Social Text 35 (Summer 1993)

Out of Sight is Out of Mind: Virtual Reality and the Postindustrial Working Class

But today, when Capital has come out of its crisis, refurbished, regenerated and radicalized by the revolution in the productive forces-and Capital is nothing if not an economic project-how can we overlook the crucial role of the economic without offering hostages to Capital?

A. Sivanandan, "All that Melts into Air is Solid: the Hokum of New Times"1

A great deal of theoretical work has been devoted to investigating the transition to a so-called "postfordist" epoch in which the traditional industrial city has been replaced by a far-flung global network of "export processing zones" and assembly plants.2 This spatial and economic restructuring has had a profound impact on the way that people live and work around the world. Because of the extent to which this transition alters the conventional organization of industrial labor, it has had a particular impact on the experience of class and class formations in the countries of the so-called Third World, as well as the political and economic capitals of the West.3

There are two questions to be considered here. The first has to do with the ways in which Postfordism effects the formation of a class consciousness among members of the "global assembly line." If the concentration of large numbers of industrial workers in urban centers "produced" class consciousness (or produced a situation in which the working class could narrativize itself as a class); the postfordist logic of fragmentation and deconcentration resists the narrative construction of a working class, or resists the formation of discursive communities that might lead to a class consciousness. As John Urry's writes, "the radical restructuring of modern industry and policies of residential relocation have undermined some of the conditions facilitating sustained [working class] 'dialogue,' especially across localities . . ."4 The second question, which is directly related to my inquiry in this essay, concerns the effects of postfordism on the apparent composition of the working class as it is perceived within the culture of the postindustrial "core" nations. One of the distinguishing characteristics of postindustrial capitalism is the increasingly sophisticated handling of the visuality of the working class on a global scale. The very existence of a postindustrial working class poses a threat to a postindustrial mythology that imagines class formation and class ideologies as quaint vestiges of the industrial past. The associated processes of "organizational and technical restructuring" and offshore sourcing, of sanitized "global cities" and isolated Mexican maquiladoras, work to insulate the constituents (and beneficiaries) of postindustrial capitalism from the social costs this system inflicts on other nations and cultures.

The social costs of industrial capitalism—the overcrowded and decrepit housing, disease, congestion, and oppressive working conditions endured by industrial labor—were to a greater or lesser extent an unavoidable part of the lived experience of urban bourgeoisie in the early modern period. The spatial proximity of residential neighborhoods and factories within the industrial city made some visual or physical contact with the working class inevitable. Regular encounters with large masses of people who were so clearly not enjoying the fruits of industrial productivity posed a potential threat to the bourgeoisie, who imagined their own privileged condition as, at least potentially, available to all. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, among others, have written of the complex psychic mechanisms employed by the Victorian bourgeoisie in its attempt to restructure the working class as the inversion of its own self-image.5 The “other half” was an incessant theme throughout mid to late nineteenth-century literature, and in the official discourse of government commissions, labor policy, and documentary surveys.

At the same time that members of the bourgeoisie mediated their experience of the working class through official and popular literature, they also worked to limit and regulate their spatial and visual proximity to the working class within the industrial city. This regulation involved the construction of literal barriers between themselves and the working class--most often as a component of urban development projects such as subway or rail construction, the siting of retail and residential districts, and the creation of boulevards and public spaces. The relationship between urban space, visuality, and class power was encapsulated by Friedrich Engels over 150 years ago in his study of Manchester:

. . . the finest part of this arrangement [the spatial organization of housing and businesses in the city] is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the laboring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined. . . with an almost unbroken series of shops. . . [that] suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime that form the complement of their wealth.6

It is the potential trauma of seeing the "laboring classes" that must be foreclosed for Engel’s “weak-nerved” bourgeoisie.

Based on the close connection between the physical and the visual regulation of the working class in Engel’s analysis of nineteenth-century Manchester, we might postulate the existence of a characteristically “bourgeois” mode of perception that is produced out of the dynamic interrelationship of urban space and class power.7 Power, exercised primarily along class lines, is deployed within the functionally differentiated spaces of the industrial city. This deployment is governed not simply by the demands of economic efficiency or productivity, but by a kind of aggressive phenomenology, dedicated to the suppression of all traces of an autonomous working class culture, and realized in concrete form through the physical arrangement of the city itself.

In the passage cited above, Engels goes on to describe the “systematic. . . shutting out of the working class” and the “tender. . . concealment of everything that might affront the eye and nerves of the bourgeoisie.”8 His references to the “weak nerves” of the middle-class when confronted with the shocking spectacle of urban poverty, suggests that this “bourgeois perception” can be understood in aesthetic terms--to the extent that it is concerned with the cultivation and enhancement of that which is visually pleasing, and the dissimulation of that which is disturbing or displeasing.

In fact, one epistemological corollary for a bourgeois perception can be found in early modern aesthetic philosophy. It was in Kant’s writing (particularly Critique of Judgment in 1790), along with the work of figures such as David Hume and Lord Shaftesbury, that the notion of an autonomous aesthetic perception was first articulated. For Kant an aesthetic perception must be entirely “disinterested,” or unconcerned with a given object’s actual usefulness--the viewer must attend only to the object qua object, or more specifically, to the particular emotion of visual pleasure that is evoked by the experience of the object. These experiences, although be definition entirely personal and intuitive, are nonetheless held to possess an objective validity (in them we judge not just for ourselves “but for everyone,” as Kant writes).9 They are both universal and thoroughly subjective because they are the product of a very particular subject--the Kantian “man of delicate taste,” who has managed to slough off the prejudices and desires of daily human existence and achieve a level of transcendent “common sense.” Where earlier philosophers evaluated a work of art on the basis of its function (e.g., its capacity to embody religious values, as in medieval aesthetics), its manner of construction, or the social context of its creation, Kant is concerned only with the object in and for itself--abstracted from any context and perceived for its inherent (formal) characteristics. Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, of course, provided the foundation for the influential modernist formalism of Clive Bell and Roger Fry in Britain, and ultimately Clement Greenberg in the U.S.

