Uffa Burnstein

Election night in SL

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“The virtual without the body is empty; the body without the virtual is blind”.

When approaching this week’s assignment for my Emerging Media & Documentary class, this concept hit me. We were asked to go out there and document election night – in any way or form we could find interesting. Most of my classmates were excited about taking a camera and going to the streets to upload fragments and samples of real life into their Facebook profiles or Flickr accounts, i.e. *connect* those to the network. I was reluctant. Why would you want to do that given there will be millions of people doing the same thing? After reading Shaviro’s book and remembering Elizabeth Ellsworth’s words from wednsday’s class, I can articulate an explanation of this neurotic obsession with over-documentation that i so had a problem with some time ago. It is not about documentation, it is about being *there* – it is not about wanting to represent something (there was no risk that this election was not going to be over-represented) but about survival itself, it’s a desperate cry for existance. It annoys me in the way any as other aggressive manifestations of somebody’s else persona.  To be is to be perceived. Word.

My approach to this project was to use this concept but reverse its direction of flow. Instead of uploading RL into the web, I wanted to dive in and bring stuff *OUT* of the network, re-work it, manipulate it and leave it there or place it back *IN*. I therefore turned my video camera TO THE SCREEN. The computer. The television. I am working through this material as we speak but I am pleased with the results. Eventually I managed not only to bring things OUT but to capture different layers of perception. Reality and Virtuality are so mixed and interwined together that it’s impossible to detect the differences. One of the outcomes is this small doc I am editing about election night in the OBAMA SIM in SL. I report only some screenshots and no audio, but these are enough to raise some questions in Shaviro’s style about what is considered *virtual* and what *real*. The people I spoke to and with whom I shared some of the tension and the celebrations, are REAL people…they are just meeting in a different place. Paraphrasing Shaviro: “[in the network society] proximity no longer is determined by geographical location…”

When starting this book I felt a strange feeling of de-ja-vu`.  Shaviro takes Hayles’ textual analysis of literature, specially SciFi, and adds his own bits & pieces of films, social theories, philosophy, financial markets economics, in a similar style to Anna Tsing… throwing everything in the big broiling pot of post-modern research methods… spitting out a blob of various concepts presented in the most fragmented of “literary” and/or “academic” forms.

And it works. At least for me.

Content aside, I have to say that this methodology of investigation and its forms of presentation is very accessible. Maybe because, as Shaviro explains, we are ourselves post-modern and deeply embodied in this digital network society where concentration is volatile, connections among things and ideas are flaky, linearity is so last century and time is lost in space. 

The result is that I did not struggle to read this book, i could pick it up anytime at any page and still understand it. The brief sections kept my [very flimsy] focus alive, the reference to literature and film helped me *visualizing* some pretty tough phylosophical ideas and stimulated a constructivist approach where new layers of connections kept of coming up in my head and mixing with the material. I agree with Sean that you could easily adapt this book to a web-based structure.  I wonder whether my father might struggle to follow Shaviro through this labirynth. Given that he can read Proust like I read comic strips, he would probably be ok. ‘La Reserche`” being the literary representation of memory, seems a very post-modern type work, and after all ‘memory is a kind of virtual reality’ itself. Maybe I have a post-modern father.

One thing I have to agree with Chester. The cultural bias is strong here, in the same way I think it also was strong in Tsing’s Friction. Who makes the judgement about what is positive and what is negative? I’m thinking about the reference to Castell and his view of financial derivatives. With the financial crisis we are hearing more and more attacks and attempts at demonizing these financial instruments. As i worked on those for 8 years, I can say that we are making the same mistakes we made for drugs. Drugs (and derivatives) are not bad tools “per se”… they are actually amazing results of the sophistication of our society and our technological development. They open a huge range of new opportunities but are RISKY stuff and need to be handled properly. The “flow” of speculative capital in the form of options, collars, swaps, CDSs etc has allowed a great deal of re-distribution of income around the world. I keep on fighting this very strong political bias, post marxist legacy, that I keep hitting my head against in the social sciences that the world is a much worse place now that it was 100, 200, 500, 1000 years ago. BULLSHIT. Plain political propaganda. Go and live in Europe throughout the 1400, 1600, 1800, 1900…we were slaughtering each other endlessly… go to tribal Africa, they were eating themselves… or dieing of disease and infection at the age of 35. Humanity [unfortunately for the environment] is doing very well.   Even Africa is not as bad as it was during its tribal times and has benefited by this “connection”.  Colonialism is still strong but is it as bloody as it was 500 years ago? (i just went to this town in Bolivia, where an estimate of 9 MILLION local people and slaves died to extract silver for the mines and give it to the Spanish!). Of course there are a lot of very wrong things, and I’m with Chomsky when he says that capitalism itself is not really bad but it becomes so because it rewards the wrong people – or as I would add: it isn’t sufficiently sophisticated to price in less material but very important effects, like environmental and social “happiness”. So wrong for me on the political bias side. But nevertheless, this was still a great book. On the other hand, when I speak to bankers, all I get is the same one sided view of opposite sign, which makes me think that we need much more cross-fertilization if we really want to get over the silos. 

Amongst the tons of interesting threads, one keeps on going around in my head and validates previous discussions in this class and in others: The realization that subjectivity in such an integral and unified sense is being dismantled – By bringing forward Leibnitz’s monads into the flowing network, Shaviro is able to provide a strong theoretical basis to the idea of multiple personalities. “Drugs like technology are capable of dispersing subjectivity”. Shaviro is extreme in the sense that he does not even accept a federal solution, i.e.  a ”self as a system of interacting conscious and unconscious parts always in motion and in direct contact with the *outside world* by means of the sensorial system” in the way C. G. Jung did, or Gregory Bateson’s and Hayles’ system of intelligent Mind. There is no self in the networked society but only an aggregate of dystopic, randomly connected personae.  In such world aesthetics defines identity and identity is fragmented, multiple, in a constant process of being re-written.  An avatar like another mask (see already quoted play by Pirandello “One, No-one and hundred thousands), a necessary social camouflage to get in yet another social system of virtual worlds, but even more one on of the many monads of personality that contribute to the definition of that being in a given place at a given time. “Zelig” by Woody Allen comes to mind – the *kameleon man* who changes his physical and mental features to conform and be accepted in a given social group.

Other very interesting topics that I do not have the time and space to review but that I would like to mention and keep alive in my memory were the concept of singularity (Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odissey would be my first link) as “difference that makes a difference” in Batesonian terms, the transformation of femininity in a hyper-real, hyper-visible world, the linear interface of “consciousness operating on a non-linear unconscious platform”. Memory [and I add dreams] as a virtual networked world, etc etc

Word.