ext, I took out a red marker and fetched some glasses from the kitchen. Placing the glasses over the cities, I traced red circles of varying sizes. I tried to remember how far out of town the radio faded out on those endless car trips, and which cities seemed to have different television when when we went there on holidays. The geography of telesthesia, a new map traced on top of nature and second nature. A third nature connecting and coordinating the movements of people, the making of goods, the extraction of raw material from nature - and transforming, all the while, images of life. from Bugs Bunny to James Dibble reading the ABC news."

The Virtual Republic

Adam Cullen DoubleTalk Francesca Da Rimini Impaedia Conceptual Art
Homoacademicus

I'm re-reading some of the more personal anecdotes in McKenzie Wark's The Virtual Republic,his second major published work of cultural criticism after Virtual Geography. Here's an author who could well have been voted as "Boy most likely to become a public intellectual" at school. Problem is, like the notion of a left-wing think-tank, no-one really believes in public intellectuals anymore, especially those who are perceived (or perceive themselves) as most likely to prevail along this rarefied career path.

This skepticism about the publicness of intellectual work moves in many directions (a productive field of conflict in itself 1 ) displacing conventional polarities of academic, practical-political, and media discourse. We can no longer draw such lines in the sand as Australian academic historians did in 1985 in response to the perceived inaccuracies and provocations of Geoffrey Blainey's All For Australia:

This was a new departure for most scholars: history is a discipline accustomed to arguments about evidence and interpretation. but these are normally conducted in an academic fashion far removed from the style of public polemic which Blainey had introduced. 2

Wark's treatment of the Demidenko/Darville affair makes a fresh departure from the spatialised adversarial logic of the old academy.Where other writers choked on this alleged duping of the Australian reading public, Wark plots phrasings of the Holocaust, Ern Malley, loss of entitlement, public reaffirmation of 'lest we forget', as links in a chain which are both memorable and sustainable, for the making of a culture which has freed itself - more or less - from the over-policing of the stories we make and tell:

A good culture both remembers and forgets; and above doesn't forget that it forgets, when it remembers. A good common world can publish the unthinkable and publish the reminding rejoinder when the unthinkable has just been thought. A good media sphere opens its pores to significant differences when phrases are in dispute, and also provides a little space for commentary on the arc of the event itself as it passes ...All of these elements, of culture, media, and the commonworld they make, come together around the public thing or event as the Virtual Republic.3

***

Note: This is a much condensed and edited version of an email interview composed between New York and Sydney in January 1999.

CH: Shall we begin with a swift summary of the Wark vector tool - as you've deployed it as a mobile mapping device (with brains) - and also some idea of where you've travelled with it philosophically and thematically over the last 12 years.

KW: There was a time (when semiotics was the model of cultural engagement) when the 'text' was treated like some kind of convenience food. You just got take away text from where ever was convenient and set to work unravelling the structure of the signs in it, and even of the signs not in it. But I just wanted to ask another question: how did a text get to a particular location in the first place? And what I realised is that before there are signs and texts, there are vectors, which are both the paths along which signs travel, but also the potential paths on which they might also travel. When my TV is switched on there is a vector, with particular technical and economic as well as semiotic properties, that brings these images into my living room, that makes a piece of furniture light up with colour and movement. But even when the set is switched off, there is still a certain kind of vectoral potential, a virtuality, that subsists in it.

CH: I read the vector as a kind of directorial unconscious which the analyst - in this case yourself - accompanies on not very predicatable excursions - into un-mastered multilogues of the email form, into newsaper print, the classroom, various public fora, and into good old codex reproduction. So how has the concept strategy changed for you in the space of your recent published work?

KW: Well my first book - Virtual Geography - says: this is what a vector is and how it works in the world. The second books says: wow, here's how a dynamic, flexible, open culture can work vectorally and virtually, from the bottom up. The third book says: yes, but, only when reactive forces, on both left and right, with an agenda to shut down differential proliferation, are kept in abeyance by a certain kind of plural and social-democratic optimism, which is what I think we now need to work on recreating.

