ARTICLE

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Digitopians
Transculturalism, computers and the politics
of hope
Jeff Lewis
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT In their search for an alternative politics, a number of cultural

theorists have turned towards computers and digitized communication. A new
utopianism (digitopia) is forming around the potential of networked computers
to enhance human communication and culture. In particular, theorists influenced
by poststructural and postmodernist ideas have argued that computer mediated
communication will transform subjectivity, community and democratic politics.
The limits of these theories can be measured against alternative notions of
transculturalism and the politics of doom.

KEYWORDS cyborg digitized space digitopia emancipation

imagination inhuman new media transculturalism

1. Doom

In the arcade game Doom the player must transpose his/her own identity
and ’lifeworld’ into the actions and sensations of the principal agent. Unlike
other computer games where the principal remains two-dimensional and
externally observed, the arcade player in Doom experiences the world
through the eyes and conduct of the character whom s/he manipulates. In
Doom this ’semblation’ process takes the player into encounters with mon-

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sters, bandits, perfidies, indeed a seemingly endless stream of dangers that

threaten at any point to cast the player (the alter-ego) into an everlasting
doom. The pleasure for the player is, presumably, the challenge of the game
and the semblation experience itself. Doom engages the player in a narra-
tive adventure, stimulating bodily responses without the actual peril of
death, or significant physiological, psychological or emotional trauma.
Moreover, for the committed and talented player, the arcade journey may be
successfully negotiated; the game may be won and the condition of ’doom’
may itself be obliterated. This victory represents, perhaps, the ultimate
arcade moment, the moment of designation whereby apparatus, program
and player achieve some semblamatic though genuinely experienced sense of
coalescence. This eschewal of doom in participant communion might use-
fully be characterized as an electronic nirvana, a digital utopia - a digitopia.
In considering this attainment, we might further analogize Doom with
the broad sphere of computer experiences. A good deal of recent futurist
writing seems consistently to attach to the computer the quality of cultural
and historic designation. Thus, the calumnies of territorial, symbolic and
cultural oppression may be neutralized or dissolved altogether through the
invocation of new, computer-based metaphors - new language games.
The computer is superhighway, World Wide Web, multimedia, digital
convergence, virtuality, cyborg, cyber-utopia. And, once wired, the new lib-
erated subject, the semblatized player, will have the opportunity to create
decorporealized and debordered spheres - ever-originating virtualities of
pleasure, geography, political structure and knowledge. Doom is jettisoned;
borders are banished. Digitopia is realized.
To betray this utopianism with doubt is to be the harbinger of an out-
moded, neo-modernist mode of doom. In this paper I want to look at doom
and hope in computer theoretics but with particular reference to the role of
the imagination, transnationalism and the phenomenon I have called trans-
culturalism. While this may seem a somewhat ambitious project for a paper
of this scope, my aim is really to establish the foundation for a more sub-
stantive investigation of the relationship between computer and trans-
cultural theoretics. To this end, I begin with an outline of the technological
utopianism that is emerging in cultural discourse; I then examine these dis-
courses in relation to current discussions on transnationalism and post-
colonial theory. The final part of the essay is devoted to an outline of a
transcultural computer theory.

2. Digitopians
The new media is proving an immensely fertile field for those postmodern-
ists and ’advanced’ liberal thinkers who regard the computer as an excep-
tional, perhaps unique, communicative mode (e.g. Poster, 1991, 1995). Of

