“A techno state of mind": Salman Rushdie and technophilia

• Autor(a) principal: Mendes, Ana Cristina
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/30178
• topic: Rushdie, Salman, 1947-..... Fury; Postcolonial literature; Postcolonial studies; British literature; Technology; Cyberpunk; Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969; Culture industry; Horkheimer, Max, 1895-1973

Rushdie writes, “Life is fury. Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths” (20). Does Solanka’s fury, materialised in the web site PlanetGalileo.com, allow for renewed forms of subjectivity, collectivity or globality? Or does it underscore the shortcomings of postcolonial ambiguities in the face of neocolonial power structures? I will try to elucidate these questions by focusing on the representation of the Internet industry in the novel, while aiming to interrogate “whether we should think of the new state of play in the cultural industries, internationally, as a new stage of cultural imperialism, or as a sign of a new global interconnectedness with democratising possibilities” (Hesmondhalgh 10). In other words, the central concern of this paper is to highlight Fury as an exploration of the (un)feasibility of postcolonial strategies of resistance in the context of globalised multinational corporations. Generally speaking, this paper finds inspiration in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s mid-20th century critique of the (American) Culture Industry and will try to chart the intricate, ambivalent and disputed aspects of the cultural industries, in particular the Internet industry. A closer reading of the narrative reveals that it communicates ambivalence, which can translate into subversive ambiguity, in relation to the postcolonial subject’s engagement and apparently easy affiliations with the present neo-imperial order. Indeed, Solanka is concurrently sickened and drawn to the glitzy spectacle of emergent American commodities and dot-com jargon. Against the unfavourable criticism Fury has received, I propose to address the transforming value of Solanka’s fury and the protagonist’s negotiations of current global power structures, based on the presupposition that such an ambivalent narrative unveils the critique, even if at times somewhat subtle, of the democratising rhetoric of cultural globalisation.