"Cybermaterialism" and the Invention of the Cybercultural Everyday

Abstract

On the contemporary academic scene the dominant post-al1 logic for thinking about contemporary culture and the social has taken its cue over the last three decades from the (post) structuralist emphasis on pleasure, difference, desire, contin gency, signification, the body, and so forth, concepts which now consti tute the horizon of intelligibility in the (post) modern academy. More recently, and in accordance with the (market) logic of constant innova tion, newer articulations have come to supplement this discursive space, which has subsequently added to its range of concepts the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, invention. . . Whereas the earlier series can be understood as centered upon Derridean theories of the text and textuality, the latter series, while drawing upon the conceptual under pinnings of theories of the text moves beyond text-space and into cyberspace. Cyberspace is above all the trope for a new cybercultural imaginary which is reenergizing idealist social theory in its promise of a different (aesthetic) experience of culture in the form of technoculture: the high-tech digital wired culture which is increasingly informing, if not shaping, everyday life (for what bourgeois sociology calls the upper middle classes) in the advanced industrial nations. In this essay I argue that whether departing from text-space or from cyberspace the outcome of this ideological configuration is the contin ued suppression of those concepts?production, labor, need, necessity, historical materiality, and collectivity?which are necessary in producing historical knowledge of social totality as the enabling means to a transformative intervention into capitalist social relations. Although this suppression, which brackets the intelligibilities that will enable a politics of social transformation, is widely seen as progressive?not at all a suppression, but rather a sign of an advanced cognitive and political sensibility?it is, in actuality, symptomatic of the fact that the historical agenda of the ruling discourses continues to be the prevention of an interrogation into the causal conditions of material inequalities in class societies and a mystification of means by which these inequalities can be eradicated. In my analysis I will first outline the theoretical conditions of