`Living' in Cyberia

Originally printed in 1995:4 issue of Development. Re-printed with permission of author.

There are few times in history when one can say that "the future is already here." At the dawn of the industrial revolution, something of the sort is said to have happened; the industrial revolution signified for most people "a precipice in time." Historians, writers, and ethnograhers of the past have vividly described to us how the advent of inventions like the steam engine, the factory, and the railway - not to speak of pauperization - were experienced by many in an unusually puzzling way. Two centuries later, a similar situation is upon us. If with the train the body was experienced for the first time as a parcel that could be transported quickly over long distances - life and landscape seen passing by through the window with a rapidity they never had before - virtual reality, reproductive technologies, and genetic engineering are again transforming our long taken for granted notions of the body, kinship, our senses, our dreams. To live in cybercultures endowed with these options is already possible at least for some people in some parts of the world, although not for most yet - this tremendous unevenness being itself a puzzling fact.

Technological innovations and dominant worldviews generally transform each other so as to naturalize and legitimize the technologies and social orders of the time. If modern technologies launched globally the technoscientific imaginary of European origin, with the new information, computer, and biological technologies this imaginary is bound to reach even deeper into the consciousness of a vast majority of people. It will, literally, reinvent people. Notions and practices of body, language, worldview, and labour will be transformed - by no means completely, but nevertheless significantly. There are important questions to be raised regarding this outlook that is no doubt becoming more real with every passing year. It is not enough to discuss it in terms of the globalisation that inevitably comes with it, or the new orders of management it will demand from capital and the state, or the proliferation of identities and the types of cultural hybridisation it will foster. The profound mutation that might be taking place - and despite obvious continuities with the modern period - demands that we venture into new landscapes of thought and life.

Let me outline briefly some recent insights into how this adventure of the imagination might be advanced. For Felix Guattari and Donna Haraway, for instance, the new technologies are facilitating a new look into life; they might provide grounds for new creative, self­referential subjectivities. This, however, is an historical possibility that has to be fought for. To become real, it will require the actualization of rights to alterity, new North­South relations, and a radical democratization of gender and intercultural relations. What Guattari called "ecosophical practices" demand profound transformations of economies (away from strict capitalist technovalorization), urban and rural ecologies (towards new relationships with biological life and new modes of being­in­space), and ways of thinking, in terms of acknowledging increasing social complexities.

Jacques Attali similarly sees in the millennium's end the dawn of a new mutation. The market becomes generalized and the world comes to be structured around two dominant spaces ­­the European space, including East and West, and the Pacific space, centered in Japan and including the USA­­ each with large peripheries. More interestingly, the world economy becomes dependent on the production of nomad objects as essential to information and communication as to most domains of daily life, including health, food, education, warfare and surveillance. These objects will be increasingly "intelligent," allowing users unprecedented independence. People will no longer have the need for stable home or family; they will carry with them everything that constitutes their social value. The world will be more sharply divided between "nomads of luxury" and "nomads of misery" - for whom drugs will be the main kind of nomadism available. As the latter seek to migrate to the centers, new walls will be erected between North and South, rich and poor. Worldwide, the rich will shelter themselves in their riches, connected to power centers through new technologies and disconnected from their own local spaces; it is not unlikely that the citizens of the North will justify this state of affairs in terms of a racial order. We only need to recall Somalia and Rwanda, or the new forms of xenophobia in the United States and Western Europe, to realize how close we are to this order. We need only travel the vast surfaces of Third World cities to notice that rich and poor are increasingly sundered from each other, spatially, socially, and culturally, even as the rich continue to extract material and emotional surplus from the poor and marginal.

The following are some of the social processes, I believe, that are achieving salience in the context of this emerging order:

1. The global failure of development. It is clear to most people that the post­World War II dream of development is dead. Asia, Africa, and Latin America are no closer to becoming "developed" than in 1945 when the powers of capital and technology were summoned to make them into clones of the First World. The question is: what comes after development? The German ecologist Wolfgang Sachs has no doubts as he answers this question: after development comes Security (conversation). By this he means that the relationship between North and South from now on will be dictated fundamentally by the security concerns of the North. This appears clear enough (recall The Gulf War and Somalia, and Panama and Grenada before them); it will likely imply, one might add, a steady increase in the flow of arms to the South. Funds for development programs will still flow to the South to some extent, but always tied to security considerations. Some of the smaller European countries - particularly the Scandinavian - will try to maintain a more progressive policy of cooperation with the South, but this will be the exception rather than the rule. Most worrying, the growth of hunger and malnutrition will be parallel by less and less sensitivity to them. It will be impossible to find idioms capable of conveying the magnitude of this suffering to those in positions to do something about it. This aspect of the crisis of language and the imagination deserves urgent attention; it is even worse because the crisis is doubtlessly accompanied by an unprecedented pervasiveness of violence. The role of violence as a mechanism of cultural production will grow; the results will not be pleasant for individual and collective minds.
2. The eruption of the biological as a crucial global and local social fact. The systematic destruction of nature fostered by capital and modern knowledge during the past two centuries has ineluctably resulted in the emergence of the survival of biological life as a fundamental problem. This is related to the security concerns of the North but goes beyond them. The crisis of nature is most evident in the crisis of biodiversity caused by the destruction of the tropical rainforests. The paradox is that our (Western, expert) understanding of the "rainforest" is still conditioned by nineteenth century ideologies of naturalism - the belief in the existence of Nature outside of human history - while its survival might depend more and more from an increase technologization of nature at the genetic level. For many, the key to the preservation of biodiversity is its sustainable utilization for the production of useful (that is, profitable) products, such as pharmaceuticals, through biotechnology. Local communities in rainforest areas seem to be thrust into deals with new technologies in order to even preserve certain autonomy over their cultural and physical ecologies. Here we are witnessing the possibility for alliances between the organic and the artificial - between local groups and technoscience - in order to defend nature from the most destructive forms of capital. In the best of cases, one might talk about strategies of "hybrid natures" arising out of the engagement of social movements with biotechnology interests.
3. The intervention into biological life possible since recombinant DNA is another area into which our cultural preparedness leaves much to be desired. We still espouse an ideology in which "the natural" is always superior to "the artificial." While is more commonly accepted that nature is socially constructed (not the same as saying that "there is not nature out there"), the tools for intervening into nature afforded by molecular biology and computer technologies, some believe, are fundamentally changing the ontological character of what moderns call "nature." Technoenthusiasts of all kinds - such as the most ardent advocates of the Human Genome Project - do not see any problem with leaving behind the era of organic nature. If the organic can be radically improved upon by artificial means, why not do it? Debates on the ethics of this possibility are entrapped in obsolete languages. How can we learn to relate - epistemologically, socially, and politically - to the visions of engineered bodies and manufactured organisms now possible in the wake of molecular technologies? Who claims the organic? Who claims the artificial? Who might convincingly advocate for, and carry out, their hybridisation and articulate a new ethics of social nature?
4. Finally, at the cultural level, cultural hybridisations of many kinds will also become increasingly salient. The important question in this regard is to identify and foster those hybridisations that seem politically important, in terms of redefining social power and contributing to the cultural affirmation of subaltern groups and to social equality. Hybridisation in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is never an individual option; it affects entire social groups. It is a collective process, not a state to be achieved. It undermines claims to purity by the elites. Fundamentalisms will also grow, and they will seem to be a rejection of hybridity. The role of religion will also become more visible. As social science analysts, we have been concerned - perhaps for too long - with the power of capital to shape social life. In allegedly secular times, we have lost sight of the importance of religion. As other forms of creating social cohesion - such as the state and the market - weaken, religion will step in to take their place. Drugs will also become a means to feel connected - and a pressing problem. Analysts of most kinds have equally failed to take notice of this rising trend.

To deal with these processes will require unprecedented creativity in all domains of social, economic, and - more importantly perhaps - cultural life. This creativity will have to face the crucial problems of the age - malnutrition, the destruction of nature, genetic engineering, the increased dispossession of most, cultural disintegration leading to violence and insecurity. Cultural reconversions and new subjectivities will have to be imagined that at least assuage the most deadening effects of these processes, and that at best contribute to reconstructing social orders based on interesting hybridisations and socio­economic experiments in cultural and material autonomy at local and regional levels. Whereas at age fifty the United Nations system appear to be obsolete - witness the anachronistic policies of the World Bank and the IMF, or the empty slogans of UNCED! - there is no indication that a new set of planetary institutions, democratically elected, might be brought into existence to steer humanity towards a globality and worldliness capable of opposing creativity to violence and to the senseless piling up of nomad objects.

Electronic disturbance in pursuit of the democratisation of information and technology; ecological disturbance in the name of a plurality of modes of consciousness and practices of nature; and cultural disturbance intended to foster the coexistence of regimes of alterity and multiple subjectivities - and all of these as collective, not merely individual, tasks - are projects worth imagining and putting into practice. Utopian? Perhaps. But let us keep in mind that "it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political, taking to its extreme the critique of its era ... utopia designates the conjunction of philosophy with the present" (Deleuze and Guattari 1993: 101). Are the modern forms of knowledge prepared for the task?

References

Attali, Jacques. (1991). Milenio. Barcelona: Seix Barral. (Translation of Lignes d'horizon, Paris: Libraire Arthme Fayard, 1990).

Deleuze, Felix. (1993). El Constructivismo Guattariano. Cali: Universidad del Valle Press

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. (1993). ¿Que es la filosofia? Barcelona: Anagrama. (Translation of Qu'est­ce que c'est la Philosophie? Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991).

Haraway, Donna. Simians. (1991). Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge