Wordpress wouldn’t let me post this in a comment, so forgive the new post — but I remembered that The Office had a funny spot about Second Life. In the clip, the character Dwight explains that Second Life is not a video game.

I’m contemplating a dissertation topic right now and would like the group’s input on my proposed topic, as I attempt to cut a “project” from matter…Focusing on Second Life, I am asking how virtual technologies produce an (un)real (a reality that sometimes defines itself as unreal, and an ontological state that is made possible only by its this paradoxical definition.) Of course, questions of the body and its relation to this (un)real are key to this production.

I guess one must start with an important point: To work past questions of representation does not mean splitting meaning and material and just going for “the matter itself.” This assumes that meanings are “imposed” on some “blank” matter. Representation, as a kind of technology, has produced this split. I suppose Deleuze’s “assemblage”: something material which has been produced through knowledge and ’statements’ seems to work here. The statements order the matter.

So I want to move away from the old representational trend of talking about “disembodiment” in regard to virtual technologies (think Anne Balsamo), but I also want to avoid simply ignoring this question through focusing on connectivity. Because there has already been a strong focus on material and informational connectivity, I feel. Yes, the body is multiple, but if so, then aren’t some of our many “bodies” or potential or virtual bodies formed around disembodiment as a social cut, force, or mold? Aren’t material bodies literally and materially “pressed” through forces that, while they can never disembody us, produce the possibility of disembodiment and thus order experience around it, making disembodiment an ontological “reality”? While it seems entirely limited to argue that Second Life and similar technologies “disembody” us, it seems equally as misguided to focus on matter’s ontological connectivity when disembodiment is obviously one of the discursive structures, if not material forces, producing Second Life. Yes, people often experience Second Life as “an elsewhere,” leaving some first “real life” for a while, but is our response to simply show that they are “really” affectively connected accross the boundaries of technology and living matter? I’m uncomfortable with saying “really,” in this situation especially. Realities compete in their multiplicity, and I am interested in examining this multiplicity…To use Annemarie Mol’s “praxiographic” method, we might examine each as a “reality” and then see how each reality exists in practice. This way, we aren’t re-instating a singular real, and arguing for one reality as more “real” than another. We are instead looking at how each becomes real through enactment. (See her book The Body Multiple for more fun.)

Or, instead, we could use the connectivity of matter to understand how the ontological state of disconnectivity is produced.

I guess you might say I am interested in the ontological materiality or affectivity of “disembodiment” and how such a disembodied body came to be produced as “unreal.” There is an experience disembodiment and it orders techno-relationality. To deny this would be to dismiss it as an “illusion,” thus reiterating an epistemological-ontological split between matter “itself” and its representation. Illusions are not untrue, unreal, or dead, they are living realities that call themselves unreal, that function as (un)real, and are socially and technically produced as (un)real. And this orders affect and life itself.

Does this make any sense?
Is it obvious?
Where do I go from here?
These are only the first steps.
Everything can change from here.
I still have time to do that. xo

I’ll start this thread with my thoughts about the process of working on our video project.

After our meeting on Friday I was left buzzing (and a little bit spasming) with the difficulty of our project, which I mean in the best sense. The difficulty suggests that we are asking a kind of question that hasn’t been answered in the same way through five editions per company. And part of the challenge is that we are trying to both acknowledge and mobilize our critique of methods as a method, too, as a measuring device, in Karen Barad’s terms.

I say we are mobilizing it because we are thinking of it in performative terms, as an enactment rather than a representation. This is where political questions about complicity arise and this is why I keep going back to questions about what it means to measure, our redefinitions of measure. According to Barad in Meeting the Universe Halfway, in the act of measuring, “…the specific material arrangement (not the will of the experimenter) enacts a cut between the ‘object of observation’ and the ‘measuring device’ such that the boundaries and properties in question become determinate” (263).

One question this raises is about the object(s) of observation that we may be determining, if it is even possible to talk about our project in these terms. If so, one of our objects might be sociological methods, but there seems to be another, too; we are dealing with a kind of technical solution that is happening all over the place, not just (or not even) in Sociology.

In a way, these two objects seem to be already determined– they already determine themselves as measuring devices. But we are determining them as objects of study or of art or critique. And in this way we are “cutting” a boundary between them and us, their technicality and ours. The way we do it, the specific material arrangement of our device, will affect what they come to be, the properties they have in our experiment. And, following Barad, our process of making this cut is part of a phenomenon we’re making. I think this is part of what we are struggling with, the idea that we are also determining indeterminacy. Our biggest measuring device is the one that measures the very process of making this cut that we’re making, the act of measuring.

So. These are the hardest questions that came up for me after our meeting on Friday. If anyone else has any comments on the experience of working on this or related thoughts, please post.