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course modernism has had its own utopian politics - socialism constructed
through revolution or the Fabian transition; and liberal humanism con-
structed through its pillars of representative democracy, public education,
utilitarianism, and technological-capitalist progressivism. At its simplest and
most direct level, the new computer utopianism merely advances some of
the discursive trajectories of modernism, most particularly through an inten-
sification of individuals, their pleasures and their needs. Certainly the
machinery itself has been transformed discursively and functionally from a
macro corporate, military and scientific calculating machine to a more per-
sonalized communicative compendium; the Altair and Apple designs, in
fact, opened the apparatus to new markets and operations, as well as new
discursive and ideological possibilities (see Sinha and Stone, 1995). Even so,
it has been the more recent developments in ’virtuality’ and international
networking facilities (especially the Internet) which appear to have revived
the cultural and economic fortunes of the computer.
Indeed, the extravagance of these language games has characterized not
only the prescience of advertisers and technologists, but it has penetrated
with equal vigour into the discourses and operations of social, cultural and
aesthetic commentary. The imperative to ’be digital’ (Negroponte, 1995) is
affecting the whole range of academic disciplines, ’forcing a radical realign-
ment of the alphabetic and graphic components of ordinary textual com-
munication’ (Lanham, 1993: 3). Thus the hypertext (see Delaney and
Landow, 1993; Landow, 1992; Snyder, 1996) or ’hypermedia’, in
McLuhan’s terms, is seen to revolutionize writing, extend the human beyond
the ossification of author-centred, lineal and fixed text: ’lA]n electronic text
only exists in the act of reading - in the interaction between the reader and
textual structure ... the writing space’ (Boller, 1992: 20). The writing space,
that is, becomes the new field for the new player of these new language
games.
This concept of ’writing space’ is a significant metaphor in computer-
based cultural commentary. In fact, the coinage of innovative metaphors to
describe the abstract dimensions of information and its conduits has been
propitious, since it is this ’space’ that most dramatically distinguishes digi-
tized media from mechanical and material modes of communication. It is
largely through the application of these lingual tropes that cultural
commentators are able to locate a ’space’ for the play of ideas and the con-
struction of new ideological ’scapes’, as Arjun Appadurai (1990) might call
them. Nicholas Negroponte (1995, see also Fox, 1996), for example, dis-
tinguishes between ’atoms’ and ‘bits’1 to indicate an evolutionary shift in
the mode of commercial, communicative and cultural transfer. To this
extent, global product exchange (matter composed of atoms) will inevitably
be replaced by the movement of ’weightless bits at the speed of light’ (Negro-
ponte, 1995: 12). Digitized information will thus supersede the cumbersome
and wasteful forms of atomic information delivery, including the most

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outmoded media of all: newspapers, magazines and books. With its great
advantages of flexibility, error correction and data compression, digitized
information delivery offers enormous possibilities for social and economic
reformation: ’Wholly new content will emerge from being digital, as well as
new players, new economic models, and a likely cottage industry of infor-
mation and entertainment’ (Negroponte, 1995: 18). Being digital, then, will
most certainly release the everyday citizen from the clutches of large media
corporations; in an age of optimism, Negroponte assures us, the negative
consequences of computerization will be subsumed by its potential for the
liberation of social harmony and individual expression:
The harmonizing effect of being digital is already apparent as previously par-
titioned disciplines and enterprises find themselves collaborating, not com-
peting. A previously missing common language emerges, allowing people to
understand across boundaries... But more than anything, my optimism
comes from the empowering nature of being digital. The access, the mobility

and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different from
the present. (Negroponte, 1995: 230)
That optimism, it would seem, finally fulfils Descartes’s enduring wish for
a common language, a certitude that would rise from the ashes of ’present’
doubt. Negroponte’s vision is formed through a more heightened and com-
plete modernism, one that has freed itself from the domineering tendencies
of mass-ness, but which has not surrendered the ideal of universal contact.
Other commentators more deliberately and directly engage the conceits
of postmodernism against the hierarchical and stifling centredness of
modernism. McKenzie Wark (1994), for example, borrows from Howard
Rheingold’s (1993) notion of ’virtual community’ and Fredric Jameson’s
notion of culture as ’second nature’ to produce a postmodern version of digi-
tized global space. This ’virtual space’ suggests for the postmodern enthusi-
ast a notion of simulation without origin, a space in which all the peoples
and cultures of the world might mingle, liberated from the tyrannies of terri-
torial divide, imperialism and Euro-rationalist hierarchies - the disgraced
dominion of modernity. The cyberville, in this sense, extends the still cloying
global village concept of McLuhan by removing mass corporations and
mass messages; the networked terminal thus becomes a postmodern totem
of ’meeting places, work areas, and electronic cafes in which this vast trans-
mission of images and words become places of communicative relation’
(Poster, 1995: 26).
Thus, while some writers (e.g. Boller, 1992, 1993; Lanham, 1993;
Negroponte, 1995) remain somewhat fixed in notions of regulated and
essentialized community, observing that electronic networking should
enhance traditional modes of democracy and public participation, the
postmodernists appear to be seeking an even more ideal and diffuse
cultural formation. Andrew Ross (1991), in particular, has outlined the

