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Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,1998), 266 pp., $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
Contrary to expectations that might be generated by its title, Margaret Morse's Virtualities is not a work centered solely on an examination of the notion of the technologicallygenerated, all-inclusive 'virtual reality' that has become common cultural currency in the late-20%, and now early-21st, centuries. Although the concept of 'virtual reality' as prophesied in William Gibson's Neuromancer or the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix does appear in Morse's work, it occupies only one of many roles in an argument that seeks to demonstrate how a wide variety of recent cultural formations (including, but not limited to, those of the electronic media) are participating in a fundamental restructuring of human subjectivity This is, of course, an enormous project, even for the theoretically sophisticated, tightly packed 266 pages of Virtualities. The breadth of Morse's vision combined with the possibilities for disjointedness inherent in any book based in large part on pre-existing works occasionally threaten to leave the reader one step behind the author's deft connections of seemingly unrelated cultural phenomena. But for the most part Virtualities avoids confusion and sets about proving its bold assertions in a coherent and straightforward fashion.
The first two chapters of the book, which together form "Part One: Virtualities As Fictions Of Presence," lay Virtualities' theoretical groundwork, beginning with Morse's intriguing adaptation of the Marxist base and superstructure model to fit her analysis of the cultural formations of the information age. In Morse's estimation, digital data is "knowledge stripped of its context . . . at once a means of production and a currency of exchange" (5) that is the bedrock of an information society. Such a society "inevitably calls forth a cyberculture-which is, in contrast with pure data that spawned it-personal rather than impersonal, irrational rather than rational, perceptually elaborated rather than abstract . . . " (5). The most significant difference between the structures of Morse's cyberculture and those of traditional culture is the capacity of cybercultural formations to include non-human subjectivity and agency. This capacity is not, in Morse's view,...