Page 211 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 205

of the hard edges and brutal knocks of power—the points at which it transparently
succeeds? The treatment of Tiananmen is illustrative: he appears more interested
in a televised dance between advancing tanks and an unarmed protester than he is
in the later untelevised stage of the event when the same military hardware actually
connected with soft human tissue. The latter is mentioned almost offhandly as an
epilogue to the mediated spectacle which Wark narrates. To this concern one might
add another about theoretical rigour. While few could accuse Wark of being under-
read, there is a certain looseness and eclecticism in the way he weaves other voices
into his text. Marx, Foucault, Said, Douglas Kellner, Noam Chomsky, Herbert
Schiller, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard—all have something to say but seem
oblivious to the scholarly ink that has been spilt in articulating their relations and
differences. The book is remarkable for the absence of apparent theoretical
contradictions or systematization of argument.
Wark has, in fact, become something of a node around which some chronic
anxieties about the possible direction of cultural studies tend to crystallize. In
Australia at least, he is a ubiquitous figure, appearing everywhere from esoteric
journals to a regular column in the Murdoch daily, The Australian. (Much of the
book has been worked up in earlier forms in these forums and the general themes
will be familiar to those who have read his essays elsewhere.) He is unapologetic
about his crossovers into journalism and generally disrespectful of the boundaries
between academia and the media. There is also a distinctly urban cultural identity
and TV generation knowingness frequently written into his texts. Early in Virtual
Geography we are told, for example, of his flat in inner city Ultimo, the TV playing
continuously in the bedroom, the toxic coffee and vodka which are used as writing
aids. The persona is clearly one which some find irritating, or perhaps worse, a
nightmare symptom of cultural studies’ loss of seriousness, its drift from grounding
references either to sober theoretical argumentation or to the harder realities of
power.
But to charge Virtual Geography too easily with trivialization would be to fail
to read it against its claims. Indeed one might ask whether certain criticisms of
Wark say more about the seriousness of the reading than of the texts being
criticized. For the claim is neither to theoretical systematization nor to a revelation
of suffering and oppression which have not previously been unearthed. It is rather
to a style of writing and an assemblage of concepts which is up to engaging with
the novelty, and above all the temporality, of highly mediated cultural terrains.
Wark is a believer in the postmodern, but not in the sense of the concept which has
been so elegantly demolished by John Frow (1991). Certainly, it implies that
‘everything has changed’, but not in ways we can easily predict or reduce to neat
tables of oppositions. The shifts we must recognize are in many cases unexpected:
the ease with which electronic vectors traverse space in some cases means
increasing not decreasing centralization; the globalization of finance has required
a greater not a lesser role for the national state in ‘administering its referents’.
At its best, Wark’s is a genuinely aporetic voice, assuming little but working in
a principled way with imperfect materials at hand. We must, he argues, ‘face up