Re: [-empyre-] gendered viractualism

["Joseph Nechvatal" <joseph_nechvatal@hotmail.com>]

> From: "Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>

> yes the body..that thing that propells us around, that makes our emotions,
> that thing that is us.. a metacolony of virii and bacteria all 
> symbiotically
> bound to one another to make up what we call human..

Hi Melinda. Actually, I want more to address here how technological 
consciousness infects people like a virus.

> why does  the individual with thier body dissapear in the viractual
> merge...?


Of course what "disappears" or is "disembodied" is not the material body but 
an abstract notion of the self. This de-presentation is followed by a 
reconstruction of embodiment into what is now commonly known as the 
posthuman condition. In fact, for me, this posthuman condition has become 
emblematic of a rigorously self-scrutinizing of the subject of 
?logocentrism?. We are now part of an automated technologically 
hallucinogenic culture that functions along the lines of a dream, free from 
some of the classical strictures of time and space; free from some of our 
traditional earthly limits which have been broken down by the instantaneous 
nature of electronic communications (particularly with its crown jewel, 
immersive virtual reality). The modernist existential concept of the 
singular individual has been supplanted by the electronic-aided individual, 
in a way liberating the body from linear time and vaporously placing it in a 
technologically stored eternity (simulacrum-hyperreality). This quality of 
phantasmagorical and perverse displacement has for some signified a 
tightening spiral which formulates a new vision of existence - a vision 
which Jean Baudrillard has called ?pornographic?.  But for me, the subject's 
existence is enhanced by his/her disappearance into technology-induced 
realms. The body's dissolution may be empowering.

I hope that this, and what follows, addresses also some Christina?s request 
that I talk a bit more about the quality of the unfamiliar ? the 
incommensurate, the excessive -- especially relative to the ideal of 
self-transcendence


> i tend to think of actual and virtual as a spatial continum..

Yea, I agree with you here. As I said, with virtuality, modes of production 
and representation collapse into a realm neither real nor imaginary - but 
simulatory. In viractual mechanomorphic consciousness the body - through a 
dismemberment of traditional narrative subjectivity - is undone by a 
proscribed clamor it cannot contain. Here trans-crystalline notions of the 
self reflect the formational effect of webbed high technology. Here the kind 
of top-down logic (with which we are all too familiar) is opposed by an 
intricate interplay of complexity. There is no Debordian spectacular society 
where all people are advertisements for the status quo portrayed here.

> so what is wrong with the physicality of the material body..?

Nothing, but The viractual supposition, it seems to me, plays more into an 
abstract area where we may refuse to recognize the subject as existing in 
the form of decisive representation. But one might wonder; should belief in 
the body?s semi-obsolescence as depicted in viractual mechanomorphism be 
theorized as an expression of narcissistic cybernetic post-flesh - or, 
rather, as a refusal of technocratic control in that the intractability of 
the body would no longer be so central an issue?



> yes we are all
> open systems of data and biological fluxes and flows and we are
> simultaneously hard and rooted to the earth ..  i tthink by setting up 
> these
> categories of opposition like fixed/temporary, individuality/multiplicity
> etc etc it   brings the actual and the virtual into more difference than
> merging.


I don?t  think it was I who set these catagories up, but I see your point.  
Frankly, I am trying to trace the tensions between human narrative and the 
mechanical spectacle - more than simply noting their merging.

> while not wanting to be essentialist, and believing that gender is to an
> extent performance.. it is also a phyisicality - interresting things happen
> within the body according to flows of eostrogen and testosterone... from my
> observation men are far more interrested in the hemaphrodite than women..
> and men take up female roles more often than women take up male roles in
> virtual space... while women also seem to be for more interrested in
> exploring  what is engendered as  female --  which sort of  leaves the
> masciuline body as an empty shell..
>
> coudl you say more about where the gendered body resides... and  what forms
> of sexual order do you see being created..  melinda


Sure, binary gender assignment provides representation with its 
organizational basis. But I?m more interested in imaginative capabilities 
which tech suggests - like non-representational counter-mannerist 
self-presentations. I think that by entering into the viractual the sexual 
subject may fuse in a complex and cryptic way. Here flesh is no longer the 
grounds for subjectivity. At the same time the subject is licensed through a 
décadent extension into self-motorized possession as the subject achieves 
disembodiment within high technology. Persuasive simulated worlds can exist 
for us as "real" because we can perceive them through the techno-apparatus 
of our body spliced into the cybernetic circuit. I understand this 
anti-materialist lurch towards liberty in terms of self-transcendent race 
and gender collapse.

I have found that there are many woman interested in this proposition from 
their standpoint. Have you seen Tamsin Lorraine?s book "Irigaray and Deleuze 
: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy"? She deals at length with female 
problems with disembodiment and surpases them. Next week I am taking part in 
an art exhibition at California State University, Sacramento called 
POSTFLESH - which is organized by Rachel Clarke.

Do you feel that woman do not wish to question - and unlasso ? their 
traditionally assigned epistemological status? Even without citing the 
efficacious theoretical influence of Donna Haraway's cyborg-theory, 
depictions of viractual post-flesh seem to courageously facilitate an 
inebriated subjectivity by constructing an imaginative space of 
accommodation. Here flamboyant self-reliant relationships between the 
protoplasmic body-image and virtual spatial conceptions are visualized as 
self-prosthesis. Indeed, female cultural producers who do not take some 
slant on this self- transcendent tilt by now look dismally gendercentric. Do 
you think men are being disingenuous by proposing this hemaphrodite posture? 
Given our period?s death, or explanation of, the mythic Father/God - I think 
not.

In the viractual mechanomorphic operation, the paradoxically simultaneous 
experiences of sex, death and immortality that is fundamental to Western 
religious practice is laid bare into a post-flesh art by virtue of a 
relocation of body/machine/consciousness. That such a semi-programmable 
philosophy engages our contemporary fixations today is not remarkable.



Meilleures salutations,
Joseph Nechvatal


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"Like philosophy, art exceeds lived experience by creating an approach to 
chaotic virtuality."
-Tamsin Lorraine, "Irigaray and Deleuze : Experiments in Visceral Philosophy

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