CHAPTER 12

Cultural Studies and New Media

Caroline Bassett

On being less forgetful

Digital codes currently direct themselves against letters, to overtakethem . . . a new form of thinking based on digital codes directs itself againstprocedural ‘progressive’ ideologies, to replace them with structural,systems-based, cybernetic moments of thought . . . a sudden almost incom-prehensible leap from one level to another. (Flusser, Die Schrift: HatSchreiben Zukunft?, cited in Strohl 2002: xxxiii)

Although ‘New media theory’ does open the way for the decline or end ofmass communication, it has not really introduced any fundamentally newissues of communication theory. (McQuail 2002: 19)

A flashback

Two summers ago, in Washington, DC, I encountered what was popularlysupposed to be the city’s first flashmob. A sudden flock of cell phone usersdescended on Books A Million in Dupont Circle and read magazinestogether. Old media became the content of a new media action. As DC mil-itarised and the concrete barriers around the administrative centre ofAmerica at war multiplied, this ‘happening’, faintly redolent of situation-ism but utterly lacking its political heart, made the pages of the WashingtonPost, which subtitled its story ‘ “Flashmobs” Gather Just Because’.Perhaps Terry Eagleton had a point when he said that sometimes someculture is not the most important thing (Eagleton 2002: 51).

Despite its apparent emptiness, or because of it, this event poses someinteresting questions for the theorisation of new media, one of which ishow media actions can be understood not only in relation to the historicaland geo-political contexts within which they take place, but also in relationto questions of technology and medium. The flashmob event might be

understood within critical horizons that locate technology in a dominantrelation to culture (or vice versa), or within less dichotomous frameworks,for instance those that place technology and culture on an immanent plane.

Flashmobs, of course, are part of a larger new media ecology predicatedon media technologies/media systems arising through processes of digitalconvergence. Convergence began in the 1980s, with the rise of popular per-sonal computing and the rapid expansion of global computer networks,and continues today. It describes a process through which previously dis-crete media forms, media industries and media contents are drawntogether, so that many old media forms are re-mediated, and many newforms are produced, although distinctions between new, old and recombin-ant media are rarely absolute. The mobile phone, a highly converged objectwithin a highly converged system, is thus typical in that it contains oldmedia forms alongside new ones and recombines them in new ways. Theextent and reach of convergence, and in particular the degree to which dig-italisation has redrawn or dissolved distinctions between media systemsand other forms of material culture, are fiercely debated within theacademy (by political economists, sociologists and media theorists in par-ticular), and beyond it (by those who play the markets, by those who areplayers in the media industry, and by those who legislate, for instance).Fuelling the arguments is a series of di!erent assessments of the scope andpower of these new media forms/new media systems and of the degree towhich they impose new modes of significance or instantiate new culturallogics.

The place of cultural studies within all this is interesting. Its interdisci-plinary constitution, its history of engagement with the new, the unsancti-fied and the marginal, and its commitment, at least in some versions, to thestudy of questions of power mean it ought to be a useful or even a ‘natural’site for the analysis of the converging, boundary-breaking, heterogeneousforms that constitute the new media landscape. This has not been the case.Instead, a di!erent formation has emerged. Most strikingly, within writingthat explores techno-culture (defined here as ‘techno-cultural theory’), anincreasingly influential body of work that finds its roots in medium theoryand media philosophy has rejected cultural studies more or less entirely.This work finds inspiration in the German tradition of medium theoryexemplified by Kittler and by Luhmanite systems theory (see, for instance,Hayles 2002, as well as Winthrop-Young in this volume) and has also reliedheavily on the monist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (see Rossiter2003; Rodowick 2001). A number of these theorists, while acknowledgingwork on cybernetics and information theory by intradisciplinary pioneerssuch as Kittler (1997) and Flusser (2002), also tend to draw directly on

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first- and second-wave cybernetics and information theory, reconsideringthe work of Shannon and Wiener (see Terranova 2004, and below). Theaim has been to build new models for the study of new media, based notonly on cybernetics’ modelling of complex feedback loops, and on infor-mation theory as a system for message transmission and control, but alsoon the logics of probability on which these sciences draw.