Although chiefly concerned with those objects socially or culturally demarcated as “art,” eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy also offers us a revealing way to study the relationship of the nascent bourgeoisie to objects, particularly objects of human manufacture. It is not without significance that the historical moment at which an autonomous aesthetic philosophy emerges in European thought (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century) coincides with the onset of organized industrial production and the large-scale importation of goods from the colonies of Asia and Africa. In his historical survey of aesthetic philosophy, Harold Osborne refers to the “opening up” (thorough colonialism) of a “vastly heterogeneous and hitherto inaccessible artistic heritage from widely separated ages and cultures.” Osborne goes on to remark that “not until the art products of the world were displayed in isolation from the living cultures which gave them birth could people begin to perceive them with mature aesthetic awareness as works of art.”10

A number of philosophers have pointed out that Kant’s theoretically universal judgment of beauty was in practice restricted to a class-, gender-, and race-specific subject. The relationship between aesthetic sensibility and class privilege, and between class and visuality, is captured in this observation from John Stuart Mill’s essay, “Civilization”;

One of the effects of civilization. . . is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea of pain, is kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fullness the benefits of civilization. . . for it is in keeping as far as possible out of sight, not only actual pain, but all that can be offensive or disagreeable to the most sensitive person, that refinement exists.11

In the mechanisms of Kantian aesthetic philosophy, in its willful indifference to the production of a given work within a particular social and cultural context, we can glimpse a faint anticipation of the commodity fetish. The same mode of perception that wants to attend to the products of colonial exploitation “divorced from the social or religious purposes for which they were made,” with a “mature aesthetic awareness,” in Osborne’s words, can be seen at work in the “mystical character of the commodity” sketched by Marx in Capital. The commodity, lifted out of its basis in human labor and “abounding in metaphysical subtleties,” is the paradigmatic object of a bourgeois perception.12

This mode of perception comes to function as a kind of phenomenological matrix through which the bourgeoisie confront an array of daily experiences--not just still lifes and Greek sculptures, but the products of the industrial economy, the industrial city, and even the working class itself. Thus, for the urban bourgeoisie, the working class is registered along a continuum of fundamentally aesthetic encounters that range from delectation to disgust and shock. The shock or dismay provoked in middle-class sensibilities by the living conditions of the urban proletariat is made possible by their distance from these same conditions. It is precisely this distance that allows them to treat urban poverty as something apart from their own function and privilege as a class, rather than, as Engels argues, “the misery and grime that form the complement of their wealth.”13

To return finally to the effects of postfordism on the perceptions of class within postindustrial capitalism, we can draw certain parallels with industrial culture based on the relationship between space and visuality that I’ve outlined above. With the transition to a postindustrial economy, the social costs of the capitalist system haven’t been eliminated, they have simply been relocated. The international division of labor under postfordism has the effect of partially displacing class divisions that were previously experienced in the industrial city--between city and suburb, middle class and working class--into spatial divisions between “First” and “Third” world.14 Violent clashes between capital and labor, between steel workers or electronics assemblers and factory owners, is now less likely to take place in downtown Detroit or Pittsburgh, than in South Korea or Sri Lanka--countries with strong anti-union policies and close relations with American industry, countries in which the cost of reproducing (and policing) a labor force is far lower than in the United States. All the associated processes of “organizational and technical restructuring” and offshore sourcing, of sanitized “global cities” and isolated Mexican maquiladoras work to insulate the beneficiaries of post-industrial capitalism from the social costs that this system inflicts on those countries that function as the labor pools for the postfordist economy.15.

The relationship between the spatial transformations of postfordism and perceptions of class is clear in the official and unofficial discourses surrounding the analysis of postindustrial society (social theory, journalism, public policy, etc.). A dominant narrative has evolved which argues that the relative decline of an urban/industrial proletariat in the United States signals the effective end of conventional class structure and its replacement by a highly rational, crisis-free technocracy. I would contend that this postindustrial mythology reiterates the formalism and abstraction that is characteristic of the bourgeois mode of perception traced above. What follows is an examination of this bourgeois perception as it is produced within postindustrial culture First I will discuss the way in which global labor shifts have impacted analyses of postindustrialism and the working class, focusing in particular on the work of Daniel Bell. I will then examine Virtual Reality technology--a paradigmatic product of the postindustrial economy--and the accompanying rhetoric that positions it as both a high-tech commodity and a potentially liberatory force for social transformation.

The Spiritual Crisis of Postindustrial Capitalism

The phenomenon of post industrialization has been the subject of a vast range of interpretations by social scientists, historians, science fiction writers, and other cultural and intellectual producers over the past three decades. Underlying many of these celebrations, critiques, analyses and descriptions, is a common set of assumptions about technological innovation and material progress. The founding moment of this "postindustrial discourse" is the displacement of unskilled (and in some cases skilled) manual labor from the core nations to the periphery and the expansion of a global capitalist economy; from this event flow a myriad of implications. One of the most significant results has been the gradual erosion of class as an analytic category in postindustrial culture, and a corresponding confidence in the triumph of technology and rational planning over the "crisis" tendencies of the capitalist economy.

The paradigmatic expression of this ideology occurs in the work of sociologist Daniel Bell, whose influential books, including The End of Ideology (1962), The Coming of Postindustrial Society (1973), and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), provide both a blueprint and a critique of the postindustrial future.16 Postindustrial society, in Bell's analysis, is characterized by constant technological innovation and the rational planning and management of economic and social resources by a disinterested, technocratic elite. In The Coming of Postindustrial Society Bell offers his description of the salient characteristics of the transition to post industrialism, "Broadly speaking, if industrial society is based on machine technology, postindustrial society is shaped by an intellectual technology. And if capital and labor are the major structural features of industrial society, information and knowledge are those of the postindustrial society."17

In Bell's description the conflicting forces of industrial capitalism--"capital" and "labor"--are resolved into the complementary assets of postindustrial capitalism: "information" and "knowledge." "Class struggle," the bane of industrial capitalism, has been transformed--according to Bell--from ". . .a matter of conflict between management and worker in the economic enterprise. . . [to] the pull and tug of various organized segments to influence the state budget. . ."18. The traditional, industrial working class has been replaced by a stratum of highly paid, well-trained scientists and engineers who fuel the fires of technological innovation. Bell optimistically predicts that this "knowledge class" will continue to expand until it becomes "the central occupational category in society," even as the percentage of unskilled labor in the U.S. workforce will plummet.19 As workers achieve "political and economic citizenship," "the old politico-economic radicalism (preoccupied with such matters as the socialization of industry) will lose its meaning."20. Scarcity, periodic crises, drastic fluctuations in the business cycle, and extremes of under and over-development, have all been banished by a "theoretical knowledge" that replaces the self-interest of earlier forms of capitalism with "tools such as systems theory and decision theory to chart more efficient, 'rational' solutions to economic and engineering, if not social problems."21

There is, however, a serpent in Bell's technocratic Garden of Eden. Capitalism has "solved" its economic crises only to be confronted by an equally debilitating cultural crisis. As scientific rationality comes to dominate more and more facets of daily life it destroys our capacity for spiritual experience, leaving nothing but ". . .a technological engine, geared to the idea of functional rationality and efficiency, which promises a rising standard of living and promotes a hedonistic way of life. . ."22 The earlier "Protestant ethic" of hard work and deferred gratification was eroded by the rise of mass production and consumer culture, and "The cultural, if not the moral, justification of capitalism become[s]. . . the idea of pleasure as a way of life."23 As a result, society is left with no ". . .transcendent ethos to provide some appropriate sense of purpose, no anchorages that can provide stable meanings for people."24 Vice President Quayle’s attacks on the “nihilism” of the “cultural elite” are only the most recent in a long history of jeremiads directed against the decline of traditional values. In an essay published in 1964 Bell (anticipating Lyotard's postmodern "condition" by two decades) writes that postindustrial culture marks the "breakdown" of the "rational cosmology" of Post-Enlightenment philosophy: ". . .there is an end of linearity and the emergence of the problem of the creation of simultaneity. People no longer have a sense of linearity, of beginning, middle and end, foreground and background."25 Thus, according to Bell, the "real problem" of modernity is "the problem of belief. . . It is a spiritual crisis, since the new anchorages have proved illusory and the old ones have become submerged."26

Corroboration of Bell's critique of postindustrial cultural fragmentation came from an unlikely quarter: the French New Left. For theorists such as André Gorz, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and Jean Baudrillard the postindustrial era was characterized by the dominance of consumer culture and the growing irrelevance of conventional theories of economic production.27 The traditional industrial working class had ceased to exist (the title of one of Gorz's most influential works was Farewell to the Working Class [1980]), leaving only a professional/managerial elite and a disenfranchised "non-class" of the unemployed and underemployed (whom Gorz views as a potentially liberatory force). In Everyday Life in the Modern World (originally published in 1971) Lefebvre wrote of the "dwindling of temporality," the "dispersal of communities and the rise of individualism (not to be confused with self-realization)." Lefebvre, like Bell, noted "the division of labor stressed to the point of specialization and the subsequent loss of unity compensated by ideology, the anguish arising from a general sense of meaningless, the proliferation of signs and signifieds failing to make up for the general lack of significance."28

If the analyses of postindustrial society developed by the French New Left sound surprisingly like those of Bell and his colleagues it is because both describe the same ostensible reality: the "stark abundance" (Baudrillard) of postindustrial capitalism.29 Reading Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism against Baudrillard's Political Economy of the Sign, with its numerous references to Thorstein Veblen and conspicuous consumption, we can detect the contours of a larger theoretical discourse on postindustrial culture which encompasses both "conservative" (neoliberal) and "radical" (post-Marxist) positions. For Bell what defines bourgeois society "is not needs, but wants. . ."30 Although Baudrillard uses the term "needs" in place of "wants," he nevertheless also characterizes late capitalism by the "false liberty of the consumer" in which ". . .desire is abstracted and atomized into needs, in order to make it homogeneous with the means of satisfaction (products, images, sign-objects, etc.) and thus to multiply consummativity."31 Bell, anticipating Baudrillard's description of the culture of capitalism in Simulations, notes that "appearances begin to count for more than reality. If consumption represents the psychological competition for status, then one can say that bourgeois society is the institutionalization of envy."32 And Baudrillard himself, in his essay "The Art Auction," remarks, "Everywhere prestige haunts our industrial society, whose bourgeois culture is never more than the phantom of aristocratic values."33

While the cultural analysis of the French New Left provided a much-needed challenge to the economic determinism of conventional Marxist models, it also held the potential for an equally immobilizing cultural determinism. The most extreme articulation of this tendency unfolds in Baudrillard's later work on the "phenomenology of consumption." As Baudrillard writes in Simulations, "we now know that it is on the level of reproduction (fashion, media, publicity, information and communication networks) on the level of what Marx negligently called the nonessential sectors of capital. . . that is to say in the sphere of the simulacra and of the code that the global process of capital is founded."34 For Bell, consumer culture is a dysfunctional symptom of postindustrial capitalism, while for Baudrillard it is the mechanism by which the capitalist system reproduces itself. Baudrillard nevertheless ends up confirming Bell's belief that the crisis tendencies of capitalism in the post-industrial era have been effectively displaced to the cultural realm, due to the objective economic "success" of the capitalist mode of production.

But productive labor did not just disappear, to be replaced by some fugitive "non-class." Rather, there are still vast populations of workers in the global assembly line on whose labor the postindustrial economy depends for its wealth. The theories of both Bell and Baudrillard inadvertently echo the spatial logic of the postindustrial system they attempt to analyze. Both theories describe a "space" of late capitalism and are themselves captured within that space; they can't theorize the uncoupling and displacement of class and economic crisis (and the social costs of capitalist production) to the Third World. They see the material success (and cultural fragmentation) of the postindustrial West, but not the economic and social misery of the global work force on which that success is founded. Their critique only extends to the visible symptoms of late capitalism as experienced by beneficiary segments of the postindustrial West, not to the associated social costs in the rest of the world (or the West’s own class of unemployed or underemployed workers, for that matter). Thus Baudrillard's consistent focus on the commodities produced by the postindustrial economy always comes at the expense of a consideration of where these commodities come from--this is the characteristic abstraction that links both modern and postmodern aesthetic methodologies.

This is not to suggest that capitalism doesn't erode social or communal values; clearly it does. Nor is it to neglect the cogency of Baudrillard's critique of postindustrial culture. It is simply to question the underlying assumption that because postindustrial capitalism has created a condition of relative abundance in selected regions of the West, it has thereby "solved the economic problems of material production."35 The surprising correspondence between Bell’s and Baudrillard's visions of postindustrial culture demonstrates the extent to which this particular interpretation can inadvertently collaborate with the very ideological forces it claims to critique. What this interpretation fails to account for is the stubborn persistence of the very conditions that have ostensibly been expunged from the core nations by the "technical mastery" of capitalism (widespread poverty, unemployment, etc.) in the nations of the periphery. Seen in this light, Gorz’s potentially liberatory "non-class" all too easily becomes either a liberal argument for the failure of the welfare state to assimilate all its citizens, or a conservative argument about the failure of individual workers to adapt to changing economic conditions. What is lost is the important recognition that, despite the benefits (and costs) of a highly developed postindustrial economy, capitalist wealth is still the product of the strategic and deliberate underdevelopment of people, resources, economies, and entire cultures.

