It is difficult not to occasionally smile a bit wryly when people take to Twitter to decry the ‘inanity’ and ‘narcissism’ of location app Foursquare. Like Twitter before it, a brief description of the service—that it “combines social networking and games to allows users to document, share and earn rewards and badges for publicizing their whereabouts—seems a bit baffling, particularly if one already feels that social networking encourages a bit too much self-concern.

Still, also like Twitter, Foursquare can be unexpectedly interesting, particularly in its capacity to create a ongoing narrative of sorts about an individual’s doings. It is quite easy to look back upon one’s list of ‘check-ins’ and recall that evening you saw an amazing band or that date that went surprisingly well. As I’ve argued repeatedly about Twitter, by centralising and publishing a person’s activity at a virtual ‘place’, Foursquare produces a personalised text of what you’ve been up to.

Yet, as someone once asked me on Twitter when discussing the service, why can’t you simply write where you’ve gone in a diary? What’s more, why must you create a record of where you are and where you have been it all?

The question sounds very similar to the classic Twitter criticism: “why would I care what some random person is having for lunch?”. And like that question (both misguided and inaccurate as it is), the response has something to do with not only the ambient social awareness fostered by real-time social networking, but also the difference between writing something privately and writing something publicly.

When we publicize actions, there is obviously a desire for something that is not met by private writing. It’s a call out to something and for something: for recognition, for engagement and for legitimacy. To write publicly is to write oneself into the social, to stitch oneself into the shared exterior space we call the common.

So checking in on Foursquare is many things: beyond the gaming aspect (in which, when you check-in somewhere more than anyone else over 60 days, you are awarded the title ‘Mayor’, which can carry real rewards), it also is act of deliberately making yourself public in order to see yourself there. To wit, you check in so you can check yourself out, making yourself into a kind of public persona or representation.

Frequently, this act is positioned as a weakness of sorts – that you only need the recognition and legitimacy conferred by the public space if you are somehow lacking. But hovering on the fringes of the accusation is an an act of forgetting caused by privilege. If you, through whatever collection of cultural and social capital, have never had to question your status as a legitimate member of society, it is easy to forget that this legitimacy often stems from being able to see oneself reflected in the public sphere. Given that not everyone gets to check that, yes, ‘the President’s hair is just like mine’, rather than just narcissism, to write oneself publicly can also be an ongoing project in which we make ourselves real to ourselves my creating a public image of ourselves.

To make oneself real, however, is not only to make oneself public – it is to make oneself public in a manner both recognised and affirmed by current social standards. You insert yourself into a network of legitimacy by performing ‘correctly’, and interestingly enough, when it comes to contemporary phenomena like Twitter and Foursquare, use of the network itself as well as one’s activity on it confers a kind of cultural capital.

So a Foursquare profile is an expression of desire, not only for connection, but also, in its own small way, but for the solidity of autobiography (and thus, we return to Mr. Penumbra).

This is only one aspect of Foursquare. After all, another trait is that it’s (apparently) a good way to meet people. But by constructing ‘checking in’ as an act of writing, it helps lay bare the mutually constitutive nature of the public and private in the self. What is inalienably and inextricably inside – i.e. subjectivity – is built from the ‘outside’ of the public space. To write oneself there is to make oneself real both in it and through it according to its rules. You are sutured into the public space by both constructing yourself in its image, but also seeing oneself presented there – and the strange tension between the joyous relief of affirmation and coercive fear of conformity never disappears.

So, the next question to consider then: what happens to both writing and the self when utterances are not, as 20th century linguists discovered only social – but persistently public too?

Heh. No, not really.

K, so this whole ‘blogging notes to myself’ thing? Done. I was (not very successfully) using it to try and motivate myself. But ultimately, spitting up incomplete, generally incoherent thoughts in a public forum felt disrespectful to those few of you who do read this blog. And I really appreciate those of you who do read! So I’ll stop and get back to opening up random Word files, typing like mad and then, 3 days later, wondering what the hell I was rambling about. Fun!

Of course, the things that interest me still interest me, both generally and specifically in terms of ‘my project’. So today, after a little e-consultation with Tim, I re-read Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (pdf link) to get some sort of grounding for how new media works to construct people – or images of people – in particular ways.

Mulvey’s central argument relies on both a feminist and psycholanalytic approach to cinema, something that she captures in the notion of the implied male gaze. She suggests that not only does looking itself produce a sort of pleasure rooted in a sense of mastery and control (concepts that, in psychoanalysis are symbolically attached to the phallus), this same gaze constructs women subjects as passive subjects, empty placeholders that enable not only male desire but also the male desire for authority.

