59 W 12th Street . October 1, 2007 . 11:41 pm .
I suspected that I wasn't going to enjoy Steven Shaviro's Connected from the moment I first opened the book. In the Preface he manifests his desire for his work to be "as radical as reality itself." Apart from reality being radical or not, in my opinion his compendium proves to be more of a personal literary exercise than anything else.
Shaviro throws out tremendous amounts of information fast and quotes other authors and artists up to five or six times a paragraph. For this reason in particular, a lack of cohesiveness and direction pervade throughout the text. The countless mini-essays he arranges are interesting and rich with data, but in my opinion cultural theory and science fiction are not the same thing and shouldn't be articulated as one.
It was great to learn about the JenniCam; his analysis of sexuality versus reproduction per Chris Cunningham's (wonderful) video for Bjork, All is Full of Love; his thoughts on The Matrix; the cyberpunk short story New Rose Hotel; the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, etc. But much to my surprise the reading was labyrinthine and in itself very disconnected.
I gather that reality and science fiction are overlapping one another in crescendo. They have always been mutually dependent and coexistent (for example, our idea of zombies originates back in the days of Haitian Voudoun.) But there is still a thin line between one concept and the other and it has to do with our humanity. We might already be making a living out of manipulating space and time, but they aren't ours and probably never will be.
Shaviro might, on the other hand, be doing all this on purpose. His sole intention while crafting Connected could have been (an actually probably was) to resonate on hypertext and the ways our brains function these days... in the midst of the network society and ambitious technological advancements galore. If this is the case though, I would much rather spend the afternoon surfing the web.
His weblog: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/
T
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4 comments:
I'm actually surprised that you had such a disappointing read of Steven Shaviro's Connected! I love the artwork they chose for the cover of book and think it is very intriguing.
I've been jumping around through the text and just reading things I find interesting. Maybe this is what he intended to do so that we feel as if were surfing the web instead of reading a book. However, I can understand how one can be overwhelmed by the amount of information he gives from the very beginning. Personally, the book Connected has made some complex ideas that I've been struggling to understand more clear. Such as when Shaviro discusses Marshall Mcluhan's argument of mediums such as the discussion of television and film having an effect of attracting our attention while at the same time distracting us. It was also fascinating to read Shaviro’s postulations of what the medium of the internet is having on our bodies as well as our brains. Shaviro describes how the internet is an even seductive medium than television because of how it demands that our entire body be engaged in order to become involved in a way that is sufficient for our need of connecting. The phenomenon of multitasking which Shaviro describes also seems pretty scary especially if we observe office workers at the computer these days and the possibility that it can be giving us a condition that is similar to attention deficit disorder.
However, I have ambivalent feelings towards cultural theory and science fiction being represented as similar. I agree that science fiction and cultural theory are not the same thing. However, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to use the two to make certain point more clear for those who are still trying to understand what a network society really entails. Many of the science fiction books of the past such as those written by Octavia Butler, Pamela Sergeant, Yevgeny Zamyatin and George Orwell are definitely about science fiction but also seem to function in a way of suggesting different forms of cultural theory that may or may not be beneficial to society. However, none of this takes away from your main argument that the book is not cohesive and the fact that it is a distraction by not putting it in any kind of logical order.
Pros and Cons of Shaviro's writing style IMHO...
Pros: A multi-faceted approach to a broad issue that really "connects" the different ideas about what is happening to society in the network age and oodles of cultural references that help keep me interested
Cons: Yes, I agree that he writes in confusing chunks. He is whimsically, blog-like, certainly not cohesive. Also I think his pool of eclectic examples make it tough to pick out the one that is actually appropriate to fostering an understanding of these really abstract concepts (as I find many not to be so much).
Tania,
I guess you are the one with the most popular post. So there it goes: my immediate desire was to read Shaviro at random, jumping from one section to another. But then I felt into the old habit of reading it sequentially. Then I thought about reading it both ways. Just like you are supposed to read Rayuela (Hopscotch), but while writing this post, I realize that it doesn't matter how you read it. I guess the point is not really of how the book is written but rather what is in it. What Shaviro writes about is more important than how he writes about it.
-Juan
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