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Crossing Boundaries in Cyberspace? The Politics of "Body" and "Language" after the Emergence of New Media - Critical Essay
Art Journal, Winter, 2000 by Ursula Frohne, Christian Katti
This section of Art Journal derives from a session that we chaired for the 2000 Annual Conference of the College Art Association in New York under the same title. It was designed for theorists and artists who are engaged in the critical examination of historical and current implications of electronic media to investigate the changing notions and politics of "body" and "language" under the impact of new technologies, particularly the Internet, as a medium for potential decentralized, interactive, nonhierarchical, unlimited, and intercultural knowledge exchange.
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(Art) Historically, "body" and "language" gained new significance with the emergence of action, performance, and concept art. Retrospectively, they may be considered as preliminary impulses for the introduction of "new media," such as video, interactive installation, the Internet, and virtual reality. Although "body" and "language" are rarely considered primary media themselves, they continue to be major issues in today's representations of "media art" and newly evolving media practices: The "body" functioning as a virtual projection screen for the mostly utopian promises of cyberspace as discussed in the articles that follow, and "language" as the embodiment of allegedly unlimited communication in the global community. Critical reflection on these general tendencies in the new media debate gives rise to numerous questions: Can we develop a critical concept of media that neither presupposes nor excludes the categories of the body or language? How will the juxtaposition of the global versus the local in the n ew media redefine the political sphere? Further queries about the cultural consequences of new media politics" come to mind: How are art, life, and the public and private spheres junctured in cultural discourse? Is the rhetoric of an evolutionary gain through a "technology of worldwide inclusion" symptomatic of increasingly rigid border politics, hovering behind the compensatory vision of a unified, mediated society? Considering how radically electronic media have reorganized space and communication, including the accelerated crossing of all kinds of boundaries (national, cultural, political, gendered), the socio-historical formation of a media concept in art and culture as well as the actual users' practices and strategies of applying these media make it imperative to address the political implications for changing notions of the body and language under the impact of electronic space and communication.
These dramatic transformations of the digital revolution reveal clearly that social space--public and private--is never structured neutrally like a tabula rasa, but instead consists of collective discourses. Inasmuch as this feature also applies to cyberspace as a new sphere of public space, concepts of power, history, gender, and politics must be introduced as basic categories of "practical interpretations" of its discursive forces. According to the critical art/theory project, "Old Boys Network" virtual reality does not represent a different reality as such, contradicting the hegemonic and hierarchical conditions of reality. To the degree that artists work with hybrid methods, as well as in site-specific and ephemeral contexts in alternative spaces such as the Internet, they link up with strategies of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the physical art space began to lose its defining power over the work of art. However, neither the White Cube of the gallery space, nor the digital virtual space is neutral. Both spheres are socially and ideologically defined. Therefore, both the White Cube, and the digital art space request and imply a political use. In reverse, hierarchical uses are as possible in a digital art space and with electronic media as in the traditional gallery space. Thus, electronic space is not unbaised by definition, but socially conditioned even as a site for artists' projects. The use of new technologies is neither essentially reactionary, nor already a realization of socio-political utopias. Although the structure of the Internet and new media in general do not intrinsically serve subversive and alternative interests, they offer a range of possibilities for subjective agency.
Posing questions of and about identity (consciousness, self, subject, and so on) can be addressed in the methodological frame of the most common means of understanding and communication, which is still language, although the study of culture has tended to shift from text-based descriptions to those centered on performative paradigms. The differences between language and media are subtle and hard to grasp. Philosophically, it might even be suitable to ask whether language is a medium at all or whether it is an indispensable aspect of the world. To separate a concept of world from language seems theoretically possible at first, although the emanating problems of referentiality (language to world, language to language) are as pertinent as the incredible shrinking features of a world without any semiotic spheres, which could hardly be called a world anymore. Language seems to belong to the world as much as it transcends it into the different perspectives that occur from the broad variations and differences betwe en various and dissimilar languages, cultures, value systems, and in the end, different worlds that are part of our globe. Instead of a dualism between world and language (these Cartesian dualisms are deeply rooted in Western culture with its doublings between body and soul--the latter structured as a language according to Jacques Lacan--nature and culture, form and content, and so on), media are always materialized and thereby are a physical part of the world. And they are bound to certain practices which themselves are embedded in cultural features and in political effects and consequences. Examining the complicated and newly developing "world(s) of electronic media" confronts us with an uncanny revival of many of those dualisms and inherent problems encountered in the twofold obsession of these new media with body and language.
