So, the classroom has been emptied with the students and tutors fleeing online to populate and interact, supposedly often in greater intimacy, in multiple online spaces. The material reality of ‘here’ has given way to imagined ‘there’, a fluid space with ‘few, if any fixed compass bearings’ (Barnett, 2007). The physical body has been discarded too in favour of the spectrality, the disembodied presence , strangely enough, the embodied absence, the representation of you living online long after you’ve logged off. The temporal and multiple synchronicity deepens the ontological blurring even more.

Instead of attempting to normalise the situation by bridging the gap created by temporal and spatial disjunctures, Bayne (2010) suggests embracing thus induced uncertainty as something generative, constructive and transformative.

In general I agree with such a proposition – planes of doubt look to me as environments which might be more conducive to creativity than fixed frames of traditional practices and the liminal space of becoming seems much more interesting than the fixed point of departure or the destination, something I tried to capture in my video on liminal spaces I produced last year for IDEL.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is however one issue I’ve got with the ontological turn the uncanny pedagogies are trying to implement. What is the limit of stretching one’s capacity for assimilating and producing strangeness? Is there a limit? Should this be even mentioned in the discourse with lack of boundaries as the basic premise?

If I’m rendered a ghost online how can online-me be there or anywhere? Does haunting equal being? What could anchor me in the online environment? Even the lifestream seems a hoax, breadcrumbs left by me but swept and arranged by technology according to its will. A fabricated piece of evidence. The growing isolation. The mounting uncertainty. The fragmentation of me, the online doppelganers render the physical-me a ghost too, as I close off from the physical reality and latch onto the online. I am neither there or here. It might be a productive space, yes, but there are limits to how much of intellectual uncertainty an individual can bear without going insane. Or is that a part of the ontological turn too, reaching the threshold of tolerance where the balance is tipped and you plunge/are thrown into the deep waters? Perhaps the limit I’m feeling frustratingly as very close is like other boundaries, ‘illusions, wisps of white that beckon to use just out of reach, that dissolve as we pass our hands in front of our faces’ (Kochhnar-Lindgren, 2009:5).

I loved the idea of being able to use a computer to change and shape the world.  Perhaps this and other similar movies are why I started studying computers in the first place.  Or maybe just my desire to “fight the man.”  Looking back now, I’ve come to realize that although I still root for the underdog and the anarchists, I have become the “man.”

What struck me most about the movie, and about most Hollywood movies dealing with computer hacking is not only how they make it seem so easy, but how graphically they illustrate the process.  Hacking the Gibson (perhaps an homage to William Gibson who Bell identifies as “the author who defined the genre as well as defining the cyberpunk version of cyberspace”)  is seen as flying through building like structures to a destination… As Bell (2001) describes cyberspace as “resembling the urban landscape, with flows of data like traffic and banks of data like skyscrapers”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Has Hollywood’s vision of cyberspace been accepted as true by the masses?  With the popularity of films like the Matrix and Tron, we must ask if those who do not know any different actually believe that data can be interacted with in this way?  Is it just that it is so alien that they must humanize it, and associate it with things they could relate to?  i.e. urban landscapes

If we imagine taking a person from a culture not exposed to technology, where perhaps they believe that taking a picture steals your soul, how might they react to being exposed to a virtual world like Second Life?  Could they be convinced that the avatars which they could create and control are not in fact part of themselves that have become integrated with the machine?  Is Hollywood playing into this notion that we are perhaps afraid of what cyberspace might become, or is it as Bell states that we are constantly “shifting our overall perspective on cyberspace and our place within it?”

The reasons for such festive inclinations are numerous but the most important one is that of the need to emphasise the process, the flux, the instability as inherently natural and human.  This way she avoids positioning herself as an opponent of humanism as abandoning binary dichotomies and blurring the boundaries might establish, in her view, a  rich breeding ground, where transformation is born, which echoes the rhizome proposal of Deleuze and Guattari.

What Shildrick also stresses in her paper is the promise embodied in the liquidity, not the threat. While reading about the uncanny digital technologies last year I was not sure if the fragmentation caused by the multiplying online traces of my digital escapades and practices are something worth seeking after. I felt simultaneously attracted and threatened by the prospect, thrilled by the enhanced modes of being and feeling but alarmed by the possibility of losing sanity, succumbing to the power of my avatars, becoming dehumanised, the everlasting friction between the technoutopia and dystopia, a view still entrenched in ‘either … or’ perception of the world and subjectivity, based on binarism and thus on exclusion. The exclusion can never be complete according to Shildrick as the boundaries are liquid and permeable, allowing multiple incorporations which are at the forefront when it comes to innovation, creativity and imagination and so opening up different world, modes of being and becoming. This is a richer reality, enlarging not restricting  human subjectivity, embodying it and not disembodying.

While researching monstrous bodies I came across digital manipulations of the human body in art, crossing the boundaries between the human and machinic, between the disabled and the healthy. One of the projects struck me in particular. In the process of digital imagining the basic senes of smell, sight, taste and hearing got overgrown with thick layers of skin (thus excluded), giving an overall grim and dystopic look to the technological face, this way probably emphasising the desensitising threats. I would argue that this could be indeed the case if we persist identifying and maintaining the boundaries sealed.