This development has been balanced by the burgeoning of fine-grainedempirical work on new media and new media use emanating from a ‘soci-ological turn’ within media studies (Mansell 2004: 96), evidence of whichcan frequently be found in journals such as New Media & Society. Thiswork stands in stark contrast to the often highly speculative critical-theoretical accounts described above, but is di!erent again from the ‘main-stream’ cultural studies accounts that do exist, not least because the latterare marked by their tight focus on the discursive construction both oftechno-cultures and of technological artefacts/systems ‘themselves’ (seePenley and Ross 1991 for an early example; or Sterne 2003 for an excellentlater one).

Finally, the focus of study within techno-cultural writing is also chang-ing. Many scholars who were active in the field of new media in the 1990sare now fixing their gaze on new ‘new horizons’ (biotechnology, nanotech-nology, genomics) and moving away from the ‘media sector’ as it is nar-rowly defined – I recognise that this last term begs a question.

The splits and divisions now developing within the field of techno-cultural writing need to be understood in relation to the popular and crit-ical techno-cultural hysteria that accompanied the explosive growth ofnetworked technologies in the 1990s. This period was marked by a seriesof accounts of techno-culture which were highly celebratory and whichoften, despite their theoretical abstraction, simply tail-ended corporateboosterism, processing the industry’s tales of the networking revolution thatwould render us all free rather than critiquing their fundamental assump-tions – one of which might be what constitutes freedom in the first place.(As Barbrook and Cameron (1995) pointed out, this ‘Californian’ ideologyonly found its mirror image in the ‘European dystopianism’ that was alsoin vogue at the time.) Taking the techno-cultural narratives o!ered by themarketing wings of the new media corporations for real was bound to fail.The software industry has been famous for vapourware of all kinds; accur-ate prediction was never really the point, which was rather to gain supportfor a particular version of the future – to be guaranteed by one or othersoftware standard. It is because they are essentially all the same that cor-porate visions of new media worlds were and are revealed to be ideologic-ally loaded. As Kittler put it, in one of his lighter moments, cyberspace

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ideology is the ‘foam packaging’ of the products of the software industry‘turned to the outside’ (Kittler, cited in Johnston 1997: 3).

I am interested here in why techno-cultural theory so often cleaved tothe info-corporate line, and in whether it is likely to do so again, perhapswhen faced with new new media technologies. Do the theoreticalapproaches currently being undertaken look likely to avoid such a rever-sion in the future? These are the questions addressed in this chapter, whichis also an appeal for a form of cultural studies that is less forgetful, less sus-ceptible to the scouring power of the new. This form of cultural studiesneeds to relate to, but not collapse into, other recent approaches to thestudy of new media, including some of those adumbrated above. One ofmy questions, indeed, is whether the turn to media philosophy andmedium theory could mark a rewriting/rewiring of cultural studies, ratherthan registering as a hostile response to it.

The chapter comes in two parts. The first half looks at early encountersbetween cultural studies and computer science, exploring technology andforgetfulness. The second half considers Jameson’s account of cyberpunkand dirty realism, in the context of Terranova’s conception of informa-tional culture, reading both in relation to speculative software, here under-stood as a critical art practice, as a form of tactical media, and possibly as away of ‘doing’ cultural studies.

Under the sign of language

Traditionally, mass communications research has conceptualized the processof communication in terms of a circuit or loop. (Hall 1992a: 128)

Contemporary medium theory is marked by a series of returns to the earlycybernetics and information theory of Shannon and Wiener, which wasdeveloped alongside computers themselves, in the nascent Cold War con-texts of the 1940s and on. These returns come as hard science attempts towrest ownership of ‘theory’ from cultural studies and from the humanities,demanding that science is understood in its ‘own’ terms (see Zizek 2002:19); that its own response to the ‘systematic, totalizing claims of philoso-phy’ (Weber 2000) produces a valid and complete understanding of a total-ity that encompasses the social and the physical world, perhaps.

