In Parallax, a selection of his journalism and academic papers on media and cultural studies from the 1990s, Tofts devotes some attention to this contemporary interactive culture – digital artists and science fiction writers, cybernetic theory, cyborgs, and androids. But contrary to the book’s coolly suggestive techno idiom and suggestively hip graphic styling, Tofts is principally concerned with what he has called elsewhere ‘the archaeology of cyberspace’: that historical, revolutionary hard-core producing the most uncompromisingly ambitious modern art. Needless to say, for a culture that today delights in parody, in chic banality and hyper-conformism – when for instance artists hang dead animals in glass tanks, fill a house with party balloons or get a dozen fashion models to pose motionless in pantyhose for two hours – an appeal to deeply radical modernism will sound old-fashioned and a bit too much like hard work.

And Tofts’ scenario has a familiar, hard-working cast: Joyce, Duchamp, Mallarme, John Cage, Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon. Their signature artistic devices often cascade down the page like labels in fashion reportage, linked by ‘a common thread’ of ‘speculative, creative risk-taking’ that leaves their texts radically ‘open’; and associated also, paradoxically, by resort to a literary or visual language that is ‘intransitive’, that ‘will not lead to a point outside the materiality of its own play’. These artists are the usual suspects in those line-ups of practitioners of the avant-garde sublime, assembled so often by cultural studies critics and theoreticians who like to remind us of just how serious art could be. Could be, that is, before the advent of an entertainment and infotainment culture that has provided cultural studies with its objects and methods of criticism. Tofts’ main players were not just fashionable innovators but artists who rigorously took their medium and its aesthetic theory to a certain kind of limit, to a brink of intelligibility and even of possibility.

Tofts’ rhetorical insistence on the originality of this avant-garde, on its unsurpassed achievement, at times approaches almost codger-like rancour for the slacker generation of geeks and cyberjockeys whose seemingly natural fluency in hypermedia has removed any need to maintain the rage for a critical revolution in artistic language. Keeping up with accelerating new releases of software and climbing those steep tutorial curves in game protocols have supplanted the enterprise of aesthetic auto-critique. A ‘true believer’ in the modernist tradition, however, Tofts’ attention is urgently with the unfinished business of modernism rather than with the ecstatic facility of postmodern e-media stylistics. And the truly radical works of modernism, he claims, are permanently, constitutionally unfinished. The millennial hype accumulating around current usage of digital communication technologies is a type of bad faith or failure of nerve, symptomatic of a retreat from the challenge posed by the interminable end-game predicament of modernist aesthetics.

Bacon, like Cage, recognises ‘the unavoidable necessity of chance and accident as fundamental characteristics of the act of composition’, and consequently must acknowledge the ‘irrationality’ of any disciplined application of paint to canvas. In his portraits, Bacon ‘wants to avoid illustration, and yet retain a defamiliarised re-making of the image of the sitter. It is the apparent insuperability of this situation that constitutes the painterly act.’ For Beckett, ‘the possibility of discourse is characterised by a sense of imminent dysfunction.’ Both Bacon and Beckett propose an art that is theoretically audacious yet ‘impossible in practice’. They propose’ a theory of art for which there is, literally, nothing to sustain interpretation as a viable act.’ It’s precisely this impasse in creativity and criticism that inspires the clever methodological tag Tofts uses as his book’ s title: parallax. Parallax is the phenomenon described in optics by which an object appears to be displaced in relation to its background due to a change in position of the observer. Adopting this as metaphor, an object of cultural criticism could be said to be composed from the flux of displacements that constitutes its observation. Parallactic reading, to use Tofts’ neologism, maps these displacements of the object of criticism by a ‘hyperlogic’, which seems to mean lateral, unpredictable, partial and provisional linkages between remote texts in the manner of the immediate associative jumps provided by the hotlinks in hypertext networks. The hyperlogic of parallax, he argues, is a mode of creative composition that is boundless, playfully disruptive and experimental. It resembles Duchamp’s pataphysical ‘fourth dimension’: ‘the folding and unfolding of ideas as a sequence of anachronous moments’. But it is also, he admits, purposeless; and perhaps for this very reason – despite his frequent promotion of indeterminacy, serendipity and multiplicity – surprisingly there seems to be little practical demonstration of parallactic reading in his book. Where it does appear, the very qualities that Tofts propose define it as a liberating critical method for cultural studies also render it indistinguishable from the aimless, trivial digressions that compose the experience of net surfing.

And that, perhaps perversely, is a relief, making the book more stimulating as entertainment than as a doctrine about research. Any theoretical exposition of Parallax seems destined to become a positive description of the very phenomenon that the book’s critical interventions are attempting to negate. Ironically, Tofts’ cultural theory depends upon the eclipse of the avant-garde by an entertainment culture of increasingly convergent web-TV, data-casting and internet traffic. In the ecstatic and unlimited circuits of his hyperlogical annexation of textual details, he too momentarily forgets the legacy of modernism’s claustrophobic and morbid end-game. But that’s where the 1990s and Parallax both end: not with a studied project for an historical revision, but in the euphoric plateau state of cruising the information superhighway. Parallactic reading may be the best way to read at such speed. In the exhilarating ambience of the New Economy, critical reception becomes a parodic form of commodity consumption.