Many films thus ‘double-up’ this gaze by making the woman doubly ‘looked-at’ and desired: by the characters in the film, but also by the audience. In doing so, the male viewer (and possibly director/crew) stave off a fear of castration (again, usually taken as a symbolic castration where the phallus is the symbol of power in a system that works to prioritise  masculine power – hence patriarchy as ‘phallogocentrism’).

This is all important and useful – and vaguely problematic, as it offers no recourse for any sort of escape – and I haven’t done it any justice (and have probably misread it). But what struck me was part of Mulvey’s argument is about the pleasure produced in looking at the individual construed as aesthetic object – the person made thing. Because what I immediately thought of was Clay Shirky’s insistence that one of the differences of the web vs. other forms is the exponentially more people who, rather than being viewers (or consumers) of media, are producers of it. To wit: if in film, one constitutes subjects as objects in order to reassert a particular ideological stance, on the web, we are constituting ourselves as aesthetic objects and text to be looked at and read. The entrance into subjecthood is recast as an entrance into objecthood.

If the mirror stage, according to Lacan, is that process by which self, falsely recognizing its external projection as the ideal, unreachable whole, moves into being a subject, then producing an online profile is like a second mirror stage ( and third, and fourth etc., obviously I’m not being literal here). Because there are some interesting, if inverted moves through which one produces an idealized vision of the self as object so that one moves into a symbolic order as an object that exceeds its self (i.e. you are producing the idealized, whole image of your self as text or image. Think of the way people will photoshop their Twitter avatars, for example).

Right? So it’s Freud’s scopophilia (the pleasure of looking at another subject as object) turned inside out and upside down: it’s the pleasure of constituting oneself as an object that can be looked at and read by both oneself (i.e. look at me and how awesome I am now that I’ve written it all down) but also building an idealized version of oneself to produce for others. We constitute our ‘object-ive selves’ to be the… Well, clearly, this is where I have that crushing realization that I need to go learn my Lacan. Bah!

But, other fun ideas:

• If the mirror stage happens at that time that “children’s physical ambitions outstrip their motor capacity”, then our silly ‘second mirror stage’ occurs through the introduction of a technology that lets us ‘exceed’ our physical limitations i.e. it allows our subject-ified, existing in the symbolic order selves to produce an hyper version of ourselves according to that symbolic order.
• Mulvey states that “the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it”. It’s an idea that could take on new life in the avatar, particularly in an analysis of the how/why of the desire to ‘fill in gaps’ in the avatar. Standard example – the meek, skinny guy with the massive warrior avatar in WoW.
• Mulvey also says something about the pleasure derived from public/private looking in a cinema – that it “helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation” and  that the “conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world”. Here no inversion is needed, as Facebook seems to do precisely this – invoke a sense of privacy (you sitting at home, looking up your ex) while doing so in a (generally) public forum.

I suppose what I’m getting at there is, in the production of our online selves and avatars, pleasure and desire are going to be key concepts in figuring out the how and why.

Continuing my breathtakingly narcissistic endeavour of ‘blogging my notes to myself’, I figure after last my post – which was way too wishy-washy, even for me – it might be time for some concrete questions about how the existence and functioning of virtual technologies affects our idea of the individual. So, without further ado… some needless public wanking! Yay! Warning: if you hate academic writing – particularly bad academic writing – this post will send you into a rage. Avoid.

The premise I’m starting with is that the existence of the web and video games have an effect on both the material experience of subjectivity and its theoretical conception. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this, right?

But if that’s my hypothesis (with the eventual goal being some suggestion of how that impacts how the literary representation of the subject), what feels important is some articulation of the ‘how and what’ of this proposed change (if it indeed exists) and its consequences.

For the time being, however, I’m just going to pose questions, mainly so I can then figure out what I should read so that I might (maybe, possibly) give them some sort of answer.

The Unitary Subject

So, the concept of unitary, sovereign, autonomous subject was long ago shattered.

The self is multiple, fragmented, constituted in part by its material circumstances, its libidinal drives and subconscious, symbolic relations, and also its temporal multiplicity – the way in which we enter and occupy provisional identities by performing them (operating within both ‘pre-approved’ systems of bodily signification and also ‘queering’ them occasionally). This we know.

But if, as I previously suggested, the spatial and temporal metaphors of the web are not the same as the similar ones produced by print – “his/her identity exists online” vs. “his/her identity lives on in this book” – what is the ‘actual’ difference between the multiple self articulated by Butler et al and the subject that exists in both a body and in virtual space? (Deleuze joke! What is the actual difference of the virtual?! Hey yo!)

