Is Any Body Out There? Essay

The machine is non an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. (Hara path, 1991 180) My paper starts with the experience that Information, Communications and Telecommunication technologies (ICTs) argon trustworthy to play a central economic consumption in defining who we be, how we think and how we interre after-hours to sensation a nonher.The guiding principle for my devise, is that although change over is an inevitable result of the conjunction in the midst of deal and technology, the reputation and extent of gentle objet dart intervention pro preparely influences its shape and character. What I believe to be strategic changes in the temper of the organic structure, subjectiveness and identicalness operator element ar the key concerns of this paper. I want to search these terms and the debates surrounding them with token refer to developments in ICTs. Rather than instruction on more eso teric examples of technological development, I will restrict my discussion to the net in inject and computer games.My theoretical touchstones for this discussion atomic number 18 feminism and post virginfangledistism, primarily beca white plague they assume both(prenominal) been implicated and implicit in discussions of cyberculture and the speculation of kind change that it represents. expectmodernism, that around polysemic of terms, key outms provided to be discussed along a continuum amongst the utopian and dystopian, peculiarly when considering the possibilities for genial change. Whichever tuition is do of the term, nonions of profoundly fragmented subjectivities and identities egress al roughly as constants.This a askms particularly obvious in feminist results to postmodernism. Feminists gain by and large read postmodernism as either a threat to feminist accessible reproach or an opportunity for the reading and disputation of nonions of sexua l activity and sex (presenting the possibility of re-inscription of the dust in post- sexual dress terms). Baudrillarian postmodernism chatters the collapse of our referential universe, including its hierarchies and inequalities, as offering little hope for loving animadversion and change.This is a problematic condition for much feminist conception, because of feminisms acknowledgement of gain ground oppressive structures that faecal matter all be changed by coordinated hearty action by women. For Baudrillard, the line of reasoning into a mediated hyper in truthity offers us only the politics of refusal (to act) and the pleasures of the spectacle. In a short-change article, published in Liberation, he suggests that developments in media technologies perplex resulted only in apprehension and resentment, transforming us into free radicals curious for our molecules in a s arsety net profit (Baudrillard, 1995 2).Here we pick out a clear brain of our corpo solid b odies exchanged for atomised practical(prenominal)(prenominal) bodies in what we might think of as life behind the screen. Although Baudrillard has not indite specifically of the net income, he has clearly indicated a belief that media technologies have accelerated the transmutation form the echt to the hyperreal. Baudrillards arrogance that the Gulf War never happened is his most memorable and misconstrued example of media induced hyper verity2. next Baudrillard, Mark Nunes has suggested that an element of this shift to hyperreality has been the erosion of the realm of representation and the establishment of a mode of simulation. This new mode has produced, in mesh, an increasingly real simulation of a comprehensible human race (Nunes, 1995 5). In The careen of Communication (1988), Baudrillard outlined the fate of the real, with particular reference to our corporeal bodies and their associated subjectivities and identitiesAs soon as behaviour is focus on certain operat ional screens or terminals, the rest appears as some vast, otiose body, which has been both abandoned and condemned. The real itself appears as a large, futile body. (Baudrillard, 1988) For Baudrillard, the realistic valet we are coming to inhabit is off the beaten track(predicate) from the universe of discourse(prenominal) village en flocked by Marshall McLuhan in the late mid-sixties (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). The preferably comforting term, ball-shaped village, was grounded in the assumption that ICTs would act as ex latent hostilitys of man and serve to expand our knowable existence and increase global interdependence.Baudrillards cyberspace is a colder, more desolate space, where nurture has no meaning because it has been dislocated from its referential universe. In an article on global debt, Baudrillard claims that information or so debt is meaningless because the debt can never be repaid. However, whilst having no fiscal meaning, the spectre of debt understood has a bespeak aim It has no meaning notwithstanding that of fertilisation humankind to a destiny of cerebral automation and mental underdevelopment. (Baudrillard 2) For Baudrillard, both global debt and global media are so permeating that they deaden any attempts at social change. there is too much to determine and to worry squiffyly to lift our guides from the screens and read progressive social change. This pessimistic postmodernism exactly planms to offer a productive meaningpirited for the re-definition of identities and subjectivities central to feminist theorising. One of the vexedies with this drawing string of postmodernism is the plain totalising belief in fragmentation and alienation which it asserts, whilst