Historical ontology

In going through Foucault’s various books and articles that I’ve read this semester, I came across this very dense and apt phrase in Order of Things that seems to sum up the entire concept of historical ontology:

“History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist”
(p. 372)

I am grappling now with this concept as shown by this quote: that of historical ontology, which argues for the specific situatedness of modes of being and specific epistemes.

I’ve been reading Hacking’s book by that name, in which he is arguing for the situated understanding of being in a specific episteme. He argues through Foucault, without directly referencing Foucault much, a method I find quite interesting as an approach for the Foucault paper I’m working on, that presents a historical ontology of digitality. It needs to be a long-ish paper, so I should be able to nicely sink my teeth in it. I’ve still got some of that “white paper syndrome” going on, where I am a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the argument I want to present. As I spend time playing solitaire on my computer or concocting new recipes, I feel the whole paper swirling around in my head.

The question then is, when will the thought that I need to capture on whiteness in Word coalesce into thoughts that can be coherently stated?

Discourse communities?

I just finished writing a rather mediocre paper last night that analysed death memorial websites as fulfilling a kind of networked digital author function.

Part of my somewhat muddled argument in the paper was the idea that the narratives and practices of the people and the platform and functionalities of the net cooperate to create a specific discourse about what death means to these people and what it does to their selves as subjects.

But today I stumbled across a Terra Nova post by John Bilodeau that speaks of discourse communities. He describes them as:

Both practices and vocabularies are shared within particular social groups.

I find it most interesting that he lumps actual practice in with the notion of discourse. This is one of those areas that I find to be somewhat gray - where does sociological notions of interaction, sociality and self management butt up or overlap with the linguistic and semiotic notions of language and discourse theory? Or perhaps a more pertinent question, why does it?

If discourse is now being widened out to take into account not just a larger ensemble of what people say and believe as a result of a circulating concept, but is also now including all kinds of action and practice in it... what does this do to various concepts of self management, identity practice and power/knowledge within the social sciences? Is this a turf war or just another example of interdisciplinary muddling together of concepts? Another idea of the postmodern doing violence to the originary textual meaning?

Who does Google think I am?

While googling myself today as part of an exercise to see how well social networking sites work to make one visible on the net (part of a project I'm working on), I found an entry in the results from Terra Nova.

Surprised and a bit nonplussed, I clicked over to find this topic thread from last November, quoting something I'd said on the GameCODE blog.

Wow.

Considering the cred of Terra Nova, I'm now awed and humbled.

But I also found this listing at All Academics, referencing the paper I presented last summer at the American Sociological Assocation annual meeting. What is All Academic? It is the conference submission system that ASA used for the paper submissions. What I'm not sure about is why it has my paper info archived that way. Very odd.

A philosopher's mindset?

"The philosopher who has learnt and adopted the attitudes of philosophy (contemplation and speculation) sees everyday life as the repository of mysteries and wonders that elude his discipline.”
--Henri Lefebvre, 1971, Everyday Life in the Modern World, p. 17.

Is this my problem with my paper writing right now and my feelings of inadequacy? Am I being too much the philosopher?

Stuttering, stumbling, succeeding?

It has been a strange few semesters in graduate school so far. I started with optimism, passion, excitement, delight and hope. I'm finishing my second semester feeling somewhat disheartened, uninterested, bored even.

While my fellow students are just as smart and engaged as I expected them to be, the issue for me is that they aren't particularly engaged in the same sort of things I am. I got used to this somewhat in sociology, where the idea of studying digital culture was an oddity that was tolerated by my fellow students studying the more serious topics related to race, gender, economics, politics and quantitative research. I had hoped that this more inter-disciplinary program would allow me to connect with like-minded grad students and we could form a community together, arguing theory, trading links and cfps and generally starting to form a network based on our shared interest and passion for theory and digital culture.

What I'm finding is a program that is heavily slanted towards visual culture, art, literature on one side, and politics, political economy, policy reform and the actual hard-core tech of technology on the other side. The theory ideas are there, but in works I'm already quite familiar with for the most part (e.g. Debord, Adorno, Habermas, Baudrillard). Once again, I'm falling outside of those margins and am feeling the lack of others who share my interests.

Case in point -- trying to start taking a stab at some topics that relate to what will be my MA thesis. My end-of-term-paper proposal in a core communications class did not go over well with the professor and I got a stunningly low grade on it. Ego hit aside, I just needed to talk to a few fellow students who'd get my reaction to it, not just to the grade or the professor's reaction, but to the entire topic, and who could help me kick start it and get going anyway and prove to the professor that my topic is, indeed, worthy of being in a communications course. I didn't and don't have that, so I've been stumbling along, starting things, reading a few others, stuttering out some words on digital paper and generally feeling an increasing fogginess of my brain and lack of interest in my topic.

