Back in the 1980s, there was a cabaret act called “The Joan Collins Fan Club”.  We weren’t digital then but key elements of that act illustrate the power of the uncanny.  This was long before Julian Clary was famous, so the act played in small clubs and was intimate and scary at the same time.  Clary would walk amongst the audience, selecting his “victims” for the evening.  A key part of his act was to take someone’s handbag or wallet and then go through it, item by item, dissecting their personality with acerbic wit.  This was buzzing around in my mind as I read about the power of the uncanny to defamiliarise conventional teaching practices.  Just as Bayne writes about the liminal area between what is perceived to be “normal” and that which is “troublesome” or “strange”, so the cabaret picked apart the artefacts that an “unstrange” member of the audience carried with them and could thus be assumed to be both personal and also having some value to that person.  As the dissection went on, those of us in the audience laughing at the jokes and banter were also left feeling distinctly uneasy; what would be made of some of the things I had in my pockets?  What would they say about me?  When laid out bare on the stage (or screen) what do our artefacts say in a voice that is not necessarily under our control?

“our actual and immediate activity on the network is less important than the presence of our representation, our ‘ghost’”

The unease/ amusement was accentuated when Fanny the Wonder Dog would do her impressions of famous people of the time.  It was ridiculous and yet, somehow, it worked: a dog in a wig was recognised as a member of the Royal Family.  For some of the audience, this display of “troublesome knowledge” induced anxiety leading to desires to disengage.  For most, however, it held a fascination and demonstrated the fluidity of our ability to process images and “ontological disturbance” in ways which created new meanings that had a shared provenance and resonance but also a particularly personal edge.

At the moment, I perceive the LifeStream to be a type of “pocket emptying”; what is to be made of what I carry around virtually?  As Bayne points out, there is a blurring of boundaries that leads to a redefining of identity.  As I have commented elsewhere, on the continuum of Absent to Present and back again, how is that reflected in my presence online?  While I may be tied up in meetings or lying on the sofa telling myself to do some work, that is not the presence that is represented online by my ‘ghost’.  That ghost may not register at all or may be seen as less ghostlike than I think.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!

Robert Burns here evokes the uncanny in that a louse wandering around a woman’s hair has taken on the presence of a phantomenological encounter.  A louse amidst the finery is mischievous and the author is near malicious in his analysis of what it represents.  We experience a new relationship with reality as we contemplate the appeal to a higher power; this is the power of the uncanny, providing us with the ability to see ourselves in new existences and from alternate existences.  (This is also why I think the word “strangeness” is just not strong enough.  Uncanny layers the experience with a myriad nuances that tap into, like hypertext, a wealth of other understandings.)

Which brings me to Zombies (this is a posting of tangents…)  A few decades back, Zombies were gross representations of the “living dead”; slow-moving, incapable of thought, driven purely by some supernatural instinct.  Now, that has changed.  In the recent TV series, “The Walking Dead“, Zombies have acquired human abilities; they have the sense of smell and taste, can use basic tools and have a primitive ability to hunt in packs.  And they’re not called Zombies anymore.  They are now known as “Walkers”, which sounds cosily human to me in a country where “mall walking” is a legitimate form of exercise.

This made me wonder if the on-going popularity of magic (Harry Potter et al) and the supernatural (all things Vampire, Undead and Super-Powered) is in some way a reflection of our attempts to reason out the impact of the virtual world on and in our lives.  It is no longer the case that the uncanny inhabit the dark nights and dark alleys of our imagination.  We have become uncanny in our flow through the digiverse but how to we process that?  I’ve probably gone too far off track in my thinking but I can’t help feeling that our attempts to humanise the unnatural are a reflection of our need to humanise the virtual.  We recognise the uncanny but do not seem able to embrace it in its entirety.  Therefore, we need to give it some of our attributes.

There seem to be far fewer “sleek shiny avatars” these days and far earthier, more nature-based representations.  We may give ourselves wings, horns or halos but it seems we need to deal with the uncanny by keeping a link to realworld human representation.  I don’t have one but I’ve been in cars where the car talks to you.  You can choose the voice you want it to have.  In my apartment building, the lift talks to me.  Admittedly, “her” repertoire is limited to telling me if I’m going up and down and which floor we’re stopping at but I find I do think of the lift as “her”.  (Other people hear her, too, so it’s alright.)

Courtesy of Mohammed Al Marzouqi as found on Facebook. He is a digital artist and can be contacted at Momorzq@gmail.com

In his article, “Unspoken Truths“, Christopher Hitchens writes about language and the power of the voice and how he has reacted to its weakening as a result of his cancer:

“Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me.”

David Mitchell, author of “Cloud Atlas” spoke in a Guardian Podcast about the writer’s voice and how each writer needs to find it for themselves before they can produce a text.  As he says at the beginning of the podcast, it’s dangerous to think too much about who is reading your words as you can overanalyse and hency stultify the message.  He goes on to say that it’s not worth working out if you’re writing for “high brow” or “low brow”; there’s “just brow”.

I think that this is what Kress was getting at in his chapter.  He was pounced on for his comments on words as “mere signifiers” to be filled with meaning: “relatively empty signifiers”.  And yet, is he so far from the truth?  As a language teacher, I know that we often define words by saying what they are not.  For example, if I’m talking about drinking vessels, and I want to convey the meaning of “mug”, it would be very long-winded of me to try and describe a mug in isolation; it could potentially lead to confusion with other things that we drink from.  So, it seems easier to start with, “It’s not a cup.”  Move on to “It’s not a glass.”  Once that’s established, we can go on to clarify what features distinguish it from both cups and glasses, thereby pouring significance into the word.

There is also the role of nuance and with it the power of the idiolect; what do we bring to the meaning of words and how to we relate to them on a personal level?  For example, a typical British person is likely to have a fairly positive reaction to the word “dog” when discussing pets.  A Gulf Arab is not necessarily going to have the same reaction.  Although the word “dog” is clearly understood by both parties in terms of zoological terms, the significance of what that word signifies can be radically different.  The same is true of body language, visuals and a wealth of other communication devices.  I recall a new teacher to Saudi Arabia going into a children’s class and showing scenes from the movie “Babe: Pig in the City”.  Many of the boys didn’t even recognise Babe as a pig as they had never seen one before (they are banned in that country and their image is forbidden).  But as young religious scholars, they shared the horror of speaking animals.  What was a cute story of animal friendship in one context became a horror story in another.

Bearing all of this in mind, Kress makes the valuable point that the affordances of virtual semiotics allow us to compose, create and convey meaning in new ways that are perhaps not fully grasped until actually undertaken.  My visual artefact exercise gave me a whole new respect for Kress and helped me to grasp what he was saying.  If I was a non-English speaker and was to look up “uncanny” in either Cambridge or Oxford Online (two of the most used resources for English learners), I’d be left with a rather dry and perhaps confusing concept: strange, mysterious, unsettling.  Into these bare shells I need to pour my own representations of what that term means to me as I explore it in various contexts.  The Scots Dictionary will help to fill out the construction but no matter what a dictionary says, we do not know a word until it speaks to us in a voice we understand; a voice we have given it.