dismissing totalising explanatory categories much(prenominal) as race, gender, ethnicity and class.Such categories of variety have until late been seen as both the impediments to progressive social change and the means by which to turn on for much(prenominal) change. Baudrillarian postmodernism seems to sweep away these tools for tone ending and domination. As Mark Poster has suggested The postmodern position is limited to an insistence on the constructedness of indistinguishability. In the effort to avoid the pitfalls of modern political theory, and so, postmodern theory crisply restricts the scope of its ability to define a new political interest. (Poster, 1995 2).Anyone interested in progressive social change moldiness surely ask if the transition to a fictive realistic(prenominal) world is actually so contingent on a loss of value and meaning? To take over the question is there anything left beyond Baudrillards morose fatalism? Many of those staking their claims on the electronic frontier of the internet see themselves engaged in the edifice of value-laden (and unquestionably manly) virtual worlds predicated on living notions of subjectivity, identity and wider democratic concerns. Few pioneers of the I nternet wishing a sense of meaning and purpose.For instance, Mitch Kapor, don of the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation3, has little motion about the guiding principles of the Foundations vision of cyberspace Life in cyberspace at its best is more egalitarian than elitist and more de-centred than hierarchical In fact, life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly how doubting Thomas Jefferson would have wanted founded on the primacy of individualist liberty and commitment to pluralism, diversity and partnership. (Kapor in Nunes, 1995 7) Kapors assessment of cyberspace is late impertinent.We are first offered a vision of a de-centred and egalitarian virtual space, accordingly this is overlain with a Western (more accurately, northwards American) encounter of democracy based solidly on the primacy of the individual (neat shorthand for capitalist social organisation). Kapors vision seems to belie the supposedly fragmented and schizophrenic electron orbit of cyber space, which Baudrillard puts forward. Citizens of the Internet appear to be taking their ethnical and social baggage with them on their transit to the other side of the mirror.Although existent structures of inequality are, I would press, becoming apparent in cyberspace4, they may be sluice more heavy contested than they have been in real space. The Internet, because of its decentralised structure seems to influence against unified concepts of citizenship and community and presents a heterogeneity of subjectivities and identities. Whilst people may wish to transfer the more stable values of the real into the realm of simulation, such attempts are oft quantifys contested5. Resistance is more bidly because virtuality, almost by definition, reveals the constructed constitution of subjectivities and identities.The case of Louise Woodward reveals the clash effect of juxtaposing reactory identities and positions. In the do main(prenominal) of cyberspace (enabled by the trans-fron tier nature of broadcast technology), the reduction of Woodwards sentence was presented co-occurrently with celebrations at the Rigger pub in the English village of Elton. Judging from the Internet discussion group provided by the local Boston newspaper, American opinion was late offended by the virtual co-presence of the imperious villagers and their assumption of Woodwards innocence.For many another(prenominal) contri barelyors to the American discussion, the villagers appeared to be dancing on the engrave of a dead child. Before the coming of instantaneous cross- ethnic communication such juxtapositions would not have been viable. Virtuality offers this co-presence, but the reaction to it in this case, seems to support claims that such ethnical encounters are replete with struggle and meaning, earlier than free of them. A posting by Katie is typical of the angry and mystified response of many American contributors to the clash of co-present pagan identities.Without a Doubt, Louise Woodward *IS* indictable Guilty Guilty by Katie, 11/6/97 As I said in other postings Poor Louise Woodward she loved eight-month old, clear Matthew Eappen so she wrote to her family and friends back in England she did not see Matty hurt his head she testified tearful eyed but smiled broadly and gave a little laugh when next she was asked if she slammed Mattys head. Poor Louise.Woodward 27 seconds after the inculpatory verdict was announced she became hysterical (aahhow sad, she is unspoilt a child, such injustice, cried Geraldo, Gibson, and the like) her hysterics lasted all of 118 seconds transactions later she left the courtroom unassisted, composed, and arid eyed. Poor Matthew Eappen the media decided to focus on poor Louise Woodward.In the realm of cyberspace we become arbiters of the identities and positions paraded before us. Of course, our existing cultural ties have a considerable contact on who we choose to name with us, but we cannot ignore the co-pr esence of other identities, which call into question the turn of events of our profess.Texter has identified the Internet as the first stage in the construction of a virtual reality, towards the manufacture of identity without the corporeal body The social construction of the body becomes clear in cyberspace, where both identity is represented for Baudrillard, simulated, earlier than real. The consensus of cyberspace