CH: Policy makers (let's focus on the area of education for the moment) have been very selective in their interpretation and use of academic work. Simon Marginson argues that the privilege accorded to the work of Ross Parish (on the eve of the Dawkins revolution) excluded other (more humanistic) studies of equity and access. And He slips on a John-Maynard knuckle-duster quote in the process:

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."4

KW: The difficulty for the universities is that there really has to be some kind of accountability, but it's the purpose of universities to provide an environment for different kinds of knowledge, knowledges so different that they have no common measure by which to compare them, or even a measure that works reliably in the same discipline as it changes over time. The good thing about the Dawkins era was that it showed that the inequities between universities were simply not justifiable. The response of the biggest seven or eight universities has been a matter of special pleading. I don't think its a question of going back, but of going forward, looking for more subtle and fairer ways of measuring and assessing the performance of very intangible qualities.

... There is inevitably some lag between academic discourse and that of policy, since policy is a more slow moving institution - even than the academy. But that's it's role -- to filter ideas and select them for application. Application is never as straightforward as some theorists imagine - take as an example the complexities of implementing the Dawkins reforms. The principle of those reforms -- accountability - is I think quite sound. Academics in the humanities talk so much about 'justice', you think we'd be thrilled that somebody wanted to find a practice of justice for allocating academic resources, but what happened instead was special pleading. No wonder the public is dismissive of academic talk about justice, when we won't accept the demand that our own use of public resources be just and accountable. Specific criticisms of the Dawkins era plan might well be valid, but when couched in a total rejection of the demand for accountability, they cut very little ice.

CH: Henry Giroux expresses the view that cultural studies should pay more attention to its pedagogical and adult education origins 5 (I think he's referring to early Birmingham School here) ... I guess the question - reading between the lines - is, are we fetishising youth culture at the expense of other 'outside' the institutional framework socio-cultural formations?

KW: I'm really not fond of the self importance of scholars who keep insisting: the stuff that matters is *my* stuff, not your stuff! The people who do cultural policy in Australia are famous for that. The historians and the ethnographers also have this disease. It's just resentment: "Your stuff is popular and sexy but what really really matters is my stuff....". My answer is: who knows, in the long run, where the most 'important' sites are at which to work? Isn't it best, in the short run, to have people apply themselves at different places, according to their talents?

... More and more I think of criticism as a reactionary mode of discourse, the province of the Right. So rather than ask: what is wrong with what X does? I'm more interested in asking: what's *useful* in what X does? What's useful to me, or what might be useful to some other project I might know about. This is the basis of my approach to book reviewing in my column for The Australian. Most of which is about what's useful in a book, if not to me then to a wider sense of different but connected projects. Its a question of how you understand the politics of knowledge. I think of a plural field of differences in tension but also in relation, asking questions about justice, democracy, the good life, and experimenting also with answers to those questions, at the level of the social, in the media, in institutions, in everyday life.

CH: It seems to me that sustainable academic community performance (not the bean-counters version) requires greater acceptance of the role of on-line activity, of 'conversational' publishing. Now there are so many different processes, so many different containers of writing.

KW: We've seen a huge revival of letter writing as a genre and the internet has broadened the base of it. The most encouraging sign is the elaborate 'nettiquette' 6 that has grown, mostly spontaneously and from the bottom up. I'm involved in lots of projects that try to use this new space for literacy. Nettime 7 is a good example -- its a network for distributing media theory, but its not based on an academic model. It grew more out of the art avant gardes of the European type. I'd go so far as to say that Nettime is a kind of collective intelligence, always struggling against itself and overcoming itself. It 'changes its mind' as different people post different items to the site. ... And that's been a fabulous experience for me, finding new ways to think and write collectively. It's a different kind of speed and distribution to anything else I've experienced. The internet has made that sort of thing possible on a global scale. But it happens not simply because of the technology, but because there are literate people, and even people for whom the 18th century philosophes or the early 20th century avant gardes are a living tradition, and they can bring that to the network with them.

CH: I'm interested in this idea of a willed dumbing down in the space of communal writing, expressing oneself (in a moment where one loses oneself) in unguarded moments of epistolary enthusiasm, neither speaking nor writing, yet strangely both, an unworking of communities communication - a dissensual rather than a consensual matrix. I'm rather fond of The Bad Subjects Collective (of which Michael Bérubé is a founding editor - I think.8 The online version is always entertaining and informative - the edited codex version is a strange beast however - a carnival of atomised, 'incompetent 'political expression and idiosyncratic writing styles that is rarely found in craftedited academic anthologies.