There are some parallels here. Cybernetics in particular was formulatedas a ‘general concept’ model, one ‘capable of modelling command andcontrol systems ‘in man and machine’ (Wiener 1961; Johnson 1997: 7; myitalics), and the potential for this new ‘computer science’ to cross over fromthe hard sciences to the social and human sciences was recognised – and

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championed – early on. Studies of formally organised cross-over eventssuch as the Macy conferences have begun to document this activity (seeGere 2002: 52) but only brush the surface of a process of di!usion that waslargely informal and no less pervasive for that. Indeed, in the decades fol-lowing its inception, the direct and indirect influence of cybernetics andinformation theory within the humanities was profound. Briefly, this influ-ence is evident in structuralism/poststructuralism (e.g. Barthes 1982),psychoanalysis (e.g. Lacan 1988), apparatus and screen theory (e.g. Metz1974) and mass communications theory (Carey 2002). In the post-ColdWar years, however, cybernetics was consigned to relative obscurity, cer-tainly falling out of favour as a model equally capable of describing thesocial world and the human psyche and of defining the dynamics of (infor-mation) machines. Information theory too became understood as operat-ing in a more restricted field.

Cultural studies itself was not developed in ignorance of first-wave cyber-netics/information theory or of systems theory. In fact it might be said to bean indirect response to the extension of various scientific and functionalistmodels of analysis in the humanities, and was certainly, at least in itsBirmingham years, a very direct response to dissatisfaction with the domi-nance of mass culture/mass communication theories (the latter being itselfdirectly influenced by information theory). Stuart Hall points out that anysearch for the origins of cultural studies is largely an illusory process (Hall1992b: 16), but ‘Encoding/Decoding’ is an extremely important and influ-ential text within a particular era and tradition of cultural studies and in itHall broke with cybernetics and information theory’s models and principles,rejecting the more or less absolute division between communication andmeaning posited by these theories, and with it the view that interference inthe system amounted to ‘noise’ and should be set aside (Hall 1992c: 118).

In the place of cybernetics’ and information theory’s transmissionmodels and feedback loops Hall set a circuit of culture. This encompassesproduction and reception, but prioritises the semiotic moment, ensuringthat ‘the symbolic form of the message has a privileged position in thecommunicative exchange’ (Hall 2002: 303). Cultural studies thus works‘under the sign of language’. Indeed, there is nothing in this model that isoutside of language since, as D’Acci notes, despite the inclusion ofmoments of production and reception, the circulant in the encoding/decoding model is semiotic/discursive (D’Acci 2004: 425). This linguisticmodel produces particular lacunae, one of which concerns media technol-ogy. As Joshua Meyrowitz, a long-standing medium theorist, comments:‘most studies of the impact of media ignore the study of the media them-selves . . . [since] the medium itself is viewed as a neutral delivery system’

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(Meyrowitz 2002: 101). While the turn to language in cultural studies cer-tainly enabled some encounters to be staged (arguably it allowed theencounter between Marxism and psychoanalysis begun in Screen theory tobe continued on new grounds), it ruled out others. In particular, this turnmeant that technology was either rendered into discourse or set aside (setoutside), irrelevant to questions of signification or significance.

This is inevitably schematic, but now, having pointed to a break, I want toflag the degree to which Hall’s encoding/decoding model retains traces ofthese earlier histories, in the sense that it clearly remains a communicationalmodel. As such, it tends to reduce the complexity and breadth of culture tocommunication (or even transmission), thus ignoring its more expansiveand/or ritual aspect. This is a point Lawrence Grossberg has made fromwithin cultural studies (Grossberg 1997; see also D’Acci 2004: 430), drawingon James Carey’s early exploration of ritual aspects of culture and commu-nication to do so (see, for instance, Carey 2002: 43). In sum, Hall’s model forcultural studies, apparently resolutely linguistic, is haunted by the techno-logical, which comes in the form of an informing structural model or, toput it another way, in the form of an abstraction. What’s more, if modelsemployed by communication studies, themselves influenced by cybernet-ics/information theory, still influence cultural studies in particular ways,biasing the latter towards communication, this certainly isn’t often acknowl-edged in relation to new media – and although Steve Jones’ consideration ofthe 1990s rhetoric of the information superhighway takes up some of thesepoints in suggestive ways (Jones 2001: 57), what is not acknowledged is thetechnological redoubling involved here.

