Frontiers of Cyberspace 9042035838, 9789042035836

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Frontiers of Cyberspace

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Asa Kasher Owen Kelly Dr Peter Mario Kreuter

Dr Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Dr Paul Reynolds Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 85 A volume in the Critical Issues series ‘Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture’

Probing the Boundaries

Frontiers of Cyberspace Edited by

Daniel Riha

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3583-6 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0858-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012 Printed in the Netherlands

Table of Contents Introduction Daniel Riha

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PART I Critical Philosophies The Doubtful Chances of Choice Imre Bárd Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control Tamar Sharon A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking Leighton Evans

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29 55

PART II Cyber-Identity My Self, My Avatar, My Rights? Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay Too Faced? Reconsidering Friendship in the Digital Age Jordan J. Copeland Experiences of Embodiment and Subjectivity in Haunting Ground Ewan Kirkland

81 101

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PART III Virtual Environments and Academia Trans-Generational Dialogues: Social Sciences as Multimedia Games Peter Ludes Interactive 3-D Documentary as Serious Videogame Daniel Riha Ecosystem of Knowledge: Strategies, Rituals and Metaphors in Networked Communication Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski

151 173

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PART IV Cyberpunk Literature and Film Gender Resistance: Interrogating the ‘Punk’ in Cyberpunk Katherine Harrison What Does a Scanner See? Techno-Fascination and Unreliability in the Mind-Game Film Laura Schuster Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology Michael J. Klein

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229 255

PART V Merger of Cyberspace and Art ‘Cyborg Art’ as a Critical Sphere of Inquiry into Increasing Corporeal Human-Technology Merger Elizabeth Borst

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Digital Dance: Encounters between Media Technologies and the Dancing Body Zeynep Gündüz

309

Introduction Daniel Riha The collection of chapters in this volume is the result of a selective process comprising both peer-based nominations and the careful review of the project’s steering group. Taken as a whole, the volume is intended to capture and convey the amalgam of discourse, discussion, and debate that shaped the 3rd Global Conference on Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction. ‘Visions’ was first launched in 2003, under the purview of the ID.Net Critical Issues series, as an annual multi-disciplinary conference, and research and publishing project. The 3rd annual conference was held over several days in July 2008, on the beautiful grounds of Mansfield College, Oxford, UK. The following essays, however, offer much more than a snapshot or recitation of the conference itself. The author of each chapter was invited to expand significantly on his or her original paper, because of the promise identified therein for continuing and carrying forward the exciting discourse that has come to define these meetings. Thus, for readers perhaps unfamiliar with the conference, one is encouraged also to approach both the volume and the essays on their own terms, as having been developed out of, but not fullydependent upon the conference itself. The penetration of new forms of communication, such as online social networking, internet video-casting, and massive online multiplayer gaming; the experience and exploration of virtual worlds; and the massive adoption of ever-emergent ICT technologies; are all developments in desperate need of serious examination. It is not surprising that these new realities, and the questions and issues to which they give rise, have drawn increasing attention from academics. Those engaging these issues do so from a wide range of academic fields. Accordingly, the authors contributing to this volume represent an impressive array of academic disciplines and varied perspectives, including philosophy, sociology, religion, anthropology, digital humanities, literature studies, film science, new media studies and still others. Thus, the subsequent chapters offer the reader a multidimensional examination of this volume’s unifying theme: the ways and extent to which current and anticipated cybernetic environments have altered, and will continue to shape, our understandings of what it means to be human. The wide spectrum of topics covered by this volume include: the merger of body and technology in the arts; potentially new and serious issues raised by the emergence of what many have described as (post)human conditions; gender-representation issues in cyberspace; online social networking; the examination of cyberpunk concepts in literature and movies; the analysis of developing forms of filmic mediations; designing online

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______________________________________________________________ historical representations; interactivity analysis and serious gaming simulation; and the development of new legal concepts as they apply to avatars in virtual worlds. This book consists of 14 chapters and has been organised into five sections: PART I: Critical Philosophies; PART II: Cyber-Identity; PART III: Virtual Environments and Academia; PART IV: Cyberpunk Literature and Film; PART V: Merger of Cyberspace and Art. The first part considers selected theoretical issues in critical philosophy, with a focus on digital culture and posthuman conditions: Imre Bárd in his essay ‘The Doubtful Chances of Choice’ argues that ICT technologies may eventually lead to the prolongation of human life, changing the essential conditions of human existence. The author critically compares two competing ideologies, positioning the transhumanist, technoprogressive movement, on the one hand, and the bioconservatives on the other. For humans to achieve the posthuman conditions that certain authors anticipate, requires significant modifications to the human body, which, some contend, will inevitably lead to the manipulation of human beings as such, and a situation where human lives are made ‘a manageable enterprise.’ Bárd argues that the transhumanist and the bioconservative positions uncritically adapt to a discourse that is dominated primarily by biomedical models. He emphasises that his critique applies to both transhumanism and bioconservative positions, insofar as both represent merely polar opposites of the same paradigm. Tamar Sharon in ‘Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control’ uses Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of paranoia and schizophrenia as the effects of the fundamental organising principles of capitalist society. Sharon identifies possible contradictions between the emancipating pull of new technologies, which might move human societies towards a posthuman organisation, and ‘modernist’ tendencies that seem to realise their ‘subversive’ potential. Leighton Evans employs the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in his essay ‘A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking.’ This chapter identifies social networking as a technology designed to organise both individual persons and their relationships with others. Evans contends that an essential characteristic of social-networking technologies constitutes what Heidegger called ‘enframing.’ The result, the author argues, is that these technologies prove capable of altering human relationships in ways other

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______________________________________________________________ digital technologies are not. Evans concludes by considering as an option artistic uses of social networks, which might re-open the option for ‘free’ (non-enframed) relationships via digital technologies. The second part of this volume focuses on the discussion of identity, and avatar/user relations: Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay, in their essay ‘My Self, My Avatar, My Rights? Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds,’ analyse the relationship between the user in a virtual world and his/her self-expression avatar, and identity formation in the virtual world. The authors identify distinctions among different categories of avatars in a variety of settings (MMORPGs, Social Virtual Worlds with the respect to the Second Life Online service). The essay engages the interesting issue of the legal treatment of avatar rights, and considers the connection to issues of identity in virtual worlds. They offer a view that although online users are free to explore idealised preconceptions of themselves, they too often include copyrighted cultural items and objects, which inevitably leads to conflicts regarding copyrights between users and technology providers. Jordan J. Copeland in ‘Too Faced? Reconsidering Friendship in the Digital Age’ draws on Aristotle’s classical theory and taxonomy of friendship and compares contemporary philosophical reflections on preferential relationships to investigate the nature and significance of virtual friendships. His inquiry is based on the assumption that humans are social animals and their identity formation thus depends upon a wide and complex range of social interactions. Copeland argues that evaluations of technologicallymediated, online, relationships must draw upon reasonable, rather than ideal, normative models for their analysis. Such analysis, the author contends, reveals that many such ‘virtual’ relationships can, in good-conscience, and according to traditional classifications, be identified as ‘real’ friendships. Ewan Kirkland’s chapter, ‘Experiences of Embodiment and Subjectivity in Haunting Ground,’ discusses the avatar/player relationship with regard to videogame agency, textuality and interactivity issues. In his essay, Kirkland seeks to identify links between intertextuality and the concept of the avatar Fiona in the survival horror videogame Haunting Ground. Kirkland proposes that the player is not bound to one particular mode of engagement, but acts within mixed modes of engagement and participation. The third part of this volume considers new modes of scientific inquiry, including the varied formats of multimedia, interactive 3-D environments, videogames, and wikinomics: Peter Ludes in his contribution ‘Trans-generational Dialogues: Social Sciences as Multimedia Games’ discusses the use multimedia as an alternative to the written word for extending the scope of social scientific

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______________________________________________________________ modes of theory-formation, beyond traditional uni-linear texts to networked social-science as multimedia and art games. Drawing on his own concepts of ‘dialogical sociology’ and ‘inter-media plays,’ Ludes present characteristics of approach based on the use of non-textual media as alternative modes of scientific argumentation. He considers the need for a different style of argumentation with respect to the changing modes of cognition caused by appearance of the phenomenon of ICT and multimedia technologies. Daniel Riha’s chapter ‘Interactive 3-D Documentary as Serious Videogame’ explores the potential of an interactive 3-D medium for documentary work in the context of cultural studies. The author investigates a range of methodologies currently available for designers/producers, and intended to enable them to design ‘experiential’ virtual spaces in the context of an interactive cultural-historical simulation. Riha then summarises a methodology from the field of game studies that supports the use of 3-D game spaces as dispositive for knowledge representation. As an illustrative conclusion, Riha presents his own media concept, which is being developed as an interactive documentary space for representing the lives and artistic works of select Bosnian artists living in Prague during the 1990’s. Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski in the chapter ‘Ecosystem of Knowledge: Strategies, Rituals and Metaphors in Networked Communication’ explore the boundaries of cyber-freedom and cyberdemocracy, drawing upon their analysis of important concepts related to cybercommunity. They open by examining the extent to which Telecom companies and Wikinomics currently shape cyberspace and variouis forms of communication on the Internet. The authors illustrate in detail the elements of modelling involved in user-generated content, wiki-identity, and the folksonomic ordering of knowledge. Their chapter further explores some new areas of anthropological research, such as cyber-ritual analysis and research on online communities and their cyber mythologies. Part four of this volume examines examples of and themes represented within cyberpunk literature and movies: Katherine Harrison in ‘Gender Resistance: Interrogating the Punk in Cyberpunk’ uses closed textual analysis for examining cyber-literary texts, including Candas Jane Dorsey’s short story Learning about and Machine Sex and Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. Harrison’s aim in this analysis is to identify and evaluate whether these texts in some way present a form of resistance not only to mainstream society as a whole, but, more specifically, to gender stereotypes. Harrison concludes that while Stephenson’s text has been limited in its approach to gender stereotypes, Dorsey’s story comes with new types of punk resistance, which, however, does not offer ‘easy’ answers. Laura Schuster’s contribution ‘What Does a Scanner See? TechnoFascination and Unreliability in the Mind-Game Film’ considers the concepts

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______________________________________________________________ paranoia and conspiracy as they are developed within the plot of the movie A Scanner Darkly. Schuster draws upon this analysis to illustrate the relationship of these notions to issues of technological media innovation. The author concludes by articulating how the film functions as a mediated presentation of ‘unstable’ storyworlds, and considers questions regarding the effects that future forms of audio-visual media may have on human perception and identity. Michael J. Klein’s text ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology’ draws upon several works of science fiction to examine the way each represents artificially-produced organisms and entities, as well as the responses they evoke from the viewer/reader. Klein analyses two novels Frankenstein and Brave New World - and two films Blade Runner and GATTACA. The author contends that these work raise issues that are relevant to current ethical dilemmas and debates, including those of the transhumanist and bioconservatives positions considered elsewhere in this volume. Klein argues that novels and films share themes on the roles of high-tech and closely reproductive technologies in society. The final section of this volume presents two chapters that consider the several intriguing intersections of cyberculture, cyberspace and art: Elizabeth Borst in ‘“Cyborg Art” as a Critical Sphere of Inquiry into Increasing Corporeal Human-Technology Merger’ examines the visual representations and integration of corporeal human-technology in the fine arts. Borst focuses on figural cyborg representations, with priority given to the convergence of flesh and metal. Borst, in this chapter, argues for the need to introduce the original cyborg-art genre as a newly recognised area of research in relation to body-technology relations. Zeynep Gündüz’ in her chapter ‘Digital Dance: Encounters between Media Technologies and the Dancing Body’ offers an interesting view on the relationship between the human body and interactive ICT in the context of cultural practices of contemporary dance. Gündüz uses the stage performances and the case study in Apparition to demonstrate her findings.

PART I Critical Philosophies

The Doubtful Chances of Choice Imre Bárd Abstract Transhumanist thinkers argue that emerging technologies and future artificial intelligence will allow us to extend the human lifespan and to radically alter, or even transcend the human condition. Such emancipation from the confines and injustice of the natural lottery would result in the emergence of the posthuman - a being that is vastly superior to us and exhibits total control over its own physical, intellectual and emotional capacities. Interestingly, the literal merger of man and technology, and ultimately the replacement of humans by posthumans are considered to manifest the true unfolding and fulfilment of human potentials. This chapter 1 provides a reading of transhumanist visions of the future of humanity, focusing especially on the use of human enhancement technologies. By considering the continuity between transhumanism and its intellectual antecedents I show that it has inherited the problems and conceptual fallacies of earlier periods, which prevent it from adequately addressing the challenges posed by emerging technologies. I claim that transhumanism interprets the often quoted blurring of boundaries between the natural and the artificial at a merely technological level but fails to recognise important conceptual rearrangements and changing notions of subjectivity brought about by the very technologies transhumanism embraces. I try to offer a constructive critique of these aspects of transhumanist thought by reflecting on its notion of the subject and by analysing the concept of choice. Key Words: Transhumanism, human enhancement, biopolitics, posthuman. ***** 1.

Introduction Humanity has always used culture-specific methods and practices to increase the capacities and extend the limits of human biology. These methods can range from the use of substances like caffeine or gingko, through the creation and application of increasingly complex tools, up to systematic ways of disciplining and educating the mind and the body. In a certain sense the entire process of cultural evolution can be understood as a series of attempts to overcome natural human limitations. However, in our present age the never ending quest to better the human condition seems to have reached a crucial turning point. The convergence of the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science seems to enable previously unheard-of degrees of intervention into

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The Doubtful Chances of Choice

______________________________________________________________ matter, into life processes and into human nature. Recent advances in the field of biotechnology have blurred the lines between therapeutic and enhancing interventions on the human body. It is gradually becoming possible to use biotechnological means not just to cure diseases or ameliorate suffering but also to improve upon normal, healthy functioning. Projected breakthroughs in nanotechnology, stem cell therapy, human-computer interfaces and psychopharmacology are currently the subjects of great hope and hype. Because the impact of these developments is potentially profound, the turn of the 21st century has seen the emergence of heated bioethics debates. In the year 2000, four leading U.S. bioethicists published a book under the title From Chance to Choice - Genetics and Justice, in which they analysed the challenges posed by recent biotechnological developments to ethical reasoning and distributive justice. 2 The four words, from chance to choice - from which the title of this chapter is derived - perfectly express and brings to the point a crucial issue that lies at the heart of current technoscientific developments. One might only want to add a question mark at the end. While new possibilities seem to expand the domain of human agency and choice to fundamental biological levels, they simultaneously present moral and political dilemmas of great magnitude. There is a broad spectrum of opinions concerning the desirability and the limitations of new technologies. Whereas some consider them to be nothing more than new and more sophisticated means for treating and preventing disease, for others, these developments hold out the promise of exchanging the chance of the natural lottery for free human choice, thus liberating us from the burdens of our biological determination. Enthusiastic voices speak of radically enhanced humans, indefinitely expanded life spans and the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence. The position of those eagerly embracing these prospects could be called progressive technoeuphoric, while conservative technophobia is characterised by the fear that our technological hubris might make us lose the essence of what it means to be human. The transhumanist movement or stream of thought is perhaps the most outspoken advocate and proponent of technoprogressive views and of the use of converging technologies to enhance human capabilities. In the following, I am going to provide a reading of the vision of humanity’s future put forth by transhumanist thinkers. The issue whether any of the anticipated technologies is realistic and feasible will not form a part of my enquiry. I am more interested in the ways in which promised technologies and visions of the future interface and interact with our self understanding, resulting in novel ways of thinking about, and intervening into ourselves. What kind of an understanding of the human being is inscribed into emerging technologies of self-manipulation?

Imre Bárd

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______________________________________________________________ In the first part I am going to introduce the core ideas and major sources of inspiration of transhumanism. I will then attempt to offer a constructive critique of certain aspects of transhumanist thought without summoning and reaffirming the usual dichotomy between technoprogressive and bioconservative postitions. A critical analysis of this polarisation will form part of my considerations. I wish to argue neither in favour nor against human enhancement technologies in general. I would rather like to point out why this polarisation and especially certain styles of transhumanist argumentation are unable to adequately address the challenges posed by emerging technologies. I will try to support this claim by reflecting on the transhumanist notion of the subject, and by examining the nature of, and the ambivalences surrounding the concept of choice. 2.

What is Transhumanism? Although the trope of the posthuman is relatively recent, documents dealing with the history of transhumanism usually construct a seamless continuity from the ancient times of the epic of Gilgamesh, through utopian writers of the Enlightenment up to current proponents of human enhancement. 3 The narrative is united by the idea of applying reason to improve the human condition. When identifying intellectual antecedents, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Men serves as a central historical reference. Mirandola can be credited for formulating the idea that human beings are ultimately shapeable, without any assigned and ultimate nature. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine. 4 In light of this, man appears as a creature characterised essentially by its freedom to mould itself into whatever form it wishes. However, humans seem to be torn between the world of low beasts on the one hand which can be equated with instincts, with the body, or with biology - and the world of divine intellect on the other hand. Being human means existing at the interface of these overwhelming forces. As implicated by Mirandola the truly worthy path for humans to pursue is the one, which surpasses brutish forms of life. The Enlightenment sought to overcome this animal part or naturalness of human existence. It set out to emancipate humanity from the

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______________________________________________________________ bonds of nature. As Martin Weiss points out, this is most explicitly evidenced in Kant’s definition of man as animal rationabile, 5 as the animal which can become rational. 6 This formulation makes clear that being human is essentially a task to be accomplished. A task that consists in transcending the instinctive, natural part of our being and unfolding the uniquely human trait of reason. It seems that in order for the human to be, it first needs to liberate itself from biological constraints. Though there had been examples of utopian writing since Plato, the 17th and 18th centuries brought a proliferation of works dealing with the future of humanity. As a result of the successes of the natural sciences people in modern times came to see themselves more and more in terms of manipulable machines that can in principle be perfected. By this time the highly influential idea had been born that technological progress could pave the way to the optimisation of the surrounding natural world, that of society, and of human nature itself. 7 The proper utilisation of man’s intellect was perceived to be the only prerequisite for achieving these ends. Faith in the improvability of the human body was most emphatically voiced by the Marquis de Condorcet, who regarded the scope of perfectibility to be infinite. 8 Transhumanism considers itself to be an extension of this tradition, and commitment to Enlightenment values has been repeatedly expressed by a number of authors. 9 The birth of the theory of evolution in the 19th century provided enormous impetus to the project of naturalisation. In 1883 Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin coined the word eugenics, meaning noble in heredity. 10 The science of eugenics, which was meant to improve the human stock by selectively breeding the suitable and preventing the same to the less fit, spread quickly around the world, with institutes being established in Europe, Russia, Australia and the United States. Galton proposed that eugenics allowed mankind to take control of its own evolution. 11 Eugenicists in the early 20th century were mainly concerned about the gradual degeneration and impoverishment of the human gene pool. The occupation of the eugenics movement with the quality of the human ‘stock’ can be interpreted as the paradigmatic expression of what Foucault called the biopolitics of the human race. 12 As Foucault observed in one of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1976: [o]ne of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power's hold over life ... [t]here was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the biological. 13

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______________________________________________________________ Characteristic of this form of biopower is that it is not concerned with individual bodies but rather with collections of bodies. It is ‘directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species.’ 14 State control of the biological was eagerly embraced by a group of remarkable, yet seldom mentioned forerunners to transhumanism - Russian futurists of the early decades of the 20th century. In the midst of great social and political upheavals they developed a unique utopianism that set out to fulfil ‘the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,’ 15 proclaimed by Engels in 1880. The group of biocosmists demanded the right to immortality and interplanetary freedom. What is more, Russian futurists envisaged a time in which the whole world, even the entire universe would be consciously transformed by the activities of mankind. Among the members of such groups were highly influential scientists, poets and writers, such as Maxim Gorky who was one of the founding members of the group called godbuilders, or Alexander Bogdanov whose theory of tectology greatly anticipated cybernetics and systems theory. Bogdanov was also working on rejuvenation technologies and life extension methods and in 1908 published a utopian novel that portrayed an idealised socialist state set on Mars. 16 The father of Russian space travel and rocket science, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was also a devoted biocosmist whose scientific work was motivated by the desire to conquer space and create extraterrestrial colonies. Tsiolkovsky espoused a radical program of eugenics and intended to do away with all forms of suffering in the entire universe. Preventing the reproduction of flawed beings was of crucial importance to him, be they unconscious animals, plants or humans deemed imperfect. 17 The program of biocosmists, immortalists and god-builders was nothing less than the creation of a radically new and improved human. Science, technology, education and governance were to unite and jointly bring about the man of the future with hitherto unimaginable qualities. The central demand of these futurists was the abrogation of death. They considered the unjust temporal limitations imposed on mankind to be unacceptable. The literal annihilation of all natural differences was considered to be the only path towards a truly just society. Moreover, building on the ideas of late 19th century philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, futurists demanded the physical resurrection of all previous generations. Since socialism promised the coming of an infinitely just society it was considered grotesquely unjust that only the latest generations would have the fortune of actually living in that society. 18 The finitude of life has thus been added to the list of problems that the state was expected to solve. At about the same time when Martin Heidegger contemplated the existence of man in terms of the inevitability of his being-unto-death, a few Russian thinkers demanded personal physical immortality as their fundamental human right.

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______________________________________________________________ This represents the realisation of a form of power that - in the words of Foucault - not only has the right to ‘“make” live and “let” die’ 19 but one that does not even permit death. Proponents of immortalism considered the complete state control of life, this total biopower to be the necessary precondition for transcending the limitations of humanity and achieving freedom. Full state control and the abolishment of death were seen as indispensable for the creation of a truly just communistic society. Clearly, these biopolitical utopias were embedded into a broad collectivist political vision. In 1921 Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We articulated a devastating critique of the burgeoning totalitarian communist regime. 20 Zamyatin depicted an utterly conformist society ruled according to scientific principles, where people are reduced to numbers and individuality is completely suppressed by the One State. Zamyatin’s novel has greatly influenced George Orwell and probably Aldous Huxley as well. In the 1920’s England such prominent scientists and public figures as John D. Bernal, Julian Huxley and John B. S. Haldane have voiced visions that were in a certain sense less radical but otherwise very similar to the ideas of their Russian utopist contemporaries. British biofuturists have greatly influenced transhumanism and anticipated much of present day debates. 21 They propagated the scientific enhancement of the evolutionary process and put forth visions of a world where humans had over many millennia colonised the universe and radically re-engineered themselves. 22 They all embraced eugenics as a means of improving the human gene pool even after the Second World War, but held that it ‘must be free of racial and class bias.’ 23 To different degrees they were all related to socialist movements of their day and their visions had a tendency towards the kind of collectivist utopias characteristic of Russian futurists of the time. Huxley, Haldane and Bernal articulated the prospect of the unification of mankind under a world government run according to scientific principles. 24 Such visions have largely motivated Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World, a dystopian novel that was meant to reveal the horrors of dehumanisation brought about by a technocratic totalitarian state that used biotechnology to manufacture its citizens. 25 Since its publication Brave New World has often been cited as a depiction of the dangers of tampering with human nature. 26 However, according to Nick Bostrom - a highly influential transhumanist thinker Brave New World cannot be considered a critique of transhumanist aspirations because it does not portray human enhancement gone astray but rather the ‘tragedy of technology and social engineering being used to deliberately cripple moral and intellectual capacities.’ 27 In agreement with Michael Klein I believe that Huxley’s novel is not a critique of scientific endeavours per se but of a society that solely emphasises control and stability to the expense of all individual values. 28

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______________________________________________________________ The birth of cybernetics in the 1940s and the prospects opened by space travel in the 1960s provided a crucial image that became a central trope of transhumanism: the cybernetic organism, or cyborg. Cyberneticists Nathan Kline and Manfred Clynes coined to word cyborg in the 1960 article Cyborgs and Space, in which they also discussed the coming era of participant evolution. The concept of the cyborg was originally meant to describe the technological supplementation of man for the purpose of space exploration, but it quickly became a cultural. According to Clynes and Kline the cybernetic expansion of man leaves him ‘free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.’ 29 This liberation from the constraints of the body is to be achieved with the help of prosthetic extensions and supplements. Cybernetics contributed greatly to the conceptualisation of man in terms of an information processing system. Despite the fact that following the Second World War the potentially sinister applications of eugenics and modern technology came to light many remained optimistic about the prospects of future development. In fact, the word ‘transhumanism’ itself was introduced by Julian Huxley, writing in 1957 that: The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself - not just sporadically ... but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. 30 At a famous symposium organised by the Ciba Foundation in 1963 Huxley, Haldane and a host of renowned scientists pondered over the issues raised by the growing possibilities of interference with ‘natural processes.’ Out of concern for the quality of the human gene pool a number of participants articulated the desirability of eugenic interventions. 31 Whereas British biofuturists thought in terms of hundreds and thousands of years of evolution that still awaited mankind before it reached its full potential, second wave transhumanists such as Fereidoun M. Esfandiary - or FM-2030 - proclaimed that the transition from human to transhuman was already happening and could be further accelerated by actively supporting the advancement of science. 32 He wrote with unfaltering optimism and hope about a very near future in which humanity would be completely transformed. We want to spread a daring new optimism crystallizing from the obvious fact that for the first time in all the eons of life we are no longer blackholed within this microplanet - no longer trapped within fragile terminal bodies - that we

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______________________________________________________________ are emerging as a triumphant new species - extraterrestrial and immortal. 33 FM-2030’s programmatic work contributed greatly to the launch of transhumanism as a movement. The book Engines of Creation published by Eric Drexler in 1986 also became a central work of reference. 34 Drexler described a potentially paradisiacal future in which the joint application of nanotechnology and advanced artificial intelligence would enable the creation of universal assemblers that could manufacture literally anything, thereby banishing the problem of scarcity. In 1990 Max More and Tom Bell founded the Extropy Institute which had a strong libertarian orientation. The institute became defunct in 2006 after having accomplished its goal of raising awareness for transhumanist issues, developing a coherent philosophy and enabling networking between futurists. In 1998 Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), an international nongovernmental organisation promoting the ethical use of technology to extend human capabilities. In 2008 the WTA changed its name to Humanity Plus. In the same year the Oxford English Dictionary added the word transhumanism with the following definition: ‘[a] belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current limitations, esp. by the use of science and technology.’ 35 Due to the heterogeneity of the contemporary transhumanist movement it would be difficult to find a more precise definition that did justice to the many streams emphasising and embracing different aspects of human-technology merger. In the following I am going to consider the contents of the Transhumanist Frequently Asked Questions 36 document as representing the transhumanist standpoint. I will also discuss specific authors who I believe are influential within this diverse community. Such authors include Nick Bostrom, James Hughes and Raymond Kurzweil. The views of these thinkers enjoy increasing media coverage. Moreover, in recent years Nick Bostrom - head of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University - has been a frequent member of commissions and international projects assessing the ethical issues related to human enhancement technologies. According to Bostrom transhumanism is a: [l]oosely defined movement [that] can be viewed as an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment. It holds that current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science and other rational methods, which may make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control over our own mental states and moods. 37

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______________________________________________________________ Besides ‘promoting rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy, and concern for our fellow human beings’ 38 the central occupation is to encourage the application of technology in order to transcend our current limitations. The aim is to achieve technological mastery over our own nature thereby attaining a post-human state of existence. This would consist in possessing ‘intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates.’ 39 Posthumans would be: [r]esistant to disease and impervious to aging [they would have] unlimited youth and vigor [and could] exercise control over their own desires, moods, and mental states [as well as] be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things. 40 We have thus traced the path of a vision that was born in the emancipatory enthusiasm of humanism and the Enlightenment. I believe we can interpret the utopias I have described as the radicalisation of the Enlightenment’s project to emancipate humanity from nature. At first sight, the alliance between this liberatory Enlightenment goal and converging technologies is a perfect match. Developments in the field of biotechnology have dissolved our understanding of nature as solid or unchangeable, and have made biology fundamentally malleable. The dream of liberating ourselves from natural constraints by extending our control over human nature seems finally to come true. Yet, as I intend to show, enthusiasm and faith in technological progress are not the only legacies of the Enlightenment. Transhumanism has also inherited a range of problems and conceptual fallacies. 3.

Troubles with Transhumanism A central element of all the visions I have discussed is that humanity is to take control of its future development by consciously manipulating its own biology. Reengineering ourselves is perceived to be the ultimate realisation of man’s mastery over nature. Bioconservative authors often criticise this tendency from a moralizing perspective. For example, as Michael Sandel writes: There is something appealing, even intoxicating, about a vision of human freedom unfettered by the given. … It is … plausible to view genetic engineering as the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But that promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a

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______________________________________________________________ gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will. 41 Needless to say, technoprogressive thinkers reject this line of argumentation by pointing out that the level of ‘the given’ we are willing to accept and cherish is historically contingent. 42 Those condemning the technological self manipulation of man best hold the first tool using Homo sapiens responsible because, in the words of Andy Clark we are natural born cyborgs 43 whose evolution has been intertwined with the development of cultural artefacts. In Hayles’ formulation, ‘what we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together.’ 44 Nonetheless current bioethics lacks consensus on the issues of human enhancement because: parties are separated by incompatible metaphysical commitments (e.g., embryos do or do not have an immortal soul), religious moral beliefs (e.g., euthanasia does or does not involve the sin of murder), and by divergent rankings of cardinal moral concerns (e.g., the claims of security do or do not trump concerns for prosperity). 45 Regardless of how we adjudicate morally the drive to mastery, it seems to be inherently paradoxical. As Ian Hacking argues thinkers since Clynes and Kline who have proclaimed technological mastery over the body can be seen as radical dualists. This view considers the biological body to be the original prosthesis that could be altered and amended without in any way affecting the human essence, which seems to consist mainly in freedom and in the delights of an unconstrained mind. 46 When reading such contemporary transhumanists as Ray Kurzweil or William Sims Bainbridge, one can not escape the impression that a strong dualism is indeed characteristic of their thinking. According to Kurzweil, progress in nanotechnology will enable us to replace a host of our organs such as the gastrointestinal system, the heart, the lungs, etc., with artificial ones of increased functionality. As he claims, ‘ultimately we will become more nonbiological than biological.’ 47 As authors like Kurzweil or Bainbridge argue eventually and seemingly inevitably humans shall become more than human, transcending biology altogether. Kurzweil, Bainbridge and Bostrom have often spoken about the possibility of uploading the contents of the mind to a computer. 48 The feasibility of this procedure is one of the most intensely debated issues within the transhumanist community. The prospect of this form of transcending biology is linked to the question of the multiple realisability of conscious states - an issue introduced by the functionalist philosophy of mind of Hilary Putnam in the 1960s. 49 Besides the theoretically highly controversial nature of the idea, it would require a range of technological innovations, the possibility of which

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______________________________________________________________ is currently hypothetical at best. Yet, thinkers who accept the prospect of uploading often describe it as follows: [t]he transition from flesh to data will not be so much metamorphosis as liberation … When we emerge into cyberspace, we should no more lament the loss of the bodies that we leave behind than an eagle hatchling laments the shattered fragments of its egg when it first takes wing. 50 Hence, the ultimate realisation of human potentials would be to shed the current form of human existence entirely. This seems to confirm that transhumanists who embrace this possibility subscribe to a dualistic logic and a conceptual framework that is largely inherited from the Enlightenment. Ultimate mastery over the limiting world of the flesh is finally achieved when the mind can sever its biological bonds. Thus, a disembodied notion of conscious agency is avowed. According to Katherine N. Hayles, as the mind is hypothetically divorced from the body and dissolved in patterns of information that can travel freely between different substrates, the potentially liberatory effects of technology are subsumed under the classical mind/body dualism. In this respect transhumanism seems to be heir to a liberal humanist understanding of the subject that perceives the mind to be essential, while the body merely accidental. Yet, as Hayles eloquently argued, cyborgisation is not a means to extend liberal humanism - it seems rather to subvert and undermine it. According to her: [c]onscious agency has never been “in control.” ... Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures. If … there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account. 51 For Hayles then, the posthuman offers a perspective beyond the traditional dichotomies of classical humanism, regardless of whether actual technological manipulations have been made on the body. As we can see, the most crucial characteristic of this understanding of posthumanism is a shift in the conceptualisation of subjectivity, away from the notion of a controlling disembodied agency. Nonetheless, transhumanism seems to be immune to this understanding. So much so, that a foundational text of the movement explicitly states, that the belief in achieving posthumanity simply due to

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______________________________________________________________ shifts in our self-understanding is a ‘confusion or corruption of the original meaning of the term.’ 52 Changing some aspects of our self-conception will not suffice, for true posthumanity is achievable only by radically modifying our brains and bodies. Yet, an unintended consequence of the destabilisation of solid categories and the dissolution of human nature provoked by cyborg technologies is the demonstration of the impossibility of classical dualistic conceptions. 53 Everyday practices of biotechnology clearly demonstrate the illusoriness of the idea of a subject gaining control over objective nature, for such interventions are never aimed merely at a body, but constitute the manipulation of a human being. 54 As Martin Weiss argues: [t]he alleged liberation of the subject from its corporal limitations finally proves to be a new sort of oppression of man, who thus tragically learns that the body is not the grave of the soul (to quote Plato), but the only mode in which the mind exists. 55 In light of this, statements from transhumanist authors about our increasing ability to control our own nature and the interpretation of this ability as the true unfolding of human potentials, mastery and freedom seems to be somewhat self-contradictory. Technological mastery over our own nature presupposes the existence of something beyond the technologically manipulable, yet, the condition of possibility for presupposing that is dissolved by technological naturalisation itself. There is thus a rather peculiar vision of humanity emerging from these transhumanist prophecies, which seems to be the paradigmatic expression of what psychologist Louis Sass described in terms of the Foucauldian doublet of modern thought. It consists in ‘a characteristic veering between a bracing sense of absolute epistemic omnipotence, omniscience and freedom; and an equally compelling experience of the self as limited, determined and blind.’ 56 Foucault traced the birth of this doublet to Kantian philosophy, which stressed the constitutive role of subjectivity and the mind in forming the world of phenomena. According to Sass, this transcendental role attributes the mind the characteristics of an almost omnipotent entity, which in a sense has the power to create its own world. On the other hand, the fact that Kant identified concrete categories by which the mind shaped the world of experience culminated in the scientific study of the mind, accompanied by naturalistic notions. As a result, the mind had been gradually transformed into a mere object under objects, and became completely amenable to manipulation. It served as the precondition of knowledge and at the same time the prime object of study; the quasiomnipotent knower and the calculable known. By drawing attention to certain

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______________________________________________________________ experiences of schizophrenic patients Sass argues that the same paradoxical duality is manifest in that condition: [a] schizophrenic person is as liable to identify himself with god as with a machine, perhaps the most emblematic delusion of this enigmatic illness is of being a sort of Godmachine, a kind of all-seeing, all-constituting camera eye. 57 It is this very duality that is taken to extremes in the visions of technologically enabled posthumans. In exactly the same manner do posthumans seem to be God-machines - free and nearly omnipotent entities that are at the same time entirely transparent and manipulable. While it is absorbed in the images of the cyborg, the posthuman and the dissolution of boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the impossibility of pursuing a project of domination completely escapes the perspective of transhumanism. It still operates with the rhetoric of mastery which is derived from the Enlightenment, and presupposes a liberal humanist understanding of the subject which is dissolved by the very technologies transhumanism enthusiastically supports. In her essay Technoscience and Schizophrenia Tamar Sharon analyses the ambiguous, simultaneously liberatory and disciplinary potential of contemporary technoscience. 58 The creative potential of this ambiguity is precisely what remains unrecognised and subsumed under modern binaries by transhumanism. A careful and elaborated reflection on the changes and rearrangements in our self-understanding and their interplay with technologies of self manipulation seems to be largely absent in many transhumanist thinkers. This is also exemplified by the accompanying understanding of biopolitics and the emphasis placed on choice. 4.

Choosing Ourselves If we return for a moment to the visions of the future I discussed in the second section we can notice that most scenarios from the late 19th century onwards were embedded in broad, collectivist utopias. The British biofuturists and the utopian socialists of Russia imagined a time in which the whole of mankind would be united under a scientifically led government. Greg Klerkx considers even FM-2030 to have been a new age socialist. 59 But the course of the 20th century has brought the gradual decline of faith in mass political utopias and this transformation has also influenced the ways in which humanity’s future has been imagined. Although it has been a crucial part of earlier visions as well, political and economic rearrangements have highlighted the question of choice. Earlier utopias seem to have described the abstract community of mankind choosing its course of evolution, whereas today the individual responsibility of making choices is foregrounded. Even though James Hughes has repeatedly articulated the necessity of a world

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______________________________________________________________ government 60 and Ray Kurzweil has depicted future scenarios similar to visions of a ‘hive’ mind introduced by Bernal, where the collective mind of humanity fuses with vast nonbiological forms of intelligence, 61 these are more the exceptions rather than the rule. In a certain sense the utopianism of transhumanism has faded because overarching visions for humanity are mostly absent. In mainstream public debates the question of human enhancement is discussed in relation to individual cognitive and morphological liberties. Reflecting on this issue Humanity Plus states that ‘transhumanists are often deeply suspicious of collectively orchestrated change, arguing instead for the right of individuals to redesign themselves and their own descendants.’ 62 According to Greg Klerkx this shift reflects atomising tendencies of our contemporary society. 63 As Nikolas Rose argues complex political, institutional and economic rearrangements in the 1980s, the development of an enterprise culture have led to the emergence of what he calls the entrepreneurial self. 64 An image of the self as autonomous and conscious - a choosing self, who pursues its own life plans according to its own values and priorities. The self is to be a subjective being, it is to aspire to autonomy, it is to strive for personal fulfilment in its earthly life, it is to interpret its reality and destiny as a matter of individual responsibility, it is to find meaning in existence by shaping its life through acts of choice. 65 As Rose demonstrates the birth of the image of an entrepreneurial self had been accompanied by the emersion of specific forms of expert knowledge and authority that are to guide and support the individual’s choices. A plethora of institutions, self-help services, advisors and counsellors simultaneously construct and regulate autonomous choice. Rose has termed these guiding instances pastoral forms of power, for they no longer force or coerce but rather guide and aid the internalisation of values according to which individuals are to see themselves. 66 The combination of these new forms of pastoral power and the responsibilities vested in individuals to autonomously direct their own lives results in a new type of politics, which Rose calls ethopolitics. If discipline individualizes and normalizes, and biopower collectivizes and socializes, ethopolitics concerns itself with the self-techniques by which human beings should judge themselves and act upon themselves to make themselves better than they are. 67

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______________________________________________________________ Transhumanist aspirations of constant individual self improvement can perfectly be located within this ethopolitical framework. With the growing possibilities of intervening into our biology the scope of possible enterprises becomes vastly expanded. In this context the entrepreneurial self takes on a new dimension. The contemporary biopolitical landscape is fundamentally different from those of previous eras. Instead of state controlled, large scale eugenics programs, in consequence of the growing consumerisation and commercialisation of biotechnologies we are witnessing the emergence of privatised, laissez-faire, 68 or liberal eugenics. 69 As our self-understanding comes to be shaped by biomedicine and by the actual and promised possibilities of biotechnologies even our understanding of personhood is being interpreted ‘by others, and by ourselves, in terms of our contemporary understandings of the possibilities and limits of our corporeality.’ 70 As we become ‘neurochemical selves,’ 71 or ‘somatic individuals’ 72 we learn to think of our individuality in bodily terms, which means that the body comes to serve as the fundamental site of acting upon ourselves, by the means provided mostly by biomedicine. With the dissolution of the natural/artificial dichotomy life itself has become utterly political. As our biology becomes more open to choice and as we learn to act upon it and integrate knowledge about it into our lives, we simultaneously become responsible for the design we choose for our bodies. 73 With the possibility of intervention comes inevitable responsibility. 74 Consequently, the body is seen more and more as an asset, or a kind of capital that needs prudent management. As Nikolas Rose put it: ‘Contemporary individuals are incited to live as if making a project of themselves … to develop a “style” of living that will maximize the worth of their existence to themselves.’ 75 Our lives have thus taken on the character of a manageable enterprise, where each act and each decision takes place under the influence of an immense bioeconomy, which constantly inscribes in us the imperative of perpetual self/body perfection. In this ethopolitical framework ‘life itself in its everyday manifestations is the object of adjudication.’ 76 While on the one hand the image of the entrepreneurial self, who lives according to its own norms, values and increasingly with self-chosen biological characteristics, is flourishing, on the other hand we confront the impossibility and dissolution of this self-sufficient autonomy. As already argued, control over the mere body is impossible because the supposed controlling instance becomes mapped unto the manipulable and dissolves into it. The tendency to view ourselves as enterprising somatic individuals ties us with a million strings the biomedical system, to the bioeconomy, to complex webs of social expectations, and links us with our genetic ancestors and our potential offspring. In light of this, it seems insufficient that from a transhumanist perspective biopolitics consists mainly in the application of bioethics in the

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______________________________________________________________ political arena. Somewhat simplified it could be seen as a debate played out between Enlightenment enthusiasts for, and bioconservatives against technological enhancement. 77 As Thomas Lemke argues, there are many reasons why considering biopolitics to be applied bioethics is inadequate. 78 Firstly, for the sake of an unambiguous presentation of possible alternatives of action bioethics discourses tend to largely ignore the genesis and social context of medical interventions and biotechnological innovations. When it comes to the issue of choice, bioethics usually ignores the social expectations and constraints that individuals are confronted with. In the end, it all seems to boil down to a question of pro or contra, raised against the background of some complex ethical theory, be that utilitarian, deontological or other. Furthermore, strategies of power and their relationship to the construction of subjectivity are neglected. A reflection on why certain issues are perceived as legitimate topics of bioethical deliberations while others are not is also mostly absent. Both the transhumanist and the bioconservative positions uncritically adapt to a discourse mostly dominated by the biomedical model of health and illness. In this respect, a critique of transhumanism is also a critique of bioconservative positions, for they represent the polar opposites of the same paradigm. Whereas bioconservative thinkers oppose enhancement technologies and argue for the normativity of human nature, transhumanists welcome such possibilities as liberation from constraints. The former position runs the risk of committing the naturalistic fallacy, by deriving norms from vaguely defined facts, while the latter is, as we have seen, ‘subject to the “dialectics of enlightenment”’ 79 insofar as the aspired liberation from nature culminates in new forms of manipulability. While both sides happily embrace our growing ability to diagnose and treat diseases, often both positions seem unaware of the subtle processes by which any condition comes to be seen as pathological and requiring therapeutic intervention in the first place. As Gregor Wolbring argues, ‘the transhumanist model sees every human body as defective and in need of improvement, such that every unenhanced human being is, by definition, “disabled” in the impairment or medical sense.’ 80 While transhumanist thinkers argue that individuals should have the broadest possible choice over the technologies they use to shape themselves, the implicit normativity of the market and the surrounding pastoral technologies are left out of consideration. Yet, as an analysis of, for example, direct to consumer marketing of psychiatric drugs show, this market also trades with ideas and norms of what it means to live a good and valuable human life. According to Rose, such drugs are ‘entangled with certain conceptions of what humans are or should be.’ 81 In fact, decisions made about enhancement technologies qualify as ideal candidates for what Thomas Murray called free choice under pressure. 82 The boundary between coercion, and consent or free choice is indeed a blurry one. In Peter Wehling’s succinct summary, ‘the

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______________________________________________________________ emancipation from the natural body and its inadequacies merges in the selfsubordination to the social norm of body enhancement.’ 83 5.

Conclusion In this chapter I have given a brief account of some of the major intellectual antecedents of the transhumanist movement. At the beginning I have claimed that transhumanism in its current form is not able to adequately address the challenges posed by cyborg technologies. The reason for this deficiency is twofold. First, the central aspiration of transhumanism, to emancipate humanity from nature, is rooted in the age of Enlightenment. This intellectual genealogy results in a number of conceptual fallacies transhumanism can not escape. Most importantly, it results in the espousal of a disembodied notion of subjectivity which is undermined as a result of the subversive cyborg technologies transhumanism so ardently embraces. As the project of scientific naturalisation dissolves the controlling mind in the controlled body transhumanism finds itself bereft of the possibility of emancipation and has to confront the need of conceptualising subjectivity, beyond the paradigm of mastery. Second, tracing the history of biopolitical utopias in the 20th century has revealed a transition from broadly conceived collectivist visions of the future to the emergence of enterprising selves and the rise of the ethopolitical governance of individuals. This type of governance simultaneously constructs and dispels the image of the autonomous, choosing self. Though transhumanism stresses individual choice above all, it needs to develop a more elaborate reflection on the shifting social and biopolitical landscapes of our time.

Notes 1

I would like to express my gratitude to Péter D. Szigeti for his valuable comments and suggestions. 2 A. Buchanan, et al, From Chance to Choice - Genetics and Justice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. 3 See N. Bostrom, ‘A History of Transhumanist Thought’, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 14, April 2005. 4 G. P. della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, Gateway Editions, Chicago, 1956. quoted in N. Bostrom, ‘A History of Transhumanist Thought’, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 14, No. 1, April 2005, pp. 1-25.

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R. B. Louden and M. Kuehn, Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006, p. 226. 6 M. G. Weiss, ‘Bioethical Consequences of Biotechnologies’, University of Vienna, Transformations in Public Policy, The Dissolution of Human Nature, viewed on 23 July 2008, . 7 B. Gordijn and R. Chadwick, ‘Introduction’, in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, B. Gordijn and R. Chadwick (eds), Springer, Netherlands, 2009. pp. 1-5. 8 See U. Wiesing, ‘The History of Medical Enhancement: From Restitutio ad Integrum to Transformatio ad Optimum?’, in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, Springer, Netherlands, 2009, pp. 25-37. 9 See N. Bostrom, ‘The Transhumanist FAQ’, Humanity Plus, October 2003, viewed on 1 January 2009, ; or J. Hughes, ‘Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future’, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, viewed on 1 January 2009, . 10 See D. J. Kevles, ‘From Eugenics to Genetic Manipulation’, in Science in the Twentieth Century, J. Krige and D. Pestre, Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, 1997, pp. 301-317. 11 See Kevles op. cit. 12 M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Picador, New York, 2003, p. 243. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, New York Labor News Company, New York, 1901, p. 90. 16 See A. Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984. 17 M. Hagemeister, ‘Unser Körper Muss Unser Werk Sein’, in Die Neue Menschheit, B. Groys and M. Hagemeister (eds), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2005, p. 61. 18 B. Groys, ‘Unsterbliche Körper’, in B. Groys and M. Hagemeister (eds), Die Neue Menschheit, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2005. 19 Foucault, op. cit., p. 241. 20 J. Zamyatin, We, Penguin Books, London, 1993. 21 J. Hughes, ‘Back to the Future’, European Molecular Biology Organization Reports, Vol. 9, 2008, pp. 59-63. 22 Ibid. 23 Kevles, op. cit., p. 310.

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Hughes, op. cit. A. Huxley, Brave New World, Perennial Classics, New York, 1998. 26 See F. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, Picardor, New York, 2002. 27 N. Bostrom, ‘In Defense of Posthuman Dignity’, Nick Bostrom’s Home Page, viewed on 1 January 2009, . 28 See Michael J. Klein’s contribution in this volume. 29 M. E. Clynes and N. S. Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’, in C H Gray, S Mentor, H J Figueroa-Sarriera, The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, London, 1995, p. 31. 30 J. Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, Chatto & Windus, London, 1957, p. 17. 31 See G. Wolstenholme (ed), Man and his Future, A Ciba Foundation Volume, London, 1963. 32 See G. Klerkx, ‘Transhumanists as Tribe’, in Better Humans?, P. Miller and J. Wilsdon (eds), Demos, London, 2006, pp. 59-66. 33 F. M. Esfandiary, ‘Upwing Priorities’, Future Life, Issue 21, June 1981, p. 73. 34 See K. E. Drexler, Engines of Creation, Anchor Books, New York, 1986. 35 See The Oxford English Dictionary, . 36 See N. Bostrom, ‘The Transhumanist FAQ’, World Transhumanist Association, October 2003, October 2003, viewed on 23 July 2008, . 37 N. Bostrom, ‘In Defense of Posthuman Dignity’, Nick Bostrom’s Home Page, viewed on 1 January 2009, . 38 N. Bostrom, ‘The Transhumanist FAQ’, World Transhumanist Association, October 2003, viewed on 23 July 2008, . 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 M. Sandel, The Case Against Perfection, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007, p. 99. 42 See J. Harris, Enhancing Evolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2007. 43 See A. Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. 44 N. K. Hayles, ‘Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, July, 2006, p. 164. 25

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H. T. Engelhardt, ‘The Search for Global Morality: Bioethics, the Culture Wars, and Moral Diversity’, in Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus, H. T. Engelhardt (ed), M & M Scrivener Press,Salem, MA, 2006, p. 28. 46 I. Hacking, ‘Körperteile Groß und Klein’, in Genpool: Biopolitik und Körper-Utopien, T. Steiner (ed), Passagen Verlag, Wien, 2002. 47 R. Kurzweil, ‘Human Body Version 2.0’, in Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans, LibrosEnRed, Buenos Aires, 2004, p. 103. 48 See for example R. Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Penguin Books, New York, 2005. 49 See H. Putnam, ‘Psychological Predicates’, in Art, Mind, and Religion, W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (eds), University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1967, pp. 37-48. 50 Kurzweil, op. cit., p. 119. 51 N. K. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999, p. 288. 52 Bostrom, op. cit. 53 M. G. Weiss, ‘The Body of Phenomenology; Unforeseen Phenomenological Outcomes of Biotechnologies’, The New School of Social Research, The Husserl Archives in Memory of Alfred Schütz, On The Future of Husserlian Phenomenology, viewed on 1 January 2009, . 54 M. G. Weiss, ‘Bioethical Consequences of Biotechnologies’, University of Vienna, Transformations in Public Policy, The Dissolution of Human Nature, viewed on 23 July 2008, . 55 Ibid. 56 L. A. Sass, ‘Schizophrenia, Self-Consciousness and the Modern Mind’, in Models of the Self, S. Gallagher and J. Shear (eds), Imprint Academic, Exeter, 1999, p. 327. 57 Ibid., p. 320. 58 See T. Sharon’s ‘Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control’ in this volume. 59 Klerkx, op. cit., p. 65. 60 See J. Hughes, ‘Better Living Through World Government: Transnationalism as 21st Century Socialism’, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, viewed on 1 January 2009, . 61 Kurzweil, op. cit. 62 Bostrom, WTA FAQ. 63 Klerkx, op. cit.

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______________________________________________________________ 64

N. Rose, Inventing Our Selves, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 150. 65 Ibid., p. 151. 66 Ibid., p. 26. 67 N. Rose, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 18, 2001, p. 18. 68 P. Kitcher, The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities, Penguin Press, London, 1996. 69 J. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003. 70 N. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007, p. 76. 71 N. Rose, ‘Neurochemical Selves’, Society, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2003, pp. 46-59. 72 C. Novas and N. Rose, ‘Genetic Risk and the Birth of the Somatic Individual’, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 4, November 2000, pp. 485513. 73 L. Negrin, ‘Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity’, Body & Society, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2002, pp. 21-42. 74 Harris, op. cit., p. 118. 75 Rose, Inventing Our Selves, p. 157. 76 Rose, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’, p. 18. 77 J. Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, Westview Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004. 78 See T. Lemke, Biopolitik, Junius Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 154. 79 Weiss, op. cit. 80 G. Wolbring, ‘The Unenhanced Underclass’, in Better Humans?, P. Miller and J. Wilsdon (eds), Demos, London, 2006, p. 126. 81 Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p. 222. 82 Quoted in P. D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac, Viking Press, New York, 1996, p. 272. 83 P. Wehling, ‘Social Inequalities Beyond the Modern Nature-SocietyDivide?’, Science, Technology & Innovation Studies, Vol. 1, July, 2005, p. 12

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______________________________________________________________ Hacking, I., ‘Körperteile Groß und Klein’, in Genpool: Biopolitik und Körper-Utopien. T. Steiner (ed), Passagen Verlag, Wien, 2002. Hayles, N. K., How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999. Hughes, J., Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. Westview Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004. —––, ‘Better Living Through World Government: Transnationalism as 21st Century Socialism’. Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, viewed on 1 January 2009, . —––, ‘Back to the Future’. European Molecular Biology Organization Reports, Vol. 9, 2008, pp. 59-63. Huxley, A., Brave New World. Perennial Classics, New York, 1998. Kitcher, P., The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities. Penguin Press, London, 1996. Klein, M. J., ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 255-279. Kramer, P. D., Listening to Prozac. Viking Press, New York, 1996. Krige, J. and Pestre, D. (eds), Science in the Twentieth Century. Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, 1997. Kurzweil, R., The Singularity is Near. Penguin Books, New York, 2005. Lemke, T., Biopolitik. Junius Verlag, Hamburg, 2007. Louden, R. B., and Kuehn, M., Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006. Miller, P. and Wilsdon, J. (eds), Better Humans? Demos, London, 2006.

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______________________________________________________________ Negrin, L., ‘Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity’. Body & Society, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2002, pp. 21-42. Novas, C. and Rose, N., ‘Genetic Risk and the Birth of the Somatic Individual’. Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 4, November, 2000, pp. 485513. Rose, N., Inventing Our Selves. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. —––, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’. Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 18, No. 6, 2001. pp. 1-30. —––, ‘Neurochemical Selves’. Society, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2003, pp. 46-59. —––, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007. Rose, S., The Future of the Brain: The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow’s Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, New York, 2005. Sandel, M., The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007. Sass, L., A., ‘Schizophrenia, Self-Consciousness and the Modern Mind’, in Models of the Self. S. Gallagher and J. Shear (eds), Imprint Academic, Exeter, 1999. Sharon, T., ‘Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 2953. Weiss, M. G., ‘Bioethical Consequences of Biotechnologies’. University of Vienna, Transformations in Public Policy, The Dissolution of Human Nature, viewed on 23 July 2008, . —––, ‘Die Auflösung der Menschlichen Natur’. University of Vienna, Transformations in Public Policy, The Dissolution of Human Nature, viewed on 23 July 2008,

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______________________________________________________________ . —––, ‘The Body of Phenomenology; Unforeseen Phenomenological Outcomes of Biotechnologies’. The New School of Social Research, The Husserl Archives in Memory of Alfred Schütz, On the Future of Husserlian Phenomenology, viewed on 1 January 2009, . Wehling, P., ‘Social Inequalities beyond the Modern Nature-SocietyDivide?’. Science, Technology & Innovation Studies, Vol. 1, July 2005, pp. 3-15. Wolstenholme, G. (ed), Man and His Future. A Ciba Foundation Volume, London, 1963. Zamyatin, J., We. Penguin Books, London, 1993. Imre Bárd is a PhD student at the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, King’s College London, United Kingdom.

Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control Tamar Sharon Abstract In line with Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of paranoia and schizophrenia as the effects of the fundamental organising principles of capitalist society, Rosi Braidotti identifies what she calls a ‘schizoid double pull,’ the co-occurrence of contradictory or incompatible trends, as one of the distinctive traits of our age. This chapter presents a reading of contemporary technoscience as a manifestation of this double pull through the examples of assisted reproductive technologies, genetically modified organisms, contemporary genetics and biological psychiatry. In this framework, the potentially innovative, liberatory and deterritorialising impact of new technologies, technoscience’s ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘postmodern’ tendencies that might indicate a shift towards a posthuman and post-anthropocentric paradigm, come up against ‘paranoid’ or ‘modernist’ tendencies that seem to appropriate this transgressive or subversive potential. Focusing on the notions of ‘technologically produced nature’ and ‘biology under control’ as symbols of the technoscientific schizoid double pull, I will argue that what we are witnessing in reproductive and genetic technologies is a reworking of foundational categories such as nature and self in novel ways. This is to say that the schizoid double pull, though it most easily lends itself to a dialectic framework, does not harbour a contradiction, and that the schizoid/postmodern and paranoid/modern tendencies inherent in technoscience are not fixed in a relation of strict binary opposition. Rather, they interact and co-evolve, indicating that contemporary technoscience is neither explicitly modern nor postmodern but itself calls into question the distinction between these two, while perhaps indicating the emergence of a new configuration of power. Key Words: Technoscience, critical posthumanism, assisted reproduction, geneticisation, molecularisation, denaturalisation, biomedicine. ***** 1.

Introduction In their epic two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari identify schizophrenia and paranoia as the fundamental organising principles of capitalist society. 1 In this framework, schizophrenia designates an absolute decoding of flows, unrestrained desire and the potential for freedom and permanent revolution. Paranoia, in contrast,

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______________________________________________________________ designates a reactionary dynamic that strives to absorb subversive schizophrenic energies by reterritorialising and recoding desire within social organisation or normalising institutions. Schizophrenia deterritorialises, decomposing value systems, individual and collective identities; it is an intrinsically emancipatory process. Paranoia seeks to recompose these, fixing desire in socially accepted representations or transcendental signifiers that regulate which connections desire can and cannot make. Because the capitalist mode of unrestrained economic production gives rise to a profusion of decoded flows (‘All that is solid melts into air’), capitalism, according to Deleuze and Guattari, differs from other modes of social organisation insofar as it does not explicitly block schizophrenia but promotes it. Nevertheless, the schizophrenic processes that the capitalist machine unleashes are always a threat to its stability, and act as its threshold limit, to which it is constantly drawn and from which it persistently pulls back. I propose to extend Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis to contemporary technoscience, which I argue is informed by the same unleashing of schizophrenic energies and paranoid capture that underlies the logic of capitalism, through several examples of reproductive and genetic technologies. To Deleuze and Guattari’s complementary sets of analytic terms (schizophrenic/paranoid, deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation, molecular/molar, rhizomatic/arborescent), I would like to add ‘postmodern’/‘modern,’ which expresses a similar distinction and complements Deleuze and Guattari’s terms with a chronological component. In a schizoanalytic reading of contemporary technoscience, the schizophrenic or postmodernist tendency lies in the potentially innovative, liberatory and deterritorialising impact of new technologies; tendencies that seem to indicate a shift towards a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric paradigm, what some critical posthumanist theorists see as an overcoming of modernity. But this schizophrenic force seems to continuously come up against technoscience’s paranoid or modernist drive that captures and reterritorialises any transgressive or subversive potential new technologies might have. Technoscience thus emerges as a manifestation of what Rosi Braidotti has called the ‘schizoid double pull,’ the co-occurrence of contradictory or incompatible trends. 2 The focus of this chapter is on reproductive and genetic technoscience, but instances of the schizoid double pull can be found throughout the landscape of techno- and cyberculture. Indeed, a number of contributions presented at the ‘Visions of Humanity’ conference that gave rise to this volume allude to the schizoid double pull in other contexts. For example, Ewan Kirkland’s 3 chapter presents two contrasting models that are embodied in the videogame avatar: the cyborg avatar, which as an extension of the player’s body suggests a liberation from physical and ideological constraints, and the interpellated avatar, which suggests the restriction of

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______________________________________________________________ player autonomy by avatar corporeality, game structure and rules. Similarly, Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay 4 explore the schizoid nature of freedom in the virtual world of Second Life, in light of the need for the legislation of avatar rights. As for the two chapters by Leighton Evans 5 and Jordan J. Copeland, 6 they approach the schizoid double pull of social networking sites from either pole. While for Leighton such sites allow users to be manipulated as resources, thus placing them in ‘standing-reserve,’ for Jordan the virtual is a shared space of real interaction, a context where relationships can be cultivated. I will argue that this double pull, though it most easily lends itself to a dialectic framework, does not harbour a contradiction. The schizoid/postmodern and paranoid/modern tendencies found within technoscience and cyberculture are not fixed in a relation of strict binary opposition. As in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of these poles, it is not a question of one or the other but rather of both processes occurring simultaneously, where either one is a potential within the other, always haunting its other. 7 As we shall see, schizoid/postmodern and paranoid/modern tendencies coexist within contemporary technoscience in a non-exclusive manner, interacting and co-evolving, indicating that contemporary technoscience is neither explicitly modern nor postmodern but itself calls into question the distinction between these two. This schizoanalytic reading of contemporary technoscience reconceptualises it as a manifestation of something new, neither the explicit continuation of the modern paradigm, nor its overcoming in a postmodern paradigm, nor the prelude to this overcoming. I will begin with a discussion of technoscience’s schizophrenic potential as understood by critical posthumanist and cyborg theorists, and then offer several examples that illustrate the compatible, rather than exclusive, coexistence of schizophrenic and paranoid tendencies. I will first focus on the notion of ‘technologically produced nature’ that incessantly emerges in analyses of assisted reproductive technologies and research into genetically modified organisms, and then on the notion of ‘biology under control’ advanced in the molecularisation of life effectuated in contemporary genetics and biological psychiatry. In both examples we shall see that the categories of nature and the self take on novel meanings. 2. Overcoming Modernity: Technoscience’s Schizophrenic Potential In recent decades, developments in biological, cybernetic and digital technologies have increasingly complicated traditional notions of the natural and the artificial, as well as human and non-human nature. Advanced technologies such as genetic manipulations, organ transplantation, expanding cosmetic surgeries, artificial intelligence, an array of new psychopharmaceuticals and new reproductive technologies, are engendering

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______________________________________________________________ the prospect of technologically enhanced humans, intelligent machines and modified nature. A number of theorists, forming what is increasingly becoming known as the disciplinary field of critical posthumanism or cyborg studies, 8 view these developments as a potential to contest the modern ‘paradigm’ or ‘project,’ offering what Paul Rabinow has called a ‘Nietzschean potential to free us from some of our most enduring lies.’ 9 This contesting of modernity takes place along several registers: a challenging of the binary oppositions that underpin Western systems of thought, a deconstruction of the unitary notion of self upheld by liberal humanism, an undermining of the foundational authority of nature, and a substitution of deterministic, reductionist and linear models of thought with nonlinear and nondeterministic ones. These are the schizophrenic or ‘postmodern’ tendencies found in contemporary technoscience. The boundary transgressions characteristic of new technologies - between the natural and the artificial, the technological and the organic, reality and non-reality - lead to the collapse of the model of binary, oppositional thought which is held as the basis of the central logic of modern domination and exclusion. Such breakdowns call into question the very notion of original, essentialist categories, of the idea of the genetic integrity or unity of an organism. In this way they also destabilise the traditional understanding of nature as a stable, foundational category and undermine its use to legitimate hierarchies and norms of conduct. In this reshuffling of foundational terms, the category of the human is also rendered instable, to the point that what Elaine Graham calls the ‘ontological purity’ that has informed the normatively human in Western thought can no longer be sustained. 10 Indeed, contemporary technologies in which boundaries between human and non-human and human and environment are no longer clear, are evidence that the unified, autonomous and self-directed subject of classical liberal humanism is not only undergoing a crisis in theoretical terms, but also in material terms. From the posthuman body that will no longer adapt to the disciplining institutions of modern sovereign biopower, to the deterritorialised non-place of cyberspace, contemporary technoscience offers privileged sites of resistance, and seems to herald a postmodern, posthuman and post-anthropocentric paradigm. Information and biotechnologies, however, are much more than the sum of their potentialities. Amid the cyborgs and the transgenic creatures, the ‘translated’ hybrids of technoscience, a strong paranoid tendency can be located within contemporary technoscience alongside its schizophrenic potential. This paranoid drive includes a return of master narratives, such as technological mastery and scientific progress as the overriding form of human progress, widespread discourses of genetic reductionism and biological essentialism, and the continuation of normalising and conservative tendencies. This could be conceptualised as the gap between technoscience’s

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______________________________________________________________ potential and its praxis, but such a potential/praxis dichotomy is insufficient to describe the complexity of the interaction between the schizophrenic or the postmodern and the paranoid or the modern. For critical posthumanists and cyborgologists, technoscience’s paranoid drive is usually ultimately seen as stronger than its schizophrenic drive; it captures, contains and represses, confining schizophrenia to mere potential. But such an analysis portrays the schizophrenic and the paranoid in a dialectical opposition that fails to see the degree of interaction between the two and how they engage each other in a multiplicity of ways. It is more fruitful to see how schizophrenia and paranoia act together, giving rise to novel assemblages in reproductive and genetic technoscience. 3. The Technological Production of Nature: Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Genetically Modified Organisms During the past thirty years the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has become a sign of the increasing prominence of biotechnologies in some of the most basic areas of human existence. 11 As highly technologised forms of intervening in nature, ARTs provide grounds for unique forms of schizophrenic and postmodern experimentation in social and kinship relations, but they also simultaneously perpetuate and reinstate forms of paranoid and modern biopolitical control. ARTs are thus a clear manifestation of a schizoid double pull, where the traditional category of nature is often denaturalised but also renaturalised. The schizophrenic effect of reproductive technoscience has had its greatest impact on kinship ties and notions of the family by contributing towards a greater fluidity in kinship patterns and pluralising notions of relatedness. The use of technologies and third parties in the process of procreation has led to a destabilisation of the biological aspect of parenthood. As Marilyn Strathern, who pioneered the new anthropology of kinship, has noted, ARTs have created ‘a new convention, the distinction between social and biological parenting, out of an old one, kinship and the social construction of natural facts.’ 12 Strathern argues that if kinship, a set of social relations, was previously seen as rooted in the natural facts of biological reproduction, then ARTs have a denaturalising effect on kinship models, thus blurring the nature/culture dichotomy. Core notions of kinship and conventional family units are thus unsettled by ARTs, as a multiplicity of forms of quasi-, semi- or pseudo-biological forms of parenthood are created. 13 With the introduction of surrogate motherhood, for example, the concept of ‘motherhood’ is deconstructed into a variety of possible functions, of genetic, birth, adoptive and surrogate maternities. 14 Similarly, donor insemination can disrupt ideals of manhood and fatherhood, subverting models of heteropatriarchal kinship. These developments destabilise any axiomatic link between biology and parenthood, and indicate ways in which

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______________________________________________________________ supposedly ‘natural’ categories already conceal multiple meanings. Furthermore, they might point to the loss of an essentialised definition of womanhood, or at least of motherhood, indicating the decline of one rigid or fixed way of experiencing motherhood in favour of an increased freedom for women. 15 ARTs also convey a schizophrenic potential to unsettle traditional notions of heterosexual kinship models, expanding categories of parenthood beyond reproduction by strictly heterosexual intercourse (to gay, lesbian and transgender couples, as well as single parents). This has led to a ‘queering of reproduction,’ and the development of an entire support system of specialised clinics and web sites for same-sex and single-parent parents. 16 Currently, reproduction in same-sex unions focuses on donor insemination and gestational surrogacy, but recent intersections between assisted reproduction and human genomics hold the promise of countless reproductive possibilities, from cloning and gene-splicing technologies to the use of male skin cells to produce eggs. By completing the dissociation between sex and reproduction that was begun with the introduction of the contraceptive pill (from sex without reproduction to reproduction without sex), ARTs offer a broad array of partnerings and possibilities for reproduction that can disrupt traditional heteronormative kinship structures. And as access to parenthood is increasingly widened, the idea of ‘natural’ conception becomes increasingly problematic. Nature as a foundational concept is twice unsettled here: first as ‘natural’ biological reproduction, and second, as what a ‘natural’ reproductive unit is. But the schizophrenic potential inherent in ARTs is countered by several paranoid tendencies. Many feminist scholars have argued that far from liberating women from the burdens of childbirth, the technologisation and medicalisation of conception has transformed women’s bodies into sites for increasing medical intervention and control. 17 In this sense there has been a literalisation of the modernist Baconian metaphor of the pursuit of scientific knowledge as the domination of the female body of nature. A significant concern is the degree to which ARTs replicate traditional, i.e., patriarchal, ideologies of motherhood and femininity in which women were held to be merely bodies, and are now reduced to less than their bodies, stripped of bodily sovereignty. These critics argue that an increasing effacement of maternal subjects as the agents of reproduction has ensued from the fragmentation of the reproductive body under the biomedical gaze (or even its complete absence in in vitro conception), and from the subsequent ‘birth’ of the foetus as a distinct entity severed from the maternal body and invested with ‘life,’ subjectivity and rights. Furthermore, the ‘post-biological’ effects of ARTs are often precluded by attempts to re-establish the link between reproduction, hetereosexuality and the nuclear family. Medical, legal and moral rhetoric

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______________________________________________________________ contribute to maintaining and institutionalising a conservative network of reproduction, thwarting the proliferation of new opportunities for parenthood by selectivity that is based on social suitability. While explicit legislative efforts to restrict access to fertility clinics are usually not successful, fertility laws often incorporate value judgments and biases that channel the demand for ARTs in conservative directions, indicating, again, the highly subversive potential of these technologies. 18 Likewise, underlying assumptions about the desirability of racial purity and the idea that race is reducible to biological features are perpetuated in assisted reproductive practices. While technologies like donor insemination could be used to subvert the model of the racially unified family and of the illusory purity of race as evidenced by physical markers, the ‘racial’ characteristics of donors is usually carefully catalogued by sperm banks. The degree of media outcry in response to cases of women being mistakenly inseminated with sperm from the ‘wrong’ racial group attests to this. 19 The schizophrenic potential inherent in ARTs to destabilise nature as a foundational concept seems to be contained by establishing a continuity between reproductive technologies and discourses of natural processes. What should emerge as a troubling oxymoron - ‘technologically produced nature’ is resolved by the creation of an innocent euphemism - nature’s ‘helping hand:’ ARTs are not understood as alternatives or substitutes to natural conception, but as tools that assist, promote, supplement, correct or improve natural processes that have gone awry and are in any case very fickle. Thus, even as the notion of parenthood is increasingly severed from a strictly unmediated biological basis, genetic inheritance is privileged over all other forms of kinship ties, and even as it becomes increasingly difficult to ground nature and uphold the distinction between nature and technology, a greater emphasis is placed on the desire to create a ‘natural’ continuity between parents and offspring, a desire which takes on the features of a self-evident right. 20 We see this in the physical and emotional price that women (and men) are willing to undergo in order for fertility treatments to succeed, in the marginalisation of adoption as an alternate, non-medical means for family formation by infertile couples, 21 and in the shroud of secrecy that often surrounds the use of donor sperm among heterosexual couples, and their use of ‘resemblance talk’ to mask the child’s origins. 22 Nature, rendered malleable on the one hand, is re-established as a legitimising force on the other. A similar dynamic is at work in the research and development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). 23 GMOs are enveloped in a rhetoric of nature as originally hybrid and constructivist. Indeed it is the very assumption that species boundaries are permeable that legitimises from the outset the creation of transgenic breeds. This assumption also underlies the claims made by biotech companies that the genetic modification of crops in a

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______________________________________________________________ laboratory does not differ in essence from the cross-breeding of plants ‘in nature’ - either in the absence of human intervention or guided by century-old agricultural methods like selective breeding or the controlled pollination of plants. For example, in an article on Monsanto’s research and marketing of genetically modified crops, Susan McCough, a rice specialist, claims: If you look even briefly at the history of plant breeding, then you know that every crop we eat today is genetically modified. Every one. Human beings have imposed selection on them all. So don’t ask me what is natural and what is not. Because I have no idea. 24 Plant identity thus emerges as always having been the result of a dialogue between nature and culture, whether in or outside the lab. As Haraway has noted, this schizophrenic potential of transgenic bordercrossings poses a serious challenge to the ‘sanctity of life,’ since the transferring of genes between species transgresses natural barriers, compromises species integrity and violates the essential and intrinsic quality of nature. 25 As we saw with ARTs, in this context the genetic modification of crops can be presented as improving nature, i.e., doing what nature naturally does only more safely and efficiently - not different from nature in kind, but in degree. Indeed, the shift in terminology from genetically engineered to genetically modified organisms reflects the resolution of the schizoid double pull that is also expressed here by the oxymoron of ‘technologically produced nature.’ 26 But the rhetoric of improving, enhancing or even ‘perfecting’ nature in the context of GMOs is always the improvement or perfection of nature for the sake of humanity - a slippage which re-establishes the hierarchical nature/culture divide and reinforces the modernist narrative of scientific progress as the domination and exploitation of nature as inanimate matter. This is clearly evident in the case of patenting laws: while the possibility of producing new varieties of plants or organisms assumes that nature is essentially hybrid and constructivist - both in light of the permeability of species boundaries and in light of the collapse of the nature/culture divide inherent in the notion of ‘improving nature’ - it is the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between nature and culture, or nature and human activity, that provides the basis for patent claims in agribusiness. Without a clear nature/culture divide, the distinction that informs patent laws between the simple ‘discovery’ of plant varieties as opposed to their ‘invention’ would have no foundation; the notion of human authorship of a genetically modified organism implies a consciously acting agent and a passive natural world. 27

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______________________________________________________________ The collapse or the overcoming of the nature/culture divide has been the subject of much scholarly work, and has been expressed in a variety of ways, from ‘implosion’ (Haraway - nature and culture have become inseparably intertwined), to ‘effacement’ (Lyotard and Baudrillard - nature is a cultural construct), to ‘inversion’ (Rabinow - nature is now modelled after culture in ‘biosociality’). But if the reconfiguration of notions such as nature and culture, nature and technology, natural and artificial, that is taking place in contemporary technoscience undeniably points to a malleability of nature that unsettles its foundational authority, thus expressing a schizophrenic or postmodernist tendency, it does not indicate a real collapse of the nature/culture binary. This relationship has not so much imploded, as it has been refigured, in processes where nature is in effect de-naturalised, but also, through a paranoid drive, re-naturalised. 28 For Franklin et al., nature and culture in the current global order is increasingly isomorphic: nature is no longer the fixed guarantor of ‘natural’ borders of sex, race, gender and the human body, and likewise, culture is no longer a wholly constructivist concept at a time when it is being biologically reproduced in the life forms of patented property. The authority of nature is not undermined, they argue, but reincarnated: although the question is no longer “Is nature real?”, but rather, “Is nature of use?” (swiftly followed by “Is nature saleable?” and “Is nature efficient?” … ), the instrumentalisation of nature presents little threat to its continuing pervasiveness as authenticator. Indeed […] its endless adaptability has become evidence of its universality. 29 The processes of technologisation and even commodification of nature that we have seen to be at work in the context of reproductive technology and genetically modified nature are evidence of the fragility of the category ‘nature’ and the instability of its referent. They express a paradox that we might expect to be resolved by the disappearance of nature’s foundational authority. But what we witness are renewed efforts at positing nature’s authority and the redrawing of boundary lines between nature and technology. This is more than a rhetorical or semantic endeavour. The paranoid renaturalisation of nature does not merely oppose or even simply ‘contain’ the schizophrenic potential inherent in a non-essentialist notion of nature, blocking it and rechanneling it into known categories and conventions. The isomorphism of nature and culture coincides with their ongoing differentiation; these processes are happening simultaneously, not necessarily in sequence, so that nature ‘after’ its renaturalisation is not the same as it was ‘prior’ to its denaturalisation, in the same way that in Deleuze

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______________________________________________________________ and Guattari’s rhizomatics a reterritorialised territory is not the same as it was prior to its deterritorialisation. Some of the reworkings of nature that we have seen do provide occasions for reinforcement or restaging of familiar, modernist categories, but that is far from all that is happening. Nature in the technoscientific schizoid double pull maintains its power of authentication and legitimation, and as such the power to include and exclude. But it is a new kind of nature, one where terms like ‘technologically produced nature,’ and the ‘technological manipulation or mediation of life’ are rendered intelligible, and one that allows for the inclusion of aspects of being human that could not be in the past. In order to grasp this novelty it is necessary to move beyond the conceptualisation of technoscience’s schizophrenic and paranoid drives as a strict opposition. 4. Biology under Control: The Molecularisation of Life and of Personhood Like ARTs and research in GMOs, the schizoid double pull of contemporary technoscience speckles the landscape of molecular genetics and the biosciences. Here paranoid or modern trends such as genetic reductionism, essentialism and determinism come up against schizophrenic or postmodern tendencies that challenge liberal humanism, such as the loss of inner depth and truth, and the opening up of biological destiny to selftransformation. In addition to the notion of ‘technologically produced nature’ that contemporary genetics constantly re-enacts, these paranoid and schizophrenic interactions give rise to a notion of ‘biology under control’ that indicates a novel sense of selfhood. In the early 1950s that biology joined the reductionist trend of the physical sciences with Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of the gene and the centrality of DNA in heredity and development. This reductionist tendency is expressed most explicitly in the so-called ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology, the notion that a single gene codes for the production of a single corresponding protein molecule which determines a behavioural trait. In this schema, the uni-directional flow of genetic information - from DNA to RNA to protein - presents genes as having the only explanatory role in development and rules out any environmental or topdown effects on heredity. The central dogma has by no means gone undisputed, especially since the publishing of the draft mapping of the human genome in 2001, which showed that there were too few genes to explain whole-organism traits. 30 But the breakdown of the one gene-one protein hypothesis has not undermined the role of DNA as the master molecule, the privileged and central element to understanding life, health and disease. Indeed, even as this simple schema has been rendered more complicated, the essence of our

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______________________________________________________________ humanity has come to be (re)localised within our DNA, as genetic ‘codes’ defined as such through the use of metaphors of information - have come to be seen as codes of ‘life’ itself. 31 Thus, a host of more or less explicit religious imagery, what Haraway has called a ‘secularized Christian realism,’ 32 is regularly used to portray the human genome, from the ‘Holy Grail’ of genetics, to the ‘Book of Life,’ to the ‘lingua franca’ that governs the human organism; imagery that is certainly inflated by the media, but that originates with genome scientists. 33 Such genetic essentialism, in which human being is equated with genetic constitution, does not only effectuate a paranoid reduction of the social, historical and moral complexity of human beings to their genes, it also cultivates a paranoid discourse of genetic determinism, the idea that many socially significant traits are largely under genetic control and invariant across a range of environmental conditions of development. 34 While progress has been made in understanding the importance of genetic mutations in the incidence of many diseases (some of the most clear-cut examples are singlegene disorders like Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and thalassemia), such examples remain atypical and cannot account for the overwhelming number of ‘gene-for’ type reports that flood the mass media, whether regarding ‘genetic’ diseases or the genetic basis of human behaviour and traits, ranging from violence and alcoholism, to intelligence, schizophrenia, risk taking, and even political positions. 35 This has contributed to both a medicalisation of what were once considered social problems (and, as many scholars have commented, has justified a reduction in government expenditures on social programs), and the search for a molecular legitimation by alternative medical practices and psychoanalysis. In the paranoid geneticisation of life, our behaviour is reduced to our biology and our biology is reduced to our genes, and this chain of determinants governs and fixes all of human nature. The same paranoid tendencies of genetic reductionism, essentialism and determinism can also be seen in contemporary psychiatry, a field which has been greatly influenced by contemporary genetics, and the new generation of psychiatric drugs exemplified by Prozac. Psychiatry today is primarily biological, i.e., it aims to understand mental health in terms of the biological function of the nervous system, and to explain problems of mental health in terms of the production and activity of chemical neurotransmitters. Biological psychiatry advances a materialist understanding of mental disorders where neurogenetic explanations have come to replace the environmental and historical explanatory structures offered by psychoanalysis. With the aid of visualising techniques like fMRI, not only mental illness but also a range of phenomena from violence to kindness to self-awareness, indeed mood and personality themselves, have been reduced to biology.

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______________________________________________________________ The biosciences currently understand life at the molecular level, where genes, molecules and proteins can be detached from their affinity to specific organisms and isolated, manipulated and transferred. At this level, life appears open to calculated intervention, its mechanisms can be identified, recombined and imitated; contemporary biology is biology under control. This new level of control over life, in combination with the growing pathologisation of physical and mental ‘conditions’ can be interpreted as the apotheosis of modern biopolitics, the paranoid attempt to manage and control a population via its biological makeup. Indeed, one of the major fears concerning the growing presence of genetic technologies in our lives is the possible emergence of a ‘new eugenics,’ 36 that might reduce social tolerance for the variation of human experience. Thus the opposition to germline modification protests treating humans as biologically perfectible artefacts, particularly, it is argued, when the standards for what is genetically desirable will always be shaped by dominant groups. It is this same fear that has spurred the ethical debate surrounding genetic screening in the context of insurance and employment, and pre-natal diagnosis for selective abortion and the more recent technology of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. 37 The fear of a tacit eugenic agenda is also present in the discussion on anti-depressants or ‘designer drugs,’ the success of which lies, for some critics, in its ability to boost conformity or compliance to advanced capitalist values. 38 Contemporary genetics defines the human as a knowable species, a biological entity whose limits can be specified. The human genome, we are told, is not only the key to our human essence, but also that which defines and limits our being part of the human species. This is made possible thanks to the elaboration of the gene as information, and the genome as the entirety of genetic instructions, which is presented as a vast but finite information database. Informed by genetic reductionism and essentialism, this is a paranoid account of the human which also concurs with the model of the subject central to liberal humanism, as a stable, organic integrity, an entity that is autonomous and distinct from its environment. But while the human genome project (HGP) offers an account of the biological human that seems to fix it in a closed and finite framework, it simultaneously assumes and promotes a model of human openness to the non-human which points to the schizophrenic pole of genetics. This is, first of all, an openness to the human’s technological other, since, much like we have seen with ARTs, the HGP assumes that human nature is open to technologically driven transformation. But it is also an openness to other species. Contemporary genetics’ translation of all living organisms into genetic code and the discovery that many genes function the same way - regardless of the organism they are found in - has erased essential differences between species. Indeed, it is this indifference to species distinction that allows for the use of non-human organisms, namely mice, as

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______________________________________________________________ model systems for the human genome. 39 As we have seen with the creation of GMOs and their patenting, such transgenic movements necessarily assume that all organisms, including the human - and despite any rhetoric of human distinctness - are open systems. This schizophrenic effect of the molecularisation of life undermines any notion of the human as an integral, stable and purely organic entity whose limits can be easily specified. An additional schizophrenic tendency lies in the blurring of the distinction between depth and surface that results from the claim to the discovery of the genetic basis of life. As we have seen, the rearticulation of DNA as genetic ‘code,’ and of the genome as the ‘language of life,’ has been accompanied by a relocation of the essence or secret of life in our genes, a conceptualisation of the genetic code as a deep inner truth that is expressed in the surface of corporeality and behaviour, and the endowment of DNA with often quasi-mystical and sacred qualities. This is a continuation of the narrative formulated by nineteenth-century biology, that saw life as a mysterious, invisible force, common to all beings but hidden away in the unseen depths of the body. 40 Contemporary genetics, like much modern thought, works within this ‘depth ontology,’ where surface phenomena are made intelligible in terms of an underlying depth. But by discovering the molecular basis of genetic information, contemporary genetics also simultaneously lays bare what it defined as the essence of life. Indeed, as Richard Doyle has skilfully argued, the rhetorical effect of the molecularisation of life is a narrative of resolution - that the search for the essence of life is finally over. And the resolution of this search lies in the revelation that there is nothing supernatural or unrepresentable in the phenomenon of life, that ‘the secret of life is that … there is no secret.’ 41 While scientific rhetoric tends to vacillate between this secular and metaphysical terminology in creative ways, there is no doubt that once the secret of life has been ‘ousted’ in the form of DNA, the explanatory strength of an ontology of depth is in the process of giving way to an epistemology of ‘flatness’ or of superficiality, that explains phenomena in terms of surfaces and connections. 42 Insofar as models of depth inform the modern episteme, from the invisible hand of the free market to the psychic interiority of the psychoanalytic subject, the passage to an epistemology of surfaces, which sees all depth as no more than latent surface, indicates a schizophrenic and postmodern potential to challenge the modern episteme. 43 The paranoid and schizophrenic tendencies of contemporary genetics, like those of reproductive technoscience, do not counter each other in a way that cancels either one out. Here too, both forces work side by side and hint at novel reworkings of foundational terms, conceptual frameworks and processes of identity formation. While the molecularisation of life reduces aspects of human being, conduct and identity to biology, the debates surrounding geneticisation are not just a contemporary version of the much

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______________________________________________________________ older ‘nature vs. nurture’ dispute, in which a preference for ‘nature’ has once more swung into fashion. Molecularised nature is malleable nature, and malleable nature is not nurture’s other, just as we have seen with the denaturalised and renaturalised notion of technologically produced nature. The schizoid double pull of genetic technoscience emerges in what seems to be another blatant contradiction - ‘biology under control.’ The biopolitical control over life that the molecularisation of life has made possible, articulated in the persistent fears of a new eugenics, is precisely what counters the paranoid reductionism and determinism that confines life to a pre-determined genetic setting. Thus, once we are aware of the genetic determinism that governs us and have gained the knowledge of how it functions, we are transformed from determinants to determiners, masters of our future evolution. This fantastic reversal can be seen, for example, in the writings of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, whose concept of the ‘selfish gene’ has played a significant role in popularising the reductionist tendency of modern biology. 44 According to Dawkins, DNA is a ‘replicator,’ the fundamental unit of inheritance and reproduction, and organisms, or individuals, are simply ‘vehicles’ for the successful transmission of these replicators. Genes are selfish in that, as the only real level of selection, their sole objective is to replicate. Again, genes are conceptualised here as the real agents of life. Dawkins writes: ‘nothing an individual does during its lifetime has any effect whatsoever upon its genes’ and ‘we … are survival machines programmed to propogate the digital database that did the programming.’ 45 But this determinism, despite its strength in evolutionary terms, somehow takes second place to individual free will when it is informed by a knowledge of the genetic basis of life, and Dawkins concludes that ‘[w]e have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth … we have the power to turn against our creators.’ 46 While this liberation of life from genetic determinism (and essentialism to a certain extent, since controlling our genes entails some degree of critical distance from them) does suggest a schizophrenic potential, this potential is just as soon contained by a neo-liberal, Promethean type determinism. Dawkins’ ascertainment of human freedom might counter genetic determinism, but it is a reinstatement of liberal humanism and the modernist narrative that once we will succeed in wresting from nature her secrets we will be able to dominate her. In itself however, this quite simple inconsistency does not constitute the schizoid double pull that biology under control symbolises, because a much more complex dynamic is at work here. In light of the geneticisation of life, we are increasingly understanding ourselves as what Nikolas Rose has termed ‘somatic’ individuals:

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______________________________________________________________ beings whose individuality is, in part at least, grounded within our fleshy, corporeal existence, and who experience, articulate, judge, and act upon ourselves in part in the language of biomedicine. 47 Our notions of self, personhood and identity become rooted in and shaped by our biology, through which we understand the limits of our being, but also, because this biology is under control, through which our being becomes open to virtually unlimited possibilities. Genetic determinism, in such a framework, is a starting point, not an end point, and biology, no longer an unalterable endowment, becomes a ‘space of uncertainty, not certainty,’ 48 open to choice and experimentation. At first glance, it is difficult to see how this fundamentally differs from Dawkins’ account of human freedom in a world of selfish genes, how somatic individuality differs from liberal individualism, in other words, what schizophrenic potential for subjectivity really lies in genetic technoscience. Indeed, it is specifically in an age of free-market consumerisation, of choice and self-maximisation that the body has become the preferred site for selftransformation, self-optimisation and self-perfection. But when linked with other transformations, namely the loss of a depth ontology and the notion of technologically produced nature, liberal subjectivity does not subsist unaltered in its somatic form. In the molecularisation of psychic life, for example, a sense of self emerges that retains notions of authentic and real personhood - but this self can no longer be the signifier for a deep hidden truth when behaviour is directly mapped onto the brain and its neurochemistry, and authenticity can no longer be the signifier for some pure, originary natural state when technological means are required to attain it. Such slippages are not obvious: hence what psychiatric drugs often promise today is a return to, or a restoration of, a ‘real self,’ rather than the creation of a ‘false’ or ‘new self.’ 49 But these slippages do reveal interactions between paranoid and schizophrenic forces that indicate a de- and reterrritorialisation of the self, and so surely, a novel sense of self that is layered onto both modern and postmodern subjectivity. 5.

Conclusion Manifestations of the schizoid double pull will appear wherever nature is technologically mediated, wherever life has been molecularised and wherever biology has been brought under control. Contemporary technoscience, as I have attempted to show in reproductive technologies, genetically modified organisms, contemporary genetics and biological psychiatry, abounds with such examples. Technoscience’s schizophrenic tendencies challenge the hierarchical binary oppositions that underpin Western systems of meaning, they destabilise the foundational authority of

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______________________________________________________________ the categories of nature and the unitary self, and they challenge the ontology of depth that characterises the modern episteme. At first glance, this schizophrenic potential seems to be contained or repressed by technoscience’s paranoid tendencies: the renaturalisation of nature, an increased biopolitical potential for normative, discursive control, the reduction of life in all of its complexity to its genetic expression. But conceptualising the schizoid double pull as a paradox does not allow us to grasp the real dynamic at work in contemporary technoscience, the complex interactions that paranoid and schizophrenic, modern and postmodern forces engage in that constantly de- and reterritorialise the foundational categories of human being. From this strange dance, contemporary technoscience emerges not as a confirmation of the modern paradigm, nor as a clear break with modernity in the form of a postmodern paradigm, but as a configuration that informs and is informed by the use of novel reworkings of foundational terms, conceptual frameworks and processes of identity formation.

Notes 1

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Viking Press, New York, 1977, and A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. 2 R. Braidotti, Transpositions, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006. 3 E. Kirkland, ‘Experiences of Embodiment and Subjectivity in Haunting Ground’, in this volume. 4 M. de Zwart and D. Lindsay, ‘My Self, My Avatar, My Rights?: Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds’, in this volume. 5 L. Evans, ‘A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking’, in this volume. 6 J. J. Copeland, ‘Too Faced? Reconsidering Friendship in the Digital Age’, in this volume. 7 Thus deterritorialisation is always accompanied by reterritorialisation and the molecular by the molar. Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘The fact that there is no deterritorialization without a special reterritorialization should prompt us to rethink the abiding correlation between the molar and the molecular: no flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible landmarks for the imperceptible processes.’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., p. 303. 8 Critical posthumanism is an interdisciplinary approach informed by science and technology studies, cultural theory, and feminist, gender and queer theory. Representative works include D. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Routledge, New York, 1991, pp. 149-181; B.

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______________________________________________________________ Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993; C. H. Gray (ed), The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, New York, 1995; J. Halberstam and I. Livingston (eds), Posthuman Bodies, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1995; A. Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, Duke University Press, Durham and New York, 1996; D. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, Routledge, New York, 1997; K. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999; N. Badmington (ed), Posthumanism, Palgrave, New York, 2000; E. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2002. 9 P. Rabinow, ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’, in Incorporations, J. Cary and S. Kwinter (eds), Zone Books, New York, 1992, p. 248. 10 Graham, op., cit. 11 ARTs include procedures such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), artificial insemination or intrauterine insemination, donor insemination and preimplantation genetic diagnosis, hormone treatment, prenatal screenings, surrogacy and cryopreservation. 12 M. Strathern, Reproducing the Future, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992, pp. 27-28. 13 S. Franklin and H. Ragoné (eds), Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1998. 14 M. C. Inhorn and D. Birenbaum-Carmeli, ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 37, 2008, p. 182. 15 This is the same liberatory component identified by some early feminist scholarship in reproductive technologies such as Shulamit Firestone’s radical advocacy of their use to free women from the ‘tyranny of reproduction.’ See S. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Bantam Books, New York, 1970. 16 See L. Mamo, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2007. 17 B. Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993; V. Hartouni, ‘Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s’, in Technoculture, A. Ross and C. Penley (eds), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991, pp. 27-56; R. Braidotti Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994.

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Antigay ART legislation can be found in very liberal countries, such as Denmark, for example (see M. Bryld, ‘The Infertility Clinic and the Birth of the Lesbian: The Political Debate on Assisted Reproduction in Denmark’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 8, 2001, pp. 299-312). In the US, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine asserted in 2006 that ‘programs should treat all requests for assisted reproduction equally without regard to marital status or sexual orientation,’ but some fertility clinics and individual specialists refuse to offer services to non-heterosexual couples and individuals. For more on conservative legislation of ARTs, see S. Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception, Routledge, London, 1997; M. Melhuus, ‘“Better Safe than Sorry”: Legislating Assisted Conception in Norway’, in State Formations: Anthropological Perspectives, C. Krohn-Hansen and K. G. Nustad (eds), Pluto, London, 2005, pp. 212-233; A. Ong and S. J. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005; H. Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994, and M. Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics, Routledge, London, 1997. 19 Seline Szkupinski Quiroga studies two such cases in ‘Blood is thicker than Water: Policing Donor Insemination and the Reproduction of Whiteness’, Hypatia, Vol. 22, Issue 2, 2007, pp. 143-161. Meanwhile, celebrity adoptions such as Angelina Jolie’s and Madonna’s try to emphasise racial discontinuity as defined by visual markers as much as possible. 20 Public funding of IVF varies greatly from country to country, based on various criteria (number of treatment cycles, age limits, marital status). In the US, few states mandate full or even partial coverage. In most Western European states these are partially subsidised. In Israel, where the use of ARTs is perhaps the most extensive in the world, IVF is fully funded to any woman, irrespective of marital status, until she has two children with her current partner. 21 R. F. Storrow, ‘Marginalizing Adoption through the Regulation of Assisted Reproduction’, Capital University Law Review, Vol. 35, 2006, pp. 479-516. 22 G. Becker, A. Butler, R. D. Nachtigall, ‘Resemblance Talk: A Challenge for Parents whose Children were Conceived with Donor Gametes in the U.S.’ Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 61, 2005, pp. 1300-1309. 23 Genetic modification (also known as genetic engineering, genetic manipulation or recombinant DNA technology) typically involves any change to the genetic make-up of an organism resulting from the transfer of genetic material form either another organism or its construction in a laboratory.

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Cited in J. Didur, ‘Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies: Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life’, Cultural Critique, Vol. 53, Winter, 2003, p. 101. 25 Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, op. cit., p. 60. 26 L. Levidow, ‘Simulating Mother Nature, Industrializing Agriculture’, in FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture, G. Roberston, M. Mash, L. Tickner, B. Curtis, T. Putnam (eds), Routledge, London, 1996, p. 62. 27 In 1980, the Supreme Court in the US overruled the Patent and Trademark Office’s decision that microorganisms, even if modified by gene-splicing techniques, remained ‘products of nature’ and thus not patentable in the Diamond vs. Chakrabarty case. Chakrabarty’s genetically modified bacterium, capable of breaking down petroleum, was deemed by the court to be, as Haraway writes, ‘a product of human ingenuity, of labor mixed with nature in that magical, constitutional way that legally turns the human being into nature’s author or inventor,’ Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, op. cit., p. 89. 28 I borrow the term and the schema from the book by S. Franklin, C. Lury, J. Stacey, Global Nature, Global Culture, SAGE, London, 2000. 29 Ibid., p. 140. 30 In the draft mapping, only about 30,000-40,000 of an expected 100,000300,000 genes were found (see J. C. Venter et al., ‘The Sequence of the Human Genome’, Science, Vol. 291, Issue 5507, 2001, pp. 1304-1351), thus challenging the gene’s function as a unique coder for single characteristic traits. This recognition has given a boost to complexity approaches that offer an alternative to the molecular dogma, such as systems biology, autopoeisis, epigenomics and distributive approaches, and, at the least, has introduced novel entities such as regulator genes, split genes and junk DNA. Today the notion that phenotypic traits are the joint product of heredity and environment is widely acknowledged by the scientific community - the media’s handling of this idea is an altogether different issue. 31 Lily E. Kay has analysed the production of the ‘information discourse’ in molecular biology, and the discursive shift which led to the equation of organisms and molecules with information storage and retrieval systems, and heredity with information transfer. L. E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000. 32 Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, op. cit., p. 10. 33 It was molecular biologist Walter Gilbert who referred to the human genome as the ‘Holy Grail’ of genetics. S. S. Hall, ‘James Watson and the Search for Biology’s “Holy Grail”’, Smithsonian, Vol. 20, February, 1990, pp. 41-49.

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A number of theorists have been critical of the phenomenon of genetic determinism and essentialism, a term first used by Sarah Franklin in ‘Essentialism, Which Essentialism? Some Implications of Reproductive and Genetic Technoscience’, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 24, Issue 3-4, 1993, pp. 27-40. See also R. C. Lewontin, S. Rose, L. J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, Pantheon, New York, 1984; A. Lippman, ‘Prenatal Genetic Testing and Screening: Constructing Needs and Reinforcing Inequities’, American Journal of Law and Medicine, Vol. 17, 1991, pp. 15-50; and D. Nelkin and S. Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1995. 35 Claims for the biological basis for political leaning have recently been made by neuroscientists who have shown that liberals and conservatives have different patterns of brain activity. J. Giles, ‘Born that Way’, New Scientist, 2 February 2008, Issue 2641, pp. 29-31. 36 R. Hubbard and E. Ward, Exploding the Gene Myth, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993; T. Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, Routledge, London, 1990. 37 Jürgen Habermas has strongly argued that the selection of future children will instrumentalise them. J. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Polity, Cambridge, 2003. Tacit eugenic views have also been identified in the stratified access to ARTs, which reflects class- and race-based inequalities on both national and global levels. See F. D. Ginsburg and R. Rapp (eds), Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995. 38 See C. Griggers, Becoming Woman, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, and E. Parens, ‘Is Better Always Good?’ Hastings Centre Report, January-February, 1998, S1-S17. 39 P. Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996, p. 98. 40 M. Foucault, The Order of Things, Pantheon, New York, 1971. 41 R. Doyle, On Beyond Living, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997, p. 20. 42 This shift is one of the underlying theses of Nikolas Rose’s brilliant book The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007. See specifically, p. 130. 43 For Frederic Jameson, postmodernism signals above all a loss of depth, a flattening of spaces into surfaces and a new kind of superficiality. See F. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, Vol. 146, 1984, pp. 53-92. 44 R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989. 45 R. Dawkins, River Out of Eden, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995, pp. 3 and 19.

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Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, op. cit., pp. 200-201. Rose, op. cit., p. 26. 48 Ibid., p. 52. 49 Thus, the psychiatrist Peter Kramer cites patients of his who took Prozac and spoke of ‘being themselves again’ while taking it, or ‘no longer themselves’ while off it, of having located a self that is ‘true,’ ‘normal,’ or ‘whole.’ P. Kramer, Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self, Penguin, New York, 1993. 47

Bibliography Badmington, N. (ed), Posthumanism. Palgrave, New York, 2000. Balsamo, A., Technologies of the Gendered Body. Duke University Press, Durham and New York, 1996. Becker, G., Butler, A., Nachtigall, R. D., ‘Resemblance Talk: A Challenge for Parents whose Children were Conceived with Donor Gametes in the U.S.’. Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 61, 2005, pp. 1300-1309. Braidotti, R., Transpositions. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006. —––, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press, New York, 1994. Bryld, M., ‘The Infertility Clinic and the Birth of the Lesbian: The Political Debate on Assisted Reproduction in Denmark’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 8, 2001, pp. 299-312. Copeland, J. J., ‘Too Faced? Reconsidering Friendship in the Digital Age’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 101-123. Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989. —––, River Out of Eden. Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., Anti-Oedipus. Viking Press, New York, 1977.

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______________________________________________________________ —––, A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. De Zwart, M. and Lindsay, D., ‘My Self, My Avatar, My Rights?: Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 81-100. Didur, J., ‘Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies: Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life’. Cultural Critique, Vol. 53, Winter, 2003, pp. 98-105. Doyle, R., On Beyond Living. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997. Duden, B., Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. Duster, T., Backdoor to Eugenics. Routledge, London, 1990. Evans, L., ‘A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 55-77. Firestone, S., The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Bantam Books, New York, 1970. Foucault, M., The Order of Things. Pantheon, New York, 1971. Franklin, S., ‘Essentialism, Which Essentialism? Some Implications of Reproductive and Genetic Technoscience’. Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 24, Issue 3-4, 1993, pp. 27-40. —––, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. Routledge, London, 1997. Franklin, S., Lury, C., Stacey, J., Global Nature, Global Culture. SAGE, London, 2000. Franklin, S. and Ragoné, H. (eds), Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1998.

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______________________________________________________________ Giles, J., ‘Born that Way’. New Scientist, 2 February 2008, Issue 2641, pp. 29-31. Ginsburg, F. D. and Rapp, R. (eds), Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995. Graham, E., Representations of the Post/Human. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2002. Gray, C. H. (ed), The Cyborg Handbook. Routledge, New York, 1995. Griggers, C., Becoming Woman. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997. Habermas, J., The Future of Human Nature. Polity, Cambridge, 2003. Halberstam, J. and Livingston, I. (eds), Posthuman Bodies. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1995. Hall, S. S., ‘James Watson and the Search for Biology’s “Holy Grail”’. Smithsonian, Vol. 20, February, 1990, pp. 41-49. Haraway, D., ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. Routledge, New York, 1991, pp. 149-181. —––, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium:FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, New York, 1997. Hartouni, V., ‘Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s’, in Technoculture. A. Ross and C. Penley (eds), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991, pp. 27-56. Hayles, N., How We Became Posthuman. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999. Hubbard, R. and Ward, E., Exploding the Gene Myth. Beacon Press, Boston, 1993.

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______________________________________________________________ Inhorn, M. C. and Birenbaum-Carmeli, D., ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change’. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 37, 2008, pp. 177-196. Jameson, F., ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. New Left Review, Vol. 146, 1984, pp. 53-92. Kay, L. E., Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000. Kirkland, E., ‘Experiences of Embodiment and Subjectivity in Haunting Ground’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 125-147. Latour, B., We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. Levidow, L., ‘Simulating Mother Nature, Industrializing Agriculture’, in FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. G. Roberston, M. Mash, L. Tickner, B. Curtis, T. Putnam (eds), Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 55-71. Lewontin, R. C., Rose, S., Kamin, L. J., Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. Pantheon, New York, 1984. Lippman, A., ‘Prenatal Genetic Testing and Screening: Constructing Needs and Reinforcing Inequities’. American Journal of Law and Medicine, Vol. 17, 1991, pp. 15-50. Melhuus, M., ‘“Better Safe than Sorry”: Legislating Assisted Conception in Norway’, in State Formations: Anthropological Perspectives. C. KrohnHansen and K. G. Nustad (eds), Pluto, London, 2005, pp. 212-233. Mamo, L., Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2007. Nelkin, D. and Lindee, S., The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon. W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1995. Parens, E., ‘Is Better Always Good?’. Hastings Centre Report, JanuaryFebruary 1998, S1-S17.

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______________________________________________________________ Rabinow, P., ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’, in Incorporations. J. Cary and S. Kwinter (eds), Zone Books, New York, 1992, pp. 234-252. –––, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996. Rose, H., Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994. Rose, N., The Politics of Life Itself. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007. Shildrick, M., Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics. Routledge, London, 1997. Storrow, R. F., ‘Marginalizing Adoption through the Regulation of Assisted Reproduction’. Capital University Law Review, Vol. 35, 2006, pp. 479-516. Strathern, M., Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992. Szkupinski Quiroga, S., ‘Blood is Thicker than Water: Policing Donor Insemination and the Reproduction of Whiteness’. Hypatia, Vol. 22, Issue 2, 2007, pp. 143-161. Venter, J. C. et al., ‘The Sequence of the Human Genome’. Science, Vol. 291, Issue 5507, 2001, pp. 1304-1351. Tamar Sharon is a PhD candidate in the faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Her research deals with varying conceptualisations of the posthuman in contemporary thought and their manifestations in technoscience.

A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking Leighton Evans Abstract When someone says ‘I am online,’ it is a phenomenological issue. In reflecting upon the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger, in particular focusing upon The Question Concerning Technology, social networking is a classic modern technology. The essence of the technology of social networking is Enframing, the essence of all modern technology for Heidegger; the essence of technology is nothing technological, but instead how the technology orientates humans towards the world. Social networking allows the users of the network to be placed in ‘standing-reserve,’ and so the actual essence of social networking is no different to other technologies. The resources in social networking are people; and so the technology is creating the sense that people can be manipulated as resources, and put in standingreserve. This is the main issue with social networking; the technology is designed to organise persons and their relationships with others, and as such the essence of technology, Enframing, affects human relationships in a way in which other modern technologies do not, simply because of the usage of the technology by humans. Key Words: Enframing, standing-reserve, social networking, poesis, disclosure, authenticity. ***** In reflecting upon the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger, in particular focusing upon The Question Concerning Technology, social networking is a classic modern technology. The essence of the technology of social networking is Enframing, the essence of all modern technology for Heidegger; Enframing is a perspective on the world and other entities that frames other entities as resources to be used. This Enframing gives Being the perspective that other entities do not have a deeper, fixed essence of their own, but are simply a resource, framed as ‘standing reserve,’ to be utilised maximally when necessary. The essence of technology is nothing technological, but instead how the technology orientates humans towards the world. Social networking allows the users of the network to be placed in ‘standing-reserve,’ and so the actual essence of social networking is no different to other technologies. The resources in social networking are people; and so the technology is creating the sense that people can be manipulated as resources, and put in standing-reserve. This is the main issue with social networking; the technology is designed to organise persons and

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______________________________________________________________ their relationships with others, and as such the essence of technology, Enframing, affects human relationships in a way in which other modern technologies do not, simply because of the usage of the technology by humans. This Enframing is for Heidegger a great danger for being; such an orientation to the world does not allow humans correctly interpret how the natural world and entities in the world disclose their identity and essence, and so has distinct phenomenological repercussions. As social networking grows, and users increasingly use the technology to replace rather than augment traditional social interaction, then the world view of Enframing will become more prevalent, and Heidegger’s proposed solution to the problem becomes less likely. Social networking websites are modern technology in the sense that their essence is Enframing; social networking actively enframes other users, and transforms interpersonal relationships into resources. I argue that this is the great potential danger of social networking websites, orientating users towards treating other people purely as resources, and that avoiding or altering this is difficult due to the constraints and basic nature of social networking software. Within the confines of a user profile and a stratification of friends, the Enframing orientation is strict in social networking, and hence it becomes a ‘danger.’ When Heidegger was discussing disclosedness in Being and Time, he still described himself as belonging to the phenomenological tradition, although what he understood and philosophised about phenomenology was already considerably different from the phenomenology of his mentor at Freiberg, Edmund Husserl. 1 For Husserl, the subject of phenomenology was consciousness and the objects of consciousness; as has been outlined earlier, the primary concern of Heidegger’s phenomenology was Dasein, or the understanding of being. It is a well established convention that Heidegger’s thinking underwent a radical change, or turn. An example of later Heidegger work is The Question Concerning Technology, 2 and the approach within this work does have some marked differences from Heidegger’s earlier work. Most importantly, the change concerns the relationship between Dasein and being. 3 In The Question Concerning Technology Heidegger is concerned with the essence of technology, and this is not something that is technological. What Heidegger understands by essence is the understanding of being that makes technology possible. The essence of technology, for Heidegger, is a danger; it is something that prevents us from having a proper understanding of our own being. In discussing disclosedness, Heidegger was proposing that one of the key tenets of Being was to show itself as being; disclosure was the facet of Dasein that allowed being to assess being, and getting being to show itself and allowing it to be seen was the task of Being and Time. Heidegger called this letting be seen of being phenomenology, and in Being and Time, Heidegger was examining the ‘fundamental ontology,’ as the ontology if Dasein was the fundamental part of the study of all other

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______________________________________________________________ entities. However, Heidegger’s philosophy after the turn is the history of Being, 4 or seingeschichte, and the study of technology is a study in the history of Being. The fundamental difference after the ‘turn’ is in how Being is considered; not as something in itself, but as something that affects the ability of Being to understand itself. Heidegger’s approach is therefore still phenomenological, although it is not concerned with the method of phenomenology in the later works, but instead with what there is in the world that affects Dasein’s relationship to being itself. Heidegger’s aim in The Question Concerning Technology is set out in the first paragraph: 5 to investigate technology in order to prepare us for a ‘free relationship’ with technology. Heidegger’s first major concern is how ‘we’ relate to technology, how we think about it and how it affects us. Hence, Heidegger is not concerned with the existence of technology, but instead how humans are orientated towards technology; the problem is not the technology itself, and so the problem cannot be resolved through improving technology: Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. 6 Heidegger accepts that technology cannot be avoided or escaped, and so must be considered. More importantly, Heidegger asserts that the essence of technology is not ‘anything technological’ 7 either. This assertion serves the purpose of opening up technology for discussion free from the domain of technological experts, and towards the field of philosophy. The removal of the technological from the essence of technology also allows Heidegger to undertake a historical analysis of technology, including an analysis of Greek philosophy, and to argue that the essence of technology precedes the emergence of modern technology in the 18th century. Heidegger begins his analysis of technology by questioning how humans think about technology. Two conclusions are drawn: technology is a means to an end and technology is a human activity. Heidegger terms these the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology. 8 Heidegger assesses these definitions to be correct, but they do not go far enough - the definitions describe how technology is used, not how technology affects the understanding of being. The understanding of technology that humans have based on the definitions given prevents entities from understanding the relationship between being and technology more fully; in effect, the definitions of technology based on the pragmatics of technology create a ‘blind spot’ that prevents further understanding. Heidegger’s aim is to uncover this more fundamental insight into how technology affects the

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______________________________________________________________ relationship between Being and understanding being. Humans can control technology, but even this control is informed by our ‘instrumental conception’ 9 of what technology is; our thinking about technology is dominated by what the technology does and how humans use the technology, rather than by how the technology affects being and what is the relationship between humans and technology. To understand how being and humans stand in relationship to technology, Heidegger considers what is meant by the ‘instrumental’ use of technology as a means to an end. To do this, the assumptions that underlie such pragmatic considerations of technology such as ‘getting things done’ need to be considered - how one thing (such as a social networking website) has an effect on another thing (the friendships that a person has). The analysis of the instrumentality of technology leads Heidegger to consider causality; Heidegger’s analysis turns to ancient Greek philosophy, as the question of causality has been considered since the time of the ancient Greeks. Heidegger uses the example of a silver chalice, 10 of the kind that is used in Christian communion services, to illustrate the model of Aristotle’s 11 four causes. The material cause is the underlying matter that makes up the chalice. The formal cause is the form or essence that imbues the matter can causes it to be a chalice and no other kind of thing: this formal cause guides the chalice in its use. The final cause - the end point or purpose of the whole process, namely to become a chalice used in communion (the form or essence defines the final cause and guides the chalice in its development to reach this end point; the purpose of an chalice is to be used in communion and achieving its natural purpose is good for the chalice). The efficient cause is what is responsible for the beginning of the process - ‘what gets it going’ - and here it would be the silversmith that produced the chalice. Heidegger questioned the adequacy of Aristotle’s model, as it is this which has shaped all subsequent human enquiries into the subject: 12 ‘But suppose that causality, for its part, is veiled in darkness with respect for what it is.’ 13 Heidegger questioned what was exactly meant by the word cause, and presupposed that the true meaning may not be the one used when discussing technology in an instrumental manner. Causa, Heidegger stated, derives from the Greek verb meaning ‘to fall’ and is used to denote ‘that which brings it about that something turns out as a result in such and such a way.’ 14 Philosophical tradition has traced the doctrine of the four causes back to Aristotle; Heidegger pointed out that the meaning of the Greek word that Aristotle uses is radically different from the use of the word that emphasises the effecting of one thing on another, as it is used when denoting the instrumentality of technology. Heidegger identified the Greek word aition, which is used when describing ‘that which is responsible for something else,’ 15 as a word that more effectively denotes the word cause in the conventional manner that it is used.

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______________________________________________________________ Heidegger’s aim is to return the word cause to a more fundamental meaning. Cause, when considering the ancient Greek etymology of the word, is closer to aitia or ‘to occasion.’ When considering the chalice, the silversmith occasions or causes the chalice, bringing together the four causes, ‘to make present’ the chalice in time and space. The four causes are redefined as the four ‘ways of being responsible’ which assist the potential of the chalice in the silver for the chalice. Heidegger requires the reader to imagine the chalice that is on its way to existence, and the four ways of ‘being responsible’ help the chalice achieve this bringing into existence. Heidegger’s language takes on a poetic form at this point of the Question Concerning Technology, 16 and this is not accidental, as Heidegger now introduces the term poesis, which is related to being responsible for something in the sense that the silversmith is responsible for the chalice. Poesis means ‘bringing forth,’ and Heidegger means two things by bringing forth; the first being the bringing forth into existence, such as the silversmith practices with the chalice, and the second being the bringing forth into nature, such as a tree that is brought forth from the acorn. Both kinds are poesis, in the way in which something was brought forth which was not present. ‘Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment.’ 17 The understanding of poesis as a kind of revealing led Heidegger to conclude that it is related to the Greek word aletheia, which means ‘revealing’ and is also the Greek word for truth; at this point Heidegger links the bringing forth of technology with truth; hence technology will be discussed with reference to truth. Heidegger wants to argue that technology is a kind of poesis, a way of bringing forth from concealment, and as such is in ‘the realm of truth.’ 18 This is now a radical departure from the instrumental definition of technology, as Heidegger is not considering the usage of technology in his discussion. Instead, the focus is on how technology brings forth what is absent, and what affect this has on truth. The word poesis alludes to poetry, and it is not as incongruent as it appears to compare technology and poetry at this point. Heidegger is looking for an alternative method to thinking about technology, away from instrumentality, and the way that poetry confronts the world and relates to human beings is radically different from the way that instrumentality frames and confronts the world. Poetry looks to reveal the concealed aspects of the world through allusion to imagery and emotion; technology looks to reveal the world through such allusion also, not of an identical kind to poetry, but not purely in an instrumental manner either. In order to consider the revealing that technology does, Heidegger again concerns himself with the etymology of words, in this case technology. 19 Technology comes from the Greek technikon, which is related to the word techne. Heidegger argues that techne refers to both manufacturing and the arts, such as the techniques of artists and poets.

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______________________________________________________________ Techne also relates to episteme, from which epistemology derives, as to how we know things. Techne is therefore a kind of knowing of things and the world; the ‘know-how’ or the revealing of knowing how things are done. 20 If technology is understood as deriving from this sense of techne then the essence of technology can be seen as not in the instrumental production of things or the instrumental use of things, but as a revealing of how things are known. The silversmith, through his techne, brings together the form and the matter of the chalice, and the idea of the chalice to reveal the chalice that has been on its way to existence. Heidegger anticipates an objection to his view of technology as a revealing. Heidegger questions the validity of considering the Greek meaning of words when the fundamental question he is approaching is about modern technology. The discussion of ancient Greece and the chalice might appear redundant in the modern technological age of social networking and cyberspace. However, to assume that modern technology is based on modern science such as physics is to miss the point of Heidegger’s argument. The developments of sciences, for example physics, have depended upon the development of the technology that supports their empirical methodologies. As this is the case, science cannot be separated from technology; it cannot be the cause of technology as it is a part of the technology itself. What differences there are do not come from the technology itself, but from the orientation of modern technology to the world, and that modern technology’s mode of revealing is not poesis, but a challenging that puts to nature an unreasonable demand that it supplies energy which cannot be replenished, but extracted and stored as such. Heidegger has now drawn the key distinction; technology has traditionally been a poesis that brings forth what has not been present - such as the windmill that harnesses the power of the wind. The wind was there, but the power of the wind requires the technology to be revealed forth. Modern technology does not act in the way of bringing forth, but instead extracts and exploits, such as the changing of the earth by mining coal into a resource, which cannot be repaired or restored to its former state. Heidegger also uses the Rhine River to draw the comparison between modern technology and the ‘revealing’ of poetry. When the river is dammed to provide electricity, the meaning of the river is altered; it becomes a resource for energy. The view of the Rhine as a source of hydroelectric power is contrasted with the poetry of Hölderlin, whose poetry portrays the river as a source of artistic, philosophical and nationalistic inspiration. The source of revealing is the same in both cases, but the result of the revealing is clearly different. Modern technology reveals, but the revealing is of a different kind; to explain this further, Heidegger introduces the notion of the standing reserve. The standing reserve is linked to the notion of instrumentality with which Heidegger began. The instrumental orientation of technology brings all

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______________________________________________________________ things in the world into standing reserve, and Heidegger’s fundamental argument is thus reached; technology transforms human beings into standing reserve. The forester, for example, is a resource, and therefore is at the mercy of, the paper industry that has developed through technology. The paper industry also transforms the reading public into a resource through and hence into standing reserve. However, humans are never just raw materials; the position of humans as the forefront of technological advance means that humans will not become purely raw material. The way we orientate ourselves towards the world is changed by technology though - the fundamental relationship between the world and humanity is changed by technology through an orientation that Heidegger labels Enframing (or Gestell). Heidegger uses Enframing to describe how humans come to relate to the world around them, or how they are orientated to the world around them. For Heidegger, humans have a concept of Enframing that allows us to categorise the world in a certain way. Heidegger explains Gestell as a type of schematic structure; something that organises our perceptions in a manner that informs our understanding of the world. The forester, through Enframing, will view trees in a manner different from the conservationist, due the Enframing of the world through the technology that places the forester in this relationship to trees. Thus, Enframing compels humans to categorise our experiences and the entities that we encounter in the world. This then gives humans a sense of control over the entities that are encountered in the world, and it is this which is the character of modern technology; the Enframing, or categorisation of entities in the world. Heidegger states that the essence of modern technology ‘is by no means anything technological’ 21 and this is illustrated in the contention that the essence of modern technology is Enframing. Technology does not have its essence in technological creations themselves, and not in the activities that humans indulge in using technology, such as creating social networks using web 2.0 based software such as Facebook. Instead, the essence of technology is realised through the ‘frame of mind’ that the individual constituents of technological processes are viewed; in social networking, the neither the software nor the users are the essence of the technology, but the way that the parts of this relationship as an interaction - the technology and the users - are viewed as raw materials for another product, that is the actual social networking that occurs itself, is the essence of modern technology. In this way, Heidegger’s argument is that the essence of technology is the ordering of the components of the technological process into specific means to the end of the technology. Users using social networking software and websites are ordered by the technology into a relationship not only with the other users but also with the technology itself. Heidegger goes further than this, and progresses to claim that Enframing stems from the human motivation to explain the world through

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______________________________________________________________ precise scientific and provable means. 22 This places technology within the realm of the modern sciences, although Heidegger is clear in the contention that technology is a driving force of the sciences, in particular physics, rather than is dictated by the sciences. The reason for this is clear; empirical method is dependent upon the technology available for empirical observation. It is implausible that very accurate observations of distant supernovae could not be made without pre-existing technological advances in optics and telescopic design. Technology is once again an Enframing; the technology available is, according to Heidegger, responsible for the ‘frame of mind’ that dictates the area of study for a physicist, and hence is responsible for the scientific advances that occur in that time. The essence of the technology orientates scientists towards certain scientific paradigms. Similarly, the essence of modern technology orients software engineers towards the creation of social networking sites. With the proliferation of such sites at the moment, it can also be observed that social networking sites orient users towards other sites; those that began with MySpace accounts move onto Facebook, and then to the next site. Some commentators have observed this phenomenon as a fad, but in Heidegger’s analysis of technology, the essence of the technology itself drives such behaviour; social networking software enframes the user and predisposes them towards other social networking sites. At the same time, software engineers are orientated towards the development of social networking software. The essence of the technology, Enframing, describes some of the behavioural principles of the users and the developers of social networking software. In reflecting upon social networking and Enframing, the essence of the technology transforms the users themselves into standing reserve. This is a process of reduction; humans are reduced to resources, and the inherent significance of entities will be lost due to this reductive process. 23 As Heidegger notes, humans go from being entities with deep essences to ‘functionaries of Enframing.’ 24 As functionaries of Enframing, humans are affected in two ways; firstly, they are transformed into resources to be exploited by other users, but also humans will be driven to get the most out of the possibilities that exist in other people. In doing this, the deep essences of other entities will not be recognised; other entities are simply seen in terms of their ease of use and maximum utility, and how flexible the entity is in being used for the needs of the person. Such a revealing ‘never comes to an end’ 25 because everything must be considered as a resource at all times. Hence, an entity would, if revealed as a resource that had no further usage, become obsolete and not suitable for further consideration if Enframing has committed a person to the view of other entities as standing reserve. Social networking sites have the notion of standing reserve embedded within them; the sites compel users to rank and stratify their relationships with other users in order of preference, reducing relationships with others to a hierarchy of

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______________________________________________________________ utility - a person is promoted based on their utility within the social networking environment. This means that if two users maintain a high level of communication within the network, no matter how superficial of banal that communication could be, the statistics and graphical information compiled by the software will promote the user whom another user is in communication with as a ‘friend.’ This then should be reciprocated by advancement in the hierarchical structure of friendships that users have on sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The result is that the encounters and interactions that take place within social networking are essentially ones designed to promote the utility of one user to another; the relationship is one of standing reserve, the more that one user can be used by another, the stronger that relationship will be when viewed through the structures enforced by social networking software. The notion of standing reserve also reflects other salient features of the affects of social networking on users. Modern technology, by having the essence of Enframing and reducing entities to standing reserve, changes the sense that humans have for the world. 26 Modern technology provides the sense that all things are available to use here and now and that humans can have anything immediately and on demand. In order to achieve this instant gratification, it is necessary to constantly rearrange and reassess our practices to achieve this, such as changing our modes of communication from face-toface, to telephone-based, to social networking. The speed and relative ease of communication over social networking has been advanced as one of the primary reasons for the growth of the phenomenon. 27 This change in practices inevitably alters the significance of entities with which humans have interactions. Heidegger uses the example of farming to illustrate this: 28 farming was a vocation, the purpose of which was to tend and care for the land that the farming took place on. When farming became a mechanised industry, with no notion of stewardship (a phenomenon observable in western intensive farming practices and the collectivisation of agriculture in the former U.S.S.R. 29 ) then the ability of a farmer to look after nature was reduced. Indeed, the Enframing of modern technology sets out something other than maintenance; it is now the role of the farmer to improve nature, not maintain it. If nature is improved by modern technology, then humans are no longer constrained by nature; they can change it, do with it what they want and extract whatever is needed from it due to its status as a resource. Social networking does for human relationships what agricultural mechanisation has done for farmland. As human interactions are reduced to emaciated and superficial conversations through computer-mediated platforms, their purpose is to extract as much information from as little communication as possible. Hence, instead of care and consideration being the key parts of interpersonal friendship communications, the communication which takes place through social networking is, for the main part,

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______________________________________________________________ characterised by short, abbreviated styles with the aim of advancing as much information a possible with the least amount of energy or resource spent; the maximum gain for the minimum effort. Modern technology, in this case social networking software, facilitates the maximum use of it exposes, and in this case it is other users that are exposed. Social networking software places users into the open; as a modern technology it grasps users in a manner which ‘unlocks’ them and their potential as resources and which then allows other users to exploit and use the other users. This analysis requires a view of social networking in a purely negative manner, ignoring any possible pragmatic uses that could be beyond the superficial and perfunctory nature of typical discourse in such networks. However, given the exponential increases in users and the predominant basic level of communication on such networks, the analysis does hold weight. More over, the structure of such networks implicitly requires the view of others as resources due to the hierarchical structuring of other users in the users pages. Other people are presented in a manner which makes them observable as a resource; other people are ranked, labelled as ‘top friends,’ and users are encouraged to do this through the software interface that presents the user with no option but to rank and objectify other people. Hence, other people are enframed as a resource in that they are presented to the user not as people, but as a link to be connected to, and to be presented on their own page in a certain way. In looking at and using social networking sites, the user sees every other user that they are linked with as a resource; users are not seen indeterminately, to be chosen and labelled through analysis and consideration, but just as a link to another page that can be used in that way. The status of this resource may not be precise; it will vary with each user that is being considered. However, with all users, social networking software shares a common effect; as its essence is Enframing, it transforms all users from deeper entities into standing reserve, and presents all users as resources, not as people with whom people can develop traditional relationships. The danger of social networking as a tool of Enframing has been expressed in other, stronger ways. In the essay ‘Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,’ Hubert Dreyfus pushes the concept of standing-reserve to the extent that objectivism and subjectivism are subsumed into a schema that culminates to an imminent nihilism. Dictated through a purely technological schema, the world described by Dreyfus is one in which life functions with methodical efficiency solely for the sake of technological advancement. 30 If Dreyfus’ assumptions are correct, then the Enframing of social networking and being-in-cyberspace in general can be seen as a driving force for nihilism and the eventual rejection of all interpersonal communication as a meaningful enterprise; instead, it is considered as a perfunctory and basic tool for advancement. The idea of a schema is both interesting and important; Dreyfus proposes that the way of

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______________________________________________________________ being with technology will become a schema - a pre-existing set of knowledge that includes models of behaviour and communication - which will result in a set of conditioned behaviours in users which will be characterised by a nihilistic world view in reference to other users (and implicitly to other people in general). People have schemas for every set of actions that can be done; going to a restaurant, for example, can be reduced to a schematic analysis - a person leaves their home, drives to a restaurant, enters through the door, asks for a table, is seated, orders drinks while perusing the menu, and so on. Each person has a schema for any behaviour that they will do, and novel behaviours are adapted to from existing schemas - a new car is driven differently from other cars, but the activation of a cardriving schema informs the new process of driving the new vehicle, and the original schema is adjusted to accommodate the new information of driving the new car. The Enframing of modern technology, in this case social networking technology, will become all encompassing if it becomes a schema; not just orientating the user and the being of the user towards a particular world view, but also shaping cognitive and behavioural processes, as schemas are proposed to do by psychologists. The warning is therefore that social networking, as a modern technology, will not just enframe the user, but also affect the user at a fundamental psychological level. At this level, the user develops a new schema for interactions with other entities. This schema will be characterised by the conventions of communication in social networking; the superficial, short and disclosure-free communication that proliferates in social networks. If this becomes a schema, then everyday noncomputer mediated communication may be affected. This phenomenon has already been observed; some school examiners have expressed exasperation at school children writing examination answers in ‘text speak,’ the preferred non-standard writing style used in SMS text messaging. 31 In this case the basic, abbreviated form of communication becomes a standard for written communications as usage increases and becomes normal. The schema for written language has been altered; from a traditional standard style to ‘text speak,’ causing the criticism of that form of communication as an influence over users. If this can happen with text messaging, it is reasonable to suggest that with the exponential increase in users in social networking a similar phenomenon can be predicted and hence may be observed. If this is the case, then the disclosure-free and truncated form of interpersonal communication in social networking will lead to a schema-development that characterises interpersonal communication as not requiring a concern for the emotions and thoughts of others, beyond a superficial level. If Dreyfus’ conclusions do apply to social networking as a modern technology, then the implications are immense; an alteration in the way that communication is approached by users in all situations.

