CRDM 701

dawn--week 9 blog

(I should probably mention that I am using a different version of the Baudrillard text, so the pagination will be different.)

This week's readings allow me to continue to talk about the identity and self in terms of the space between bodies.  My project topic is beginning reach something approaching actualization (finally), and it really is only tangentially related to embodiment.  But I find this idea interesting, and it seems to be a nice way to frame discussion of the relationship between the discrete private self (or selves, more accurately) and technologies.  So perhaps there is some there there.

Baudrillard (1994) addresses media and identity in his discussion of PBS's "An American Family."  He posits that we have moved from a model of persuasion to one of deterrence in which "'YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.' An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.  No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or periphery: pure flexion or circular flexion" (p., 29).  He goes on to point out that media are now "intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer say that the medium is altered by it" (p. 30).  
The discussion of identity and subjectivity (and agency) in "Spatial Materialism" (Wiley, 2005) also deals with these boundary issues, though not directly related to technology.  We are semi-autonomous assemblages and components of larger assemblages that "do not coincide with the biological boundaries of [our bodies] or the phenomenological boundaries of [our] perception and cognition" (p. 76).  And although we are always "concrete assemblage[s]" we remain "caught up in other assemblages" (77). 

In Hillis's (1999) introduction to Digital Sensations, I found the section "A Machine for Performance" especially meaningful for work on self and technology, and I think it ties together issues discussed in all of the readings.  I am not sure that I have completely understood the complex of VE, identity, and space discussed in this section, and I am going to try to work through it here.  In reference to the "fractured and multiple identities" we all take on, he writes, "Whether holiday makers or mothers, our bodies remain with us both as testimony to who we are and as a unifying dimension of ourselves within social polyvalency.  Not so in VEs, where users' bodies, if represented, are only components of simulated digital space and need not be tied to any representational public façade the self may employ" (p. xxxi). He goes on to point out that "one's self is constituted by and within the language community of which one is a part" and that this constitutive experience is becoming increasingly mediated, muddying the distinction between selves and technology: "Even as we experience increasing spatial segmentation among our human selves, the boundaries between the self and the technologies it uses to transcend this segmentation seem to begin to blur" (xxxiii).  But it seems, then, that if bodies function as useful physical fronts and may be recreated (remediated, perhaps?) or eliminated completely in VE, the boundary between self and other could also be destabilized, even erased, creating mass selves without discrete boundaries. 

Posted at 06:51PM Oct 24, 2007 by drshephe in General  |  Comments[1]