Summary: Allucquere Rosanne Stone's The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age is an examination what it's like to shape-shift, to live on the borders, to de- and re-construct identity and community at the twilight of the mechanical, and dawn of the virtual, age. In so doing, the book adroitly illustrates the complexity and confusion of the circumstances that surround the negotiation of meaning and experience in the cultural construction of online social spaces.

In her latest book, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquere Rosanne Stone takes a novel approach to her subject; not only does she comfortably adopt the position of a dramatist who can tell compelling stories, but she also proves adept at articulating and systematically addressing social science theory. The work successfully accomplishes what it sets out to do -- hold different, at times competing, discourses in productive tension by refusing to allow them to collapse into univocal accounts. Even more impressive is the way Stone threads new configurations while remaining ever mindful of the webs of power within which they get re-spun.

The dominant theme tying the book's diverse narratives together has to do with the ways computer-mediated communication (CMC) influences the developmental trajectories of self and subjectivity. Stone realizes that, at least academically speaking, it is not breaking new ground to say that any subject position is a mask. Nevertheless, as she points out, most people still take some "primary" subject position for granted. When pressed, they may pay lip service to the idea that perhaps even their current "root" persona is also a mask, but nobody really believes it. Thus for all intent and purpose, your "root" persona, as Stone describes it, is you, take that one away, and there's nobody home.

Stone's work (in keeping with a long-standing Symbolic Interactionist tradition) functions to destabilize the myth of the fixed and determinate self, and instead sees self-as-process, something that is historically and geographically influenced and revealed, yet remains in a continual state of flux; a process digital mediation encourages as we move from a (reluctantly periodized and historicized) mechanical age into what Stone, for lack of a better word, terms the "virtual" age.

In her introductory chapter, "Sex, Death, and Machinery, or How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis," we get taken through a few seminal moments in Stone's life: 1) finding crystal hot-spots allowing detection and reception of radio waves as a young child in the fifties; 2) comprehension of the sonic power enabled by a 24 24 recording console when not much older; and 3) the more recent recognition during a lecture given by physicist Stephen Hawking (who because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis must speak through a machine) that it is becoming less clear where bodily boundaries begin, and where they end; Hawking was the voice-box in his lap, displaced in space and time, just as we by extension are the pulses carried through phone-cables, to be reassembled as audio and/or visual signals through speakers and terminal displays.

According to Stone, it is not just information that is being sent back and forth over the wires, it is bodies, though radically re-configured ones. Some of the relevant questions emerging out of the corporeal transformations her stories address have to do with how these bodies are represented through technological systems, how desire is constructed through such representations, the relationship of the body to self-awareness, and the role of play in an emergent paradigm of human-computer interaction.

Traditionally, many communications theorists have exhibited what Stone refers to as a kind of "epistemological Calvinism," in which computer-supported cooperative works (CSCW) scholars embrace a philosophy that proposes all human activity can be usefully interpreted as a kind of labor, and that this is, or should be, the quintessential defining human capacity. Not surprisingly, such a position ignores the developmental and experiential significance of what commonly gets called play. In contrast, Stone grants play primacy in her analyses of CMC, and sees the play-ethic as an integral component to the electronic environment inhabited by many of the subjects she studies. And, as she illustrates, while online participants may not have any specific transformative agenda in mind, the infusion of the play-ethic into the belly of the corporate beast can serve to mutate the networked institutional framework, or as she calls it "corporate genome," within which people's labor occurs.

So far, Stone claims, there have been two main responses to the question, "What's new about networking?": 1) Nothing -- the virtual reality of online communities is the same as sitting with a good book; and 2) Everything -- inside the little box are other people (a position she is is more receptive to). According to Stone, for the second answer to be true we need to fundamentally rethink many of our long held assumptions around the notion of presence (and absence). Traditionally, presence has been associated with the direct witness of something, and the relationship of proximity to intentionality (i.e., the degree to which agency is held responsible for outcome). Such understandings tend to be rooted in a platonic ideal of the body, which gets treated as a physical envelope and the locus of agential control. Clearly this conceptual framework is undergoing rather dramatic revision due to advances in medical and communications technologies that drastically extend human instrumentality.