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______________________________________________________________ Dreyfus goes further than the pessimism of his original claim. ‘In this technological perspective, ultimate goals like serving God, society, our fellows, or even ourselves no longer make sense to us. Human beings on this view, become as resource to be used - but more important, to be enhanced like any other.’ 32 Dreyfus’ ultimate conclusion stresses Heidegger’s fears in a global sense; when applying this to social networking, Dreyfus’ conclusion would mean that the technology is Enframing users to become a resource, as has already been stressed, but also to be maximally used and enhanced for use. In that way, those that can be used most will be the most pre-enhanced, and hence have more value from the perspective of standing reserve; users who cannot be maximally exploited as a resource will lose value. The Enframing of users as standing reserve may therefore lead to a change in the criteria of evaluation of the value of close relationships and associations; those persons that can be used and enhanced have the most value, as they are providing the maximum resourcefulness. Traditional markers for building relationships - such as proximity, interests, empathy, kinship - may be rejected for online presence and the ability to provide resources, a fundamental change in the way beings interact and connect with one another. With no ultimate goal beyond treating others as a resource, the duration of and strength of the connection between beings becomes altered; there is no requirement for the goal of a long-term communicative relationship when there are millions of other social networking users’ enframed as resources to be used like any other users. Hence, if social networking has the status of modern technology as Dreyfus would envisage, then the damage resulting from it would be, from a phenomenological perspective, catastrophic. A cautionary note is necessary at this point. Dreyfus’ conclusions can be seen as a worst-case scenario - what could occur if the conventions of communication and behaviour in social networking become schemas, and hence become normalised modes of behaviour for users. There is no definitive evidence to suggest that this is the case at this time, nor is there evidence to suggest that it could become the norm in the future. The danger here is not an immediate one; it would be better termed as the potential danger of social networking technology. That does not mean that the possible repercussions are illusory though - internet use increases exponentially over time; internet use has grown 158% in the U.K. since 2002, 33 and according to this OFCOM research emphasised that internet usage is replacing traditional leisure activities such as television watching. With the massive growth in social networking over this period, and the predominance of the major social networking sites in the most popular sites on the internet, 34 with MySpace and Facebook being constant fixtures in the top 10 for individual user visits on the internet, the possibility of the danger is apparent. As people spend more time online, and by doing so necessarily have to use online technologies such as social networking for communicating with others due to being online

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______________________________________________________________ (or ‘in cyberspace’) for longer, then the dangers of online communication becoming an Enframing influence, with the subsequent effects on orientation to the world, viewing other entities as resources and the normalisation of online behaviour through schema development become closer and more apparent. It is easy to dismiss these fears, but not necessarily prudent; as people depend more on ‘being online,’ then the phenomenological status of being may be increasingly shaped by being online. A further danger of Enframing comes from how Heidegger describes how ‘both subject and object are sucked up in standing-reserves’ in such a way that the object is no longer simply controlled by the subject. 35 This is not to say that standing-reserve annihilates the distinction between subject and object by regressing to a pre-subjective understanding of the thing. Rather, the subject/object distinction culminates as a self-sufficient standing constituted by the subsumption of subject and object. In so doing, Heidegger demonstrates how ‘the nature of technology does not depend on subjects understanding and using objects,’ but that technology itself transcends the subject’s manipulation of the object. 36 In this sense, the technology being used no longer is used by the user; instead, a process of assimilation between the subject and object occurs, where the subject is reduced to the level of the object, rather than the object being promoted to the level of the subject. When using social networks, the subject or user therefore is subsumed by the technology, reduced to the level of the technology and hence the sophistication of the communication that the user can participate in becomes a function of the sophistication of the technology used. In simple terms, the being of the user in the social network is affected by the quality of the social network itself; if banality and mediocrity of communication are the defining characteristics of social networking communication, then the standard of being within a social network will be reflective of this quality of communication. Again, this is a pessimistic analysis; it is not a necessity of communication in social networks that communication should be basic and superficial, but the current state of such technology is certainly not conducive to the promotion of sophisticated modes of being if the subsumption of the subject is an effect of modern technology as Heidegger proposes. Copeland 37 offers a counterpoint to this view. From an Aristotelian viewpoint, there is a way in which the friendships that are developed in cyberspace can be seen as matching the taxonomy of relationships used in the Nicomachean Ethics, and using this analytic method can offer a new reading of online friendship. Aristotle’s teleology towards flourishing and the eudaimonic life indicates that such relationships, in order to become friendships in a meaningful sense, must contribute towards a flourishing in some way. If both parts of a friendship are ‘sucked up in standing reserves’ then it is hard to see how this technology does facilitate a flourishing of human relationships. At the level of poesis or revealing, from Heidegger’s perspective, there does not appear to

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______________________________________________________________ be the possibility of breaking free from the technology to flourish, or a flourishing from within the confines of the technology itself as the technology enframes the user and all others within that technology. Structurally, social networking appears to be conducive to the building and maintenance of significant relationships, but it is the use of the technological platform that reveals the user as a resource which significantly hinders this possibility. For Heidegger, the identification of the essence of modern technology as Enframing is not enough for the enquiry to be complete. What also needs to be established clearly is what the relationship between humans and technology is and how humans stand in relationship to technology. Heidegger characterises the Enframing of humans as an inevitable development of human consciousness over time, and defends this position. Heidegger believes that the question concerning technology has been asked too late, 38 since humans are already caught in the view of Enframing nature and other entities. However, Heidegger does stress that humans can achieve some perspective on how we are orientated towards the world and then from this achieve a perspective on modern technology. This is a critical juncture for Heidegger’s overall argument; without a convincing alternative to the Enframing of the world, Heidegger’s observations will appear overwhelmingly negative and deterministic. Heidegger looks at how human history is related to the historical development of technology, 39 and how the aim of the essay - the free relationship to technology - might be achieved through the correct perspective on technology. Heidegger approaches the question through another analysis of words; 40 Geschichte, the German word for history, and Geschick, the word for destiny, have the same common root, the verb schicken, to send. The human drive to understand the world and obtain a quantifiable understanding of the world will ‘send’ humanity on the way to a relationship with the world which sees other entities as ‘standing reserve.’ This world view culminates in modern technology, whose essence is Enframing. Therefore, in order to understand the world, humanity moves into an Enframing relationship with the world, but humanity is still experiencing the world as it revels itself; Enframing has not changed the world itself, only the relationship between humans and the world. Thus, in Heidegger’s view there is the opportunity for there to be a different orientation between humans and the world, apart from Enframing. Heidegger cautions against the inevitable and fatalistic view of technology and Enframing; once humans realise that their orientation to the world is the essence of technology, then humans will find the opportunity for the free relationship to technology. Heidegger characterises the choice as so: 41 humanity can continue on the path of Enframing, of ‘pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in its ordering,’ 42 and structure life accordingly. Or, humanity can realise that it is too ‘on a Way’ 43 to an arrival, and that only

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______________________________________________________________ through re-orienting itself to the way in which nature reveals itself can humanity establish a relationship with the world which is not self-destructive. Hubert Dreyfus writes, ‘Heidegger’s concern is the human distress caused by the technological understanding of being, rather than the destruction caused by specific technologies.’ 44 The danger is not so much the direct effects of the mechanisation of the world; instead, Heidegger is referring to the danger of technology to human spiritual life, although this is not to say that Heidegger is concerned with spirituality in the sense that religions use the word, despite Heidegger’s initial background in theology. What Heidegger characterises as danger is that if humans continue along the path of Enframing, there will be a point where humans too are only a ‘standing reserve.’ This will be allied to an exaggerated sense of the power of humanity; if the trend towards Enframing the natural world, then what will follow is the sense that humans can control the natural world due to the orientation that Enframing gives, which positions the natural world as a resource for human use. Heidegger believes this world view positions humanity into a narcissistic position, a delusion that humanity encounters itself and only itself in the world. Such an orientation denies humanity the ability to see the world as it presents itself, and therefore the truth of the world cannot be obtained as the method of alignment and orientation to the world will be incorrect. Heidegger summarises his view of the danger of modern technology as such: The threat to humanity does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatuses of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted humanity in its essence. The rule of Enframing threatens humanity with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. 45 Heidegger requires a positive hypothesis to counter the negativity of the essay to this point. Heidegger again resorts to Hölderlin, from the poem Patmos 46 and takes the paradox in the poem as the start point; the paradox being that within the danger of humanity’s orientation of Enframing, there lays the potential rescue from that danger. To understand this, Heidegger directs attention towards the meaning of the word ‘essence.’ The traditional sense of essence is what something is; an essence names what something is in the sense that it is a genus of something, or a class of something. All plants have ‘plantness’ in common, the essence of plants being that they are plants. The Greek philosophers developed the concept of eidos from their enquiries into essences, as was stated earlier. The essence of modern technology does not derive from this mode of observation however. The idea of a genus or

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______________________________________________________________ type does not fit with the essence of modern technology, and indeed does not fit with the relationship between the essence of a thing and how the thing is as it appears to us (especially in the case of modern technology, where the essence of technology is not itself anything technological). If Enframing is not a category in the same sense that a genus is, then the correct way of thinking about it needs to be established. Heidegger now utilises the paradox he takes from Hölderlin, also drawing upon the work of Goethe. Goethe 47 joined the words fortwähren (to endure permanently) and gewähren (to grant), and Heidegger too wants to link the concepts of enduring and granting together to offer a new perspective on Enframing. Heidegger considers granting, or more appropriately ‘giving’ from the German es Gibt, as most important in how a new orientation can be envisaged. The response of humans to the ‘giving’ or revealing of the world is Enframing; this is how humans have grasped what has been presented to them in the world. This Enframing constitutes a grave danger, putting humans on a self-destructive course, but there is also opportunity. If humans can orientate themselves appropriately, to see themselves as part of the coming-into-being and ‘granting’ of the world, and not simply orientated in a way which sees the world as resource, then the danger of Enframing can be avoided. As human beings are at the forefront of technology and can manipulate technology to an extent, then humans can also begin to appreciate what the implications for orientation from this are. Everything that exists must not be seen as resource, but as something to be cared for, 48 as the responsibility of humanity is to care for Being itself. In this sense, the Question Concerning Technology no longer has technology as its core; everything in the world is at stake if it is care that is the alternative to Enframing. Heidegger concludes that Enframing, while being a danger, is also a ‘saving power’ and an opportunity. The Enframing orientation of humanity to the world can make clear to humans what their responsibility in the world is and how to realise this responsibility. If the Enframing of technology is correctly reflected upon, what is found is not only that humans are part of the world, but also that the world has a need for humans; that humanity is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. 49 Heidegger’s conclusion is that there are two opposing orientations within Enframing, the dangerous orientation of seeing the contents of the world as resource, and the opportunity to see the role of humanity in the world correctly through Enframing. These two orientations are joined together, according to Heidegger, in Enframing. As humans are enclosed within an Enframing orientation to the world, Heidegger must explain how the danger of Enframing can be overcome to allow the possibilities and opportunities for truth that is also inherent in Enframing to become apparent. Heidegger’s alternative to the Enframing orientation that demands that the

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______________________________________________________________ world is grasped in empirical, measurable terms is through art. Heidegger asks the reader to go back to a time before Enframing had captivated the western world, when the concept of techne included both instrumentality and poesis, or the fine arts. Heidegger invokes an ancient Greece in which art was not separated from the rest of society, but instead played a pivotal role in unifying the other aspects of civil life, such as religion and politics, within the social life of the community. For Heidegger, the art of ancient Greece was an expression of the connection between human beings and Being; art was the extension of the care of humans for Being, just as Enframing is the extension of the need to explain the world empirically. Heidegger advocates that the poetic or artistic orientation to the world is the alternative dimension of Enframing; the orientation is still one that looks to understand the world, but it is not one which looks to place the world into ‘standing reserve.’ Instead, the poet takes the world as it is 50 which is for Heidegger the world in its truest form, free from the danger of Enframing. It must be considered whether there is the possibility for any artistic reorientation or realignment within cyberspace, and specifically within the use of social networking as a primary interpersonal communicative tool. The orientation of Enframing in social networking has been established at some length, but if it is possible to envisage how such technology can be used in a different way from the superficial and damaging communicative tool that is the case at present becomes a critical question. If not, then social networking could be considered a highly damaging form of social networking; Dreyfus’ world in which life functions with methodical efficiency solely for the sake of technological advancement would be well served by a technology for communication which solely provides an Enframing of the user without the possibility of an alternative view. Whether within the confines of the software that constitutes social networking, there is a possibility of a form of communication which can be reflective of the world in a different sense than seeing all entities as standing reserve is at this time difficult to answer. Without being overly cynical, there is the possibility that social networking itself can evolve beyond the current crude versions of itself, and into a technology that allows the expression of a world view that is aligned differently to Enframing. There are possibilities in using internet communication tools that allow for an interpretative use of the technology, and for expressions and communications that avoid the impoverished nature of typical social networking communication and allow for more poetic or artistic orientation in cyberspace. Arguably, this possibility already exists; blogging, the portmanteau of web log, is a phenomenon of online communication that has been a feature of the internet since the popularity of the internet grew exponentially since 1994. Blogging was explained earlier as a type of communication that might allow disclosedness and disclosure-assuch to avoid the paucity and inhibitory nature of communication within

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______________________________________________________________ social networks, and it is again towards blogging that some kind of relief from the phenomenological problems that social networking poses may be provided when considering the orientating effect that social networking has on users. Blogs commonly form a type on online diary, in which users can express thoughts and feelings in a manner that goes beyond the usual superficial manner of communication that occurs in social networking. Although not commonly thought of as social networking technology, some sites, such as Open Diary, 51 allow users to link to other diarists in the same manner that users are linked to one another in social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. The difference is in the content; Open Diary is designed to be used as a tool that allows users to disclose details about their lives and themselves, which is not easy to do with the truncated communications that are allowed within the more popular social networks (Open Diary has only 520, 407 52 users compared to the multiple millions that use Facebook and MySpace). MySpace has had a blogging facility available to users, but it is not the most prominent feature of the social network, and requires a user to navigate to an entry; blogging sites themselves present the latest thoughts of the user directly and without the need to navigate to a new part of the site. Blogging is not the primary use of MySpace or other major social networks; yet the possibilities that blogging opens up are possible ways to realign users in social networking. A web log allows a user to develop a genuine discursive communication, which other users can comment upon and receive either as passive recipients or as active participants. The extended form of the web log means that some of the most criticised features of social networks, namely the paucity of genuine disclosure-allowing communication opportunities, can be addressed through this online communication tool. If this is so, then blogging may provide a way for users of online social networks to express themselves in a way which is not constrained by the Enframing of social networking. The use of the modal verb ‘may’ was not accidental, and its use is indicative of the problems that such a move towards a different orientation in social networks will encounter. Blogging is available, and has been for some time; it is not universally used, and when it is the quality of the communication is often not superior to the quality in the most mundane of social network communications. Blogging, and the extension of the form of the web log into the pre-existing social networks may provide the creative outlet that will allow users to realign themselves away from the Enframing of the technology; but that said, it may just as well not do any of this. The possibility of escape from Enframing in blogging comes only if the web log is used in a genuinely discursive and disclosure-allowing manner, and there can never be any guarantee which users can or will embrace such a use of blogging. There is the opportunity for blogging to facilitate realignment of users in social networking, but it is dependent on the manner of the use of the

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______________________________________________________________ web log; if it is used in a perfunctory and superficial manner, then it cannot have the desired effect. Similarly, it is not inconceivable that current social networks cannot be extended to include other forms of artistic expression, such as displaying users artworks through picture or video formats; but even if this made possible, the manner of the usage will be the critical factor in determining whether it is possible for users to express themselves in a manner in social networks that can genuinely avoid an Enframing perspective. There are no guarantees; to form a communicative relationship with other users that avoids framing them as standing reserve requires a commitment on the part of the individual, and this is not necessarily something that will occur. As has been stated, social networking is an Enframing technology, which promotes ease of use and exploiting resources with the minimum of effort; to reverse this will involve a considerable and concerted effort on the part of individual users, which would require a necessary turning away from the very features of convenience and ease of resource use that makes social networking an attractive proposition for people initially. The implications of the potential difficulties of artistic response in social networking are important. Truth is for Heidegger a revealing; how something gives or shows itself. In art, the revealing is free from the Enframing as resource, and the view of the world will not be concerned with the technological preoccupation with measuring and classifying the world. Art takes place in the world, and is part of the process of coming-to-being, not detached like the view of the world as standing reserve. Heidegger is not advocating the end of industry so all can become poets; rather, the preeminence of the technological view of the world should be reconsidered, and some of the artist’s vision of the world should be incorporated into the world view that we hold. If this is done, then the dangers of Enframing can be avoided, and humans can enter into a ‘free’ 53 relationship with technology which will be one that questions and takes a critical perspective, rather than being constantly orientated by technology towards seeing the world as standing reserve. If not impossible, it may be difficult to see a practical way for this to be achieved within social networks; the technology and applications are available, but the willingness of users to embrace and use such opportunities is not something that can be assured with any certainty. Indeed, this could be a technological paranoia in line with Deluze and Guattari’s observations on the schizophrenic and paranoid organising principles of capitalistic society, in a technology that is a classic example of late capitalism 54 - the opportunity to embrace and develop the technology and run free with it is avoided as it is more comfortable to remain within the confines of the software. As such, the opportunity for a ‘free relationship’ with such technology is possible, but not assured, and there can be no guarantee that there will be any inclination to establish a free relationship

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______________________________________________________________ with the technology by those that use it, if that requires a desire on the part of users to reject the seductive ease of use of the technology; this cannot be taken as a given.

Notes 1

P. Gorner, ‘Heidegger, Phenomenology and the Essence of Technology’, 30 January 2007, 13 August 2007, . 2 M. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt (trans), Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1977, p. 1. 3 Gorner, ‘Heidegger, Phenomenology and the Essence of Technology’. 4 Ibid. 5 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 3. 6 Ibid., p. 3. 7 Ibid., p. 4. 8 Ibid., p. 5. 9 Ibid., p. 5. 10 Ibid., p. 6. 11 M. O’Brien, ‘Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”’, in Thinking Together: Proceedings of the IWM Junior Fellows’ Conference, Winter 2003, A. Cashin and J. Jirsa (eds), IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, Vienna, Austria, Vol. 16, 2004, p. 15. 12 Ibid., p. 15. 13 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 6. 14 Ibid., p. 7. 15 Ibid., p. 10. 16 Ibid., p. 11. 17 Ibid., p. 11. 18 Ibid., p. 12. 19 Ibid., p. 13. 20 Ibid., p. 12. 21 Ibid., p. 4. 22 Ibid., p. 12. 23 M.Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger, Granta, London, 2006, p. 104. 24 M. Heidegger, Bremen und Freiburger Vorträge, Petra Jaeger, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p. 30. 25 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 16. 26 Wrathall, How to read Heidegger, p. 101. 27 C. Dwyer, ‘Digital Relationships in the MySpace Generation: Results from a Qualitative Study’, in Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International

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______________________________________________________________ Conference on System Sciences, IEEE Computer Society Press, Big Island, Hawaii, 2007, p. 7. 28 Wrathall, p. 102. 29 J. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books, London, 2003, pp. 138-139. 30 H. L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, C. Guignon (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1993, p. 307. 31 BBC, ‘Texting Troubles Teachers’, 8 September 2007, 8 September 2007, . 32 Dreyfus, p. 307. 33 BBC, ‘Britain Enjoys Digital Boom’, 23 August 2007, 23 August 2007, . 34 Alexa: ‘Top 500 Websites’, 8 September 2007; 8 September 2007, . 35 M. Heidegger, ‘Science and Reflection’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt (trans), Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1977, p. 157. 36 H. L. Dreyfus and C. Spinosa, ‘Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology’, 12 May 2006, 21 August 2007, , p. 2. 37 J. J. Copeland, ‘Too Faced? Reconsidering Friendship in the Digital Age’, in this volume. 38 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 32. 39 Ibid., p. 24. 40 Ibid., p. 24. 41 Ibid., p. 25. 42 Ibid., p. 26. 43 Ibid., p. 26. 44 Dreyfus, p. 307. 45 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 28. 46 O’Brien, p. 35. 47 Ibid., p. 35. 48 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 32. 49 Ibid., p. 32. 50 Ibid., p. 34. 51 21 August 2007, 21 August 2007, . 52 11 September 2007, 11 September 2007, . 53 Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 4.

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T. Sharon, ‘Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control’, in this volume.

Bibliography BBC, 2007, . Copeland, J. J., ‘Too Faced? Reconsidering Friendship in the Digital Age’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 101-123. Dreyfus, H. L., ‘Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. C. Guignon (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. Dreyfus, H. L. and Spinosa, C., ‘Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology’. 2005, . Dwyer, C., ‘Digital Relationships in the MySpace Generation: Results from a Qualitative Study’, in Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Computer Society Press, Big Island, Hawaii, 2007. Gorner, P., ‘Heidegger, Phenomenology and the Essence of Technology’. 2007, . Gray, J. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Granta Books, London, 2003. Heidegger, M., Bremen und Freiburger Vorträge. Petra Jaeger, Frankfurt am Main, 1994. —––, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. W. Lovitt (ed), Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1977. —––, ‘Science and Reflection’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. W. Lovitt (ed), Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1977. Inwood, M., Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford, 2005.

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______________________________________________________________ O’Brien, M., ‘Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”’, in Thinking Together: Proceedings of the IWM Junior Fellows’ Conference, Winter 2003. A. Cashin and J. Jirsa (eds), IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, Vol. 16, Vienna, Austria, 2004. Sharon, T., ‘Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 2953. Wrathall, M., How to read Heidegger. Granta, London, 2007. Leighton Evans, received his M. A. from the University of Wales, Lampeter and actually is commencing his PhD studies at Swansea University, researching the phenomenological impacts of online communication and ‘being online.’

PART II Cyber-Identity

My Self, My Avatar, My Rights? Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay Abstract This chapter will consider the particular nature of the relationship between the avatar and user in social virtual worlds for the purpose of understanding what legal rights and responsibilities may attach to the avatar in the event of interference with those rights. This chapter analyses various explanations of the nature and role of the avatar, including the concept of avatar as ‘cyborg,’ for the purpose of determining the impact that such a categorisation has upon the identification of appropriate legal rules in social virtual worlds. It concludes that the characterisation of the avatar/user relationship is a vital determinate of the appropriate laws and rules applicable to a particular online environment, however that characterisation may change over time and context, reflecting a range of different roles and purposes as the user’s online identity evolves. Key Words: Avatar, identity, cyborg, regulation, virtual worlds. ***** 1.

Introduction This chapter is an examination of the relationship between selfexpression, consumerism and identity in virtual worlds. In particular, the chapter presents a psycho-sociological analysis of the relationship between users and their avatars in social virtual worlds, and an assessment of the implications of this analysis for establishing legal rights in avatars. The chapter argues that normative questions relating to the extent to which users should have rights in their avatars necessarily depend upon the particular paradigm applied to understanding the relationship between users and avatars. It is important to understand that the relationship of user to avatar reflects a range of uses and purposes and therefore is a complex and changing relationship that responds to the specific circumstances of the engagement between user and avatar. An avatar in a social virtual world may reflect a different set of expectations and aspirations from an avatar in an online roleplaying game. Further, the user may develop different expectations with respect to the role of his or her avatar (or avatars) over time. Therefore one homogenous explanation of the avatar relationship may oversimplify the complex relationship that may evolve between user and avatar over time and in differing worlds and even contexts within those worlds.

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______________________________________________________________ 2.

Avatars in Social Virtual Worlds The term avatar, derived from the Sanskrit for ‘incarnation,’ has come to refer to a user’s online representation of herself or himself. 1 In this context, the term was originally used for a character in the 1985 computer game Ultima IV, before being popularised by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash. 2 The term, can mean any online representation of a user, including a simple screen name, the purely textbased constructs of early Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), a two-dimensional icon used on internet forums, a pre-set visual character used in computer games (such as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider or Fiona Belli in Haunting Ground), or a personalised three-dimensional visual representation used in social virtual worlds. Our current understanding of what amounts to an ‘avatar’ therefore lies on a continuum ranging from relatively simple forms of identity choices to choices that are becoming ever more complex, as virtual worlds become more sophisticated and immersive, and as the functionality of online bearers of identity increases. This continuum can, in fact, be traced to simple representations of players in traditional off-line games. In different ways, and to varying degrees, traditional games have always offered players a choice of in-game identity. In chess, for example players have the choice of black or white pieces and in Monopoly, the choice of racing car, top hat or shoe. The nature of in-game identity formation became more complex with the advent of formal role-playing games, which have at their very core the adoption of player-created in-game identities. These formal role-playing games (RPGs) have taken a variety of forms, ranging from live action games, such as How to Host a Murder, to traditional table-top strategy games, such as Dungeons and Dragons. The pencil-and-paper RPGs, such as Dungeons and Dragons, were the progenitors of the first digital RPGs, which emerged in academic computer networks in the late 1970s. These digital RPGs, which became known as MUDs, were purely text-based worlds that revolved around the creation of an in-game character, with a declared name, qualities, abilities and preferences. In early MUDs, player self-expression through their digital identity was severely constrained by the rules of the RPG and game-play. With the development of graphical MUDs, and the increasing functionality of MUD-based programs, the visual appearance of a user’s online character, as opposed to other characteristics of the avatar, became more significant. In the late 1990s, the increase in computing power and readily available internet connectivity resulted in the development of multi-user online graphical RPGs, known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. While there is considerable divergence among MMORPGs, they share a number of features, especially the extent to which activities are goal-oriented, often taking the form of ‘quests.’ Within this context, the progressive development of each user’s character through, for

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______________________________________________________________ example, the accumulation of ‘experience points’ is, at the very least, a significant objective. At the same time, the overall goal-oriented character of these MMORPGs establishes some constraints on the ability of a user to create and modify her or his online representation. For example, in World of Warcraft, a new player must choose her or his online representation, known as a ‘character,’ from two factions, ‘Alliance’ and ‘Horde,’ and ten playable races. MMORPGs must be distinguished from what may be termed social virtual worlds, which are essentially platforms for unstructured social interaction, rather than goal-oriented games. In social virtual worlds, such as Second Life, (SL) users can create and operate their avatars largely free from restrictions or rules. The visual appearance of the avatar assumes the utmost importance as it is the key medium for users to express themselves and their individuality, and the main way for users to signal their identity to other users. Consequently, a major activity in social virtual worlds consists of the customisation of the appearance of an avatar by, for example, the alteration of body shape, skin, eye colour, and hair colour or style. The extent to which a user is able to personalise her or his online representation and, correspondingly, the amount of time and resources invested in this activity, obviously influences the intensity of the relationship between the user and her or his avatar. Further, unlike MMORPGs which are based on fantasy or science-fiction environments, there is greater scope for users to create humanoid avatars, which may more accurately reflect their vision of self. There is greater capacity for merger between the identity of the user and the avatar given the humanoid appearance of the avatar as there is no requirement to embody and adopt the characteristics of a non-human race such as an elf, troll or faerie. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on an analysis of the relationship between users and avatars in those social virtual worlds, such as SL, that provide the greatest capacity for individual modification of avatar appearance. 3.

Identity Formation in Social Virtual Worlds In complex, technologically-mediated, post-modern societies, problems relating to identity - including the nature of self-identity and subjectivity - have become absolutely central to socio-political analysis. 3 This is related to the progressive disconnection of individual identities from traditional, more rigidly-defined, collective identities. For example, in his influential account of the differences between identity formation in traditional societies and in post-traditional societies, Giddens draws an important distinction between personal identity and social identity. 4 According to Giddens, the problem of identity is central to modern societies in ways that it was not in traditional societies, as traditionally identity was essentially externally determined, whereas in modern societies, self-identity

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______________________________________________________________ is made and not inherited. Thus, Giddens explained that, in post-traditional societies, identity is a ‘reflexive’ project, in which individuals must create themselves by means of their own narrative. In this way, Giddens was able to relate the contemporary focus on identity formation to broader institutional and political forces, including globalisation and the progressive fragmentation (or disintegration) of modern and postmodern societies. Further, as Filiciak has observed, appearance and identity have become an obsession in modern society, with the emergence of the capacity to fully develop and control an online identity providing the tools to exercise these preoccupations. Avatars provide users with the capacity to express and define themselves outside of the boundaries of the physical world. Online identity creation thus provides the ultimate avenue for realisation and materialisation of the project of identity creation, with users being able to see and interact through and with their manifested identity. 5 Problems of identity formation have been extensively applied to the online context by theorists, commencing with Sherry Turkle in her seminal work, Life on the Screen. 6 Largely through an exploration of text-based MUDs, Turkle essentially argued that the exploration of identity through online interactions could be therapeutic, involving a continual reconstruction of the self through simulation. Turkle drew an important connection between experimentation with online identities and postmodern theory, maintaining that online interactions illustrate the extent to which life is discontinuous, fragmented, episodic and consequences-avoiding. Given the considerable investment of the user in evolving the appearance of the avatar, it may be arguable that the user is both more conscious of the distance between the identity of the avatar and the user than in relation to other forms of online identity. The continually evolving and changing appearance of the avatar may create particular difficulties in characterising the relationship between the user and avatar. On his Liquid Learning blog, which examines issues of identity and online learning, Steven Warburton describes five typical stages of a user’s relationship with their avatar: from creating the avatar and overcoming competency and technical issues, bonding with the avatar and developing a sense of care through to frustration with the limitations of a single avatar leading to the fragmentation of identity to the possible adoption of multiple avatars serving different functions. He notes that: ‘the struggle to stabilise the tensions between multiple modes of existence within a single frame can lead to the spawning of a second avatar.’ He explains that this ‘can be a liberating experience for many as it suddenly frees the creator from the behavioural pressures that dominate formal settings even when they are translated into our virtual and imaginary worlds.’ 7 Applying Giddens’ concept of ‘reflexivity,’ we can interpret the more or less permanent embodiment of online identity in a particular online visual image involves a tentative creation of identity - one’s

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______________________________________________________________ own other - than the conditional incorporation of this identity into the user’s own narrative. It could also be that this is a more developed stage of the relationship with the avatar, as it moves from being a creation of the user reflecting the user’s own tastes, interests and desires, to a more stylised avatar, which is one of a portfolio of avatars operated by one user for different purposes, each reflecting one aspect of the user or serving one online purpose. These more highly developed avatars may also reflect the rules of particular groups or societies within the virtual world. Interestingly, the relative lack of constraints in social virtual worlds, such as SL, does not mean that such worlds are characterised by a lack of rules. Indeed, it appears that rules and ritualised behaviour, generated by communities of users, become relatively more important than in other online environments. For example, in SL there are distinct communities of users, such as Goreans and vampire bloodlines, whose interactions are characterised by extremely strict, and often quite detailed, rules of behaviour. 8 SL proudly refers explicitly to its objectives of maximising user individuality and creativity. For example, the Second Life FAQ states that ‘Second Life is a 3D digital world imagined and created by its Residents.’ Further, it explains: ‘Second Life provides near unlimited freedom to its Residents. This world really is whatever you make it, and your experience is what you want out of it.’ 9 Despite this aspiration, research conducted by Maria Bäcke, a PhD candidate in digital gaming, indicates that a majority of residents in SL recreate existing social orders and cultural patterns which shape the social spaces of SL, acting as a guide and control upon identity formation. 10 The rules imposed by the communities are strictly applied by the owners of the relevant sims. 11 Essentially, avatars participate in the knowledge that they consent to abide by the rules on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis, and it appears that many people are happy to participate on such conditions, knowing there is scope to go and create alternative versions in other spaces. This indicates that the most powerful organising principles in this open society are in fact localised group or community rules, which are rigidly enforced. A possible explanation of the importance of community rules in social virtual worlds can be found in the work of Judith Donath. Donath has applied signalling theory to investigate the revelation and withholding of identity information in online environments. 12 Signalling theory, which analyses honesty and deception in communications, models the relationship between ‘signals’ and ‘qualities’ in order to show why some signals are reliable, while others are not. In social virtual worlds such as SL, the most important signals, such as name, avatar appearance and profile information, are both more highly controlled, and more malleable, than in offline contexts. Offline, there are a range of complex signals that are transmitted and

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______________________________________________________________ processed, both consciously and unconsciously, concerning individual identity. For example, there are subtleties of gestures, body language, eye movement and voice intonation that are difficult to replicate online. As the accuracy of identity signals is more difficult to authenticate online, there is a need to develop a range of online signals, such as the exaggerated appearance of avatars and adherence to ritualised forms of behaviour. Thus, the exaggerated appearance of avatars, which often take the form of highly stereotyped characters, transmits immediate visual signals that may form the basis for future interactions. Similarly, the adoption of strongly rule-based forms of behaviour serves to ease anxieties about predictability in the absence of the full range of offline signals. In this respect, there are apparent parallels between communities in social virtual worlds and prison-based communities where the inmates are stripped of the accustomed richness of signals which form the basis for interactions outside of the prison walls. 13 There is also a corresponding convergence of online and offline models of identity formation, arising in part, because identity formation increasingly incorporates a virtual component. Consider, for example, the success of virtual communities such as Facebook, illustrating increasing dependence on the virtual for a continuing affirmation of self-identity. Users spend a great deal of time and energy decorating their pages or profiles with symbols which reflect their own image and construction of identity. These symbols, such as images from films, television shows and other sources of popular culture take the place of descriptions of their own personality, i.e., these are symbols or shorthand for who they are and who they like. 14 Users frequently create separate Facebook pages for their avatar and there are several applications within Facebook that facilitate ‘teleporting’ directly into SL. Such applications further blur the distinction between on and offline identity and provide the opportunity for the user to observe both themselves and their avatar as the ‘other.’ As Copeland discusses elsewhere in this volume, ‘humanity is, by nature, a social animal.’ 15 Whether through social networks or social virtual communities such as SL, people will seek to associate with other people with whom they share common interests and values. In the offline world in order to identify themselves to potential ‘friends’ people will adopt a particular mode of dress and appearance symbolising their belonging to a particular group or culture, such as goth, geek or anime. In social networks this same behaviour will be manifested through wallpaper, clips, profiles and games such as ‘What Star Wars character are you?’, whereas in social virtual worlds it will be through customisation of avatar appearance. As Copeland notes in his exploration of the concept of online friendship, these displays of friendship groups allow us to see that relationships, both on and offline are socially constructed and will change and evolve over time. He argues that the fact that the friendships must of necessity be constructed through the use of

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______________________________________________________________ symbols does not undermine their value as friendships. Furthermore, as the virtual continues to ‘bleed’ into the real with the development of virtual ‘friendships’ the distinction between online and offline friends will continue to blur. As technology and portable mobile devices become the medium either of choice or necessity for interacting with one’s friends, it appears that people are adopting and using some of the signalling behaviour learnt online to the offline context with an emphasis on appearance, and on the superficial and transient, over depth and persistence. The use of ‘txt’ speak, emoticons and other symbolic shorthand has taken the place of in-depth conversations and correspondence. It is likely therefore that skills learnt and friends made in the virtual environments such as virtual social worlds, will be imported back into the real world. In fact, the popular media delights in stories about love triangles and affairs which lead to real world crimes, such as the woman who stalked the man whose avatar who had jilted her in SL. 16 Such events demonstrate the importance that users place on their online relationships and hint at the potential merger between the online and offline identity. 4.

Implications of Identity Formation in Social Virtual Worlds Post-modern theories of identity formation, on the fluid and fragmented nature of the self, are bifurcated into those who see the fragmented self as an opportunity for the creative exploration of multiple identities and those who regard these developments as, overall, a form of impoverishment of the self. Sherry Turkle, for example, highlights the potentially liberating features of the discontinuous, fractured and episodic nature of post-modern life. As opposed to this, Richard Sennett, in his book The Corrosion of Character, sees the fragmented self as degenerating into a kind of ‘supermarket identity,’ where each individual is in a perpetual state of anxiety about self-identity, which is dealt with by purchasing and consuming scraps of identity, that never quite fill the void. 17 As Elliott has characterised these competing tendencies: On the one hand, there is recognition that global culture reshapes the self in powerful, and sometimes disturbing and frightening, ways. Accompanying this, there is an attempt to understand the reconstitution of the self under cultural conditions of fragmentation, dislocation and dispersal. On the other hand, there is the desire to celebrate the potentialities of postmodern identity to assess the liberating possibilities opened for the self, self-identity and subjectivity. 18 These competing tendencies in postmodern identity theory are related to the coexistence of modern and postmodern identities, a feature of

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______________________________________________________________ contemporary societies that has been explored in the work of the sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman. 19 Modern identity formation is based on a unitary concept of self-mastery, control of the contingent that leads to an idealised view of the perfectible self. The modern self is therefore defined in terms of a coherent project or narrative but, as the perfectible self can never be achieved, there is a void at the centre of the self that leads inexorably to alienation. The postmodern self, on the other hand, is based on the avoidance of any fixed identity, or ordered structures, with life being a series of fragmented, short-term events. The coexistence of the modern self and the postmodern self in contemporary societies has significant consequences when set against the backdrop of globalised market economies. The modern self is caught in a Sisyphean search for an ideal identity - for self-fulfilment - which the market promises can be purchased and consumed, but the postmodern self can only ever be ephemeral, as identity must continually be rebooted. Personal identity therefore becomes a process of continual questioning, which can never have any fixed answers. It is in this broader context that identity experimentation by means of the visual appearance of avatars must be positioned. 5. Self-Expression, Consumerism and Identity Formation in Social Virtual Worlds Just as there are two main interpretations of postmodern identity formation, there are two interpretations of the form of identity experimentation consisting of the acquisition and modifications of an avatar. On the first view, these activities are a form of creative selfexploration, with the avatar comprising an extension of the offline self, and social virtual worlds presenting opportunities for forms of identity play that are not available offline, where the self is necessarily framed by a physical body. Applying this view, which feeds into the well-established cyberliberation and cyber-transcendence memes, avatars represent an opportunity for liberation and social virtual worlds are an important, relatively unconstrained, platform for self-development. The second view is that the fully customisable avatar represents the reductio ad absurdum of globalised consumer culture. On this view, the search for postmodern identity is neatly encapsulated by the obsessive, and apparently endless, modification of the appearance of avatars by means of the purchase of new skins, apparel or other accoutrements. Thus, the self is condemned to the interminable, but unsatisfying, consumption of the virtual self. The two views of identity formation via avatars are associated with two fundamentally different ways of conceptualising the relationship between a user and her or his avatar. Applying the first view, if we interpret an avatar as a vehicle for self-exploration, then it represents a virtual extension of the

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______________________________________________________________ user as a person; a creative projection of the self into the virtual world. On this approach, rights in or over avatars should be conceptualised as essential to the protection and promotion of the dignity and autonomy of users in virtual worlds. If the second, consumerist view is adopted, however, avatars are reducible to mere tools or puppets, to be used for the predominantly instrumentalist purposes of the user. On this approach, the relationship between the user and her or his avatar is essentially proprietorial, with the user having ownership rights in the avatar which may be readily bought and sold in the marketplace. On one view, rights in an avatar are an aspect of the rights that a user has in her or his person, whereas on the other view, avatars are little more than tools for the satisfaction of the consumerist needs of the user. In determining a legal regime that establishes user rights in avatars, it is of the utmost importance to choose which paradigm to apply. In this respect, the key normative legal issues are, first of all, whether the rights of users in avatars should be able to override the terms of service established by the provider of a social virtual world and, secondly, assuming that there is a case for overriding the terms of service, what are the circumstances, and on what basis, should the terms of service be overridden? 6.

The Avatar as Cyborg In their seminal article on ‘Laws of Virtual Worlds,’ Hunter and Lastowka assert that ‘social interactions within virtual worlds operate through avatars as cyborg entities that combine the controller and the representation into a single social unit.’ 20 They argue therefore that the avatar is essentially the vehicle for the controller’s desire to experiment and engage with the online world. This notion of cyborg as a technological extension of the human operator, derived from Haraway, who described the cyborg as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,’ has been picked up by others. 21 How complete though is the merger between the controller and the avatar, making it truly a cyborg? In her study of identity and interaction in a text based MUD, Reid asks: ‘Where are the lines drawn between representation, simulation and actualisation? How far do genuine feelings draw virtual actions into the realm of the actual?’ 22 The answer to these questions determine the boundaries between avatar and user. As Kirkland observes, elsewhere in this volume, with respect to the avatar in a role-playing game (Haunting Ground) where character choice is limited and appearance and movements are predetermined, there is both closeness and a distance between the player and the avatar: ‘For a significant part of the game experience avatars are like tools or vehicles through which tasks are achieved, rather than characters with identity, personality, and history.’ 23 Kirkland describes how his feeling of closeness or embodiment

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______________________________________________________________ actually changes according to the nature of the gameplay. Where the gameplay is most direct and there is a merger of player and avatar through direct control of her actions, the player experiences the sense of the avatar as an extension of the player’s body. Where the player is less in control of the avatar, such as during cut-scenes and panic mode, the gameplay is disrupted and the player is reminded of the ‘otherness’ of the avatar, Fiona. Thus even within the one gamespace, the relationship between player and avatar experiences several separate states. As Kirkland notes: ‘The avatar’s nature is multiple rather than singular, and varied rather than uniform. This produces different subjective positions, and different experiences of embodiment, according to the body of the avatar and the body of the user.’ 24 This complexity of avatar/user relationship is reflected across virtual worlds. However it is arguable that in social virtual worlds there is less opportunity for the merger of user and avatar to be disrupted as users seek to engage through a stable identity in order to fully engage with their chosen community. As Reynolds has noted, in social virtual worlds social capital is extremely important to the community and in order to generate social capital there must be some degree of stability. He notes that ‘[k]ey to that stability is stability of identity.’ 25 As noted above, avatars in social virtual worlds can be extensively customised. However, once created an avatar develops an identity and reputation which is attached to the particular image, which may be considered separate from the identity and reputation of the user. Such highly developed avatars reflect the investment of a great deal of time, money and, often, skill, and users thus feel an attachment to the avatar in terms of reputation and integrity (personal rights) and property. Each of these reflects a different set of legal rights and responsibilities. Classification of the avatar as cyborg therefore has consequences for the legal classification of acts. As Hunter and Lastowka note, increasingly inhabitants of virtual worlds will demand recognition of their cyborg rights. 26 Users may litigate to protect their inworld identity and reputation relying upon legal principles such as privacy and defamation and to protect their investment on the basis of intellectual property and contract. Despite the fact that the relevant terms of service and community rules purport to contain an exhaustive description of the rules of participation, users maintain an attachment to their real world rights, whether perceived or real, and will resort to real world courts to redress perceived wrongs. 27 There have been cases relating to theft of inworld items and entire user accounts 28 and SL has spawned a number of copyright infringement cases. 29 The demand to litigate with respect to perceived infringement of rights may reflect entrenched real world habits as much as investment of real world money and effort in the online creations. The next section will consider some recent cases which reflect these issues.

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Avatar Identity: Current Legal Issues The primary source for rights and rules affecting avatars is, as with everything else regarding virtual worlds, the relevant Terms of Service (ToS). The ToS are generally a one-sided contract for the benefit of the service provider, the only option the user having in the event of not being content with the ToS is exit. Even in SL, which promotes itself as the only world which grants rights of ownership to users of their creations, none of these rights are clearly defined, either in the ToS or any other Linden decree (a common form of rule making in SL). The relevant ToS state that users retain copyright and all other intellectual property rights with respect to the content they create ‘to the extent that’ they have such rights under applicable law. Whilst the grant of ownership of copyright in creations in SL is well publicised, less well promoted are the exceptions also granted by the ToS. Users grant Linden Lab a worldwide licence to use, reproduce and distribute their content, including the right to delete such content at any time. Further, at the core of much user-generated content will be Linden Lab intellectual property, such as textures and scripts. The user is expressed to have rights to use such Linden content only whilst they in compliance with the ToS. The power of the ToS and the relationship of these contractual rules with the general law is currently being considered in litigation by Blizzard, the operators of World of Warcraft (WoW), against MDY, the creators and distributors of Glider, a program which facilitates automated play within WoW. 30 WoW players are granted a licence to use the WoW platform software upon purchase of the software, subject to the terms contained in the relevant agreements. Use of the software in conjunction with any modifications or unauthorised third party software is explicitly prohibited. Blizzard claims that through the manufacture and distribution of the Glider program, MDY has facilitated the infringement of copyright by WoW players by causing them to use the WoW software in breach of their agreement with Blizzard, thus rendering MDY liable for indirect infringement under the inducement principles articulated by the US Supreme Court in MGM v Grokster. 31 In a recent decision of the United States District Court of Arizona, the Judge held that the use of WoW is governed by two agreements: the EULA and the Terms of Use. As the EULA provided a prohibition on modification or copying of the WoW software other than in accordance with the two agreements, operation of WoW in conjunction with Glider which is specifically prohibited by the agreements, was therefore outside the scope of the licence granted to users and therefore transformed the use of the WoW software into an infringing use. The case is continuing, however this conclusion regarding the scope and effect of the EULA is extremely important, indicating that the scope of the copyright licence granted to users can be limited by express agreement in the EULA. This implies that virtual world providers can provide limitations beyond the scope of the copyright

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______________________________________________________________ licence upon the use of the platform software, hence enjoying an enhanced level of rights over the platform code (copyright plus) and preventing the use of software designed by third parties to run in conjunction with the platform software, such as modifications (mods) and add-ons. It also provides the virtual world provider with remedies with respect to breach of copyright and breach of contract. Although SL allows and indeed encourages the development and use of enhancements to SL, it has already had to reconsider this open policy with respect to the ‘copybot’ program, which facilitated wholesale copying of inworld items, leading to mass copying of items without the owner’s permission. 32 Copybot has now been banned by Linden decree. Thus an ‘open’ position is quickly changed when unanticipated consequences arise. So is it possible to clearly define in legal terms what the position is regarding a person’s ownership of intellectual property rights with respect to their avatar in SL? The lack of clarity of the ToS is further exacerbated by the practical fact that everything that is created within SL is currently stored on the Linden Lab servers in the form of computer code. Therefore, although the residents may think of their creations in terms of ‘things,’ such as clothing or buildings, they are really the output of a computer program. That program is created and owned by Linden Lab. If Linden Lab were to go out of business overnight, and their servers seized and all content residing thereon deleted, the avatar, no matter how lovingly created, or how much money had invested in it, would cease to exist outside of photos and imagination. Thus, as Marcus has recently observed: ‘the total copyright environment is one of unclear rights and potentially infringing creative activity.’ 33 What does this mean for projects which purport to offer users the ability to take their avatar outside of the walled garden of the game or world in which that avatar was created? In October 2007, Linden Lab and IBM announced a joint project to develop open standards to enable avatars to roam from one virtual community to the next. The goal is let a person create a digital alter-ego that can travel to many virtual worlds, keeping the same name, look and even digital currency. The companies speak of ‘a truly interoperable 3D Internet.’ Of course, this implies that a user is free to take the avatar they have created in one world and move it into the next. 34 The sole legal consideration of the ownership issues in the virtual world context to date has been by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in a case which commenced in 2006. The plaintiff, Marc Bragg, a US attorney known in SL through his avatar, Marc Woebegon, owned a number of land parcels in SL and also operated a business selling virtual fireworks. Linden Lab alleged that in April 2006, Bragg obtained a parcel of SL land in breach of the ToS. Linden Lab terminated Bragg’s account and confiscated all of his inworld assets (estimated value between US$6000-8000). Bragg brought an action against

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______________________________________________________________ Linden Lab and CEO Philip Rosedale, claiming breach of the trade practices and consumer protection law, fraud, conversion, breach of contract, unjust enrichment and other claims in tort and contract. Linden Lab and Rosedale resisted the action on a number of grounds, in particular, they filed a motion to compel arbitration of the dispute in San Francisco in accordance with the ToS. Robreno J held that the arbitration clause was unenforceable on the basis of procedural and substantive unconscionability. The case was settled in October 2007 without resolving the question of whether what Bragg possessed was virtual property and thus not providing any guidance on avatar rights. It is likely that Linden wanted to avoid opening up the question of whether any rights existed in Bragg’s in-world assets outside the Lindenfavourable ToS. A key issue with the manifestation of online identity in both virtual worlds and social networking communities relates again to the notion of signalling. Wanting to identify one’s avatar as a belonging to a community or sub-culture necessitates adopting the garb and appearance of that sub-culture, such as Gor or Star Wars. This may generate copyright and other intellectual property issues. For example, in the Star Wars sim residents are required to appear in Star Wars themed clothing and use appropriately themed weapons. Interestingly however, they are forbidden from actually representing themselves as characters from any of the seven movies or associated licensed extensions, such as graphic novels, novels or cartoons. This means that users have a limited range of options to work with in order to stay true to the canon. These issues were considered in litigation commenced by Marvel Comics against NCSoft, the developers of the MMORPG City of Heroes. 35 Players in City of Heroes create their own avatar from the range of options provided by the game software, creating their own name, appearance, identity, powers and back story. Marvel alleged that NCSoft was liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement because it facilitated the creation of characters which resembled Marvel characters such as Wolverine, Storm or Phoenix (from X Men), Spider Man and the Hulk, by providing players with a menu of options covering appearance, powers, archetypes and origin. NCSoft did not screen or censor any of the avatars created, however the name which could be chosen was limited by a list blocking third party names and prohibited terms. The case attracted a lot of attention, given the implications for other operators of RPGs, including offline versions of costumed role play. The Memorandum of Points filed by the Amici Curiae observed: This is not a case of one fictional work borrowing from another. Rather, a community of real individuals is at issue. The fact that this community is rendered visible through a

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______________________________________________________________ computer screen does not alter the fact that these are real individuals and not fictional characters. Any greater character “story” exists only in the private imagination of each discrete player, and its contours are understood only by that player. This imaginative context is not a “work”. The only recognizable work is a costume worn by players. It is established law that there is no copyright in costumes when such costumes are worn by real individuals. 36 The case was settled at the end of 2005 amid allegations that the characters in contention in the case had been created by employees of Marvel Comics. The case is however important for the issues that it raises regarding the scope within virtual worlds for users to adopt existing cultural symbols as part of their visual and other characteristics. Users were concerned that their ability to adopt images from well-known super hero characters would undermine their relationship to the City of Heroes environment. If you cannot wear a red cape, how else can you send the signal regarding which superhero you identify most closely with? This scenario raises much bigger questions regarding the scope for experimentation and exploration through user created content, and it is likely that virtual worlds will provide the arena for much larger legal battles on this front. 37 Another development is the increasing interest in marketing to avatars in-world. This raises the question of to whom the marketing is targeted, the avatar itself or the person behind the avatar? 38 Notably, the operators of online communities retain the ownership of data generated about the user and this data may prove to be extremely valuable, in terms of transaction patterns, data about consumption and friendship groups. Privacy rights have yet to be created for avatars, yet of course, much of their data would map neatly against the interests of the human behind the avatar. Again, it is likely that users are not aware of the rights they give away in the standard ToS. For example, the SL ToS provide that Linden may observe and record user interactions within SL, and share that information with third parties. Further, Linden may collect and share general and demographic information, and may track, record, observe and follow your actions within SL. 39 Such rights may be become more valuable and contentious with the rise of new ‘consumer worlds’ such as Kaneva and Sony Home, which encourage the user to create an avatar which is a virtual clone, programmed with the user’s personal details and preferences. The ability to protect the identity, privacy and integrity of such an avatar may be even more important than with respect to the lovingly created social butterflies of SL.

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Conclusions We are only beginning to understand the psychological and social processes underlying the creation and use of virtual world avatars and still further away from resolution of questions of avatar rights. What is clear is that, as users become more closely bonded with their avatars and invest more of themselves in those creations, they will become more concerned with protecting that investment, and the expressions of self-embodied in those creations. Also, as social worlds emerge into more commercial environments, the protection of the information and creativity embodied in those avatars will become more important. It may be necessary to curtail the power of the ToS by introducing general laws that respect and protect the rights of the virtual self, through the grant of rights such as privacy and freedom of expression. Those laws will need to recognise the subtleties of the relationship between avatar and user. Avatars provide us with the opportunity and means to express ourselves beyond the limitations and restrictions of the physical world. Social virtual worlds go even further than MUDs and MMORPGs in facilitating the manifestation of identity because they remove the need to engage in predetermined role-play, therefore facilitating the creation of beings that represent most closely our idealised and developed image of ourselves. However, given the preoccupation of modern society with cultural objects, users still need to replicate and recycle images from popular culture, which carry with them extensive meaning. This will inevitably give rise to claims of copyright infringement. The law will need to evolve to accommodate the needs of users and their cyborg manifestations in ways that encourage identity exploration in digital environments, respecting the desires of users to explore, develop and manifest their identity in ways that are meaningful and necessary to fully engage in postmodern society.

Notes 1

See ‘Avatar (Computing)’, in Wikipedia, June 2005, viewed 4 June 2008, . 2 N. Stephenson, Snow Crash, ROC, London, 1992. 3 A. Elliott, Concepts of the Self, 2nd Edition, Polity, Cambridge, 2007. 4 A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991. 5 M. Filiciak, ‘Hyperidentities, Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader, M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron, Routledge, New York, 2003, pp. 90-92. 6 S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1996. See further, S. L. Calvert, ‘Identity Construction

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______________________________________________________________ on the Internet’, in Children in the Digital Age: Influences of Electronic Media on Development, S. L. Calvert, A. B. Jordan, R. R. Cocking (eds), Praeger, Wesport, Connecticut, 2002, pp. 57-70, and J. S. Donath, ‘Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community’, in Communities in Cyberspace, M. Smith and P. Kollock (eds), Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 29-59. 7 S. Warburton, ‘Loving Your Avatar: Identity, Immersion and Empathy’, Liquid Learning, viewed 7 January 2009, . 8 Gorean society, modelled on John Norman’s Chronicles of Gor series, is a master/slave society with extraordinarily strict rules: see A. Fate, ‘The Problems of Gor - Part 1: Philosophy, Society, Conditioning’, The Second Life Herald, 27 November 2006, viewed 10 June 2008, . For an example of a SL game involving vampire bloodlines see: ‘The Thirst: Bloodlines’, viewed 8 June 2008, . 9 Second Life, FAQ, viewed 7 January 2009, . 10 M. Bäcke ‘Self, Setting and Situation in Second Life’, in Literary Art in Digital Performance, Continuum Books, forthcoming 2009, draft on file with the author. 11 A ‘sim’ refers to a particular region or island owned and operated by an individual, derived from the fact that a region of 256m x 256m (65,536 m²) area is hosted on a particular simulator process (sim). (This colloquial use of the term is technically imprecise as multiple regions can in fact be hosted on a single sim process), see , viewed 8 January 2009. 12 J. Donath, Signals, Truth, and Design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 13 On ritual behaviour in prison gangs see K. A. Cheeseman, ‘Importing Aggression: An Examination and Application of Subculture Theories to Prison Violence’, The Southwest Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2003, pp. 24-38. 14 See B. Williams, ‘What South Park Character Are You?: Popular Culture, Literacy, and Online Performances of Identity’, Computers and Composition, Vol. 25, 2008, pp. 24-39. 15 J. J. Copeland, ‘Shared Spaces: Seeking Real Insights from Virtual Friendships’, in Humanity in Cybernetic Environments, D. Riha (ed), InterDisciplinary Press, Oxford, 2010, p. 210. 16 The Age, 27 August 2008, ‘Second Life Stalker to Face Kidnap Charges’, viewed 8 January 2009,

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______________________________________________________________ . 17 R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Norton, New York, 1998. 18 Elliott, pp 142-143. 19 Z. Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995; Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. 20 F. G. Lastowka and D. Hunter, ‘The Laws of the Virtual Worlds’, California Law Review 92, No. 1, 2004, 63. 21 D. Haraway ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, D. Haraway, Routledge, New York, 1991, pp. 149-181. See, for example, E. Reid, Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities, MA Thesis, 1994, viewed 25 August 2008 , ‘MUD characters are much more than a few bytes of computer data - they are cyborgs, a manifestation of the self beyond the realms of the physical, existing in a space where identity is self-defined rather than pre-ordained.’ (Chapter Three). 22 Reid, op cit. 23 E. Kirkland ‘Experiences of Embodiment and Subjectivity in Haunting Ground’, p. 133 in this volume. 24 Ibid., p. 140. 25 R. Reynolds ‘The Four Worlds Theory’, Terra Nova, 28 August 2005, viewed 9 January 2009, . 26 Lastowka and Hunter, p. 73. 27 For a contrary view of the relationship between virtual worlds and real worlds laws see R. Bartle ‘Virtual Worldliness: What the Imaginary Asks of the Real’, New York Law School Law Review 49, 2004, p. 19. 28 TechnoLlama, ‘Woman Jailed for Killing Avatar’, 24 October 2008, viewed 20 December 2008, , deletion of avatar account; G. Lastowka, ‘Virtual Crime Update’, Terra Nova, 23 October 2008, viewed 20 December 2008, , theft of a number of valuable virtual items under physical duress. 29 E. Reuters, ‘Settlement Reached in Kenzo Copyright Case’, Second Life News Centre, 4 December 2007, viewed 20 December 2008, .