The eyeless body might appear anti-human but uncannily by liquidising some of the senses and leaving one, the skin a very sensitive organ, it fosters new receptiveness.

My analysis of a term into a root word and a modifier can be easily traced back to a syntactic tree structure where the noun forms a head and the adjective takes the subjugated position of a specifier. With Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar forming part of my background, I can’t help seeing the language in forms of aborescent structures, maybe rich the complexity of layers but with dichotomous relationships as an underlying organising principle. I can see movements mapped our but always with clear ports of departure and clear destinations, all of them subject to rules of government and power. Yet, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), this representation of the linguistic reality is not abstract enough …

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If the language is  indeed closely related to culture, then my linguistic musings on the nature of ‘digital culture’ are devoid of substance. If ‘digital culture’ is analysed from the rhizome perspective, the relationship between the two can be seen in a surprisingly different light.

Disassembling ...

Like in the famous example of a wasp and an orchid as a visualisation of the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the culture deterritorialises by becoming detached, disembodied and dis-embedded from its temporal and spatial contexts (Hand, 2008) as it flows into the capillaries of the Web as information. The ubiquity allows the digital to reterritorialise – ‘the project of everware is nothing less than the colonisation of everyday life by technology’ (Greenfield, 2006 in Hand, 2008) (although the term ‘colonisation’ reintroduces the notions of power). However, simultaneously, it is deterritorialised as it becomes part of the ubiquitous culture (by being infiltrated and taken over, to use Hand’s ‘power’ discourse) and then it reterritorialises the culture by transporting its artefacts.

The result is an emergence of new concepts and convergence of thereof with existing objects and practices, producing novel understandings (Hand, 2008). In the process of aggregation, repurposing, mashing-up and creative recombination, new cultural artefacts are released into the circulation (Off Book Visual Culture Online or Life in a Day)

This way the notion of imitation can be excluded as the claim that digital culture is a form of culture (either superior in utopian terms of inferior, disruptive in dystopic terms) does not hold truth any more as there are no universals, no dualisms. Rather  fragments of code characteristic for one and the other are captured and mutually exchanged allowing the digital and the culture to become the other, a becoming-digital of the culture and a becoming-culture of the digital. The boundaries are blurred in the most fantastic post-human fashion (think also of the flattened relationship between the symbol and the signified as described by Kristeva and further illustrated  by Bayne, 2008 in her example of how the avatar – the digital- often becomes what it signifies, that is the identity of the user). If so, there can be no clear answer whether digital cultures bring a promise or a threat, a utopian or a dystopic future as they are not subject to a cause-and-effect representation but a much more complex multiplicity, a machinic assemblage, surprisingly a relief for a person brought up on Chomskyan trees.

... and reassembling!

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Among different threats related to the globally rising prevalence of digital technologies, Hand lists ‘liquefaction’ of traditional institutions and practices. The humanistic stability of the self could also be subject to this process. Bauman (2000) pointed at  uncertainty as pervasive characteristics of liquid modernity. He illustrates this further by referring to notions of chaos, fluidity and ambivalence and describes a liquid modern man as a nomad or a tourist, responsible for weaving his life himself. Being in  perpetual motion and executing the freedom of one’s own making have become a mode of being.

The collapse of stability and the never-ending changes a human undergoes through the course of their life seem to be at the forefront of posthumanism (based only on preliminary reading), which also conceives the posthuman as an ‘emergent ontology’, thus emphasising the importance of becoming, hosting multiple identities and perceiving the world from a number of perspectives.

Again rapid digitisation and the transformation of culture into digital culture is possibly instrumental in this process of posthumanisation of a human(Hand 2008) or even their cyborgisation.

Is this liquefaction liberating or threatening in regard to our agency and the choices we make, our free will? If none of the universal truths can be trusted any more in the times of supercomplexity and if reality is to be observed through a number of perspectives, perhaps the notions of agency and ‘free will’ lose their validity, especially when multiple identities are at stake? It appears a whole new mindset is needed …

Liquid Man

Pic by Chris Wardle-Cousins.

In the past we were spoon fed our information through the various media.  We saw what the media producers and governments wished us to see.  There were limited viewpoints produced simply because of the costs associated with distribution, or due to government restrictions.  For the most part we accepted this information as fact because we weren’t aware of any alternatives.

With the advent of the internet, information is readily available at little to no cost to produce and distribute.  Government restrictions on the types of information shared can be bypassed, and the ‘truth’ will get out.  But who’s truth is it?  How do we know?  Why would the farmer in China who has never been anywhere question his government’s politics if that was all he ever knew?  If his government continued to speak out against capitalism, why would he seek to question those beliefs?  Even though more information and another ‘truth’ may be available to him, why would he choose to seek that out… unless someone were to show it to him.

Even though the internet allows us access to many viewpoints and many ‘truths’, do we as a culture seek out alternatives to the traditional, or we do simply continue to go with what we know?