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post-Enlightenment, New Age fusion of technology and mysticism for the

construction of modes of human experience (see also Zigura, 1994),2
new
while Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) doubts the validity of essentialized com-
munity at all, noting that community is of itself resistant to dispersal, frag-
mentation and the political self.3 Felix Guattari (1992), long interested in
the construction of liberated and fragmented subjectivities, also invokes the
computer as providing ’the most dazzling crossings between heterogeneous
domains’ of path/voices which would constitute new modes of power dis-
persal and ’universes of virtuality, the best endowed with lines of proces-
suality’ (Guattari, 1992: 19). In this sense, we can ’reduce and encode our
identities as words on a screen, decode, and unpack the identities of others’
(Rheingold, 1993: 61), producing disembodied forms of self that are not
contingencies of class, ethnicity, gender or creed (Guattari, 1992: 19,
29-30) - through digitized space the fixities of self and power are easily
and completely erased.
Georges Canguilhem (1992) and Donna Haraway (1991) have further
extended the metaphor of bodilessness in order to confirm a new politics
of technological emancipation. Haraway’s cyborg, in particular, a fusion
of molecular and digital structures, is conceived as the evolutionary
descendant of the bodied and power differentiated anthropoid. Thus, the
cyborg may appear animal and material, invincible and perishable, utopian
and mythical, corporeal and opaque, male and female, historical and sub-
versive. It rises from, yet ultimately defies, its capitalist-militaristic parent-
age :
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perver-
It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence. No longer
sity.
structured by the polarity of public,and private, the cyborg defines a techno-
logical polis, based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the
household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the
resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships
for forming wholes from parts, including those for forming polarity and hier-
archical domination are at issue in the cyborg world. (Haraway, 1991: 151 )

Haraway insists that hermetaphor is not mere futurism (see also Willis’s
examples, 1996), but genuine eschewal of theoretical incompleteness, a
a

lingual figure which fuses complex social critique - socialist, feminist, post-
structural - with imaginative conceit: the new lingual ’body’ of the cyborg
synthesizes an ’informatics’ of liberation, including the reconciliation of the
Enlightenment division of culture and nature.4 This informatics would seek
to advance semblation beyond the entertainment perimeters of arcade games
and capitalist processes generally. Haraway’s utopianism imagines a desig-
nation well exceeding the pleasure/knowledge of Doom, though, she would
insist, the knowledge of the cyborg is no less improbable nor painful in its
accomplishment.