I've had a few pointers to some relevant literature, most notably the work of french theorist Henri Lefebvre. Problem is, his most influential book is checked out at pretty much any Ontario university I try to get it from, and I don't have the luxury of waiting for inter-library loan on this. I'm trying to piece together his ideas from secondary sources, such as Rob Shields' book about Lefebvre's corpus, but I'm feeling somehow like this is cheating a bit. So I debate -- do I pay Amazon.ca the $15 they want to get it to me by Monday morning? And what do I do about the paper before then?

Right around now, with some RAship work also breathing down my neck and two papers due on Tuesday, April 17, I'm feeling more like I'm stumbling towards failure than success.

Oh sure, probably come June, things will feel more positive, but right now? eesh.

Postmodern meals?

Are these particular meals what a postmodernist would eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

Paper accepted to AoIR 8.0

I got my Second Life political economy analysis paper accepted to the Association of Internet Researcher's annual conference, "Let's Play!", which takes place in Vancouver this year, October 18-20.

I'm pleased about this, obviously, though one reviewer's comment gave me pause. The comment basically put down my paper for being a theoretical exploration rather than an "empirical study". Since I don't remember ever hearing that AoIR discourages theoretical exploration of topics, I found this a curious admonishment.

At the same time, if this is a standard view of what AoIR's conferences are supposed to be about, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that the last AoIR conference I attended was skewed so heavily to presentations of quantitative data.

Origin stories

I am wondering these days if our desire to always bring things back to the originary creator (i.e. humanity) is a fundamental part of our psyche and our need to feel we control our world(s)?

What I find fun and interesting about studying non-human agency is the fact that the question is moot really about who created the being/entity/thing being examined. The question of non-human agency centres around capacity and capability to act, not on the omnipotent human actor that birthed the non-human actor. I find it particularly fun when you consider that I, too, at my fundamental basic level of academic identification, consider myself a sociologist. But in my sociology, I study interactions between humans and their environment, which can and does include non-humans, particularly in the digital context. But I don't feel that I have to place humans at the centre of my examinations.

Perhaps this comes too from my desire to be a philosopher of sorts, without having to go back to reading Plato and Aristotle.

Certainly this whole question of origin stories is one I'm really getting into these days. What is the power of these origin stories in our world today? Why is it so necessary for us to continously remind ourselves that we created the Internet? That we can fix the earth's environmental problems? That we are full of power? What purpose and function does this serve? Why is it so important to us?

Thinking of this a lot these days as I read scads of Foucault and as I contemplate the multivariate nature of power as a pure force.

[Above musing inspired by a great juicy thoughtful post
over on the Digital Conversations blog]

Responsibility of power

Reading more in this Digital Delirium book.... Found an excellent essay by science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, in which he explores the possibilities, limitations, myths and powers of cyberspace and cyberculture. And being a writer, he can come up with some very biting, pithy and humourous observations.

Examples:

The liberating powers of the Internet:

"We might learn a lot of truth about a lot of things off the Internet, or at least access a lot of data about a lot of weird junk, but does that mean that evil vanishes? Is our technology really a panacea for our bad politics? I don't see how. We can't wave a floppy disk like a bag of garlic and expect every vampire in history to vanish." [p.36]

Its apparently transformative powers:

"Cyberspace isn't a world all its own like Jupiter or Pluto, it's a funhouse mirror of the society that breeds it. Like most mirrors it shows whatever it's given: on any day, that's mostly human banality. Cyberspace is not a fairy realm of magical transformations. It's a realm of transformations all right, but since human beings aren't magical fairies, you can pretty well scratch the magic and the fairy parts."[p.36]

What is power?

"A power that was only the power to do good would not be power at all. Real power is a genuine trial. Real power is a grave responsibility and a grave temptation which often causes people to go mad. Technical power is power. When you deal with power you have to fear the consequences of a bad decision before you can find any satisfaction in a good one. Real power means real decisions, real action with real consequences."[pp.36-37]

What are humans' metaphysical responsibilities? Sterling states that they shouldn't be centred around some magical notion of perfection or infinity, he says because "infinity and eternity are not our problem" [p.37]. Instead, they should be about judging and knowing, acting and living.

Sounds good to me!

Fragmentary Baudrillard

In honour of Baudrillard, who died earlier this month, and his series of books called Cool Memories and also his Fragments book, I'm going to start periodically posting small quote snippets from him.

"Our society was once solidified by a utopia of progress. It now exists because of a catastrophic imaginary".
[Baudrillard, J. 1997, Global Debt & Parallel Universe. In A & M Kroker (eds.), Digital Delirium, (pp. 38-40). New York: St. Martin's Press.]