The War of Desire and Technology is an amalgamation of theory and theoretically informed stories. Five of the eight chapters (nine including the introduction) that make up the book are case-studies; detailed historical investigations into topics including multiple personality disorder, cross-dressing, grass-roots community networking, and software game development. The other three chapters deal more specifically with academic debates surrounding the cultural transformations Stone sketches. Thankfully, there is considerable slippage between the two; the case-studies are well acquainted with theory, and the theoretical sections tend to read like stories...not an easy task to accomplish, let alone accomplish well, which Stone does.

The first chapter, "Collective Structures," introduces another prominent theme in Stone's work, the problematic character of binary logic, which tends to categorically reduce things into mutually exclusive dichotomies. Playfully borrowing from Paul Rabinow's idea of biosociality, a term used to describe the collapse of the distinctions between biological observation, construction, and control, where nature gets modeled on culture understood as practice, Stone deploys the idea of technosociality, a term used to describe the analagous collapse of the distinctions between technology and nature (as in electronic networks as social environments), where "social space is computer code, consensual and hallucinatory."

Ultimately, Stone is interested in prosthetic communication for what it shows of the "real" word that might otherwise go unnoticed. She wants to see if emergent online collective formations can teach us something about social problems outside of the Net. For Stone, cyberspace merits study because it is a social environment, one which, as she goes to great length to point out, often takes all too familiar form in its racialized, gendered, and stereotypically Cartesian enactment, where old and well understood power differentials get repeatedly reified. However, as she goes to equally great length to make clear, many of the interactions are unique, strange, disruptive, and perhaps even transformative of the institutional matrices within which they are instanciated. Online activities have direct bearing on "real" world events; to presume otherwise, to treat what happens in cyberspace and what happens in the "real" world as independent of one another (as many theorists still do), gravely misses the point.

For Stone, we in the "advanced" post-industrialized world are all, to one degree or another, "fiduciary subjects": collections of virtual elements (census taking, legal documentation, telephone numbers, street addresses) which, taken together, form a materialized discursivity of their own. Stone's notion of the fiduciary subject proves an extremely useful construct for articulating the political ties between the discursive terrain one inhabits, and one's sense of self. To her credit, Stone resists turning the virtual/physical distinction into a mind/body distinction. To hear her tell it, the social citizen consists of a collection of both physical and discursive elements. But by far the greater part is discursive (which is also concerned with the production of meaning for the physical part); the body thus becomes a textually mediated physicality, what Stone calls a "legible body." The legible body is one that "...displays the social meaning of 'body' on its surface, presenting a set of cultural codes that organize the ways the body is apprehended and that determine the range of socially appropriate responses."

Chapter two, "Risking Themselves: Identity in Oshkosh," provides a nice segue from the theoretical discussion of body politics in chapter one, to a critical re-reading of a situation that occurred in 1990 in which a young Wisconsin woman, diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), charged an acquaintance with raping her after he deliberately drew out one of her personalities he felt would be receptive to having sex with him. By taking the reader through a series of courtroom dramas related to the case, where the issue became one of whether MPD was "real" or simply functioned as a "convenient fantasy," Stone raises timely but thorny questions having to do with late- or post-modern identity formation and the performative nature of self and its reflexive re-constitution, particularly when operating within juridical and medical discursive fields. This is done in the service of opening up critical space for speculating on why, for example, in a medicalized discourse MPD is treated as a pathology one suffers from, a dissociation from a unified self, while in virtual systems theory the prospect of multiple selves inhabiting a single body can be seen as potentially liberating. Moreover, Stone raises the possibility of ways in which, for those who do actually suffer from MPD, CMC can perform a healing act, and help, through the preservation of multiplicity, to create room for transformative legitmization of some of its tendencies.

