Visions of excess: Cyberspace, digital technologies and new cultural politics

Abstract

This paper critically situates contemporary concerns with cyberspace and digital media within a cultural dimension. In doing this it sets the emerging new communication technologies alongside issues of cultural limits and boundaries. The paper begins by undertaking ground clearing work about the nature of cyberspace and providing an analytical index of its position in relation to its imaginary or real status. It is argued that cyberspace is destined to attract two competing responses; first for being too true to life; and second for not being true enough. It is argued that these tensions are part of the cyberspatial embodiment of certain significant cultural aesthetics which are subsequently interwoven into the fabric of popular technoculture. This embodiment projects a number of competing claims and characterisations for the potential of digital media through slogans of cyberspace. The paper addresses how spatial metaphors, forms of technological enhancement, Utopian aesthetics, technoculture and posthuman philosophy are framed as ‘frontier discourse’. The materialism of transhumanist and extroprian politics is examined from a phenome‐nological standpoint. These frontier projects posit a ‘disclosing space’ for digital media which offer a radical ‘crossing over’ from the human to nonhuman computer mediated environment. By way of phenomenological analysis these new cultural politics are shown to be intimations of the real and an illusion of radical otherness which is chimerical and exemplary of unreflexive ‘modes of becoming’.