[-empyre-] whose "our systems" & window weather [gluggaveðri]

[Alan Sondheim]

Hi, I'm writing in answer to Johannes' invitation, and will be somewhat 
short here. I've dealt with issues of sexuality, pain, death, and mourning 
in the virtual, and in the virtual in relation to the real. The points I'd 
make are as follows -

That we are always already virtual, that the symbolic and the super- 
structure of the symbolic (it's uncanny appearance of closure), brings us 
elsewhere in our embodiment;

That abject pain and abjection as well (in Kristeva's sense) break through 
the symbolic, literally muddying the waters of the real;

That messiness is on the edge of virtual worlds and their (computational, 
virtual, formal) gamespace - and it's this edge which opens up the 
possibility of thinking through embodiment.

On a practical level, avatars can be anything in a sense; some performers 
use them as functions, so that embodiment occurs as abstracted extensions 
or structured articulations; some performers "see" them as extensions of 
themselves; in some cases, the extensions, as in Polyani's tacit 
knowledge, are inhering and smoothly incorporated within the body; and so 
forth. My own avatars are often so highly extended and abstracted, that 
they mediate between the body and the function; they serve as broken 
embodiments that veer, for the performer, between exchange value and usage 
(in Polyani's sense) value - between structure (objects and arrows) and 
kernel (internal circulations) for example.

Sexuality breaks through in so many ways - arousal brings "the body" 
around into resonance with itself, through any of the styles of embodiment 
and so what triggers what, and where, and how, and with what symbolic 
manifestations, becomes problematized and "smeared" across categories. I 
think this breaking through is also true of mourning and representations 
of death in the virtual, which cease to remain representations; in the 
virtual, death is embodied, repeatedly enacted and re-enacted. When I 
crash out of the MacGrid I receive a message "You have just committed 
suicide" - and to whom is this address; the statement itself is a form of 
differend in the real, incapable of being received.

It's the smearing that fascinates, and what happens in social media for 
example with bullying - where statements within the virtual, naming or not 
naming names, react upon the body of the bullied? Or another exanple - how 
does (for example) credit card hacking itself play with embodiment, if at 
all? Or ISIS using Twitter, apparently hijacking World Cup tags? I tend 
towards the messiness of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, thinking in 
terms, not of separations and analysis (which also tend towards genre and 
canon), but of flows, spews, abjections, tolerances, potential wells and 
tunnelling, and so forth. In other words, perhaps, on the far side of the 
academic, where people live and die.

Thanks, hope this makes some sense; unlike "my" avatar in Second Life, 
Alan Dojoji, my sleeplessness last night ("I" have acute insomnia), has 
most likely led to a certain blurriness of reason -

yours, Alan