Theorisations of contemporary forms of networked new media havebeen conditioned by this early and often forgotten encounter betweeninformation technology (in its first-wave cybernetic moment) and culturaltheory. The widespread adoption of strong theories of social constructionwithin media studies’ explorations of media technology and everyday lifemight be understood within this trajectory (marking a move to remainwithin the media studies/cultural studies tradition whilst grapplingwith the technological); however, it also begins to suggest why manycontemporary techno-cultural scholars have tended to move away from the(attenuated) communications model Hall et al. o!er (where what is atten-uated is precisely the materiality of media technology; the medium),instead either returning to forms of medium theory avowedly influencedby cybernetic models and by information theory, or turning to empiricalsocial science, but in both cases rejecting cultural studies.

The first cybernetics/information theory moment is thus key to think-ing through some of the distinctions between contemporary cultural

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studies models and medium theory/medium philosophy’s treatments ofnew media. Consideration of the dynamics of innovation and di!usion ofmedia technologies – of the question of the new – can add to this accountin useful ways. This is provided in the next section in relation to amnesia.

Technology and forgetfulness

[A] technical invention as such has comparatively little significance. It is onlywhen it is selected for investment towards production, and when it is con-sciously developed for particular social uses – that is, when it moves frombeing a technical invention to what can properly be called available technol-ogy – that the general significance begins. (Williams 1989: 120)

The continuous process of innovation influences popular and criticalunderstandings of media technologies and the cultures in which they arise.New media technologies tend to be understood (given to us) as determin-ant and it is only later, when they are no longer new, when the next new mediatechnology has come along, that they are reassessed and explored in terms oftheir social shaping. This process operates in the critical sphere as well asthe popular and produces a form of oscillatory amnesia, an incapacity tohold technology and culture in view simultaneously. As Stallabrass notes,such amnesia often extends from the object under consideration to becomea general condition (Stallabrass 1999: 108–10), so that within these amne-siac circuits each significant new media technology in turn appears to holdthe promise of revealing information’s nature, as if for the very first time.This ‘nature’ is later forgotten as the moment of innovation is exhausted.That is, a previously new media technology (if it survives) becomes anaccepted part of everyday life, and is largely forgotten as a technology (inthis case as an information technology). Put yet another way, the popularinvisibility that comes with consumption is paralleled by dematerialisationin the theoretical register. Raymond Williams’ claim that technologies gaintheir significance and meaning as they are used and deployed as ‘availabletechnology’ (Williams 1989: 120) suggests how this might operate.Examples can also be found in the cases of electricity (Marvin 1988), tele-vision (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992) and cinema (in much receptiontheory). In all of these cases the passage of the media technology in ques-tion into everyday use has been marked in large part by its dissolution asan object. Slotted into a worldview characterised by a strong sense of socialconstruction, the material specificity of these technologies is forgottenand technological objects become cultural placeholders or fetishes, asLatour notes (2000). In sum, not only the status of particular new media

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technologies, but the status of technology per se, thus oscillates within thesecircuits.

Reviewing the recent history of techno-cultural theory in relation tothese circuits is interesting. The early technophobia described aboveoccurred at a moment of innovation, a moment in which specific new tech-nologies (notably the Internet) appeared to be extraordinarily powerful astechnologies, and in which the relationship between technology and culturewas reassessed and the power of the former to rewrite the latter a!rmed.Today we have reached a di"erent point in the circuit, and the cyber-theoretical works of the early cyberspace years – futurological, speculative,snake-oily, revolutionary, celebratory – have been largely taken over by themicro-sociological, by the media-philosophical, or by medium theory of amore considered kind, as I’ve noted above. In addition, the trend towardsthe reterritorialisation of new media into old disciplines (particularlynoticeable in film studies) suggests that others agree with Denis McQuail’srobust claim that not much fundamental has changed in the media/communications scene and that therefore no new models are needed.Finally, some of the early attempts to produce a political response to theexpected transformations of information appear to be exhausted. DonnaHaraway, patron saint of all forms of boundary-breaking within cybercul-ture, has abandoned her cyborg in favour of another other(ed) species, thistime canine rather than robotic (Haraway 2003). Man’s best friend hasbecome a cyborg surrogate for cultural studies’ most famous cyber-feminist. Truly, we live in slightly odd times.