KW: There's a pragmatic, optimistic spirit abroad in media theory, I think. More virtual than critical. More about experiments with different kinds of liberated or liberating media practice than any grand plan. I credit Geert Lovink and his playful- practical minded Dutch colleagues with injecting some of this into the discourse. It's quite free of leftist dogma and also of scholasticism. In Australia I'm interested in opening up spaces where, likewise, there can be creativity that isn't subordinated to the soul-sucking tedium of Policy, Academy or Art Bureaucracy. I'm not against any of those institutions. It's just that my experience of when Australian art and letters have been interesting is when, as with my Nettime experience, there has been a free flow zone outside of them. The fun went out of 80s postmodernism when it got sucked into the institutions.

CH: I read you as an optimist in pretty much the way I read Negri (who wrote 5 books in prison and considers it as good a place to write from as a university ) His Spinozian view of labour power is especially attractive - no longer on the dark or sunny side of alienation - neither enslaved nor bankable freedoms singularly and artistically personified; rather: every-one a world making machine, every projected world a person making machine.

KW: I'm a public optimist and a personal pessimist. The slide to reaction always begins with the postulate that things are getting worse. The left are now as bad in this regard as the right. But I think Negri is right. As I read him, the advance of material surplus really does make a difference. It makes it possible for people to get control of some of their life. I guess the thing that's unresolved in my writing is the relation between public optimism and personal pessimism. It's a question of finding a form that can connect them. But I think the pessimism leeches into the writing even of Virtual Republic and Celebrity, Culture and Cyberspace, which are both very optimistic books, in the form of a sceptical note, a distaste for the utopias of some of the public optimists who are also personal optimists, and a strong dislike for public pessimists who are private optimists. People, in other words, who whether they trust in public life or not seem to share very few doubts about their own powers. I think its the origins of the microfascism Deleuze and Guattari warn about, this too well armoured self that would impose itself on the world.

CH: you might want to comment on the celebrity theme in your new book. From my point of view - it's business as usual. I'm NOT amazed when I see people going bananas when they see a movie camera and movie people taking over the street - even if it's just a daggy piece to camera. It seems like the same old stuff of transference fueling the apparatus - like radio and cinema - not quite like TV (I agree with Avital Ronell that the latter is more compulsive in a traumatising kind of way) - a 'Media Happening' right on the street starring cameras, cables and technical people ... So what about your take on celebrity?

KW: By celebrity, I mean the need to create an image for the vectors of the media, through which the public reads proposals for what it could desire. By cyberspace, I mean the need to learn empirically from the great wealth of information available and create the peculiar kind of specialised knowledge that is the guile of the political generalist. If there has been a transformation in Australian culture, it is not not from the collective to individualism, it is from forms of compulsory solidarity to voluntary ones. We always confront each other in social life in packs, bands, bunches, and now in cyberspace.

***

Notes

1  The Electronic Book Review published an interesting group of essays on the issue of the 'selling out' of academic writing. Start at www.altx.com/ebr/ebr2/ebr2.htm. [last accessed - January 30, 1999]

2  Surrender Australia? Geoffrey Blainey and Asian Immigration (ed. Andrew Markus & M.C Rickles). Sydney: Allen and Unwin.1985. p 3

3 McKenzie Wark, The Virtual Republic, Australia's Cultural Wars of the Nineties. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. 1997. pp 152-153.

4 Simon Marginson, Educating Australia: government, economy, and citizen since 1960. Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1997.

5 Henry Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988.

6 The Nettime site (a closed moderated mailing list on net criticism - including contributions from McKenzie Wark) can be found at www.desk.nl/~nettime [last accessed January 30, 1999].

7 For an informative one-stop overview of how not to behave on-line, check out Roger Clarke's NET-ETHIQUETTE - Mini Case Studies of Dysfunctional Human Behaviour on the Net, at http://online.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/Netethiquettecases [last accessed February 5, 1999].

8  Bad Subjects: political education for everyday life (ed. The Bad Subjects Production Team). New York: New York University Press. 1998.

***

McKenzie Wark (mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au) is a senior lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University and writes a regular column for The Australian newspaper. His lastest book, Celebrity, Culture and Cyberspace, is published by Pluto Press Australia.

Colin Hood is a freelance writer and editor.