Page 210 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

Virtual geography
Mark Gibson
■ McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography—Living with Global Media Events
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994) 252 pp.ISBN
025320894-7 $14.95 Pbk

We live every day in a familiar terrain: the place where we sleep, the
place where we work, the place where we hang out when not working
or sleeping… We live every day also in another terrain, equally
familiar: the terrain created by television, the telephone, the
telecommunications networks crisscrossing the globe…

McKenzie Wark’s project in Virtual Geography appears in this preface to the book
as one of deceptive simplicity. It is to explore the second terrain outlined—what
Wark calls ‘third nature’—and the form of experience characteristic of it, that of
‘telesthesia’ or perception at a distance. The approach, too, seems straightforward
enough. Wark develops his exploration through a series of case studies, four ‘weird
global media events’: the Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen
Square ‘democracy’ movement and the stock market crash of October 1987. He
cites as his inspiration what for cultural studies could hardly be more classical
sources: the work of Stuart Hall and colleagues at Birmingham and, more distantly,
Marx, Gramsci and Benjamin. The book is very recognizably cultural studies in
so far as it sustains an overtly political interest in the media and consistently
thematizes the relations between cultural forms and power.
Yet in many ways Virtual Geography is an unusual work, even for a ‘field’ as wild
and diverse as cultural studies. Most strikingly, perhaps, it is a book about the
failures of power rather than its successes, its moments of impotence rather than
mastery. Wark is interested in those instances within the vector field of the media
when ‘information bites back’ against the hand that feeds it (23), those instances
when it becomes difficult to present events as the outcomes of actions either of
those on the side of ‘domination’ or ‘resistance’ (34). He locates points where the
mechanisms and strategies devised by power begin to work against themselves—
where the means of instantaneous transmission of information devised by military
and corporate interests obliterate the time required to develop effective narratives
of legitimation, where Cold War strategies of ‘othering’ lose their physical and
imaginative base of support, where ‘unicorporate’ rulers stand helplessly exposed
to chaotic chains of events outside their control, or where the speed and
sophistication of the international financial system produces an ornery dynamic of
its own.
From a certain perspective, the pursuit of this theme might seem a recipe for
complacency. If we are treated to the spectacle of power rendered helpless,
confounded not by resistance but by its own accretions, what is there left for
politically motivated criticism to achieve? Why does Wark not give us more sense