Simulation/Madness

"The first Gulf War was the first "live" war. World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first "live" war. And to those, like my friend Baudrillard, who say that this war did not actually occur, I reply: this war may not have occurred in the actual global space, but it did occur in global time. And this thans to CNN and The Pentagon. This is a new form of war, and all future wares, all future accidents will be live wars and live accidents.
(Wilson: How will this removal affect people?)
Firstly, a de-realization, the accident of the real. It's not one, two, hundreds or thousands of people who are being killed, but the whole reality itself. In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real. Imagine that all of a sudden I am convinced that I am Napoleon: I am no longer Virilio, but Napoleon. My reality is wounded. Virtual reality leads to a similar de-realization. However, it no longer works only at the scale of individuals, as in madness, but at the scale of the world.

By the way, this might sound like drama, but it is not the end of the world: it is both sad and happy, nasty and kind. It is a lot of contradictory things at the same time. And it is complex."

--Virilio, Cyberwar, God and Television: An Interview with Paul Virilio
Conducted by Louise Wilson, from Digital Delerium


Virilio's comparison of madness with simulation is really interesting because if we've been taught as liberal academics to treat madness as an interesting singularity in personality, simulation must be able to divulge similarly interesting points. Of course, we may not seek out madness, but we do seem to seek out simulation, at least on some level. Taking, for example, Massive-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), the real player can become Napoleon consciously and willingly, interact with others as Napoleon. But perhaps the previous example is "active" simulation, whereas something like television and CNN is "passive" simulation because one does not choose the way in which it overtakes the body.

Beginning Life on the Screen

I've just begun Sherry Turkle's book Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet, finish the introduction and the first chapter. Turkle begins her book, which is mostly about MUD-based interactions (think self-designable chatrooms, for now), with an interesting distinction between Modernist and Postmodernist of computer technology. The modernist defines the computer in the sense of an enlarged, more powerful calculator, capable of "computation" in the very literal sense. Postmodernist views, which she obviously prefers and embraces for the book thus far, see computer technology and the internet as an embodiment of itself; computers decentralize and fragment themselves, link (or hyperlink) between objects in infinite number of ways, and allow individual or unique creations in both hardware configurations and representation of the self (MUD chat rooms are her example).

Briefly summarizing the latter, a user can enter a chatroom and become who they want to be. They can become someone of a different gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. and design a world and a simulated life around this persona that they've chosen to adopt. She asserts that some of these users feel more Real in their simulated environment, as if they've final constructed the life they were always meant to have had. Turkle moves on to lay out a history of computer-culture before the internet, while maintaining her modernist/postmodernist binary. What becomes most interesting for me is when she moves into the subsection "objects-to-think-with"...

Computers have become objects of orientation, of remembering, and of life processing. Much like what Sontag says of the photograph at a wedding re-membering the experience, the computer creates a tension between the user and their input and the way it is re-received. But, like photographs, they have become a part of remembrance, so much that we can often rely on photographs (now digital) to recall an event or experience. (Virilio talks about this too, in The Information Bomb in a totally different light). Further than that, like the way certain knowledges are appropriated by the masses and become a part of the way we think about the world (such as Freudian Slips or Dream Analysis from Freud), computers shape ours:

"Today, life on the computer screen carries theory. Here is how it happens. People decide that they want to buy an easy-to-use computer. They are attracted by a consumer product -- say, a computer with a Macintosh-style interface [note, Turkle is writing 11 years ago]. They think they are getting an instrumentally useful product, and there is little question that they are. But now it is in their home and they interact with it every day. And it turns out they are also getting an object that teaches them a new way of thinking and encourages them to develop new expectations about the kinds of relationships they and their children will have with machines. People decide that they want to interact with others on a computer network. They get an account on a commercial service. They think that this will provide them with new access to people and information, and of course it does. But it does more. When they log on, they may find themselves playing multiple roles, they may find themselves playing characters of the opposite sex. In this way they are swept up by the experiences that enable them to explore previously unexamined aspects of their sexuality or that challenge their ideas about a unitary self."

-- Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet

...
My apologies for the vague and overlong summary. My purpose was to get down exactly what I liked about the introduction and the first chapter. The book is extremely pro-digital technology and has done little to complicate that thus far. But it is very informative in drawing a map of the sort of subjectivity-grounded-in-postmodernism. By far the biggest problem with the book is that it is 11 years old and a considerable amount of technological advancements have happened since then.

