Book Review: Virtual anxiety: photography, new technologies and subjectivity

Abstract

ception brought on by mediation (current for at least 100 years), alongside critical discussion of the claims linking forms of logic to different technologies – linear text to instrumental reason, graphics against writing and so forth – through a continual focus on how such changes may operate in detail, which challenges many overstated and underspecified accounts. Of some interest is an extended analysis of geotemporal cartographic imaging and remote sensing. The general critique of cartographical knowledges will not be surprising to readers of Ecumene, but the aesthetic account here suggests not an omniscient viewer, but one that is always rather misplaced – lost in the corporation, in the future, as at once constructed and factual, a viewer oscillating between power and ignorance, evidence and artifice, data and digital art. The argument is perhaps clearer when we turn our gaze from down on the planet to outward to the stars. The parallels of orientalism, imperial gazes and sci-fi are perhaps more suggestive than proven, but the linkage of temporalities of the image and the position of viewing with particular regimes of knowledge and desire was effective. The unpacking of the relation of the subjective and the material is also fruitful in the discussion of the networked subject as an oscillation of hyperindividualization and dispersal; where digital media offer egocentric imaginative universes privileging the controlling self, yet are predicated on the loss of that very autonomy in an endless stream of data and commodities. This leads to a conception of global hybridity that is critical of simply celebrating syncretism without looking at the relative power relations. Indeed, Cubitt is careful to see the exclusions and baggage in mediated networks, and makes a plea to move away from models of a resistant user – arguing that this very idea of popular choice is articulated through corporate technologies. In the end the critical edge of the account is to look for the possibility not of a romantic model of resistance outside the media but of a careful working of heterotopic possibilities between different configurations through a sense of play. On balance then, a by no means easy book, and one which did not always quite convince this reader, but which certainly repaid the effort of a serious engagement.