Limit to Limitlessness?
The ‘unheimliche’ liquidises boundaries in various areas of ontological significance and so disrupts the sense of presence, time, space, nodding to Delueze and Guattari’s interweaving concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Due to that, online learners and tutors are rendered as spectres and ghosts often experiencing an ontological dissonance, being at a loss where to position themselves in the new online landscape.
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.
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).