The Dream World of Postindustrial Capitalism

Virtual Reality (VR) is a paradigmatic site, or more accurately a paradigmatic 'non-site'--since it is constituted through the perceptual illusion of habitable space--in which the “cultural contradictions” of postindustrial capitalism are exemplified with particular clarity. VR embodies the social divisions of the high technology economy in its very design; sophisticated software written by the computer industry's most advanced programmers is woven into a complex cybernetic tapestry with the congealed labor of hundreds of assembly laborers and microchip production workers.

In just a few short years VR has gone from being an obscure computer system on the fringes of high-tech research and development to the most visible and celebrated technological breakthrough since the personal computer. The simultaneous publication in the summer of 1991 of Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality and Katie Hafner and John Markoff's Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier capped a year in which VR was covered in almost every major daily newspaper and magazine from the Wall Street Journal to the Village Voice.36 The previous summer witnessed the 24-hour "Cyberthon," sponsored by the Whole Earth Institute in San Francisco, in which the latest developments in virtual and interactive technologies were demonstrated around the clock to a dazed audience of international journalists, celebrities and various hangers on. In between there were no less three national conferences dedicated to discussion of various aspects of VR technology and cognate “philosophy.”37

At the center of this media feeding-frenzy is a hardware/software technology that allows the user to "inhabit" a computer-generated environment. The prototypical VR system (there are several variations) consists of a set of "EyePhones"--two tiny video monitors in a head mounted display--linked to a pair of "DataGloves," which are able to precisely track the movements of the user's hands. The EyePhones and DataGloves (there is also a full-sized "DataSuit") are linked to a software program that transmits the image of a space (usually a room) to the eyephones. As you flex your hand to pick up an imaginary object the movement is relayed via the data glove to the computer and you see your animated hand perform the action in "virtual" space through the EyePhone monitors. Hypothetically, VR space can be made to resemble anything that a software designer can imagine (and that graphics programs are capable of rendering). But despite all the feverish attention it has received the VR experience in its current state of development is relatively pedestrian. Most VR interiors look very much like three-dimensional, computer-generated scenes; rudimentary rooms occupied by various shaded polygon forms.

It is the potential uses of VR that have excited the most feverish prognostications, giving free reign to the utopian desires of an entire high-tech avant garde consisting of computer artists, software designers, engineers, writers, and social theorists. The rhetoric, which is dominated by visions of unlimited "access" and VR "town hall" meetings, is not unlike that associated with the early days of cable television. A recent cyberspace conference speculated that VR could create "viable, 3-dimensional, alternate realities providing the maximum number of individuals with the means of communication, creativity, productivity and mobility, and control over the shapes of their lives within the new information and media environment."38 Ideas for future development range from a “virtual library” in which the user-researcher would move through rows of books coded in different colors depending on their relevance to a given topic or query, to computer developer Jaron Lanier's vision of homes decorated with virtual "fish tanks" containing baseball games, class rooms and shopping malls.39

VR's significance stems in large part from the fact that it promises to bridge, if not eliminate altogether, the information flow bottleneck, or interface, that currently stands between the vast complexity of the human mind and the immense processing capabilities of new generations of computers. VR promises to transform every sensory node of the human organism into a potential site for the reception and transmission of computer data. The problem of the interface is a representational one first, and only secondarily one of technology (the actual hardware necessary for a rudimentary version of VR has been around for some time). The significance of VR rests in the recognition that bits of alphanumeric data can be experienced in a simulated, three-dimensional environment as spatial and formal relationships. The flat, one-dimensional surface of the computer screen will open out into the endless depth and multi-variability of cyberspace, producing, as one particularly breathless VR booster has it, "a great flowering of individual choice, expression and access to information. . ."40

But the epistemological miracle of VR did not spring full blown from the brows of Silicon Valley's software designers; it is based on a sophisticated hardware platform consisting of a quarter-million dollars worth of powerful microprocessors and specialized equipment.41 If the user's experience of VR is intensely private, the actual production of VR hardware is thoroughly social, exploded through a vast global network of factories, assembly plants, and suppliers. The fascinated and obsessive elaboration of hypothetical cyberspace obscures another set of spatial arrangements that, if less fantastic, are no less rooted in the material base of the postindustrial economy. It is this space, the space of postfordism and flexible accumulation, that is almost entirely repressed in the euphoric calculations of VR's prognosticators.42

Software constitutes the "dream world" of postindustrial capitalism, to use Walter Benjamin's description of the nascent consumer culture of the late nineteenth-century city.43 According to Benjamin, the commodity form is built around a mythic "wish image" that expresses the utopia of "leisure and plenty" slumbering in the lap of industrial capitalism. But the utopian desires evoked by the commodity, rather than leading to the conscious pursuit of social transformation, are deferred by the "virtual" satisfaction of consumerism. In the postindustrial economy, material plentitude is replaced by a plenitude of information, flowing like wine from the Saint-Simonian fountains of the VR matrix. This utopian moment is a central feature of postindustrial culture, surfacing in everything from advertisements for telecommunications corporations to computer hacker manifestos.

Consider AT&T's recent campaign conducted under the tagline, "AT & T: Nobody else gives you this much power to manage your world." One of the commercials in this series features an American broadcast journalist covering the Bicentennial of the French Revolution who doesn't want to miss his parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary. He uses fax machines and modems to transmit photographs in order to track down the Parisian restaurant where his parents first met years before, and then has them flown to Paris to celebrate their anniversary at the same restaurant. The message, or one of the messages, of the commercial is that the same technology that makes high tech businesses hum can also make our lives fuller. AT&T reassures us that the "human element"--rather than being lost in the blizzard of the information age--will actually be accentuated. Information technologies will bring "us" (those who use the technology, if not necessarily those who produce it) closer to the things that count; family, tradition, and compassion.