Justifying consumption

One of the things I really had to struggle with when I stopped my fancy yuppie career to go back to school was the fact that I would no longer be able to consume things as I once had. Shopping, one of my then-favourite pastimes, was going to have to be throttled back severely if I was going to make it on a student's stipend. No longer could I continuously search for the new, for something to spend my money on.

That was two years ago. Fast forward to today and I find myself quite different than I was. I haven't set foot in a Winners or Homesense in over two months. The jeans and hoody and kickaround skirt I bought a week ago are the first new clothes I've purchased in quite a while, and I only go to the grocery store a few times a month, rather than twice a week. The new mantra for me isn't the pursuit of the new, but rather "making do"....getting into my consciousness the notion that I already have everything I actually need.

It would seem, then, that I'm running contra to the current craze and buzz over one of the latest Oprah book club selections, The Secret. The book promotes the power of positive thinking to bring about success, but success isn't measured in terms of inner happiness and right living. Instead, success is put in material terms. Thinking positively and envisioning personal success will lead to fancy cars, expensive homes and designer clothing. Alternet has an excellent if scathing overview of the book and the hype around it.

This has all given me an idea for a new paper about how the new is the handmaiden of postmodern consumption practices.

Crisis of intellectualism

It is nearing the end of March and the runup to the end of the second semester of my MA is upon me. If you'd asked me last year at this time where I'd be right now intellectually, I'd have told you blithely that I'd be pumped up about my thesis, finishing up my coursework and happily enjoying the community of a bunch of like-minded students around me.

Is this my reality? Not really. Ok, no it isn't. Instead, I find myself trudging along in coursework that bears little resemblance to what I'm interested in. The digital theory and studies component of my classes is all tacked on at the end and is the first thing to be truncated in the interests of time. Rather than dealing with digital culture, every single class has at least one week, if not two or three, on psychoanalytic theory and visual culture (ick ick ick!). My fellow students are all into anthropological or visual culture/arts media topics. And an excellent paper by a PhD student in my program about the need to look at the technocultural layers of the web has shaken my faith in my thesis topic -- she's said it all, what more is there to say?

I guess I'm lucky that my RAships are with excellent and distinguished academics who are both working on digital topics, but they are topics of interest to me in the slightest. This makes it hard to drum up the enthusiasm to do the work.

The only bright spot in this semester is my Foucault reading class.

I'm sorely tempted to take the summer off and see if I can rekindle myself and my intellectualism over the warmer months. Or at least just do a single reading course, perhaps in the influence of science fiction on digital culture, particularly in the way space cowboys and soldiers have influenced video games. Perhaps if I do that I can find a niche area for myself in comparative literature, a field I'm getting more and more interested in.

RIP Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard died yesterday in Paris at the age of 77. The best obituary for him is in French, naturally, in Le Monde, but the New York Times, London Times and the Guardian Unlimited are all good too, as is this editorial commentary on his life and work.

It makes today's reading of The System of Objects surreal, sad and significant.

Preserving the vibrancy of culture

I've spoken with a lot of pedantic and pompous people lately. You know the ones...who go on and on about some topic, thinking they know all the answers, when you realize not far into the conversation that they've not read anything new about that topic in a decade and don't realize or care that the discourse has moved on and left them behind.

I was thinking about such people when reading Raymond Williams' account of the need for culture to remain adaptable, flexible and vibrant. He believes that academics and intellectuals hold a particular place within culture, acting as the defenders for culture, but for the culture of the everyday and ordinary.

Williams says that culture is ordinary. It isn't something deliberately crafted and created by artistes and academics, but is instead the accumulated effect of numerous small everyday decisions and actions made by everyday, normal and ordinary people. He scorns the intellectual who patronizingly pontificates on the everyday culture of people, while still arguing for the need to preserve high end culture and educate and restrain the masses.

It matters also whether, in the inevitable tensions of new kinds of arguments and new kinds of claims, the defenders of reason and education become open to new and unfamiliar relationships, or instead relapse to their existing habits and privileges.

And he notes that intellectuals, academics and society leaders who do so would stifle culture because:

The culture that is then being defended is not excellence but familiarity, not the knowable but only the known values [p.8].

The open-mindedness and willingness to change that he exhorts all leaders and thinkers to embrace needs to stay front of mind for me as I prepare to enter into the thesis research part of my MA program.

Creating distance

Still pondering Foucault. He says:

"To attempt to improve one's power of observation by looking through a lens, one must renounce the attempt to achieve knowledge by means of the other senses or from hearsay [p.133]

He's discussing here the primacy of the visual sense over the others in analytical observations of the emerging natural historian post-17th century. While it isn't stated as such, to my mind he is suggesting that the human drive to know and understand and classify the natural world introduced sensory intermediaries that turned direct observation into second and third level spectatorship. The microscope acts as an interpreter of the reality and being-ness of an item or object or individual.

