The mortality of the virtual: Real-time, archive and dead-time in information networks

Convergence

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 59-71

  MacKenzie, Adrian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2342508325     PISSN: 13548565     EISSN: 17487382     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/135485659700300208     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. This description applies to the Internet IP protocol. See Douglas E. Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP. Principles, Protocols and Architecture, vol. 1, 2nd edition (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991), p. 99.
2. See, for example, Paul Virilio, 'The Third Interval: A Critical Transition', in Rethinking Technologies, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
3. see also Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Time Today', The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, tr. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
4. R. Mathews, 'Panning for data gold', New Scientist, 25 May 1996, pp. 30-33.
5. Jacques Derrida, 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression', Diacritics, 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 17: '[it] also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. '
6. On this aspect of contemporary culture, see Arkady Plotnitsky, 'Re-: Re-flecting, Re-membering, Re-collecting, Re-selecting, Re-warding, Re-wording, Re-iterating, Re-et-cetra-ing . . . (in) Hegel', Postmodern Culture, 5, no. 2 (January 1995), 〈pmc@jefferson. village. virginia. edu〉.
7. Gayatri C. Spivak, Spivak Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 101.
8. 'Debatten, die aufgrund neu enstehender Medien jeweils den Untergang der abendländischen Kultur heraufbeschworen, wurden seit der Erfindung der beweglichen Lettern für die technische Reproduzierbarkeit von Literatur immer wieder geführt. ' Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisionen. Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der Geschichte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Enzyklopädie, 1989), p. 12.
9. Even the most elementary observation that the Internet processes writing rather than speech doesn't seem to prevent anyone from seizing on the Internet as a resurrection of the power of free speech to grant universal access to the polity for all members of the linguistic community. It's not so much that the Internet cannot transport spoken messages (of course, it can), but that the old dream of a linguistic community of individuals present to each other in language cannot help being a reduction and neutralisation of the virtual. It would be necessary to add some historical background on the emergence of conjunction between language, literacy and culture in the early modern epoch in order to flesh out this assertion. See Wlad Godzich, 'Language, Images and the Postmodern Predicament' in Materialities of Communication, eds. Hans Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, tr. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
10. Godzich, p. 369.
11. Walter Benjamin, 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century', Reflections, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 155.
12. Gilbert Hottois, Simondon et la philosophie de la 'culture technique' (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1993), p. 59: 'La technique, conçue comme reséau, constitue le nouveau symbole pour humanité. Mais ce symbole est réel-physique: la technique bien comprise, c'est du symbolique réalisé. '
13. See chapter 3, 'Africa 21st century' in David Wills, Prothesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) for a reading of William Gibson's novels that follows the thread of mortality in Cyberspace.
14. The Net, directed by Irwin Winkler, USA, 1995
15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? tr. Graham Burchell, and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso Books, 1994), p. 157. Deleuze and Guattari invoke dead-time as central to the independence of the event from real states of affairs in which it is 'actualised'. In other words, dead-time is crucial to the problem of thinking about how any becoming takes place. As part of their thinking of concepts as events, the notion of dead-time would also apply to that event-entity we are concerned with here: virtual culture, with its components of archive drive and real-time process. If becoming-virtual constitutes an event, then dead-time would refer to the way in which different components interact or communicate within a meanwhile or entretemps that is not lived by any subject and that is not functionally described by a system that manages the relations between variables. In other words, this entretemps or dead-time falls neither within the lived experience of virtual culture, nor in the complex series of state transitions that functionally determine the technological operations of the information networks. The eventuality of an event does not occur in lived or realtime, but in the awaiting and reserve that is unlivable yet crucial to becoming. In short, in order to think of virtual culture as something other than another instrument in the service of already constituted selves, it must be thought of as an event that co-ordinates heterogeneous components in a temporality that is not simply lived, nor simply real. The methodological insight that this version of dead-time offers is this: if we try to think of the advent of some entity, we should do so not in terms that simply accept the given relation between life and death, but in a way that considers the way in which the different components of an event pass through this entretemps or dead-time that makes them cohere as a becoming.
16. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 68.
17. Jacques Derrida, 'La Differance', Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 20-21
18. 'Differance', Margins of Philosophy, tr. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 19-20.