The kinds of amnesiac circuits outlined here are not to be read mechan-ically, and certainly operate simultaneously, in overlapping ways, and atvarious scales. They do, I believe, produce particular recursions and lacunaeand have resulted in a history of thinking about innovation that is markedby abrupt shifts and turns, ruptures, breaks and (absolutely) new starts.

These circuits o"er a new perspective on the haunted history of culturalstudies, described above. As I read it, a certain form of cultural studies,marked both by its first encounter with cybernetics and systems theory ingeneral, and by its retreat from that encounter, has switched into anabsolutely cultural mode, operating either within semiotic/discursivechannels typical of cultural studies or within fairly strong versions of socialconstruction (to this extent poststructural and phenomenological oreveryday-life theorisations mesh). This form of cultural studies has there-fore been rendered problematic as a discipline able to handle new forms ofscience and/or new forms of technology. In other words, in relation totechnology, cultural studies has been more oscillatory than it has beengenuinely interdisciplinary.

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Sadie Plant has argued that cultural studies exhibits a form of interdisci-plinarity that confirms rather than breaks boundaries. As a consequence itsets out to legitimate what is already known rather than exploring ‘how andto what extent it is possible to think di!erently’ (Plant 1996: 216). This argu-ment is revealed here to operate with some force. Plant’s response is to rejectcultural studies entirely, in favour of new forms of connectionism, based ona second-wave cybernetics (Plant 1996: 213). My sense is that, despite theseproblems, cultural studies remains a site for productive forms of thinking.Which raises the question: would it be possible to break the amnesiac circuit?Would it be possible to read and use the past di!erently, to deploy it in orderto reconnect with some of the impulses that produced cultural studies as acritical discourse in the first place, whilst not losing the impulse to insist onthe materiality of the object that continues to power medium theory?

Taking this up, the second half of the chapter seeks forms of culturaltheory and practice that have been less forgetful in their attempts to thinkthrough connections between information and cultural form. It beginswith Tiziana Terranova’s bid to combine new left cultural studies andmedium theory through a return to, and updating of, cybernetics andinformation theory.

‘Informational culture?’

Network culture is inseparable from a kind of network physics and a networkpolitics. (Terranova 2004: 3)

Tiziana Terranova claims that ‘cultural processes are increasingly graspedand conceived in terms of their informational dynamics’ and that, as a con-sequence, there is ‘no meaning outside of an informational milieu’(Terranova 2004: 7–9). Her project is at once a commentary on these devel-opments and part of them, since the concept of ‘informational culture’ asshe develops it is not understood purely as a form of cybernetics. Rather,it rethinks the connections between new and old forms of cybernetics andthe contemporary cultural horizons that are developing as a result of therise of informational dynamics. Terranova’s premise (like Plant’s in fact) isthat while old forms of information science are problematic models forculture, newer systems based on second-order cybernetics, Artificial Life(AL) and chaotic systems, all of which allow for generation or emergence,are much more hopeful prospects. As she puts it:

We are no longer mostly dealing with information that is transmittedfrom a source to a receiver, but increasingly also with an informational

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dynamics – that is with the relation of noise to signal, including fluctuationsand micro-variations, entropic emergencies and negentropic emergences,positive feedback and chaotic processes. (Terranova 2004: 7)

Terranova herself defines the terms of the connections she exploresthrough the (Deleuzian) concept of the correlative. Di!erent models ofcomputer science are explored not as they are instantiated in culture, butas they correlate. This marks a break with the ways in which earlier gener-ations understood cybernetics to be operational. However, the claims togeneral applicability at the heart of the cybernetics project, which are thebasis for the proposed epistemological break information produces, remainand continue to produce particular consequences for reading the relationbetween theory and real-world e!ects, so that, as Saul Ostrow puts it,digital media systems ‘dissolve our ability to di!erentiate, on the level ofthe natural and the artificial, between such [digital media e!ects] and thoseof the theoretical import of information theory and cybernetics’ (Ostrow1997: xii). The argument that new forms of information theory avoid thereductive modernism (see Plant 1996) of early cybernetics, enabling lesstotalising ways of thinking about informational culture that might alsoavoid the paradeictic privileging of science ‘itself ’, cannot therefore beentirely justified. ‘Informational culture’ switches between science andculture (correlatively), but also makes arguments based on the assertionthat these are the same, or indeed, that they always already operate on thesame plane.

The wriggle room here is that Terranova’s account does not operatethrough a simple delete-and-insert process (i.e. the deletion of one cyber-netically determined worldview and the insertion of the next). Instead, amore-or-less simultaneous consideration of di!erent generations of infor-mation science exposes distinctions between contemporary cultural (nowinformational) forms. Thus, while the medium theory of Kittler tends toerase medial di!erence even while expanding the terrain of media intoa general information-scape (Kittler 1997: 31), Terranova’s approachexposes the new forms such di!erences might take. In particular, distinc-tions made between communication and information, or discourse anddialogue, are here put into play and considered not in terms of representa-tion, but in terms of medium specificity. The paradox of re-mediation isthat these ‘medium-specific’ qualities may migrate onto older or newerplatforms: being informational they become general, although they flour-ish in some environments and not others (Innis’s sense of media bias mightpertain here) (Innis 1991). Informed by this paradoxical specificity,Terranova develops an account of an informational regime in which the

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active, conscious practices of activists or tactical media operators are dis-tinguished from a new form of mass audience, while both are integral to anew media ecology (Terranova 2004: 136). This ‘other mass’, the ‘televisionpublic held hostage by powerful media monopolies in a topsy-turvy worldof propaganda and simulation’ (Terranova 2004: 135), is as integral to theinformational landscape as the net activists, and in that sense is (also) madeby new media.

Of course, throughout its history cultural studies has looked at the sup-posedly inert mass and found within it active movements of various kinds.The di!erence is that the mass described here arises after the end of an erain which encoding/decoding-style theorisations of reception might pertain,after the epistemic break information produced (which is to say within‘informational culture’). In this sense it arises after cultural studies, at leastof the kind that cleaves to Hall. This mass is read as a terminal ‘for thereceptive power of images’ existing where ‘meaning no longer takes hold’and where ‘all mediations have collapsed’, ‘where images are not encodedbut absorbed’ (Terranova 2004: 138–40). The prospects for new forms ofnetwork politics arise when this terminal mass changes state. ForTerranova this is when it becomes virtual.

Dirty realism

A precursor to Terranova’s concept of ‘informational culture’ can be foundin Fredric Jameson’s exploration of ‘dirty realism’, a term he uses to inter-rogate the informing process of information on (global) culture in ‘TheConstraints of Postmodernism’ (in Jameson 1994). In Jameson’s hands,dirty realism, a figure for the cultural logic of informated capital, implies‘the ultimate rejoining and re-identification of the organic with the mechan-ical that Deleuze and Haraway . . . theorize and celebrate; but within a cate-gory – that of totality – alien to either of them’ (Jameson 1994: 138). Thistotality is described partly through an exploration of a Rem Koolhaas cube,a design for the Library of France. Within this vast cube are various organs –stairs, rooms, pipes – bounded by but also floating freely within their con-tainer, which certainly cannot be grasped from the inside. Jameson arguesthat an archetypal form of dirty realism is also to be found in the cyberpunk-inspired environment of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, both in the formsof everyday life that the vertiginous blocks of the city (which produce adi!erent version of an enclosure that cannot be grasped) and the crowdedstreets enable, and in the erasure of a certain viewing distance.

If cyberpunk ‘realism’ (resolving impossible geographies) is here heldup in opposition to forms of naturalism, what is ‘dirty’ is ‘the collective as