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3. Dis-orientation

Theories developed through such powerful and imaginative lingual tropes

tend to resist logical or rationalist episteme. Guattari (1992) concedes as
much in his account of the three principal path/voices that constitute con-
temporary capitalism - the first two (via religion, nation, and globalist
commerce) being most prolific and bound by hierarchy, crisis, and rhizomes
of domination and subjugation; the third (via the ’postmedia’ personal com-
puter) being utopian, processual, liberatory and immanently ephemeral. The
postmedia path/voice, Guattari maintains, offers the greatest hope for the
two-thirds of all humanity whose lives are a constant misery, and also for
the remainder who continue to exist ’under the massive control of appara-
tuses of power and knowledge, thus consigning technical, scientific and
artistic innovations to the service of the most reactionary and retrograde
figures of sociality’ (Guattari, 1992: 33). ’Dissensual’ media transcends the
consensual media of mass corporations: the debordering of subjectivity is
co-correlative to the debordering of state controlled social space. The liber-
ation of self, therefore, is necessarily the liberation from the fixities of those
apparatuses of nation, mass media, corporation and capital.
This form of technological utopianism clearly implicates wider fields of
transnational and global cultural debate. Ien Ang and Jon Stratton (1996)
have attempted to advance such debates (see also Appadurai, 1990; Bhabha,
1987; Docker, 1991, 1995; Hall, 1991a, 1991b; Hall et al., 1992: 284-313;
Lewis, 1994), pointing to the tendency of postcolonial theory to restore and
essentialize imperialist fixities. According to Ang and Stratton, post-
colonialism fails to address adequately the altered globalist conditions of
contemporary culture, denying especially the liberational potential of First
World citizens.5 By contrast, a transnationalist perspective would address
the new modalities of global media, capital, ethnicity and power without
surrendering to reactionary or Orientalist political conceits:
What a critical transnational cultural studies can do is place particular post-
colonial experiences, mostly situated within the nation, in a comparative trans-
national context in which what would be interrogated are the relations
between the (in)commensurable modernities which post-colonial nation-states
strive to put in place, at the same time remembering that these nation-
states are themselves testaments to the simultaneous success and failure of
the modern project. (Ang and Stratton, 1996: 32)

Thus, just as some finer liberational experience in the dis-

Guattari seeks
sensual media, the transnational theoretic attempts to eschew the inconsis-
tencies and limitations of postcolonialism (and material modernism generally)
while maintaining its oppositional integrity; transnationalism would produce
a ’moral criticism’ that is ’more provisional and need[s] a much greater degree
of contextual substantiation’ (Ang and Stratton, 1996: 31).
Ang and Stratton’s approach, however, while accepting the inescapability

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of global capitalism and the nation-state, appears to offer little direction on

how persistent theoretical and methodological tensions might be reconciled.
In particular, Ang and Stratton’s emphasis on nation and its interactions (see
also Chen, 1996) seems inevitably to override the significant multi-forming
processes within nations, across and through cultures. The transnational
model seems somewhat limited in its efforts to confront the incommensu-
rate and disorderly dimensions of culture and globalist processes, preferring,
it would seem, concession or deferral in the face of complex questions of
cultural fluidity, politics and irreconcilability.
Mark Poster’s (1991, 1995) analysis of the phenomenon he calls ’multi-
culturalism and the second media age’ seems to offer a more substantial
insight into these complexities. Multiculturalism for Poster promotes the
ideology of ethnic and cultural mixing both within and outside the borders
of nation-state (Poster, 1995: 40-2). Poster argues that the poststructural-
ist/postmodernist project of heterogenization, the dissolution of Western
logo- and ethno-centricism, and the approbation of multiple lingual forms
are parallel to multiculturalist ambitions of dissolving geographic, cultural
and ethnic borders. The new communications technologies are central to
both in reordering and reconstituting subjectivities and cultural space.
Poster recognizes that some political multiculturalists would privilege Third
World or minority group subjectivities, thus risking the return of post-
colonial political essentialism; such a restoration, however, would inevitably
transgress the potentialities of poststructuralist theoretics, and more par-
ticularly the opportunities presented by the new media:
In this case, multiculturalism is a process of subject constitution, not an affir-
mation of an essence. As the second media age unfolds and permeates every-
day practice, one political issue will be the construction of new combinations
of technology with multiple genders and ethnicities. These technocultures will
hopefully be no return to essence, no new foundationalism or essentialism,
but a coming to terms with the process of identity constitution and doing so
in ways that struggle against restrictions of systematic inequalities, hierarchies
and asymmetries. (Poster, 1995: 42)
Poster envisages a digital superhighway and virtual reality that would
engage and endorse all cultural and ethnic forms. The Ang and Stratton
transnational cultural studies might, therefore, be absorbed into a more
complete globalist scene where the ideologies of ethnicity and resonant
imperialism can be transmutated fundamentally, forming an alternative and
radical social-cultural conceit.