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______________________________________________________________ 30

MDY Industries LLC v Blizzard Entertainment, Inc CV-06-2555-PHXDGC, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 53988, at *1 (D. Ariz. July 14, 2008), and motion for permanent injunction and alternative motion to amend the judgment denied, No. CV-06-2555-PHX-DGC, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 78432, at *1 (D. Ariz. Sept. 18, 2008). 31 Writing for a unanimous court Souter J stated that ‘one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties’, 545 U.S. 913 (2005) at 931. 32 Official SL Blog, ‘Use of CopyBot and Similar Tools a ToS Violation Tuesday’, November 14th, 2006, viewed 9 January 2009, . 33 T. Marcus ‘Fostering Creativity in Virtual Worlds: Easing the Restrictiveness of Copyright for User-Created Content’, New York Law School Law Review, Vol. 52, 2008, pp. 68-69. 34 See further: , (New York Times), viewed 8 June 2008. 35 Court documents available at: , viewed 7 January 2009. 36 Marvel Enterprises, Inc and Marvel Characters, Inc, v NCSoft Corporation, Cryptic Studios, Inc and NC Interactive, Case No CV-04-9253 RGK, Memorandum of Points and Authorities of Amici Curiae Legal and Cultural Studies Scholars in Support of Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment, 19 December 2005, 4. 37 See further A. Adrian ‘No One Knows Tou are a Dog: Identity and Reputation in Virtual Worlds’, Computer Law & Security Report, Vol. 24, 2008, p. 366 and M. Burri-Nenova, User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity, NCCR Trade Working Paper No 2009/1, January 2009, viewed 7 January 2009, available at: . 38 P. Hemp ‘Avatar Based Marketing’, Harvard Business Review, June, 2006, 48. 39 Second Life, Terms of Service, viewed 5 June 2008, .

Bibliography Adrian, A., ‘No One Knows You are a Dog: Identity and Reputation in Virtual Worlds’. Computer Law & Security Report 24, 2008.

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______________________________________________________________ Bartle, R., ‘Virtual Worldliness: What the Imaginary Asks of the Real’. New York Law School Law Review 49, 2004. Bauman, Z., Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Blackwell, Oxford, 1995. —––, Postmodern Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. Burri-Nenova, M., User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity. NCCR Trade Working Paper No 2009/1, January 2009, viewed 7 January 2009, . Calvert, S., ‘Identity Construction on the Internet’, in Children in the Digital Age: Influences of Electronic Media on Development. S. L. Calvert, A. B. Jordan, R. R. Cocking (eds), Praeger, Wesport, Connecticut, 2002, pp. 57-70. Copeland, J. J., ‘Shared Space: Seeking Real Insights from Virtual Friendships’, in Humanity in Cybernetic Environments. D. Riha (ed), InterDisciplinary Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. 209-217. Cheeseman, K., ‘Importing Aggression: An Examination and Application of Subculture Theories to Prison Violence’. The Southwest Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2003, pp. 24-38. Donath, J., Signals, Truth, and Design. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. —––, ‘Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community’, in Communities in Cyberspace. M. Smith and P. Kollock (eds), Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 29-59. Elliott, A., Concepts of the Self. 2nd Edition, Polity, Cambridge, 2007. Filiciak, M., ‘Hyperidentities, Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader. M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron (eds), Routledge, New York, 2003, pp. 90-92. Giddens, A., Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991.

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______________________________________________________________ Hemp, P., ‘Avatar Based Marketing’. Harvard Business Review 48, June 2006. Kirkland, E., ‘Experiences of Embodiment and Subjectivity in Haunting Ground’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 125-147. Lastowka, F. G. and Hunter, D., ‘The Laws of the Virtual Worlds’. California Law Review 92, No. 1, 2004. Marcus, T., ‘Fostering Creativity in Virtual Worlds: Easing the Restrictiveness of Copyright for User-Created Content’. New York Law School Law Review 52, 2008. Reid, E., Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities. MA Thesis, 1994, viewed 25 August 2008, . Reynolds, R., ‘The Four Worlds Theory’. Terra Nova, 28 August 2005, viewed 9 January 2009, . Sennett, R., The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. Norton, New York, 1998. Turkle, S., Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1996. Warburton, S., ‘Loving Your Avatar: Identity, Immersion and Empathy’. Liquid Learning, viewed 7 January 2009, . Williams, B., ‘What South Park Character Are You?: Popular Culture, Literacy, and Online Performances of Identity’. Computers and Composition 25, 2008. Dr. Melissa de Zwart is an Associate Professor, Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia. Dr. David Lindsay is an Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Too Faced? Reconsidering Friendship in the Digital Age Jordan J. Copeland Abstract The purpose of this essay is to evaluate the nature and significance of online friendships using Aristotle’s theory of friendship. The essay begins with the presupposition that we are social beings and thus depend upon a variety of social relationships for the cultivation of both identity and meaning, however alterable these may prove to be. This being the case, it will be important to integrate these various relationships, as well as the obligations they imply, into our lives in a relatively coherent way. Insofar as many of our social interactions have moved into digitally-mediated and online contexts, we must consider the relationship of these virtual interactions and associations to those that have traditionally comprised our social lives. Upon evaluation, I find that many of these relationships parallel our common understanding of traditional friendships. They develop in much the same way, serve much the same purpose, and often have much the same significance within the total lives of individuals as do friendships outside the online context. At their best, such relationships are capable of playing the moral role that Aristotle envisioned for them. Further, the nature and context of such relationships may reveal important insights for reconsidering our closest friendships outside of this environment. Key Words: Friendship, social networks, Aristotle, Facebook, ethics. ***** 1.

Introduction At the outset of his discussion of friendship, Aristotle observes, ‘no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all other goods.’ 1 While he will proceed to offer a nuanced articulation of why this is the case, Aristotle clearly does not believe that the basic proposition itself stands in particular need of validation. This proposition, I believe, retains its stability some 2,400 years later. Among the sources of its perpetual force is an equally persistent, if more complex, supposition: we are fundamentally social and relational beings. As such, we depend upon a complex weave of human associations, institutions, and structures - from the immediate and natural (e.g. progenitor and progeny) to the constructed and abstract (e.g. nation and citizen) - for the cultivation of personal identity and meaning. Accordingly, the qualitative and contextual diversity of human associations and institutions is both the catalyst for and the consequence of a significant measure of human intellectual and physical energy being spent in contemplating,

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______________________________________________________________ cultivating, regulating, and organizing the various spheres that make up our relational lives. These constructive and reflective efforts reveal that while nature and proximity make association inevitable for the majority of species, we are seemingly unique as humans in our expectation that we receive from such associations more than the basics of nurture, protection, companionship, and the like. 2 We look to others - to friends, family members, fellow citizens, and our political and religious communities - to sketch a meaningful conception of who we are and to mediate and provide for our fulfilment. Such concerns have propelled the history of ethical and political discourse concerning the function and regulative principles of families, friendships, communities and nations. Thus, while respective visions concerning the components of such fulfillment will vary in accord with the flux of history, culture, and individual experience, the intuition itself abides. Presently, technological advancements and increased globalisation have provided unique (often virtual) contexts for examining this intuition. The relative isolation and homogeneity of Aristotle’s polis has been infiltrated by a siege of information regarding the events and activities of people who reside far beyond the decaying borders of our once relatively insulated moral and political communities. However, spurred by an irrepressible impetus, we have come to perceive these technologies not only as conduits of information, but as an invitation to grow new mediums and communicative networks for manifesting our desire to connect with other human beings. As we pursue this course, we resort inevitably to questions that have outlined our participation in and evaluation of traditional social associations and communities. What are the foundations of these communities? What is my identity within them? What is my relationship to other members? How are this community and my identity within it related to my other associations and to other dimensions of my identity? It may be that the answers to these questions, and still others, will prove novel; they may expose new truths about human nature and individual identity. Yet until the questions themselves have quieted, there will be revealed in their very asking a testimony to this verity: we are social beings. Online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace present obvious examples of the types of communities I have been describing. Facebook, specifically, provides occasion for raising many questions that are germane to online or virtual communities generally, and vice versa. Likewise, any insights gleaned by evaluating the nature and significance of friendships within this context, will hopefully prove pertinent to considerations of other forms of relationships developed within online communities, such as those discussed elsewhere in this volume. However, rather than quarantine this discourse to the virtual context, central to the ambitions of this essay is an analysis of online or virtual friendships that demonstrates the significant parallels they share with our more traditional friendships. Toward this end, I

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______________________________________________________________ utilize Aristotle’s philosophical taxonomy of friendships to establish a realistic benchmark for evaluating virtual friendships. This analysis reveals that virtual friendships, like friendships generally, constitute a wide-range of relationships. It is common to make distinctions between and among friendship types relative to the intimacy they comprise, as well as our perception of the overall significance these relationships have in the ‘total lives’ of the participants. Accordingly, some friendships will be based solely on, say, the friends’ reciprocated exchange of pleasurable or material benefits or goods. However, as I hope to demonstrate, a number of these friendships will also represent relational spheres of significant moral worth to the real lives of the friends. That is, virtual relationships maintain the potential for exhibiting the same characteristics that Aristotle reserves for the most esteemed of friendship types, relationships which he identifies as integral to moral development and human happiness. Finally, I argue that online social communities, such as Facebook, may actually offer unique opportunities for developing within the framework of these friendships dispositions that overcome the sort of relational insularity that often threatens our most intimate relationships. 2. A.

Aristotle’s Theory of Friendship Background and Introduction Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has served as one of the most widely influential texts in the history of practical philosophy. In this work, Aristotle engages a stunning range of philosophical questions. Subjects currently consigned to the purview of delineated philosophical disciplines (e.g. philosophical anthropology, moral psychology, action theory, etc.) and specialised analytical treatises, are here marshaled in an ambitious attempt to supply an answer to the elusive question, How ought I to live? In response to this question, Aristotle articulates a teleological vision of human flourishing that is grounded in an anthropological principle, which isolates particular rational activities as uniquely and paradigmatically human. Against this conception of our nature, Aristotle proceeds to evaluate common opinions regarding what constitutes a good human life. Aristotle’s evaluation disqualifies and refines potential candidates and initiates his own prescriptive account of the states, activities, feelings, and goods that facilitate and comprise human happiness. What is most important for our purposes is that the vision he develops - as well as the method he employs - makes it clear that Aristotle recognises the ontological, psychological, and natural necessity that the good life be sought and realised within the context of a variegated web of social relationships. According to Aristotle, just as ethical questions cannot be divorced from political considerations, the individual agent cannot be excised from the intimate relationships, communities, and

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______________________________________________________________ social institutions wherein her life takes shape. Aristotle concurs, then, with the position articulated at the start of this essay, and contends that our happiness and fulfillment depends to a considerable degree on our success at forming and sustaining good social relationships. Hence, whatever else might be perceived by contemporary theorists as antiquated, overly ambitious, or irrelevant about Aristotle’s moral theory, his primary supposition regarding the importance of social relationships to our efforts to cultivate and realise our vision of happiness and fulfillment remains remarkably pertinent. One form of social relationship to which Aristotle dedicates a conspicuous amount of attention is friendship. While Aristotle’s esteem for friendship is not on its own anomalous within the history of practical philosophy (particularly within the classical period), the significant energy and space he dedicates to providing a classification of friendship types, and the specificity with which he articulates the nature of their relative contributions to human life, makes his study and its conclusions unique. Specifically, what is striking about Aristotle’s theory of friendship (besides his dedication of two of the NE’s ten books to the subject) is his unequivocal and persistent exhortation that friendships constitute an inimitable and necessary feature of a fulfilling life. Aristotle’s proposal may strike us as pedestrian. Who would disagree with his conviction that no one who would choose a life devoid of friends? Aristotle expects that his readers will need to look no further than their own experiences for confirmation that friends constitute one of life’s greatest joys. Aristotle intends, however, to lead his readers in an investigation of their shared intuitions regarding the importance of friendships in order to provide readers with a more substantial picture of just how significant friendships are and what it is about various kinds of friendship that make them so significant. Thus, if we are to make headway toward understanding how Aristotle’s theory of friendship might address contemporary questions and criticisms concerning the nature of online relationships, our investigation must progress from the observations that have recourse to comfortable and widespread agreement to an analysis of Aristotle’s notions concerning the specific and integral ways that friendships are necessary for moral development and, ultimately, happiness. According to Aristotle, the total life of the happy person will comprise both intellective and practical activities, but will, additionally, require a range of other (non-exclusively human) activities, as well as a variety of necessary material and relational goods, including friends. Friends constitute intrinsic goods, assisting one another in the formation and ongoing integration of an instructive vision of the good in their daily activities and pursuits. Friendships serve, similarly, as an irreplaceable context for the cultivation of the moral virtues, as the friends provide each other with

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______________________________________________________________ intimate and educative support in making decisions concerning actions and feelings that reflect a good and stable character. B.

Aristotle’s Definition and Taxonomy of Friendship Given that Aristotle considers friendship to be an essential ingredient in the good life, it is fitting that he takes care from the outset to stipulate a working definition of friendship, including its necessary and sufficient conditions. Whereas the necessary conditions he outlines serve to distinguish friendship from other forms of social relationships, the sufficient conditions stretch the definition widely enough to include under its canopy a range of relationships we might not immediately consider under the category of friendship. 3 The wide descriptive net Aristotle casts allows him, on the one hand, to identify friendly associations as ubiquitous and necessary, desired, as the author contends, in poverty and wealth, in sickness and health, in youth and old age, and even as potent remedy for civic enmity and injustice. 4 On the other hand, Aristotle’s conception of friendship carves out by comparison an inimitable space for the highest form of friendship within the life of the good person. One gets a sense of the sweep of Aristotle’s conception of friendship if one considers the preliminary definition Aristotle provides, which is summarised concisely by Diana Cates when she writes that, according to Aristotle, ‘friendship is a relationship of mutually known and reciprocated affection and well - wishing in which each person wishes and does good to the other for the other’s own sake.’ 5 In other words, friendships include a range of mutually recognised social relations, each of which involves the reciprocation of benevolence, beneficence, and affection. 6 Aristotle’s characterisation of friendships is, in many ways, parallel to the way these relationships are generally envisaged today. In a fashion similar to Aristotle’s rather generous definition, the title of friendship is today used colloquially to denote a wide range of social associations to which other descriptive categories might also be appropriately assigned (e.g. colleagues, classmates, neighbors, etc.). Nevertheless, when Aristotle includes the important condition of conscious reciprocity, he intends to distinguish friendship from other familiar classes of human relationships. Thus, for instance, in certain expressions of erotic love it might be altogether appropriate - if unfortunate - for the lover to explain despondently: ‘I am in love with her, but alas she is not in love with me.’ Conversely, most people would count it a confused confession if the individual were to say: ‘I am friends (or in a friendship) with her, but she is not friends (or in a friendship) with me.’ In like manner, the requirement of mutually acknowledged and reciprocated benevolence distinguishes friendship in important ways from, say, certain familial and religious forms of extended affection, where the affection and beneficence may go

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______________________________________________________________ unreciprocated. 7 In other words, as eclectic as the relationships embraced by Aristotle’s definition of friendship may be, we, like the author himself, generally restrict the category to relationships that include, to varying degrees, the mutually conscious reciprocation of goodwill. Utilising the stipulated conditions he has articulated, Aristotle proceeds to identify three categories of friendship, each differentiated from the others according to the good that explains the genesis and continuation of the relationship. According to Aristotle, friendships emerge and persist between two people because of a shared quality (or object) that is perceived by the participants to be in some way good, and which makes each lovable and attracted to the other. 8 Thus, to put it roughly, one’s care for one’s friend is explained by and contingent upon one’s friend exhibiting or providing occasion for the realisation of some good that one has erstwhile identified as being worthy of pursuit and affection. To the degree that friendship necessitates reciprocation, this good (or object of love) must be perceived as existent or realisable within the relationship by each participant. 9 According to Aristotle the affective objects that explain and ground the relationships fall under three broad and not necessarily mutually exclusive categories: the pleasant, the useful (or advantageous), and the good. Consequently, friendship, Aristotle writes: has three species, corresponding to the three objects of love. For each object of love has a corresponding type of mutual loving, combined with awareness of it, and those who love each other wish good to each other in so far as they love each other. 10 We will, henceforth refer generally to the three species of friendship by the approximate names of pleasure-friendships, advantage-friendships, and character-friendships. C.

Friendships Based upon Pleasure and/or Advantage Before taking up an analysis of friendship’s highest form, I offer the following observations and analysis concerning Aristotle’s characterisations of friendships based on advantage and pleasure. First and foremost, in regard to these relations it is important to recall that they retain their praiseworthy status by fulfilling the basic definitional conditions of friendship. In fact, the requirements of Aristotle’s ideal form of friendship and his description of its deficient forms are such that the great majority of our friendly associations would fall under the categories of pleasure and advantage. That is, although for Aristotle friendships that are constituted by the reciprocation of some form of pleasure or advantage will inevitably pale when examined vis-à-vis the foundation, intimacy, and importance of character-friendships, the former

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______________________________________________________________ meet all of the necessary requirements of friendship and, more importantly, are understood by Aristotle to contribute substantially to one’s social, material, and emotional well-being. Aristotle is invested in the position that the hypotheses proper to moral theory receive their validity principally from the practicable worth they bear in the real world. Thus, rather than degrade our very human and natural desire for pleasure and material security, or decry the relationships that proffer these goods, Aristotle recognises that in an inconstant world people will, in all stages of life and personal development, never cease to need the companionship and joy that a variety of friendships provide. 11 However, like all components in Aristotle’s teleological scheme, the value of these friendships - as well as the goods around which each is formed - must be evaluated in terms of their relative contributions to the participants’ pursuit of happiness (i.e., eudaimonia). 12 In other words, while the stages and contexts of one’s life are diverse, and one’s day to day experiences will comprise a multiplicity of varied activities, challenges, and needs, each of which creates a place and necessity for particular forms of association, all is for naught if these endeavors are engaged or inordinately prioritised in a way that ultimately diverts one’s attempts to live well. Therefore, while friendships of advantage and pleasure are endorsed by Aristotle as conducive to the good life, the value of these relationships is correlative to the value that their respective goods maintain in the total life of the happy person. Just as Aristotle clearly considers certain pleasures (i.e., goods of the body) and external or material goods to be necessary but not sufficient conditions of human fulfillment, the relationships founded upon and productive of these goods will not, even when added together, suffice as the highest forms of friendship within the life of the good person. This leads to a second observation. Each species of friendship is evaluated on the basis of the good that constitutes and explains it, which is, in turn, assigned a value commensurate to the position the relevant good ought to maintain within the lives of the friends, as prescribed in Aristotle’s hierarchical conception of activities and ends. Consequently, if the principal draw our friend has on us is relative to the pleasure or advantage we derive from our relationship to her, then the affections and goodwill that are reciprocated will be grounded in a good that represents only a limited dimension of each of our lives. That is, the relationship, so constituted, provides the friends with an amiable, but necessarily incomplete, picture of each other. Thus Aristotle explains: But those who love each other wish goods to each other [only] insofar as they love each other. Those who love each other for utility love the other not in his own right, but insofar as they gain some good for themselves from him.

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______________________________________________________________ The same is true of those who love for pleasure; for they like a witty person not because of his character, but because he is pleasant to them. 13 Aristotle, then, is claiming that while the relationships are indeed friendships and on that account valuable, the nature and intimacy of the relationship is mitigated because of the subordinate role that the good sustaining the relationship maintains in human life, as Aristotle understands it. As a consequence, the affection for one’s friend is based on an incomplete grasp of who she is. As Diana Cates explains, in such relationships one does indeed care for one’s friend, ‘It’s just that he conceives of her according to a narrow description of who she is relative to him, such that he is attracted to her and wishes good to her as someone who is of help to him or someone whose company brings him pleasure.’ 14 Because the reciprocated goodwill that constitutes these relationships is predicated upon each friend’s circumscribed vision of the other, and attached to a partial and malleable characteristic of the other’s total persona (including her goals, passions, character, etc.), the relationships are vulnerable to both change and dissolution in a way that friendships based upon goodness of character are not. Hence, regarding advantage-friendships Aristotle observes, ‘What is useful does not remain the same, but is different at different times. Hence, when the cause of their being friends is removed, the friendship is dissolved too, on the assumption that the friendship aims at these [useful results].’ 15 What one finds advantageous or pleasant is likely to change over the course of one’s life; and these changes often occasion the need to end certain relationships, or to initiate new ones. If the non-essential characteristic upon which the relationship is based fades away or is no longer of interest to the friend, ‘then the affection that brought the advantage-or pleasure-friends together in the first place and motivated its continuation will dissolve.’ 16 An illustration from daily life may help clarify the observations that have been made thus far concerning these forms of friendship. Say, for instance, that through conversation I learn that a co-worker shares my interest in baseball and, more importantly, my abiding loyalty to the Minnesota Twins. This co-worker informs me of a local pub that screens all of the Twins’ games. As a result, he and I begin a weekly ritual of going to the pub, having a few pints, and watching the game. As obsessed with baseball as we both may be, we still find time during the game to converse about work, our families, movies we enjoy, etc. However, for the most part our friendship (for neither I nor Aristotle would hesitate to call him my friend) is based upon our shared interests and these weekly visits to the pub. By all accounts, unless the relationship evolves into something more significant, this would resemble

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______________________________________________________________ what Aristotle identifies as a pleasure-friendship. Let us consider how Aristotle’s observations regarding such friendships might pertain to this example. First, as important as baseball may be to making my life enjoyable, its value is qualified when we consider its limited contribution to stimulating and cultivating the full range of goods that are included in a meaningful life. 17 Aristotle rejects the stoic’s suspicion of pleasure, and clearly believes some forms of pleasure are good and therefore necessary for the good life. However, the value of pleasure (or material goods) is subordinate to the importance of, say, intellectual and moral considerations. Thus, friendships based fundamentally on a mutual appreciation of baseball, music, sex, or other sources of pleasure, may be enjoyable and praiseworthy, but are valued relative to their overall contribution to a good life, as Aristotle envisions it. Less abstractly, I suspect Aristotle would maintain that this evaluation will bear out if I take the time to make my own comparison and to set the friendship I have with my co-worker against the more substantial relationships that I have in my life. Second, while I certainly enjoy my friend’s company and care for him, I base this care upon a rather narrow conception of both who he is and the elements of which his total life consists (and he regards me in the same way). Our conversations and activities are restricted by the coincidental overlap of mutual interests and the relative value these have in our lives. Thus, as Aristotle claims, my knowledge of and affection for my friend will be limited, especially when compared to other more intimate relationships that are based on a mutual love of more comprehensive and essential goods. As a result, the friendship will be vulnerable to a more expansive list of extenuating circumstances that might lead to its demise. Say, for instance, if my friend were to change jobs, become a teetotaler, or, God-forbid, debase himself by rooting for the New York Yankees, our friendship is subject to lapse or dissolve. It is not that the friendship was built from feigned affection, but rather that the affection and pleasures constituting the relationship were based largely upon a limited and more malleable characteristic. 18 D.

Character Friendship According to Aristotle, the finest and most praiseworthy friendships are those based upon goodness of character (i.e., the components of good character and virtue, including the goals, deliberation, actions and feelings that are characteristic of the virtuous person). Like the relations considered to this point, character-friendships are constituted by mutual affection. However, the inspiration for this love finds its source not solely in the mutual perception of the other as a source of pleasure or benefit that are subsidiary goods within the life of the good person, but a more inclusive understanding of the other. Thus, Neera Kapur Badwhar explains:

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______________________________________________________________ As Aristotle puts it, those who are “most truly friends” love each other “by reason of their nature,” i.e., for being the persons they are. The friend is seen as lovable on account of what she essentially is, and not just on account of incidental features. 19 Accordingly, character-friendships derive their relational primacy and intimacy via the foundation of their affections and well-wishing, and the more comprehensive picture of one’s friend this foundation provides. 20 As a result, character-friendships constitute a more substantial and necessary ingredient in one’s life. Moreover, given their intimacy and the intricate way they are woven into the fabric of one’s life, they can be counted on to be more constant and less vulnerable to the permutations of life. Martha Nussbaum, providing an expressive description of character-friendships, explains that in these relations: each person loves the other for what the other most deeply is in him or herself (kath’hauto), for those dispositions and those patterns of thought and feeling that are so intrinsic to his being himself that a change in them would raise questions of identity and persistence. 21 In other words, character-friends provide us companions with whom we share our most essential and persisting values, passions and pursuits. For Aristotle, it is hard to envisage a life that is truly happy and fulfilling yet devoid of such companionship. According to Aristotle, character-friendships comprise two persons who share, first and foremost, a vision of and desire for a good life, and, who, accordingly, jointly prioritise and choose activities that exhibit and cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues. However, as exclusive and indeed rare as they may prove to be, I do not believe Aristotle intends character-friendship to be restricted to persons of immaculate moral character, or those whom John M. Cooper would characterise as ‘moral heroes.’ 22 Characterfriendships are of central importance because of the distinctive contributions they make to the formation of good character. Consequently, it would be peculiar for Aristotle to require that these friends come to the relationship with a fully-formed character, when such relationships are themselves requisite in the formation of this character. At the very least, if Aristotle abrogates the educative and developmental function of character-friendship, then it becomes much more difficult to identify his reasons for holding them in such high esteem. 23

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______________________________________________________________ Furthermore, given what Aristotle has to say regarding the importance of certain social excellences (e.g. wit and generosity), Aristotle does not take the life of virtue to be the drab reserve of the stoical and ascetic. Rather, friendships predicated on virtue will-like the total lives of its participants - comprise reciprocated pleasure and material benefit. It is a testament to the quality and comprehensiveness of these relations that they will include the goods of other sorts of friendship. Character-friendships, like those of advantage and pleasure, are, according to Aristotle, a necessary component of a flourishing life for the same reasons they are so commonly regarded as such today. Friends make our lives enjoyable; they give us love, support, and encouragement. Our closest friendships provide us intersubjective contexts within which we share our interests and passions, as well as our fears and concerns. Even if these were their only contributions to our lives, we would continue to regard our friends as irrevocably valuable to our happiness. In addition to these elements, however, Aristotle understands our most intimate friendships as contexts within which we share and work out our values and character, elements which he identifies as integral to our identity. Thus, what is central to our most important intersubjective relationships is that an instructive vision of the good life is at the core of the relationship and stimulates a shared desire for its actualisation, which motivates the friends to cultivate virtuous dispositions of thought, feeling and behavior. As Nancy Sherman explains, ‘in choosing a character friend, we select “another self” (1170b6-7), who shares a sense of our commitments and ends, and a sense of what we take to be ultimately “good and pleasant” in living.’ 24 It will be the definitive task of these relations that they provide a context within which each participant’s conception of the good and her desire to live in its accord is bolstered and enlivened. Aristotle’s highest form of friendship, then, contributes to living well by providing an intimate and supportive interpersonal context for developing a thicker and more meaningful vision of the goods that ought to be pursued. Thus, in choosing a friend, Sherman explains, ‘one chooses to make that person a part of one’s life and to arrange one’s life with that person’s flourishing (as well as one’s own) in mind. One takes on, if you like, the project of a shared conception of eudaimonia.’ 25 Regarding this conception, the friends test and refine their suppositions in dialectical reflection with each other. They are personally and mutually invested in both collaborative and individual pursuits, and this infuses these activities with deeper meaning and value, as they count their own success (as well as that of their friend) in either context to be something in which they have had a hand. 26 Moreover, as they work toward a more precise account of a fulfilling life the more cognizant they become of both the intrinsic and

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______________________________________________________________ instrumental worth of their friendship. The relationship becomes more tightly integrated into their moral and intellectual activities, and will, in so doing, facilitate a pattern of life that is more continuously and extendedly engaged in these activities. In light of their shared understanding of the good life, the friends will recognise the importance of cultivating their good character and engaging in virtuous activities. Consequently, grasping the full significance of character-friendship requires an understanding of the way these relationships represent a context of mutual commitment to the cultivation and education of virtue. Hence, without diminishing our common perception and experience that our friendships are valuable because they are sources of pleasure, companionship, assistance, and the like, Aristotle proposes that are closest friendships are valuable also because they are relational contexts within which we share conversations, deliberations, and activities with others that reflect and further determine the shape of our most important moral concerns and commitments. Given the intimacy and security of our friendships, these relationships represent rare preserves in which we are free to express openly our moral concerns and commitments and to expose them to the questions, challenges, and evaluations of another person with whom we share a bond of friendship. In this relational context friends work out and test their conceptions of what constitutes a meaningful and fulfilling life, and spur each other’s commitment to the values, ends, and activities that such a life comprises. To summarise, Aristotle stipulates a definition of friendship that embraces a broad range of our social relationships. The lesser forms of friendship, even when constructed around appropriate pleasures or advantages, are, when compared to this ideal, found wanting in terms of the relative worth of the good that grounds them, the restricted vision of the other that such friendships provide, and the extent to which such relationships prove to be vulnerable to the flux of both subjective predilections and external influences. However, he never hesitates in identifying such relationships as friendships and clearly understands them to be praiseworthy and important to the enjoyment of one’s life. While Aristotle’s rather perfectionist moral theory may color his presentation of character-friendships in ways that make them appear exceptional or idealistic, the core of his conception finds parallels in our common understanding of close friendships. First, we commonly take our closest friendships to be vital to our enjoyment of not only particular activities but life generally. Secondly, it is generally our closest friends with whom we share core interests, values, and pursuits. Thus, insofar as these represent integral aspects of our conceptions of self-identity and meaning, friendships represent shared contexts of personal and moral development. With these points in mind, we turn to an analysis of friendship within online communities.

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Analysis of Social Networking Sites As fundamentally social beings, the true challenge lies not in naming this aspect of our nature but in confronting and coming to grips with the many the varied expressions of our sociality. Specifically, one’s social and moral development would appear to require learning to move skillfully among the various social spheres within which one participates, determining the appropriate expectations and obligations of each, and integrating all of this into one’s life in a balanced and meaningful way. In our lives we find that the diverse obligations of time, attention, concern, and activity, which are required of us as participants in a wide range of social relations (e.g. families, cities, nations, religious communities, etc.) commonly compete. Once conscious of these relationships and their importance, we feel morally responsible to act in accord with the inclinations and/or duties that outline our identity and participation in each one (or, at least, other people representing these relationships expect us to feel such responsibility), and this complex social reality regularly tests our capacity to construct a coherent synthesis of social obligations. In light of this, it is not surprising that many people are tempted to recoil altogether from active participation in intimate relationships, on the one hand, or broader social and political communities, on the other. However, for the reasons that were identified at the outset of this essay, total retreat on either front undermines our attempts to live a fulfilling life. Today we are confronted with online communities that present us with new complexities and questions, many of which have been taken up admirably in the other chapters of this volume. Whether we are considering the complex and varied relationships we maintain to our online avatars, as Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay do in their essay, or providing a phenomenological analysis of social networking, as does Leighton Evans in his own, we are engaging important questions concerning the possibilities and challenges of integrating our online relationships, commitments, and activities into our ‘total’ lives. For the sake of analysis, these issues may be divided and addressed according to two general questions: First, is such integration a worthy goal? Second, if it is, how do we achieve this integration? While I will offer little by way of a response to the second, more pragmatic question, I hope to present some insights that will assist us in addressing the first, which I take to be more foundational. A first step is to demonstrate the way that many of the relationships developed and/or sustained within online communities may be justifiably identified as friendship - that they are not deficient facsimiles or analogous to friendships, but meet the definitional criteria we have been discussing. These friendships will fall along a spectrum of affinity and durability, but this variance has no necessary connection to the online context. As in our everyday relationships, the seriousness of the friendship will be conditioned

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______________________________________________________________ by the mutually recognised good (e.g. pleasure or advantage) that is the ground of the reciprocated feelings and that explains the genesis of the relationship. Thus, rather than represent a violation of or threat to the friendships we have historically and collectively esteemed, social networks demonstrate the central role that friendships continue to play in our lives and give occasion for the development of integral relationships within a virtual, online, context that was once vilified by many critics as a medium that promoted insularity, isolation, or, at best, rather tenuous and meaningless exchanges among anonymous strangers. As the hypothetical example of the co-worker included above illustrates, Aristotle’s theory makes space for the everyday types of relationships that will constitute the great majority of our friendships. Similarly, this broad usage of the term friend is adopted freely within social networking sites, where generally all of one’s reciprocally accepted associations within the network are added to one’s list of friends. Thus, one finds within these contexts individuals whose enclave of friends numbers in the hundreds, even the thousands. Certainly Aristotle would find such claims not only audacious, but impossible. 27 Consequently, there is certainly an over use of the term ‘friend’ within these contexts, but it is hard to identify any serious problems or dire consequences of this liberal designation. Aside from these extreme examples, there remains a range of online relationships, which are facilitated by social networking sites, that I believe fall within the definitional parameters we have considered to this point. If this is the case, then, according to Aristotle’s understanding of the varied roles of friendships, these relationships have the potential to enhance not only our online experience or virtual lives (whatever that might mean), but also our total lives, of which these online experiences and interactions are but a part. Let us focus for the time being on virtual friendships cultivated around areas of interest commonly expressed within the profile structures familiar to online social networking sites. General categories of such interests often include: literature, movies, forms of music, athletic teams, and so on. Within the social networks themselves these associations may include participation in online groups or simply pleasant exchanges with other individuals who share these interests. The shared interest need not be anything so heady as modern art or metaphysics. It could just as well be Belgian beers or baseball. The question, then, is whether such online relationships can be accurately identified as friendships without undermining the significance of the designation. Certainly, if the principal draw our ‘virtual friend’ has for us is her shared appreciation for well-brewed beer or a well-turned double play, then the various affections and expressions of goodwill that are reciprocated will be grounded in a good that represents - hopefully - only a limited dimension of each of our lives. As we have seen, Aristotle would contend that these

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______________________________________________________________ relationships - absent of further development - are predicated upon each friend’s circumscribed vision of the other, and attached to a partial and malleable characteristic of the other’s total persona. This may be especially true of relationships where proximity, a customary ingredient of traditional friendships, is substituted with a space and manner of exchange that are virtual. Constituted as they are, these relationships are vulnerable to both change and dissolution in a way that our most intimate relationships are not. However, I would argue that this vulnerability maintains no necessary connection with the ‘virtual’ context of the relationship, but rather, as Aristotle explains, the limited role that the mutual interest plays in the total life of each agent, their respective identities, and their more comprehensive and inherently hierarchical conceptions of value. The fact that the online context does not provide the physical proximity historically associated with friendships and other forms of social relationships is not enough, on its own, to discount their status. Likewise, the technologically mediated form of exchange does not undermine the participants’ ability to share in the pleasure that comes from having a connection with someone who shares their interests, whatever they might be. As Stine Gotved remarks: Online life and sociality is not that different from offline, we use the same social competencies in slightly transformed ways, and when allowance is made for the mediation of the computer, we have more similarities than differences. 28 Just as physical proximity does not guarantee meaningful connection, utilising this medium does not assure its demise. However, as Leighton Evans argues in his own contribution to this volume, one must consider also the potentially unique challenges that are posed by the technologically-mediated nature of social networking. The central challenge, as Evans describes it, is that such mediation runs the risk of altering our perceptions of others, rendering persons into resources. I share Evans’ concern. However, I believe this represents simply another way that relationships that are promoted by, develop within, and are largely carried on within the online context reflect our traditional offline relationships. Intersubjective relationships are always mediated in some manner and thus vulnerable to the sorts of risks that Evans identifies. Thus, regardless of context, we might utilise our relative success in overcoming or avoiding such tendencies as one measure for delineating the nature and significance of the relationship, recognizing that such evaluations need not be either/or. That is, if these types of associations are to be designated as something less than friendship, then we would seemingly have to disqualify also more-traditional friendships, such as those resembling the examples

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______________________________________________________________ provided above. The temptation to discount the former while recognising the latter is, I suspect, the product of a common inclination to diagnose the legitimacy of virtual relationships (indeed all things virtual) in accordance with a standard of an ideal and, perhaps, unrealisable criteria rather than an accurate account and appraisal of the nature of everyday, real relationships, an account such as Aristotle’s own. Even the designation virtual, as it is used colloquially, implies a certain tenuousness or deficiency. Thus, as Shawn Wilbur remarks in his own analysis of online communities, ‘Consider the notion of “virtual community.” It reveals something about our presupposition about both (unmodified, presumably “real”) community and (primarily computer) technology that this phrase even makes sense.’ 29 The word virtual, as it is used generally, ‘seems most often to refer to that which appears to be (but is not) real, authentic or proper … .’ 30 The potential consequences of this attitude include the quarantine and abandonment of these important expressions of our relationality and a neglect of the important insights they provide into who we are as social beings in an increasingly technological world. 31 While a good number of associations within online communities will not fit Aristotle’s wide definition, many more are formed around the same types of goods that Aristotle associated with friendship. Hereto, friends may contribute to the general contentment or pleasure of one another. They may be a source of material goods or other forms of advantage (e.g. assistance, social capital, business contacts, etc.). Insofar as pleasure and material goods continue to be essential to living well, these relationships add to the happiness and security of the participants, however small these contributions may be. Again, pleasure and material goods represent only a portion of the good life. Thus, these friendships will always pale when compared to friendships that include not only these goods, but also the ongoing moral development of the friends. It is from the perspective of this comparison - and not their online context - that these friendships prove wanting. As such, I believe such relationships do constitute friendships and thereby must be included in our overall efforts to integrate and make sense of the various social spheres and respective obligations that make up our social and moral lives. I maintain that the analysis applies equally to the whole of Aristotle’s taxonomy of friendship types, including character-friendship. There is nothing that is intrinsic to the online context itself that preclude these relationships. However, rather than rehearse the above observations in a discussion of character-friendship, I wish to highlight one example of how online social networks offer a unique context for exploring a moral dimension of such friendships. Previously I remarked that a primary challenges we confront is cultivating a sense of identity and meaning within a complex web of social spheres, each of which comprises various obligations. As social beings, I

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______________________________________________________________ argued, fulfillment will be contingent on our ability to order these obligations into a balanced and coherent whole. Whether technology on the whole has done more to facilitate or to frustrate these efforts remains open to debate. However, social networking, beyond providing us a means for giving expression to our sociality within cyberspace, may offer important insights concerning the organisation and balance of our social lives. For characterfriends, this includes the realisation that moral development requires the cultivation of social consciousness and the rejection of moral insularity, which some modern moral theorists have identified within friendships and other forms of special relationships (e.g. marital and filial). As a conclusion to this essay, I wish to analyse how online social networks may provide a context for analysing and addressing this concern. Modern political and ethical discourse has rightly compelled us to think critically about proximity, similarity, and special inclinations as the bases and regulating motivations for our ethical lives. Whatever role our most intimate bonds may play in determining our ethical attitudes and behavior, these bonds are understood by most modern philosophers to be subordinate in moral significance to the bonds we share with human beings as such. What is central to the moral life, for most modern philosophy, is the moral recognition of universal human equality, the protection of human dignity, the principle of respect for persons as such, and deliberative practices that adopt the state or disposition of impartiality, which has come to be associated with the moral point of view and social justice more generally. Critics contend that friendship, as a type of preferential relationship, may tempt us toward an ethical insularity that curbs our moral vision. The result being that one’s ethical obligations to other human beings, who exist on the periphery or outside of the more intimate relational spheres, risk being eclipsed by one’s special relationship to one’s friends, and that the likelihood of these negative tendencies escalates in direct proportion to the intensity of the friendship. More specifically, given the nature and intensity of the relationship, broader social and moral considerations might not come to the fore. For example, one might be so focused on the relationship with her friend that she never considers the allocation of her time and resources; it is just natural for her to focus her time and resources into her friendship (or to others who share a similarly intimate and proximate relationship to her). The issue concerning how much of her time, money and effort she may direct towards the benefit of those she cares about in light of the greater and more pressing needs of people not part of her circle may not be considered because she is absorbed in the special connection established with the friend. Further, this seems to be exactly the sort discriminating concern - the impartialists and others would contend - that friendship requires. What distinguishes the friend from others is that she is perceived to be worthy of and receives this special treatment. Consequently, the demands of such relationships always risk eclipsing other

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______________________________________________________________ moral obligations to respect and treat equally all human beings, even those with whom we intuit no special connection. The interface and context of online social networks, particularly Facebook, offer an integration of the personal and the private in a way that is rarely found offline. One’s friendships within the network are rarely extracted from the broader social context. Many of the friends’ interactions are public in the form of threads, pictures, comments, messages, and the like. Moreover, there has also been a movement more recently to use this context to highlight important social, political, and moral issues. Hence, friends are provided an interface that allows these issues to be integrated into the various dimensions of their online association. Some of these will be rather benign, such as applications that require minimal time and effort. However, many groups have begun to use Facebook and other social networking sites as means for promoting serious moral, social and political issues. The 2008 U.S. elections were a prime example of this. Through Facebook, many people who had not previously been politically or socially active participated in the process. The goal here is not an evaluation of what constitutes a worthy cause or significant social action. Rather, the important point is that online social networks have contributed to broader social engagement on real issues, and this broader engagement was spurred largely through individuals communicating with their online friends. Many of these individuals might not have participated in these issues in any other context. Others who were already socially and politically conscious and active used this medium for the first time as a component of such engagement. Finally, for character-friends, whether online, offline, or some combination thereof, these integrative efforts reveal a model worthy of consideration as both a remedy for relational insularity and the promotion of moral development within the context of our closest relationships. As such, online social networks and ‘virtual’ friendships offer resources for responding to the concerns of modern moral theorists. Perhaps more importantly, however, they offer real insights into the nature of our friendships generally and the way that these friendships contribute significantly to our lives, including our moral and social development.

Notes 1

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, T. H. Irwin (trans), 2nd Edition, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN, 1999, 1155a5. All references to the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) will appear with the appropriate Bekker numbers, rather than the page numbers from Irwin’s translation (e.g. 1155a5-9). 2 Among the countless commentaries on this anthropological supposition is the following observation by Peter Berger: ‘Society is a dialectic phenomena

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______________________________________________________________ in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continually acts back upon its producer. Society is a product of man. It has no other being except that which is bestowed upon it by human activity and consciousness. There can be no social reality apart from man. Yet it may also be stated that man is a product of society … it is within society, and as a result of social processes, that the individual becomes a person, that he attains and holds an identity, and that he carries out the various projects that constitute his life. Man cannot exist apart from society. P. Berger, Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Anchor Books, New York, 1990, p. 4. 3 Thus, David Bostock remarks, ‘By way of preliminary it must be said that “friendship” is not a good translation of Aristotle’s term philia, though no other English word would be any better, for under this title Aristotle groups together a much wider variety of social relationships than we would.’ D. Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 168. 4 Aristotle, op. cit., 1155a5ff. 5 D. Cates, Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1997, p. 50. 6 John M. Cooper draws out the connection between the NE definition of friendship and what Aristotle says in the Rhetoric on the subject, and provides a summary of even wider embrace. The author, summarising a working definition, writes that according to Aristotle, friendship, ‘taken most generally, is any relationship characterized by mutual liking and this is defined in the Rhetoric, that is, by mutual well-wishing and well-doing out of concern for one another.’ J. M. Cooper, ‘Friendship and the Good in Aristotle’, Philosophical Review, Vol. 86, 1977, p. 302. 7 However, Aristotle does use friendship to describe certain familial relationships (see NE VIII.12). This also points to the distinction between friendship and the social virtue of being friendly. The disposition, unlike the relationship, does not require reciprocity or ‘any special feeling’ (see NE 1126b22). 8 Aristotle writes, ‘Not everything is loved, but [only] what is lovable, and this is either good or pleasant or useful. However, it seems that what is useful is the source of some good or some pleasure; hence what is good and what is pleasant are lovable as ends.’ Aristotle, op. cit., 1155b16. 9 Diana Cates explains, ‘Friendships arise and persist, in Aristotle’s view, because two people perceive something good in each other that makes them lovable in each other’s eyes.’ Cates, op. cit., p. 50. 10 Aristotle, op. cit., 1156a6-9. 11 Ibid., 1155a5-22; 1155a29.

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The appropriate translation of eudaimonia is an oft-debated topic. While rendered ‘happiness’ by Irwin, most now agree that translating it as such, considering our common usage of the word happiness, is misleading; cf. Bostock, op. cit., p. 11. However, while conceptually problematic, happiness offers a more intuitively satisfying sense of what most people desire. For our purposes, I will generally use the terms happiness, fulfilment, and flourishing interchangeably to stand in for eudaimonia. It is worth noting, however, that Aristotle does appear to offer ‘living well and doing well’ as his own synonym for eudaimonia. Aristotle, op. cit., 1095a19. 13 Ibid., 1156a9-14. Aristotle, continuing with this explanation and drawing the connection to the limited scope of the relationship, remarks, ‘Those who love for utility or pleasure, then, are fond of a friend because of what is good or pleasant for themselves, not insofar as the beloved is who he is, but insofar as he is useful or pleasant. Hence these friendships as well [as the friends] are coincidental, since the beloved is loved not insofar as he is who he is, but insofar as he provides some good or pleasure.’ Ibid., 1156a15-19. 14 Cates, op. cit., p. 51. 15 Aristotle, op. cit., 1156a21. Likewise, concerning pleasure-friendships, Aristotle remarks, ‘The cause of friendship between young people seems to be pleasure. For their lives are guided by their feelings, and they pursue above all what is pleasant for themselves and what is near at hand. But as they grow up [what they find] pleasant changes too. Hence they are quick to become friends, and quick to stop; for their friendship shifts with [what they find] pleasant, and the change in such pleasure is quick.’ Ibid., 1156a31-35. 16 Cates, op. cit., p. 51. Regarding this Martha Nussbaum notes, ‘There can be genuinely disinterested mutual benefit in cases where the basis of attachment is shallow and partial. Business partners may give one another gifts and entertain one another; young lovers, knowing only one another’s pleasantness, may still genuinely contribute, unselfishly, to one another’s good. But then, Aristotle says, the relationship will be connected only incidentally to the central aims and aspirations of each member. It will lack depth, since it is not directed at what that other person really is ‘in himself’, at the goals, values, and characteristics with which he primarily identifies himself. It will also be unstable, since its basis is one that the person could easily cease to have while remaining in deeper ways unchanged (cf. EN 1157a8ff.). Business partners frequently care for one another not only as means to profit; but take away the profit context and the friendship, unless it has deepened into another sort, will falter. Lovers who know only the surface features of one another’s pleasantness will, similarly, be easily derailed by a change in looks or by circumstances that put a strain on enjoyment.’ M.

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______________________________________________________________ Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 356. 17 Needless to say, for Aristotle neither baseball nor the pleasure it brings should constitute my ultimate good. Hence, regardless of whether it did maintain such a position in my life, and, thereby, I personally considered friendships that contributed to the realisation of this good as the most important relationships in my life, Aristotle would still count such relationships as deficient on account of the place that pleasures ought to play in my life. For the sake of my own illustration, I will withhold my intuitive objections to underestimating baseball’s capacity for stimulating moral and intellectual development. 18 Hence, Aristotle explains that in cases such as this ‘there is noting absurd in dissolving the friendship whenever they are no longer pleasant or useful. For they were friends of pleasure or utility; and if these give out, it is reasonable not to love.’ Aristotle, op. cit., 1156a19-22. However, this is not to say that there is not any sense of loss when such relationships do dissolve or that such relationships cannot last over a long period of time. Further, it is also possible that such relationships-given the right circumstances-may eventually develop into character friendships over time. Moreover, as we have seen, there might not be a conscious termination of the relationship. Such relationships, quite often, simply run their course anti-climactically, or dissolve because of external changes that result in a lack of proximity and less frequent communication. 19 N. Badhwar, ‘Friends as Ends in Themselves’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 48, September 1987, p. 2. See also Aristotle, op. cit., 1157b2-5. 20 The foundation is good character, which is integral to understanding both the human good and, thus, the good for one’s friend. Thus the supremacy of this form of friendship derives from the primacy of its foundation within Aristotle’s scheme and the intimacy it facilitates. 21 Nussbaum, op. cit., p. 356. 22 Cooper, op. cit., p. 307. 23 Similarly, characterising these relationships in such a fashion would imply that something akin to moral perfection is possible, a claim that cannot be inferred from what Aristotle says regarding the limits of both ethics and human capacities. That is, even if such perfection were within the realm of human capacities, according to Aristotle, ethical inquiry lacks recourse to the testable evaluations of, say, the sciences, which would be necessary for establishing a precise account of moral perfection. 24 N. Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 131.

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Ibid., p. 133. As Nancy Sherman explains, ‘[F]riendship creates a context or arena for the expression of virtue, and ultimately for happiness. More strongly, it extends and redefines the boundaries of the good life in such a way that my happiness or complete good comes to include the happiness of significant others. Happiness or good living is thus ascribable to me, not as an isolated individual, but as a self extended, so to speak, by friends.’ Ibid., p. 94. 27 However, it is worth noting that Aristotle would likely also find many for our conceptions of and attempts at community to be suspect. This is particularly the case with our larger urban centres, given his vision of the polis. 28 S. Gotved, ‘The Construction of Cybersocial Reality’, in Critical Cybercultural Studies, A. Massanari and D. Silver (eds), New York University Press, New York, 2006, p. 171. I understand Gotved to be identifying a slight variation between other forms of mediation and computer mediation, rather than no mediation and computer mediation. That is, I would argue, all forms of relationship involve some manner of mediation, either explicit and obvious or implicit and perceptual. 29 S. Wilbur, ‘An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity’, in The Cybercultures Reader, D. Bell (ed), Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 45. 30 Ibid., p. 47. 31 Others are not so optimistic on this point; cf. M. Willson, ‘Community in the Abstract: A Political and Ethical Dilemma’, in The Cybercultures Reader, D. Bell (ed), Routledge, New York, 2002. For a position similar to Willson’s, see D. Barney, ‘The Vanishing Table, or Community in a World That Is No World’, in Community in a Digital Age, D. Barney and A. Feenberg (eds), Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD, 2004. 26

Bibliography Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. T. Irwin (trans), 2nd Edition, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, Ind., 1999. Badhwar, N., ‘Friends as Ends in Themselves’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 48, September 1987, pp. 1-23. Barney, D., ‘The Vanishing Table, or Community in a World That Is No World’, in Community in a Digital Age. D. Barney and A. Feenberg (eds), Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD, 2004, pp. 31-52.

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______________________________________________________________ Berger, P., Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Anchor Books, New York, 1990. Bostock, D., Aristotle’s Ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. Cates, D., Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1997. Cooper, J., ‘Friendship and the Good in Aristotle’. Philosophical Review, Vol. 86, 1977, pp. 290-315. De Zwart, M. and Lindsay, D., ‘My Self, My Avatar, My Rights?: Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 81-100. Evans, L., ‘A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 55-77. Gotved, S., ‘The Construction of Cybersocial Reality’, in Critical Cybercultural Studies. A. Massanari and D. Silver (eds), New York University Press, New York, 2006, pp. 168-179. Nussbaum, M., The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. Sherman, N., The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989. Wilbur, S., ‘An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity’, in The Cybercultures Reader. D. Bell (ed), Routledge, New York, 2002, pp. 45-55. Willson, M., ‘Community in the Abstract: A Political and Ethical Dilemma’, in The Cybercultures Reader. D. Bell (ed), Routledge, New York, 2002, pp. 644-657. Jordan J. Copeland, PhD Assistant Professor at La Salle University, Philadelphia, United States. His research includes philosophical reflections on preferential relationships to investigate the nature and significance of virtual friendships.

Experiences of Embodiment and Subjectivity in Haunting Ground Ewan Kirkland Abstract This chapter explores the nature of videogame avatars, using Capcom’s survival horror title Haunting Ground as case study. Various approaches to theorising the relationship between player and avatar are outlined and contrasted, including a film studies model of spectatorship, an approach emphasising avatars’ functionality, and notions of the avatar/player’s relationship as variously cyborgian. Particular attention is paid to the forms of subjectivity facilitated and constructed by the game, especially in relation to issues of gender. Throughout this chapter, my own position as a white heterosexual male player will also be considered as impacting on my relationship with the avatar of Haunted Ground. Key Words: Avatar, cyborg, gender, Haunting Ground, ludology, player, survival horror, videogame. ***** Introduction The avatar/player relationship typifies key issues regarding videogame agency, textuality and interactivity, as well as the nature of representation and identity in participatory media. Throughout videogame play the avatar is central, in terms of interaction - being the medium through which players engage with the game environment - spatial organisation - the game world constantly shifting to keep the avatar in view - videogame promotion - advertising revolving heavily around idealised versions of the avatar’s image - consumer engagement - fan art and fiction invariably focussing on the avatar as character within the game narrative - and ancillary products - as evident in the brand prominence of Sonic, Mario and Lara Croft. Both Diane Carr 1 and Margit Grieb 2 observe the extent to which videogame spaces, the focus of much critical attention in game scholarship, are designed around the shape, abilities and limitations of the avatar body. It seems reasonable to suggest that the avatar has a significant role in shaping conscious and unconscious processes of videogame pleasure. Players form a physical as well as virtual bond with the avatar. Jon Dovey and Helen Kennedy, 3 Martti Lahti, 4 Sue Morris, 5 and Sheila C. Murphy, 6 all note gamers’ tendency to tilt, lean and dodge in empathic response to in-game action, the shifting of their bodies reflecting the movement or desired movement of the avatar on the screen. Indicative of the blurring of bodily 1.

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______________________________________________________________ boundaries entailed in videogame play, when players fail, they typically say, ‘I died’ or ‘I got killed,’ rather than ‘Snake died’ or ‘My actions resulted in Snake’s death.’ The avatar body constitutes the apex of videogame engagement, while outside videogame texts, within the popular and industrial imaginary, the avatar’s image has become synonymous with videogame franchises. It is possible to have never played a title in the Tomb Raider series, and yet to be aware of the games’ central protagonist through the range of products, publications and audiovisual media in which her image has appeared. Indeed Lara Croft’s presence and persona is so fundamental to the feature films based on the series that her name serves as prefix in the movies’ titles. 7 Unpicking the various manifestations and experiences facilitated by the avatar is a complex task. The meaning of the controllable figure ‘Lara Croft’ within the Tomb Raider series is inseparable from the paratexts which surround it. Yet, as Sacha A. Howells observes in relation to Lara Croft’s multi-media presence in the mid-1990s, television and print advertisements more resembled the character’s cut-scene representation than the ‘blocky polygonal mess’ of the avatar itself. 8 M. de Zwart and D. Lindsay 9 note in their chapter in this collection, that the notion of the ‘avatar’ is one with broad meaning in discussion of online communities not to mention intriguing parallels with non-digital game playing. For the purposes of this chapter, the term refers to a ‘[g]ame character manipulated by the player, and the player’s representative within the game.’ 10 This allows a separation of intra-game from extra-game versions. Images of videogame stars on posters, game boxes, in fan art and feature films, together with cut-scene sequences, fail to meet this definition, although their contribution to an avatar’s meaning is still significant. At the same time, even within these boundaries the avatar is an extremely varied figure. Different kinds of avatars produce different experiences of player embodiment, encouraging a range of subjective relationships. In this context, ‘embodiment’ refers to the sense in which players experience a physical presence within the game world through interaction with their in-game surrogate. Considering the process of videogame immersion and absorption, Dovey and Kennedy discuss ways players are ‘re-embodied,’ given agency and presence in virtual gamespaces through the technology of the interface, and the videogame avatar. 11 ‘Subjectivity’ refers to the sense of perspective and personhood offered by this ‘re-embodiment.’ As formations of gender, race and class are discursively grounded in the body, many writers have speculated whether playing a game through a differently-bodied avatar might produce different experiences of subjectivity and identity. The player is central to this relationship, adding a further level of complication to understanding the meanings and functions of avatars. David Buckingham argues that videogames highlight a central issue within media

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______________________________________________________________ studies, expressed in the tension between humanities-based textual analysis and social science-associated audience research. Investigating either the nature of a media text or the manner of its textual consumption leads to only partial understanding of the object’s social, cultural and artistic significance. The fact videogames are played, only coming into meaningful being through direct audience involvement, means text and user are in many ways inseparable. 12 As Terry Flew and Sal Humphreys assert, in relation to digital games: ‘Representation needs to be considered in the light of consumption.’ Interaction between the body of the player and the body of the avatar seems to personify this interdependence, gender being frequently considered a significant factor in play, and Flew and Humphreys continue to speculate upon men and women players’ different responses to stereotypical female avatars, issues of body image, the possibility of gender performance, and virtual transvestisms in social games. 13 Emphasising the impact of gamers’ cultural situation upon the gaming experience, Simeon J. Yates and Karen Littleton observe that female players are involved in a process of negotiation and resistance concerning videogames’ preferred subjective positions, practices they say are absent in male players. 14 Given the evident significance of the user’s own identity position in videogame play, issues of virtual subjectivity, and the relationship between the player’s body and the body of the avatar, my own situation as a white heterosexual male will be acknowledged as a determining factor throughout the following analysis. 2.

Situating Fiona The subject of this chapter is the videogame Haunting Ground, rather than videogames in general, a decision which allows a more focussed consideration of the relationships between player and avatar. As Carr asserts, ‘games position and address their players through various perspectives, modes, channels, menus, inputs and outputs,’ suggesting ‘it would be a mistake to try and impose a single model on to all avatar-player relations.’ 15 If the nature of avatars differs between games and genres, this chapter will illustrate the extent to which the avatar-player engagement varies across a single title. Haunting Ground belongs to the ‘survival horror’ cycle of digital games. Succinctly defined by Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., as games in which ‘the player controls a character who has to get out of some enclosed place solving puzzles and destroying horrific monsters along the way,’ 16 survival horror series include Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Forbidden Siren and Fatal Frame. A number of characteristic qualities of avatars within these kinds of videogames are of note. In common with horror cinema, female characters tend to feature more frequently in horror videogames than in other genres, such as sport, war, action, or driving games where the player’s virtual embodiment is predominantly gendered as male. Two of the three games which Sarah M. Grimes considers in her comparative analysis of female avatars are horror

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______________________________________________________________ games - Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, featuring Alexis Roivas and Resident Evil which stars Jill Valentine. 17 The narrative structure of survival horror frequently involves largely-defenceless individuals who find themselves thrust into nightmarish situations, battling to stay alive, with none of the technological or physical resources common in more testosteronedriven game genres. In such scenarios, running away is frequently a more appropriate option to fighting. The femininity of many survival horror avatars undoubtedly contributes to the sense of helplessness and persecution these games generate. In Haunting Ground the playable figure is Fiona Belli. The design of this avatar is fixed and unalterable, 18 not subject to the kinds of player modification available in MMORPGs or social virtual worlds discussed in this collection. Consequently, de Zwart and Lindsay’s discussion of proprietor rights of users is inapplicable to Haunting Ground. Fiona is very clearly the authored property of Capcom, the game’s developer and publisher. Much like the famous tomb raider, Fiona’s is an avatar with all the visual and audio characteristics of a young white British upper class woman. She is pale skinned, young and slender in frame, with dark lidded eyes and white-blond hair tied in a pony tail. Dressed for the most part in knee-high boots, short skirt and a lacy drop-backed blouse, Fiona resembles a medieval serving wench, a look entirely in keeping with the game’s gothic location yet at odds with its evident contemporary setting. Players control Fiona via the Playstation 2 joypad, which permits a range of possible actions, including walking, running, crouching, stepping backwards and kicking objects, such as broken walls and ceramic pots, which when smashed reveal hidden treasures. The ‘X’ button instructs Fiona to perform more complex context-specific actions, such as picking up an object, opening a door, washing her face in a revitalising sink, or saving a game. A menu system allows the selection of objects for use, such as keys and weapons. The game is structured into levels, which begin when Fiona enters a new wing of the Belli Castle in which the game takes place. Each space is patrolled by a different resident who periodically appears and gives chase, intent on Fiona’s destruction. Debilitas is a deformed hunchback cook and handyman; Daniella is a maid who carries a large blade of glass; Riccardo is the master of the servants; and Lorenzo is an alchemist with magical powers. These villains cannot be destroyed until the level’s scripted finale, before which they must be evaded by hiding Fiona inside or underneath items of furniture located throughout the castle. This more feminine-coded mode of gameplay, involving evasion rather than combat, is entirely consistent with the game’s slender white female protagonist. As the game progresses, Fiona is joined by a second avatar, Hewie, a large German Shepherd dog. By manipulating the joypad’s right joystick, Fiona can be made to issue a number of commands - ‘Go Hewie,’ ‘Stay’ and ‘Good boy’ - which cause the dog to himself perform actions,

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______________________________________________________________ retrieving hidden objects, or attacking Fiona’s pursuers. In this respect, Haunting Ground’s avatar is herself in control of an avatar, such selfreflexivity being another characteristic of survival horror. 19 Fiona is constructed through a number of modes. These include the game cover and instruction booklet, ancillary texts such as the official strategy guide, the Capcom website, 20 and other promotional material. Cutscenes which interrupt gameplay periodically depict Fiona in the manner of Hollywood cinema. The avatar itself is visible via a series of virtual cameras positioned throughout the gamespace. These track the player/Fiona’s movement from pre-set positions, cutting from one to another, panning and travelling as if rolling along invisible tracks, a style of third-person representation characteristic of survival horror. Discussing presence in videogames, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska outline three visual or optical perspectives, each offering a different experience of existence within the videogame’s virtual space. In strategy titles, like Sim City or Civilisation, players are given an objective god-like view of the play environment, occupying a disembodied position separate from the space of the game. Firstperson shooters, at the other end of the scale of embodiment, produce a greater illusion of presence inside the virtual world which is experienced through the subjective visual perspective of the game character. A midposition between objectivity and subjectivity is adopted by third-person perspective games, where players see the avatar they are controlling along with a variously limited perspective of the environment they currently inhabit. 21 Haunting Ground is almost entirely a third person game, where the player’s avatar is clearly visible on the screen which shifts according to its movement. The sense of presence, of ‘being-in-the-game-world’ is enhanced through a number of aspects King and Krzywinska consider. The avatar’s visual design boasts significant three-dimensional detail, in contrast to the abstract avatars of earlier videogames, such as PacMan or Defender. As a fully-three dimensional photorealistic figure, Fiona might be more suited to act as an embodiment of the player, and as a focus of subjective empathy. Absent from Haunting Ground are the kinds of acrobatic movements performed by the avatars of Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia, through which users may experience a distancing from the playable character as it becomes a source of spectacle or an index of gaming competence. The irregular movement and cutting of the camera, which can jump suddenly from behind the avatar, to her right, then to her left as the figure moves through gamespace, might, as King and Krzywinska suggest, compromise the relationship between player and avatar. At the same time, such a technique provides players with a greater illusion of the figure’s three dimensional physicality and recognisable humanity, allowing Fiona’s face to be seen - a feature often lost in games where players predominantly occupy a position just behind the avatar’s shoulder. Remediating 22 a cinematic sense of film

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______________________________________________________________ star embodiment counteracts the virtuality of the videogame avatar’s body. Needless to say, in King and Krzywinska’s three modes of videogame representation - god’s eye, first and third person - the connection between virtual presence and optical perspective is significant, given the importance of visual power dynamics in criticisms of the relationship between gender construction and popular culture. 3.