Would here then would be the beginning of the shift from presence to pattern, to use Hayles' notions of posthumanism?

Science is history

Reading Chapter 5 of Foucault's "Order of Things" today and I'm liking the way he sees the 16th and 17th century drive towards rationality as a way of learning not so much how to know and document the world but how to see and speak of the world.

Some key quotes that stuck out for me today around this theme

Natural history...is the space opened up in representation by an analysis which is anticipating the possibility of naming; it is the possibility of seeing what one will be able to say [p.130].

The documents of this new history are not other words, texts or records, but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed...What had changed was the space in which it was possible to see them and from which it was possible to describe them [p.131].

What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse [p.131].

And while Foucault is talking about the role of the historian in this chapter, what strikes me about this is how little difference there really is between this and so many of the sciences outside of mathematics and physics.

Real beauty commodified

I'm still uneasy about the whole notion of real beauty for women being pushed by a beauty products company. Oh sure Dove would tell you that their Real Beauty campaign is intended to raise the self-awareness and acceptance of women everywhere, and to teach girls that the kind of beauty they see in the media is a fantasy. But at the same time, there is a subterfuge here. Dove is hoping that by tying their ads to this notion, it will promote their products in a different way. It is called a market differentiation strategy and lest people forget this, including this otherwise balanced overview in Atlantic Monthly, its still about making money from different notions of female beauty and female bodies. No matter how Dove wants to spin it, they are trying to commodify "real beauty".

Bulldogs & skateboards

What is it with skateboarding bulldogs lately? It seems every time I go to MySpace or YouTube, I find a new video like this one from someone who has discovered their bulldog trying to learn to use a skateboard, like in the movie Undiscovered.

Pattern over presence

Up late today reading chapter 2 of Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman. One quote came up that I find interesting in this whole "is the digital real or better?" question.

"The contrast between the body's limitations and cyberspace's power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence. As long as the pattern endures, one has attained a kind of immortality…Such views are authorized by cultural conditions that make physicality seem a better state to be from than to inhabit…A cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and corruption" (Hayles, 1999, p.36).

Not applicable to the class that I'm going to be presenting in on Tuesday, as it isn't part of the theme of the class. But this is going to be useful for the paper I'm writing for the class which I hope to present at the CASCA annual conference in May. The paper is entitled "Digital dreams & cyborg selves: Fear as a constituent force in online colonization".

Reality vs fantasy

There is this odd idea held by many today it seems that what happens online isn't real. Okay I could maybe understand that mentality in 2000 when the i-space still felt new to people. But today? Why is that happening still today?

This is a question that has preoccupied me since I first came across it in the mid-1990s, at the beginning of the web. But with all the things that have happened becuase of the net, the people who've met through it, forged relationships, found lost relatives, gotten jobs, made deep friendships... with all of those thousands of people out there, why does this idea persist?

What is it about non-protein-based corporeality that gets people to reject the notion of online interactions as real? Or worse, that allows them to believe that they can use online interactions as a kind of fantasy testing ground for their supposedly offline "real" selves?

yes I understand that most people don't buy into Cartesian metaphysics...the "I think therefore I am" that devalues the physical proteomic flesh. But at the same time, they should know that when they're on the net, interacting with others, that it is real people they're interacting with, real psyches and feelings and dreams and persons. It's real, not fantasy.

Existentialism is essential?

According to a late philosophical scholar, Nietzsche and Heidegger's existential views are more necessary than ever to North America, and therefore more relevant.

Feeling Foucault

Reading History of Sexuality this week... came across this....

The central issue...is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its effects, or whether refines the words one uses to designate it;but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact", the way in which sex is "put into discourse". p. 11

This sounds like a manifesto for how to be a cultural analyst.

Wookiepedia

I guess it was just a matter of time. With the Internet connecting tech geeks, open source freaks and Star Wars fans, the Wookieepedia was probably inevitable.

SL avatar utterly mine?

Cnet recently interviewed Second Life real estate mogul Anshe Chung but SL protesters attempted to disrupt the interview as much as possible by throwing detachable penises at the pair (a process called griefing). A video of the action was caught on YouTube, triggering a protest by Chung and a demand by Chung to remove the video, citing ownership of her avatar, copyright infringement and personal damage.

youTube complied.

Which raises the question...in a Digital social world (DSW) like Second Life, which is facilitated and extended by user content of all kinds, including added and detachable body parts, but whose basic avatar component is owned and provided by Linden Lab, who owns the avatar?

Claiming the avatar is an extension of your meat self makes it an interesting case to watch. Will there be more of these? What are the implications of this for the reality of DSWs?