globe are interchangeable. Standing the ideology of the market on its feet, the multitude promotes through its labor the biopolitical singularizations of groups and sets of humanity, across each and every node of global interchange.72

Exchange here develops out of a shifting, nomadic, converging and disjunctive group association that both allows affiliation and departs from the flat homogeneity of community. But this concept of the multitude also moves away from the idea that network culture is either produced by user autonomy or releases the self from the shackles of situated localism, instead pointing to an ontological transformation that comes with distributed informationalism. What this means, then, is that network culture cannot be understood as an enabling aggregation of individuals. If, for the ‘New Communalists’, ‘the key to social transformation lay not in changing a political regime but in changing the consciousness of individuals’,73 then this transformation must therefore be understood as extending beyond a cognitive reinvention alone. Looking to Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Thacker & Galloway find this reinvention in network culture’s potential to trigger a fundamental rethinking of subjectivity: ‘If we are to take seriously the networked view of power relations, then individuals would need to be considered not as individuals, but as what Deleuze calls “dividuals”’.74 Dividualized by both its online encounters and its online encounter with itself, the user is not simply the site of a new interpellation or another méconnaissance, acquiring self-identicality from the systemic externality of the network, but is an asymmetrically and irreconcilably overcoded entity that short-circuits the ideas of community and self-determination.

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V A brief detour through the theology and philology that animates early network theory allows us to map the passage from the user’s bifurcated constitution to a different understanding of online community. The post-informational liberation of the user as consumer will finally occur, Being Digital imagines, when meditating technologies become, in effect, invisible: the ‘digital marketplace’ will be realized only when ‘the interface between people and their computers improves to the point where talking to your computer is as easy as talking to another human being’.75 Echoing Negroponte’s anticipation of the moment in which digital meditation mimics the intuitive immediacy of interpersonal communication, Rheingold declares his faith in the capacity for online exchange to be reliable and honest. Allowing the authentic expression of almost the full range of human emotion and behaviour (‘People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind’76), virtual community for Rheingold promises so much for participatory democracy – a utopian agora built around the principles of ‘a citizen-designed, citizen-controlled worldwide communications network’77 – because it can overcome the limitations that inhibit traditional forms of community. Rather than being essentially alienating, sacrificing the proximity of personal contact to the detachment that comes with technologicallymediated – and, indeed, written – communication, Rheingold replies that a shared environment exists online for those who would otherwise remain separate, a space for those who prefer the processed structurality of written language over the spontaneity of speech. Online communication is, then, conceived as reliable because it acts as a medium that can, directly and without corruption, reproduce the purity of the spoken word; community is where sovereign interiority is authentically articulated and externalized in a coded environment. When Rheingold describes this community as bound together by a ‘tacit understanding’ which ‘sanctifies virtual space’,78 he invokes a de profundis narrative of the passage from the mundane to the celestial. Surpassing relationships that occur offline, this image of networked association as a sacred space converges with visions of networked transcendence that stretch from Tielhard de Chardin’s and Vernadsky’s cosmology of the noosphere to McLuhan’s



