What's the matter with the internet. - book review

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Are Flagan

Mark Poster

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Never judge a book by its cover. For book reviews of any length, this dictum goes without saying, but it does ignore the researched fact that most books are sold and read on the merits of the cover alone. Seductive pictures and fancy designs compose a fetish to attract readers, and this covering siren song is usually offset against a content that runs into considerable lengths of uniform typography. Where a suggestive cover appeals to the eyes and the imagination, the character baseline that feeds the mind once the book is opened invariably attempts to satisfy this teasing promise.

Mark Poster's What's the Matter with the Internet? unwraps itself with a mocking pun on any attempt to judge a book by its cover. Matter and Internet are highlighted with an orange glow to remind us of the itinerant yet obvious path--matter, as in material, refers to the Internet, which, by recent standards, is nothing more or less than a virtual Mall of America and an elusive terrorist network rolled into one. While the Internet and especially the World Wide Web increasingly weave the very fabric of society, our ability to visualize its matrices and grasp its flow of electrons has struggled with variations of the differing and deferring pun announced in the title. To further accentuate this missing point, someone thought it necessary to include a background photograph of an overlapping mesh, prompting anyone who has ever stared into a monitor with TCP/IP running to point a telling index finger and exclaim, in reference to the title--that's not it!

Based on this basic negation and faced with an entity riddled by "underdetermination," a term developed in the introduction to describe an object that is structured by practices but remains open to a new imaginary. Poster proceeds to outline his own metamorphosis over nine chapters. The net he casts is as wide as one may imagine the virtual Web to be: the quest starts with Heidegger's work on technology and being, branches into digital commodities with capitalism's linguistic turn, bounces back to the author with a look at Foucault's work in relation to the feminist critique, picks up this thread to provide some notes on digital authorship, returns to the modern subject with speculations on national identities and global citizenship, enters the question of virtuality through the writings of Baudrillard and Derrida, examines the fate of race and ethnicity in electronic space, and finally considers the democracy of it all.

Compiled in a modest paperback the above content amounts to a lot of surfing on the internet, and although the narrative wobbles precariously at times, the read is both enjoyable and challenging. But, to recall the curiosity awakened by the cover, what's the matter with the Internet? The question is perhaps most directly addressed in Poster's treatment of Derrida, but that section suffers from the schizophrenic slapstick of asked and answered that analytical philosophy usually brings to deconstruction. Poster's oversight rests with his persistent conception of the Internet as a meta-agent, a pun on matter, open to theorizing, while it arguably assumes the character of a fluid network structured by its participating nodes. Individual agency works at or on the interfaces of metaphysics, and that is why, contrary to better judgment, we must actually consider a book by its cover to review what matters about the Internet.

Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-cultural Mimesis by Laleen Jayamanne. Indiana University Press/335 pp./$22.95 (sb).

Truth or Consequences by Nick Waplinglon. Phaidon/192 pp./$39.95 (hb).

Tyranny of the Moment: Fist and Slow Time In the information Age by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Pluto/180 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics edited by Bill Beckley and David Shapiro. Allworth Press/448 pp./$19.95 (sb).

Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy by Janet Wasko. Polity/272 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 edited and annotated hg Bruce Posner. Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives/160 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Voyager by Clarissa Sligh. Nexus Press/non-paginated/$35.00 (sb).