IntroductionAuthor(s): Jodi DeanSource: Signs, Vol. 24, No. 4, Institutions, Regulation, and Social Control (Summer, 1999), pp.1067-1068Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175602 .

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Jodi Dean

Symposium Virtually Regulated: New Technologies and Social Control

Introduction

n this exchange, Lee Quinby, Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, and I examine the relationships between new technologies, in particular those con- nected with network computing and virtual reality (VR), and social reg-

ulation. We are interested in how these technologies (re)produce and

respond to regulation and in how they compel new theorizations of resis- tance in the information age. To this end, we consider the ways new tech-

nologies provide new forms of interaction, surveillance, and regulation of bodies in communication. We also consider how they serve as vehicles for the extension of regulations throughout the social field by providing op- portunities for the reassertion of certain normative forms of sex, exchange, and interaction.

Relying on some of the very technologies under consideration, we e-mailed our questions, answers, suggestions, and revisions back and forth

among ourselves. The electronic medium had a few noticeable effects on our interaction. First, the speed of it made me, as the editor, ever more impa- tient. I tended, rather unreasonably, to expect immediate replies. In retro-

spect, I wonder if Quinby and Sharpe may have attempted to resist my efforts at regulation by taking time to think through their ideas rather than

instantly hitting the reply button. Second, there was the unsettling aspect of neither carrying on a conversation nor reading/writing a paper but

doing something in between. We tended to move back and forth between formal and informal statements, between a kind of chatty, casual style and a more academic one. (This is not reflected in the final articles published here due to the regulatory diligence of copy editors.) Finally, and here I can

only speak for myself, my dependence on e-mail and networked computers made me hesitant in my critique of new technology. My investment in the communicative benefits of the Internet and my dependence on computers for my writing and research made me reluctant to accept the notion of

virile-reality theorized by Quinby and the possibilities of forbidden

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1999, vol. 24, no. 4] ? 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/99/2404-0007$02.00

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1068 I Dean

performances of race in a seemingly disembodied domain that Sharpe iden- tifies. Interestingly, I was more convinced of their positions when we spoke in person or on the phone. This interdependence and coexistence of vari- ous communications media needs to be kept in mind. It simply is not the case that one medium, VR, has taken over another, RL (real life).

Our responses express very different assessments of the possibilities for freedom presented by the Internet, VR, and new medical technologies. Sharpe is primarily concerned with the freedom to experiment with ra- cialized performances. Attentive to the coercive effects of racial disappear- ance on the Net, she raises the question of the fantasies that support racist, sexist, and homophobic reproductions of power relations in VR. Rather than celebrating cyberspace as a terrain without bodies or criticizing it for the prevalence of racist imagery, she calls for a divergence from the ex-

pected that will empower new ways of imagining visibility and embodi- ment. Quinby analyzes the apocalypticism oftechnoculture. Inquiring into the masculinist ideology of perfection that pervades techno-enthusiasm, she cautions us about its racist, homophobic, sexist, and violent implica- tions. More specifically, Quinby rejects the hype of newness and empha- sizes instead the continued presence of earlier power formations. Patri-

archy, in other words, does not just go away now that the Internet is in

place. Her feminist critique of technoculture draws out the insufficiency of assessments of new technologies that reassert masculinist values and mil- lennialist thinking. My concern is with the appeal to foundational truth that pervades Net criticism. Examining the rhetorics of infection and pro- tection used to express fears of technology, I consider the regulatory impli- cations of attempts to reassert the authority of the real.

Our responses thus consider different aspects of technological develop- ment at the dawn of the twenty-first century. I concentrate on computer- mediated communication and the Internet. Quinby takes up the larger context of bioperfection in contemporary technoculture, and Sharpe con- siders the meaning of race in the performative fantasies of VR. Nonethe-

less, although our emphases differ, our responses converge with respect to crucial issues regarding the relationships of virtuality to sex, race, action, and truth. That is to say, we concur in thinking that new technologies affect

embodiment, that freedoms they produce are inequitably distributed, and that failing to acknowledge the dangers of utopian and distopian themes in the rhetorics and ideologies of technoculture can be dangerous.

Department ofPolitical Science Hobart and William Smith Colleges

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