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divination of humanity’s rapturous disembodiment. ‘Might not our current translation of our lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?’,79 McLuhan asks. To take such a rhetorical turn is, however, to replace one theology with another: troping computer use as an act of quasi-religious grandiosity becomes an informational version of what David Nye terms ‘the technological sublime’, which manufactures a sense of unity by providing ‘a way to reinvest the landscape and the works of men with transcendent significance’.80 No longer simply the enhancement of the online participant-user’s otherwise secure identity nor the attainment of a spiritual collectivity, the sanctification of network culture instead functions to ensure social stability. If association of some form does develop online, then perhaps it neither begins in immanence nor ends in transcendence, neither establishing an amity of self-identical users nor initiating a shared state of becoming divine. If subjectivity is acquired through association – if the self that logs into online groups does not arrive fully laden with a pre-social substance; if it is not individuals that constitute community – then what brings this association to life? And, if consciousness is not being upgraded by its online sublimation, how are digital networks affecting those who move through them? What is the place of representation in an environment that is built on the pursuit of communicative immediacy? Nancy’s response to these questions – that community is both initiated and withheld by literature – is borne out by fictions in which identification becomes possible only with acts of external affiliation, especially through representational technologies in which contact is always mediated and communication is always contaminated by noise. Two novels – Jeannette Winterson’s The.PowerBook and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – show what community as a noisy mediation might look like. The.PowerBook is most easily read as a text written in the wake of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler; structured as a series of intersecting and embedded micronarratives, this text is where technologies become the site for self-reinvention and the body becomes a mutable repository for sex and desire. In the Orlando-inspired mise-en-abyme tale of a sixteenth-century Turkish flower courier, for example, corporeality is turned into a masquerade when her body becomes resexed by the tulips she transports in her trousers: ‘what if my body is a disguise?,’ she asks, ‘What if skin, bones, liver, veins, are

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the things I use to hide myself?’81 Moving restlessly across time (from the sixteenth to the twentieth century) and place (Turkey, Holland, London, Paris and Capri), Winterson’s characters break with their habitualized environments to encounter a defamiliarized ‘Space without weight or gravity, where bit by bit the self disintegrates’.82 And this text saturates itself in a symbolic order drawn from computing technologies: its title both suggests a website URL and points (complete with intercapping) to one of Apple’s earliest generation of portable devices (produced at a time when Apple packaged itself as corporate nonconformity); for the contents page (‘MENU’) and some chapter titles (‘NEW DOCUMENT’, ‘HELP’, ‘QUIT’, ‘REALLY QUIT?’, and ‘RESTART’, among others), word-processing commands provide the lexicon for characters’ relationships; and the intratextual use of email remodels the epistolary novel for the information age. What these technologies are exposing, The.PowerBook suggests, is the collapsing nature of nature, the disintegration of the border that separates actuality and artificiality: When I sit down at my computer, I accept that the virtual worlds I find there parallel my own. I talk to people whose identity I cannot prove. I disappear into a web of co-ordinates that we say will change the world. What world? Which world? It used to be that the real and the invented were parallel lines that never meet. Then we discovered that space is curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet.83

Despite these symbolic and structural qualities, Winterson’s text nevertheless maintains a nervous distance from the technologic that it constantly appears to embrace; her ‘use of virtual reality is a metaphorical one, enabling her to explore familiar themes of love, desire and boundaries’.84 The.PowerBook in this manner invokes the hyperbole that equates virtuality with a consensual, deterritorialized and illimitable liberty: In this space which is inside you and inside me I ask for no rights or territories. There are no frontiers or controls. The usual channels do not exist. This is the orderly anarchic space that no one can dictate, though everyone tries. This is a country without a ruler. I am free to come and go as I please. This is Utopia . . . This is the model of government for the world. No one will ever vote for it, but everyone comes back here. This is the one place where everybody comes.85