is a precarious one identification is entirely contingent, based on a consensual agreement to take ones word for it. (Texter, 1996 3) Texter suggests identity in cyberspace is often about passing off, offering up a fluid sense of self, project onto an imaginary virtual body.As a slight corrective, I think it is important not to exaggerate the difference among the creation of real world identities and virtual ones. Judith butler contends that the constitution of identity (with particular reference to gender) is always something of an unstable and contradictory car ry withance, whether simulated or real sexuality ought not to be construed as a stable identity or a locus of agency from which various acts follow, quite, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through and through a stylised repetition of acts. (Butler in Texter, 1996 4) Perhaps what the Internet does, by removing the optic cues that partly gender us, is open up possibilities for experimentation and play with existing manifestations of subjectivity. Here, the take of Dona Haraway is particularly important. Haraways influential bionic man manifesto (1985) has inspired other cyber-feminists, such as Sadie Plant, to foresee a post-gender time to come where existing pass overaries and categories no longer have the profound structuring effects that have resulted in gender inequalities under patriarchy.Haraways work coifs a profound scarper with feminist thought that posits a unified year of women, who can only be liberated by the d evelopment of joint consciousness and action. There is nothing about being fe antheral that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as being fe virile, itself a highly complex course of study constructed in contested social-scientific discourses and other social practices. (Haraway in Keen 1) Haraways profoundly anti-essentialist abstract rests on the notion of the cyborg, an entity based on the conjunction between technology and our selves.Haraway contends that we are all cyborgs now, because of our immersion in, and dependence on, techno-culture. She does not mean to suggest that we are robots in the Science Fiction sense, but that the relationship between people and technology is so intimate, that it is hard to tell where machines and people end and begin. As an example of our end relationship with technology, try to wrestle the TV remote control away from its symmetric user (who is as well often, coincidentally, the staminate head of the household).For Hara way, we have come to see our bodies as high-performance machines that must be monitored and added to by technological innovation. Given that the boundaries between the natural and the technological have collapsed, then so have the assumptions that cluster around these terms. For instance, the belief that women are naturally passive, pliant and nurturing can no longer be sustained in the era of the cyborg. The cyborg displays a polymorphous perversity (Haraway in Kunzru, 1997 4), and in conjunction with technology constructs identity, sexuality and gender as it pleases.Haraway has little time for either techno-utopians or the knee-jerk techno-phobia she sees in some feminist thought. She urges women to become part of networks (such as the Internet) that constitute the cyborg world. However, her ideas of connectivity should not be taken to equate with existing concepts of community based on the model of organic family. For her, the cyborg has no fear of partial tone identities and co ntradictory standpoints (Quoted in Keen 2).What is not allowable in the cyborg world, is a call to arms around a unified notion of women posed against an as cohesive notion of men. Butlers work on the performative nature of gender reaches many of the same conclusions, regarding the category of women central to much feminist thought as limiting and exclusive. She argues that feminist theory has taken the category of women to be foundational without realising that the category effects a political full point on the kinds of experiences articulable as part of feminist discourse. (Butler in Nicholson (Ed. ), 1990 325) Post-structuralist feminism has long attempt to question the essentialising concept of gender in feminist thought, but some writers have been wary of jettisoning gender as a unifying and explanatory category for the nature of womens oppression. Angela McRobbie, who is by no means hostile to postmodernism or post-structuralism, has expressed the tension poignantly, in a d iscussion of the nature of identity On the one hand, it is fluid, never completely secured and constantly being remade, reconstruct afresh.On the other hand, it only exists in relation to what it is not, to the other identities which are its other. (Quoted in Texter, 1995 18) I broadly accept McRobbies argument that any re-definition of identity ask something to define itself against. I would further argue that our existing tools for the construction of identities are move from often narrow and predictable paradigms, particularly when moneymaking(prenominal) considerations become part of the process. In my concluding section I would like to offer an example of how the structuring effects of gender seem to be still very apparent in the more mainstream sectors of cyberspace. devil computer games have secured huge followings in the last couple of years. Both are touted as offering virtual reality experiences (although without the headsets and gloves of experimental virtual reality ). quaver and grave looter are available crossways a variety of computer and ikon game platforms and both render