homogeneous unity. The borders or enclosures that convey a semblance of cultural authenticity or genuineness are dissolving. Culture is bursting at the seams, so to speak. It is exploding all ties and joints. It is becoming unbound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a hyperculture.10 The hyperspace of culture is organized not by borders but by links and network connections.
The process of globalization, accelerated by the new technologies, de-distances cultural space. The resulting closeness creates a richness, a corpus of cultural lifeworld practices and forms of expression. The process of globalization accumulates and condenses. Heterogeneous cultural contents are pushed together side by side. Cultural spaces overlap and penetrate each other. This unbounding also applies to time. Not only different sites but also different time frames are de-distanced so that the different is placed side by side. The feeling of hyper-, rather than the feeling of trans-, inter- or multi-, is the most precise expression of today’s culture. Cultures implode; that is, they are de-distanced into a hyperculture.
In a certain sense, hyperculture means more culture. By being de-naturalized, by being liberated from ‘blood’ and ‘soil’, that is, from biological or terrestrial codes, culture becomes genuinely cultural, even hypercultural. De-naturalization intensifies culturalization. If the factual existence of a culture is tied to a site, then hyperculturalization represents an abolition of the facticity of culture.
Will hyperculture come to be seen as a fleeting semblance, a dream vision, like Coleridge’s ‘Xanadu’? Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome is erected on an earth that is ‘with ceaseless turmoil seething’. And the sacred river ‘Alph’, flowing through the paradisiacal garden, sinks ‘in tumult to a lifeless ocean’:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
In the roaring of the waters, Kubla Khan can hear the voices of his ancestors. They prophesy war:
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!11
A war of cultures? A hyperculture without centre, without a God, without sites will continue to trigger resistance. There are many for whom it means the trauma of loss. Re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization are common reactions to the hyperculturalization of the world. Thus, hypercultural de-siting will have to confront a fundamentalism of sites. Will those ‘ancestral voices’ prophesying disaster be proved right? Or are they just the voices of a few revenants who will soon drift away again?
Notes
1 1. Theodor Holm Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Redmond: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987, p. 30.
2 2. Ibid., p. 31.
3 3. Ibid.
4 4. Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines, Edition 87.1, p. 1/16.
5 5. Ibid., p. 1/14.
6 6. Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, p. 31.
7 7. Ibid., p. 32.
8 8. Ibid., p. 142.
9 9. Ibid., p. 145.
10 10. Hyperculture, or hyperculturality, is a concept belonging to the theory and philosophy of culture. It differs from the concept of ‘hyperculture’ one finds in media theory and literary theory, which contrasts with book culture. See M. Klepper, R. Mayer and E.-P. Schneck (eds), Hyperkultur: Zur Fiktion des Computerzeitalters, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995, which contains exclusively contributions from the fields of media theory and literary theory that discuss hypertext, hyperfiction, science fiction, cyberpunk, cyberspace or virtual reality. Despite the title, then, it actually has very little to do with culture in the proper sense of the word, and indeed the volume does not contain any theoretical reflections on culture. ‘Hyperculture’ is merely used as an undefined collective term for computer-related phenomena.
11 11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, in Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon, 1912, Vol. 1, p. 295.
The Eros of Interconnectedness
In a posthumously published fragment, ‘Die Zeit bedenken’ [Thinking of Time], Vilém Flusser reflects on the temporality that characterizes the information society.1 He distinguishes between three forms of time: the time of the image, the time of the book and the time of the bit – in geometrical terms, plane-like time, linear time and point-like time. The time of the image belongs to mythical time. Mythical time is a perspicuous order in which every thing has its fixed place. If something moves away from its place, it is put back. The time of the book belongs to historical time. Historical time is the linearity of history. It is a stream flowing from the past into the future. All events point towards either progress or decay. Today’s time, by contrast, possesses neither a mythical nor a historical horizon. It lacks any comprehensive horizon of meaning. It is de-theologized, or de-teleologicized, into an ‘atom-like’ ‘universe of bits’, a ‘mosaic universe’ in which possibilities ‘buzz’ like points, or ‘sprinkle’ like ‘grains’, as ‘discrete sensations’:
These possibilities advance towards me: they are the future. Wherever I happen to look, there is the future…. Put differently: the void that I am is not passive, but like a vortex it sucks in all the possibilities that surround it.
In this ‘universe of points’, there are no ‘images’, no ‘books’ to limit the possibilities. Rather, Dasein is surrounded by freely hovering possibilities. In this way, the ‘universe of points’ promises greater freedom. After all, the future is ‘everywhere’ that I ‘turn to’.
The possibilities increase, Flusser continues, if I include others in my own time, that is, if I ‘acknowledge’ and ‘love’: ‘I am not alone in the world; there are also others in it…. By putting my own future at the disposal of the other I have the other’s future at my disposal.’ Perhaps Flusser would also understand interconnectedness as a practice of love and acknowledgement, for interconnectedness expands the future by creating a hyperspace of possibilities. The fundamental traits of the Dasein that inhabits this hypercultural universe would be not ‘fear’ and ‘isolation’ but Eros and interconnectedness.
The increasing interconnectedness of the world, whether it is driven by ‘Eros’ or by some altogether different human inclination, creates an abundance, even an overabundance, of relations and possibilities. The saturated space of possibilities, the hyperspace of possible options, exceeds the ‘facticity’ which would otherwise limit the ‘projection’, the freedom of choice, to speak with Heidegger, to ‘the possibility it has inherited’: ‘The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over.’2 ‘Thrownness’ is surely not one of the traits of today’s human existence. Contemporary existence corresponds rather to ‘being projected’. The excess of possibilities enables a projection of Dasein beyond the horizon of ‘inheritance’ and ‘tradition’. Excess therefore has a de-facticizing effect, which leads to an increase in freedom. ‘Dasein’ is de-facticized into a homo liber. Microsoft’s famous slogan ‘Where do you want to go today?’ encodes the de-facticization of Dasein,