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But Winterson is not describing the gravitational pull that networked sociality and informational superabundance exerts on anyone with a computer and a modem; the clamorous state she describes is not the unruly amity of being online, and the inevitability of union is not that of deregulated digital citizenship. Rather, it is sex – or, more precisely, sex between women – that allows such an ecstatic displacement. Although superficially relishing the uncertainties and opportunities that are often associated with the fluid and fabricated subjectivities that are made possible by digital and network culture, The.PowerBook therefore retreats from notions of the body made virtual and instead turns to materiality’s reinvention (‘Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl’,86 she writes), as well as to a reinscription of customary literary topoi. This is also a return to the question of writing itself, and in Winterson’s text it is as a fabulation – not as the conjunctive association of discrete subjects – that community becomes possible. ‘I keep telling this story’, she writes, ‘different people, different places, different times – but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tightrope between two worlds’.87 The two worlds that become attached here are not just those of the real and the invented; rather, The.PowerBook suggests that the ‘I’ that narrates is itself internally differentiated, itself dividualized by time and space, attaining unity with itself and community with others only because of the contact that writing allows. Chronotopological collisions also structure Mitchell’s fiction, where historically and geographically distinct narratives chiasmically converge across time and space to produce an elaborate sense of planetary and transtemporal connectedness that leaves notions of global uniformity or human universality in ruins. In these novels, it is often subtle, unspoken, and invisible minutiae that bind otherwise disparate and dispersed characters together; rather than allowing individuals to express their will to interaction, technologies become humanity’s uncanny double which produces the human. For Schoene, Mitchell’s work dramatizes Nancy’s reading of community as an incessantly reshaped non-finitude that is inhabited by the subject as a singularity lacking self-identity. Globalization here becomes the mondialization to which both Schoene and Derrida refer, not the inclusive belonging of a world that has become present to itself, but a condition of perpetual coalescence and dispersion that establishes connections but never produces systemic totality. ‘Mitchell’s ambition’,

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Schoene writes, ‘is to imagine globality by depicting worldwide human living in multifaceted, delicately entwined, serialised snapshots of the human condition, marked by global connectivity and virtual proximity as much as psychogeographical detachment and xenophobic segregation’.88 Certainly, as Schoene observes, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas establishes the connected and detached, proximate and segregated co-ordinates of a disjunctive association that extends across human history. Built around six episodes that touch on, fold into and unravel each other, this novel works against a Joycean sense of spatial or territorial paralysis – the hemiplegia that Dubliners so famously finds in metropolitan modernity – by tracing the dynamic interactions that traverse and connect each of these moments across history as a longer duration. Cloud Atlas opens with ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing’, the ship-bound travelogue of a nineteenth-century American lawyer, though this chronicle is interrupted by ‘Letters from Zedelghem’, the missives of Robert Frobisher, a disgraced and disinherited musician who flees England for Belgium in 1931 to become a composer’s amanuensis. Again interrupted, these letters are succeeded by ‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, a tale of nuclear industry criminality and corporate corruption in 1970s California, which is itself replaced before completion by ‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish’, the eponymous character of which finds himself unexpectedly committed to a nursing home after a publishing deal leaves him pursued by vengeful relatives. ‘The Orison of Sonmi~451’ follows the story of Cavendish’s unfinished ordeal; here, a genomically produced fabricant in what was once Korea confesses to the crime of sedition before her execution. At the centre of this chiasmus is ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After’, a post-apocalyptic tale set in Hawaii after ‘the Fall’, where Sonmi~451 is revered as a deity; at the close of this story, Cloud Atlas then returns to and successively resolves each preceding episode. Cloud Atlas does not simply organize these narratives in a thematically related seriality, however, since it tracks connections that iteratively tie its principal characters together in a manner which, suggesting a transtemporal and spatially dispersed human condition, denies the schismatic separation of nations, races, or ethnicities. Indeed, the novel stands against the polygenist opinions of the preacher documented in Adam Ewing’s journal, who (like Linnaeus, Cuvier, or Gobineau) classifies biological type according to a scala naturae:



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Highest of all the races on this ladder stands the Anglo-Saxon. The Latins are a rung or two below. Lower still are Asiatics – a hardworking race, none can deny, yet lacking our Aryan bravery. Sinologists insist they once aspired to greatness, but where is your yellow-hued Shakespeare, eh, or your almondeyed da Vinci? . . . Lower down, we have the Negro. Good-tempered ones may be trained to work profitably, though a rumbunctious one is the devil incarnate.89