Reading Fiona The main character of Haunting Ground is Fiona Belli. An eighteenyear old college student, Fiona ‘appears more mature than her actual age.’ Although ‘not talkative’ she is ‘not introverted’ either; she ‘thinks quickly on her feet’ while being ‘gifted with extremely sharp wits’ and an ‘inner strength’ masked by her quiet nature. Fiona ‘rarely expresses emotions,’ but ‘when she smiles, she smiles from her heart and her charm easily wins people over.’ 23 Here, in the game manual, can be seen an attempt to define Fiona as a literary character, one who exhibits a feisty combination of feminine charm, intelligence and emotional sophistication. Admittedly, this is within the limitations discussed by Andrew Darley, who sees the comparable insignificance of narrative in videogames evident in the fact that more manual space is devoted to game controls than to ‘so-called “back story.”’ 24 Haunting Ground offers just three pages of narrative and characters, of which only half a page describes the game’s central protagonist. This compares to eight pages on menu systems, game controls, objects, tactics and hints. Considerable more attention is consequently devoted to instructing players on how to control Fiona than detailing her personality. Haunting Ground defines the protagonist in other more visual ways. Her picture as concept art appears on the box cover, and her image features five times in the eighteen page instruction booklet, in addition to the front and back covers. The significance of such material is considered by Laurie Taylor, who argues that these images constitute an underlying superstructure or metastructure which comes to represent the ‘real world’ of the videogame. Depicting characters and game environments to a degree which contemporary computer imaging technologies may be incapable of realising, concept art circulated in the form of walk-through guides, advertisements, magazine features and ancillary products, establishes an ideal or originating standard to which subsequent game releases aspire. 25 Although Haunting Ground is less an arcade game than Quake, as discussed by Darley, and more graphically photorealistic than the early Meteroid Prime titles examined by Taylor, the instruction manual serves to construct the figure of Fiona as exists within the game. In various images Fiona is pictured looking distractedly up from a crouching position on the floor, peering fearfully at something off-page, and glancing over her shoulder with a demure expression. Before the game begins, players are primed to interpret Fiona in a particular way, as situated within an established

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______________________________________________________________ set of qualities ascribed to female protagonists within popular narrative culture, and horror in particular. Sweet, prone, threatened, vulnerable, sexual, Fiona’s visual depiction in the booklet exhibits none of the ‘inner strength’ suggested by the accompanying text. In addition to these literary and visual constructions, Fiona’s avatar is audiovisually represented through cinematic cut-scenes where she moves and speaks independent of the player’s participation. The first time a game version of Fiona features is in an introductory sequence which begins automatically after the game has loaded. Here we see an as-yet unnamed woman walking in slow dream-like steps down a blood-red corridor, her legs and feet bare, her body covered in a white silky fabric which swirls seductively round her knees. This is intercut with close-up images of feet, lips and hand, the toneless white skin contrasting with a trickle of blood which runs down her face and body. Such elements structure Fiona according to a dominant position of women in mainstream culture: the object of the heterosexual ‘male gaze.’ In her polemic essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey famously discuses the extent to which popular film ‘reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle.’ The conventions of mainstream cinema are employed in Haunting Ground’s opening sequence, giving Fiona’s body an ‘appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.’ The blood which trickles across the woman’s pale skin implies her incomplete status as ‘bearer of the bleeding wound,’ while the threat of castration is assuaged by being ‘stylised and fragmented by close-ups.’ This has the impact of ‘turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.’ 26 Mulvey’s influential account has most prominently been applied to cinema, understandable given that film constitutes the paper’s most exampled medium. However, the essay is also an interrogation of the gendering of visual pleasure, incorporating pin-ups, strip tease and musical performances, and is arguably just as applicable to elements of contemporary videogames. Throughout Haunting Ground, cut-scenes repeatedly frame the heroine’s body as the subject of a gaze that is variously desiring, objectifying and sadistic. In an early sequence, an unseen figure watches Fiona getting dressed from behind the eyes of a portrait. 27 Encountering Debilitas, players see Fiona through the creature’s eyes as he looks from the doll in his hand, to Fiona, and back again, clearly connecting the two and choosing the real life body over the toy. Daniella expresses equal fascination with the protagonist’s body, evident in similar cinematic sequences. Like Fiona’s depiction in the game manual, these cut-scenes employ conventions of gender representation, defining the heroine’s body in a particular way. Cut-scene sequences may not necessarily affect play - in terms of the performance of functional actions required to complete game objectives -

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______________________________________________________________ but they do frame the meaning of such objectives, and the meaning of player interaction. As Howells observes, cut-scenes create the gamer’s first impression of the game, and constitute the majority of advertising content a player encounters before the product has even been purchased. 28 Rune Klevjer also argues that these short digital-video sequences serve to contextualise subsequent gameplay, working in conjunction with the tropes and iconography of recognisable genres to establish setting, style and stereotypical characters. 29 Hence the introductory sequence of Haunting Ground segues from the slow surreal shots of Fiona’s body parts, to a more frenetic series of images situating a now-clothed protagonist running round a shadowy, lightening-lit castle, pursued by a disfigured hunchback. The sequence ends with a shot of a woman screaming, presumably from the monster’s perspective, as he bears down upon her; an image which Rhona J. Berenstein argues ‘succinctly signifies the American horror film.’ 30 Further cut-scenes see Fiona being terrorised over the telephone, attacked by moths, poisoned by Daniella, taunted by Riccardo and assaulted by a monstrous Lorenzo. As Linda Williams argues, the body is a central image and theme of the horror genre. 31 In order for gameplay to generate a sense of fear and imperilment approaching that of a slasher movie, the avatar must be given a sense of physicality. Acknowledging connections between the avatar and the space she inhabits, and the cut-scene’s role in producing a necessary sense of embodiment Klevjer writes: ‘When you play with the machine, it is as if, by analogy, you are a body in a world. A cutscene is a part of the more general strategy of providing a particularity to this body, and to this world.’ 32 The cut-scenes in Haunting Ground define the body of the avatar with which players engage throughout the game’s duration. Fiona, in the brief sequence with which Haunting Ground opens, is defined as a horror heroine, a final girl figure, terrorised by a deformed and potentially cannibalistic butcher. This position combines the iconography of both the setting and the body of the protagonist in a manner which is as gendered as it is genred. 4.

Playing Fiona While Mulvey’s paradigm for understanding the representation of women in popular culture may resonate with Haunting Ground’s framing of Fiona, in other respects such theories are inappropriate to videogame study. Considering the medium using methods drawn from non-participatory media may result in a lack of appreciation for the language and grammar of the form. For example, an important function of cut-scenes has little to do with narrative or characterisation, being to inform players of solutions to riddles or the weaknesses of adversaries. In one scene from Haunting Ground, Fiona finds a celluloid film containing moments from her adventures to date. While indicating the threatening forces watching and recording Fiona unseen, underlining her position as voyeuristic spectacle, the function of this cut-

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______________________________________________________________ scene from a gaming perspective is to reveal the combination to a locked door which two characters are seen exiting at the end of the sequence. This is not to suggest that cut-scenes cannot serve more than one purpose - having both aesthetic or thematic as well as ludic meaning - only that traditional theories of media and culture have problems accounting for the latter. An analysis focussing on filmic cut-scenes might over-emphasise the significance of these non-playable moments, which can be skipped by impatient players, often with little adverse impact upon progress. Described by Steven Poole as ‘merely tinsel around the real gameplay’ 33 and ‘gift wrapping’ by Markku Eskelinen, 34 many writers emphasise the peripheral nature of cut-scenes and other cinematic narrative elements to core videogame experiences. While cut-scenes might serve a significant framing function, avatars are of a different nature to the still or cinematic images represented in game literature and digital films. Just as the sterile rectilinear spaces of Tomb Raider are considered incapable of carrying the uncanny resonance of horrorscience fiction cinema; Carr asks whether Lara Croft is ‘woman enough’ to sustain the claims Mulvey makes about the female body in popular film. 35 Similar questions might surround the avatar of Fiona who differs quite significantly from the detailed stylisation and naturalistic movement of her print and cut-scene counterparts, being the product of a game engine which ‘draws upon a library of short, pre-rendered animated sequences…’ which are ‘combined and recombined in the real-time of the gameplay.’ 36 This gives the avatar a restrictive, repetitive, robotic gait, seemingly at odds with any reading of her as a vulnerable sexual young woman. There is an undoubtedly functional quality to the videogame avatar which seems to undermine analysis based on traditional representational or narrative media. For a significant part of the game experience, avatars are like tools or vehicles through which tasks are achieved, rather than characters with identity, personality, and history. Criticising Quake for the poverty of its story (described as ‘even more shallow than the blockbuster movie or the music video’ 37 ), the absence of depth to protagonist and antagonists, and the game’s lack of semiotic complexity, Darley argues the game’s narrative dimensions are comparatively minor and disappear soon after gaming commences. Darley claims: ‘Characterisation and psychological motivation recedes and is replaced by player-centred problems which - in the case of the action game concern survival and one’s successful passage through a difficult-to-negotiate and obstacle-littered setting.’ 38 While such a negative aesthetic assessment may be inapplicable to Haunting Ground, and although differing from the action orientated Quake, survival and the negotiation of hazardous landscapes is central to Haunting Ground’s gameplay, in which Fiona’s characterisation as a ‘quiet type who masks her inner strength’ has little relevance to my attempt to hide from the current adversary.

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______________________________________________________________ A strand of videogame criticism has strongly argued against the projection of such literary qualities onto figure within videogames, drawing attention to the differences between digital games and traditional media. Labelled ‘radical ludology’ by Klevjer, this approach is antagonistically characterised as: ‘Everything other than the pure game mechanics of a computer game is essentially alien to its true aesthetic form.’ 39 Many videogame scholars are justifiably suspicious of perspectives emphasising the medium’s cinematic qualities, attempts to apply traditional cultural theories or theories applied to traditional culture to the interactive digital experience, or to discuss character, narrative or identity politics without sufficient awareness of the specifics of the videogame form. One of the most vocal of such critics is Espen Aarseth. In a dismissive assessment of avatars’ visual significance, Aarseth asserts that despite the critical attention she has received: ‘the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body … are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently.’ 40 In an earlier article, Henry Jenkins in discussion with Mary Fuller argues that videogames are about spaces, not characters or plot, with avatars functioning largely as a means by which players move around these spectacular landscapes. Just as Jenkins claims videogame characterisation boils down to ‘capacities for action,’ 41 James Newman also emphasises the functionality of videogames’ playable characters. Citing Marsha Kinder’s observations that young male gamers may choose an avatar based on their style of play rather than their gender, 42 Newman argues that these figures’ significance may lie not in identity and appearance, but rather in ‘gameplayaffecting characteristics.’ 43 Such a perspective is clearly evident in de Zwart and Lindsay’s discussion of avatars as instrumental tools whereby users satisfy their consumer needs, rather than as vehicles for self-exploration. This aspect of avatars problematises the meaning of identity when reduced to the level of pure aesthetics. King and Krzywinska note games where players are permitted to re-design the avatar’s appearance according to race and gender, but such visual characteristics have little or no impact on gameplay, 44 while Lahti argues avatars’ aesthetic differences are largely shorn from the social contexts which make identity meaningful. 45 These arguments and observations indicate the challenge videogames pose to familiar ways of theorising and conceptualising media, culture, and gendered bodies. A method of analysis based on voyeuristic practices and visual dimensions of representation is in significant respects inadequate and inappropriate for a medium based on doing, in which protagonist and viewer combine in the synthesis of player and avatar, and where audiovisual design is secondary to the underlying structure - the rules of the game - with which participants primarily engage.

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______________________________________________________________ 5.

Fiona as Cyborg Videogame avatars are significantly different from literary, cinematic, or televisual characters. Nevertheless, dismissing their visual qualities, and the ways in which these are aligned with both dominant and transgressive identity formations is to marginalise an important dimension of videogames as texts, interactive experiences, media culture, and artistic works. The tension which Mark J. P. Wolf notes has always existed between videogames as a mode of representation and as a medium of abstraction 46 is evident in the two perspectives on videogame avatars which have so far been discussed. The first, applying traditional theories of gender representation, identified Fiona as a character within an audiovisual narrative text who is constructed as recognisably and stereotypically female. The second, using more ludiological approaches to videogame analysis, emphasised the avatar’s abstract functionality as a gender-neutral means of achieving game goals within a game context. An alternative way of understanding and reconciling, if not unifying, these contradictory positions is suggested by Donna J. Haraway’s cyborg. Coming close to describing the player/avatar relationship, Haraway identifies the cyborg as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ Conceived of as a political weapon in undermining the hierarchical dualism of Western capitalism, science and politics, the cyborg is a figure which revels in the blurring of boundaries and the social transformation this may facilitate. Critical of technophobic tendencies in critical theory and gender politics, Haraway suggests: ‘there are … great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self.’ The cyborg is both a myth of science fiction and a perspective on actual developments in contemporary industrial, technological, medical and cultural institutions. It entails the transgression of dichotomies between natural and artificial, organic and inorganic, mind and body, public and private, physical and non-physical, male and female, and particularly relevant given the relationship between player/avatar and Hewie human and animal. The fusion of mind, body and tool which Haraway describes as taking place within contemporary industries approximates the union of the player and avatar’s physical movements and subjective positions in videogame play. These developments, empowered by the mythology Haraway constructs around them, are said to have the potential to liberate individuals from traditional identity structures of gender, race, class and sexuality. 47 The cyborg features as a discursive motif for many writers describing the process of player/avatar engagement. For example, Lahti argues that ‘video games epitomize a new cyborgian relationship with entertainment technologies, linking our everyday social space and computer

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______________________________________________________________ technologies to virtual spaces and futuristic technologies.’ 48 For Lahti, the fascination of videogaming emerges from the cyborgian reflectivity between the player and avatar, whereby ‘our surrogate body on the screen … mirrors our desires and bodily experiences.’ 49 The muddying of boundaries between myself and the Fiona avatar is certainly a pleasure of playing Haunting Ground. Once mastery of the control system is achieved, my conscious manipulation of the joypad recedes, and Fiona seems to move in unmediated response to my desires. Insofar as the avatar becomes an extension of my body, the relationship between us indeed approaches that of the cyborg. The utopian aspects of Haraway’s application of the term - the discourses of ‘cyberliberation’ and ‘cyber-transcendence’ discussed by de Zwart and Lindsay - are also suggested in some videogame studies. Playing as a differently gendered, classed or raced avatar body is seen as allowing users to experience different forms of subjectivity, with many authors suggesting transgressive potentials across a range of videogame genres. Dovey and Kennedy’s videogame ‘re-embodiment’ emerges through the cybernetic circuit between player and game, which they describe as ‘a compelling literalization of the ontology of the cyborg - a subjectivity that depends precisely on this collapse of boundary between the human and the machine.’ 50 This cybernetic process, they argue, allows the possibility for users to experience alternative subjectivities, explore worlds free of prejudice, and deepen understandings of social conflict. In an earlier text on Lara Croft, Kennedy suggests that the adventure game character presents the possibility of a transgendered engagement. The potential collapse between male gamer and female avatar which happens when young men play as the adventuress: ‘offers a promise of a utopian subjectivity which is free from the constraints of fixed gender boundaries,’ constituting a kind of ‘queer embodiment.’ 51 Similarly, Caroline Bassett’s paper on the online world LambdaMOO - an early text game which in many ways parallels the contemporary Second Life - argues that the virtual bodies which inhabit this virtual space allow residents to ‘play with multiple subjectivities,’ many choosing descriptions completely different from their real life identities. 52 And the cyborg parallel is also employed by Jonathan Boulter in discussing first person shooter deathmatch tournaments. Boulter argues: ‘the gaming experience, with its various opportunities for fictionalizing both the real subject and the subject-who-plays … becomes a perfect site for the realization and representation of the cyborg.’ Part of the attraction of playing, despite the extreme and violent nature of the deathmatch genre, Boulter insists, is the promise of a better world realised through a cyborigian process of subjective transformation. 53 In addition to the cyborg-like relationship Haunting Ground produces between player and avatar, Fiona herself might be understood as a cyborg-like figure. Discussing JenniCam, Krissi M. Jimroglou applies

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______________________________________________________________ Haraway’s paradigm to the activities of Jennifer Ringley, a young woman who broadcast live unedited images from her living spaces over the internet via a digital camera from 1996 to 2003. ‘Through the integration of body and technology’ Fiona, like JenniCam, ‘is a hybrid, neither fully human nor fully machine yet constituted, in part, by both.’ 54 Paralleling the subject of Jimroglou’s paper, Fiona can be seen as playfully negotiating the relationship between player-subject and avatar/game/console-object; resisting traditional feminist approaches to the issue of embodiment. In the narrative of Haunting Ground, Fiona is both a damsel in distress requiring the player’s heroic intervention, a fetishised and sexualised object of desire for characters within the diegisis, and a central protagonist who is active in ensuring her own survival. A hybrid, Fiona not only combines player and machine, but also converging modes of representation and identity construction - print, audiovisual, and interactive media. Engaging with Fiona involves reading about her character and her capabilities, observing her from the omniscient position of voyeuristic and objectifying film spectator, controlling her from the distant yet highly engaged and motivated position of game player, and, in some instances, seeing things from the avatar’s visual perspective. When Fiona is made to hide from pursuers, depending on her location, the game’s visual perspective suddenly shifts from third person to first person. Players see things from Fiona’s eyes as the pursuer snuffles round the room trying to seek her out. This mode produces an optical, physical, and psychological alignment with the avatar. I experience events from Fiona’s point of view, from beneath a couch or under a bed, and sense the closeness of the villains as they search the area for the vanished protagonist. Absent from the frame, in contrast to Mulvey’s assertion about women in cinema, 55 Fiona is maker of meaning, not its bearer. 6.

The Cyborg Breaks Down While recognising Fiona as a hybrid cyborg, a figure of ‘partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ 56 may explain her indefinable nature, the application of the cyborg paradigm to the process of videogame play is far from straightforward. Most academics who do so are simultaneously sceptical of the extent to which videogame cultures fulfil such a potential. In relation to Lara Croft, Kennedy asserts that the transgendering possibilities offered by interaction with the star are contingent upon the assumption that her body is in any significant way feminine. 57 Lambda may have offered the possibility of gender transcendence, but Bassett observes that of the nine genders offered within the game, including ‘splat,’ ‘plural,’ ‘egotistical’ and ‘Spivak’ - an identity which even had its own pronouns most residents identified as either male, female or neutral. Moreover, ‘women’ predominantly described themselves as long haired and femininely accessorised, while ‘men’ tended to be over six foot tall with striking eyes. 58

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______________________________________________________________ The online world might offer a space for gender performance, but this frequently just translates into the reproduction of fairly rigid stereotypes. Moreover, utopian accounts of the cyborg’s potential for bodily liberation through a merging of player and avatar may be contingent upon an overstatement of the collapsing of the two in videogame play. As Barry Atkins observes: ‘We may become deeply involved in the experience of watching or playing “as” Lara Croft, but we never undertake a magical transformation to “become” her.’ The experience of playing Tomb Raider is constantly mediated by the graphical limitations of Croft’s stylised design, and by the angling of the third person perspective. 59 Equally, I never ‘become’ Fiona. I am never truly incorporated into the game-character and her environment, but instead, as Steven E. Jones describes it, ‘play comfortably at the “threshold” of game and world.’ 60 There are admittedly moments when I feel myself and the avatar Fiona align in cyborgian symbiosis. In such a situation ‘the limitations of the real are (momentarily) cast aside precisely in an active assumption of another subjective position.’ 61 But unlike the carnivalesque deathmatches described by Boulter, playing as Fiona is a far from exhilarating experience, but one which involves adopting a fairly masochistic subjective position. Part of the displeasure of the game, undermining a central requirement of the cyborg process, lies in the uneasy and often frustrating relationship between player and avatar. King and Krzywinska list a range of restrictive features used to increase fear and tension within horror videogames: enclosed spaces, limited vision, pre-determined camera angles, 62 arguing such shifts and cuts of the camera result in a ‘disjunctive fracture of player/player-character orientation.’ 63 Both Howells 64 and Newman 65 make similar points about the disruptive nature of videogame cut-scenes, which frequent interrupt survival horror gameplay and preface every major encounter or development. The moment when Fiona hides, and I see things through her eyes, can also be a jolting experience. While traditional film studies might consider such an optical position as aligning viewer with protagonist, in this context the sudden change in perspective breaks the player’s normal third-person relationship between gamespace and avatar. Even more discomforting is the game’s ‘panic mode,’ which activates if Fiona becomes too close to an adversary. In this state players loses their otherwise complete control of the avatar, the joypad vibrates and the screen becomes blurry. Fiona stumbles wildly around, bumping into walls and furniture. Both point of view shot and the visual distortion of ‘panic mode’ can be understood as encouraging identification with the avatar through adopting optical or psychological perspectives. They are associated with moments of fear and anxiety, felt by the on-screen protagonist, which the game encourages in the player. However, both techniques simultaneously break the player’s immersion in the game and identification with the avatar, through drawing attention to its

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______________________________________________________________ surface texture, its mechanics and technologies. Fear and anxiety are particularly unpleasant experiences, and any text generating such an affect is likely, in the same moment that it is successfully produced, to propel the reader/viewer/player back into the real world. Reflecting upon my own feeling of cyborgian symbiosis it does seem as though such moments are more correctly remembered than experienced. A necessary element of the fusion of player and avatar is an unawareness of the process itself. Like riding a bike, or driving a car, controlling the vehicular avatar constitute an ideal synchronisation between user and machine, but the moment one becomes aware of the feet on the peddles, the hands on the steering device, or the fingers on the buttons, that seamlessness is abruptly ruptured. The extent to which I become feminised through playing as Fiona is dependent on an alignment between the two of us, and the extent to which Fiona, like Croft, represents a genuine feminine experience. And yet, as a male player, these two requirements seem mutually exclusive. In the moments when the fusion between player and avatar is at its most perfect, Fiona disappears as a character, consequently negating any sense of feminisation which playing as her might generate. Instead she becomes simply a functional tool allowing me to engage with the world of the game. In Haunting Ground, the strongest moments of cyborgian fusion tend to involve exploration, guiding Fiona around Belli Castle, searching for objects, doors and clues. In such a situation, the avatar represents an identityless counter being shifted around a three dimensional gamespace, a blank slate, her emptiness being a product of, and a necessary quality for, my merging with her form. The design of Fiona’s body undeniably reminds me of her femininity, but the stock cycle of movement soon loses its visual impact. In contrast, points during Haunting Ground where Fiona appears most gendered are cut-scenes, hiding, and panic mode sequences. Notably, these are the moments when the player is least in control of Fiona, and the player/avatar relationship is at its most disrupted or disembodied. Respectively, I view Fiona as a movie character separate from my spectator self, I watch the game world from an optical perspective so alien that it ruptures the familiar mode of gameplay, or I experience the usually-smooth alignment between player and avatar crudely dislocated as Fiona lurches chaotically about the place. In each instance I am reminded of Fiona’s otherness, her femininity, and her helplessness without me to supply direction to her movement. At best, in such situations, I am tasked with taking care of the otherwise immobile avatar’s body, guiding her to safety, evading the threat. This is a role enhanced by Fiona’s design as a female figure, a femininity I do not share in my patriarchal position as benevolent protector. I might experience a significant investment in her body. At times this may entail a strange sympathy with the virtual protagonist. But my primary role is that of gamer. Here, following King and Krzywinska’s application of the

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______________________________________________________________ term, I am interpolated as a player, ‘self consciously aware of the act of playing,’ 66 not as a character. I am not Fiona, but someone looking after Fiona. I do identify with Fiona’s sense of panic. I am anxious to keep her safe, but more because her death would frustrate my progress through the game than as a consequence of any real fear for her safety. Such a failure would mean returning to the last save point and starting again, a repetition which would further distance me from Fiona as character and encourage an even more pragmatic ludic approach to our relationship. At worst, in such situations I feel frustration bordering on misogynist anger as the female figure flounders around, ignoring my assistance, my failure in the game a consequence of the hysterical protagonist I have been burdened with assisting. 7.

Conclusion Exploring the nature of player/avatar relationships reveals much about the processes of videogame play, the function of videogames as audiovisual texts, and the identity politics of this increasingly sophisticated medium. The avatar’s nature is multiple rather than singular, and varied rather than uniform. This produces different subjective positions, and different experiences of embodiment, according to the body of the avatar and the body of the user. When playing Haunting Ground I am neither the cinema spectator of Mulvey’s paradigm, nor the dispassionate gamer of the ludological model, nor the immersed and re-embodied player described by Dovey and Kennedy, nor the fusion of machine and man implicit in Haraway’s cyborg. And yet playing the game involves moving between a partial and combined engagement with all these modes of participation and interaction. The academic study of videogames is still in its infancy. It is hoped that this chapter has contributed to a future theory of avatars in this emerging academic discipline.

Notes 1

D. Carr, ‘Playing With Lara’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces, G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, pp. 174-175. 2 M. Grieb, ‘Run Lara Run’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces, G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, p. 163. 3 J. Dovey and H. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media, Open University Press, Oxfordshire, 2006, p. 112. 4 M. Lahti, ‘As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures in Video Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader, M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron (eds), London, Routledge, 2003, p. 163.

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S. Morris, ‘First-Person Shooters - A Game Apparatus’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces, G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, p. 87. 6 S. C. Murphy, ‘“Live in Your World, Play in Ours”: The Spaces of Video Game Identity’, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004, p. 231. 7 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was released in 2001, followed in 2003 by the triple-titled Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. 8 S. A. Howells, ‘Watching a Game, Playing a Movie: When Media Collide’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces, G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, p. 115. 9 M. de Zwart and D. Lindsay, ‘My Self, My Avatar, My Rights?: Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds’, in this volume. 10 S. Natkin, Video Games & Interactive Media: A Glimpse at New Digital Entertainment, A K Peters Ltd, Wellesley, MAS, 2006, p. 140. 11 Dovey and Kennedy, Game Cultures, p. 106. 12 D. Buckingham, ‘Studying Computer Games’, in Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn, G. Schott, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 12. 13 T. Flew and S. Humphreys, New Media: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. 110-111. 14 S. J. Yates and K. Littleton, ‘Understanding Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach’, in Virtual Gender: Technology, Consumption and Identity, E. Green and A. Adam (eds), London, Routledge, 2001, p. 115. 15 D. Carr, ‘Space, Navigation and Affect,’ in Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn, G. Schott, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 68. 16 S. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, J. H. Smith, S. P. Tosca, Understanding VideoGames: The Essential Introduction, Routledge, London, 2008, p. 184. 17 S. M. Grimes, ‘“You Shoot Like a Girl”: The Female Protagonist in Action-Adventure Video Games’, in Level Up Conference Proceedings, November 2003, viewed 7 January 2009, . 18 Upon playing the game a second time, users do have the chance to change Fiona’s costume, selecting from options such as cowgirl, dominatrix or fancy-dress frog, but can only select from available designs, and cannot alter the avatar’s bodily appearance. 19 As argued in relation to Konami’s long-running horror franchise in E. Kirkland, ‘The Self-Reflexive Fun House of Silent Hill’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 13, No. 4, November 2007. 20 .

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King and Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders. J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin use this term to refer to new media’s employment of the modes and methods of old media, and visa versa in Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2001. 23 Haunted Ground game manual, Capcom, 2005, p. 7. 24 A. Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 150-151. 25 L. Taylor, ‘Networking Power: Videogame Structure from Concept Art,’ in Videgames and Art, A. Clarke and G. Mitchell (eds), Intellect, Bristol, 2007. 26 L. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in The Film Studies Reader, J. Hollows, P. Hutchings, M. Jancovich (eds), Arnold, London, 2000. 27 Examining this painting, Fiona’s typed comments underline the portrait’s scopic penetration: ‘The eyes really feel like they are peering into one’s soul.’ 28 Howells, ‘Watching A Game, Playing A Movie: When Media Collide’, p. 112. 29 R. Klevjer, ‘In Defence of Cutscenes’, in Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, F. Mäyrä (ed), Tampere University Press, Tamper, viewed on 14 July 2008, . 30 R. J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema, California University Press, New York, 1996, p. 1. 31 L. Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, in Film Genre Reader II, B. K. Grant (ed), University of Texas Press, Austin, 1997. 32 Klevjer, ‘In Defence of Cutscenes’, emphasis in original. 33 S. Poole, Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, Forth Estate, London, 2000, p. 90. 34 M. Eskelinen, ‘The Gaming Situation’, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game, Vol. 1, No 1, July 2001, viewed on 7 January 2009, . 35 Carr, ‘Playing With Lara’, p. 175. 36 P. Ward, ‘Videogames as Remediated Animation’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces, G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, p. 123. 37 Darley, Visual Digital Culture, p. 154. 38 Ibid., p. 152-153. 39 Klevjer, ‘In Defense of Cutscenes’. 40 E. Aarseth, ‘Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation’, in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, N. WardripFruin and P. Harrigan (eds), The MIT Press, London, 2004, p. 48. 22

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M. Fuller and H. Jenkins, ‘Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue’, in Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, S. G. Jones (ed), Sage, London, 1995, p. 61. 42 M. Kinder, Playing With Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, University of California Press, London, 1993. 43 J. Newman, Videogames, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 129. 44 King and Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders, p. 185-186. 45 Lahti, ‘As We Become Machines…’, p. 166-167. 46 M. J. P. Wolf, ‘On the Future of Video Games’, in Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication, P. Messaris and L. Humphreys (eds), Peter Lang, Oxford, 2007, p. 193. 47 D. J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association Books, London, 1991. 48 Lahti, ‘As We Become Machines…’, p. 158. 49 Ibid., p. 163. 50 Dovey and Kennedy, Game Cultures, p. 109. 51 H. W. Kennedy, ‘Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis’, Gamestudies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, Vol. 2, Issue 2, December 2002, viewed on 14 July 2008, . 52 C. Bassett, ‘Virtually Gendered: Life in an On-Line World’, in The Subcultures Reader, K. Gelder and S. Thornton (eds), Routledge, London, 1997. 53 J. Boulter, ‘Virtual Bodies, or Cyborgs Are People Too’, in Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer, N. Garrelts (ed), McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005. 54 K. M. Jimroglou, ‘A Camera with a View: JenniCAM, Visual Representation, and Cyborg Subjectivity’, Information, Communication and Society, Vol. 2, Issue 4, 1999, p. 441. 55 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 239. 56 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 154. 57 Kennedy, ‘Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?’ 58 Bassett, ‘Virtually Gendered’. 59 B. Atkins, More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2003, pp. 27-28. 60 S. E. Jones, The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies Routledge, London, 2008, p. 14. 61 Boulter, ‘Virtual Bodies’, p. 55, emphasis in original. 62 King and Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders, pp. 90-91. 63 Ibid., p. 99.

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Howells, ‘Watching a Game, Playing a Move’, p. 116. Newman, Videogames, p. 104. 66 King and Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders, p. 198. 65

Bibliography Aarseth, E., ‘Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation’, in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan (eds), The MIT Press, London, 2004, pp. 45-55. Atkins, B., More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2003. Bassett, C., ‘Virtually Gendered: Life in an On-Line World’, in The Subcultures Reader. K. Gelder and S. Thornton (eds), Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 537-550. Berenstein, R. J., Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. California University Press, New York, 1996. Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R., Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2001. Boulter, J., ‘Virtual Bodies, or Cyborgs Are People Too’, in Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer. N. Garrelts (ed), McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005, pp. 52-68. Buckingham, D., ‘Studying Computer Games’, in Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play. D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn, G. Schott, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 1-13. Carr, D., ‘Space, Navigation and Affect’, in Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play. D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn, G. Schott, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 59-71. —––, ‘Playing with Lara’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces. G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, pp. 171180.

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______________________________________________________________ Darley, A., Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. Routledge, London, 2000. De Zwart, M. and Lindsay, D., ‘My Self, My Avatar, My Rights?: Avatar Identity in Social Virtual Worlds’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 81-100. Dovey, J. and Kennedy, H., Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Open University Press, Oxfordshire, 2006. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S., Smith, J. H., Tosca, S. P., Understanding VideoGames: The Essential Introduction. Routledge, London, 2008. Eskelinen, M., ‘The Gaming Situation’. Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game, Vol. 1, No 1, July 2001, viewed on 7 January 2009, . Flew, T. and Humphreys, S., New Media: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005. Fuller, M. and Jenkins, H., ‘Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue’, in Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, S. G. Jones (ed), Sage, London, 1995, pp. 57-72. Grieb, M., ‘Run Lara Run’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces. G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, pp. 157170. Grimes, S. M., ‘“You Shoot Like a Girl”: The Female Protagonist in ActionAdventure Video Games’. Level Up Conference Proceedings, November 2003, viewed 7 January 2009, . Haraway, D. J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books, London, 1991. Howells, S. A., ‘Watching a Game, Playing a Movie: When Media Collide’, in ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interface. G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, pp. 110-121.

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______________________________________________________________ Jimroglou, K. M., ‘A Camera with a View: JenniCAM, Visual Representation, and Cyborg Subjectivity’. Information, Communication and Society, Vol. 2, Issue 4, 1999, pp. 439-453. Jones, S. E., The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies. Routledge, London, 2008. Kennedy, H. W., ‘Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis’. Gamestudies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, Vol. 2, Issue 2, December 2002, viewed on 7 January 2009, . Kinder, M., Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. University of California Press, London, 1993. King, G. and Krzywinska, T., Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts. IB Tauris, London, 2006. Kirkland, E., ‘The Self-Reflexive Fun House of Silent Hill’. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 13, No. 4, November 2007. Klevjer, R., ‘In Defence of Cutscenes’, in Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings. Frans Mäyrä (ed), Tampere University Press, Tamper, viewed on 7 January 2009, . Lahti, M., ‘As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures in Video Games’, in The Video Game Theory Reader. M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron (eds), Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 157-170. Morris, S., ‘First-Person Shooters - A Game Apparatus’, in ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interface. G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, pp. 81-97. Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in The Film Studies Reader. J. Hollows, P. Hutchings, M. Jancovich (eds), Arnold, London, 2000, pp. 238-248.

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______________________________________________________________ Murphy, S. C., ‘“Live in Your World, Play in Ours”: The Spaces of Video Game Identity’. Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004, pp. 223-238. Natkin, S., Video Games & Interactive Media: A Glimpse at New Digital Entertainment. A K Peters Ltd, Wellesley, 2006. Newman, J., Videogames. Routledge, London, 2004. Poole, S., Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. Forth Estate, London, 2000. Sommerfeldt, C., ‘The Embodied Adventurer: Women as Player-Characters, Gamers, and Module-Builders in BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights’, in Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer. N. Garrelts (ed), Mcfarland & Co, Jefferson, 2005, pp. 160-173. Taylor, L., ‘Networking Power: Videogame Structure from Concept Art’, in Videgames and Art. A. Clarke and G. Mitchell (eds), Intellect, Bristol, 2007, pp. 226-237. Ward, P., ‘Videogames as Remediated Animation’, in Screenplay: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces. G. King and T. Krywinska (eds), Wallflower Press, London, 2002, pp. 122-135. Williams, L., ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, in Film Genre Reader II. B. K. Grant (ed), University of Texas Press, Austin, 1997, pp. 140158. Wolf., M. J. P., ‘On the Future of Video Games’, in Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication. P. Messaris and L. Humphreys (eds), Peter Lang, Oxford, 2007, pp. 187-195. Yates, S. J. and Littleton, K., ‘Understanding Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach’, in Virtual Gender: Technology, Consumption and Identity. E. Green and A. Adam (eds), London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 103123. Ewan Kirkland is a Film and Screen Studies lecturer at the University of Brighton.

PART III Virtual Environments and Academia

Trans-Generational Dialogues: Social Sciences as Multimedia Games Peter Ludes Abstract A few classical social scientists realised that the format of articles and books does not always provide us with the best medium of elaborating and conveying important insights. Therefore they experimented with a theater play in the sociology of knowledge (Karl Mannheim), a utopian tale on the great debate of the intellectuals (Norbert Elias in an interview with Peter Ludes), insightful drawings (Kurt H. Wolff, a student of both Mannheim and Elias) or a Sylvester Symposium on the Principle of Love (Agnes Heller). 1 Arguing that some sociologists (for certain types of problems) felt more elective affinities with artists than with scientists or political activists, certain characteristics of this approach can be detected: These authors have transcended the simplifying functional differentiations of truth, justice, and taste - or science, morality, and art in order to create a new form of understanding. Individual actors are not the most important or decisive units of analysis, but figurations of groups of people, which do not always consciously choose their actions. Not only are the concepts of individual actors and of short-term orientations and actions at stake, but the very notion of action itself, to be replaced by trans-generational interdependencies. The latter refer to impersonal forces, hardly open to deliberations or discourses, but which are constituted by so far hidden and may be unintelligible constraints. A few of these traits will be sketched here, to enlarge the scope of social scientific modes of theory-formation beyond traditional uni-linear texts to networked social-science-as-arts games. Key Words: Dialogical sociology, trans-generational dialogues, multimedia games, discourse theory, civilising processes, functional realms, social science arts, Shalom, Norbert Elias, Jürgen Habermas. ***** 1.

Social Sciences across Functional Realms In my last personal talk with Norbert Elias, in Amsterdam, in 1988, I told him that he would always be sitting at my desk. He smiled and replied: ‘That is very nice.’ Of course, we can also have many more by-sitters, standers, -joggers and -thinkers who contribute more than by the way: Important authors, whether of scientific works, plays, or sculptures whom we came only to cherish or confront via and in terms of our reception of a few of their published work. In this sense, an inner dialogue is constitutive for any

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______________________________________________________________ (re-) creation. It is institutionalised by footnotes and acknowledgements, yet seldom understood as continuous dialogue but rather as, e.g. ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ (Robert K. Merton). This metaphor already implies that the later generations are higher and see farther, a view suspended in transgenerational dialogues with arguments back and forth across time with no presupposed assumption of an inevitable progress of social science. The new devices of interactive data banks, which allow for simulating thought experiments also re-configure the dialogues between the living and the deadand avatars of the not-yet-born. As a pragmatic suggested ground rule, the life spans of all living citizens might be represented, i.e., roughly 200 years, moving forward at the beginning of the 21st century from about 1900 to 2010 every year and thereby clarifying sustainability not only in terms of natural resources or knowledge, but also for the main creators and institutions of codifying social scientific knowledge. Under the new conditions of computer-based simulations of millions of phases of various societal developments, similar discourses across generations with elaborations of classical and contemporary social theories emerge. They must also imply representatives from the major cultures and strata to enhance insights beyond pre-given chains of existential biases. Therefore, the historical error to ‘see’ the world or the few selected social atoms of it from the day fly’s view of hodie-centrism and the ego-centrism of super-theoreticians or humble empiricists who offer their share of individual contributions will be overcome by trans-generational dialogues and authorships. When it will become natural not to see men and/or women as crowns of genesis or evolution, but as integrated elements of vivid and mortified impressions transformed via and into the terms of virtual or mixed reality, new chances for multi-mediated thought experiments enter the stage. Classic movies will be used for re-productions of exceptional works of art like Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’ for post-industrial societies in the 21st century. Similarly, all recorded interviews and the few actually taking place dialogues between insightful (not always the most reputed) social scientists will be put into an online data bank. Thereby, the so far hidden biases in their arguments, whether based on gender, age, nation, class or so far unobservable social conditionings, will be made explicit and allow for completely new types of freely floating intellectuals. Based on my ‘dialogical sociology’ 2 and ‘inter-media plays,’ 3 I will sketch a few characteristics of such an approach, first from a play which enacted a dialogue between Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber: 4 ‘Whereto, Why and anyway?’ A.

Actors: The old Fritz: An about 40 years old man, whose appearance throughout the entire first act should incarnate the following contradiction:

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______________________________________________________________ between a very weak, decrepit, ill body and an extraordinary, ingenious mind, that is aware of this uniqueness. Thus, gestures and facial expressions need to be consistent with the appearance of a ruler over centuries, but should also be consistently lessened into the everyday. For example the firm, loud, clear voice can often switch into unsteady vocalisation with a hardly understandable rasping sound, whispering. The confident, upright walking may again and again change into scuffling and towards the end of the first act into crawling. The expressive hand gestures can fade to shivering, like that of an alcoholic or pill addict. The old Fritz grows tired and exhausted throughout the first act. The handsome Siggi: He is a big, portly man of more than 50 years. He is physically clearly considerably stronger than the old Fritz, mentally and emotionally composed and balanced. Through the whole first act he wears a facial mask behind which all his features, except for the eyes, disappear. The mask is very rigid. The facial expressions are only suggestively depicted through contours and the nose’s elevation. His mask is a mirror. Throughout the play the stage light will more and more often be refracted, so that it blinds the audience. Siggi’s body movements document his extraordinary body control. But, during the first act he slowly loses and only towards the end really noticeably the control over his voice. It becomes more rasping like that of a man who just had a difficult jaw surgery. The tight Max: He is very tall, at least 1.90m, bristles with energy, through which time and again a sickening nervousness shows. His movements are demanding and bossy. He wears a mask which makes the left half of his face all rigid but which completely corresponds to his normal face in concentrated, idle position. Through this it has to be made clear that always only half of his face, and through this half of his being, is grasped in any talking, laughing, and any facial expression. About half way through the first act Max becomes ill and nervous. Towards the end of the second act he comes down with a strong cold and pneumonia. This shows through the degeneration of his externally still slightly appearing stature. B.

Stage-Setting Part of a mountain range which covers well the lower half, the whole width and the half depth of the stage; two peaks on the left and on the very right side of the stage, where the left one is about one third higher than the right. About in the middle of the mountain section an abyss. It is made of Styrofoam but gives a realistic, dark threatening and gruesomely beautiful, ‘elevating’ and ‘degrading’ impression. In the foreground on the right side there is a small mountain hut made of wood, which has an open side facing the audience. Inside is a simple bed, very close to a simple table with one chair. In the middle of the stage, also in front of the mountain range, there is a table with a filming device and a record player. About one third length of the

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______________________________________________________________ stage away from the right side of the stage there is a small waterfall, a bit more than man-high, coming down from the mountains. It ends in a ceramic basin - not visible until the in act one indicated point - which channels the water into a normal tap. The left, high mountain hides behind a rock overhang a wine barrel, which the handsome Siggi is going to use. The divides of the mountain must leave enough space for a sofa and a comfortable armchair. The right mountain hides behind a rock overhang a beer barrel, which the strong Max is going to use. Right next to it there is an alehouse table and fitting chair. The distances between the hut, the left and the right mountain must be about the same. That means, the seat of Max is considerably higher than that of the handsome Siggi. But he must not appear nobler through this; to the contrary, it seems rather somewhat misplaced. In the middle of the mountain range, valley insertion, there is a very modern, small conference table with multiple armchairs. C.

First Act The curtain is already open before the play begins. The stage is completely dark. Five minutes before the official start of the play a movie is projected across the surface of the mountain range: a slow, but compared to reality faster, sunrise, if possible the shoots of a sunrise in the city in which this play is currently staged, most suitable one close to the theater so that there is the illusion that the audience watch a real sunrise, as if the back wall of the stage had disappeared. Two minutes to the official opening of the play starts ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra.’ 5 It is a bit louder than one normally listens to music. The denoted times must at all cost be abided by: This should create the impression that the audience already enters the slowly developing events, which do not wait for them. At the determined, official start of the play a light in the mountain hut is lit. The old Fritz is getting out of bed slowly and sleepy. He wears long johns and a thick, long, and an, according to today’s concepts, out fashioned shirt. He washes his face slowly and still sleepily with the little water that is in a washbowl on the edge of the table. Throughout the entire time the sunrise and the music continue. The old Fritz is surprised and finally gets worried. He murmurs something like ‘that’s hardly bearable,’ looks first around the hut, then out of the window and finally, slowly but assertive, walks out of the hut. This phase lasts about 5 minutes. Fritz has a short look at the sunrise. Only now the sun gives enough light, so that the audience and Fritz are simultaneously able to recognise the table in the middle of the stage, on which there are a film projector and a record player. Fritz walks with a normal pace towards the table, takes, as a matter of course, the tone arm from the record, so that the music stops and he says ‘there you go.’ Then he also turns off the projector. For a second it is

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______________________________________________________________ completely dark - except for the faint light from the hut. Then the lower, right half of the stage - thus the mountain hut and part of its forecourt - is light through stage lights. The old Fritz goes content towards his table, sits down approximately in a half-profile - and starts reading, first quietly and eventually increasingly loud until his voice fills the room, the mountains and the auditorium. But through the first act there are, again and again, mood and mind swings as well as physical weaknesses to be observed. Fritz: ‘Is science maybe only a fear and elusion from pessimism? A self-defense against … the truth? And, speaking morally, something like cowardliness and deceitfulness?’ 6 ‘A scene from a picture book for the blind - only for apprehension’? 7 Do we build ‘together with our virtues also our flaws?’ 8 ‘The erudite’ - and here, the voice should already be loudly audible in the auditorium - ‘decomposes a picture into many dots, such as one, who uses the lorgnette to see the stage and shortly sees a head, shortly a piece of cloth, but never grasps the whole. He doesn’t see these singular dots connected but only develops their interrelation; that is why he has no strong impression of anything general. For example he assesses a script, because he is not able to have an overview of the whole, after some pieces or sentences or mistakes; he would be ensnared to allege that an oil painting is a wild bunch of dots.’ 9 Short break in Fritz’s talk, then abruptly and loudly: ‘Some generation has to start the fight, which a later one shall win.’ 10 Then in normal volume again: ‘The only critic of a philosophy that is possible and also proving something, namely to try to live according to it, has never been taught at universities: but always the critic of words by words.’ 11 Another break, a bit shorter than the first, and then again a bit louder than normal, but less loudly than the first time: ‘Maybe this very generation will even, on the whole, appear more evil than the current one - because it will be, both in the bad and the good, more open; yes, it would be possible that its soul, once it sounds fully and freely, stirs and shocks our souls in a similar fashion, as if the voice of some, until now hidden, evil nature spirit, grew loud. Or how do these sentences sound in our ears, that the passion is better than the stoicism and the hypocrisy, that being honest, even in evil, is better than losing oneself to the morality of convention, that a free human can be good as well as bad, but that the illiberal human is a disgrace of nature?’ 12 The old Fritz makes a slightly fatigued impression for the first time since he turned off the record placer and the film projector. He gets up, walks up and down in his hut, out to the waterfall, which slowly becomes visible through the stage light, and only the waterfall! He looks at it, his eyes fall on the ceramic basin, which now also becomes visible to the audience as it is, because it is now illuminated. Fritz takes a big metal cup, which stands next to the basin on a ledge. He opens the tap, which now also becomes visible for the audience, fills it with water and drinks audible and with pleasure.

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______________________________________________________________ At that moment the handsome Siggi slowly appears on stage from the right. At this Fritz puts on a record ‘Was kann der Sigismund dafür, dass er so schön ist [It is not Sigismund’s fault, that he is so handsome].’ 13 Siggi has to get through the mountain range to reach his, on the left side situated, place. He carries, with some difficulty, a comfortable, big leather chair. Slowly he walks towards his place, which is gradually illuminated by the stage lights. The old Fritz watches him naturally; he slowly walks back to his hut and gets dressed. At the same time Siggi, who put down the chair in his place at the left mountain and has sat down for a short time, now walks back to the right edge of the stage. After a short time he appears again in a stopped fashion with a big red sofa on his shoulders and back. He is considerably stronger illuminated than before. Very slowly and arduous, increasingly weighed down, yet throughout self-confident, Siggi manages to carry the couch to his place at the feet of the leather chair without putting it down once. Siggi shortly lies down on the sofa. One notices that he enjoys this; it is necessary so he can recover his strength/energy, maybe to attain new strength. From his idle position his body movements slowly give way to that of a very strongly focused scientist and doctor. With a bit quieter voice than Fritz, but still clearly audible, Siggi speaks from the beginning in a steady, clam ton: That ‘the thinking about human behavior, the all-too human - or as the learned expression is: psychological observation - would belong to the means with which one could ease life’s burdens, that the practice of this art would grant presence of mind in difficult situations and conversations … was believed, was known in previous centuries.’ 14 ‘Maybe, by the way, it is a result of my occupation with psychoanalysis that I can hardly lie anymore. As often as I try a misrepresentation, I am subject to errors or other blunders, through which my insincerity is revealed.’ 15 ‘Only for the most exquisite and balanced minds it appears possible to preserve the image of the perceived outer reality from distortions which would otherwise be experienced during the passage through the mental individuality of the perceiver.’ 16 ‘The bigger the resistance the more ample this deformation. … If one has a method that makes it possible to get from the idea to the repressed, from the distortions to the deformed, then one can also make the former unconscious in a person’s inner life accessible to the conscious without hypnosis. … Object of this interpretation work are not only the ideas of the ill person, but also his dreams, which open the most direct access to the knowledge of the unconscious, its unintentional as aimless actions … and the errors of his achievements in daily life (promises, making mistakes, and whatnot).’ 17 The last words Siggi said - as if unintended - in the direction of Fritz. He, by now correctly dressed and the chair put in front of the hut in Siggi’s direction, answers with a loud and clear voice: ‘If virtue slept it will get up more freshly.’ ‘As the bones, the meat, the intestines and arteries are

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______________________________________________________________ enclosed with a skin that makes the sight of a human bearable, so are the emotions and passions of the soul enclosed through conceitedness: this is the skin of the soul.’ 18 The ‘dermatologist,’ who has to help his patients to casting of the skin, Siggi answers: All repressions ‘are to be reversed.’ The goal is ‘the development’ of ‘the ability of achievement as well as enjoyment’ of the ill person. ‘Various requests are to be made towards the person who is to be subjected to the advantages of the casting of the skin. First, he or she must be able to attain a psychic normal state … Furthermore, one can ask for a certain degree of intelligence and ethic development; the doctor will soon lose interest with worthless people. Interest is necessary to enable him to delve deeper into the psyche of the patient. Distinct character buildings, traits of a really degenerative constitution manifest themselves during the treatment as source of hardly conquerable resistance. … Also an age bracket near the fifth decennium creates disadvantageous conditions. … Then the mass of the psychic material cannot be overcome anymore, the time necessary for the development becomes too long, and the ability to reverse psychic processes starts to weaken.’ 19 Fritz: ‘The biggest sin of humans is that they were born.’ 20 Siggi: ‘The casting of the skin doesn’t want to apply anything, doesn’t want to add anything new, but it wants to take away, to get something out, and for this reason it cares for the recovery of the abnormal symptoms … whose riddance is its goal.’ 21 Fritz: ‘The one that thinks deeper knows that he is always at fault however he acts or judges. … The error turned animals into humans; should the truth be able to turn humans back into animals?’ 22 Yes, ‘if we had not remained to some degree unscientific humans, what could be dear to us about science at all? All things considered and round, smooth and fully pronounced: a fully aware being would be indifferent towards awareness.’ 23 Siggi (with somewhat raised voice and slight gesticulation - he could for example get up at the following): ‘It is a long overcome conception, one clinging to the exterior appearance, that the ill person suffers as a result of some kind of insecurity and if this insecurity was relieved through communication (of the causal relationships of his illness with his life, his childhood experiences, etc.), then he would have to get healthy. Not this ignorance by itself is the pathogenic moment but the reasoning of the ignorance in inner antagonisms, which have at first called forth the ignorance and now still keep it. In the combat of these antagonisms is the task of therapy. The communication of that, which the patient does not know, because he has repressed it, is only one of the necessary preparations. … Would the knowledge of the unconscious be so important for the ill person, then it would be enough to heal him if he listened to lectures or read books’ or went to the theater.’ 24 ‘But these measures would have only as much effect

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______________________________________________________________ on the nervous symptoms as the distribution of menu carts at times of dearth on the hunger. The comparison is even suitable beyond its first usage, because the messages of the unconscious for the patient have regularly the consequence that the conflict within him tightens and the discomfort increases. But since psychoanalysis cannot do without such communication, it prescribes that psychoanalysis must not happen before two conditions are met. Firstly, until the ill person through preparation has come near the repressed by himself and secondly, until he has attached himself so far to the doctor, so that the emotional relationship with the doctor makes any new escape impossible. Only through the fulfilment of these conditions it becomes possible to recognize the antagonisms that led to repression and ignorance, and to get it under control. Thus a psychoanalytic intervention does definitely postulate a longer contact with the patient.’ 25 and - now clearly towards the audience, Siggi says: ‘I therefore must ask you, to not leave yet this big treatment room. … .’ 26 The references refer to the collected works and are specified in the original German edition. This classic dialogue may be supplemented by the conclusion of a further fictional dialogue, this time between Niklas Luhmann, Juergen Habermas, Norbert Elias, and Kurt H. Wolff, moderated by ‘Merkur’ the God of trade and title of a German intellectual journal, as published in Ludes: 27 Elias: “To understand societal structures and processes … the investigation of a single functional layer never suffices within a social field. In order really to be understood, these structures and processes require an investigation of the relationship between the various functional layers that are bound to one another within a social field.” And I would like to emphasise something else: “All that may be discerned today is that a series of specific marks of civilization present themselves in the gradually emergent civilization. But it cannot be said that we already fully understand why we are actually tormenting ourselves. We perceive that we have gotten into certain entanglements with our civilization that are unknown among less civilized human beings, but we also know that these less “civilized” human beings are for their part often plagued by needs and fears that we no longer suffer from, or surely at least to a lesser degree. Wolff: Yes, but there is something that has never heretofore existed, namely, an unprecedented “estrangement from history.” With that “I understand our feeling of discontinuity, the feeling that we all and every one of us are facing something never previously given …

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______________________________________________________________ something much less graspable by means of feelings than by means of cognition: our termination, the termination of all humanity, of every single individual … I would be unable to recognize our estrangement from history if I did not stand in continuity with my past, but that means with our past; in other words, if I were not a human being among human beings.” I have said little here, and have felt profoundly, how little all these grand theories have to say to this problem - even though I know, Norbert, that precisely your recent investigations on problems of involvement and detachment can lead us out of double-bind traps. 2.

Social Science Arts: Project Shalom The century-long and still dominating scientific argumentation in terms of oral speeches and, mainly, written texts (rather than multisensuously, especially visually) has been a historically particular mode of argumentation. The connections between graphics, written texts and moving images, which predominate already in multimedia networks, will be used ever more in a complementary way to traditional textual scientific argumentations-not least because of the new technological possibilities in the direction of an increasing importance of ‘visual argumentation.’ Up to now, media communications typically exclude smelling, tasting and touching. Nintendo Wii, however, can be considered as a new phase of interactive mass media, which allow for new identification models, e.g. figures like Mario or self-created Miis at the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008, in simulations of the real ‘bird’s nest’ or other Olympic sites. Experiences of and with all senses demand personal interactions from face to face, most intensely in friendships and especially in love’s multisensual expressions. But it must not be underestimated that at first glance mono-sensually appealing artworks like music productions can indirectly capture all senses or that the excitation of only one sense can silence or resonate all the others. Multimedia games for example have already left behind film, TV and video in their technical development and economic importance. They are still mainly played by children and teenagers and thereby shape notably the pre-pictures, personality structures, fears and wishes, norms and values that will prevail in the next decades. In Western societies and Japan, the generation between 30 and 50 years of age, which fills many leading positions in economy, politics, the military or culture usually has had formative experiences with multimedia games. Some of them still play once in a while and transfer aesthetic, moral, or strategic principles from games to other realms of life and death. 28

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______________________________________________________________ Gadgets and fastness in this market usually push aside complex emotions, subtle and completely sensual modes of behaviour and the imaginative testing of new leeway. A new cultural procurement would be for example that composers, authors and festival directors, who were so far creatively active for the opera, theater or festival, should prepare performances that are tried simultaneously on classical stages and in worldwide multimedia networks. The social science works of art by Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, and Agnes Heller could be tried out as contributions to corresponding festivals. There has already emerged a network culture of digital audio-visual symbols. Multimedia networks reproduce, combine, and diversify old media images of events, people, or landscapes, which the majority of users have never seen immediately and never will. Thus not only fictional representations become day-to-day consumable with their origins still rooted in real occurrences - but also forms and colours, which were created computer-based and have so far not been encountered in any life situation. With the increase of these historically new modes of experiences and of expressions, this re-figuring of space, time, intimacy, interaction, self and others, important changes in human cognition and, albeit with a considerable delay, in respective relevance schemata, assessments and modes of behaviour emerge. At the same time these modes are mixed or brought into alternation with sedimentations of old situations, landscapes and people, whereby mixed worldviews open up new chances for insights. 29 The radical changes in modes of cognition, behavioural models and perspectives in media communications demand a novel aesthetic mode of transferring fragments of immediate experiences. Inter-media games, for example, work understandably across functional realms, national and generational cultures and may contribute to overcome nationally spoken languages, but tie in with nonverbal communication and visual symbols. This potential achievement is based in common sense pre-linguistic and nonverbal socialisation processes. The combination of older and newer media into filmTV-theater-video-computer-games, thus inter- and multimedia-games, in the next section therefore is not deployed as an end in itself. It is to enhance imaginations, for which multi-mediated networked self- and world perceptions become a part of the life-world. Representatives of various cultures, generations and professional groups thereby may build up a common background which connects, combines, and further develops networked, multi-mediated relationships with immediate and multi-sensual ones. This development shows beyond Habermas’ discourse theory 30 and connects elements of this old European tradition with Castells’ theory of mass self-communication. 31

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______________________________________________________________ 3.

Social Science Arts: Project Shalom In 1939, the Nazis were rumoured to be developing an atomic bomb. The United States initiated its own program under the Army Corps of Engineers in June 1942 in order to build an atomic weapon before Germany or Japan did. General Leslie R. Groves, Deputy Chief of Construction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was appointed to direct this top-secret project. For Norbert Elias’ 90th birthday, in 1987, I wrote a counter-play, Project Shalom, on the development of historically new means of understanding, on a similarly large scale, which trespasses traditional boundaries of social scientific work. In the succession of generations of specialised occupations and identities social-scientific artists and artistic social-scientists will in the future develop/live/play insights, which were so far lost because of the established system borders. Let us imagine: Project Shalom, Excerpt of Act 1: The Detached Prophet: Thank you. We are here to contribute our share, so that it goes on: the development of humankind. We discussed our time diagnosis over the last years. There is no clear solution. I suggest that we initiate a project to acquire new means of understanding instead of weapons of mass destruction or a trinity bomb. I guess I do not need to explain to you why this project should be called ‘Shalom’? The Human Wolf: Who are the collaborators in this project? The Bright: That’s the point. The Human She-Wolf: Who knows the fear and can stand it, those who looked death in the eye and want to survive, who know about their own pain and feel with others. The Detached Prophet: Who can get over his selfabsorbedness and concentration on the immediate presence, those who know for the tensions in themselves and between humans and can live with them, who can find their contents in other people. The Bright: Those belong to it. It won’t be a talk and no conference. That which contributes to survival must be experienced in exemplary ways. The Human She-Wolf: In confined space, in shortest time, what an effort, but also what a goal!