4. Doom-2

The utopianism which characterizes much of the writing on computer tech-

nology, including postmodernist and ethno-globalist writing, is rarely linked

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to its romantic foundations. While many - including Deleuze and Guattari,

Donna Haraway and Mark Poster - would reject such lineage as atavistic
and even technophobic, there is a strong sense in which this optimistic pre-
science represents a sort of lingual and imaginative release, an ascent which
transports the writer/player through the barriers of logical restraint and
more completely into the realm of lingual play, imagination and fantasy.
While there is nothing at all perverse in the development and application of
metaphor to describe and reconcile complicated theoretical problems, for
computer commentary there has been a tendency for such tropes to assume
proportions that become self-refractory and self-legitimatizing. The danger
is that the problems that informed and stimulated the language game in the
first instance might become obscured by the metaphoric play.
To this extent, claims about the fluidity, non-lineality, and seemingly infi-
nite and exclusive potentialities of electronic writing are exaggerated.6 Such
hyperbole, of course, has accompanied the introduction of any new tech-
nology - successful or not - and has been especially typical of the market-
ing (romanticizing) of electricity and electrical products (see Carey, 1989;
Hartley and O’Regan, 1992; Hill, 1988; Potts, 1989; Street, 1992; Webster
and Robins, 1989). Moreover, the cyber village, as many have noted (e.g.
Balnaves and Caputi, 1997; Forester, 1992), remains an exclusive zone
which may or may not accede to the overwhelming institutional conditions
of hierarchical and hegemonic international capital. Claims about the broad
accessibility and creative potential of the new communicative technologies
tend to parenthesize the actual life source of the apparatus itself - a ’mar-
ketable scarcity’ or ’value’ which is also the precarious centre of capitalism
more generally.7 To impugn or assault ’scarcity’ in any fundamental way is
to engage capitalism in a battle to the death.

Jean Baudrillard (1994, 1995) has produced an alternative and far less
utopian vision of the contemporary electronic culture. For Baudrillard the
simulacra that proliferate through electronic and digital communication
have ultimately transformed history as material. The metaphor of material
history is achieved not through the temporal records of archaeology or
genealogy, but through its compression with human ecology and consequent
dissolution as waste. In The Illusion o f the End Baudrillard claims that the
human too is becoming residual:
By producing highly centralized structures, highly developed urban, industrial
and technical systems, by remorselessly condensing down programmes, func-
tions and models, we are transforming all the rest into waste, residues, useless
relics. By putting the higher functions into orbit, we are transforming the
planet itself into a waste-product, a marginal territory, a peripheral space ...
Creating ultra-rapid communication networks immediately means trans-
forming human exchanges into a residue. (Baudrillard, 1994: 78)
And history’s dustbins, Baudrillard repeats for us, contain the hypermedia

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of their own perpetual presence, that newness of news which deprives all
events and images of meaning and which casts itself in obsolescence at the
very moment of its genesis. For Baudrillard the new media appears to be
little more than an extension of the old. Even the much vaunted specialized
news promised by the Internet is fashioned residue, part of the onward tra-

jectory of temporal and spatial compression. The great institutions of com-

merce and state which provide the hardware, regulations and linkages will
continue to assert themselves, even behind the illusion of their disappear-
ance.

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984, 1986, 1991) has doubted the significance

of macro-simulation networks as the fundamental social-political consti-
tution. History, Lyotard (1991: esp. ch.2) confirms, is subsumed in self-
refractory systems; human time is subject to infinite writing and
re-writings, including the of
periodizing impulses modernity. However, it is
the organization of these infinite and infinitely erasable writings into in-
formational bits which is so disturbing for Lyotard (1991: 34). This
’Cartesian’ writing which Snyder (1996), Boller (1992), Negroponte (1995)
and others esteem might be otherwise conceived as a highly restrictive and
formalized geometricizing of flow, the reduction of writing to more and
more precise, speedily reproduced and entropic ’cuts’ of language. Thus,
the ’rush to write’ might be construed as an engineering masterpiece: the
constriction of imaginative spontaneity, the withdrawal of pause and play,
and the reciprocal imposition of systematic units of expressive control. In
Lyotard’s terms, this engineered articulation might further subsume the
condition he calls ’the inhuman’, that realm of possibilities - and dangers
-
which necessarily challenges the sorts of lexical, syntactical and rhetori-
cal unities constituted through computers and their language (see also
Lewis, 1997).
On this point, at least, there is some confluence between Lyotard’s
inhuman and Baudrillard’s claim that the evil of a malefficient ecology might
constitute a rare - though not necessarily formidable - challenge to the evil
of historical, qua communicative, waste. More importantly, Lyotard and
Baudrillard’s work represents an even rarer rampart in poststructuralist and
postmodernist theoretics for political and social criticism, most particularly
as it is focused on the new communications technologies. The politics of

