18th Oct2012

Virtual/Actual

by melissarogers

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodiment, by virtue of our relationships with other bodies (including objects), and by virtue of practices of representation (digital or otherwise).

Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that come into being through technologies of surveillance.

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities; the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance; and the imagination of self in relation to virtual and actual communities.

Questions:

To help organize our discussion today, I thought I would compile the questions from the blog posts as I’m noticing some common threads.

  1. Here’s a question of mine from last week, since I accidentally read de Souza e Silva and Sutko:

I find the frameworks that de Souza e Silva and Sutko lay out for thinking the virtual and the real to be immensely useful, especially when it comes to potential. I am also preoccupied with the language of “possible and incompossible worlds” (32), which I think has implications for community organizing of various kinds. They write, “For Borges, as for Deleuze, there is no longer a person who chooses among several worlds, as in Leibniz, but a person who is pressured by several selves, which are not masks or appearances (like in Plato), but indeed constitute the same person. This perspective frames the virtual into something that is ready to emerge, to be created, or to transform” (32-33). This is particularly useful for conceptualizing identity and intersectionality; it gives us a way to think about identification as a process, with multiple forms or modes of consciousness operating or salient at different times, a la Chela Sandoval. My question therefore is about the difficulty of writing about this process in an analysis, as language seems inadequate to the task of apprehending being/becoming. In our own research, how do we each deal differently with representing the slipperiness of identity as process?

2. Felix and Justin have asked about the role of the psychological, cognitive, imaginative, and I would add, affective in spatial practices, all of which have implications not only for theorizing the virtual through locative technologies but also for the “generative process” of design (Tierney). Similarly, Jessica V. has asked about memory and perception, and many of us seem preoccupied with developing a language for embodied experiences in virtual/actual worlds as well as in spacetime. Does the metaphor of the “virtual house” work for us? It might be productive to revisit our discussions of the cognitive/precognitive, as well as Butler’s arguments on the racial production of the visible. We could also clarify our terms: virtual, actual, real, material, physical, potential vs. possible.

3. Tatiana brought up the in-betweenness of transnational subjects and spaces, as well as the need to think space and place relationally. I agree with her that relationships are key here. How do we conceptualize being/becoming in-between, whether it’s in between past and future or in-between places and spaces? Many of us have also mentioned actualization; if the virtual is the background for our reality and new realities as Tierney claims, then how do we reconceptualize cause and effect and therefore individual and collective agency?

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