Hegelian Buddhist Hypertextual Media Inhabitation, or, Criticism in the Age of Electronic Immersion

Publication: In Adrift in the Technological Matrix, Bucknell Review 46.2, Autumn 2002, 90-108.

Criticism of art and popular culture usually works from a stable theoretical platform removed from the work being criticized. But what happens when the work requires the critic to enter an immersive total experience. Distanced criticism “afterwards” is always possible, but are there ways to criticize immersive works, virtual worlds, and the like, from within? This essay suggests several modes of criticism and intervention that take advantage of dualities and spacings inherent even in the most immersive virtuality or entertainment. There is always a duality between being immersed and helping to stage the immersion, and there are ways to make limitations of a world appear from within its own movements.

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