hope which characterize digital commentary need to be measured critically

against these sorts of propositions. In particular, I would suggest, we need
to take seriously the conditions of a world in which significant power con-
tinues to be jostled between elites, while 800 million people live on star-
vation levels, nuclear and conventional war products continue to proliferate,
over 25,000 life species are extinguished every year, and most of us continue
to struggle against the constriction and degradation of cultural, political and
economic subjugations. It is undoubtedly true that the unceasing progress
of capital is sweeping away familiar axes of national and international

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power forms, and that oppositional ideologies must necessarily adjust to

rapidly altering cultural and ideological conditions; however, it is equally
true that new cultural conditions seem little able in themselves to halt the
destructive and oppressive side-effects of transnationalism. The Internet and
other forms of global communication, to this extent, need to be considered
as both a perpetrator of oppression and a conduit for emancipation. The

metaphor of the ’superhighway’ might need to be measured against other

metaphors such as those of surveillance and discipline, in Foucault’s terms
(see Lyon, 1994; Poster 1991), or those that might indicate a choked and
cluttered sphere, a four-dimensional maze, perhaps, in which the joys of dis-
covery and communion are continuously impinged by the invisible and
noiseless impasse of power, waste and the withering of time. In this latter
metaphor the possibility of knowledge continues to motivate the player,
though its liberatory potential is unquestionably threatened, not merely by
the re-assertion of fundamental systems and ideologies, but also by the
debilitating narcosis of insubstantial utopianism - a pleasure zone that
’resembles’ rather than ’confirms’ the player’s own potential.
Indeed, if the computer is to be truly dissensual, as Guattari hopes, then
it must assume symbolic or discursive proportions transcendent of its sus-
ceptibility to capitalist induction. Such a reformation of meaning, of course,
is a matter of everyday consumption practices - as de Certeau (1984) has
so deftly demonstrated - which are themselves crimped through power
transfer and exchange. Certainly there are those, like Andrew Ross’s (1991)
New Agers and Howard Rheingold’s (1993) Virtual Community, who
would aspire to such everyday resistance in the seeking of new and higher
planes of social and personal fulfilment. But by and large, the microproces-
sor has proliferated in the service of business and the capitalist ethos. Thus,
while there has been some significant ’raiding’ of meaning - most especially
through the youth sub-cultures of game-playing, program piracy and
hacking - there appears also to have been a certain blandness in the capi-
talist conscription of computers, a resistance or indifference, that is, to the
new democratic activism so passionately promoted by theorists like Chantal

Mouffe (1996). Perhaps, as Poster and others predict, it is the phenomenal

growth of the World Wide Web/Internet facility which will create ever
greater opportunities for communicative access, play, information-creation
and social-cultural subversion. It may be that this facility will contribute to
the sorts of de-bordering and personal creativity so enthusiastically envis-
aged in the politics of hope.
Even so, I think this extremely unlikely without a far more active and sig-
nificant contribution of critical thinking and a theoretics of doom. To this
extent, the formulation I have elsewhere called ’transculturalism’ - a theory
of cultural instability and transfer - needs to be argued. Transculturalism
would extend theoretics and ideological discussion beyond the containment
of Ang and Stratton’s transnationalism and Poster’s multiculturalism. In

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concluding this paper, I make specific reference to the theory in relation to

the issues discussed above.