The liberatory power of data consumerism is also regularly evoked in the rhetoric of the computer counter-culture. The following excerpt is taken from "The Conscience of a Hacker," written by a member of the group Legion of Doom:

This is our world now . . . the world of the electron and the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it weren't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore . . . and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge . . . and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias . . . and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals . . .44

With this hacker manifesto we are on the familiar terrain of high-technology utopia. Racial, sexual, class, nationalistic, and religious "biases" will be dissolved in the limitless and unfettered exchange of the data cloud. Computers could provide endless streams of free information to everyone, and unite the planet in a classless Gemeinschaft, if only they weren't controlled by "Big Money," and "the power creeps."45 Hackers imagine themselves as poised at the most vulnerable points (terminals and networks) of the information economy, waiting for the proper moment to launch a postindustrial revolution. "Governments are institutionalized, regimented, bureaucratic systems" as one hacker has it, "As things get out of hand, there are several thousand hackers out there who will take action."46

Computer hackers, following Daniel Bell, recognize that with the transition to postindustrialism, information itself is subject to the laws of capital--it can be bought and sold like any other commodity. But in their various analyses and manifestos, information not only takes on the form of a commodity, it emerges as the new basis of capitalist domination (and potential liberation), while the conventional structures of economic exploitation on which the commodity form is founded drop away. Thus their resistance to postindustrial capitalism is always staged around ethical issues of access, and denial of access, to information. In their tendency to hypostatize “information,” they implicitly confirm Bell’s belief in the irrelevance of traditional modes of economic production and class-based social control. This is also what leads them to attach such grandiose revolutionary significance to their own position as highly-skilled technicians within the postindustrial economy.

A more domesticated version of this "revolutionary" rhetoric issues from visual artists who have embraced VR and interactivity. In his article "Interactive Art and Cultural Change" computer artist Stephen Wilson rehearses the standard dystopian/utopian themes:

We are at a cultural crossroads in the evolution of technology. Computers promise great opportunity and great danger. They could usher in a dark age of increasing passivity and centralization and a decay into a faceless mass society; or they could bring about a great flowering of individual choice, expression and access to information and communication . . . Artists could be critical in helping to direct this technological evolution. They can uncover and investigate new capabilities of the computer that are unlikely to be developed by manufacturers, given the current dominance of commercial interests . . .47

Film- and video maker Gene Youngblood, whose forthcoming book is entitled Virtual Worlds: The Power to Create on the Same Scale as We Destroy, believes that "creative people can take [technology] and apply aesthetics and civility and a human element . . . we can be the ethical conscience of high technology."48 Others view interactivity as a liberatory, postmodern art form. Artist and writer Roy Ascott, in a special issue of Leonardo on art and telecommunications, contends that interactive art

is no longer seen as a linear affair, dealing in harmony, completion, resolution, closure--a composed and ordered finality. Instead it is open-ended, even fugitive, fleeting, tentative, virtual. Forming rather than formed, it celebrates process, embodies system, embraces chaos . . . Our need is to fly, to reach out, to touch, connect--to expand our consciousness by a dissemination of our presence, to distribute self into a larger society of the mind.49

The correspondence between Ascott’s description and AT&T’s “reach out and touch someone” ad campaign is striking.

The process by which VR achieves the status of a "postmodern" art form is decidedly modernist. The critical methodology that fetishizes VR's formal characteristics as a medium (interactivity, simulatation, etc.), necessarily elides its basis in the postindustrial global economy. This process effectively reproduces the epistemological gesture of a modernist aesthetics, which abstracts objects from their original cultural contexts and celebrates their conformation to some ostensibly “universal” standard of beauty. VR functions in this respect like a strange tribal artifact whose origins are shrouded in mystery but which is nevertheless available for aesthetic delectation.

Jaron Lanier, the CEO of Virtual Programming Languages in California, and a leading VR developer, is one of the most visible godheads in the pantheon on the computer avant garde. Lanier's version of VR utopia extends beyond hackneyed visions of hacker revolution, populist access, or the greeting card aesthetics of computer artists, to the reformation of human consciousness itself. In his numerous interviews and public remarks Lanier claims that VR will provide a form of "post-symbolic" communication that will liberate us from conventional language systems and allow us to experience an unprecedented conceptual freedom.50 VR will precipitate an "epistemological revolution," transforming communication from the linear fascism of numbers and written language to the free flowing, non-linear, visual paradise of the VR "playhouse," where thoughts pass directly into material form without the ideological mediation of language.

It is with Lanier, and the subculture surrounding VR, that the underlying continuities between current high-tech ideology and Daniel Bell's postindustrial technocracy are clearest. Both Lanier and Bell believe that the drastically accelerated technological change of the postindustrial era has catapulted society to a fundamentally new evolutionary plateau at which conventional social, political and economic forces are no longer operative.51 VR--one of the exemplary technological expression of the postindustrial era--clears away the rubble of history and social life. In Lanier's vision of VR class, race, gender and age "all become invention. You can be whoever or whatever you want. If you can choose your form, you don't have to make it a human one . . . Virtual Reality is the ultimate lack of class or race distinctions or any other form of pretense, since all form is variable . . ."52 Just as class as an economic marker has been effaced by the growing efficiency and productivity of the postindustrial economy, so class as a subjective experience has been (or will be) dissolved in the limitless flux of the VR matrix. Lanier, like Baudrillard, believes that class will become little more than an effect of postindustrial culture. Even as the spatial logic of postindustrial capitalism has expanded outward, from the division of city and suburb to the global division of core and periphery, so too it has migrated inward, to the psychic landscape of the human mind. The social vacuum of postfordist space is reproduced in the privatized, flattened landscape of VR, in which the computer avant-garde can indulge in fantasies of absolute mobility and pure communication.

Although Lanier is critical of the conformity of big business (he describes institutions as "halfway houses for the partially inspired"), his vision of VR marks a decisive break with even the denuded “anarchism” of the hacker fringe. Where the hacker community would overthrow or subvert the corporate world, Lanier's goals are more metaphysical. As he comments in a recent interview, "I don't think we're trying to beat the system. I think we're trying to inspire the system."53 According to Bell the cultural crisis of late capitalism derives from the fact that affluence and productivity have cushioned us from the "existential predicaments which are the ground of humility and care for others."54 In the pre-high tech past material privation and scarcity spurred humanity towards a collective sense of spirituality. But now, because of our overwhelming technological progress, we have lost the capacity to experience awe before the unknown.