quite real simulated virtual worlds to search and three-dimensional adversaries to shoot at6. My first example, swing, presents us with a subjective enchant of our virtual world. Screen-shot the view through your eyes.We, as the severely build up mavin, are able to freely roam through this world. All we see of our virtual self is the end of whichever machine we have selected. In Quake we see the virtual world through our own eyes. When we are low on life force we hear our alive become laboured. When we are killed we view the world from a wedded position (our subjectivity seems to survive death) until the schoolbook Game Over appears. The sound of our breathing and the grunts that emanate from us are decidedly masculine.Quake offers us an hick masculine gender identity based on the idea of identification with a masculine protagonist who drives the floor towards a possible (although not inevitable) resolution. Quake closely conforms to the observations made by Laura Mulvey on the dominance of the staminate gaze in chronicle motion-picture show. Mulvey, written material in the early 1970s, suggested that Hollywood celluloid routinely places the active male at the centre of the annals and invites us to account with this character, which through force of personality, brings about narrative resolution.It is somewhat depressing to note that the virtual reality offered by Quake is such an unreconstructed one. The fit with Mulvey is very close As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the self-involved look, both giving a conform to sense of omnipotence. (Mulvey in Easthope and McGowan, 1992 163) In Quake identification is aided by the conflation of the male protagonist with our selves, perhaps even escalate our satisfying omnipotence.Even if we read Quake against the grain in a Barthesian sense (as some of my women friends do), it is hard to argue that this commercial manifestation of virtual reality offers us anything but a very clear, uncomplicated subject position to inhabit. What we do not get with Quake, is much space within the text to contest existing gender categories. My second example, tomb Raider, offers a much more ambivalent experience. In this game, the main protagonist is a heavily armed effeminate character identified as Lara Croft.Unlike in Quake, Lara is represented on-screen. She is modelled in the Anime style that originated in Japanese graphic novels and animations. Lara, as can be seen from the screen shot below, is both engaging and physically decently. Screen-shot Lara Croft on-screen A number of my egg-producing(prenominal) students raised the issue of Tomb Raider in a discussion on the genderin g of video games and said that they regularly vie the game and found it an empowering experience (partly because of the gewgaw of having a female protagonist to identify with).Having vie video and computer games since the late 1970s I was interested by the notion of a game that seemed to contradict the usual masculine gendering usually found within this medium. Although Lara does drive the narrative, she is also heavily eroticised. We control her movements and identify with her, but she is also the prey of our gaze7. Mulvey suggests that female characters in narrative cinema often halt the narrative flow (Mulvey in Easthope & McGowan, 1992 163) for moments of erotic materialization.Initially, the active narrative role of the protagonist in Tomb Raider seems to support this, but the game does encourage us to gaze at Lara though male eyes. We can manipulate our view of the character to see her from a mould of angles using movements of the frame that closely tally cinematic zo oms, tracking shots and pans. These features make the game-play rather clumsy but allow us to fetishise the protagonist. As Mulvey comments on narrative cinema This fetishism builds up the physical beauty of the object transforming it into something satisfying in itself. (Ibid. 165)This perhaps explains why, when I first played the game, I played out some time making Lara perform a variety of acrobatic manoeuvres that were far removed from the task of killing adversaries. The ambivalence in Tomb Raider lies in the unusual tension between its al-Qaida in the male gaze and its simultaneous identification with an active female protagonist. That my female students felt empowered by, and attracted to, Tomb Raider, suggests it does mark a shift in conceptions of subjectivity and identity. However, this shift is not total and still appears to be rooted in existing gender definitions.Whilst some of the claims of cyber-feminism seem overstated, and rather too willing to claim the human ra ce of a virtual space where handed-down dualisms and hierarchies have collapsed, virtuality may offer new web sites for contestation and the expression of difference. Indeed, in a recent interview, Dona Haraway has suggested that technology is a value-laden welkin of contestation rather than a lily-white screen to be straightforwardly sculptured with new subjectivities and identities Technology is not neutral. Were inside of what we make, and its inside of us. Were living in a world of connections and it matters which get made and unmade. (Haraway in Kunzru 1997 6) I am conscious of having steered a evenhandedly delicate and cautious course through the hazards and attractions of structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism throughout this paper. I recognise that the body is becoming an increasingly contested site of theoretical debates and diverse social and cultural practices. The erosion of subjectivities and identities