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______________________________________________________________ The Human Wolf: In search of commonalities despite all contradictions. The Detached Prophet: Let us open hands, eyes, ears and noses until we can stand each other again, not a slave to someone but mature, looking oneself and others straight into the eye, others who want to continue living and living anew today and tomorrow. The four get up. The Detached Prophet walks very slowly on the winding staircase towards the third level; the Bright walks with determination towards the first level where she then hastens up and down between the different work and political assembly points and in each case changes some objects (machines, tools, posters, multimedia equipments); the Wolf-pair stays on the second level and mostly looks into the audience; after a few minutes the Human She-Wolf sits back down and pours herself some tea. The Bright: The national conflicts, religious and civil wars, class and gender struggles, the conflicts with external and our own nature, all this in the smallest possible space, on two islands of this world, for some years, how should that go well? The Human She-Wolf: Humans, that knew the hunger, anger, mourning, hate, lost close relatives, important parts of their selves, those who want to survive, animated with the wish that all they suffered from should not happen anymore. The Human Wolf: Those who reached the bottom of their fear, that even fell through there and caught themselves in what connects us humans, those who did not loose the trust to get back out of this hole, this crack in the world and in us. The Detached Prophet: Those who no longer first think of themselves, who fell without being pushed, those who know of the pains and happiness of their predecessors, they do not want to stem the tide of generations. The Human Wolf: Korcula, island in the middle of the Dalmatian archipelago, Croatia, 47 kilometers long and 276

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______________________________________________________________ km2, tourism and winegrowing, fishery and processing of fish. The Human She-Wolf: Newfoundland, eastern province of Canada, 417000 km,2 timber industry, mining, no more Cod’s land. The Bright: In the South and the North, densely crowded and vastly scattered, thousands of scientists who experience the conflicts of their time first body, from contrasting classes, nations and religious groups. … Excerpt of Act 2: The four initiators of Project Shalom came to know many people, countries and situations since their emigration more than half a century ago. They themselves continued to be displaced people wherever they wanted to gain a foothold, past Gestapo and concentration camps just by days or minutes. In the will to survive and in the struggle for existence they became survival specialists. Now the boundaries are different. The four protagonists have met numerous of such newly displaced people. They brought them together from different countries and parts of the world; three of these displaced and survivalists in a complex world, full of computerized attack potential which can destroy everything within minutes are on the brightly lit stage on the first level at the beginning of the second scene. … The three somebodies are each individually put into glistening light. They let their arms dangle and walk or stand in the direction of the audience. Through technical tricks each of the illuminated bodies becomes synchronically darker from the middle. Thus the impression arises that the three dissolve from their middle on, meaning from their genitals onwards. They open their mouths as if for a cry of help, but no sound is heard. The darkness, the nothing on their bodies spreads until with their forehead and their feet the last body parts disappear. In total darkness the sound of three falling bodies can be heard. In that moment the movie illumination turns on, the three somebodies are again in the bright, individual spot light. The process is reversed. As soon as the eyes are to be seen again, they look at their own bodies and the bodies of their fellow sufferers. Then they walk towards each other, look each other into the eyes. Once all three bodies are complete the light turns off. … Maria Maculata, resembling the Bright, climbs up the spiral staircase, being chased by five armed soldiers. On the second level they enter the secretarial pool of the Detached Prophet. The Detached has fallen asleep, forever. The soldiers follow, dazzled by a life that resisted violence for so long. Maria and the five soldiers face each other. In slow motion the raid

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______________________________________________________________ starts. In this room the blows do not hit, they always stop shortly before Maria: kicks and jots, ripping. In slow motion the occurrence happens until just before the five soldiers: pacing and rising, soft sounds. Clenched fists bash forward - open hands receive them. Butts swish down - fragment when they hit the desk. Bayonets hit - into the books, which move. A grenade explodes - down the balcony. Only the eyes will be illumed - Maria’s full of sadness, the five full of hate. Only the mouth will be illumed - Maria’s slightly opened, the tip of the tongue guessable; the five widely opened, the right corner of the mouth hanging down. Maria: Another five years, maybe, and humanity will be extinguished. … A task group of seven soldiers and five intellectuals sits at the wooden table on the balcony of the secretarial pool, which is again on the second level. They have some personal items from their homelands on the table in front of them. Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ in the orchestration of Ravel sounds. The twelve scatter across the first and second floor. Together with their homeland symbols they represent first each individually, then in groups and finally as a collective group the following developments. These will not be explained in more detail, as each time it must be left to the fantasy and expressiveness of the actors. 1. From the embryo to the dead body. 2. From joy of life to fear of death. 3. From dominance to self-control. 4. The prey becomes hunter. 5. The militaries become more self-controlled in their movements; the intellectuals more aggressive. Afterwards all bodies are disintegrated through special illumination effects similarly as in the second scene. This time it is not a coherent dissolution, from the middle onwards that can be reversed. This time it is an irreversible process. For each of the actors who are running up and down, crawling or crouching different body parts are spotlight: eyes, hands, chest, genital, knees, and feet. The rest is dark. Suddenly it seems that the illuminated body parts of the twelve move away from their original bodies and toward each other. Where they were brightly illuminated, bleeding wounds remain. On the spiral staircase, on the way from the first to the second level, a new combination comes into being: a vast majority of body parts and behavioural patterns of the military, and in the minority intellectuals represented through their eyes. Bleeding body parts are pushed into each other until they fit; the blood dries; the new combination slowly

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______________________________________________________________ seems to be natural, like a costume for carnival, its bumpiness appears more comical than threatening. According to this expression the figure does not act very goal oriented. Slowly the first and second floor is illuminated. The remaining eleven persons are aggregated similarly, they move partially rather clumsy, uncoordinated, partially playful like on their journey of discovery into a new, hardly threatening world. The twelve, while shortly pausing in various distances and in different courses of motions: not very interested, they resemble each other like animals in a flock. The violence-experts lost their homeland symbols, mainly weapons. Likewise the intellectuals lost theirs: paintings and sculptures, musical instruments or USB sticks, books or manuscripts. The twelve roam about, come across these items, and cannot do anything with them. More or less by chance they meet again within a few minutes at the table on the balcony of the secretarial pool, which has been set with a meat platter. They sit down; look at each other with hardly active, partially sad, partially hungry eyes. The body movements are only little controlled, within a few seconds all start to eat loudly. … To praise her, the all-embracing, Beyond the knowledge of time Him, the all-creating, Who needed a home. You in us, and us in you, For we are still alive In life’s mercy Still How long, you child of men Still innocent of time And strength On the margins of your self You bow your childlike head And you smile, and smile Into this hole To plead to hear, the all-embracing, More urgently than ever Him, the all-creating, We need a home. You in us, and us in you For we are still alive In life’s mercy Still How long, you and you

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______________________________________________________________ Sensing the consequences Of the powerlessness Even on the margin You bend backwards your youthful head And you laugh, you laugh About the abyss Inside ourselves 4.

Epilogue: Civilising Media? According to Norbert Elias’ (1939, in English 2000) theory of longterm unplanned civilising processes, neither individuals nor actions constitute major components of social processes, but figurations of interdependent people across generations. These networks of interdependencies are multidimensional: multi-sensual and multi-functional, only very partially known or intelligible to the actors. They are so numerous (cp. Elias’ chapter 3 on Game models and his calculation of the complexity of social relationships in Elias 1978, p. 101, Table 1) that it is impossible for any individual actor to oversee millions of connections already in small-scale networks. Even less probable is that individuals can calculate advantages and disadvantages, costs and benefits of individual actions within such networks or even parts of figurations beyond their own lifetimes. Elias (1939; cp. Ludes 1989a) mainly argued that unplanned long-term social processes predominate any kind of short-term individual constraints and options as well as affective ties and deep-seated levels of anxieties. The latter can hardly be put into words and therefore mass and network mediated visuals gain importance. In earlier publications Ludes (1989a and 2008) elaborated and revised Elias’ original theory to take into more adequate account ‘political long-term alternatives,’ and upheavals of civilising processes due to networked communication and non-European patterns of state-formations or failing states. From Elias’ classic theory, however, three major components are also pertinent to our inquiry into visions of humanity in cyberculture, cyberspace and science fiction: (1) Individual actors are not the most important or decisive units of analysis, but figurations of groups of people, which do not always consciously choose their actions. (2) Especially in violent conflicts, feelings of hurt (relatives and friends killed or mutilated), hate and extreme distrust dominate over clear interests and rational choices of rather short-term actions of a few weeks or at most years, well below, e.g. individual life-spans, those of established states, or networks (figurations) of generations. (3) Not only the concepts of individual actors and of short-term orientations and actions are at stake, but the very notion of action itself, to be replaced by trans-generational interdependencies. The latter refer to impersonal forces, hardly open to individual deliberations or even discourses, but which are constituted by so far hidden and may be unintelligible

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______________________________________________________________ constraints. A few of these traits have been sketched here, as I have argued to enlarge the scope of social scientific modes of theory-formation beyond traditional linear texts to trans-generational networked social-science-as-arts games. I have first used original quotations, put into fictional dialogues and then completely new settings in which avatars of major theoreticians combine to networked theorising beyond traditional lonesome strangers. This trans-generational online dialogue can learn from recent developments as outlined in the contribution by Daniel Riha: ‘interactive 3-D space is here recognised as a part of the discourse that will, in turn, function itself as an expressive element. But the embedded narrativisation must be implemented across multiple information channels (interactive 3-D, websites, web 2.0 services, webcasting and other) to present contextual information.’ 32 And Anna Maj and Michał Derda-Nowakowski specify: ‘What matters most here is the social participation in activities allowing community-based creation of content, redefinition of meanings and exchange of knowledge. It is based on the belief in the possibility of positive cooperation among internauts, a form of social constructivism. The key example of activity based on constructivist consciousness is Wikipedia.’ 33 Together the three modules of Section 3 on virtual environments and academia compose an interplay of re-presentations of past, present, and future developments and thereby enact already realistic settings for emerging trans-generational dialogues, networked via and in terms of new media platforms and forums of discourse. Endnote This text is partially based on three earlier and much more elaborate inquiries: P. Ludes, Kulturtheorien als Intermediaspiele, Blaue Eule, Essen, 1989; P. Ludes (ed), Sozialwissenschaften als Kunst, UVK, Constance, 1997; P. Ludes and M. Shani, Civilising Media: Peacemaker? Presentation at the European Sociological Association Meeting in Glasgow, September 2007. I am indebted to numerous face to face conversations and mail to mail communications with Norbert Elias, Agnes Heller, Carla, and Kurt H. Wolff. My presentation is a continuation and transformation of these personal encounters.

Notes 1

All published in: P. Ludes (ed), Social Sciences as Arts. Original Contributions by Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff and Agnes Heller (Sozialwissenschaften als Kunst. Originalbeiträge von Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff und Agnes Heller), Konstanz, UVK, 1997.

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______________________________________________________________ 2

P. Ludes, Drei Moderne Soziologische Theorien. Zur Entwicklung des Orientierungsmittels Alternativen (Three Modern Sociological Theories: ‘Alternatives’ as a Means of Orientation), Goettingen, Schwartz, 1989a, Book One. 3 P. Ludes, Kulturtheorien als Intermediaspiele: Trilogie des Wann-Sinns, Die Blaue Eule Verlag, Essen, 1989b. 4 Ludes Kulturtheorien als Intermediaspiele: Trilogie des Wann-Sinns, Play One, Marie Haude (trans). 5 Tone poem, op. 30, by Richard Strauss. 6 All the following quotations from Nietzsche and Freud were translated from the original German editions by Marie Haude. The Roman volume number I refers to F. Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bänden (Collected Works in Three Volumes), Vol. I, Karl Schlechta (ed), Munich, 1977. 7 Ibid., I 201. 8 Ibid., I 210. 9 Ibid., I 338. 10 Ibid., I 343. 11 Ibid., I 356. 12 Ibid., I 431. 13 Volume as it was for ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra.’ 14 Nietzsche, I 475. 15 S. Freud, Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life), Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1977 [1904], p. 176. 16 Ibid., p. 182. 17 S. Freud, Studienausgabe: Ergänzungsband. Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1975, p. 104. 18 Nietzsche, I 499. 19 Freud, Behandlungstechnik, p. 105 f. 20 Nietzsche, I 540. 21 Freud, Behandlungstechnik, p. 112. 22 Nietzsche, I 698. 23 Ibid., I 775. 24 Freud, Behandlungstechnik, p. 139. 25 Ibid., 139f. 26 End of this summary of Ludes, Kulturtheorien als Intermediaspiele: Trilogie des Wann-Sinns, pp. 9-19. 27 P. Ludes, ‘Existential Truths as Prerequisites for a Globalizing Discourse Theory’, in The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn, Lanham, G. Backhaus and G. Psathas (eds), Lexington Books, 2007, pp. 129-130.

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Cp. R. Klevjer, ‘The Cultural Value of Games: Computer Games and Cultural Policy in Europe’, in Convergence and Fragmentation: Media Technology and the Information Society, P. Ludes (ed), Volume 5, ‘Changing Media, Changing Europe Series’, Intellect, Bristol, 2008, pp. 71-90. and P. Ludes, ‘Vernetzte Zivilisationsumbrüche und Assoziationspiele’ (‘Networks of Civilizing Upheavals and Associational Games’), in Theatralisierungen und Enttheatralisierungen in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft, H. Willems (ed), Volume 1: Soziale Felder, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, 2008. 29 For which Elias’ 1984, 1997, Utopia of the Great Debate of the Intellectuals already sets an example. 30 Cp. Ludes, ‘Existential Truths as Prerequisites for a Globalizing Discourse Theory’. 31 M. Castells, ‘Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society’, International Journal of Communication 1, 2007, pp. 238-266. 32 D. Riha, ‘Game Design Technology as a Tool for Research and Education in Cultural History’, in Humanity in Cybernetic Environments. D. Riha (ed), Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, UK, 2010, p. 199. 33 A. Maj and M. Derda-Nowakowski, ‘Ecosystem of Knowledge: Strategies, Rituals and Metaphors in Networked Communication’, p. 195, in this volume.

Bibliography Castells, M., ‘Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society’. International Journal of Communication 1, 2007, pp. 238-266, viewed on 15 May 2008, . Elias, N., The Civilizing Process. E. Jephcott (trans), Blackwell Publishing, Malden, 2000 [German 1939; Postcript 1969]. —––, Was ist Soziologie? (What is Sociology), Juventa Verlag, Weinheim, 1978. —––, ‘Knowledge and Power: An Interview by Peter Ludes’, Chapter 7, in Society and Knowledge: Contemporary Perspectives in the Sociology of Knowledge and Science. N. Stehr and V. Meja (eds), Transaction, New Brunswick, 1984, pp. 251-291.

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______________________________________________________________ —––, ‘Wissen und Macht: Der Große Kampf der Intellektuellen‘, in Sozialwissenschaften als Kunst: Originalbeiträge von Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff und Agnes Heller (Social Sciences as Arts: Original Contributions by Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff, and Agnes Heller). P. Ludes (ed), UVK, Konstanz, 1997, pp.77-137. Freud, S., Studienausgabe: Ergänzungsband. Behandlungstechnik. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1975.

Schriften

zur

—––, Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life). Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1977 [1904]. Habermas, J., Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action). 2 Volumes, Beacon, Boston, 1984 [German 1981]. Heller, A., ‘Silvester-Symposion’, in Sozialwissenschaften als Kunst: Originalbeiträge von Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff und Agnes Heller (Social Sciences as Arts: Original Contributions by Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff, and Agnes Heller). P. Ludes (ed), UVK, Konstanz, 1997, pp. 201-280. Klevjer, R., ‘The Cultural Value of Games: Computer Games and Cultural Policy in Europe’, in Convergence and Fragmentation: Media Technology and the Information Society. P. Ludes (ed), Volume 5, ‘Changing Media, Changing Europe Series’. Intellect, Bristol, 2008, pp. 71-90. Ludes, P., Drei Moderne Soziologische Theorien. Zur Entwicklung des Orientierungsmittels Alternativen (Three Modern Sociological Theories: ‘Alternatives’ as a Means of Orientation). Schwartz, Goettingen, 1989a. —––, Kulturtheorien als Intermediaspiele: Trilogie des Wann-Sinns. P. Ludes, Die Blaue Eule Verlag, Essen, 1989b. —–– (ed), Sozialwissenschaften als Kunst: Originalbeiträge von Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff und Agnes Heller (Social Sciences as Arts: Original Contributions by Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff, and Agnes Heller). UVK, Konstanz, 1997. —––, ‘Existential Truths as Prerequisites for a Globalizing Discourse Theory’, in The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff's

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______________________________________________________________ Existential Turn, Lanham. G. Backhaus and G. Psathas (eds), Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2007, pp. 115-136. —––, ‘Vernetzte Zivilisationsumbrüche und Assoziationspiele’ (‘Networks of Civilizing Upheavals and Associational Games’), in Theatralisierungen und Enttheatralisierungen in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft. H. Willems (ed), Volume 1: Soziale Felder, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, 2008, pp. 225-239. Maj, A. and Derda-Nowakowski, M., ‘Ecosystem of Knowledge: Strategies, Rituals and Metaphors in Networked Communication’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 191-205. Mannheim, K., ‘Die Dame aus Biarritz: Ein Spiel in Vier Szenen’, in Sozialwissenschaften als Kunst: Originalbeiträge von Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff und Agnes Heller. P. Ludes (ed), UVK, Konstanz, 1997, pp. 49-76. Nietzsche, F. Werke in Drei Bänden (Collected Works in Three Volumes), Vol. I. K. Schlechta (ed), Munich, 1977. Riha, D., ‘Game Design Technology as a Tool for Research and Education in Cultural History’, in Humanity in Cybernetic Environments. D. Riha (ed), Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, UK, 2010, pp. 197-206. Wolff, K., ‘Vorgang’, in Sozialwissenschaften als Kunst: Originalbeiträge von Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias, Kurt H. Wolff und Agnes Heller. P. Ludes (ed), UVK, Konstanz, 1997, pp. 139-188. Peter Ludes, Professor of Mass Communication/Integrated Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen. Member of the core group and head of team 3 of the European Science Foundation program ‘Changing Media - Changing Europe’ (until December 2004); co-chair of the Research Network ‘Mass Media and Communication’ of the European Sociological Association (20082011); speaker of an international group of researchers on Key Visuals (since 2003) . From 2008 to 2012 he heads, together with Otthein Herzog, Center for Computing Technologies, University of Bremen, a DFG-sponsored project on the automatic detection and classification of persons as key visual candidates.

Interactive 3-D Documentary as Serious Videogame Daniel Riha Abstract This chapter investigates the potential of an interactive 3-D medium for documentary productions within the context of cultural studies. The first part summarises a methodology from the area of videogame studies that supports the use interactive 3-D spaces as dispositive for knowledge representation, and provides guidance on how to encode and decode spatial narrative information within an interactive cultural-historical simulation. The second part introduces and discusses plans for an interactive documentary space (3-D ID) as an approach to representing the lives and works of select Bosnian artists living in Prague during 1990’s. Key Words: Serious games, spatial narrative, 3-D interactive environments, cultural transition, Bosnian artists, Prague. ***** 1.

Introduction This chapter investigates the potential of an interactive 3-D medium for documentary productions within the context of cultural studies. The first part summarises a methodology from the area of videogame studies that supports the use interactive 3-D spaces as dispositive for knowledge representation, and provides guidance on how to encode and decode spatial narrative information within an interactive cultural-historical simulation. For example, Jenkins’s concept of environmental storytelling deals with preconditions of immersive narrative experience in spatial storytelling. Fuchs, likewise, introduced the concept of virtual knowledge space wherein the process of de-categorisation and re-classification may be successfully implemented. The concept of story map, developed by Nitsche and Thomas, may serve for content structuring of such a knowledge space. In the interactive project Memory Theatre VR Hegedues revived a historical concept of memory theatre. Hann offers ‘piercing of the skin’ concept where the layers of information might be exposed below the ‘surface:’ ‘Information that documents the path, from the conceptual sourced material, to an interpreted three-dimensional environment.’ 1 The second part introduces and discusses plans for an interactive documentary space (3-D ID) as an approach to representing the lives and works of select Bosnian artists living in Prague during 1990’s.

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______________________________________________________________ 2.

Spatial Narrative in 3-D Interactive Applications Peter Ludes in this volume argues that ‘The radical changes in modes of cognition, behavioural models and perspectives in media communications demand a novel aesthetic mode of transferring fragments of immediate experiences.’ 2 Nitsche considers the virtual space to be a key element of the experience in 3-D videogames and the designer as a person acting in the virtual environment development in the role of the ‘spacemaker.’ 3 He points to the fact that ‘Whereas the playwright and the filmmaker both try to communicate the idea of an experience, the spacemaker tries to communicate the experience itself.’ 4 Jenkins recognizes the design activity of virtual-environment producers as a sort of narrative architecture. Canter proposes that one view virtual place-making as setting up the objects and spaces with a focus on an environmental design that will support action in the virtual environment while also conveying social and cultural conceptions of the user communities. 5 All of these authors might be considered when approaching the question: What methodologies are actually available for designers/producers that would enable them to design these ‘experiential’ virtual spaces in the context of an interactive cultural-historical simulation? A.

Environmental Storytelling How it is possible to represent the urban lives in the big city? In the framework of Lefebvre’s triadic model of space this issue relates to the category of representational space, which is defined as the combination of spatial practice and represented space, experientially lived. 6 In Jenkins’ words, such a representation deals with the spatial representation of personal stories that shall ‘express something of the complexity and heterogeneity of urban life.’ 7 According to Jenkins, spatial stories may offer a solution for transforming the big city ‘from a mundane space into a fantastic one.’ 8 Jenkins proposes centralising the structure of spatial stories around tours and incorporates this idea into the concept of environmental storytelling (CES), where he claims CES to bring an immersive narrative experience to the user in four ways: Spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives. 9 The enacted narrative sub-concept, inspired by Eisenstein’s concept of ‘attractions,’ introduces the idea of micronarratives in games that communicate their main themes and which work towards increased emotional

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______________________________________________________________ involvement by the user through a series of short narrative units, recalled in the user’s mind as ‘memorable moments.’ The information resources to be implemented in the 3-D ID medium have often had a fragmented character. Micronarrative elements may present an important feature that will support the comprehension process of the 3-D ID space into the user’s grand narrative. Likewise, the embedded narrative sub-concept might be fruitfully employed in the 3-D ID productions. The interactive 3-D space is here recognised as part of a larger discourse that will, in turn, function itself as an expressive element. But the embedded narrativisation must be implemented across multiple information channels (interactive 3-D, websites, web 2.0 services, webcasting and other) to present contextual information which enables users to switch available information contents into the ‘documentarizing lecture.’ 10 B.

The Concept of Story Maps Nitsche and Thomas emphasize the need to understand the spatial composition of virtual environments. They declare that: Visitors to a building - movie audiences to a film projection - readers of literary texts - users of real time 3-D virtual environments have to make sense of the spatial data provided. The results are individual cognitive maps of the understood space and its ingredients. 11 Nitsche and Thomas offer the concept of gives designers a point of reference for world and offers a tool to improve environments. For Nitsche and Thomas include:

Story Map. For them such a model how users comprehend the virtual the content structures of virtual the basic elements of Story Maps

The connection of event and navigable space, the cinematic mediation of space and event, and the cognitive mapping of these events and the dramatic setting in space. The Story Map is the result of the comprehension process that can be influenced through evocative means of event-, space-, and mediation-structure. 12 Nitsche and Thomas declare each Story Map as unique and without an identified general form, but, rather, having a recognisable effect as ‘the better understanding and generation of meaning from the experience by combining space and events.’ 13 Thus, the Story Maps might be used to comparatively test the comprehension process of the user during all stages of developing a player-oriented environment.

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______________________________________________________________ C.

The Concept of Knowledge Space The 3-D ID productions include important locations that represent real-town places in the form of 3-D content. However, such an environment cannot be realised simply as just a simple reconstruction of the town’s cultural landmarks. Rather, conceptually, the interactive 3-D environment might be best understood as a virtual knowledge space, and presents the core of the proposed research. Strauss and Fleischman define knowledge space as ‘architectural space furnished with data,’ where the user is not understood only as the protagonist, but also ‘the producer of knowledge through interaction.’ 14 The interactive 3-D space thus may be experienced through the perception of 3-D space via the exploration of data and the production of knowledge through active experience. Here it is important to mention that this research proposal understands the virtual knowledge space as a concept not limited to architecture or the cityscape, but more broadly as a virtual scientific laboratory. Fuchs understands interactive 3-D as a genre in which decategorisation and re-classification may be positively implemented. Fuchs declares that ‘The gamers not designers set reference point of individual interpretation. The gamer navigating the space individual way describes the objects of experience in re-shaped contexts.’ 15 For Fuchs, serious games may be classified as processually produced ‘Ludic Archive for Cultural Studies.’ 16 Following Fuchs, knowledge spaces attempt as space and time overcoming, trans-cultural and anti-rational games to produce what Warburg intended with his ‘Library for Cultural Studies (LCS).’ Fuchs further argues about Warburg’s methodology: ‘Warburg’s research emphasized to gain relevant knowledge on materials of timely open-ended origin through process of collage. Equally Warburg used to relocate locally disparate objects, narratives and symbols.’ 17 According to Fuchs, videogame designers may apply, in a similar way, Warburg’s method of time-collage and space-collage to evoke ‘amazed experiences’ for their users. Hegedues realised an interesting approach to the structuring of the virtual space in the interactive installation Memory Theater VR. She revived the work of the Neo-Platonists that constructed virtual temples of memory. Grau declares that memory theaters were: spaces of thought, memory storage spaces for the assembled knowledge of their time, where multilayered, theoretically infinite associations between the displayed objects and memory spaces were possible. In the imagination, the mind could navigate through spaces that facilitated combinatory process. 18

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______________________________________________________________ According to Grau, Hegedues has applied the old concept of the memory theater while offering the user with virtual space ‘as dynamic structure with intermedia elements, thus expanding the historic mnemonic techniques with contemporary media.’ 19 Although the 3-D ID productions cannot create complete or partially complete hyper-maps of the big town’s virtual cultural geographies, the experimental collage method offers a tool that enables to integrate geographically and culturally dislocated cultural landmarks and items. D.

Implementing the Virtual Architectures According to McGregor, videogames do not endlessly improve the patterns of spatial use but are reusing, reapplying and restructuring the elementary patterns already existing in the real world. She identifies six patterns that describe the majority of interactive acts in the virtual environment: Challenge space - Game space directly challenges player Forms gameplay Contested space - Game space as arena for conflict Affects gameplay Nodal space - Game space structured by social layout Structures gameplay Codified space - Game space as interface & information Contains information in gameplay Creation Space - Game space is created & altered Becomes gameplay Backdrops - Game space as non-interactive - Not part of gameplay 20 The majority of interactive 3-D virtual environments often use a combination of all above listed patterns. Following Roudavski and Penz, the presumptions about the meaning of an environment are always socially dependent and always refer to the collective practice. In order to affect a user’s understanding, memory and navigation they propose to employ the individual character of the mental image: ‘The structure of the mental image transforms as familiarity with the place grows and the meaningful relationships between components become

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______________________________________________________________ established.’ 21 They propose to implement the redundant elements, deduction and prediction to help the user deal with the inconsistency always present in the virtual environment. The presence of mediation devices may significantly limit the designer’s intention to implement the above-mentioned real-world patterns. While the mediation devices will always have a strong impact on the understanding of the virtual space, the designer may take into account the fact that ‘The influence of these constraints can be averaged for all users at all times if the set of mediation devices is identical for all.’ 22 According to Hann, access to the scholarly process that informed the knowledge space design shall be required. She argues that in revealing the methodological process, the user as well as the scholar shall be ‘able to independently assess the researcher’s conclusions, allowing the research to be recognised as a valid and reliable contribution.’ 23 Hann introduced the concept called ‘piercing of the skin’ where the layers of information might be exposed below the surface: ‘Information that documents the path, from the conceptual sourced material, to an interpreted three-dimensional environment.’ 24 She recommends offering a sufficient amount of metadata in a variety of different forms. So, in this model as well, the embedded narrativisation must be implemented across multiple information channels, as such a design would offer many alternative insights to a visual argumentation. 25 3.

Advantages of 3-D Interactive Form for Documentary In the discourse of videogame studies, an ID 3-D environment relates to realist videogames as understood by Galloway, where games ‘reflect critically on the minutia of everyday life, replete as it is with struggle, personal drama and injustice.’ 26 The interactive 3-D form offers several important advantages over film and video production. For Brinson, in the case of documentary film: The filmmaker’s portrayal and delivery of the events is at the foreground of the experience. … Often a viewer will agree with the film’s subjective points as well as take the portrayal of events as historical fact. … This negotiation of the content is a result, an after effect of the film documentary’s narrative. In a documentary game, the player’s reaction to the content - both within the game and in mind - is the narrative. It is part of the real-time, present tense experience of the game’s portrayal, rather than a personal addendum to the grand narrative. … The game’s

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______________________________________________________________ simulation of events acts as a set of supportive story threads to the player’s grand narrative. 27 Similarly, Nitsche, et al., emphasise the continuity of experience and action through spatial navigation, where interactive 3-D, non-linear narratives, for example, have a major advantage not available in Hypermovie structure. 28 Dankert and Wille point to the fact that a designer is, in the case of interactive 3-D documentary, not limited by genre conventions and the demands of linearity and continuity. They identify the major advantages of this media form, including the decreased importance of tempo and the easier creation of believable illusion with use of unobserved observation via virtual camera. The aforementioned initial research reveals important facts about the nature of the 3-D interactive documentary medium. But in documentary practice, the genre of interactive 3-D documentary has not yet become an extensively applied method for documentary production. So, the ultimate goals for this genre, as proposed by Dankert and Wille, is to set the user free from all the limitations of spectatorship and to provide ‘multiple choices with a wide range of possibilities in the form of interactivity.’ 29 The rapid popularisation of documentaries through faction form, as envisioned by Raessens, is still a major challenge, even for today’s experimental crossmedia documentary productions. Why Implement Questing into Interactive 3-D Documentaries? The quest model might be an optimal method for the incorporation of narrative information into the interactive knowledge space, but design constraints would decrease the possibility of highly ‘fictionalising’ lecture. The quests are described by many game theorists, including Tronstad, Aarseth, Tosca and Juul, as the essential building elements of videogame design. From the serious applications design point of view, the questing activity has the highest potential to add ‘serious’ value to the interaction. If properly designed, the user would ideally gain a meaningful experience of the serious contents through the questing activities that at the same time shall become a sponsor to the fun. For Tosca, the game quests have become one of the easiest techniques for implementing storytelling elements into videogames, because the gameplay is ‘entwined’ with a story:

4.

Whatever their variety or the name we give them (quests, missions, adventures, exchanges, errands, tasks), quests are the chance for the game designer to bring the storytelling elements into play. And if there should be any general recommendation for designers, it would be that they try to

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______________________________________________________________ entwine structure and story as much as they can in their quests. 30 According to Tosca, the optimization of the semantic and the structural functions of game quests will ease a combination of objects and actions that lead to interesting and meaningful interaction: The two levels can be perceived by both the player and the designer, and if the quests are well built, they will contribute to create some kind of emotional engagement as part of the player’s experience, as they can be the glue where world, rules and themes come together in a meaningful way. 31 A user’s emotional involvement increases in the virtual environment and so functions as a prerequisite for the true adoption of informative and narrative contents made available. Aarseth points out the fact that ‘the quest is the game designer’s main control of the players’ agenda, forcing them to perform certain actions that might otherwise not have been chosen, thus reducing the possibility space offered by the game rules and the landscape.’ 32 The quests offer a promise of having a certain level of control over the user’s action, a feature highly valued in serious gaming development. The perfected semantic and structural levels of the game quests have been identified as a substantial condition of the meaningful interaction in 3-D interactive environments. But how complex might these quests need to be to compel the digital natives to employ the serious gaming applications, like 3D ID? It is clear that serious 3-D interactive environments cannot always offer rich content to be discovered by the interacting user. But fortunately the users of interactive 3-D environments are usually recruited from specialist groups, 33 and these users have higher explorative motivation when engaging with the interactive gaming environment. The quests might be accompanied with activities such as looking for external explanatory discourse on the web sites, or even having its parts designed as alternate reality game (ARG) side quests. 5.

Prague Lives of Bosnian Artists in 1990’s After the fall of the Czechoslovak communist regime in 1989, the City of Prague became the most popular post-communist residential destination among the Western expatriates. 34 The expatriate community members established many important cultural institutions such as art foundations, English newspapers and journals, language schools, literary

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______________________________________________________________ cafes, book stores, music clubs, music shops and others. Their presence and activity significantly influenced Prague’s socio-cultural transition. The town’s cultural history and the then extremely open nature of the Czech community were among the main attractions for expatriates - not only for Americans but, since 1992, for many Bosnians following the breakdown of the Yugoslav Federation, including several recognized Bosnian intellectuals and artists. Bosnians formed one of the important foreign communities in Prague. During the same time period, Czechoslovakia was in the process of its ‘Velvet Divorce.’ Bosnians started their post-war life in the newlyestablished Czech state, gradually recovering economically from the command economy to the market system and culturally transforming into a post-communist cultural environment. Bosnian intellectuals established friendly relations with each other, but they have never formed a directly self-promoted expatriate community 35 as was the case with Prague-based Americans. In the contrast to the Western residential community that lived from savings and advantageous investments, Bosnians were forced to apply for permanent employment, learn the Czech language and accommodate themselves to the surrounding Czech social environment. In the 1990s they lived daily experiences so intensely that it often challenged them to transform their feelings immediately into the poems, stories or soundscapes. The Prague-based Bosnian artists now actively publish, exhibit and perform. But their historical relevance in relation to Prague’s cultural transition in the 1990s has not been yet fully documented and comprehensively evaluated by Czech or international scholars. 6.

3-D Interactive Documentary on Prague Life of Bosnian Artists The concept of a 3-D interactive documentary aims to draw attention to this interesting artistic community by documenting and crossmedially representing their art work and daily lives, which illustrate an important alternative vantage into Prague’s post-communist social and cultural transition. The Bosnian artists’ productions reflect the City of Prague’s socio-cultural environment during the 1990s in a unique way. The moments of protagonists’ daily activities express the substance of Prague life in the 1990’s and offer differentiating characteristics via the Bosnian eyelens. The medium of the 3-D ID offers a challenging environment for the cultural-historical simulation to be experimentally built in the form of dramatised events in the interactive 3-D space. The lives and work of a Bosnian expatriate artist group which flew from the Bosnian war to Prague in the early 1990s provides an excellent example of a knowledge space that is only partially describable by the linear medium text. The lives of Bosnians in Prague in the 1990s may gain relevance not simply because they represent individual destinies, but they

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______________________________________________________________ also serve to provide an alternative lens for expressing the characteristics of the sociocultural changes of that era. The Bosnian artists’ productions reflect not only the post-communist, socio-cultural transition during the 1990s in a unique way, but might - to a certain extent - also be understood as a reflection of European affairs. In the 1990s they lived daily experiences so intensely that these often challenged them to transform their feelings immediately into artistic expressions as poems, stories or soundscapes. Artists such as the Bosnian expatriates interpret a city and their situations in an atypical way. They recreate their psychosocial situation with artistic devices. But how does one show the interdependency of artistic production and the social space that supports the creation of artwork? A linear narrative would not work, and interpretative work tends to ease the complexity of the task by using metaphors. The 3-D ID concept suggests operational 3-D images as an interactive knowledge space applying interactive computer gaming in order to re- create the psychosocial as well as mythic and political space within the specific chronotopos of postcommunist Prague. Positioning the interpreted elements from their productions in the interactive 3-D environment might allow designers and end users the ability to discover the pathways relating these works of art. As there is currently no uniform methodology for coding this knowledge into an interactive 3-D environment, this concept proposes to adapt computer gaming to the professional academic production of cultural knowledge. On the other hand, even in the case of perfectly-coded knowledge space, the design job has not been fully accomplished until we learn about the reconfiguration manners of users; so the major operation of this 3-D interactive knowledge space must be searched in ‘reconfiguration.’ The authenticity of the characters and their behaviour will be based on the interpretation of their poetic and literary productions and on the analysis of documents, biographical materials and interviews. The protagonist’s daily activities possibly express the substance of life in Prague in the 1990s and would be built into the 3-D environment in the form of dramatised events. According to Howard, the transformation of narratives into quests ‘bridges the gap between the process of searching represented through the constative speech act of narrative and the program of invention and interaction enacted through performative speech acts as quests.’ 36 Howard calls for quest design implementations to offer ‘multiple allegorical and symbolic connotations.’ 37 He argues that these ‘might be enjoyably enacted multiple times by different players, as they deepen their understanding of this meaning or seek a different interpretation.’ 38

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______________________________________________________________ For Howard designing computer games based on literary production leads to active performance of meaning rather than passive absorbance. He calls this search to enact meaning an interpretative quest: Rather than asking players to interpret concepts without a concrete referent, games require players to act out the meaning of an object or landscape within the context of a situation whose outcome matters to them. 39 Active performance of meaning might be supported by the role of estrangement, emphasised by Løvlie. The experience of estrangement in videogames will lead to the creation of distance for reflection: When the tools provided by the game are not appropriate for solving the problems presented, this experience breaks down, and the potential for meaningful gameplay is denied. This is a kind of mock agency; a broken promise of agency. If this situation is appropriately contextualized, it might create the distance that is necessary for contemplation and reflection on serious themes. 40 The author’s own concept for an interactive 3-D documentary on Bosnian artists in Prague during the 1990’s might adopt the model of a quest as a method for incorporating narrative information into the 3-D interactive documentary, but design constraints must decrease the possibility of fictionalising lecture. Daily life situations described by Bosnian authors are often obscure in nature. Thus, the estrangement effect might be fruitfully exploited to express such obscurity, but its applicability must to be proven through play-testing. In terms of traditional documentary theory, the design approach of this 3-D interactive documentary relates to the reflexive mode 41 of reality representation during the production process. Dankert and Wille propose an interesting model of reflexive-content exploration in interactive 3-D documentaries, where a user has to act in a foreign environment as if he or she belonged there, but without the necessary knowledge and experience. The interface would then provide the tools for overcoming a user’s lack of knowledge and experience. They propose encyclopaedias, explanatory discourse, tutorial guides or similar constructs for breaking the illusion of total immersion. Here again, the quest system might be usefully employed to help motivate players to search for additional information. Prague-based Bosnian productions have a strong autobiographical nature and therefore represent a very important contribution to a complex 1990s era image. For this reason, the proposed project plans to regard factual

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______________________________________________________________ as well as fictional information as equal. A comparative content analysis of both types of information will identify places of overlap. The available factual and fictional resources about the lives of Bosnian artists living in Prague will enable the designer to blend the knowledge levels surrounding the fictional space of Prague, as seen by the Bosnian artists, with the knowledge level coded according to factual information about Prague as it was in the 1990s. Additionally, a biographical level of coding in the interactive 3-D space is, in its essence, a mixture of fact and fiction. As argued above, in the process of reconfiguring this interactive knowledge space, the user will deconstruct various fact/faction/fiction blending approaches and therefore will be allowed to split the particular knowledge levels in his or her own unique way. 7.

Conclusion This article presents a summary of selected approaches to the incorporation of information content into 3-D virtual space and identifies several added value elements to be employed in the frames of the interactive 3-D documentary production as a cultural-historical representation. The listed concepts share the understanding of the virtual space as kind of explorative information space or ‘memory palace.’ The medium of text is neither the only nor the most adequate means of interpreting a given cultural situation. The twists and layers, the knots and parallel narratives of this factive space cannot be grasped within the limited potential of text. RT 3-D IKS developed in the frames of this concept shall convey the knowledge and socio-cultural context about Bosnian artists’ destinies, relations, stories, literary and artistic works in relation to Prague’s political and cultural transition. Meanwhile, cultural and media studies only describe and interpret images and do not use them as a means for producing new knowledge. In comparison, engineers, as well as social scientists, are used to applying all sorts of diagrams in support of their arguments. Within the humanities, the specific qualities of interactive 3-D environments might be applied for the interpretation of complex cultural situations as the overlay of fictive and real spaces. Artists such as the Bosnian expatriates interpret a city and their situations in an atypical way. They recreate their psychosocial situation with artistic devices. But how does one show the interdependency of artistic production and the social space that supports the creation of the artworks? A linear narrative would not work and interpretative work tends to ease the complexity of the task by using metaphors. This research concept suggests applying interactive computer gaming in order to re-create the psychosocial

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______________________________________________________________ as well as mythic and political space within the specific chronotopos of postcommunist Prague.

Notes 1

R. Hann, ‘Visualized Arguments’, in Proceedings of EVA 2009 Conference, 6-8 July, London, 2009, p. 117. 2 P. Ludes, ‘Trans-Generational Dialogues: Social Sciences as Multimedia Games’, p. 160 in this volume. 3 Coined by R. Walser, cited in M. Nitsche, ‘From Faerie Tale to Adventure Game’, in Playing the Universe: Games and Gaming in Science Fiction, P. Frelik and D. Mead (eds), Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press, Lublin, 2007, p. 213. 4 Ibid. 5 Canter cited in S. Roudavski and M. Penz, ‘Spatial Context of Interactivity’, in Interactive Convergence: Critical Issues in Multimedia, S. P. Schaffer and M. L. Price (eds), Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 47. 6 Analysed in A. Stockburger, The Rendered Arena: Modalities of Space in Video and Computer Games, PhD. Thesis, University of Arts London, London, 2006, p. 78. 7 H. Jenkins, ‘Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban Imagination through Hollywood Film’, in Imagining the City, L. Vale and S. B. Warner (eds), Center for Urban Policy Research Press, 2001, p. 9 (in article). 8 Ibid. 9 H. Jenkins, ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, N. Waldrip-Fruin and P. Harrington (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 5 (in article). 10 J. Raessens, ‘Reality Play: Documentary Computer Games beyond Fact and Fiction’, in Popular Communication 4(3), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006, p. 214. 11 M. Nitsche and M. Thomas, ‘Stories in Space: The Concept of the Story Map’, in Proceedings of the Second Conference on Virtual Storytelling (ICVS ’03), O. Balet, G. Subsol, P. Torquet, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2003, p. 85. 12 Ibid., p. 88. 13 Ibid., p. 93. 14 W. Strauss and M. Fleischmann, ‘Aesthetics of Knowledge Space’, in the Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA, Singapore, 2008, p. 1. 15 M. Fuchs, ‘Spielräume als Wissensräume’, in Kunstforum International, Kunst und Spiel I. Band 176, Juni - August 2005, p. 4, online, translation by D. Riha.

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______________________________________________________________ 16

Ibid., p. 9, online version, translation by D. Riha. Ibid., p. 3, online version, translation by D. Riha. 18 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, MIT Press, Boston, 2003, p. 231. 19 Ibid. 20 L. G. McGregor, ‘Situations of Play: Patterns of Spatial Use in Videogames’, in Proceedings of Situated Play - DiGRA Conference, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, September, 2007, p. 539. 21 Roudavski and Penz, p. 50. 22 Ibid., p. 51. 23 Hann, p. 116. 24 Ibid., p. 117. 25 See as well a discussion of Wiki and other online communication models in A. Maj and M. Derda-Nowakowski, ‘Ecosystem of Knowledge: Strategies, Rituals and Metaphors in Networked Communication’, in this volume. 26 A. R. Galloway, ‘Social Realism in Gaming’, International Journal of Computer Game Research, Vol. 4, Issue 1, November, 2004, p. 5 (online). 27 Cited in T. Fullerton, ‘Documentary Games: Putting the Player in the Path of History’, in Playing the Past: Nostalgia in Video Games and Electronic Literature, Z. Whalen and L. Taylor (eds), Vanderbilt University Press, June 2008, p. 23 (in article). 28 M. Nitsche, S. Roudavski, M. Thomas, F. Penz, ‘Narrative Expressive Space’, ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, Vol. 23, Issue 2, August, 2002, pp. 1013. 29 H. Dankert and N. E. Wille, ‘Constructing the Concept of the “Interactive 3D Documentary”: Film, Drama, Narrative or Simulation’, in Virtual Interaction: Interaction in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds, L. Quortrup (ed), Springer, London, 2000, p. 27. 30 S. Tosca, ‘The Quest Problem in Computer Games’, in Proceedings of the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment Conference, Fraunhofer IRB Verlag, Darmstadt, 2003, Online Version available at: . 31 Ibid. 32 E. Aarseth, ‘From Hunt the Wumpus to EverQuest: Introduction to Quest Theory’, in Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2005: Proceedings of 4th International Conference, Sanda, Japan, 19-21 September, 2005, F. Kishino (ed), International Federation for Information Processing, 2005, p. 504. 33 Experts, teachers, students or enthusiasts. 34 The estimated number of the American expatriates living in Prague in the 90s reached 40,000 - Source: K. Drew, CNN, 5 October 2004. Alan Levy, the editor of Prague Post introduced Prague as the Paris of the 1990s. 17

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______________________________________________________________ 35

For more information visit the following websites: ,

or . 36 J. Howard, ‘Designing Interpretative Quests in the Literature Classroom’, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Videogames, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006, p. 137. 37 Ibid., p. 134. 38 Ibid., p. 134. 39 Ibid., p. 136. 40 A. S. Løvlie, ‘End of Story? Quest, Narrative and Enactment in Computer Games’, in Proceedings of DiGRA ´05 Conference: Changing Views Worlds in Play, 2005, , p. 5. 41 B. Nichols in Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, 1991 calls them ‘Modes of Representation’ and proposes four types: ‘expository,’ ‘observational,’ ‘interactive’ and ‘reflexive’ (cited in Dankert and Wille).

Bibliography Aarseth, E., ‘From Hunt the Wumpus to EverQuest: Introduction to Quest Theory’, in Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2005: Proceedings of 4th International Conference. Sanda, Japan, September 19-21, 2005. F. Kishino (ed), International Federation for Information Processing, 2005, pp. 496-505. Barab, S., Thomas, M., Dodge, T., Goodrich, T., Carteaux, B., Tuzun, H., ‘Empowerment Design Work: Building Participant Structures that Transform’, in Keeping Learning Complex: The Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). P. Bell, R. Stevens, T. Satwicz (eds), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2002, pp. 132-138. Dankert, H. and Wille, N. E., ‘Constructing the Concept of the “Interactive 3D Documentary”: Film, Drama, Narrative or Simulation’, in Virtual Interaction: Interaction in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds. L. Quortrup (ed), Springer, London, 2000. Drew, K., ‘Rex-patriate Games’. CNN, October 5th, 2004. . Fuchs, M., ‘Spielräume als Wissensräume’, in Kunstforum International, Kunst und Spiel I. Band 176, 2005, pp. 56-69.

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______________________________________________________________ Fullerton, T., ‘Documentary Games: Putting the Player in the Path of History’, in Playing the Past: Nostalgia in Video Games and Electronic Literature. Z. Whalen and L. Taylor (eds), Vanderbilt University Press, 2008. Galloway, A. R., ‘Social Realism in Gaming’. International Journal of Computer Game Research, Vol. 4, Issue 1, November, 2004. Grau, O., Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. MIT Press, Boston, 2003. Hann, R., ‘Visualized Arguments’, in Proceedings of EVA 2009 Conference. 6-8 July, London, 2009. Howard, J., ‘Designing Interpretative Quests in the Literature Classroom’, in Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Videogames. Boston, Mass, 2006, pp. 133-138. Ince, S., Writing for Videogames. A & C Black Publishers Limited, London, 2006. Jenkins, H., ‘Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban Imagination through Hollywood Film’, in Imagining the City. L. Vale and S. B. Warner (eds), Center for Urban Policy Research Press, 2001, . —––, ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. N. Waldrip-Fruin and P. Harrington (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004. Karsen, F., ‘Quests in Context’. Game Studies, Vol. 8, Issue 1, September, 2008. Løvlie, A. S., ‘End of Story? Quest, Narrative and Enactment in Computer Games’, in Proceedings of DiGRA ´05 Conference: Changing Views Worlds in Play. 2005. Ludes, P., ‘Trans-Generational Dialogues: Social Sciences as Multimedia Games’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 151-171. Maj, A. and Derda-Nowakowski, M., ‘Ecosystem of Knowledge: Strategies, Rituals and Metaphors in Networked Communication’, in Frontiers of

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______________________________________________________________ Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 191-205. McGregor, L. G., ‘Situations of Play Patterns of Spatial Use in Videogames’, in Proceedings of Situated Play - DiGRA Conference. The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, September, 2007. Nitsche, M., ‘From Faerie Tale to Adventure Game’, in Playing the Universe: Games and Gaming in Science Fiction. P. Frelik and D. Mead (eds), Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press, Lublin, 2007, pp. 209-229. Nitsche, M. and Thomas, M., ‘Stories in Space: The Concept of the Story Map’, in Proceedings of the Second Conference on Virtual Storytelling (ICVS '03). O. Balet, G. Subsol, P. Torquet (eds), Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2003, pp. 85-94. Nitsche, M., Roudavski, S., Thomas, M., Penz, F., ‘Narrative Expressive Space’, in ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin. Vol. 23, Issue 2, August, 2002, pp. 1013. Raessens, J., ‘Reality Play: Documentary Computer Games beyond Fact and Fiction’, in Popular Communication 4(3), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006, pp. 213-224. Roudavski, S. and Penz, M., ‘Spatial Context of Interactivity’, in Interactive Convergence: Critical Issues in Multimedia. S. P. Schaffer and M. L. Price, Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. 45-66. Stockburger, A., The Rendered Arena: Modalities of Space in Video and Computer Games. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Arts London, London, 2006. Strauss, W. and M. Fleischmann, ‘Aesthetics of Knowledge Space’, in the Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA, Singapore, 2008, pp. 429-431. Thomas, D. and Seely Brown, J., ‘The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind’. Games and Culture 2, 2007. Tosca, S., ‘The Quest Problem in Computer Games’, in Proceedings of the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment

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______________________________________________________________ Conference. Fraunhofer IRB Verlag, Darmstadt, 2003, Online Version, . Daniel Riha, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research includes issues on Serious Games, Interactive Documentary Production and Multi-User Virtual Environments Design. He is as well an award winning artist - Kunst am Bau (Art on Construction) International Art Competition, Constance, Germany.

Ecosystem of Knowledge: Strategies, Rituals and Metaphors in Networked Communication Anna Maj and Michal Derda-Nowakowski Abstract The article concerns the problem of boundaries of cyber-freedom and cyberdemocracy. User-generated content portals, wikiprojects and virtual worlds depend on the will of users to re-define the meanings and - on limitations of economy of the Web 2.0. Social-networking may be then regarded as the embodiment of cyber-utopia of peaceful cooperation of humankind but social creation and transmission of knowledge is invisibly shaped by new economy - wikinomics and telecoms. Authors analyse the most important ideas of cyber-communities as free culture, wiki and open source. They explicit the fundamental elements of wiki-identity and of folksonomic order of knowledge. The Web 2.0 is not only the marketing trend controlling societies but also the tool of social pressure of bottom-to-top character. The openness for user demands stemming from economic reasons changes the authorities and companies as well. The change is culturally significant as it creates the new order of society and new discourse of knowledge and power. However, there appear new threats as privacy loss or control and electronic vandalism. The chapter shows new areas of anthropological research as cyber-ritual analysis and research on online communities and their cyber mythologies. Key Words: Web anthropology, cyber-rituals, social networking, Wikipedia, Web 2.0, folksonomy, wikinomics, cyber mythology. ***** The freedom of culture is the main purpose consolidating the communities of net activists. In the 90s the idea was related to the cyberpunk movement, based on the cultural trend of being technically skilled at using new technologies, seen as rather mysterious at the time. This trend was undoubtedly a sort of postmodern and pro-technological gnosis. 1 The language used for research on the subject of the Net could not keep up with the rapid developments of technical connections and emerging cybercommunities. The many theories of cyber studies generated metaphors and terms that increased mysteriousness of the new media and demonised the Net as a mystic reality. The state of knowledge in those days can be described, in narratological terms, as a paradoxically scientific science-fiction. This gnostic-cum-philosophical approach can be seen as the necessary first step in the process of getting accustomed to new technologies that paved the way for the contemporary sociological, anthropological, ethnographic and

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______________________________________________________________ psychological research. According to Derrick de Kerckhove, new technologies can only become popular when the society is ready to accept them, which happens through a process of gradual rationalising of the communication environment. 2 Researcher himself perceives the humancomputer interaction in McLuhan’s perspective of sensorial extensions. There is a new continuity between the private mind and the world, but there is also a new connectivity between the private minds in the world. A connected screen is more than a “window on the world”, it is a searchlight and a hand right into it. It is also the portal through which minds interact and leave common traces. The private mind is newly connected to other people via cyberspace and that relationship is spatialized as well as specialized. Cyberspace is visible on screen. Otherwise, it is hidden in wires and waves and pulses. It is like the human nervous system, under the skin of culture. It is certainly the “space” because it has an inside and an outside (the wired versus the not wired), and a deep interiority (the depths of connectivity and hypertextuality). 3 This anthropological diagnosis implies that user-generated narrations and micronarrations on the Web need to be regarded as consequences of situation of mediated communication. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a set of mental and body behaviours and processes. It cannot be analysed only in its variability of individual implementations but also as a complex of patterns of culture characteristic for the new humankind - the world of connected users. Contemporary everydayness becomes impossible without ubiquitous instant connectivity, symbolic exchange and ‘pathological’ never ending, global semiosis. HCI as communication situation connected with technological mental extensions is undoubtedly a revolution which breaks cognitive models worked out by nature and culture. Thus, the knowledge of communication environment plays an absolutely critical role in determining the cultural development. From early 90s new communication competences and acquaintance with technology have become an inseparable element of social life due to, among others, the cyberpunk avant guard movement, members of the Open Source movement, pioneers of methods of alternative content distribution and privacy protection on the Net. The turning point in the development of the Net was undoubtedly September 11, 2001. That was when a certain paradigm of the Net broke down, the paradigm positing the Net as an anarchistic environment exerting further anarchistic influence on the whole of culture. The Net gained, in a

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______________________________________________________________ way, the maturity. Today, the freedom on the Net is usually seen in more down-to-earth terms: as new licences, new copyrights and new ways to generate content. 4 Questions of privacy, Big Brother, control over citizens, the dangers of Echelon or Carnivore systems have lost much of their popularity on the level of social Net discourse. Internet anonymisation of communication has been replaced by the now fashionable tendency, connected with Web 2.0 marketing, to reveal even deeper layers of one’s identity. 5 It is not only the question of personal data, but rather of narrations directly connected with privacy, which create nowadays vast space of narratives on the everydayness of practically all cultures. This global selfrecording of micronarration is undoubtedly an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of culture. The paranoid registering of everything and everywhere (life logs) and the subsequent presentation of these records as a form of creation has led to the development of a new social communication paradigm, personal web publishing. Blogosphere has become the most important space for symbolic exchange characteristic for information society. On the other hand, registering and mixing data of various origin has evolved in the apotheosis of ‘creativity.’ Everything and everyone needs to be creative. In this situation not only the problem of depreciation of values and massification of art arises but also the research paradigm needs to be changed. If the user is creative, a researcher needs to be the creative user as well. This can be achieved by different means, researcher has to show at least proficiency in media use and rituals. The new methodologies connected with multimedia games or serious game design are introduced to social sciences and Web anthropology. 6 Today, researcher needs to be even a designer of the space for social narrations and human-computer interactions. Thus, it can be said that methodologies of social sciences are developing from orality to multimediality, similarly to the culture paradigm. As Marshal McLuhan said: ‘In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin’ 7 - it is impossible to provide research apart from the contemporary customs of communication. This situation may result in new scientific creativity. Possible effects of such research due to the interactivity and creativity can give deeper interpretation of social life than social sciences achieved so-far. However, ‘creativity’ on user level can be regarded as fake value. On the other hand, social networking portals and grassroots journalism enable re-definition of communication strategies by generating new rules of transmission of the knowledge in the society. This is the evolution from the society of consumers to the society of prosumers - who are consuming but at the same time producing or simply adding new values to the products or information. Grassroots journalism may be seen as a revolution in data creating, managing and distributing. This is done by deconstruction and reconstruction of the authority of journalists in society. The old functions of

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______________________________________________________________ reporters, editors, filmmakers, photographers and producers are disappearing and the new function of multimedial grassroot journalist arises on their place. This new citizen authority is ideologically devoted to the work of data collector and interpreter. This can be seen especially in tragic situations, such as wars, conflicts or natural catastrophes, when dozens of bloggers travel to suffering areas, hoping to find interesting object for the blog. It could be described as mass electronic paparazzi movement but on the other hand it can be seen as a sign of new global emotionality. Travelling bloggers equipped with multiple mobile devices are sometimes the only journalists in the demolished areas, the only ones who can transmit someone’s grief, anger or happiness. Moreover their voices can influence people on the planetary scale. It is worth mentioning that grassroots journalism can be described as well as social discourse of anti-hegemonic character. Blogging is also about sharing - knowledge, experience, opinions. Blogosphere is often used as a platform for exchanging ideas, recommendations and points of view. This is crucial in the situation when so-called mainstream media are not interested in variety of topics which are important for global identity. Blogosphere as a part of Web 2.0 tendencies becomes thus not only the news service or the opinion market, but also the only global possibility to discuss all kinds of problems of humankind. However, it is important to notice economic dimension of Web 2.0. It is becoming more and more popular to use procedures of informal communication for business purposes. Known as wikinomics, this phenomenon largely questions the ‘informality’ of the Internet self-recording. The new mass collaboration is driving a historic change in how companies and societies harness knowledge and capability to innovate and create value. This affects just about every sector of society and every aspect of management. A new kind of business is emerging - one that opens its doors to the world, co-innovates with everyone (especially customers), shares resources that were previously closely guarded, harnesses the power of mass collaboration, and behaves not as a multinational but as something new: a truly global firm. These companies are driving important changes in their industries and rewriting the rules of competition. … The new art and science of wikinomics is based on four powerful new ideas: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. 8 The set of socio-cultural phenomena and processes known as Web 2.0, although a marketing slogan appealing even to dot-com pessimists, has

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______________________________________________________________ nevertheless clearly altered the contemporary understanding of the Internet as well as refreshed many freedom-related ideas connected with the cyberculture. 9 These phenomena have led to the spread of the idea of democratisation of the communication, but have also given a new meaning to such basic cultural terms as ‘knowledge,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘authority,’ ‘trust’ and ‘social transmission of meaning.’ What can be seen here is the process of reevaluation within the discourse of knowledge and power - blogosphere and grassroots journalism, often exposing political or media propaganda, have undermined traditional strategies of constructing and distributing meaning in the society. 10 Wiki technology has given rise to decentralised social networks, used, for instance, in gathering knowledge on a given subject or creating concepts and documentation for a group of users. It is to be remembered, however, that these processes take place within the limits of social communication delineated by technical possibilities, economic capacity and the policy of the leading telecoms. Usergenerated content portals do not operate outside the market, but within its framework. Personalised services are of interest not only to their users, they also help create their consumer profile accessible to service providers. The consumer may be consciously involved in the process of constructing such a profile, as is the case with the portals such as Hostelworld that allow users efficiently to search particular services, assess them based on other users’ opinions, and, finally, buy any items selected. However, users might not be aware of their involvement in the services market, as is the case with the communication within Second Life, where actual consumption, social interaction and the creation of virtual world may permeate each other. Web 2.0 is based first and foremost on the Net users’ desire to participate in a broad data exchange, information sharing and global selfpresentation. It is something more than just a fashion for generating content with a private or personal aspect, nor is it not only a form of global exhibitionism and escaping into the virtual. What matters most here is the social participation in activities allowing community-based creation of content, redefinition of meanings and exchange of knowledge. It is based on the belief in the possibility of positive cooperation among internauts, a form of social constructivism. The key example of activity based on constructivist consciousness is Wikipedia. 11 This way of constructing knowledge might be frown upon by conservative-minded intellectuals. Wikipedia, however, is different from social networking portals where the knowledge is generated based on folksonomic rules. Wikiknowledge is a sort of compromise between folksonomy and taxonomy. The Encyclopaedia is built in an open, but not anarchistic, way. The social rules in operation here to a certain extent put an order to the space of freedom. It is the ‘neutral point of view’ that becomes the reference point, imposing some moderation in expressing one’s opinions while retaining the

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______________________________________________________________ interpretative character of contributions. The rules governing the submission of contributions to Wikipedia concern the use of content management system programming code and formatting these contributions according to the existing editing principles. First and foremost, however, these rules rely on the Wikipedia social order, a peculiar libertarian social stratification imposing a hierarchical responsibility for content. And so lines of responsibility go from administrators of particular language versions, to editors of particular sections who are in charge of any changes introduced, regular editors, authors of codification solutions to ambassadors of wikiorder. An average user does not have to be aware of this hierarchy. Intellectuals cannot accept the wikiorder, seeing it as an infringement of the traditional authority of the knowledge distributed in the educational and publishing systems. Wikipedia, however, is not the everyday, nor is it unprofessional knowledge. Although it appears to be unstable and chaotic, wikiknowledge is nevertheless referential. This is achieved through strategies such as community-based setting of rules for entry creation, dialog-based process of content creation, open voting over the form of definitions and social monitoring of any latest changes to the content of entries. Thanks to constant social control any breaches of the referential rule, called vandalism, are in most cases detected. Thus the system characterised by the fluency of creative process bears some features of stability of the knowledge corpus. This feature is often overlooked by the critics of the new approach to encyclopaedia. It is to be noticed as well that the wiki technology has come into its own in corporate environments where there is a need to create knowledge bases for complex procedures whose administering touches ‘frontiers of complexity.’ 12 These applications show the full potential of wiki to generate knowledge, created solely by a closed team of specialists. They also show the hierarchical character of this method of knowledge creation, a direct consequence of corporate culture and its ideological assumptions. Wiki is first and foremost about the technology, while at the same time forming an element of social order. Connective content generation and open character of modification, while retaining the control of the group of controllersadministrators, allows nevertheless to stop the movement of meaning on the level acceptable by the rules of reference, coherence and communicativeness. The complexity of opinions expressed within wiki and multifacetedness are only appearances. The organism of Wikipedia as a connective intelligence seeks to reach simplicity. Simplicity and complexity need each other. The more complexity there is in the market, the more that something simpler stands out. And because technology will only continue to grow in complexity, there is a clear economic

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______________________________________________________________ benefit to adopting a strategy of simplicity that will help your product apart. That said establishing a feeling of simplicity in design requires making complexity consciously available in some explicit form. This relationship can be manifest in either the same object or experience, or in contrast with other offerings in the same category ... . 13 Technophilic contact with interfaces demands alertness. In order to enable communication human cognitive and operational abilities must lead to simplification not only of redundant content but also of communication procedures. There can be observed both the global increase of functionalities of interfaces and the reduction of their possibilities. There are many tools used for various communication procedures. On the other hand, book and library as traditional knowledge systems are the interfaces that demand for its physical creation the deep typographic and logistic knowledge. But using the content is not connected with complexity of technical procedures as production of this knowledge interface. The use of content is based on simplicity - the ability of reading and discursive understanding of the text is efficient. The Net environment is different - the most important is complex technical knowledge which becomes a fundamental cultural competence (e.g. content indexing, ask syntax in search engines). However, its analysis and rules of sociotechnological game between Net users are also important. Interface is not stable and homogeneous - taking into account the necessity of its constant customisation to actual needs, and fitting it to users’ behaviours - it is open and dynamic architecture and, undoubtedly also a creative cognitive process, in which tools and contents participate in constant flow of designing of cultural meanings. It concerns not only McLuhan’s extensions and interfaces, but also human identity connected with machine and plugged into the network of devices and people. Thus, social relations become patterns of culture for hybrid connection between humanity and technology. The flexibility of interfaces evokes the culture of plug-ins and mashups, easily manipulable in order to achieve the temporal cognitive homeostasis - the content fulfilment and stability. A particular territory of this kind of hybridisation is wikinomics - the new economy of the world connected to the Net, where the goal of content sharing is the achievement of knowledge, understood as never ending process of creation. Wikinomics is based on very strictly obeyed rules of social life and rituals which are codified as the rules of connective life. The importance of this type of procedures of collecting and processing knowledge is appreciated even by the Encyclopedia Britannica editorial staff, implementing wikinomic rules in works on still traditional encyclopaedia. 14

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______________________________________________________________ The experience of Wikipedia is precedence in human history and in the history of human effort to construct knowledge. The free encyclopaedia is the fastest source of information about the digital environment as an extension of the human being. It reacts instantly to any emerging technological change, which is way beyond the scope of any traditionally constructed knowledge base. It is to be noted as well that the source of this knowledge are often the authors of technological solutions themselves including members of the Open Source movement. This is a sort of feedback, whereby solutions described and theorised upon are the ones making up the space of contemporary ecology of the digital environment, where, in turn, new media-based cognitive procedures are being developed. It is worth noticing that Wikipedia revitalises the traditional notion of studying as an independent research on a given subject. 15 Such reevaluation of amateur efforts to compile knowledge is undoubtedly connected with McDonaldisation and commercialisation of higher education institutions as well as the decline of traditional authorities. In the digital world the adequacy of knowledge is related more to its instantness and its social transmission (popularity) than to it being a priori acknowledged as valuable by the Academy. And so Wikipedia is a space of knowledge that goes beyond the everydayness as defined by sociology or the anthropological local knowledge. The folksonomic knowledge, produced in user-generated content websites is of a slightly different character. Social tagging, social bookmarking and social networking are all strategies of ordering information, strategies at the same time subjective and public in their character. They allow each user to create their own media profile, their private selfpresentation environments or their own area of interest (e.g. my little world, a personal vision of the world implemented in the processes of social web browsing). Folksonomy is about imparting information with a subjective order of meaning (tagging), multi-dimensional categorisation of concepts. 16 Dispersion and voluntaristic character of folksonomy constructs a highly attractive model of knowledge compared to the traditional model of taxonomy. Folksonomy is undoubtedly an image of the everydayness mediated through the Net. This is the natural way of ordering things in physical space. We juggle multiple principles of organization without even thinking about it. You know what goes in your spice rack and what doesn’t, even through the principle of order is hard to find: What makes dried leaves (oregano), dried seeds (nutmeg), and dried bark (cinnamon) all spices? All add a little more flavour to a dish? But so do chocolate sprinkles, and they don’t count as a spice, despite coming

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______________________________________________________________ in a shaker the size and shape of an oregano bottle. And even if you count salt and black pepper as spices, you probably don’t keep them in the spice rack, because you use them too often. Without pausing for thought, you have coordinated four intersecting sets of criteria: how big the bottles are, what the contents are used for, which part of a meal they’re applied to, and how frequently you need them. The same is true for every room, every closet, and every tabletop in our houses. 17 Weinberger suggests that such ways of subjective ordering things are part of our subconscious cultural model of upbringing. Folksonomy is gathered and reproduced in the process of education. However, in digital world user has to fight for this natural, subjective insight. Social networking websites, as You Tube, Flickr or Del.icio.us are thus the places of shaping the new digital strategies of data collecting in the opposition to the traditional architecture of taxonomic tree. This can be seen as the breakthrough over the cognitive models which are mostly the heritage of the Enlightenment. Weinberger concludes, that ‘to take advantage of the digital opportunity - we have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.’ 18 What can be seen here is a change of paradigm in the area of gathering knowledge: objectivising procedures being questioned as a result of human knowledge getting entangled in all the competing discourses, an increasingly important role is now played by the subjective factor. The subjective factor, emphasising the pluralism of categorising is now being more and more appreciated. Folksonomy can also be seen as a ‘social monitoring’ phenomenon, where, for instance, digital traces of friends activity are searched with the use of personalised information channels that are conducive to personality leaks. This is a slow and fragmentary process, yet it allows the identity profile of users to be compiled in a great detail without them knowing. Identity 2.0 is an entity emerging from the limited choices designed by programmers. This is a ‘choice from the menu,’ according to the interpretation of the interface user’s activities presented by Lev Manovich. 19 Consequently, the user’s identity is designed as an element of the interface and the data base. The Internet being a part of our culture for almost two decades now, technical skills have become commonplace in whole societies and complicated user interfaces requiring specialist knowledge on the part of the user have been replaced by user-friendly graphic interfaces and the universal networking of information. This has been possible thanks to the humanisation of the computer and computerisation of the user’s identity. What once was ‘secret knowledge’ has now become common knowledge.