Where Bell advocates a return to conventional religion proponents of VR like Lanier offer a kind of religious technology--a spiritual machine that can induce transcendence. Lanier will heal the "disjunction of realms" that threatens to tear apart the high technology economy with the liberating satori of VR. VR proponent Michael Heim suggests that Cyberspace can provide a "metaphysical grounding":

The ultimate VR experience is a philosophical experience, probably an experience of the sublime or awesome . . . The final point of a virtual world is to dissolve the constraints of the anchored world so we can lift anchor--not to drift aimlessly without point, but so we can explore anchorage in ever new places and, perhaps, find our way back to experience the most primitive and powerful alternative embedded in the question posed by Leibniz: "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?55

And Randal Walser, the head of the software company Autodesk, envisions "Cyberspace Playhouses" as a "new kind of social gathering place where people go to participate in three-dimensional simulations . . . that engage not just the mind but the whole body and spirit."56

Both Bell and Lanier see the role of culture in the postindustrial era as a normative one. For Bell, art and literature can help fill the spiritual vacuum left by the declining influence of organized religion (at least among members of the knowledge class). And for Lanier cultural media such as VR can act as a buffer against the more extreme, dehumanizing effects of technological progress. Thus, the computer avant-garde will provide the "human element" that is systematically denied in the banal and rational information age. Computer artists working with virtual and interactive systems will balance the "dominance of commercial interests" with the sheer force of their moral integrity, or act as a kind of humanistic research and development arm of postindustrial culture. The role of VR as imagined by its more utopian proponents is hardly revolutionary, and is only nominally reformist. They aren’t interested in challenging the underlying class relations or labor structures of postindustrial capitalism, only in insulating the knowledge class from its more damaging psychic and spiritual effects.

The beneficiaries of VR's spiritual efflorescence are the privileged, highly trained members of the postindustrial knowledge class. A significant number of these managers, administrators, technicians and other functionaries live and work in semi-urban spaces that are characterized not by density, but by sprawl and dispersal. “Edge City” complexes consisting of shopping malls, condominiums, and high-tech office parks have sprung up on the peripheries of major cities throughout the United States, including Post Oak-Galleria outside of Houston, Tysons Corner outside of Washington, D.C., Route 128 outside of Boston and South Coast Metro Center in Orange County, California.57.

These primarily white, upper-middle-class enclaves represent the clean side of the global division of labor--offering irrefutable “proof” of the affluence of the postindustrial economy. They have been the focus of a vast outpouring of theoretical and journalistic analysis during the last several years. The most persistent criticism of these malls writ large is that they have sacrificed the community and diversity of the vanquished metropolis. The solution to the “cultural crisis” of the edge city, according to many observers, is for planners to create specially designed urban “villages” in which stores, homes and businesses are closer together: “the idea is to foster a sense of community and face-to-face human contact. . . to give towns a higher cultural purpose than the efficient flow of traffic.”58

The Florida-based architectural team of Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is one of the principle forces behind the push for village-based design. They argue that “architecture has the power to affect behavior. If you build a town with a correct relationship of buildings, streets, and sidewalks, people act as though they were in a town. They get to know each other, they look after each other’s places. . .”59. Centrum at Marine World Parkway, a mixed-use development not far from California’s “Silicon Valley,” is typical of corporate efforts to “humanize” the high-tech work environment. Centrum offers its executive tenants health clubs, jogging trails, reflecting lakes, programmable environmental controls, and “complete electronics-based life safety features” because, as Centrum's promotional brochure advises us, "We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature."

The references to “spiritual demands” and “higher cultural purposes” in analyses of contemporary urban society suggest the existence of a larger therapeutic discourse that lies at the heart of postindustrial culture. There is a striking confluence between discussions of edge cities and VR technology. In each case the fragmentation of postindustrial culture, the loss of communal and convivial values, will be restored through exposure to an exemplary space. Physical environments like Centrum and psychic "environments" like VR can be viewed as the postindustrial equivalents of the parks and gardens of the nineteenth-century City Beautiful movement, providing isolated sanctuaries of aesthetically integrated experience in the midst of the fragmented, ex-urban space of the postfordist city. Thus, developments such as Centrum and VR function as spiritual prosthetics, compensating for the human absence in the routinized culture of the information economy. Centrum offers the revivifying tonic of a holistic work/recreation complex, while VR functions as a kind of phenomenological Nautilus machine, providing therapy for the mentally fatigued members of the knowledge class--liberating their perceptions from the linear, instrumentalizing habitat of the postindustrial economy and providing them with simulated existential encounters.

Daniel Bell's optimistic prediction that the steadily increasing ranks of skilled engineers and scientists would be matched by a dwindling working class has been belied by the postfordist labor shifts sketched above.60 In fact, the development of a globally integrated work force has been marked by the persistence and intensification of precisely those traditional class divisions that the postindustrial economy was supposed to eradicate. As sociologist Ben Agger writes, “The people who run computer companies are no less entrepreneurial and narrowly self-interested than mill owners in Victorian England.”61 The vast majority of the engineers, programmers, and technicians who make up the knowledge class are white males, while the bulk of unskilled manual labor is performed by women of color living in Third World countries with low wage levels and little or no labor organization. Thus, the spatial separation between core and periphery, or First and Third World, is further reiterated as a racial and gendered division.

There remain vast segments of the global population that are on quite familiar terms with "existential dilemmas" such as hunger, material privation, and homelessness, and for whom the experience of class, race, and gender is considerably more than a "bias" or "pretense" to be effortlessly shed in the liberating precincts of Cyberspace. These are the "massed up workers of the Third World," in Amblavaner Sivanandan's words, "on whose greater immiseration and exploitation the brave new western world of postfordism is being erected." These are the "hostages" that we concede to postindustrial capitalism when we accept its claim of "technical mastery".62 While the office parks, "postmodern" hotels, and the ever-shifting shapes and colors of the VR matrix hold the fascinated gaze of western theorists, we must also account for other, less glamorous, spaces; the maquiladora plant and the microchip factory, the shanty town and the colonia. If these sites are less rewarding to study as arenas for the play of signification, they are no less symptomatic of postindustrial capitalism.