Chapter three, "In Novel Conditions: The Cross Dressing Psychiatrist," is an interesting analogue to chapter two. Here Stone tells the story of Sanford Lewin, a New York psychiatrist who, after discovering that women talk to women differently than they talk to men online, passed himself off as a severely physically challenged female psychiatrist so he could experience some more of the same. A fascinating account that again challenges the degree to which our virtual identities can become real and productive interventions into the notion that we are composed of a single self in a single body. At what point, one is encouraged to wonder, does a masquerade become "real." Or perhaps it would be better asked, if all identity is performative, is the "real" ever anything other than a masquerade?

Chapter four, "Reinvention and Encounter: Pause for Theory," takes stock of where the adventures have led so far, and points in the direction they appear to be heading. As Stone makes perfectly explicit, the stakes are high in critically listening to who is telling the stories through which we produce our communities, our bodies, and our selves, and for or to what purpose these stories get told. It goes without saying that the process of changing the relationship between agency and an authorizing body to an increasingly discursive and electronically mediated one has presented some interesting dilemmas which Stone takes up in the books remaining chapters.

Briefly, chapter five, "Agency and Proximity: Communities/CommuniTrees," provides a glimpse into The CommuniTree Group, which emerged in the early seventies in effort to move computing out of the restricted domain of centralized mainframes and into the community, while chapters six, "The End of Innocence, Part 1: Cyberdammerung at the Atari Lab," and seven, "The End of Innocence, Part 2: Cyberdammerung at Wellspring Systems," offers a comparative peek into two different software gaming development companies -- one that sprung up in California's Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, and the other (still operative) in Texas as we move out of the 1990s.

Part 2 of the installment is not a very happy tale, as it shows how in certain ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In her fieldwork Stone found that game developers and software programmers are still almost exclusively young, white, heterosexist, males, who refuse to see how pernicious the problems of sexism, racism, and homophobia are in their products. Why? Primarily because it is invisible to them; and, regrettably, they seem determined to keep it that way. The larger problem Stone's research raises has to do with the fact that it is no longer just a few boys making games they find appealing for a few other boys, it is a few boys making games they find appealing for a few million other boys; as Stone maintains, a frustrating state of affairs for a medium that offers such potential for strategic subversion of long-standing, patriarchal, and oppressive discourses.

The book's final chapter, "The Gaze of the Vampire," provides a critique of the metaphoric reemergence of "technology as saviour," which continues unabated as we move into the realm of the virtual. Stone is neither a simple cheerleader for new technology, nor someone who uncritically proselytizes a rosy vision for the future of virtual systems. Indeed, if there's one story she goes to great lengths to debunk, it is the all-too-popular fiction that cyberspace offers the possibility of a level playing field where race, age, gender, class, etc., no longer count. Stone considers this notion a fascile illusion stemming from the belief that the codings traditionally attached to physical presence have been uncoupled from their referents, an uncoupling often mistakenly presumed to be liberatory, and which forgets about how power really works. The critical point to remember, as Stone makes so compellingly clear, is that we must be ever cognizant of how meaning gets attributed to new (and old) technologies, the battles fought over who gets to own those meanings, and the ways that these structures of meaning produce that which we recognize and call "human."

Stone is at her best when she is doing theory, or perhaps better put, when she is making theoretical observations in a storytelling mode. Occasionally the chapters, particularly those presenting the case-studies, wander a bit, and sometimes it is not too clear why certain histories are being presented in such detail, or ultimately, what those histories have to do with the organizing motifs of the section at hand. Once in a while passages get repeated (Lippman's five corollaries to interactivity are presented in two separate chapters in the service of making a point about "poke-and-see" technology, a concept attributed to a different person each time it appears). But these editorial oversights are minor criticisms, and are part and parcel of almost any book that emerges out of a series of papers, articles, and other assorted writings worked on over an extended period.

All told, The War of Desire and Technology is well written, full of important and timely analytic insights, and a pleasure to read. Through Stone's creative retelling, retheorizing, and remythologizing of individual and collective experience in the electronic environment, the reader is treated to complex, clever, friendly, and accessible account of what it is like for the growing numbers of us who live, war, and desire at the close of the mechanical, and dawn of the virtual, age.

(Reviewed by Robert F. Nideffer, University of California, Santa Barbara)