The Difference Between the Textual Self and ‘Web Self” (Or Is There One?)

So if my question is, “k, how is it different?”, there are other questions that need asking:

• Does the persistence of the web have a material impact on the subject? Is the way in which we might ‘offload’ or ‘outsource’ subjectivity online different from the printed word or image, which also allow you to exist ‘beyond yourself’?
• If there is a difference, does the ‘differently public’ nature of the web change anything? Are a book and the web public in the same way? i.e. do their publicly available natures differ precisely because of: a) simultaneous access by multiple other subjects; b) the capacity of the web to provide an ongoing, dynamic, changing relationship to the persona produced by a ‘site of identity’
• Well, shit – then you have to ask: is ‘a site of identity’ different than the texts of identity? Yes, obviously, there is a distinctly textual aspect to a Twitter stream – but is it only that?
• Related: Is the spatial and temporal metaphor of a web site relevant in any way. The book (possibly) operates in a kind of spatio-temporal limbo: yes, ‘it exists’ in a material sense, but does the notion of ‘the work’ (the thing that exists between text and reader) existing as an event operate differently from the work of a website (that too, exists in as much it is read).
• Unfortunately, in some sense that requires the question: what is the ontology or epistemology of the book vs. the web? Bleh. Sthuper.

The Body

Performativity, particularly when identity is conceived in textual terms, has become a central concept in the understanding of the subject (and its subject-ion). So much of the dynamic of performativity is about the body existing in time and space – of the way the multiple, overlapped signs of identity, according to Sedgwick, operate along ‘multi-dimensional orthogonal axes’.

The shift between the web and the ‘textual self’ seems to be that the discourse of multiple selves operates in relation to different metaphors – perhaps that of time vs. space. To wit, the bodily self is multiple sequentially – in a syntagmatic sense – temporally. The online self is multiple simultaneously – in a paradigmatic sense – both temporally and spatially.

This is, of course, still a question of metaphor though; the bodily self-as-text can of course produce a number of different apparent texts depending upon its reader and the ideological-sign system invoked. One imagines a clown standing in the middle of a diverse crowd. The ‘sign of the clown’ is obviously being read in numerous ways.

There is also the question of the author-text as existing ‘outside the body’.

But surely there is a difference to that metaphorical multiplicity and the ‘material’ one engendered by an online persona that may ‘do things’ while one sleeps? It’s not simply the same to say the body signifies multiply in the same moment and the body and the avatar signify multiply in the same moment and across different spaces – is it? That ‘spatial multiplicity’ or the (literal) multiple sites of identity do constitute a material difference, no?

Why? Because it seems that the outsourced nature of the self produced by the avatar is not subject to the same constraints of socio-ideological signification as the body. Which is to say – the avatar ‘escapes’ the logocentric significatory systems of the bodily subject precisely because there is no body. That is not to say, of course, that there is no subsumption back into discourses of race, class, sex, gender, etc. But they function in parallel, rather than identical ways.

So, maybe we’ve arrived at something? Because what I’ll call the ‘offsite’ self: a) does something to the usual signfication of identity categories; b) does so in an ongoing temporal sense – i.e. constantly modified etc. – that cannot be replicated by the metaphor of ‘the self’ that resides in the book. To me anyway, this constitutes a difference because:

Though one my occupy a nom de plume in printed text in order to pursue self-actualization – i.e. to explore some avenue of the self that ‘power’ prevents you from doing (de Sade etc.) – the signs that constitute that textualised self remain fixed. Sure, their signfication is multiple, fluid etc. But it’s constrained in a way that the online self isn’t because it’s ‘production-reception mechanism’ (oh you know) can constantly be reconfigured.

Basic Stuff

1) There needs to an articulable difference of the ‘offsite self’ in print and that on the web in order for any of this to make sense.

2) That difference seems to relate to: a) the possibly ‘epistemological difference’ between the ‘static’ (but not) nature of the page and dynamic (but not always) nature of the web i.e. the fact that the avatar-self is an ongoing process vs. the comparatively more fixed nature of the print-self (will need to figure out how to express this less stupidly); b) the multiplicity of selves engendered by the web has something to do with both space and spatial metaphors; c) the reconfiguration of the bodily self by the avatar self seems like a more immediate, ongoing and materially available process than the possibility of the same thing happening in print. Why? I dunno any more. My brain hurts.

