Let’s Talk Virtual.
- I’m still working/thinking through the concepts and ideas I posed in my digital space presentation and upon rereading de Souza e Silva and Sutko, I’m now considering how the body can be understood as an interface. As the authors explain in their discussion of Deleuze and the virtual as potentiality, “[t]he choice of interface itself actualizes certain potentialities and leaves others virtual” (33). If we think of the body as an interface (this reminds me of an earlier discussion about experience mediated through embodiment), does that also mean we necessarily leave other potentialities virtual? So, to draw from my own work, if the goal of weight loss relies on the body as a interface (the object through which information on diet, exercise, motivation, etc. can be read, what potentialities get left unfulfilled?
- I’m grateful for the impetus to read Rajchman a second time, especially his discussion of possibility and specificity. While the virtual house’s possibility does not preclude specificity or vice versa, I wonder if that is also true of the body. He explains that “[i]ncreased possibility comes at the price of reducing specificity,” which, if I apply this concept to the bodies of fat women, seems to make sense (119). That is, the possibilities read into the fat body presuppose the fat body as malleable and without specificity (an amorphous blob, if you will. Please don’t. Ever.) but as it approaches its potential, its possibilities decrease to the point that it becomes an example of a very specific type of body, a “normal” body, a “thin” body.
- Backing away from my project for a moment, I’d like to think about de Souza e Silva and Sutko’s discussion of WikiMe and “distance as the logic for organizing entries” (28). The authors argue that this means that “[p]hysical space, represented by distance, becomes the primary interface for that information. Can we consider space outside of distance? For example, the primacy of distance shifts when we consider the facts of physical barriers (walls, one-way streets, wheelchair inaccessible pathways) between two things that supposedly are closest to one another. What happens when the logic of “from Point A to Point B” does not work?
Definitions:
Body: The interface through which we interact with the world