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.