3) Maybe what I’ve circled around to isn’t some massive difference between the difference of a print self vs. an online avatar self – but the cultural difference produced by the mass availability of an offsite self at all. Perhaps something like it always existed for a very few, who could be both published and read by a public. Now that it exists in a mass form – and it really does – maybe this is why we begin to see a logic of the avatar appear in literature.

Note: A couple of years ago on SiW, I wrote a lot about how I thought the web changed the conception of the individual. Funnily enough, that thinking will likely now form the middle chapter of my dissertation – and thus requires a bit more fleshing out. So for the next little while, I’m going to be ‘thinking out loud’ here, trying to figure out how and why virtual technologies change both our theoretical conception and material experience of individuality. Hopefully, it’ll also be of some interest for regular readers. If it totally isn’t… fear not! It’ll only last a couple of weeks.

* * *

According to Wikipedia, that most useful and sketchy of web resources, “hardware virtualization is a [virtual recreation in software] of computers or operating systems. It hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from users, instead showing another abstract computing platform”.

Put somewhat differently, virtualization is when one operating system – i.e. the software mechanism by which hardware is made comprehensible and usable to the user – runs atop another operating system, obscuring and obfuscating the ‘original’ one as it simultaneously depends on it.

This seems as good a metaphor to start with as any.

* * *

Imagine, if you will, that you could walk around with a holographic projection of your own creation, hovering a few feet in front of you.

Often, as people looked at you and your shimmering shadow, they would see you through the virtual projection. So, in those moments, you would be the combined image of the body and your projected self. A cyborg self, if you like.

The projection would be like you, but not. Not touched with the same extravagances or the same tortuous, bodily limitations – of cheeks that blush too quickly, or a mouth that moves a hair faster than the brain – it is similar to you, but not the same.

In fact, you have the option of making your holographic self entirely different from you – with the small caveat that, the greater the disparity between the projected self and the bodily one, the more intriguing and potentially confusing the resultant cyborg image.

Two options, then, both borne of a desire to be ‘true to oneself’: the mimetic hologram, an attempt at a recreation of the self; and the fantastical hologram, an attempt at re-creation: an attempt to re-produce and re-present some facet of oneself that bodies – your own, others’, and those bodies of ‘the structural apparatuses’ -  will not allow.

* * *

A few things resolve into something almost resembling clarity:

• The image of both the body and the self is key, both in terms of its ongoing signification, but also of the semantic and experiential possibilities produced by the gaps between ‘sign’ and ‘referent’.
• It cannot be just the image though. The interwoven nature of textuality is also a necessary component of ‘both’ selves, particularly as they are both intertwined productions of identity.
• It is, nonetheless, clearly very easy to slip into a discourse of the true and the false, the authentic prior and the sullied present, the actual self and the virtual. This feels like a problem, as these distinctions are further muddied by the web, particularly in its effects on temporality.

* * *

So. The holographic self is paradoxical. The projection is reliant upon you, its ‘author’, but can also exist and signify beyond you, without you. The web is a persistent space. It is the ‘world of ideas’ made (im)material. Words and images ‘exist somewhere’. The spatial and temporal aspects of the web are metaphors – but they are not the same metaphors produced by books and films. The web is a constellation – it is there, even in daytime, when it cannot be seen.

Thus, in a very material sense, to many, your ‘bodily subjectivity’ exists prior to your bodily one. In online subjectivit, there are (possibly) simultaneous yet not entirely concurrent langues, to make no mention of disparate paroles, invoked in the self seen through the hologram. You are you, but light is bent; you are wearing makeup that deflects light so as to render you as almost yourself.

* * *

Metaphors can only take one so far. So let us ask some straightforward questions and make some tentative statements:

• Is there a material difference to the experience of subjectivity engendered by the technology of the web? If so, what are they – and are they relevant?
• The difficulty with the body – particularly the body as text – is that, within historically inflected ideological systems of signification, the sexed, raced, gendered, abled body is always subsumed back into those significatory systems. These systems are inextricably logocentric. To wit, my identity is always a movement either toward or away from whiteness – or, at best, the cosmopolitan subject who has ‘escaped race’.
• What effect does it then have to provisionally occupy different subject positions online? If ‘putting identity somewhere’ – and this is a phrase that must be returned to – allows one to (temporarily, sort of) escape or exceed those textual systems that pin bodies in place, what material effect does it have to be able to do so in a ‘place’ that ‘isn’t real’?
• Put differently: is the holographic self an escape? Or is a site that, when occupied, one that reconfigures the bodily, ‘interior’ notion of subjectivity.