Leonardo Digital Reviews

Connected or What it Means to Live in the Network Society

by Steven Shaviro
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2003
240 pp. Trade, $53.95; Paper, $17.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4362-8; ISBN: 0-8166-4363-6.

Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology

eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu

I have been reading Steve Shaviro’s Connected in bits and pieces. A section here, a section there, most of the time opening at random and reading. Already this review is late, but I have to admit there is something in me that resists finishing this book. In addition, I seem to want to not finish this book in a decidedly non-linear fashion. Either I am one of the people that this book describes, or the type of reader that it aims to create. I am still not sure which.

Speaking about K.W. Jeter’s novel Noir, Shaviro notes that "the problem is not how to get onto the network, but how to get off" (4). But, just as Baudrillard noted that everything exists in order to be televised, we might also say that, in the network society, every exists in order to become a node on the network. "No matter what position you seek to occupy, that position will be located somewhere on the grid" (4). Despite the current hype over getting connected in any way possible (DSL, wireless, mobile, ubiquitous computing), for Shaviro "connection" is a problem. "Reach out and touch someone? It’s the worst thing that could happen to you. Every connection has its price; the one thing you can be sure of is that, sooner or later, you will have to pay" (3).

Connected is arranged as a series of short segments, each with a title, and each running between one to three pages. There is no one theoretical or narrative thread in Connected, but many. Methodologically, Shaviro uses science fiction as a way of gaining a novel, critical understanding of our current network society. For Shaviro, science fiction is the only social theory capable of comprehending the many reversals that new media offer. Shaviro’s description of Philip K. Dick’s novels is also an apt description of the network society that Connected aims to map: "Unlike The Matrix, Dick’s fictions never encounter the desert of the real. They never get beyond appearances, never reach an ultimate level of reality" (93).

However this is not to say that Connected is a random jumble of technophilic observations. The critical traditions of Bataille, Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze make several appearances (often without the reader knowing it). A reader beginning at page one will encounter a series of evocative and provocative connections: from the science fiction novel Noir, to the current Internet and wireless obsession for being "always on, all the time," to the media-induced horror pastiche in the Aphex Twin video Come to Daddy, to William Burroughs‚ "algebra of need" in addictions of all kinds, to a remixing of Richard Dawkins‚ "selfish meme," to the "viral marketing" in the heyday of Internet dotcom. mania, to Octavia Butler’s re-working of the host-parasite theme in the context of the alien, and so on.

Connected follows upon Shaviro’s earlier books on media and culture, including Doom Patrols, Stranded in the Jungle (serialized online), and his influential film studies book, The Cinematic Body. Like Maurice Blanchot, a philosopher who figures prominently in his work, Shaviro always aims to bring new modes of writing to new modes of thinking. Connected can be seen as a development in this direction for Shaviro. Make no mistake about it, Shaviro has done his homework, be it contemporary science fiction (e.g., China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station), drum’n’bass videos, zombie films, or the philosophy of Georges Bataille.

The strategy of Connected is not only to pose the "problem of connection," but, through Shaviro’s novel mode of critical analysis, to pose new ways of intervening in connections of all sorts. This is perhaps why Shaviro opens Connected with a discussion of "distraction." Distraction is at once the product of connection (inasmuch as being online impels or even demands multitasking), but distraction can also allow for breathing room. In his discussion of Bruce Sterling’s novel, Distraction, Shaviro notes the fine line between attentive multitasking and the McLuhanesque "cool media" of total media distraction. In a way, Connected is Shaviro’s attempt to explore this boundary. We might even call it the "critical theory of distraction." Connected’s fragments seem akin to associative links, but links that resist resolving themselves into a nice, neat theoretical whole by the book’s end. Connected asks us to innovate in the critique of new media, to deny both technophilia, as well as technophobia.