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such . . . the traces of mass, anonymous living and using’ (Jameson 1994:158) that are found in and illuminate Blade Runner’s dark (noir) streets. ForJameson, Blade Runner is a prefiguration of the end of traditional forms ofcommunity, an ushering in of ‘a form of society beyond the end of the civilsociety’ that will produce new forms of action and interaction (Jameson1994: 160). These include new possibilities for ‘corporate comebacks’ ascapital finds its uses for street uses of technology. Jameson’s account ofthese new forms of collective life forcibly brings to mind Hardt and Negri’s(later) account of the biopolitical multitude in Empire, and this latter is awork Terranova explicitly draws on. Whereas Terranova’s multitude oper-ates in an immanent plane beyond the degree-zero of the political, however,some form of historical horizon remains in Jameson’s account of connec-tions made on the street, even if this horizon is beyond reach. Having saidthat, Terranova’s sense of the vitality of the multitude that springs to lifeafter meaning clearly resonates with Jameson’s account of the libidinalconnotations of dirty realism, and above all with that vitality (the life thatburns brightly and too fast) found in Blade Runner’s androids themselves.In both cases there is a utopian gesture, a hope for new kinds of culturalpolitics that might be founded on forms of human interaction with themachine – although of course Jameson’s utopian moment, in contrast toTerranova’s, is configured in fiction, and also in the text.

Tactical media: ‘How low can you go?’1

With the exception of the telephone we dialogue with each other in thesame way as those who lived during the Roman age. At the same time dis-courses raining down on us avail themselves of the most recent scientificadvances. However, if there is hope in preventing the totalitarian danger ofmassification through programming discourses, it lies in the possibility ofopening up the technological media to dialogue. (Flusser, cited in Strohl2002: xix)

Operating in a very di!erent sphere from Jameson’s cultural semiotics butsharing his sense of the importance of what the street can do, and resonat-ing also with Terranova’s concern to explore the phase change thatswitches the mass to the multitude, are new forms of medium activism.These trade in software itself. They seek to get low (for real), rather thangetting dirty within the text or remaining purely within the grounds oftheory, and use media technology to provoke various kinds of disturbance.

One approach to tactical media is found in speculative software. This isdefined by Matt Fuller as a form of art production and a form of cultural

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critique that ‘plays with the form not the content [of new media] or ratherrefuses the distinction while staying on the right side of it’ (Fuller 2003:14). Tactical media/speculative software thus begins with a focus on themedium itself. It certainly involves playing tricks in code (Rtmark’s noto-rious web redirects, or the recent Google hacks linking ‘Bush’ and ‘Blair’with various search terms, might be understood as speculative software),and also exposes tricks in the code of others. Clearly these tactical inter-ventions do not confine themselves to the medium. They rather refuse –and therefore expose – naturalised distinctions between form and content.These distinctions include those that are conventionally drawn betweenhigher- or lower-level layers in complex software architectures, governedby various protocols, which are assumed to be more or less ‘transparent’ or‘neutral’. Playing with this, one of Fuller’s works, for instance, explores theways in which Microsoft Word shapes user productions through its menu-driven interface ‘options’.

In refusing form/content distinctions at all levels, speculative softwarebreaks with traditional hacker values, which are predicated on a modernistkind of cybernetics and which therefore also valorise form over content.The desire to ‘get close to the metal’, a paradoxical way of expressing thatwish to find ‘the truth in code’, is recognised as characteristic of a particu-lar era of hacking (see Taylor 1999). It amounts in the end to a romance ofinformation and is a form of media sublime (Rossiter 2003). Kittler’s mod-ernist approach to information shares this characteristic since for Kittler,too, the only honest way to approach information technology and the onlypossibility for democracy in information society is through the granting offull or unmediated access to the machine-level code. The interface is intrin-sically dishonest, denying access to the system, the latter being understoodonly as code. In refusing this romance of code, speculative software is thusalso rejecting an essentially structural view of information technology infavour of an exploration of the processual characteristics and possibilities ofa medium that is only understandable in use, and in terms that include theuser. This exploration, both critical and political, interventionist andspeculative, is a form of cultural politics. As Fuller puts it, speculative soft-ware is ‘built to critically expose the mainstream model of the user – whilstat the same time creating social utopias in computer code’ (Fuller 2003: 3,my italics).

Speculative software and tactical media thus try to harness the force ofnew media to oppositional ends. In doing so, they both create and draw onmedium theory. However, while tactical media might find a new god insoftware, it most certainly refuses the injunction of all good cyberneticgods, which is to keep the noise down.2 Its point indeed is to practice a form

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of pollution; precisely to open the system. Despite tactical media’s sup-posed hostility to cultural studies, then, and despite its firm commitmentto the medium, its refusal to dissolve technology into discourse, asTerranova once put it (2000), we are not so far from Stuart Hall here as itmight at first appear.