It has not been my intention in this essay to portray the culture of postindustrial capitalism as inexorably oppressive or monolithic. Clearly its operations are subject to contestation and subversion (although it has not been my concern to explore this process here). At the same time, I would argue that most attempts to either analyze postindustrial culture, or to theorize some form of resistance to it, are founded--whether consciously or not--on the elision of the global dimension of the high-tech economy. It is this elision that characterizes the bourgeois perception I have sketched above. From the utopian predictions of “virtual town halls,” to the dystopian visions of cyberpunk, to those who seek liberatory discontinuities in the apparently seamless façade of postindustrial consumer culture, all these analyses are based on a fundamentally uniform portrayal of the effects of postindustrial capitalism. They assume that, for better or worse, everyone will have access to the full range of computer and telecommunications technologies, and that their relationship to this technology will be principally defined in terms of consumption, rather than production. What seems far more likely is a process of strategic underdevelopment, characterized by the formation of a “communications elite,” on the one hand, and the persistence of wide scale poverty and exploitive labor on the other.63

Seen in this light, Jaron Lanier’s yearning for a “post symbolic” communication, for some state of innocence beyond the ideological contamination of language, and history, is finally, a rejection of the social. It is precisely the extent to which this position mirrors the privileged disavowal of a bourgeois perception that undermines the critiques of postindustrial society mounted by the computer avant-garde. No matter how deeply a hacker can penetrate into a given data bank, or how “interactive” a given piece of software is, no matter how many hours a day the average American spends in a VR playhouse, the underlying system of postindustrial production and the vast inequities in the quality of life between First and Third World will remain both unrecognized and unchallenged.

Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego

Notes

1. Amblavaner Sivanandan, "All that melts into air is solid: the hokum of New Times," Race and Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation, vol.31, no.3, (January-March 1990), 1-30.

2. On the impact of Postfordism on urban space, see Manual Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); and Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).

3. See Jeffrey Henderson, The Globalization of High Technology Production (New York: Routledge, 1989); June Nash and María Patricia Fernández-Kelly, eds., Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Keith Hoggart and Eleanore Kofman, eds., Politics, Geography, and Social Stratification (Kent: Croom Helm, 1986); M.P. Smith and Joe R. Feagin, eds., The Capitalist City: Global Restructuring and Community Politics (New York: Blackwell, 1987); M. Gottdiener and Nicos Komninos, eds., Capitalist Development and Crisis Theory: Accumulation, Regulation and Spatial Restructuring (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989); and Michael Taylor and Nigel Thrift, The Geography of Multinationals (New York: St. Martins Press, 1982).

4. John Urry, "Class, Space, and Disorganized Capitalism," in Politics, Geography, and Social Stratification, 30.

5. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986). Also see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

6. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 78.

7. One of the few books that attempts to develop an analysis of a characteristically "bourgeois" mode of perception is Donald M. Lowe's History of Bourgeois Perception, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Lowe's book attempts to read bourgeois perceptions of space and time through a rapprochement between Marxism and phenomenology.

8. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 78.

9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 214.

10. Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Introduction (New York: Dutton, 1970), 157.

11. John Stuart Mill, “Civilization,” in Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 64.

12. Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York: Modern Library, 1961), 81.

13. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 78.

14. The division between the global working class and the managerial and technical classes in the urban centers of the core nations is far from absolute. Highly developed "informal" economies proliferate within the core cities, characterized by assembly and back office labor, silicon chip fabrication and other components of high technology production. These economies, which rely heavily on immigrant workers, essentially reproduce a Third World labor pool in the midst of First World affluence. These workers are joined by a drastically expanded service class in the core cities which recuperates the disenfranchised skilled workers of the declining industrial sector. See Kristin Koptiuch, "Third-Worlding at Home," Social Text 28 (1991), 87-99.

15. See The Globalization of High Technology Production, 3. Also see Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space, esp. “The Restructuring of Settlement Space.”

16. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1962); The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, (New York: Basic Books, 1973); The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

17. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society, xiii.

18. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 24.

19. In The Coming of Postindustrial Society Bell predicts that by 1980 "semi-skilled labor" will constitute only 16.2% of the workforce, making in "third in size ranking, outpaced by clerical, and by professional and technical workers,” (136).

20. The source isn't Bell, but another neo-conservative writer, Seymour Martin Lipset, quoted by Michael Harrington in "The Anti-Ideology Ideologues," in The End of Ideology Debate, Chaim I. Waxman, editor, (New York: Clarion Books, 1969), 349.

21. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society, xvi.

22. Ibid., .xxi.

23. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 22.

24. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society, xxi.

25. Daniel Bell, "The Postindustrial Society," in Technology and Social Change, Eli Ginzberg, editor, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 58.

26. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 28.

27. See André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, translated by Michael Sonenscher (Boston: South End Press, 1982); Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1990); Jean Baudrillard, Le Systeme de objets, (Paris: Denoel-Gonthier, 1968) and La Societe de consommation, (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), and Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977).

28. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 39.

29. “We are verging on the point where consumption seizes life entirely. . . In this phenomenology of consumption, the general climatization of life, of social relations, represent[s] the accomplished, the ‘consummate’ stage in an evolution based on start abundance. . .” Baudrillard, Le systéme des objets, cited in the translator’s introduction to For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 11.

30. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 22.

31. In his essay "The Ideological Genesis of Needs," Baudrillard argues that the very idea of "primary needs," or a subsistence level of food, clothing, and shelter, is an illusion. He insists that both "societies of scarcity" and "societies of abundance" are equally "articulated in terms of a structural surplus." Baudrillard's elevation of exchange value over use value, of consumption over production, of cultural over material determination, leads him to ask, "Is loss of status--or social non-existence--less upsetting than hunger?" For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 81.

32. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 22-23.

33. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 119.

34. Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. by Paul Foss, et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 99 (italics mine).

35. Arthur Hirsh, The French New Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz, (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 99.

36. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality, (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). Also see Teresa Carpenter, “Slouching Toward Cyberspace,” Village Voice 12 (March 1991), 34-40 and Douglas Martin, “Virtual Reality! Hallucinations!! Age of Aquarius!!!,” New York Times, (March 2, 1991).

37. The First Annual Virtual Reality Conference was held December 10-11, 1990 in San Francisco, CA. See: John Minkowsky, "Playing Virtual House," Afterimage 18, no. 8 (March 1991), 5. The First Annual Conference on Cyberspace was held at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture May 4-5, 1990. The conference abstracts were published by MIT Press in the fall of 1991 as CYBerspace, ed. Michael Benedikt. “CyberArts International: A Forum for the Application of Technology in the Arts” was held in Los Angeles from September 7-9 1990.

38. Cited in Joseph Henderson, “Designing Realities: Interactive Media, Virtual Reality, and Cyberspace,” in Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice, Promise, ed. Sandra K. Helsel and Judith Paris Roth (Westport, Conn.: Meckler Publishing, 1991), 67.