Racial hierarchies of this sort, as well as less problematic distinctions between ethnic and national identity, become unsustainable in Cloud Atlas as a result of the confluences that bridge this novel’s historical and geographical locations. Of the various motifs, events, traits and objects that signal this convergence, perhaps the most visible or tangible is the cometshaped birthmark inscribed upon the novel’s dramatis personae, suggesting an otherwise-overlooked biological inheritance that connects characters across time and space, and which overcomes sexual, national, ethnic, generational and contextual differences. This bodily legacy is complicated by the persistence of memory for these characters: each remembers events from others’ stories and images echo across their different moments, suggesting that the connections between them are not just the product of genealogically transmitted genetic code but are evidence of metempsychotically shared identity. Cloud Atlas itself, however, questions this notion of disembodied transubstantiation: Timothy Cavendish, when considering Luisa Rey’s manuscript for publication, remarks ‘One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggie new-age’.90 Later in the text, this repetition is extended beyond the metaphysics of transubstantiation when, in the suicide letter that concludes Frobisher’s narrative, recurrence is described as an underlying historiographic condition: Certainties. Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools and states, you’ll find indelible truths at one’s core. Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortazar’ll sail again and, later, Ewing will too. I’ll come to Bruges again . . . you’ll read this letter again, the Sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.91

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Schoene reads the perpetuity of rebirth and recurrence in Cloud Atlas as a novelistic treatment of ‘humanity’s potential for communal affiliation across the generations’, with the implied remembrances between characters conveying a feeling of personal dissociation and shared community rather than denoting the memories of a reincarnated entity. ‘All Mitchell’s novel does’, Schoene writes, ‘is materialise our consciousness of humanity’s global being-in-common by writing onto the body of his protagonists the mysterious actuality and endurance of history’.92 However, as much as Cloud Atlas establishes subjectivity as divisibility and represents community as constitutive of those who populate it, it also conceives this global and abstracted inhabitation as a textual affiliation. Nietzsche’s endlessly replaying gramophone record does not simply suggest a repeated transfiguration of the human, but the poetic and rhetorical intensification of human relations that have always been linguistically situated,93 and in Cloud Atlas too it is textuality that shapes relations between protagonists. Narrative here acts thematically and formally, since the perpetual embedding of texts within other texts is an abiding concern of Mitchell’s novel. Adam Ewing’s journal is discovered in Belgium by Robert Frobisher, whose letters are later read by Luisa Rey. Rey’s story arrives as a fictional manuscript on Timothy Cavendish’s desk, meaning that the two preceding narratives referred to in it become intratextually embedded fictions. Cavendish’s ordeal is viewed as a film by Sonmi~451, whose testimony (described in the text as a ‘narrative’ of ‘scripted events’94) is archived on an ‘Orison’, a visual recording device which is watched by Zachry in ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’’. If, in this vertiginous narrative layering, Cloud Atlas looks to only to fictions to confirm the validity of textual events, then ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’’ appears to stand alone as the single episode which, because it does not subsequently become absorbed into another fictional stratum, endorses realism as the novel’s generic centre of gravity. And yet, even here events take on a fabulated quality: not only has Zachry’s society adopted a theology that takes Sonmi (as a mythical figure or a representation) as its idol, but the perverse temporality embraced by Cloud Atlas situates this moment as a precursor to (and therefore incorporated into) the fictional worlds of Adam Ewing, Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish and Sonmi~451. If subjectivity is shown in Cloud Atlas to be an originary being-in-common, then this condition is also depicted as an effect



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of symbolic systems that allow contact and communication to take place. For Cloud Atlas, in other words, global community is a fiction. Read thus, Winterson’s and Mitchell’s texts dramatize Nancy’s description of literature (against the Platonic treatment of storytelling as an inhibitor of community formation) as the site where association is both inaugurated and interrupted. For Nancy, community is not so much exhibited as enacted by literature; rather than providing content that can be communicated or a thematic that can be transmitted, literature offers a perpetual calling together – a tireless repetition of contact but also a withholding of the horizon or limit that would circumscribe thought, truth and being. The singularity of literature is to be found not in a ‘designation’ of community, but in ‘an inscription of the communitarian exposition . . . this exposition, as such, can only be inscribed, or can be offered only by way of an inscription’.95 Without hardening into ‘the literary’ as a representational monolith or collection of generic structures, literature as inscription exposes – or, more precisely for Nancy, ex-poses – being-in-common as both convocation and caesura: Literature interrupts itself: this is, essentially, what makes it literature (writing) and not myth. Or, better, what interrupts itself – discourse or song, gesture or voice, narrative or proof – that is literature (or writing). Precisely what interrupts or suspends its own mythos (that is to say, its logos).96