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______________________________________________________________ And thus cyberspace mythology has evolved: the mythology of the programmer creating freed tools, characterising Web 1.0, in Web 2.0 has been replaced by the mythology of the user who creates, or releases, symbolic content. 20 Also, Web 2.0 brings a re-definition of communication applications of the Internet. The medium leads to the emergence of online communities as well as social networks of different types. Web 2.0 involves a communication mode characterised by two main features: rituality and pragmaticism. Wikipedia and other wiki implementations as well as social networks respond to the needs for information and cooperation, e.g. social creation of knowledge base (Wikipedia, Wikitravel) or business networks (LinkedIn, GoldenLine). The ritual goal of communication is extremely important. True, the ritual has often been seen as valueless ‘communication without information’ by communication theorists (proponents of the transmission model). 21 However, anthropological research proves that the ritual performs an important function of supporting social relations and consolidating culture. The social space of Web 2.0 has developed rituals that allow users to get accustomed to new technologies as well as re-define the place of human being in culture. They offer a possibility to participate in social games and to create the patterns of culture. Social networking websites are centres around which new rituals are constructed. Building the profile or avatar (e.g. in Second Life) can be regarded as a self-presenting and self-defining ritual, selecting a particular skin for the avatar or a photo for blog may be seen as an element of ritual whereby the user adjusts to social norms and aesthetic models. In this perspective, collecting friends in social networking portals such as Facebook, Classmates or in the Polish cultural phenomenon of ‘Ourclass’ (Nasza-klasa.pl) is a sort of ritual of confirming one’s social status through artificially increasing the size of one’s social network. Running a blog, photoblog, microblog, moblog, audioblog or videoblog is also a ritual confirmation of one’s value as well as an expression of willingness to be part of the space of modernity and technological skill. Many rites connected with embellishing one’s virtual body or its destruction are to be seen here, too, including the ritual murder of avatars (Second Life). Another important ritual linking the online and offline reality is the ritual of digital mourning, most typically accompanying offline event and manifesting itself in blogs. It is possible to find more phenomena of ritual type on the Net, the ones mentioned above being some of the most prominent examples for Web 2.0. Concluding, it is worth noticing what is - from the anthropological point of view - a puzzling shift in the understanding of the Net that has taken place over the last two decades. It can be observed that metaphors used to think about the Net and to describe it have been changed. The metaphor of the Net as a rhizome has been replaced by the metaphor of the Net as a map of the underground. It can be regarded as the progressive rationalising of

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______________________________________________________________ operational metaphors used to describe crucial cultural terms, in this case both the medium, the technology and the communication environment. Thinking about the Internet is linked to thinking about cognitive space. The metaphor of rhizome referred to the tradition of understanding unimaginable notions such as Cosmos, Chaos or God. It was adequate in the times of amazement at inconceivable technology, it was meant to help understand it. As it turned out, however, the practice of communication led to the simplification of the cognitive model and metaphors of closed systems proved more functional. It is not possible to describe an infinite environment while at the same time experiencing it on a daily basis as finite in the form of search results or a definite number of acts of communication. The metaphor of the Net as a map of the underground seems better suited to the communication everydayness of internauts. It gives a framework to the universe. The communication aspect has taken precedence over the metaphysics of the Net. It is this communication aspect that sets the rules of the new economy (wikinomics), new taxonomy (folksonomy) and social restratification. It is communication, both in its pragmatic and ritual aspect, that generates the deepest cultural meanings of Web 2.0 and delineates the future of the networked society.

Notes 1

E. Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, Serpents Tail, London, 2004, passim. 2 D. de Kerckhove, Powloka Kultury: Odkrywanie Nowej Elektronicznej Rzeczywiśtosci, W. Sikorski and P. Nowakowski (trans), Mikom, Warszawa, 1996, pp. 21-25. [The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Ch. Dewdney (ed), Somerville House Publishing, Toronto, 1995]. 3 D. de Kerckhove, The Architecture of Intelligence, Birkhäuser, Basel, Boston and Berlin, 2001, p. 15. 4 L. Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Penguin Press, New York, 2004, passim. 5 T. O’Reilly, ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, in O’Reilly News, 30 September 2005, p. 6, viewed on 2 September 2007, . 6 P. Ludes and D. Riha in this volume. 7 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Ark Paperbacks, London and New York, 1987, p. 47. 8 D. Tapscott and A. D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Atlantic Books, New York, 2007, p. 20.

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O’Reilly, p. 6. D. Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People, O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, 2006, passim. 11 Wikipedia: ‘Deklaracja Przykuty’ [Wikipedia: ‘Przykuta’s Decla-ration’], 29 October 2004, viewed on 16 June 2008, ; or: Wikipedia: ‘Nasza Odpowiedz na Krytyke’ [Wikipedia: ‘Our Response to Criticism’], 27 November 2002, viewed on 17 April 2007, . 12 P. Coveney and R. Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, Random House, New York and Toronto, 1995. 13 J. Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity (Design, Technology, Business, Life), The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2006, pp. 45-46. 14 The situation has changed since we wrote this article in 2008. Britannica stopped publishing the traditional paper hardbound version of their Encyclopaedia in 2010 as a result of losing the competiiton with Wikipedia. 15 A. Maj, Media w Podróży [Media in Travel], Wydawnictwo Naukowe ExMachina, Katowice, 2008. 16 D. Weinberger, ‘When Things Aren’t What They Are’, in Hybrid - Living in Paradox. Ars Electronica 2005, C. Schöpf and G. Stocker (eds), Hatje Cantz, Linz, 2005, pp. 76-78. 17 D. Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Times Books, New York, 2007, p. 10. 18 Ibid., p. 11. 19 L. Manovich, Jezyk Nowych Mediów, P. Cypryanski (trans), Wydawnictwa Profesjonalne i Akademickie, Warszawa, 2006, p. 220. [The Language of New Media, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2002]. 20 M. Derda-Nowakowski, ‘Komunikacja Społeczna w Internecie: Problemy Badawcze’ [‘Social Communication on the Internet. Research Problems’], in Oblicza Komunikacji 1: Perspektywy Badań nad Tekstem, Dyskursem i Komunikacją, Vol. 2, I. Kaminska-Szmaj, T. Piekot, M. Zasko-Zielinska (eds), Tertium, Krakow, 2006. 21 E. W. Rothenbuhler, Komunikacja Rytualna: Od Rozmowy Codziennej do Ceremonii Medialnej, J. Baranski (trans), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, Krakow, 2003, p. 40. [Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony, Sage, Thousand Oaks, California, 1998]. 10

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Bibliography Benedict, R., Patterns of Culture. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1961. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise its the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books, Garden City, New York, 1966. Bush, V., ‘As We May Think’. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. Coveney, P. and Highfield, R., Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World. Random House, New York and Toronto, 1995. Davis, E., TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Serpents Tail, London, 2004. De Kerckhove, D., Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society. Sommerville House Publishing, Toronto, 1997. —––, Powloka Kultury: Odkrywanie Nowej Elektronicznej Rzeczywistości. W. Sikorski and P. Nowakowski (trans), Mikom, Warszawa, 1996 [The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. C. Dewdney (ed), Somerville House Publishing, Toronto, 1995]. —––, The Architecture of Intelligence. Birkhäuser, Basel, Boston and Berlin, 2001. Derda-Nowakowski, M., ‘Komunikacja Społeczna w Internecie: Problemy Badawcze’ [‘Social Communication on the Internet: Research Problems’]. Oblicza Komunikacji 1: Perspektywy Badań nad Tekstem, Dyskursem i Komunikacją. Vol. 2, I. Kaminska-Szmaj, T. Piekot, M. Zasko-Zielinska (eds), Tertium, Krakow, 2006. Gillmor, D., We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People, O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, 2006. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980. Lessig, L., Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Penguin Press, New York, 2004.

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______________________________________________________________ Ludes, P., ‘Trans-Generational Dialogues: Social Sciences as Multimedia Games’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 151-171. Maeda, J., The Laws of Simplicity (Design, Technology, Business, Life). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2006. Maj, A., Media w Podróży [Media in Travel]. Wydawnictwo Naukowe ExMachina, Katowice, 2008. Maj, A. and Derda-Nowakowski, M., ‘Discourses on Media, Culture and Anthropology of the Web.’ Interview with Derrick de Kerckhove. Ars Electronica, Linz 2005. NETLORE. Media/Anthropology/Design, 2006, Nos. 1-2; . Manovich, L., Jezyk Nowych Mediów. P. Cypryanski (trans), Wydawnictwa Profesjonalne i Akademickie, Warszawa, 2006 [The Language of New Media. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002]. McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ark Paperbacks, London and New York, 1987. O’Reilly, T., ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’. O’Reilly News, 30 September 2005, viewed on 2 September 2007, , p. 6. Riha, D., ‘Interactive 3-D Documentary as Serious Videogame’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 173-190. Rothenbuhler, E. W., Komunikacja Rytualna: Od Rozmowy Codziennej do Ceremonii Medialnej. J. Baranski (trans), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, Krakow, 2003 [Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony. Sage, Thousand Oaks, California, 1998]. Tapscott, D., and Williams, A. D., Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Atlantic Books, New York, 2007.

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______________________________________________________________ Weinberger, D., ‘When Things Aren’t What They Are’, in Hybrid - Living in Paradox. Ars Electronica 2005. C. Schöpf and G. Stocker (eds), Hatje Cantz, Linz, 2005, pp. 76-78. —––, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Times Books, New York, 2007. Anna Maj, Ph.D., University of Silesia, Katowice Poland. Research Field: Media Anthropology and Theory of Communication. Michal Derda-Nowakowski, Ph.D., University of Lodz, Poland. Research Field: Media Anthropology and Design.

PART IV Cyberpunk Literature and Film

Gender Resistance: Interrogating the ‘Punk’ in Cyberpunk Katherine Harrison Abstract In this chapter, I examine two cyberpunk texts to assess whether their apparent resistance to mainstream society includes resistance to gender stereotypes. Writing from a feminist perspective, I suggest that much of the disruptive potential of this genre is derived from its integration of ‘punk’ as a discourse or practice of resistance to social ‘norms.’ Punk explicitly sets out to upset preconceived notions of identity, subscribing to values which highlight ‘alternative’ ways of being. I focus on Candas Jane Dorsey’s short story ‘(Learning about) Machine Sex’ - a feminist parody of cyberpunk - and Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash - a second-wave cyberpunk text. Dorsey’s text centres on female protagonist Angel, who creates a piece of software designed to program the human body to orgasm. In so doing, Dorsey exploits the sexualised rhetoric of technology often seen in early cyberpunk, resulting in an ironic, open-ended narrative. Stephenson’s novel provides an interesting counterpoint to Dorsey’s text, bringing together ‘classic’ cyberpunk concerns about on/off-line life with contemporary social anxieties about bodily boundaries, religious fundamentalism, migration and global corporatisation. I have deliberately chosen texts whose relationship with first-wave cyberpunk is complicated either by an explicitly feminist standpoint (Dorsey) or a generational distance (Stephenson), in order to assess whether these authors avoid or succumb to the same critiques levelled at early cyberpunk about gender representation. I am concerned with who and what these texts are resisting, and how this resistance is performed. This line of enquiry, however, also demands a closer examination of the positive connotations attached to ‘resistance’ in cyberpunk, and, consequently, to ask whose interests are not represented. To do this, I use the disruptive associations of ‘punk’ as a tool, looking not only at particular themes of resistance within the text, but also how the authors’ innovative stylistic manoeuvres resist genre conventions. Key Words: Gender, cyberpunk, Dorsey, Stephenson, technology, cyberculture, punk, resistance. ***** 1.

Introduction Fight for independence; fight for the freedom to create; fight against the monoculture that threatens every aspect of your life. 1

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______________________________________________________________ This is the ‘fight’ that attracted me to cyberpunk; the challenge to normative ways of thinking which punk seems to offer, and which cyberpunk tries to harness in its representations of technology. Cyberpunk - a subgenre of science fiction - mixes up the technophilia of cyberculture with the antiestablishment attitude of punk, resulting in a number of recognisable characteristics in its texts, including ‘hybrid’ identities, dystopian futures, and a focus on technology. This focus often upsets any easy distinction between human and machine, while its alternative (cyborgian) identities perhaps offer new paradigms for thinking about gender. 2 My premise in this chapter is that much of the disruptive potential of this distinctive subgenre is derived from its adoption of ‘punk’ as a discourse or practice of resistance to social ‘norms.’ 3 As a number of critics have noted, both cyberpunk and its ‘parent’ genre, science fiction, show an interest in innovative style and language. 4 Here I am going to use this close attention to language and style to interrogate the ‘punk’ in cyber-punk, and to ask to what extent it is effective as a means of resisting normative models of technology and gender. To do this, I use close textual analysis of two cyberpunk texts: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and ‘(Learning about) Machine Sex’ by Candas Jane Dorsey. What do these texts offer which is different from better known cyberpunk texts, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer? Gibson - one of the most famous cyberpunk authors - is widely credited with coining the term ‘cyberspace,’ and his 1984 novel, Neuromancer, is perhaps the best known example of this genre. Neuromancer epitomises many features of the genre, its narrative structured round a plot to remove the electronic restraints which prevent an Artificial Intelligence from functioning independently of its human owner. The main protagonists are a male hacker called Case, and a ‘razorgirl’ (a technologically-enhanced hired assassin) called Molly. It uses a number of tropes which associate it with popular perceptions of punk, including a ‘DIY’ approach to technology, resistance to authority, street slang and gang dress codes. The narrative raises many of the hopes and fears associated with new technologies, from the euphoria of online disembodiment to the possibilities for bodily enhancement through medical technology. It also highlights some of the problematic aspects of the genre in terms of gender representation. Wendy Wahl writing in ‘Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of Resistance,’ notes that ‘Case doesn’t seem to have a body unless he is inside Molly, either in sex or sim/stim … Molly is the body. Case can jack out any time.’ 5 More recently, June Deery, in her comparison of Gibson’s and Marge Piercy’s work, was equally damning when she suggested that in his writing we see ‘the world of macho, hardboiled console cowboys on the wild frontier, mercenary loners who try to outmaneuver each other with the latest weaponry and gadgetry.’ 6 The unproblematised connection between man and mind, and woman and body,

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______________________________________________________________ together with the ‘macho’ discourse of the frontier limits the potential of Gibson’s work when considering it in relation to resistance to gender norms. The texts by Stephenson and Dorsey perhaps offer a new twist on the genre; Stephenson’s novel is considered ‘second-generation’ cyberpunk, while Dorsey’s short story is explicitly billed as a parody of cyberpunk. Can this distance from classic, ‘first-wave’ cyberpunk produce more challenging gender representations? Stephenson’s novel, Snow Crash, 7 tells the story of a computer hacker called Hiro Protagonist and a skateboard courier called Y.T. Set in a recognisable future America, Stephenson’s novel brings together perennial cyberpunk themes such as life online with contemporary social anxieties about bodily boundaries, religious fundamentalism, surveillance, migration and global corporatisation. The novel is centred on Hiro and Y.T. uncovering a plot to kill hackers using a new virus called ‘snow crash.’ Writing about the novel in ‘Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash,’ David Porush describes ‘snow crash’ as follows: On the streets, Snow Crash takes the form of a designer drug that induces a type of aphasia, causing its users to babble in a glossolalia of basic morphemes … The drug also causes an extraordinary susceptibility to suggestion and manipulation. In virtual reality, Snow Crash takes the form of viral computer code that infects a host system merely by revealing it “visually” to the avatar of the host. The results are disastrous: the code sustaining the virtual avatar becomes infected, causing the avatar to become inoperant and the brain of the host, the live handler, to become infected as well, inducing the same symptoms that the street drug does. 8 Y.T. and Hiro track the source of ‘snow crash’ over the course of the novel, with the action slipping easily between online and offline action. In the short story, ‘(Learning about) Machine Sex,’ 9 Dorsey’s protagonist is a programmer called Angel who designs an Artificial Intelligence. Disillusioned when her boss (and ex-lover) sells the small company for which she works to a larger corporation, Angel enacts her own personal revenge by designing a program called ‘Machine Sex.’ This is based on the idea that orgasm can be programmed and the text traces Angel’s development of the hardware she dubs the ‘Mannboard’ and accompanying software (‘Machine Sex’); this hardware-software combination results in a piece of equipment with touch pads through which the user is effectively ‘programmed’ to orgasm.

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______________________________________________________________ In both texts, the protagonists are portrayed as not wishing to ascribe to society’s norms, through anti-corporate attitudes as well as a number of other aesthetic cues such as dress or behaviour. This chapter is particularly concerned with examining how this ‘resistance’ operates specifically in relation to gender, using ‘punk’ as a way in to do this. Given the centrality of ‘punk’ to this approach, a discussion of this topic precedes my examination of the texts themselves. 2.

Interrogating ‘Punk’ Cyberpunk explicitly sets out to upset preconceived notions of identity and ‘a good life’ by proffering values which highlight alternative ways of being, 10 coupled with an anarchic disrespect for authority associated with the punk ethos. David Porush’s definition of punk below perfectly captures some of this anger and anti-establishment sentiment that make it a movement worth closer investigation: So what is punk? It’s primitive lizard-brain passion clawing its way through the cerebrum of urbanity. The emotive electric acidjuice of adolescence decoding the palimpsest of civilization, stripping it away to expose deeper codes. Graffiti painting its postliterate mark on the official billboards. It’s the reassertion and readaptation of the genetic code over the industrial one which has tried to suppress it. It’s the war between natural and artificial, and their inevitable deconstruction, their collapse into each other as meaningless distinctions. 11 The images and tone used here evoke not only the ‘real life’ images of punk and the counterculture world portrayed in cyberpunk itself, but also echo recent Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) concerns with nature, artifice, culture and technology. 12 Cyberpunk models a near-future society in which technology is more advanced, a depiction of a society we can easily imagine our own one becoming, 13 located somewhere between old and new, between a simple fiction and the ‘facts’ of the present day. In its reinterpretation of previous styles, punk (and cyberpunk too) appears to position itself as straddling the divide between old and new, pushing at the boundaries of the acceptable and the accepted, refusing to fit into any of the existing categories, walking the ‘edge.’ In this respect, cyberpunk shares a number of the concerns which have long preoccupied science fiction, as Michael J. Klein aptly notes in his chapter in this volume. 14 In the context of cyberpunk, ‘punk’ can be seen in not only the resistance of its characters to authority (and particularly corporatisation) or to gender norms, but also in the recurring resistance towards any easy separation of human and machine,

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______________________________________________________________ nature and culture. Finally, cyberpunk seems to offer resistance on a genre level, adopting and adapting a range of styles to produce distinctive technosexualised environments, characters and language. In turning mainstream value systems upside down, entangling previously discrete categories and disrupting bodily and machinic boundaries, cyberpunk fiction appears to resist contemporary binary hierarchies. However, a closer look at the origins of punk and cyberpunk perhaps suggests a more ambivalent reading. ‘Punk’ is an old word, 15 often replete with images of otherness, a word which has long been part of popular culture, whose meaning has shifted over time to designate a range of socially marginalised positions. In the 1970s, the term underwent a kind of revaluation with the advent of Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, their infamous shop ‘Sex’ and the accompanying furor caused by bands such as the ‘Sex Pistols.’ Punk at this point became a lifestyle, a commodity - music, dress and behaviours that were designed to shock, to upset norms, as well as a different approach to aesthetics. Then, in the 1980s, the anti-establishment attitude of punk met the Internet. When Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter in the early 1980s, computers were technologies of which people were aware. However, they were still several years away from being freely available and a regular fixture in your ‘average’ home. This distance from lived reality resulted in heightened fears and expectations of what this new technology would offer and cyberpunk is the result of the meeting of this hyperimaginative response to new technologies (and the Internet in particular) and the anti-establishment approach of punk. In addition to this historical context, it is also worth noting that many of the early cyberpunk authors are Anglo-American, Englishspeaking men. 16 Locating this subgenre chronologically and geographically is important when considering what ‘resistance’ might mean in this particular context. In particular, these texts reflect concerns with corporatisation as well as an aesthetic (bodily) resistance to the mainstream. Acknowledging socio-historical contexts helps when considering whose interests are not recognised by the form that resistance takes. For example, the emergence of ‘punk’ into popular culture, and its subsequent homogenisation (see, for example, dictionary definitions), is in striking contrast to the tone of the opening quotation from a contemporary punk zine, Punk Planet (now sadly discontinued). In his article, ‘L.A.’s ‘“White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization,’ 17 Daniel S. Traber draws attention to the way in which race was used by the L.A. punks as a way for white punks to distinguish themselves from the ‘privileged white youth.’ 18 However, Traber is keen to stress that this positioning implicitly reinforces the idea of the middle-class, white male as the ‘norm’ in a move that undermines some of the radical potential of punk:

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______________________________________________________________ … the foundations of L. A. punk’s politics are shaky, and its liberatory spirit needs to be reconsidered. This subculture claims to desire dissonance and destabilization, but it depends on boundaries and regulatory fictions staying in place to define itself as oppositional. 19 Bearing this in mind, it is also worth considering how women have been located in relationship to the punk movement. Writing in ‘“A little too ironic”: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians,’ Kristen Schilt traces the history of the ‘riot grrrl’ movement from its punk founding mothers, through the era of bands like Bikini Kill, to mainstream ‘angry’ female musicians such as Alanis Morrisette. Schilt notes the connection between the ‘founding women’ 20 of riot grrrl and punk, explicitly framing punk as a ‘parent’ discourse, one which facilitates and validates Riot Grrrl messages. However, through analysis of lyrics from female bands and artists, Schilt shows how the original punk messages of the Riot Grrrl movement moved into mainstream popular culture, finally emerging in the diluted form of ‘The Spice Girls’ and ‘Girl Power.’ In light of this, her conclusion is unsurprisingly gloomy, noting that while ‘anger towards patriarchy is present, the discussion of sexual abuse, and even acknowledgement of female desire,’ 21 positive action for women seems to have got lost en route: There is no shared experience or advice in how to move towards healing, as there is in Riot Grrrl material. There is no encouragement for girls to use music as a form of expressing anger towards a world that marginalizes them … That future may seem bleak if you don’t look good in spangled bustiers and hot pants. 22 The complaints which Schilt makes about punk are echoed in responses to stereotyped female figures in cyberpunk too; June Deery describes Molly as ‘not so far removed from the sexy, cold, violent female warrior who remains a staple of computer games and science fiction comics.’ 23 The damning review from Schilt seems to suggest an increasingly bland and stable definition of punk which comes to be used as shorthand for ‘cool’ or ‘different’ by mainstream artists. However, contemporary zines like Punk Planet stress how ‘punk’ moves, that it is an iterative process, in which ‘sometimes things have to end so that something new can begin.’ 24 So, while Schilt may be right to mourn what she reads as the disappearance of positive punk female role models as their style (but not their substance) becomes a fashion statement, her argument fails to trace where the substance goes. This

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______________________________________________________________ disparity between the style and substance of punk will also be of relevance to this consideration of cyberpunk. The increasingly stable definitions of punk not only limit its evolution and disruptive force, but have more serious problems when trying to consider punk as an oppositional or resistant force. If punk draws power and momentum from defining itself in opposition to mainstream or traditional ideas, it enforces and stabilises a punk/mainstream dichotomy. In this sense the resistance which punk seems to offer could be read as becoming another regulatory discourse, one which reinforces a binary opposition and erases subjectivities which do not fit this model, rather than functioning as the discomfiting, shifting force posited by Punk Planet and which seems to offer promise for rethinking gendered bodies. This resistance instead becomes a gesture empty of any transformational power, or as James Kincaid neatly puts it: Resistance is the ultimate acquiescence. It pools the imaginations of the hungry and dissatisfied into conservative gestures of barricading and nose thumbing. It admits its own failure to think (or fight) its way out of bondage. It likes where it is, since that location provides the only identity it can know. 25 Kincaid turns away from the idea of ‘resistance’ by looking for a ‘vocabulary innocent of power,’ by advocating multiple stories, with no one meaning, plus an avoidance of causality, genre hierarchies, set plots and the law of logical contradiction. In so doing, he removes authority from the narrative and reintroduces pleasure. Pleasure in stories. And this I think is helpful in thinking about cyberpunk. While Kincaid avoids calling his approach ‘resistance,’ in my chapter it is very much his approach I have in mind when I refer to ‘discourses of resistance.’ On first glance, cyberpunk appears to invert a hierarchy of values, for example, positioning DIY/hacker/freeware culture as somehow more cutting-edge or ‘real’ than the mainstream. However, this reading of cyberpunk clearly reinforces this binary, rather than fundamentally undermining it. Furthermore, as Traber and Schilt note, this valorisation of the non-dominant term not only reinforces this binary structure but potentially renders positions other than the binary invisible. Can cyberpunk be read in a way that avoids this simplistic either/or option? With these concerns about ‘punk,’ and by extension cyberpunk, in mind, I have deliberately chosen texts which are not ‘straightforward’ first wave cyberpunk narratives. While both have relationships with the original cyberpunks, these are complicated either by a feminist perspective (Dorsey) or a generational distance (Stephenson). Can Dorsey and Stephenson avoid

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______________________________________________________________ these traps outlined by Traber and Schilt, and release productive ‘resistance’ to gender norms in their texts? In the following sections, I will consider what the texts are resisting, how this resistance is performed and whether it can be considered successful. 3.

Snow Crash In Stephenson’s novel, Snow Crash, we see the ultimate dystopian future society, a mindless America in which everything has become the property of a company, where there are no laws and the Mafia is a recognised business. Hiro Protagonist, one of the two main protagonists in Snow Crash, is announced to the reader through his business card which dubs him ‘Last of the freelance hackers. Greatest sword fighter in the world.’ 26 Hiro is the ultimate cyberpunk; technically adept, physically strong - oh, and he carries swords and rides a motorcycle too. Hiro’s ‘cool’ cyberpunk persona is undercut, however, by his mundane job delivering pizza. Stephenson heightens the incongruity between Hiro’s two identities by juxtaposing a hyped rhetorical style with the ordinariness of Hiro’s job. The book opens with a description of Hiro on a night at work, during which he is referred to as ‘The Deliverator.’ This description lasts several pages. However, it is only on the third page that the reader actually discovers that the job is pizza delivery. The two pages prior to that are hyperbolic descriptions of his car, uniform and gun, as the opening sentences demonstrate: The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is as black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. 27 Deliberately playing with recognisable styles from action and adventure narratives, Stephenson undermines the trappings of cyberpunk machismo in his opening pages. The other central character in Snow Crash is a teenage girl called Y.T.. Y.T. lives with her mother who works ‘for the Feds’ but leads a ‘double life’ as a skateboard courier, pausing at her local McDonalds on the way home to change her courier uniform for a skirt and blouse with a ‘delicate floral print.’ 28 Independent and strong-willed, she rarely goes online, and does not carry a weapon. Both Hiro and Y.T. are portrayed as existing more comfortably outside ‘accepted’ society, and this is often reflected in their use of slang.

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______________________________________________________________ Y.T.’s affiliation to the skate gangs, and Hiro’s to the hackers, are shown through their use of distinctive linguistic patterns and their attitudes towards those living within society’s norms. For example, their negotiation of these norms can be clearly seen in their easy shifts between different identities, from courier to school girl, pizza delivery person to online sword fighter. The contemporary preoccupation with surveillance which Laura Schuster discusses in her chapter about 2006 film A Scanner Darkly, 29 is also reflected in Stephenson’s novel, with Hiro and Y.T moving between highly monitored professional roles and ones which enable them to live ‘under the radar.’ Like Arctor in A Scanner Darkly, the identity shifts performed by Hiro and Y.T result in a certain narrative uncertainty as to which is the ‘real’ identity, resisting the creation of neatly packaged protagonists. The lifestyle choices of Y.T. and Hiro deliberately contrast with the mindless, corporate suburban future America that Stephenson portrays. For both, aesthetic choices and attitudes function as markers of group membership and as different to ‘corporate’ America, while multiple roles render the characters multi-dimensional and unstable. However, we need to ask - following Traber and Schilt - whether this apparent opposition actually reinforces boundaries, and, if so, what other ‘regulatory fictions’ remain in place in Stephenson’s novel? Larry McCaffery’s introduction to the cyberpunk anthology, Storming the Reality Studio, provides a helpful starting point for investigating this. In the following extract, he describes the image projected by the early cyberpunk authors: Decked out in mirrorshades and leather jackets, the cyberpunks projected an image of confrontational “reality hacker” artists who were armed, dangerous, and jacked into (but not under the thumb of) the Now and the New. 30 Although not directly identified as male in the quotation above, the cyberpunk is implicitly gendered through references to typically male figures such as the biker, the hacker and the criminal. Broader cultural associations between aggression and masculinity also contribute to this not-so-subtle gendering of the (cyber)punk. In Snow Crash, this connection is played out in various ways. Hiro’s highly developed technical skills as hacker and developer - and his role in the narrative as detective and decoder of the plot - seem to associate him with mental abilities. His body (when mentioned) is connected primarily with fighting or driving, and whilst Stephenson clearly shows himself capable of parodying dominant discourses in these descriptions (as demonstrated in the extract about ‘the Deliverator’), his treatment is not consistently self-aware when doing so. For example, in the stages leading up to the final sequence

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______________________________________________________________ Hiro buys a motorbike, and when seated on the bike in his new motorcycling clothes he is described as looking like ‘one bad motherfucker.’ 31 With no apparent irony and in just a few lines, Stephenson thus returns Hiro to the mould of earlier cyberpunks. Like many female figures in cyberpunk, Y.T. is positioned as independent and strong-willed. However, she suffers from the same lack of attention to her mental abilities and absence of online persona as earlier female figures in this genre. Y.T.’s body is usually mentioned in relation to her skateboarding, or her sexual encounters with her courier boyfriend and the assassin, Raven. In the passages with Raven she is portrayed as being physically and sexually powerless. In many respects, Y.T is simply an updated version of the original female cyberpunk character, Molly from Neuromancer. Throughout this well-known text, Gibson repeatedly draws attention to Molly’s physically attractive appearance, combining this with her physical strength and weapons to create an almost cartoon-like dominatrix figure. In contrast, the physical appearance of Case, the male protagonist of Neuromancer, is described only once and then through Molly’s eyes. Although Y.T is not a hired fighter, like Molly, Stephenson’s reliance on stock scenarios such as her admiration of Hiro, her lack of weapons, and the references to her physicality and sexuality results in a disappointingly stereotyped portrayal. Thus while Stephenson’s novel initially appears to be a self-aware updating of the cyberpunk genre seen in his playful adaptation of the rhetorical style of earlier texts, and his positioning of Hiro and Y.T. as distanced from mainstream, corporate culture, his gendering of the characters falls back on stock positions more in keeping with texts such as Gibson’s. 4.

‘(Learning about) Machine Sex’ The integration of punk ethics into a technological or futuristic framework inevitably results in criticism of corporate concerns becoming a fundamental part of the cyberpunk ethos. Concerns with uses of technology and the relationship between technology and society have long been a concern of science fiction, as Klein’s analysis of well-known novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World shows. 32 In cyberpunk fiction, however, these concerns are voiced through a strong anti-establishment spirit directly inspired by the punk heritage of the sub-genre, as we see in Dorsey’s short story, ‘(Learning about) Machine Sex.’ The response of the main protagonist, Angel, to the buy-out of the small, start-up company for which she works is perhaps typical of cyberpunk positioning: ‘Had a big day,’ he said. ‘Yeah?’ ‘Big deal went through.’

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______________________________________________________________ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Yeah, I sold the company.’ ‘You what?’ Reflexively moving herself so that none of her body touched his. ‘Northern. I put it to Bronfmann. Megabucks.’ ‘Are you joking?’ but she saw he was not. ‘You didn’t, I didn’t…Northern’s our company.’ 33 Angel’s instinctive response here reflects the punk mistrust of authority and the hacker commitment to free access to software. Angel is identified from early in the story as being resistant to societal norms, as demonstrated by both her appearance and her ability to succeed in the maledominated hacker world: ‘they say a hacker’s burned out before he’s twentyone. Note the pronoun: he. Not many young women in that heady realm of the chip.’ 34 The cynicism and self-awareness of the narrator’s voice, combined with Angel’s attitude, marks this text as being as much ‘punk’ as it is ‘cyberpunk.’ Angel is fiercely resistant to corporatisation of her creative programming work. Her attitude disrupts the male-dominated corporate world and simultaneously returns the technology to the hands of the individual. 35 Angel engages in behaviours which she recognises as being outside social and gender norms, and which are only tolerated by her employer because of her talent with computers: By then he knew her, knew her rep, knew that the sweatysmelling, dishevelled, anorectic-looking waif in the filthy, oversized silk shirt (the rebels had affected natural fabrics the year she left home, and she always did after that, even when the silk was cleaner, more upmarket, and black instead of white) had something. Two weeks ago he’d bought a company on the strength of that something, and the board Whitman had brought him the day after the sale, even without the software to run on it, had been enough to convince him he’d been right. 36 Her chosen aesthetic disrupts the image of the desirable feminine techno-body seen in earlier cyberpunk, while her choice of ‘uniform’ again marks her distance from the corporate world and her membership of alternative culture. Thus, Dorsey positions Angel as closer to ‘punk’ than ‘cyberpunk’ in her bodily aesthetics. Dorsey’s treatment of Angel aptly captures the ambiguity of the position of women cyberpunks - Angel is intelligent, talented and resistant to absorption into the corporate sphere. However, whilst a strong, independent character, she is riven by betrayals and marked by her chosen forms of escape into prostitution and drugs.

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______________________________________________________________ Dorsey is equally ambivalent about the ‘promise of technology’ for women, simultaneously drawing Angel herself as a kind of machine, and associating meaningless, ‘programmable’ sex with male desire. Overall, though, Dorsey’s text is resistant to reaching any definitive conclusion about technology - unlike Neuromancer this is no boys’ adventure story with a ‘happy ending’ in which man and technology work together to outwit the evil forces of corporate America. Rather Dorsey’s story ends on an open note - while Angel has created the piece of software she envisaged, the final scene shows her presenting the software to the (male) bosses of the company for which she works. Her software is her joke on them, which they never understand: “‘And what’s better than a man?’ Angel says; they jump slightly. ‘Why, your MannComp touchpads, with two-way input. I bet you’ll be able to have them personally fitted.’” 37 Dorsey unremittingly drags the body back into science fiction in her cyberpunk; it is notable that Angel never experiences the online disembodiment so beloved of Gibson and many other early cyberpunk authors. Instead, she has a difficult, tense relationship with desire and bodily pleasure, resorting to tailored drugs and anonymous sex both of which are experiences with which she is ultimately disappointed. ‘(Learning about) Machine Sex’ thus resists the normative gender representations seen in science fiction using self-aware commentary on, or parody of, the stereotypes associated with cyberpunk. In Angel, Dorsey has created a character who marks a distinct aesthetic departure from the glossy female figures of earlier cyberpunk, and who, in her attitude to machines, relishes the intellectual challenge whilst avoiding blissful disembodiment. Dorsey’s resistance to these stock figures and themes of cyberpunk, however, goes beyond her portrayal of Angel. Her prose style is sparse and notable for its avoidance of technophilic rhetoric. Instead, when it starts to drift towards that mode, Dorsey pops the bubble with a swift dose of self-awareness: Angel, like everyone else, comes from somewhere and goes somewhere else. She lives in that linear and binary universe. However, like everyone else, she lives concurrently in another universe less simple. Trivalent, quadrivalent, multivalent. World without end, with no amen. And so, on. 38 The mocking tone of the narrator’s voice at the end of the above extract undermines the euphoric rhetoric of early cyberpunk, playing with the accepted tropes. This playfulness can also be seen in Dorsey’s elegant melding of the discourses of sexual desire and computing: ‘At first it did turn him on, then off, then it made his blood run cold. She was pleased by that: her work had chilled her too.’ 39

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______________________________________________________________ Dorsey’s style has important implications for the gendering of cyberpunk by parodying the ‘sexy’ technologies of novels such as Neuromancer, and particularly their techno-sexualisation of the female body. Dorsey thus turns the genre conventions back on themselves to resist gender stereotypes, drawing on typical modes of punk resistance to help her achieve this. Her use of multiple discourses and the circular narrative which breaks with linear, chronological story telling prevent emergence of a single, stable reading of the text. This disruptive style ‘hooks’ the reader and, for me at least, led to constant rereading as I tried and failed to decipher the text. This resistance to a single, clear, linear narrative is, as Schuster also notes, an important feature of contemporary science fiction. 40 The way in which this self-aware genre plays on and challenges audience expectations is thus a key aspect of the way in which it questions the uses of technology. 5.

Conclusion This genre’s moniker aptly reflects its interest in technology and also the anti-establishment attitudes of its characters and themes. ‘Punk’ can be seen here as a kind of short-hand for all that is alternative or disruptive. However, as Traber highlights in the article I discussed earlier, this positioning of punk as a somehow more ‘genuine’ lifestyle assumes an Other: ‘(p)unks unconsciously reinforce the dominant culture rather than escape it because their turn to the sub-urban reaffirms the negative stereotypes used in the center to define this space and its population.’ 41 Punk thus is in danger of rooting a binary opposition that fetishises the punk other but which fails to either truly invert the binary or entirely break free of it. I would suggest that the same limitations can also restrict the potential for resistance in cyberpunk. The potential for resistance suggested by Stephenson’s representation of big business and adaptation of existing genre conventions, for example, is limited by the often stereotypical gender representations. Punk thus functions as a glossy surface which obscures the ongoing reproduction of oppositions and hierarchies. Dorsey’s short story, however, might be a more successful example of resistance. Dorsey’s protagonist, Angel, is not offered as role model, rather her own existence, replete with dissonances and tensions, poses questions to the reader about how and where to situate themselves, how to read the text, and what to conclude. Having read it many times, and been initially frustrated by being unable to take away any simple message, I have come to recognise that this is perhaps the strength of this text. In terms of resistance, this is a new kind of punk. ‘Punk’ here is not only in the choice of words, or the actions and dress of the characters, it can also - as Dorsey shows us - consist on another level again where the author deliberately baits the reader, refusing any easy answer. Central to this mode is Dorsey’s use of parody, through which the discourse of cyberpunk is

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______________________________________________________________ undermined from within. In this respect, her text could be said to be selfdestructive, as it unpicks the dominant discourses but does not offer a new ‘truth’ to replace the one it has unpicked. Angel appears ‘punk’ but in fact the really ‘punk’ aspect of this story is Dorsey’s refusal to bow down to the ‘boys club’ of cyberpunk and make machines sexier than humans. Or more precisely, she performs a kind of reality check by putting the sex into cyberpunk - and she revels in our ensuing discomfort.

Notes 1

From the Introduction by Daniel Sinker to the zine Punk Planet: Notes from the Underground, Issue 80, July and August, 2007, p. 3. 2 For example, Donna Haraway suggests that ‘(t)he cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity or body,’ in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association Books, London, 1991, p. 178. 3 For example, Cathy Peppers suggests it ‘presents readers with hacker/street punk heroes who subvert monolithic corporate technocracy, and the tools of their subversion are the pirated programs, viruses, and genetic manipulations the technocracy has spawned.’ From: ‘“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: Cyber(sexed) Bodies in Cyberpunk Fiction’, in Bodily Discursion: Genders, Representations, Technologies, D. S. Wilson and C. M. Laennec (eds), State University of New York Press, Albany, 1997, p. 167. 4 For example, S. R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, New York, 1977, or N. Moody, ‘Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in Women’s Science Fiction’, in Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations, A. Sawyer and D. Seed (eds), Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2000, or S. Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993. 5 W. Wahl, ‘Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of Resistance’, Postmodern Culture, Vol. 3, Issue 2, January, 1993, viewed on 28 April 2008, . 6 J. Deery, ‘The Biopolitics of Cyberspace: Piercy Hacks Gibson’, in Future Females, The New Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, M. S. Barr (ed), Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford, 2000, p. 91. 7 N. Stephenson, Snow Crash, Bantam Dell, New York, 1993.

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D. Porush, ‘Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash’, in Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, R. Markley (ed), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996, p. 133. 9 In a collection of Dorsey’s short stories titled Machine Sex and Other Stories, The Women’s Press, London, 1990, pp. 76-97. 10 My use of scare quotes here is a reference to how the parent genre of punk questioned social norms and aspirations by ‘celebrating ugliness in contrast to beauty, depression instead of joy, the sordid over the morally approved,’ from D. S. Traber, ‘L.A.’s “White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization’, in Cultural Critique, Vol. 48, Spring, 2001, p. 34. 11 D. Porush, ‘Frothing the Synaptic Bath’, in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, L. McCaffery (ed), Duke University Press, Durham and London,1991, p. 332. 12 See, for example, J. Wjacman, Technofeminism, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2004, Doing Science and Culture, R. Reid and S. Traweek (eds), Routledge, New York and London, 2000, or Chasing Technoscience, D. Ihde and E. Selinger (eds), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind., 2003. 13 In this respect it seems to differ from science fiction, which often presents a world further removed from our own. 14 See M. Klein, ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology’, in this volume. 15 Punk is an admirer or player of a loud, fast-moving, and aggressive form of rock music popular in the late 1970s, typically characterised by coloured spiked hair and clothing decorated with safety pins or zips; also, this form of music. The terms punk rocker and punk rock are also used. The word is recorded from the late 17th century in the sense ‘soft crumbly wood that can be used as timber,’ and from the early 20th century in the sense ‘a worthless person;’ it may also be related to archaic punk ‘prostitute’ and spunk, ‘courage.’ From: A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Knowles (ed), Oxford University Press, 2006. In Oxford Reference Online, viewed 23 January, 2008, . 16 Although, admittedly, there are more female cyberpunk authors in the ‘second-wave,’ for example, Pat Cadigan and Justina Robson. 17 Traber, pp. 30-64. 18 Ibid., p. 33. 19 Ibid., p. 32.

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______________________________________________________________ 20

K. Schilt, ‘“A Little too Ironic”: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians’, in Popular Music and Society, Vol. 26, Issue 1, 2003, p. 6. 21 Ibid., p. 14. 22 Ibid., pp. 14-15. 23 Deery, p. 96. 24 Sinker, p. 3. 25 J. R. Kincaid, ‘Resist Me, You Sweet Resistible You’, in PMLA, Vol. 118, Issue 5, 2003, p. 1329. 26 Stephenson, p.17. 27 Ibid., p. 1. 28 Ibid., p. 101. 29 See L. Schuster ‘What Does a Scanner Dee? Techno-Fascination and Unreliability in the Mind-Game Film’, in this volume. 30 L. McCaffery, ‘Introduction: The Desert of the Real’, in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, L. McCaffery (ed), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1991, p. 13. 31 Stephenson, p. 271. 32 This volume. 33 Dorsey, p. 84. 34 Ibid., p. 79. 35 I found Jenny Wolmark’s ideas on disruptive figures helpful in thinking about Angel in relation to this section. See ‘Staying with the Body: Narratives of the Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction’, in Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation, V. Hollinger and J. Gordon (eds), University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2002, p. 79. 36 Dorsey, p. 81. 37 Ibid., p. 97. 38 Ibid., p. 78-9. 39 Ibid., p. 91. 40 See this volume. 41 Traber, p. 31.

Bibliography Bukatman, S., Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993. Deery, J., ‘The Biopolitics of Cyberspace: Piercy Hacks Gibson’, in Future Females, The New Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist

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______________________________________________________________ Science Fiction Criticism. M. S. Barr (ed), Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford, 2000, pp. 87-108. Delany, S. R., The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Dragon Press, New York, 1977. Dorsey, C. J., ‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’, in Machine Sex and Other Stories. The Women’s Press, London, 1990, pp. 76-97. Gibson, W., Neuromancer. Voyager, London, 1995. Haraway, D. J., ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books, London, 1991, pp. 149181. Haraway, D. J., FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Routledge, London, 1997.

Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: Feminism and Technoscience.

Ihde, D. and Selinger, E. (eds), Chasing Technoscience. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind., 2003. Kincaid, J. R., ‘Resist Me, You Sweet Resistible You’. PMLA, Vol. 118, Issue 5, 2003, pp. 1325-1333. Klein, M. J., ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 255-279. Knowles, E. (ed), A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Oxford University Press, 2006, viewed 23 January 2008, . McCaffery, L., ‘Introduction: The Desert of the Real’, in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction. L. McCaffery (ed), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1991, pp. 1-16. Moody, N., ‘Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in Women’s Science Fiction’, in Speaking Science Fiction:

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______________________________________________________________ Dialogues and Interpretations. A. Sawyer and D. Seed (eds), Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2000, pp. 179-187. Peppers, C., ‘“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: Cyber(sexed) Bodies in Cyberpunk Fiction’, in Bodily Discursion: Genders, Representations, Technologies. D. S. Wilson and C. M. Laennec (eds), State University of New York Press, Albany, 1997, pp. 163-185. Porush, D., ‘Frothing the Synaptic Bath’, in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction. L. McCaffery (ed), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1991, pp. 331-333. —––, ‘Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash’, in Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. R. Markley (ed), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996, pp. 107-141. Reid, R. and Traweek, S. (eds), Doing Science and Culture. Routledge, New York and London, 2000. Schilt, K., ‘“A Little too Ironic”: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians’. Popular Music and Society, Vol. 26, Issue 1, 2003, pp. 5-16. Schuster, L., ‘What Does a Scanner See? Techno-Fascination and Unreliability in the Mind-Game Film’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 229-253. Sinker, D., ‘Introduction’. Punk Planet: Notes from the Underground, Issue 80, July and August, 2007, p. 3. Stephenson, N., Snow Crash. Bantam Dell, New York, 1993. Traber, D. S., ‘L.A.’s “White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of SelfMarginalization’. Cultural Critique, Vol. 48, Spring, 2001, pp. 30-64. Wahl, W., ‘Bodies and Technologies: Dora, Neuromancer, and Strategies of Resistance’. Postmodern Culture, Vol. 3, Issue 2, January, 1993, viewed 28 April 2008, . Wajcman, J., Technofeminism. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2004.

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______________________________________________________________ Wikipedia Outline of Punk. Viewed 24 August 2006,

. Wolmark, J., Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism. Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1993. —––, ‘Staying with the Body: Narratives of the Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction’, in Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation. V. Hollinger and J. Gordon (eds), University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2002, pp. 75-89. Katherine Harrison is a postdoctoral researcher at the Unit of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Her doctoral research focused on the relationship between gender, discourse and technology as it materialised in cyberpunk fiction, infertility weblogs and the naming of biotechnological products. Katherine is currently conducting a research project called ‘Information management, gender and organisation’ for the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. Financial support for writing this chapter was provided by a studentship from Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and by the European Community under a Marie Curie Host Fellowship for Early Stage Researchers Training called ‘GenderGraduates: Interdisciplinary PhD Training in Gender & Women’s Studies,’ which was hosted at the Unit of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden.

What Does a Scanner See? Techno-Fascination and Unreliability in the Mind-Game Film Laura Schuster Abstract In popular cinema, paranoia and conspiracy plots often go hand in hand with questions of technological innovation and unreliable perceptions. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, US 2006) combines issues such as audiovisual surveillance, conspiracy, and mediated manipulation without disambiguating between paranoid delusion and conventional causality. By foregrounding the possibility of all audiovisual media to colour our perceptions, the film emphasises its own functioning as a mediated and synthetic presentation. Moreover, its mode of presentation mimics the central themes of delusion, conspiracy, blurred boundaries, and unfixed identities, drawing the spectator fully into its state of confusion. Films such as A Scanner Darkly signal a shift in narrative cinema, and prompt a kind of spectator-engagement much in line with posthumanist views on subjectivity. Rather than pertaining to traditional notions of illusionism and suspension of disbelief, these ‘mind-game films’ (Thomas Elsaesser) employ unreliability and spectacle for the creation of unstable and synthetic storyworlds. While firmly embedded in the institution of narrative fiction cinema, this film presents novel and significant modes of signification and agency (even if limited or dystopian), both for those ‘trapped’ within its filmic story and for the spectators on its other end. Key Words: Cinema, mediation, perception, posthuman, spectatorship, surveillance. ***** 1.

Introduction When we seek to be represented, what is it that we want to see? Sean Cubitt

What if you found yourself in a surveillance monitoring room, forced to inspect recordings of yourself for signs of bad behaviour, and saw yourself in a compromising situation you did not remember ever having been part of? Would you trust the surveillance camera; your memory; your conscience? Luckily, the occurrence of this situation is not very likely in reality. It is, however, a cliché in nowadays’ science fiction cinema, where a wide array of what-if questions prompts an even wider array of scenarios

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______________________________________________________________ concerning the future of technocratic western society, and what-if questions concerning the future of information and imaging technologies (such as electronic surveillance) in particular. In this hypothetical situation there is a conflict between a human individual’s perceptions and those of an agent or system, which are assumed objective and reliable; in a science fiction film, the event would probably function to illustrate the risk of an autonomous and authoritative technological system no longer in agreement or support of human values and (self)perceptions. Debate over the truthfulness and reliability of camera registrations is a telling and pressing matter: from our personal snapshot mementos to juridical evidence, we invest great amounts of faith in the objectivity of ‘the camera’, while examples ranging from the Lee Harvey Oswald trial to research findings on the ever-subjective interpretation of (audio)visual recordings offer poignant reminders of the shaky foundations of this faith. 1 We depend upon the reliability of machine registrations all throughout our daily lives, but prefer to confront the risk of misfiring and manipulation (either deliberate or accidental) only in fiction. Surveillance and data-gathering are common concerns in contemporary Western society, often discussed with reference to controlsociety science fiction narratives such as George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (1949) and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), which was based upon the same-titled 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick. In an exemplary essay, Tom Levin discusses a variety of recent innovations, from which he suggests that we imagine the consequences of the next generation of terrestrial surveillance technologies which will capitalize on the rapidly developing field of biometrics, allowing for the automated recognition of individuals by means of facial or ocular analysis - the famous “retinal scan” already in trial use at some bank-teller machines. Combined with the video surveillance systems already in place, such technology will allow for the automatic, continuous remote identification and tracking of individuals in nearly all spaces, both public and private, a dustpan scenario whose consequences were already explored in detail in “Gattaca” (Andrew Niccol, 1997). 2 A similarly common preoccupation, though more restricted to fiction, is the manipulability of perceptions and memories as envisaged in Dark City (1997) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003). In many cases, technological access to mental processes in these stories culminates in a similar clash between conventional notions of subjectivity and privacy on

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______________________________________________________________ the one hand, and information technologies’ lack of recognition thereof on the other. Put to its extreme, the ‘inhumane-ness’ of information technologies is often presented in tandem with extraterrestrial or artificial life-forms, as in the Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003). In such scenarios, as Stefan Herbrechter states, ‘humans might contribute to the installation of their own technological successor species by blindly succumbing to the cultural and economic dynamic of techno-scientific capitalism.’ 3 But as he justly observes, ‘[t]his apocalypticism, however, is only the flipside of the euphoric spectrum of discourses celebrating the posthuman condition of “man” as a new form of colonial project: pushing our bodily and mental limits to the edge of virtuality and cyberspace.’ 4 This mention of a virtual or cybernetic ‘posthumanity’ immediately recalls the utopian libertarianism of early cyberpunk fiction, the shortcomings of which we find powerfully addressed in Katherine Harrison’s essay, elsewhere in this volume. The aim of this text, however, is not to expose the reality behind the threats posed in this subset of dystopian science fiction films, but rather to address certain rhetorics of unreliability and manipulation - narrative and aesthetic strategies which are to be found in a much larger category of narrative cinema, but seem particularly prevalent in contemporary tales of technological mediation and control. I hope to indicate how such rhetorics may lead to, or produce, ‘posthumanism’ in a less literal sense; one that does not necessarily include cyborgs and cyberculture, but does revolve around rather related issues. For illustration of this argument, I will draw upon the film A Scanner Darkly (USA, 2006), 5 which I find exemplary for contemporary cinema’s exploration of old, new, and imagined audiovisual technologies, and for taking up as a concrete issue the effects of such technologies upon our notions of perception and subjectivity. 2.

