Page 213 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 207

to work with the freedoms this situation allows, experimenting with what can be
made of cultural material, rather than attempting to judge what it is. This is why it
makes sense not to rush to condemn the cynicism and brutality of the Gulf War
allies or Deng Xiaoping. It is also why it makes sense to examine their weaknesses
as much as their strengths—it is these which reveal openings for alternative
realities. The politics is one which measures its success more by its possible effects
than by the strength of its oppositional claims. It is allied more closely to creative
media production than to established canons of ‘critical theory’.
If I have a reservation or anxiety about Virtual Geography, it is over the hint of
assurance with which Wark proclaims the ‘emergent’. An example is his criticisms
of the work of Tony Bennett, Stuart Cunningham and Ian Hunter, which he sees
as dealing only with ‘dominant’ or ‘residual’ cultural forms—literature, museums,
schools and national broadcast TV. It is not so much the specific criticisms of
Bennett, Cunningham and Hunter which are the problem—I think they are good
ones—as the possible direction the argument might run: a re-establishment of
precisely the kind of territorializing hierarchies of value which Wark rejects
elsewhere. At another point, Wark compares his writing with ‘marginal and radical
art’—and a suspicion begins to form. Is the radical, urbanite, mediaphile critic of
CNN to claim a place at the top of a heap overlooking the dusty academic-of-the-
archive at the bottom?
Such a conclusion is more a possible tendency than a real problem in the text.
One gets a sense, reading Wark, of a fragile state of temporary and groundless
equilibrium—rather like that of the stock markets which he analyses in the book.
Perhaps this captures the present state of cultural studies—hedged with
anxieties, not quite sure if it should return to ground. If so, however, we should be
careful to remember that the temporal ordering of ‘emergent’ over ‘dominant’ or
‘residual’ offers no more certainties than anything else. As Joshua Meyrowitz
argues, the emergence of any new medium cannot be considered in isolation, for
it transforms the entire ‘media matrix’ into which it is inserted (1985:19).
Dominant and residual cultural forms are not, therefore, quite what they were
before and their difference from the emergent is never straightforward. Museums
now have touch-screen interactives; Shakespeare resides on CD-ROM. It would
do less than justice to Virtual Geography if the game were to become one of ranking
the analysis of ‘weird global media events’ above or below the analysis of more
obviously ‘traditional’ cultural forms. Why not find the points at which it can
productively articulate with work on schools, museums—perhaps even literature?

References

Frow, John (1991) What Was Postmodernism?, Sydney: Local Consumption Publications.
Meyrowitz, Joshua (1985) No Sense of Place, New York/Oxford: Oxford University
Press.