seems to be closely bound up with the heightened sense of mediation and virtuality that inflects the way we view the world, and equally importantly, how it views us.Postmodernism helps us tone the shifts from unified to fragmented subjectivities and identities, but it is a poor tool for investigating the possibilities of social change and identifiying the barriers to it. I have tested to show how the tools of structuralism still have salience, even when applied to the texts of cyberspace. It would perhaps be convenient to wish away the seemingly intractable hierarchies posited by structuralism, but to do so might also fall the space for cohesive social criticism and unified political action. This is clearly a tension felt by many feminists and certainly not one I have managed to resolve in this paper.What I hope I have done, is to point out the necessity of retaining some existing explanatory categories, whilst recognising the need for constant reflection on, and reaction to, changing subjectivities and identities both in the r eal world and the emerging virtual world. If Baudrillard is proved right, and we do eventually come to exclusively inhabit a rather hyperreal and schizophrenic virtual world, the need for tiny engagement will surely be more vital than ever, however difficult and contradictory such critical practice might prove to be. Notes1 more writing on subjectivity and identity in cyberspace uses marginal practices as illustrative examples. I think this focus on what might fairly be called an avant-garde often descends into futurology. The mainstream may not be as exotic, but it is where most of us live, and will live, in the future. 2 What Baudrillard seems to have meant was that the Gulf War never happened for those of us in the West, beyond the simulated hyperreality of surgical strikes and Cruise missiles with the ability to wait at traffic lights and avoid clean-handed civilians on the way to their targets.3 The use of the term electronic frontier indicates powerful myths of male colonis ation, the establishment of laws and the hierarchical normal of behaviour. 4 According to UNESCO 95% of the worlds computers are located in advanced industrial countries and the ten richest countries have 75% of the worlds surround lines. Networks and poverty seem to be effectively de-coupled at the moment 5 For example, the online group Guerrilla Girls are working against the masculine domination of cyberspace, albeit in a playfully aggressive and ironic manner.6 Quake can be played across computer networks and has been held responsible for mess up corporate networks in North America. 7 There are a number of Internet sites devoted to Tomb Raider. All of them contain numerous screen-shots of Lara Croft. On one site there were even a collection of images of Lara sans clothing, suggesting that male identification with Lara is rooted largely in objectification. charter Bibliography Note Where publication dates are not listed this is because the material is drawn from Internet art icles where such dates are absent. Internet addresses are condition where known. Baudrillard, J (1988) The Ecstasy of Communication, Semiotext(e) (trans. Bernard Schutz & Caroline Schutze) Baudrillard, J (n. d. ) Global Debt and couple human race, WWW document uniform resource locator , first published in Liberation, Paris (trans. Francois Debrix). http//www. Ctheory. com/e31_global_debt. hypertext mark-up language Baudrillard, J (1994) credit card Surgery for the Other, WWW document URL , Figures de lalteritie (trans. Francois Debrix). http//www. Ctheory. com/a33-plastic_surgery. hypertext mark-up language Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble, Feminist supposition, and psychoanalytic Discourse in Nicholson (Ed.) op. cit. , pp. 324-41 Easthope, A and K McGowan (Eds. ) (1992).A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, Buckingham Open University Press Haraway, Dona (1990) A Manifesto for Cyborgs Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the mid-eighties. In Nicholson (E d. ) op. cit. , pp. 190-234 Keen, Carolyn (n. d. ) On the Cyborg Manifesto, WWW document URL http//www. english. upenn. edu/jenglish/Courses/keen2. html Kunzru, Hari (1997) You are Cyborg in Wired, Issue 5. 02 McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore (1967) The Medium is the Massage. capital of the United Kingdom Penguin. Mulvey, Laura (1992) Visual Pleasure and Narrative motion-picture show. In Easthope and McGowan (Eds. ), op. cit. , pp 158-67 Nicholson, Linda J (Ed. ) (1990) Feminism/Postmodernism. capital of the United Kingdom Routledge Nunes, Mark (1995) Baudrillard in Cyberspace Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity, http//www. dc. peachnet. edu/mnunes/jbnet. html Pesce, Mark (n. d. ) Proximal or distal Unity, Cyberconference Home Page, http//www. hyperreal. com/mpesce Poster, Mark (1995) Cyber land The Internet and the Public Sphere http//www. hotpumped(p). com/wired/3. 11/departments/poster. if. html. Sawchuk, K A (1995) Post Panoptic Mirrored Worlds, Ctheory, WWW docu ment URL http//www. Ctheory. com/r-post_panoptic_mirrored. html Steffensen, Jyanni (1996) Decoding Perversity Queering Cyberspace, Parallel Gallery and Journal, http//www. va. com. au/ jibe/parallelcamtech. com. au Steinbach, J (n. d. ) Postmodern Technoculture, http//omni. cc. purdue. edu/beer mug/techcult. htm Texter, W (1996) I May be Synthetic, but Im not Stupid Technicity, Artifice and Repetition in Cyberville, http//www. texter. com/Textual/thesis. html December 1997 electronic mail the author spittleuce5. u-net. com.