Preventing the fulfilment of the association that it calls into being, literature is the domain of the possible and impossible, constantly suspending itself as a founding enunciation even as it continues to inscribe finitude as the condition for meaning. Literature, then, is where community takes place incessantly. If The.PowerBook and Cloud Atlas find this divided and written opening of finitude in the subject which is, from its inception, a being-in-common, then in The Cybergypsies it is in online networks that community is inscribed – produced and suspended – as an unthinkable, illimitable and written bond. Here, despite framing the gathering of online groups in the language of the connected and enhanced subject-as-user, cyberspatial assembly becomes a zone of ecstatic singularity, one made possible by a writing that interrupts the literary. Certainly, the idea that memoir generically stands apart from the fictional is troubled by Sinha’s text. The communities it documents – as well

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as the experience of community that takes place with the formation of online groups and multiplayer games – are ultimately construed not as an electronic extension of face-to-face relationships, but as an association that is brought together as a fiction and established by writing. This sense of the textual can be tracked across The Cybergypsies. The boards and gaming domains that Bear inhabits are, at a time when online activity occurred without sounds or images (except for occasional ANSI graphics), shown to be forged as written environments. ‘The Vortex’, an exclusive board to which Bear is invited, is described as ‘a small theatre group . . . which creates, stages, improvises, performs and is simultaneously audience’;97 Luna, the designer and moderator of this board, is a shape-shifting figure who denies her offline existence and finds identity in the rewriting of self; against the notion that authenticity and reliability are defining features of cybersociality, here it is around a transformative selfauthoring that online community becomes possible. Structurally, Sinha’s text is built around intrusions, interruptions, elisions and narrative resequencings which prevent it from sliding into the naturalism that typifies the memoir as a genre. Compounding the sense that The Cybergypsies is situated somewhere between autofiction and creative nonfiction – that it should be placed in the quasi-literary legacy of the fictitious memoir: Defoe, Goldsmith, Miller, Angelou, or Eco – this text rejects the masquerade of pure reminiscence and instead embraces writing as both a generic demand and an opportunity to trouble memory’s inscription in an act of sterile or uncorrupted recollection. Scraps of Roger Garfitt’s ‘Animula’, torn from a magazine, are accidentally rearranged to form a poem that evokes the reassembled texts of Tzara, Burroughs, Gysin, Cortázar, or Michael Joyce. Later, in a moment that echoes Coupland’s imaging of the synthetic interlacing of cognition and software, one of Bear’s memories becomes distorted when file clustering breaks down: The system files are being rebuilt or re-created or possibly even vandalised. Vmpr.dllDheevaeilnifmorpoefdilfaocr,Moiccsriocsnoaf rtf ibnya Sflr acnn IF iynnnaepgmaonc F&i nyneeelsufkglaanm ‘Ox’ Mnaalgleenyn i&f Qcnoaaoo;ssmgpeannnyi FI nxca.rFSoeewaynb PhillipAllTrinCollCambridgeLilithACedarAveJeffreyArchwizLonS mbicouseFtrftityaadpigeonsconueir]donqpopE17[p=35ehdßÖn¶fsccio7m,-ô◊ŒŸ»¡Àʹœ ,œ¬≈˝–≈fi… ¡¿>…» ˝≈¡Ã…/¡ √…¿ ÀœŒ˝΄…΄΄… œŒŒŸ» –˝¡ fi≈Ãœ◊À¡



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