Identity and Power

Hillis contends that virtual subjectivity through the use of avatars is an imagistic “middle ground” similar to the text-based literary device of free indirect discourse, where desires and identity cannot be fully assigned to either the character or author. Hillis points out the potentiality for avatar identification to be reinscribed into the production and labor (commodity) power structure, where commodity fetishism is enhanced and multiplied through the fracturing of identities (while still being connected to a transcendental understanding –desire?- of identity), an “increasingly mandated disarticulated self” (87). This spatial and temporal fracturing of identity serves market forces well because the “fractured subject on the move…will purchase many things, avatars included, to satisfy the wants established by various identity claims” (88). A good lens with which to look at Second Life is of course the virtualization of desire, and how commodity fetishism plays a role in peoples’ use of virtual worlds. Back to something I talked about in an earlier response – Shaviro’s discussion of the implementation of scarcity in virtual worlds – how does the creation of scarcity relate to a user’s enjoyment and use of a virtual world, and what can this tell us about cultural and individual identities and desire as it resituates itself on a virtual platform?

“the careful guarding of sense in language is not just analogous to but entirely complicit in the careful guarding of sense in life, and that possibly well-intentioned activity systematically squelches curiosity, change, variety, & finally, all delight in life. It promotes common sense at the expense of all others” (247)

I thought Jackson’s piece was wonderful, one of the more engaging treatises on hyper and non-linear text that I’ve read, and I found it difficult to pull quotes from, as the whole piece is quotable. From here on out, when I refer to hypertext, I mean not just computerized hypertext, but non-linear text in general. Identity and body are patchwork (“it’s possible and maybe preferable for the self to think of itself as a sort of practice rather than a thing, a proposition with variable terms, a mesh of relationships” 246), as she indirectly points to in her introductory paragraph by essentially removing her author identity from the text. How does a byline and the presence of an “author” affect one’s reading of a text? The piece goes on to illuminate the dynamic and emergent properties of hypertext, its ability to empower the reader to create her or his own meanings, and as meanings become fluid rather than static (through forking and nonlinear channels of reading), hypertexts are also (to borrow Hakim Bey’s term) temporary autonomous zones, escaping appropriation by cultural paradigms and other power schemes that will gladly (and I don’t really mean to personify the forces of power relations here) formulate meanings for the reader.

We don’t experience the body as whole, but as a phantom body, an intersection of bodily and embodied experiences, and although our minds work on an associative and fragmented continuum, we have a “catatonic obsession with stasis, centrality and unity” (240). It’s difficult for us to give up our understanding of self-identity as something stable and/or transcendental; this carries over to our readings of text, which we also want to be clean and unified. How does this desire become problematic, not just in its denial in the actual workings of mind, body, subjectivity, but in a social/political context? How does hypertext challenge this type of desire? She points to language as being a desiring machine, and that it must be recognized as such, where the “possibility of pollution is its only life” (250); desire/meaning can be formulated in texts through a passive and codified reading or an active and permeable reading. Jackson says, “Hypertext is schizophrenic: you can’t tell what’s the original and what’s the reference. Hierarchies break down into chains of likenesses” (242). She champions hypertext as a way of evading power structures and the reterritorialization of productive desires that Hillis mentions; instead hypertext invites questioning, transformation, it “leaves you naked with yourself in every leap; it shows you the gamble thought is, and it invites criticism, refusal even” (245). My associative thought runs to Taoism, one tenet of which is letting go of polarized dichotomies and being comfortable with paradox and ambiguity (indeed, chaos) as a way of understanding the nature of the world more deeply (though not necessarily, rightly). How does the idea of stable identity, authorship, and plagiarism/intellectual property reinforce dominant power structures? And who owns and produces the language and ideas in hypertext? The threads of identity, desire and power in the two pieces we read were particularly interesting to me as a useful way of looking at Second Life; Second Life as fiction, latent with hypertextual possibilities but also a desiring-machine functioning within a capitalist context.

Some hypertext fictions:

A Party in Woodside

Hegirascope

The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot 

~ by glycerine517 on October 18, 2007.