1 Transculturalism acknowledges the instability of all cultural formations,

including those determined as nation or state. Transculturalism thereby

eschews the problems of legitimation by emphasizing the transitional

nature of culture and the inevitability of its own internal discursive decon-
struction. Transculturalism - as opposed to transnationalism, cross-
cultural communication, or postcolonialism - admits the multiple
processing of communicative interaction. It limits, therefore, fixities of
power as it acknowledges volatility, exchange and the possibilities of
reversal and everyday subversion. It does this, however, in full recognition
that power may be concentrated through particular economic, political
and cultural forms, including those of corporation, nation, ethnic cat-
egory and so on. These concentrations, according to a transcultural
theory, are not inevitable but remain vulnerable to external as well as
internal assault and exchange.
2 Transculturalism acknowledges in the contemporary context that cultural
propinquity is inevitable, and that it may be good, bad, or both. It sug-
gests further that the epistemological, discursive and political intensifica-
tion of the concept of ’difference’ (especially as the corruption of Derrida’s
différence) in fact limits the heuristic and ideological potential of propin-
quity. That is, ’difference’, like ’community’, may be generative and posi-
tive, or it may be grotesque and oppressive, depending on the specific
conditions of its discursive attachments. Transculturalism will always
allow for transitions and mutations, and the elision of social and cultural
constructions of difference (or commonality) that might increment rather
than diminish human misery. Transculturalism, therefore, is a theory of
perpetual exchange. In this sense, computer culture might be understood
as contributing to monodism and/or diversity - the important thing,

however, is to conscript the machinery into more creative and imagina-

tive cultural practices.
3 Transculturalism embraces the condition that Lyotard (1991, see also
Lewis, 1997) calls ’the inhuman’, that Deleuze ( 1992) ~calls ’the imagina-
tion’, that Chantal Mouffe (1996) calls ’agonism’, and that Baudrillard
(1994) calls the ’malefficient ecology’. This is a condition of multiple
opposites and contradictions, both terrifying and pleasing, dissatisfied
with systematized, orderly and organized liberal humanism (Lyotard,
1991) and the forces of domestication (Deleuze, 1992).8 This is to say,
transculturalism is deeply suspicious of itself and its own theoretical ten-
dencies to synthesis and illumination. It seeks to articulate the opposite
intensities of the human and inhuman, the complex and chaotic, the
logical and imaginative, the emotional and intellectual - acknowledging
at all times that these intensities remain ultimately elusive and at critical

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times entirely indistinguishable. At this moment of acknowledgement

comes the living and withering of true imagination and creativity. This is
not determined by technology but by discursive gesture. It is not a matter
of distinguishing between print and electronic media (Deleuze, 1992), but
between an encompassing creativity or imagination (which is self-threat-
ening) and a deficient, confining regularity - even a regularity that pro-
motes itself as postmodern.
4 The imagination of transculturalism is not easily conscripted into the
capitalist project, but is intensely spontaneous, aberrant, subversive,
dangerous and unpredictable. The computer, to be sure, may facilitate
imaginative play - but not necessarily.
5 Transculturalism is therefore political in that it promotes the discursive
multiplicities of power exchange, though it insists that power - like mean-
ings - is inevitably partial. Power intensities must be challenged with the
greater might of the inhuman as much as the human, with imagination as
much as intelligent conviction. Identity and difference should not, there-
fore, be essentialized but must be seen as ideological figments, matters of
everyday pleasure and resistance at the most immediate level, and matters
of revolution at the most brutal. The cyborg, in this sense, can only pro-
claim its potential in the light of a myriad alternative voices. Transcul-
turalism is iconoclastic - as much in dispute as in dialogue with the
invention of the future, refusing always to comply with the designation
or determination of others.
6 Transculturalism thus rejects the essentialization of technology or
progress. It rejects a utopianism which is not conditional, inhuman, imag-
inative or clouded by the dread of doubt and the prospect of doom. Trans-
culturalism is a theory of change and its politics admit the possibility of
social improvement via the de-bordering potentialities of the new com-
munications media. However, there is nothing to be gained by the
absolutes of faith or a semblation which leads only to itself and its own
pure condition. Thus, the vision of the cyborg, of the bit-driven world, of
the ’harmonizing’ superhighway, seems as terrible to me as it is hopeful.

