RE: [-empyre-] gendered viractualism

["Gregory Little" <glittle@oberlin.net>]

>to hack french femminism we are all already, both feminine, masculine ,
transgender, hemaphrodite,neuter, viral or whatever ,  the sex which is not
one, always doubly aware and touching ourselves, perhaps technology just
>points this out?

Yes, Melinda, Joseph, in this regard I prefer to look at
body/self/mind/virtual/actual as UNgengered, not about sex or sexuality at
all, but about signification, vectors of pleasure and pain, "local
intensities" body inscribed on code inscribed on emergent body, not body
with sex and sex organs, but, of course, body w/o organs. I feel there is an
entirely resolutely Materialist mode of transcendence, a "lurch toward
liberty" and "gender collapse", I am thinking of Lyotard here as well, where
concentration on sexuality, climax, genitalia gives way to distributed,
poly-pleasure.
Joseph, I am intrigued, it seems that viractualism on the one hand seeks a
condition of transcendence through a subjectivity that is "licensed through
decadent extension" where "sexual signs are subject to boundless semiosis",
sexuality and consciousness are distributed through technology, (although I
could argue that they are distributed without technology) as the bee is part
of the sex organ of the flower, and I am with this, aroused by this process
you describe, the words you craft.  But when you go on to say...."the
subject achieves
> disembodiment within high technology. "
My alarms go off, same old "trick", as Melinda puts it....why do we become
part this wonderful ecstatic, Chandella-esque luscious
re-territorialization of distributed subjectivities and significations, so
that we can then seek to leave one element of the synthetic mix (the body)
behind.  Seems like an afterthought, a left-over, and it is absolutely
necessary to our sentient friction within the flows of viractual mix.  Maybe
it is not a disembodiment, it is a new body, still materialist in part, but
inside-out, pierced and distributed.  Like the drug "Merge" in Rudy Rucker's
Wetware.

Gregory

-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-admin@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-admin@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au]On Behalf Of Melinda Rackham
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 3:11 AM
To: empyre@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] gendered viractualism

> The point is that within viractual creation all sexual signs are subject
to
> boundless semiosis - which is to say that they are translatable into other
> signs. Here, of course, it is possible to find resonances and affinities
> between sexual opposites. Here we can always articulate new sexes within.
> Here a new-sprung chameleon-like sexual demeanor is being built from the
> virtual abyss.

> 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.

no I haven't read her . I was thinking more of the work of Sadie Plant in
the  mid late 90's around the lusciousness of the body touching code.. of
the body entwined with the machine.. that sort of  erotic manifesto of cyber
feminism..

where I am coming form is the idealisation of disembodiment is a sort of
silicon anorexia fantasy - mirroring the fear of embracing theflesh, rather
than from any position of moral wrongness.

 ill just go off on my tangent here... I do believe that disembodiment is a
trick.. just like we all thought virtuality  was a trick once , or haraways
god-trick of objectivity.. we cant be separated.. and  technologically
mediated art  - particularly multiuser 3d which im working on  at teh moment
, is a totally embodied multisensory experience.. ..perhaps the
disembodiment idea relates more to how we think about ourselves acting in
the world on a regular basis than about how we theorise ourselves in
mediated soft spaces?

recently I went into char Davies immersive VR ephemere and i came out with
sore legs from squatting to much.. it may seem dreadfully modernist to say
it but I can never leave my physical construction behind... my solid core
colony of self, which is of course is  simultaneously a slippery self, - my
parinama - the Buddhist notion of alterity, or ”becoming otherwise” where
the identity of the self which is really non-self in never fixed and  is
changing from moment to moment. even when I am in an altered physiological
state because of my virtual  experience its precisely the chemical flows
thru my physicality that allow that weird brain trick of disembodiment to
happen...


m




 > 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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:-.,_
>
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