Actuvirtualized Activity and Passivity in the Political Sphere

In this paper I discuss the transformation of political discourse wrought by the rise of internet-based communicative media. I argue that the conventional focus on the inter-activity that the internet makes possible (through the availability of blogging sites, sites to display downloaded videos and pictures, commenting, virtual worlds, etc.) is misplaced, or at least in need of modification. I will take a Derridean turn in my analysis of the internet effect to show that the medium carries a new structure of actuvirtuality, the import of which is to potentially emancipate the internet user from the serial, coherent rationality that has dominated the major audio-visual media of modernity, thus opening a space for the virtual problematization of political reality. I demonstrate how this virtual dimension generates new strategies both for those who seek political change and for those who seek to defend the status quo. It creates a new field, or game, in which they can engage. The possibility of neutralization arises from the same condition that makes actuvirtuality strategically viable: the relative emancipation from rational coherency and fixation. Any radical strategy for change that would privilege the internet must, I will argue, be supplemented by more reflectively oriented approaches.