Notes

1 I should mention in that Negroponte’s comparison is of itself rather

passing
problematic. While the actual building blocks of matter, bits are
atoms are
measurements of an abstract phenomenon. Whether mediated electronically
or materially (and there remains debate as to whether electrons are light or

matter), information is itself abstract; the metaphoric comparison is created,

it would seem, in order to substantiate absolute differences, lending substance
to Negroponte’s conclusions about the greater value of computer based infor-
mation exchange.

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2 I have elsewhere made some comment on Ross and also Mackenzie Wark’s

work in this area (Lewis, 1997). In passing I would note that both Ross and
Wark seem, in fact, to have struggled to liberate themselves from the pro-
gressivism of modernity. Indeed, I would argue further that the utopianism of
their work owes more to romantic principles than they seem prepared to
concede.
3 For a broader discussion of Luc Nancy’s ideas see Poster (1995) and Maurice
Blanchot (1988). The tension between community and democracy on the one
side, and fragmented subjectivity and dissent, on the other, has also been a
recurring theme in the work of Laclau and Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe have
argued that democracy and hence community is both desirable and possible
in a context of perpetual dissent or agonism. See Laclau and Mouffe (1985)
and Mouffe (1996).
4 Futurist writing has often conscripted themes of cyborg or hybridized mol-
ecular machinery into its commentary. In particular, the notion of nanotech-
nology - molecular tools - suggests that a fusion of digital and genetic
engineering will produce a social and personal utopia that would see the
eradication of disease and all forms of social calumny. See also Charles
Jencks’s (1995) adaptation of complexity theory for a postmodernist polemic.
Jencks claims that biological and cosmological evolution engage human con-
sciousness in the advance of complex forms. Human technology, including
architecture and digital machinery, are clearly embedded in this process of
’leaping’ complexity at the edge of chaos. Jencks’s own utopianism is based
on a belief that the universe would be enhanced if ’we understand, love and

criticize it better’ (Jencks, 1995: 166).

5 Suvendrini Perera (1993, see also 1996) has defended postcolonialism against
this revisionism, describing as preposterous a conciliatory transnationalism
which fails ’to engage disturbingly challenging, uncompromisingly opposi-
tional discourses of colonised and post-colonised peoples whose languages
and self-representations are either dismissed as naively referential or delegit-
imised, and even demobilised, by being labelled essentialist, totalising or plain
fantastic’ (Perera, 1993: 21). To this extent, Perera regards recent descriptions
of Australia in postcolonial terms as the symbolic divide which separates her
own ’oppositional’ postcolonial De-Orientalism from the positionings of

globalists (see also Chen, 1996).

6 I can think of no machine that is more logical, processual and lineal than a
computer, despite some rather inflated claims to the contrary. While the com-
puter might give the impression, like the TV or cinema screen, of spatial or
vectoral depth, the effect merely camouflages the digital and electric processes
that give it form. Negroponte’s (1995) explanation of digital processing con-
veniently eschews these electrical functions. Snyder’s (1996) claim that hyper-
text is non-lineal and moves sectionally and in complex directions merely
distorts the whole notion of lineality. Readers of newspapers and other infor-
mation forms jump about the page and text continuously, seeking the

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information they need. Snyder’s experience with literary fictions, I suspect,

distracts her from the complex processes of reading texts generally.
7 I am aware that theorists like Michel de Certeau identify consumption itself
as politically subversive. However, these ideas fail, I think, to confront the
material and discursive conditions of oppression as I go on to outline in this
essay (see also Lewis, 1998).
8 Mouffe (1996) uses the concept of agonism (and domestication) in somewhat
more conciliatory or pragmatic ways than may be acceptable to others in this

group. Dispute is essential in the new democracy, according to Mouffe,

though power itself needs to be re-formed and domesticated - that is, main-
tained through the experiences of the subjective.

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JEFF LEWIS lectures in media and cultural studies at RMIT

University, Melbourne. He has published numerous papers on cultural
politics, transculturalism and postmodern theory. Address: RMB 6715,
Balnarring, Victoria, Australia. [email: bslewis@alphalink.com.au]

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