----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hi, I'm writing in answer to Johannes' invitation, and will be somewhat short here. I've dealt with issues of sexuality, pain, death, and mourning in the virtual, and in the virtual in relation to the real. The points I'd make are as follows -
That we are always already virtual, that the symbolic and the super- structure of the symbolic (it's uncanny appearance of closure), brings us elsewhere in our embodiment;
That abject pain and abjection as well (in Kristeva's sense) break through the symbolic, literally muddying the waters of the real;
That messiness is on the edge of virtual worlds and their (computational, virtual, formal) gamespace - and it's this edge which opens up the possibility of thinking through embodiment.
On a practical level, avatars can be anything in a sense; some performers use them as functions, so that embodiment occurs as abstracted extensions or structured articulations; some performers "see" them as extensions of themselves; in some cases, the extensions, as in Polyani's tacit knowledge, are inhering and smoothly incorporated within the body; and so forth. My own avatars are often so highly extended and abstracted, that they mediate between the body and the function; they serve as broken embodiments that veer, for the performer, between exchange value and usage (in Polyani's sense) value - between structure (objects and arrows) and kernel (internal circulations) for example.
Sexuality breaks through in so many ways - arousal brings "the body" around into resonance with itself, through any of the styles of embodiment and so what triggers what, and where, and how, and with what symbolic manifestations, becomes problematized and "smeared" across categories. I think this breaking through is also true of mourning and representations of death in the virtual, which cease to remain representations; in the virtual, death is embodied, repeatedly enacted and re-enacted. When I crash out of the MacGrid I receive a message "You have just committed suicide" - and to whom is this address; the statement itself is a form of differend in the real, incapable of being received.
It's the smearing that fascinates, and what happens in social media for example with bullying - where statements within the virtual, naming or not naming names, react upon the body of the bullied? Or another exanple - how does (for example) credit card hacking itself play with embodiment, if at all? Or ISIS using Twitter, apparently hijacking World Cup tags? I tend towards the messiness of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, thinking in terms, not of separations and analysis (which also tend towards genre and canon), but of flows, spews, abjections, tolerances, potential wells and tunnelling, and so forth. In other words, perhaps, on the far side of the academic, where people live and die.
Thanks, hope this makes some sense; unlike "my" avatar in Second Life, Alan Dojoji, my sleeplessness last night ("I" have acute insomnia), has most likely led to a certain blurriness of reason -
yours, Alan _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