39. The following is one of Jaron Lanier's concepts for a VR application, "You go home and you're in your living room and you put on some nice sunglasses and a glove, and then suddenly you're in the room again, but there's new furniture there. There's a big rack of fish tanks, and in the fish tanks there are little people running around doing things. In one of them is a three-dimensional game of baseball, and in another one there's some home shopping things so you can go around and see what you want. In another one you have a class going on about geology. And another one has the city council meeting, and they're putting up new a new skyscraper, and you can see how it will look from all these angles. You put your hand into one of these bowls, and you experience yourself flying into the scene, which becomes big so you're the same size as the people. You can do whatever you want there. It's like a virtual reality party line going on in there." in Tim Druckrey, "Revenge of the Nerds: An Interview with Jaron Lanier," Afterimage 18, no. 10 (May 1991), 8. The "virtual library" is described by Michael B. Spring in "Informating with Virtual Reality," in Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice, and Promise, 12. Some of the more interesting VR fantasies include the following vision described by Lanier, "If you suddenly wanted to make the planet three times larger, put a crystal cave in the middle with a giant goat bladder pulsing inside of that and tiny cities populating the goat bladder's surface, and running between each of the cities were solid gold railways carrying tiny gerbils playing accordions--you could build that world instead of talking about it!" Cited in Minkowsky, “Playing Virtual House,” 5.

40. Stephen Wilson, "Interactive Art and Cultural Change," in Leonardo, 23, no.2/3 (1990), 255.

41. Much of the original research that made VR systems possible derived from Department of Defense projects for simulating battle conditions. Curiously, the initial introduction of interactive computer technologies to the general public has taken place through entertainment media, and in particular, through toys such as Mattel's "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future" system (1987) and "Power Glove" (a Nintendo peripheral device) (1989). For a discussion of the relationship between military research and development and computer technology see Cyborg Worlds: the military information society, eds. Les Levidow and Kevin Robins (London: Free Association Books, 1989). $250,000 represents the "top end" of the consumer market--a VPL, Inc. "RB2" system (for "A Reality Built for Two"). The Sense8 corporation is developing a VR system in the $10,000 range ("a price that is practical for business today" according to Sense8's chief scientist) See Arthur Bodisco, "Sense8 Plans Affordable VR Now," in Mondo 2000, no.2 (Summer 1990), 54. The major VR research centers at NASA, the University of North Carolina, the MIT Media Lab, and the University of Washington all operate far more expensive systems.

42. For a general introduction to issues of postfordism see New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989); David Harvey, The Urban Experience; Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and Bob Jessop, Kevin Bonnett, Simon Bromley, and Tom Ling, Thatcherism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

43. See Susan Buck-Morss's "Mythic History: Fetish," and "Mythic Nature: Wish Image," in her exposition of Benjamin's Passagenwerk, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 78-158. Buck-Morss, writing on Benjamin's notion of the "wish image," remarks that when "Benjamin states that these [wish] images 'pertain' to a 'classless' society,' it is because the fairy-tale quality of the wish for happiness that they express presupposes an end to material scarcity and exploitive labor that form the structural core of societies based on class domination.", (118). Also see Benjamin's essay based on some of the Passagenwerk notes, "Paris--the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1985). I owe the image of computer software as a "dream world" to Greig Crysler.

44. "A Message to You from Legion of Doom Member 'The Mentor'," Mondo 2000, no.3 (Winter 1991), 59.

45. Lee Felsenstein, "Parting Shot: Have I Missed the Revolution?" Mondo 2000, no.7 (Fall 1989), 153.

46. Allan Lundell, "Some Good Things to Say About Computer Viruses," Mondo 2000 no.7, (Fall, 1989), 50.

47. Wilson, "Interactive Art and Cultural Change," 255.

48. Remarks during the panel "Enchanting Technologies: Photography and Electronic Media in the 21st-Century," at the 1990 National Society for Photographic Education Conference, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico March 15-18, 1990.

49. Roy Ascott, "Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications," Leonardo 24, no.2 (1991), 116. In a special issue of the Art Journal on "Computers and Art," Timothy Binkley attempts to establish the "postmodernist" character of computers and computer art through four "common [postmodern] themes," "conceptualism," "pluralism," "simulation," and "metadiscourse." He then goes on to elaborate his argument with quotes from Lyotard and Baudrillard. See "The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation without Tools or Media," Art Journal, (Fall 1990), 233-40.

50. See Druckrey, "Revenge of the Nerds," 6. Also see Lanier's discussion of "communication without symbols" in Barbara Stacks and Adam Heilbrun, "Virtual Reality: An Interview with Jaron Lanier," Whole Earth Review, (Fall, 1989).

51. Lanier speaks of VR as achieving a "plateau of completion of media technology." "Revenge of the Nerds," 6. And Bell speaks of the "leap" in "social awareness, contact and interaction" that characterizes the postindustrial era. The Coming of Postindustrial Society, 172.

52. Peggy Orenstein, "Get a Cyberlife," Mother Jones (May/June, 1991), 63.

53. John Barlow, "Life In The Data Cloud: An Interview with Jaron Lanier," Mondo 2000, no.2 (Summer, 1990), 51.

54. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 30.

55. Michael Heim, "The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality," in Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice, Promise, 33.

56. Randal Walser, "Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse," Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice, Promise, 52.

57. See Joel Garreau, Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991). Also see Paul Goldberger, “When Suburban Sprawl Meets Upward Mobility,” New York Times, 26 July 1987, and the “Global Landscape” issue of Landscape Architecture 78, no.8 (December 1988).

58. Joseph Giovannini, “Today’s Planners Want to Go Home Again,” New York Times, 13 December 1987, E6.

59. Ibid.

60. See Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, The Changing Working Class: Essays on Class Structure Today (London: Bookmarks, 1987).

61. Ben Agger, “The Dialectic of Deindustrialization,” in Critical Theory and Public Life, ed. John Forester (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 10.

62. Amblavanar Sivanandan, “All that Melts into Air is Solid,” 6.

63. This process is already being borne out by preliminary discussions over the installation of fiber optic networks in the U.S. John Markoff warns that “fiber optics networks may be deployed only for those who can afford the new services. This raises the possibility of creating a new information technology elite and erecting a new electronic wall between rich and poor.” John Markoff, “Here Comes the Fiber-Optic Home,” New York Times, 5 November 1989, F14-15. See also Edmund L. Andrews, “Battle Looms over Paying to Rewire U.S. for Phones,” New York Times, 9 June 1992. A1.