My main concern at the moment comes from the idea of computer technology (and, more related to the present moment, cyber- or internet technology) as an extension of the self. I hope Turkle goes into more depth here, because she rejects the equation of the computer with the human mind, so the usage of the computer for the mind doesn't quite connect. Virilio and Baudrillard (and Lyotard?) seem to address this from the other point of view. It will be interesting to dive deeper into both sides.

Optics in 20th Century

"As the century of unbounded curiosity, covetous looking and the de-regulation of the gaze, the twentieth has not been the century of the 'image', as is often claimed, but of optics -- and, in particular, of the optical illusion.
Since pre-1914 days, the imperatives of propaganda (of advertising) and, subsequently, during the long period of Cold War and nuclear deterrence, secuity and iintelligence needs have gradually drawn us into an intolerable situation in which industrial optics have run wildly out of control.
This has produced the new opto-electronic arsenal, which ranges from remote medical detection devices, probing our 'hearts and loins' in real time, to global remote surveillance (from the street-corner camera to the whole panoply of orbital satellites), with the promised emergence of the cyber-circus still to come.
'The cinema involves putting the eye into uniform,' claimed Kafka. What are we to say, then, of this dictatorship exerted for more than half a century by optical hardware which has become omniscient and omnipresent and which, like any totalitarian regime, encourages us to forget we are individuated beings?"

-- Virilio, The Information Bomb, pages 28-29.

I'm interested in the connection Virilio makes with the age of curiosity, because the use of curiosity invokes an image of childishness and wonderment. There is a notion of innocence that comes with this excuse for the gaze, as if this sort of optical technology is a toy for man (Virilio elsewhere in this book talks about 1900s visions of the new century as a vision of blown-up toys for adults). Carelessness comes with curiosity and, just as "curiosity killed the cat" is a horrible saying used to prevent children from sticking their noses into other peoples' business, we can take this age of curiosity as a warning. But perhaps digital technology has made up for this by also making this an "age of consent".

We click 'agree' license and privacy agreements in digital technologies without reading them. We willingly submit details about our lives in the hopes that others will find them interesting (or dateable, or sexy, or intelligent). We post photos of ourselves, tagged with our own full names, searchable by any moderately competent search engine. We allow 'cookies' to show us form-fitted advertisements. Conversely, behind the veil of the screen, we turn and look at all these things in other people. We can browse profiles on dating or social networking sites, look at pictures of thousands of people we don't know -- and their friends and family -- without feeling like a peeping tom. Have voyeurism and consent allied themselves in digital space? Such a question is totally superficial, but worth thinking about in the sense that we can no longer strictly define what is private and what is public.

Transitions -- Quotebook to Notebook -- and a Pseudo Thesis

This post is necessary in the sense that I feel like I need to state, for my own records (though I do not currently keep records, I am told I should), this blog's transition. Previously - ie. all the posts below this one - I had laid out quotes from books I was reading and then commented on them. This will not change. I enjoy reflecting on these quotes and processing them for myself afterwards. However, the intention of the blog has changed, or better yet has been amended. Now, this blog will be regularly updated as a requisite of my Division III project in my final year at Hampshire College. Though the Div III has no title yet, the topics I will begin to explore (starting now) include:

-->Critiques of Technology, in particular Digital Technology.

-->Accessibility to Knowledge and the Encyclopedic Nature of the Internet.

-->Digital Culture, Techno-culture, Cyberculture, and any other clever configurations of culture which relies on technology or is significantly shaped by technology.

-->Communication Studies, in particular the reduction of distance (as manifested in this blog) and hyperproliferation of communicative devices

-->Visual Culture on the internet and New Media Studies, looking at diverse topics such as art on the internet and personal profiles.


I plan to draw these topics out and position them inside Subjectivity - how the subject is constituted by the world around him - from the schools of continental philosophy, critical theory, and EGS-style mass communications. Thus, my Division III will be theoretically rigorous and include a large written element. However, I also plan to explore, to no lesser degree, creative expression through technology, attempting to question digital technology's reproducibility, temporality, and utter solitude in massive sea of webpages.

Also, though I doubt anyone read this blog before now, I want to be more personal in the way I respond, while still maintaining my previous (supposed) academic demeanor.