Which raises the question: does tactical media o!er a form of culturalpolitics that is amenable to cultural studies? And what might Terranova’sand Jameson’s accounts have to o!er in this respect? It is important to bemindful of the very real di!erences in their respective approaches, whilstalso considering the connections. One link between tactical media’s bidto reconfigure and reimagine ‘using’, Terranova’s vision of the massturned multitude, and Jameson’s reading of Blade Runner is the sharedconcern to find a cultural politics within this new milieu, and to do so byrethinking the relationship between communication and culture. What Imean by this is that all of these accounts explore the possibilities forrethinking new media politics around forms of communion that mightoppose or undermine what Deleuze aptly called communicational stu-pidity, and all to some extent do so by considering forms of communica-tion in process.

There are of course distinctions to be made between tactical media asmedium action, dirty realism as a cultural semiotics, and Terranova’ssystems-influenced account of informational culture. These are veryevident in the form that the particular turn (or return) to the medium takesin each case, as I have shown. Jameson embarks on an exercise in cognitivemapping in a coming information milieu, described textually. Terranovadoes this by way of a return to cybernetic theory that is largely if notentirely immanent to the cultural forms she explores. Tactical media setsout to remap the possibilities for use and does so partly through an insist-ence on cultural politics as (also) practice.

Flash forward

I close the chapter with three doubts. My first is that tactical media, at leastin its less theoretically engaged forms, is all too easily subsumed within cul-tural studies’ discourses of resistance, so that despite the hostility of someof its practitioners, it comes to be viewed as (just) another form of subcul-tural activity. As such, it might lose its medium specificity, since thisderives less from the potential of an information system in the abstractthan from a sense of what the possibilities are for politics within a newsphere of engagement or interaction between humans and machines, whenthis interaction begins with the medium.

"#$%#&'$ (%#)*+( ',) ,+- .+)*' 233

My second doubt is that this neglects what is most interesting abouttactical media, which is its insistence on breaking the barrier betweencritical theory and critical practice. Many, like the unfortunate electronicZapatistas, have had their moment in a cultural studies sun that, at itsworst, does more to warm those who study forms of resistance than it doesto contribute to a movement. This works the other way around too, since,in so far as contemporary medium theory and medium practice lionisethe ‘processual as political’, it is in danger of repeating, albeit in the regis-ter of medium specificity rather than in relation to media ‘content’, bothcultural studies’ old fondness for the romance of resistance and its inca-pacity to register the limits of this resistance. This is to disparage neithertheory nor tacticalism/hactivism. It is to question certain presumed con-nections between theory and (creative) practice, and more broadly toquestion the connections drawn between (system) theory and the worldit models.

My third doubt concerns the degree to which a focus on tactical mediaobscures a strength of cultural studies, which is its capacity to considerforms of practice that do not register as explicitly political, and that do notrequire the kinds of active skills or expert knowledge that the free softwaremovement valorises and that tactical media employs, but which none theless do not conform.

A return to forms of cultural studies sensitive to questions of materialcreativity, material creative practice, and the material use of material tech-nologies within broader historical and economic contexts might avoidthese obstacles. This amounts to a demand for the (re)incorporation of thepolitical economy of the new media into cultural studies, here taking thenotion of political economy at its broadest, and reading cultural studies inits most interdisciplinary and least oscillatory moment: which is to say inits least forgetful moment. To abjure oscillation is not to abandon the hopeof political transformation, or of critique.

Terranova’s insistence that the ‘other’ mass, a many rather than theexpert few, can change state insists on the inherently political possibilitiescontained in all cultural forms and cultural practices. A flashmob thatrefused the injunction ‘only connect’ and in doing so refused the injunc-tion to disperse might be significant in all kinds of new ways.

Acknowledgement

This chapter stems from a research abroad period funded by theLeverhulme Trust and I would like to acknowledge their support. Thanksalso to Clare Birchall and Gary Hall for their comments and suggestions.

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Notes

1 Slogan for ‘The Next Five Minutes’, Tactical Media conference, Amsterdam,1999.

2 The demand of the gods of Gilgamesh.

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