Adventures in Cinema Futuristic flights-of-fantasy have always provided excellent opportunities for showing off newly developed imaging technologies in the cinema; moreover, their distance from lived reality conveniently suits Hollywood’s tendency towards the construction of ideological fables centered around a protagonist’s laudable attempt to rise up against a powerful and overtly evil force. 6 What better stakes for a movie hero to defend than the future of the entire human race? Though techno-dystopia has for long been a strong current in popular fiction film (2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982) are classic examples), it makes sense to interpret its recent proliferation as ‘symptomatic’ of various mutations within narrative cinema. There has been much discussion of cinema’s confrontation with its 100-year anniversary and history, while postmodern pastiche and selfreflexivity practices may suggest that both ‘artistic’ and Hollywood

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______________________________________________________________ storytelling conventions have long exhausted themselves and the Ouroboros circles of poststructuralist theories collide with the cinephilia of semiotic and aesthetic film analysis. These issues have contributed to a felt collapse of borders and demarcations, ranging from filmic style and aesthetics to genre classifications and industrial organisation. 7 And then, of course, there is the horizon of the digital, which changes our definition of cinema even if it does not announce its end. While some theorists have long proclaimed the ‘death’ of cinema, and others predict a fully transformed cinema of the future, many remain sceptical on whether the digital really inaugurated such a paradigmatic shift. 8 A common conclusion is that whereas the manipulability, impermanence, and flexibility of digital information allow and force cinema to go just about anywhere, the established principles of narrative cinema are unlikely to be fully abandoned. It is no coincidence that dystopian technofuturistic films flourish in this transformed and ‘borderless’ new institution of digital cinema. According to Yvonne Spielmann, the ‘reactionary narrative settings’ of these filmic stories have everything to do with industrial concerns surrounding the hybridity of media forms: Resulting from the merger of film, video, and computer, special effects not only enhance the fictional and visualspatial capacities of the cinema, but also simultaneously echo the attempts of the entertainment industry to cope with new media tools. 9 Threatened by the development of novel imaging and immersion technologies, and trying to keep up with them, Hollywood turns ‘cyberphobic’ (Paul Young’s phrase). ‘Surprisingly,’ Spielmann states, ‘film - once the most technologically advanced medium of its time - nowadays appears to resist new technologies for ideological reasons.’ 10 While her argumentation brings out clearly how content and context never travel on separate tracks, Spielmann’s surprise at cinema’s conservatism seems rather misplaced. As Marshall McLuhan already observed, new technologies are nearly always met with reactionary responses: ‘Involvement that goes with our instant technologies transforms the most “socially conscious” people into conservatives.’ 11 Ever since early modernity, mediation and technology have been reified and externalised along similar patterns. 12 Constructing different and/or technological forms of intelligence as dangerous or hostile is a common coping strategy for fear of change, and at the same time a denial of our own hand in matters. Time and again when technological enemies - whether typewriter ghosts or renegade robots - strike in cultural texts, western culture seems oblivious to what my colleague Maria Poulaki once matter-of-factly described as the awkward truth

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______________________________________________________________ that ‘we get the technologies we deserve.’ 13 Though highly symptomatic, this holds little particularity for our current position on the threshold of the cyberage. In contemporary science fiction films, technological manipulations of what we experience as ‘reality’ are often paired with psychological delusions. Whereas these are sometimes explicitly linked to the invasive strategies of nonhuman entities (as in Dark City and The Forgotten (2004)), mental aberrations, hallucinations, and ‘false memories’ can be just as easily connected to the general nature of cinematic presentation. Itself a technology for manipulating time, reality, and observations, cinema has a well-stocked toolkit for playing with our minds and perceptions. In recent years, and quite likely under the influence of digitisation, it has perhaps begun to finally exploit this potential in full. While we well know that what we see in a fiction film is not ‘real,’ conventional wisdom here phrased by Paolo Teobaldelli - still dictates that ‘[t]he main aspect of the production of filmic text is its direct use of reality in constructing the interactional textual world:’ in film theory, this issue is usually referred to as the question of ‘photographic (Peircean) indexicality.’ 14 The photographic mode of production, however, has been only part of cinema’s trade ever since its inception (think, for instance, of intertitles, or Mélies’ stop-motion magic effects); non-recorded content has gained much prevalence over the past decades, and since the late 1990s, an origin in photographical recording is no longer the norm for filmic representation. 15 Nowadays’ mainstream films, including movies as far removed from sci-fi as Titanic, are seamless collages of recorded, animated, and algorhythm-based content. This might not critically affect our evaluations (and is not to say that photography-based cinema does bear a privileged relationship to any pre-recorded reality). It does, however, do something else: cinema’s diminishing base in the recording-of-reality severs its link with representation, and undoes conventional distinctions between ‘camera registrations,’ ‘mental images,’ and ‘special effects’ in whichever form, effectively liberating the cinematic medium from its traditional dictum of ‘representation.’ The prefix does no longer apply; contemporary cinema is much better described simply as ‘presentation.’ The use of digital information and imaging technologies has greatly expanded the register of what cinema can present in a photorealistic manner, to the chagrin of some. Especially the loss of distinction between ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ pieces of content is mourned by many lovers of celluloid cinema. In a representative complaint, Wheeler Winston Dixon takes a resolute stance against the lack of signals and boundaries in digital image manipulation: Image manipulation through external montage is one matter [but] Digital Domain, ILM, and their brethren are creating

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______________________________________________________________ a new sort of montage - montage within the frame, without the familiar warning, or “limit” signals we have been trained to look for (wipes, matte lines, differences in film stock grain, inaccurate image-sizing and other flaws). These visual clues alerted us to the artificiality and the constructed-ness of the manufactured image we see on the screen; now these clues are absent. Images within images are nothing new. Images seamlessly bonded to images within the same frame are a different matter altogether. 16 Others address such changing practices less pessimistically. Sean Cubitt is quite radical in arguing that ‘[s]pecial effects cinema, especially digital films’ functions as ‘an intrapsychic event that perceives itself as a relation between psyche and virtual world in which the emergence of selfconsciousness is synchronous with its dissolution.’ 17 However, while he finds the construction of subjectivity (or the lack thereof) in contemporary spectacle cinema problematic, he justly observes that we would be wrong to blame the spectacle itself: Today, we must doubt even the assumption of a lost authenticity: the authentic itself has become a special effect, a connotation of a specific type of brushstroke in painting, a specific vocal style in music, of handheld cameras in dogme movies. Experience has always been mediated, but never before to the point at which it can appear to result in the loss of tactility … and even of the unconscious. 18 Cubitt sees the fluidity of image composites and the resulting ‘loss of authenticity’ as a chance to revel in filmic style and mediation. Now that cinema has grown less concerned with the notion of ‘faithful’ representation, it can concern itself with the unbound wonders of presentation alone, for better or worse. 3.

Scanning the Unreliable An eager adapter to new possibilities for digital animation, Richard Linklater received much acclaim for the use of an animation technique entitled ‘rotoscoping’ (which involves the manual and automated ‘tracing’ of recorded content) in his 2001 film Waking Life. Enabled by this animated appearance, its protagonist ‘floats in and out of a series of philosophical discussions and ethereal experiences,’ in the words of one reviewer. 19 An elaborated version of the same technology was used for the production of A Scanner Darkly (2006), an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction

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______________________________________________________________ novel of the same name. The title derives from the biblical reference ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’ (with the implicit hope of a clearer view in the afterlife), though the phrase has travelled widely and Dick may have had Isaac Asimov’s SF collection Through a Glass, Clearly (1967) or Ingmar Bergson’s 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly more closely in mind. Interestingly, the latter is quite a perfect mirror image for Dick’s novel: both revolve around the themes of belief, schizophrenia, and failure to perceive or communicate. 20 The film A Scanner Darkly fully exploits contemporary cinema’s vast range of possible image manipulations. Through a story of concealed identities, surveillance ‘scanner’ recordings, and large-scale conspiracy, it concretely engages with current preoccupations around the thinning lines between mediation and manipulation, man and machine, perception and recording. Protagonist Robert Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover narcotics detective (‘Officer Fred’) whose undercover-ness works miraculous ways. In all police contact, he wears a so-called ‘scramble suit,’ a full-body cover projecting a continuous mixture of facial and bodily images to cover his own. His individual appearance, in reverse, serves as undercover identity and remains unknown to his employer. Arctor’s assignment is to uncover distribution networks for Substance D, a highly addictive sedative and hallucinogen. This goal is pursued through a vast collection of informants, recordings, and interventions. Arctor’s main target is Donna, a dealer with whom he has a loosely romantic relationship. He lives amidst a circle of users; as the group of addicts grow increasingly paranoid (or conscient) of surveillance and double-crossing, Arctor sinks further into addiction and delusion, and his two identities come under extensive interference. The question arises which identity preceded the other; it is suggested that the police or government have lured him into addiction, in order to plant not a mole but a near-unconscious robot into their scheme. A mixture of recorded performances and animation, this film’s extravagant appearance allows for the seamless incorporation of different ‘kinds’ of filmic sequences, most notably surveillance recordings and individuals’ hallucinations. 21 Disambiguating between ‘actual’ and ‘imagined,’ or ‘past’ and ‘current’, events becomes a task in itself, and this trouble creates a parallel between characters and spectators as both struggle to make sense of their perceptions. The non-realistic appearance of this film also renders the film’s closing sequence rather stunning: the protagonists’ comical stoner paranoia and hysterical back-and-forth accusations were not at all irrational. The truth about their situation was in fact much wilder than their imaginations. Like many recent films, A Scanner Darkly is as much concerned with the future of audiovisual media as with their effects on human perceptions. Moreover, such films clearly indicate that technological control

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______________________________________________________________ is not something external to mankind, but an extension of man’s desire to survey, record, control, and where needed, manipulate. Along with this insight, typically flaunted and effaced at the same time, often comes a tight structure of self-reflexivity that foregrounds a film’s own technology display; it presents advanced media technologies as a cause for fear while fetishising the threat, allowing the spectator to admire those cinematic technologies that produced such spectacle. Rather than continue to position them within the institution of cinema, however, I want to discuss how recent techno-fascinated films, with A Scanner Darkly as a representative, incorporate and produce changing notions of spectatorship and subjectivity. Whereas ‘traditional’ film theory has never been blind to the complex interdependencies and interactions of cinematic experience, developments in the 1990s have brought distinct new balances and emphases to mainstream film spectatorship. Spectatorship theories have traditionally revolved around concepts such as spectator-toprotagonist identification, the suspension of disbelief, and the amount of immersion that subjects experience when engaging with a filmic narrative. Such schemata apply quite well, as long as one’s definition of cinema relies upon the aforementioned assumption that a film is experienced ‘realistically’ to some degree. Over the past few decades film theory, film practice, and popular culture in general, however, have come to indicate that such is not necessarily the case. Spectatorship as a theoretical concept once more steps to the fore. As Matt Hanson observes: The digitization of cinema means elements can be fused and altered by the processor, blurring the lines previously dividing these established schools and their traditions. The 800lb gorilla of moving image, the feature film, is increasingly coming under attack. It needs to shape up, mutate, and evolve if it is to stay relevant in a universe of changing hardware, content, and, ultimately, the thing that matters most: viewer expectations. 22 The impact of the digital is also crucial to Laura Mulvey’s notion of a reinvigorated ‘technological curiosity.’ Diversifying digital film practices and the current proliferation of cinema history through DVD culture, she argues, add to a situation where almost anything can be ‘done’ to pre-existing film images (while, as Hanson points out, almost anything can be created in new ones): In this dialogue between old and new, past and present the opposition between film and new technologies begins to break down and the new modes of spectatorship illuminate

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______________________________________________________________ aspects of cinema that, like the still frame, have been hidden from view. 23 This matches nicely to a tendency in contemporary cinema that Thomas Elsaesser has called the ‘mind-game film,’ which applies to films that innovatively explore ways of ‘playing games’ with conventional modes of filmic comprehension, while often exploring the concept of ‘mind’ itself: The new contract between spectator and film is no longer based solely on ocular verification, identification, voyeuristic perspectivism and “spectatorship” as such, but on the particular rules that obtain for and, in a sense, are the conditions for spectatorship … What makes the mind-game films noteworthy in this respect is the “avant-garde” or “pilot” or “prototype” function they play within the “institution cinema” at this juncture, where they, besides providing “mind-games”, “brain-candy” and often enough, spectacular special effects, set out to train, elaborate, and yes: “test” the textual forms, narrative tropes and story motifs that can serve such a re-negotiation of the rules of the game. 24 The new first rule is to take nothing for granted: a typical mindgame film will play on viewers’ expectations and disprove assumptions by showing its own manipulative sleight of hand. Narrative stability is undermined and becomes thematically important through topic matter such as ‘perceptive delusional disorders, surveillance societies, memory erasure, scientific experiments, virtual reality games, cyborgs, and supernatural phenomena,’ as Pepita Hesselberth and I have summed up elsewhere. 25 One cause for all this unreliability, in what might appear as a slight contradiction at first, seems to be the incredible amount of information typically available in films of the mind-game variety. Movies such as A Scanner Darkly demand intense viewing attention, rapid and continuous information processing, and a keen evaluation, or ‘labeling’ of new pieces of filmic content; their experience thus becomes very active and game-like indeed. At the same time, though, there is never enough information: in order to enable unsuspected plot twists, openendedness, or false leads, spectators must always be left ‘assuming’ rather than ‘knowing’ what is going on. Moreover, since ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ perspectives are often indistinguishable, spectators will easily find themselves lost, tricked, or sidetracked from the narrative if they do not keep their ears and eyes open at all times, in order to register slight clues and markers concerning the nature and ‘source’ of filmic items.

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______________________________________________________________ A simple example early on in A Scanner Darkly: as a character notices a police car driving right behind his own, the previously ‘natural’ registration of his actions (inobtrusive, conventional camera standpoints for in-car scenes), a cartoon-like think-bubble appears over his head, slowly filling the screen. The car scene continues, with the music score dramatically increasing in pace and anxiety. The police car pulls the driver over to the side; after failing to obtain his name, the police agent decides to arrest the driver and within seconds shoots the man out of some unmotivated frustration. After spattered blood fills the screen, the scene returns to an earlier point, right before the cartoon bubble, and viewers will immediately conclude that the shooting took place in this character’s paranoid imagination. We should be so lucky, however, to have it this easy all the time. As the film progresses, hints of ‘unreal’, psychotic, ‘false’ or otherwise unusual presentation become much less frequent and noticeable. This contradictory notion of too much and too little information at the same time is perfectly in line with the infamous ‘postmodern crisis of knowledge,’ here summarised by Frank Webster in an essay on cybernetics and choice: One premise of the Enlightenment was that knowledge would give control over the environment and over ourselves - and this it has done with a vengeance; but another premise was that knowledge would bring certainty about what to do - and this it assuredly has not delivered. Quite the contrary, the more knowledge there has been generated and disseminated, the more has there been induced a profound and often incapacitating scepticism as regards how we might best arrange our affairs. … the removal of constraints has generated and exacerbated a nagging sense of insecurity. 26 Webster’s general description of a ‘nagging sense of insecurity’ applies remarkably well to the experience of mind-game films. In A Scanner Darkly, the lack of knowledge is first played out in epistemological questions such as the distribution of information and knowledge: Arctor does not know that his enigmatic house-mate Jim Barris is setting him up as a police suspect, while Barris does not know that Arctor is an undercover agent (Officer Fred), but Fred/Arctor does not know that his employer’s assignment to surveillance Arctor (presumably, the office does not know that Arctor is Fred) is in fact a black herring in order for Fred to deliver neutral information on their main suspect Barris. Moreover, toward the end of the film it surfaces that not even Barris was the main target: the office deliberately ‘tricked’ Arctor into a state of self-loss and non-cognition for other purposes. The arising confusion gradually tips over into ontological doubt. As Arctor is primed loose, by his

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______________________________________________________________ assignment, of any sense of cohesion and comprehension, he sinks further down in questioning the shaky foundations of his perceptions and, in effect, of his entire existence. The alienating experience of self-surveillance and mediated manipulations is a crucial factor in this, while outside of the story it has also served to align spectators with Arctor’s insecurities. With regard to self-reflexive presentation, one particular scene deserves closer attention. Over coffee, two characters debate the feasibility of extracting cocaine out of household chemicals; we then see them exiting the diner, driving to a convenience store, purchasing a deodorant spraycan, driving home, and entering a laboratory-like garage, where the experiment takes place. Interestingly, all intermittent actions between the discussion and the onset of the experiment are presented as if fast-forwarded on VCR playback, including horizontal lines of static. This obvious artificiality effect seems misplaced and unmotivated aesthetically (‘camera positions’ vary from ‘neutral’ birds’ eye position to a perspective clearly justified as belonging to an in-store surveillance camera), while it serves a very clear narratological purpose (foregrounding the ‘everyday life’ actions which apparently suffice for the production of pure cocaine). A distinction between ‘auteurist’ and ‘narratological’ markers might seem arbitrary and subject to taste, but there is a difference in scale here: whereas a typical self-reflexive act of nouvelle vague cinema frames the narrative action, the above scene affects its story on a much more directly experiential level. Not quite embedded diegetically, it hovers between traditional ‘levels of narration’ as film theorists such as Edward Branigan would classify them, not quite seeming to make an emphatically ‘intellectual’ point either. 27 It does, however, make a point against some conventional takes on cinema, and against the notion of photographic indexicality in particular. Rather than referring to now-obsolete modes of photographic image production, this stylistic choice refers to celluloid’s poor cousin, magnetic video. This scene acutely presents an enigmatic question: if this kind of presentation will seem unnatural to most viewers, then what it is that we find ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ in cinematic representation? Already in 1971, Christian Metz devoted an essay to the overlooked importance of trucage (which we may take in its broadest sense as ‘nonphotographically recorded content’) and noted ‘a certain duplicity attached to the very notion of trucage’ (special effects), which we might call a problematic sort of performativity: any kind of effect is embedded in a given film, justified either by narratology (such as a character reminiscing about his beloved, which motivates the sudden superimposition of a woman’s face) or by genre (in a fantasy film, a sorcerer may cause a character to suddenly appear within the diegesis). While thus ‘hidden inside’ the narration, an effect ‘flaunts itself, since it is important that the powers of cinema be credited for this astonishing of the senses.’ 28 Many mind-game films, however, push this

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______________________________________________________________ insight to the fore and self-reflexively render themselves complicit in an ideologically untenable double bind: while fully part of the technological developments they criticise, they promote hesitation towards the ready acceptance of the very ‘authoritative’ imaging and information innovations by grace of which they have themselves come into being. Put in general terms, contemporary cinema functions through a set of communications and aesthetics that is defined by ambivalence, promoting doubt and scepticism on the part of the spectator while depending on spectators’ willingness to go along with (often) quite unlikely plot events. Unreliability is a returning factor in the mind-game film, quite more extensively so than it has been in detective, avant-garde, and art-house films over the past century. In these films, unreliable narration always carries an ontological component, a doubt about the trustworthiness of reality and of perceptions. Audiovisual technologies within the filmic world are often blamed for the loss of reliability: they facilitate the manipulation of characters’ perceptions, memories, and/or environments, and sometimes literally pull the ground from under one’s feet. Though hardly new inventions, the current popularity and ubiquity of comments on mediation in popular cinema affect our sense of perception, cognition, and ultimately, our sense of subjectivity. Surveillance recordings in A Scanner Darkly colour the filmic presentation, but also interfere with characters’ perceptions of their own identities, and with the world around them. The trouble, however, neither ends nor starts here: regardless of the scanners, protagonists’ own perceptions and conclusions are hopelessly compromised by drug-induced paranoia and cognitive deterioration. There is no stable or natural ground below the confusions and manipulations. Conspiracy, paranoia, surveillance, and delusion interact in a causal feedback loop: a narcotics agent is manipulated into a brain-damaging addiction and forced to spy on himself, only to find his own perceptions further muddled by recordings. Once fully alienated from any self-image or reliable thought, he is planted in a rehabilitation clinic in the hopes that he, unaware, will supply proof of the suspicion that these clinics themselves manufacture the drugs they proclaim to fight. 4.

Machine Vision By emphasising issues of perception and memory, mind-game films often hint at the position of the spectator vis-à-vis the film. When considering the way we understand narrative cinema, and the confusing narrative presentations of the mind-game film in particular, it is only a small step from spectators’ ‘illusions’ to protagonists’ delusions, and this is one example of how mind-game films tie their audience into the game. In their insistence upon the unreliability of information and the fragmented nature of consciousness, these films offer a sense of subjectivity that is characterised

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______________________________________________________________ by synthetic-ness in both senses of the word: it is as fabricated as it is combinatory. ‘When narrative functionalities change,’ N. Katherine Hayles remarks on cyborg literature, ‘a new kind of reader is produced by the text.’ 29 This is exactly what happens with mind-game films when they dramatically transgress the traditional positioning of the spectator by Hollywood mainstream pre-1990s cinema. Both more open and more closed to the spectator, offering views from ‘impossible,’ multiple, or contradictory perspectives, not distinguishing between objective and subjective views, jumping between characters, and playing constantly with factors of restricted and omniscient narration, mind-game storytelling and style create a high degree of narrative complexity. 30 Their complexity, however, is in many cases not strictly narratological (as with A Scanner Darkly’s fast-forward scene) but closer to what Garrett Stewart would refer to as ‘narrography:’ a mode of aesthetic presentation that conveys narratological information through a sort of thematic communication, rather than explicit ‘telling.’ 31 An example of such thematic communication is the scene that connects Arctor’s police activities to his undercover (personal) life: we first see him taking off his scramble suit in a locker room and exiting through a secured back door of his office building. ‘Neutral’ camera perspective then makes way for a composite that will be familiar to most spectators of contemporary science fiction: that of a hypermediated surveillance monitoring interface. Various data and statistics run alongside an outdoor surveillance camera perspective, which shows Arctor on a street sidewalk as the computer identifies Arctor’s location; the viewer is thus coerced into the perspective of the anonymous interface user. We hear the contents of Arctor’s brief telephone conversation to Donna, who the computer identifies for us, through the monitoring board, after which the suggestion to arrest Arctor appears onscreen; ‘no’ is entered as a response. Indications such as this will presumably prompt spectators to understand that Arctor is working undercover, and that Donna is a suspect in his investigation. Much later on in the film, when Arctor becomes more and more troubled with the inaccuracy of his perceptions, he has a bewildering encounter with ‘machine vision.’ After first dismissing as a dream-like hallucination his disturbing experience of waking up next to a prostitute and for a moment seeing her change into Donna - the girl he actually desires Arctor is shocked to find his experience validated a few days later. When reviewing surveillance footage of himself as part of his incognito narcotics investigation, he finds that the camera has registered the exact same transformation: it shows Arctor waking up at night and staring in shock as his anonymous bed-mate changes into the image of Donna, and back. A virtual technology here follows Arctor’s subjective desire. This is an ultimate fetish image, pure manifest desire with no need for a material base, and perfectly in

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______________________________________________________________ line with Cubitt’s remark that ‘[d]igital effects [here incorporated into the filmic diegesis] tend to communicate rather than represent.’ 32 This constitutes a doubling of artificiality-effects. What we spectators see is pure mediation, to be attributed with as much realism as we like, but within the filmic diegesis there exists a concrete battle over the ontology of the filmic image, the tensions between objective registration and the mental projections of the observer. This battle, moreover, is not an auteurist, intellectual observation but exerts a concrete effect upon the lives of the film’s characters. Whereas the framing of narrative actions through self-reflexive camera movements, violations of the precious 180-degrees camera rule, and other sudden disruptions of ‘smooth’ cinematography have always been part of the filmic register, in films such as A Scanner Darkly it arrives in a fashion much more directly related to diegetic action. Through the constant ambiguations between actual, imagined, and diegetically recorded sequences, A Scanner Darkly corresponds exactly to what Elsaesser, in a discussion of the authenticity and archive function of recordings, refers to as a: contest … between two kinds of recording-system (the human mind and psyche on the one hand, the camera and sensor on the other), whose data in each case are treated … as (raw) material or information, rather than as documents or embodied action. 33 Whether the filmic enunciation motivates such items of information as psychical or actual, both remain the ‘raw data’ of the film itself and function as its real components. To my mind, such self-reflexive layering of recordings can achieve more than a mere ‘postmodern’ sense of hyperreality or techno-fetish. It suggests a redefinition of human subjectivity, knowledge, and engagement with the technologically mediated world presented by and within a film. These novel perspectives and effects often point to the interaction and (in)compatibility of mechanical and human perceptions, a continuous preoccupation in cinema from Vertov to Godard. Now, however, it is all over the mainstream multiplex cinemas and our home entertainment systems. From a film-historical, but also from a much wider perspective, this is no coincidence: in western culture today, concrete manifestations of this matter abound. We find ourselves interacting with - and depending on - machine observations most every day, in ways not altogether dissimilar from the dystopian situations in A Scanner Darkly or Minority Report. Manifestations and examples range from long-distance communication to artificial intelligence, videogames and training simulations to information warfare, Photoshop to DNA analysis.

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______________________________________________________________ There are a number of different ways to argue that mind-game films are symptomatic of a relatively new conception of subjectivity - one that has emerged in the past few decades and under the influences of technological restructurations, scientific preoccupations, philosophical ‘turns’ and, last but not least, fictional innovations. In an introductory survey text, Neil Badmington credits Lacan, Foucault, and Althusser with having produced, out of the legacy of Freud and Marx, an ‘anti-humanist resistance movement’ aimed at the eradication of the Cartesian (active, rational, autonomous) subject figure, while the popular-cultural image of ‘mankind’ came under attack in the many science-fiction films featuring alternative (and generally hostile) life forms. 34 Badmington suggests that the near-obligatory vanquishing of evil non-human intruders in popular fiction texts might signal a denial of poststructuralism’s war against the ideological construct of the liberal humanist subject: ‘whereas the intellectuals were celebrating the demise, popular culture was committed to a defence of humanism (the aliens were always defeated, frequently by a uniquely ‘human’ quality).’ 35 In a similar vein, Manuela Rossini promotes the term ‘imagineering’ to indicate the interwovenness of techno-science and idealist fiction in this field, defining ‘critical posthumanism’ as ‘a re-vision of liberal-humanism aimed at imagineering a radically democratic future in which human identity is not reduced to a single standard or norm.’ 36 In its philosophical sense, ‘posthumanism’ has little to do with any sort of becoming-less-human. Stefan Herbrechter states that: posthumanism confronts the separations of the two movements of “purification” (i.e. the ongoing questioning of “what does it mean to be human?”) and hybridization (i.e. the ongoing cyborgisation of human and non-human technology) … One could say that the very often simplistic technological determinism at work in a lot of posthumanist readings is undertheorised in the sense of a forgetting of the complexity of humanism itself on the one hand, and theory’s work of the critique of the “liberal humanist subject” on the other. 37 Posthumanist issues such as artificial intelligence and consciousness lead to a conception of the human individual that does not pose a break from humanity, but rather a move away from a historically-developed and culturally distinct sense of humanism which involves individuality, uniqueness, truth, objectivity, embodiment, freedom, will, and agency: the notions of the liberal humanist subject as the active center of its world. Much in line with the posthuman, Garrett Stewart proposes the term ‘postsubjective virtuality’ for the underdetermination of images, perspectives, and validity in

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______________________________________________________________ contemporary films. 38 I would suggest, however, that ‘transsubjective’ is a more accurate term for the transferable, borderless, and unstable nature of subjectivity amidst the technological and psychological distortions of mindgame films. 39 5.

Obscure Perceptions Identity is the key arena for all these distortions to be played out: like many mind-game films, A Scanner Darkly is riddled with doppelgänger motifs, counter-identities, amnesia, and split personalities. Without entering the realm of cyborgs, the questioning, fragmentation, and splitting of identities in A Scanner Darkly establishes a similar discussion of human identity, consciousness, and subjectivity. It does so by emphatically communicating confusion, and by mirroring the instability of its storyworld in its own mode of presentation. Arctor finds his identity muddled not only by the surveillance of himself that he is forced to process, but also by the dwindling of his mental faculties due to the drugs he has himself become addicted to during his undercover narcotics investigation. Without any alien invasions, Arctor’s self-doubt fully corresponds to what Yvonne Spielmann finds to be a common structure in contemporary science fiction: Hybrid attacks from unknown or invisible domains [in this case, the Narcotics dept.’s strategic attacks on Arctor’s selfimage] target the integrity of political, territorial and ideological systems, thereby destabilising a breakdown of temporal and spatial systems of representation. The unknown order effectively threatens common belief systems by simulating and manipulating basic perceptions or reality. 40 All these internal and external influences contaminate any clear-cut, coherent sense of self for Arctor; he thus perfectly illustrates the posthumanist notion, here phrased by Slavoj Žižek, that: At the level of material reality (inclusive of the psychological reality of “inner experience”) there is in effect no Self: the Self is not the “inner kernel” of an organism, but a surface-effect. A “true” human Self functions, in a sense, like a computer screen: what is “behind” it is nothing but a network of “selfless” neuronal machinery. 41

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______________________________________________________________ In a fitting scene, Arctor delivers a work speech in his scramble suit, but suffers extreme discomfort halfway. His perceptions of the audience are truly caught in the prism of filmic representation: before the blur of his scramble suit, we see the markings ‘Live’ and ‘HQ’ within what is supposedly Arctor’s vision. Arctor’s subjective perceptions appear filtered by the panoptical reign of his employer; our perceptions of the film are filtered by its logic of surveillance and mediation. Complex and lamentable as the process of Arctor’s self-loss might be, for spectators the trouble neither ends nor starts with awareness of his precarious mental state. Even before applying any kind of explanatory psychology, viewers will have to deduct from (often feeble) hints whether Arctor is present in a scene to begin with. Information surrounding his undercover work and personal life arrives in ambiguous leaps and order; moreover, as several of the characters wear police scramble suits, positive identification is sometimes impossible. Again, characters’ perceptions are paired with those of the audience: only near the end of the film does it surface that the scramble suits have served the film much better than its storyworld. To Arctor and his colleagues, the scramble suit regime is fussy and impractical; to the system, it facilitates employee misconduct and fraud. To the film, however, it is crucial for withholding until the very end the information that Donna is also an undercover agent, Fred/Arctor’s superior Hank. It then follows that, while Arctor thought he was drying out Donna’s drug supplies in order to uncover a higher level of distribution, it was in fact his colleague (Hank/Donna) who actively lured him into addiction by posing for him - as a dealer, as a romantic interest, and as bait. In many ways, the inhabitants of A Scanner Darkly’s world are subject to pre-selected and fragmented information as much as its spectators are - body, mind, and soul, it seems. Arctor’s quasi-philosophical soliloquy (another trademark feature of mind-game films), taken almost verbatim from the film’s literary source, Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel of the same name, is telling in this respect: Whatever it is that’s watching, it’s not human, unlike little dark eyed Donna. It doesn’t ever blink. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can’t any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone’s sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I’m cursed and cursed again. I’ll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too.

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______________________________________________________________ Such ontological doubt, caused by confrontation with alternative, nonhuman perceptive and interpretive systems, is a key structure of technoand futurophobia. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Spielmann proposes that ‘Where the extension of man into the unknown … through technology is driving the limits too far, in reverse the lust for expansion turns into fear and existential anxieties.’ 42 Michael Klein’s essay ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology,’ included in this volume, traces such patterns in the case of (fictional) reproduction technologies, finding similar reactionary reifications of threatening ‘new’ life forms, such as the monster of Frankenstein (which is often linked to the introduction of electric energy). His analysis of societal conflict arising from such ‘loss of humanity’ in various texts clearly exemplifies western society’s overarching tendency to externalise the unknown in order to preserve and defend conventional notions of ‘humanness.’ Such findings correspond with what Hayles identifies as a common connection between the assumptions undergirding the liberal humanist subject and the ethical position that humans, not machines, must be in control. Such an argument assumes a vision of the human in which conscious agency is the essence of human identity. Sacrifice this, and we humans are hopelessly compromised, contaminated with mechanic alienness in the very heart of our humanity. 43 But we need not necessarily ascribe to A Scanner Darkly’s pessimist foreboding of a future technocracy with our bodies and mind lost in mediation. Upon closer inspection, and perhaps untypically for technodystopian fiction, Arctor’s speech presents his all-too-human limitations as the problem, hoping for ‘the scanners’ to ‘do better’ and make up for the abilities that he himself has lost. Arctor suggests that precisely the nonhumanness of scanner vision might compensate for the ‘murk’ of his own, for his incapability to reconstruct himself as a subject. His last vestige of hope, along with the definitive validation of a vast conspiracy plot in the final scenes of the film, prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the manipulations at play in this film are of humans, by humans, and often by individuals upon themselves. Substance D and surveillance scanners are mere weapons of choice. Furthermore, whereas this film’s characters may be trapped in the doomsday picture of a humanity without self or agency, I suggest that the way we spectators can understand, enjoy, and engage with such disorienting narrative structures and presentations is in itself good news. Over the course of a century, film spectatorship has come a long way. A Scanner Darkly is

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______________________________________________________________ arguably not an outstanding intellectual film, and did not do particularly well in sales. It shows, however, that narrative cinema does not necessarily rely upon illusionism, photographic indexicality, or on psychological audience-toprotagonist identification. In the end it is the filmic text that we must believe in, not the (in)accurate perceptions of an ‘informant.’ The blinking ‘HQ’ indicators, along with many other markers of machine vision and sound, disembody but also render coherent its mode of communication. We only have its enunciation as a whole, comprised of fragmented sequences of heterogeneous origins - contaminated by mediation, perhaps, but also rendered presentable by it. Confusion in itself can be a source of enjoyment; in fact, the puzzle aspect of mind-game films is a highly appreciated and discussed feature. They practically require multiple viewings and additional titbits of information. Audiences gladly embrace these films’ challenge to their hermeneutic and mnemonic faculties, which Elsaesser interprets in light of a general call in popular culture on citizens and consumers ‘to remain flexible, adaptive and interactive, and above all, to know the “rules of the game.”’ 44 All this I take as a variety of indications that, indeed, films such as A Scanner Darkly serve as our pilots into ‘the posthuman,’ if we are not already there. Mind-game films show that the subject is willing to give up a bit of stable ground and surrender to the unreliable or the hypothetical - at least for the duration of a movie.

Notes 1

A famous tale in this respect is a psychological experiment, for which participant’s childhood memories of Disneyland were altered to include nonDisney characters such as Bugs Bunny, which many of them easily accepted upon review; see C. Cozen, ‘Ads Can Alter Memory Claim Scientists’, The Guardian.co.uk, 4 September 2001, viewed 08 January 2009, . J. van Dijck’s ‘Memory Matters in the Digital Age’, Configurations, Vol. 12, 2004, pp. 349-373, offers a comprehensive survey of recent discussions surrounding the nature of personal memory and memory retrieval. 2 T. Levin, ‘Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “real time”’, in CTRL [SPACE ], T. Levin, U. Frohne, P. Weibel (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge (US), 2002, p. 54. 3 S. Herbrechter, ‘The Posthuman Subject in The Matrix’, in The Matrix in Theory, M. Diocaretz and S. Herbrechter (eds), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2006, p. 250. 4 Ibid. 5 A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, US 2006).

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For exemplary Messianist readings of films such as The Matrix and Dark City, see L. Bartlett and T. B. Myers, ‘Back to the Future: The Humanist Matrix’, Cultural Critique, Vol. 53, 2003, pp. 28-46, and T. Blackmore, ‘High on Technology - Low on Memory: Cultural Crisis in Dark City and The Matrix’, Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2004, pp. 13-54. 7 Related discussions concern diminishing borders in media forms (media convergence), formats (genre hybridity), production (diversifying industrial practices), viewing situations (home cinemas), between producer and user control (the relative freedom of DVD); collapses between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms (mainstream / avant-garde or ‘arthouse’ cinema), ‘attraction’ and ‘realism’ in film, and many other things; altogether too vast a field to briefly summarise. 8 Within the arena of media-technology debate, theorists predicting a fully transformed future cinema include Mark B. N. Hansen, Friedrich Kittler, David Tafler, Yvonne Spielmann, and Peter Wollen. Perspectives emphasising the continuation of established cinematic principles are forwarded by Sean Cubitt, Anne Friedberg, Daniel Frampton, Matt Hanson, Lev Manovich, and Marie-Laure Ryan, to name but a few. For more on this matter, see S. Cubitt, ‘Technological Film’, in The Cinema Effect, MIT Press, Cambridge (US), 2005; T. Elsaesser and K. Hoffmann (eds), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 1998. 9 Y. Spielmann, ‘Elastic Cinema: Technological Imagery in Contemporary Science Fiction Films’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 9, 2003, p. 58. 10 Spielmann, p. 58. 11 M. McLuhan, ‘Reversal of the Overheated Medium’, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Routledge, London and New York, 2008 [1964], p. 37. 12 For more on the principle of externalised media technologies and its source in early modernity, see F. Kittler, ‘Romanticism-Psychoanalysis-Film: A History of the Double’, in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, F. Kittler, G+B Arts, Amsterdam, 1997. 13 This remark was made in the context of a panel discussion entitled ‘Is Resistance Really Futile?’ for the 2008 Film and History biannual conference entitled Film and Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond. 14 P. Teobaldelli, ‘Cinema and Special Effects Seen From a Non-Dual Based Approach to Communication’, AS/SA, Vol. 14, 2004, p. 16. For a survey of the much-debated discussion around cinematic realism, see T. Gunning,

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______________________________________________________________ ‘Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’, Differences, Vol. 18.1, 2007, pp. 29-52. 15 For an instructive and detailed analysis of ‘special effects’ in even the least fantasy-based of stories, see S. T. Macclean’s Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film, MIT Press, Cambridge (US), 2007. 16 W. W. Dixon, The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image, SUNY Press, Albany, 1998, p. 32. 17 S. Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, MIT Press, Cambridge (US), 2005, p. 251. 18 Ibid., p. 271. 19 No author, Rotten Tomatoes movie review website, viewed 08 January 2009, . 20 Corinthians 13:12. The phrase has inspired a great many cultural texts; for a survey of connotations and references, see the Wikipedia disambiguation page for ‘Through a Glass Darkly,’ no author, last modified on 2 December 2008, viewed on 07 January 2009, . 21 Through the use of rotoscoping, camera recordings were re-rendered as animation; this facilitates the incorporation of surrealistic objects, technologies, and sequences. As such, Linklater’s film fully affirms the ‘return’ to animation and imaging explorations that, according to a number of media theorists including Sean Cubitt and Lev Manovich, is a result of digitisation in filmic practice. 22 M. Hanson, The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age, Rotovision SA, Hove, 2004, p. 9. 23 L. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Reaktion, London, 2006, p. 27. 24 T. Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, W. Buckland (ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, pp. 37-38. 25 P. Hesselberth and L. Schuster, ‘Into the Mind and Out to the World: Memory Anxiety in the Mind-Game Film’, in Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser, J. Kooijman, P. Pisters, W. Strauven (eds), Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2008, p. 96. 26 F. Webster, ‘Cybernetic Life: Limits to Choice’, in J. Armitage and J. Roberts (eds), Living with Cyberspace, Continuum, New York and London, 2002, pp. 36-37. 27 See E. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, Routledge, London and New York, 1992. 28 C. Metz, ‘Trucage and the Film’ [1971], Francoise Meltzer (trans), Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1977, p. 665.

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N. K. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 47. 30 The narrative complexity of contemporary popular fiction films has been stressed by many narratologically-inclined film theorists, including David Bordwell, Edward Branigan, Warren Buckland, and Erven Lavik. I am convinced, however, that its identification is not a sufficient end in itself, but rather a means of entry into the complexity of the issues raised through these films’ difficult storytelling strategies. See for instance W. Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, Blackwell, Oxford, 2009. 31 G. Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2007. 32 Cubitt, op. cit., p. 260. 33 T. Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’, Cinemas, Vol. 14, Nos. 2-3, Spring, 2005, p. 108. 34 N. Badmington, ‘Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism’, in Posthumanism, N. Badmington (ed), Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2000, p. 9. 35 Ibid., p. 8. 36 M. Rossini, ‘Figurations of Posthumanity in Contemporary Science/Fiction - All too Human(ist)?’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, Vol. 50, 2005, p. 33. 37 Herbrechter, op. cit., pp. 253-254. 38 Stewart, op. cit., p. 211: ‘the technofantastic plots of recent Hollywood films, along with their low-tech supernatural variants, indulge in what we might call a postsubjective virtuality.’ Though Stewart’s interest lies with the temporal distortions brought on by technological and supernatural presences in contemporary cinema, his conclusions apply perfectly to this article’s concern with mediation and subjectivity. 39 While ‘intersubjectivity’ presents itself as another candidate for the denomination of posthuman subjectivity, this concept already functions in a different context. For theorists such as Lacanian, Lyotard and Habermas, ‘intersubjectivity’ describes the social phenomenon of communication and meaning-production. For more on this conception of the intersubjective, see for instance H. Eid, ‘Lyotard, Habermas, and the Virtue of the Universal’, Kritikos, Vol. 4, 2007, Intertheory Press, last updated May 2007, viewed May 28th, 2008, . 40 Spielmann, op. cit., p. 61. 41 S. Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge (US), MIT Press, 2006, p. 206. 42 Spielmann, op. cit., p. 62. 43 Hayles, op. cit., p. 288.

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T. Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, W. Buckland (ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 2009.

Bibliography Badmington, N., ‘Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism’, in Posthumanism. N. Badmington (ed), Palgrave and McMillan, Basingstoke, 2000, pp. 1-10. Cubitt, S., The Cinema Effect. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005 [2004]. Dick, P.K., A Scanner Darkly. Orion / Gollancz, London, 1999 [1977]. Dixon, W.W., The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image. SUNY Press, Albany, 1998. Elsaesser, T., ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’. Cinemas, Vol. 14, Nos. 2-3, 2005, pp. 75-117. —––, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. W. Buckland (ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, pp. 1341. Hanson, M., The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age. Rotovision SA, Hove, 2004. Harrison, K., ‘Gender Resistance: Interrogating the ‘Punk’ in Cyberpunk’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 209-227. Hayles, N. K., How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1999. Herbrechter, S., ‘The Posthuman Subject in The Matrix’, in The Matrix in Theory. M. Diocaretz and S. Herbrechter (eds), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2006. Hesselberth, P. and Schuster, L., ‘Into the Mind and Out to the World: Memory Anxiety in the Mind-Game Film’, in Mind the Screen: Media

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______________________________________________________________ Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser. J. Kooijman, P. Pisters, W. Strauven (eds), Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2008, pp. 96-111. Klein, M. J., ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 255-279. Levin, T. Y., ‘Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”’, in CTRL [SPACE]. T. Y. Levin, U. Frohne, P. Weibel (eds). MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 52-67. McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge, London and New York, 2008 [1964]. Metz, C., ‘Trucage and the Film’, F. Meltzer (trans), Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1977 [1971], pp. 657-675. Mulvey, L., Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion, London, 2006. Rossini, M., ‘Figurations of Posthumanity in Contemporary Science/Fiction All too Human(ist)?’ Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, Vol. 50, 2005, pp. 21-36. A Scanner Darkly. Dir. Richard Linklater, Warner Independent Pictures, US, 2006. Spielmann, Y., ‘Elastic Cinema: Technological Imagery in Contemporary Science Fiction Films’. Convergence, Vol. 9, 2003, pp. 56-73. Stewart, G., Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2007. Teobaldelli, P., ‘Cinema and Special Effects Seen From a Non-Dual Based Approach to Communication’. AS/SA, Vol. 14, 2004, pp. 15-19. Webster, F., ‘Cybernetic Life: Limits to Choice’, in Living with Cyberspace. J. Armitage and J. Roberts (eds), Continuum, New York and London, 2002, pp. 34-42. Žižek, S., The Parallax View. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006.

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______________________________________________________________ Laura Schuster is a PhD candidate at the Universiteit van Amsterdam’s dept. of Media Studies, researching contemporary narrative cinema in relation to changing media practices and anxieties over technological innovation. She is a member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis’ Imagined Futures research project on media technologies.

Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology Michael J. Klein Abstract Science fiction stories and films function as myths in our modern society. The use of artificially reproduced organisms as primary characters in the works of science fiction literature dates back to the origins of the genre. These works have envisioned societies confronting the ‘other’ in the form of organisms that are ‘not of woman born.’ Whether they were in the form of cyborgs or clones, these characters often upset the balance of their societies, causing havoc and inviting scorn and misunderstanding. Ostensibly these works can be read as cautionary tales about the excesses of technological hubris in the face of modernity. However, the real focus of these works is not on the replicants and cyborgs, but on the fictional societies that spawn these creations, and by extension, the factual societies in which the authors were writing their stories. These works disconcert and inform their audiences, forcing the audience’s revaluation of its own prejudices against those they see as separate from themselves. Thus, the use of alternative reproduction in science fiction serves not as a prognostication about the future of technology, but rather as a means of enlightening the audience about the potential humanistic aspects of society’s members. Key Words: Science fiction, myth, technology, clone, cyborg, alternative reproduction. ***** 1.

Introduction Popular culture plays a large role in influencing public perceptions. Whether in the form of books, magazines, advertisements, or films, these cultural works have a significant effect in shaping our view of events and topics. In the case of cloning, an examination of books and films reveals the underlying concerns of the authors and directors. Science fiction operates as a form of modern myth in our technological culture. Individuals who invoke the names of these works, such as Frankenstein and Brave New World, reference the myths, not the actual stories. Although the two works comment on the power of science and technology in a society, this does not represent the primary critique offered by either author. For both authors, the idea of technology without regulation and without regard for human dignity outweighed concerns about just technology per se. A similar examination of films finds that their critique of science impugns the morals of the scientists and industrialists who develop genetic

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______________________________________________________________  engineering and cloning for selfish purposes, not the offspring of modern biotechnology. Rather than be alarmed by the creation, these films direct the audience to fear the creators of these non-traditional offspring. In holding a mirror up to our own society, these films say we should not use this alternative forms of reproduction; not because of the destructive nature of the new offspring, but because of our potentially destructive nature. 2.

Science Fiction as Myth Critics often cite Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World as fictional works demonstrating the problems of technology. The power that the tale of Frankenstein has within our culture emanates, in part, from our culture’s integration of the story over the past 200 years. Frankenstein the novel has become Frankenstein the myth, a myth that has been recast by those who wish to argue against different aspects of the scientific endeavour: ‘Mythology is metaphorical thinking in which the metaphor assumes independent and continuing existence … For metaphor can develop and change, and it is just in the process of such development that it becomes myth.’ 1 As a myth, Frankenstein has taken on significant meanings in our culture, meanings that change when individuals invoke the name in different situations. Thus, metaphor begets myth, which further begets metaphor. Frankenstein’s transformation over time serves as an indication of how science fiction has taken on a more significant meaning in our technological age. In their study of the history of science fiction, authors and critics Alexei and Cory Panshin argue, ‘science fiction has been the mythic vehicle for one particular culture, the rational materialistic, weigh-andmeasure, science-and-technology minded culture that has arisen in Europe and America since the Renaissance.’ 2 Just as myths from previous ages taught individuals how to function in the societies they lived in, science fiction tells modern people how to live in our own society, a society that relies on science and technology. According to the Panshins, the myths of science fiction replaced the myths of antiquity. As rationalism became the reigning paradigm in western thought, the myths of scientific discovery replaced the older myths of magic and superstition. We no longer fear ghosts or tell tales about gods with human traits that live on the tops of mountains. Instead, our stories focus on robots, aliens, and scientists that create artificial life in the laboratory. Our lives have been transfigured by the technology we use everyday to such an extent that we sometimes do not even realise how invasive the technology has become.

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______________________________________________________________  Science fiction has changed over the decades, functioning as an organic genre and inspiring work in related areas. For example, a recent subgenre of the field, cyberpunk, deals specifically with the implications of the changes brought about in society by the use of technology. As Katherine Harrison’s chapter in this volume indicates, the field is more aggressive in its attempt to warn readers about the potential effects of technology (as well as power, in general). Indeed, as Harrison points out, the ‘punk’ in cyberpunk is key: a way of signifying the need for resistance to norms and authority. Such an evolution of a genre seems to indicate the authors’ desires to warn the reader about the need to remain vigilant in a technological age.  Authors of science fiction texts have foreseen much of the technology we use, though usually inadvertently. While these authors did not seek to prophesise the future, they understood science and technology’s increased role in the lives of ordinary people. The examination of the role of science in people’s lives represents the core of science fiction, not the forecasting of the future: Science fiction is too often mistaken for a literature of prophecy best measured by the accuracy of its predictions, whereas it is better judged as Frankenstein invites judgment, by its ability to pose challenging questions about the human condition in an age of science. 3 This questioning at the core of science fiction resonates with people of different cultures and ages. The role the tale of Frankenstein now plays in debates about biotechnology illustrates this. Professor of English Chris Baldick’s In Frankenstein’s Shadow provides one of the most detailed and in-depth analyses of the way Frankenstein developed into a myth. Partially a history of the novel’s transformation through various incarnations of plays and partially an assessment of the figure of ‘the monster’ in nineteenthcentury writings, the analysis underscores the importance of Shelley’s work on subsequent generations of writers and readers. The work achieves this importance by becoming more than just a story about a scientist and his laboratory creation; it becomes larger by becoming a myth. However, in doing so, much of the meaning of the actual story becomes lost: Most myths, in literate societies at least, prolong their lives not by being retold at great length, but by alluded to, thereby finding fresh contexts and applications. This process strips down the longer stories from which they may be derived, reducing them to the simplest memorable patterns. 4

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______________________________________________________________  Frankenstein’s status as a series of ‘memorable patterns’ serves as one of its greatest strengths: its adaptability by a variety of people who use it to their own ends. As Baldick says, ‘The vitality of myths lies precisely in their capacity for change, their adaptability and openness to new combinations of meaning.’ 5 Historian of science Jon Turney illustrates this adaptability by tracing the evolution of meaning in Frankenstein. Turney argues in his book Frankenstein’s Footsteps that we comprehend the new technologies of the body through the lens of the Frankenstein story. While Shelley could not anticipate the biotechnological revolution of the twentieth century, ‘she did, at the very start of the modern era, identify concerns which go to the very heart of our response to science.’ 6 Her story of the creation of life in the laboratory, and its subsequent effects on the society in which it occurred, has become ‘one of the most important myths of modernity.’ 7 In retelling the history of biological science for the past 150 years framed by the story of Frankenstein, Turney illustrates the way non-scientific actors responded to scientific ‘progress.’ Journalists and bioethicists alike would often invoke images from fictitious works to try to have the public comprehend what these technological breakthroughs meant for society. For example, in covering the birth of Louise Brown, the first human child conceived through in vitro fertilisation, many publications invoked the spectre of future concerns through allusions to either Aldous Huxley or his dystopic work, Brave New World. 8 Thus, the promise of what this new technology heralded commingled with fears of the dangers it posed for society. While the positive potential of cloning anticipated future developments in scientific research, the negative fears associated with cloning stimulated the creation of similar critical portrayals of society in other science fiction works. Two meta-narratives exist in literature and films dealing with issues of reproductive technologies. The ‘Monster in Society’ narrative posits that the mere existence of a clone will upset the natural order of society. The clone becomes a force that destroys definitions of the traditional family, familial relationships, and the established social order. The narrative privileges the product of cloning technology rather than the technology itself, and presents a socially deterministic view: social relations impose order and create cultural change. This narrative derives from stories such as Frankenstein, in which an abomination terrifies members of society. We identify with the society portrayed in these works because of our recognition of similarities in our own society. The second meta-narrative, ‘Society as Monstrous,’ speculates that the technology of cloning will change the nature of society. Society changes because the culture accommodates this new technology, eventually

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______________________________________________________________  incorporating it and naturalising it. The narrative focuses on the technology of cloning, not the product, and presents a technologically deterministic view: technology imposes order and creates social change. This narrative derives from stories like Brave New World, in which technology has altered society to such an extent that we find it unrecognisable. Rather than identifying with the resulting society, we identify with individuals who, like us, find the society oppressive or unfamiliar. The shift from the focus on the Monster in Frankenstein to the World State in Brave New World reflects the growing influence of technology on society. Analysing Frankenstein and Brave New World illuminates their role in debates about science as ‘many of the current ethical dilemmas can be seen to be the issues presented by these two myths.’ 9 Opening the black boxes that these stories and myths have become allows us to understand their influence on subsequent cinematic works. Frankenstein: Tension between Science and the Natural Order Frankenstein stands at a crossroads, bridging the gap between the two literary genres of romanticism (especially the gothic) and science fiction. While romanticism dealt with nature and conditions of natural society, writers conceived science fiction as a response to the rapid developments in science and technology brought about by the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Europe. This bridging function becomes evident in the way the novel deals with the subject of the reanimation of the dead set against the role of family. This tension between familial duty and scientific inquiry represents the primary theme of the novel. The Industrial Revolution served as the most significant change affecting society when Shelley wrote Frankenstein. 10 Beginning in Britain and still in its infancy in 1818, the Industrial Revolution rapidly transformed manufacturing processes and the production of material goods. Machinery starting producing traditionally handcrafted items, as the early stages of semiautomation began. A subsequent dependence of workers on the scientific processes and technological products became an integral part of society. Managers no longer valued the skilled worker; machinery could turn out materials of equivalent worth in much shorter amounts of time. Shelley’s novel serves as a critique of man’s changing interaction with nature through scientific methods not as an indictment of science itself: 3.

The myth of Frankenstein registers the anxieties of the period inaugurated in the twin social and industrial revolutions in France and Britain … The myth which [sic] develops out of it turns repeatedly upon these new problems of an age in which humanity seizes responsibility

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______________________________________________________________  for re-creating the world, for violently reshaping its natural environment and its inherited social and political forms, for remaking itself. 11 Frankenstein portrays the tension between the old and the new - the early modern and the modern - and becomes the rallying cry for those who believe technologies impinge upon society’s stability. Instead of just recreating the world, science stands on the brink of re-creating the human. At first glance, the novel does indeed seem to be solely about the foibles of scientific research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge. At an early age, Victor becomes enamoured of the works of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albert Magnus, physicians and scientists of the Middle Ages. However, after witnessing the effects of a lightning strike on a tree and his father’s subsequent explanation and demonstration of electricity, Victor stops examining the works of the past and enrols in the University of Ingolstadt to study. This transition from the old to the modern as the focus of Victor’s studies proves pivotal, as it sets him on his way to explore the possibility of reanimating dead flesh by using electricity. Victor eventually succeeds by applying the scientific method to his studies. While ultimately successful in his quest to reanimate life, Victor expresses moral repulsion for the Creature’s physical hideousness. Victor runs away from his laboratory, hoping to distance himself from the hideous creature. In abandoning his offspring, Victor sets the events of the novel in motion: the work demonstrates the necessity of parental responsibility and familial relations, not the destructive power of science. Victor’s rejection of his ‘son’ causes the Creature to go out on his own and experience the world. Because he inspires almost universal repulsion, the Creature hides away from other people, learning about the world and teaching himself how to speak through the reading of books, including Plutarch’s Lives and Paradise Lost. Milton’s work, in a fashion similar to Frankenstein, tells the story about a new type of offspring (Adam) and his relationship with his father, God. However, the Creature notes the dissimilarities between himself and Adam when speaking to Victor. While God punishes Adam for his transgressions and casts him out from the Garden of Eden, Victor casts the Creature out for simply existing. Frankenstein’s subtitle The Modern Prometheus alludes to the myth of Prometheus and his punishment for the theft of fire and the creation of the human race. Unlike Prometheus, punished for his transgressions by the gods, Victor receives retribution from his offspring, not for his act itself but for his subsequent behaviour. Through this portrayal, Shelley offers a critique of science without responsibility and without governance. Victor’s reluctance in

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______________________________________________________________  acknowledging his paternal responsibilities to the Creature infuriates the Creature and starts him on his homicidal spree. 4.

Brave New World: The Imperative of Societal Control If Frankenstein serves as a tale that warns of science without supervision or boundaries, then Brave New World demonstrates what happens when society regulates everything. 12 Written in 1932, the novel depicts a future society of the 26th century in which the state manufactures everything (including people), thus embracing the ideals of mass production in Huxley’s own time (the industrialist Henry Ford functions as the deity for the populace of the World State). With the Bokanovsky’s Process, a procedure through which fertilised embryos divide multiple times, humans create babies in identical batches. Humans developing in large batches lead to uniformity, eliminating differences which could result in prejudice or hatred, all impediments to the society’s foremost goal: stability. With the creation of humans in the laboratory, the traditional family no longer exists. Children grow up in public crèches, separated according to their class and function. The World State now considers words such as ‘mother’ and ‘love’ offensive, and forbids any sort of long-term human relationships. The State entertains it citizens through its own form of bread and circuses, including feelies, mildly pornographic films that stimulate all the senses, and soma, a drug dispensed freely to the populace to keep them happy. Art and literature no longer exist because their contents made people uneasy and unhappy, and even science produces only applied technologies. The protagonist of the book, John the Savage, lives with his mother on a New Mexico reservation, the result of an ‘unnatural’ conception and birth. Like the Creature, the Savage has educated himself through the works of Shakespeare (the title of Huxley’s work comes from a passage in the Tempest). Brought back to the World State, the Savage displays naiveté when it comes to the norms and values of his new society. Initially fascinated with what he sees, the Savage eventually becomes disillusioned and despondent. Although the population remains happy through use of conditioning and drugs, the Savage, aware of life outside the World State, cannot accept the rigid order placed on life. In a climatic scene near the end of the novel, the Savage talks with the World Controller Mustapha Mond about the reasons for society’s current condition. Mond explains to him that after World War III, the survivors decided that such an event could never take place again. Thus, the state must take it upon itself to provide order for its inhabitants. A well-ordered society provided all the necessities for its inhabitants and precluded future conflicts by eliminating anything unnecessary, including art. ‘“But that’s the price we have to pay for stability”’ Mond tells the Savage. ‘“You’ve got to choose

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______________________________________________________________  between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.”’ 13 Thus, this artificial dichotomy depicts the core of Huxley’s critique: Through their [the Savage and Mond] conversation, Huxley focuses on the central problem that Brave New World is set up to explore: the extent to which happiness must necessarily exclude freedom and to which freedom must include unhappiness. The new world civilization is predicated on the conviction that happiness and freedom are mutually exclusive and that happiness is the greater good. 14 Like Shelley before him, Huxley examines society’s use of science and technology but does not condemn them outright. Rather, Huxley depicts a society embracing technology while casting aside other social endeavours, especially the drive for creativity. While order may be necessary to a certain extent in society, personal expression, be it through art, literature, or even the love of another person through social bonds, make us uniquely human and become necessary for us to retain our humanity. Science is not bad; but a society that only focuses on science to the exclusion of all other accomplishments becomes wretched. 5.

Representations of Science in Film In examining the role of cinema in culture, anthropologist Debbora Battaglia notes that the cinema reflects the values and fears of society: ‘In late modernity’s image-conscious condition, popular films are major cultural documents of the social life of the public moment.’ 15 Films not only reflect the beliefs of a culture on a specific topic or set of topics; films also help to articulate and codify those beliefs. In a sense, films reify the beliefs by putting them before the members of a culture who see a film. This cinematic event acts as a mechanism to keep people, at least in a subconscious sense, aware of the meta-narrative of values and fears shared by the larger societal group. Science fiction films have allowed writers to envision potential futures often fraught with significant imperfections. As the audience watches these stories play out, the images both inspire fright - because of what may come - and cathartic relief because it has not transpired. Science fiction films also help people understand the world they live in and come to grips with the culture they have created:

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______________________________________________________________  As the representation of the future, or of an alternate present, science fiction addresses the psychological and philosophical questions that human beings pose about the universe and their place in it. Driven by the urge to settle these questions, writers of these films and television series imagine scenarios in which they address issues based on differing economic, social, religious and technological values. The stories critique current events and social trends, and also reflect the conscious or unconscious biases of the writer(s). The end of the film or television show presents possibilities for resolving the issues addressed, or leaves the viewer with a dire warning for the future should present conditions continue. 16 By examining the culture from the external viewpoint of a fictional or futuristic society, science fiction looks inward at the factual society of the present. In watching these stories, the audience, often subtly, gains a better understanding of contentious topics debated within their current culture. For decades films have been a barometer of this nation’s feelings about science and scientists. Science studies scholar Stephen L. Goldman notes that these images have generally been negative: ‘Science-fiction films are overwhelmingly dystopian, projecting the consequences of science and technology as politically or environmentally disastrous, or as inevitably coopted by antidemocratic vested interests.’ 17 Goldman argues that such representations often reflect feelings of powerlessness created when ‘scientists and engineers are depicted as servants of corporate, political, or military institutions, committed to executing the at best misguided, and frequently insidious, agendas of those institutions.’ 18 This connection of scientists with larger institutions not only depicts science as a mysterious process but also demonstrates that the agents who undertake scientific research lack control of the fruits of their labours. Rather, large agencies with hidden agendas guide the direction the research takes, often ignoring the consequences. When examining the films of a culture, we act as cultural anthropologists, not only interpreting the message of the film but the public’s anticipated/actual reception and reaction to the film and its message. In a general sense, science fiction increases the awareness of the potential dangers of science and technology, especially when the propagators of science and technology ignore the human and focus exclusively on technology as a means unto itself.

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The Celluloid Scientist The cinematic portrayal of scientists as untrustworthy or mad owes its roots to their portrayal in literature. As literary scholar Roslynn D. Haynes notes in her study of the representations of scientists in literature, fictional characters, like Frankenstein and H.G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, have influenced society’s perceptions of scientists. 19 As well as serving as a template for future fictional portrayals, these depictions have ‘provided a model for the contemporary evaluation of scientists and, by extension, of science itself.’ 20 Members of society judge scientists not only on their deeds, but also in the way their actions compare to those of their literary and cinematic counterparts. These ideas, embedded in the works of western literature, then found their way into films. While the depiction of Dr. Frankenstein in 1931 has become emblematic of Hollywood’s portrayal of scientists, such portrayals have not been steadfast throughout the twentieth century. Often, the way filmmakers depicted scientists had as much to do with the current state of real world events as the needs of the plot. During the 1940s, when American science and technology proved instrumental in defeating fascism in Europe and Asia, films portrayed scientists more favourably. Scientists helped win the war (especially through the use of nuclear weapons in Asia) and Americans became interested in science. However, with the advent of the red scare and subsequent McCarthy period, the sense of the ‘other’ returned. Suddenly, one did not know who they could trust as communists supposedly ‘infiltrated’ society, including the government. This fear became manifest in movies with a scientific theme which further exploited the apparent dangerousness of the unknown: The extremely pro-scientific attitudes exemplified in the fiction and movies of the1940s that supported development of the atomic bomb and portrayed scientists as the saviors of the free world metamorphosed into cultural attacks on those scientists in the 1950s and 1960s, with portrayals of scientists as traitors (as J. Robert Oppenheimer was portrayed) because of their regret for their participation in development of the Bomb, or re-invigorated Dr. Frankensteins. The transition of the scientist to traitor because of his dislike of war to the scientist as traitor because of his embracing of Communism was an easy one for filmmakers and writers to make. 21 This shifting portrayal embodies the underlying tension that exists between society and the culture of science. As film historian M. Z. Ribalow

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______________________________________________________________  points out in his article on depictions of scientists in film, while people enjoy the benefits of science and technological developments, they remain wary of those who practice science: Many people are in awe of scientists, and live in holy terror of them. We want what they have, but fear what they will do with it. We admire their intellectual curiosity, but doubt whether they understand the full implications of their knowledge. We need them, but mistrust both them and our need. Movie scientists are a reflection of all those conflicting attitudes. 22 Ribalow believes this ambivalence derives from the way scientists often portray themselves as intellectual elites. This, in a sense, alienates them from the public and makes them easy targets in films that ‘represent and appeal to mass culture and therefore tend to exude a populist, anti-intellectual sensibility.’ 23 Film theorists contend that such a shift in attitudes depicted in movies has started taking place again. In a 1985 article for Discover magazine, film critic Richard Schickel laments the ‘mutation’ of the Hollywood mad scientist: ‘Where have all the mad scientists gone? How come, when the movies investigate scientific enterprise these days, we don’t find any crazies lurking there?’ 24 Schickel claims, based upon an examination of the films of the early and mid-1980s, that the traditional mad scientist, the lone figure working to subvert the natural order, has been replaced by a figure who works with others within society, particularly members of the government. The scientist, often the victim of governmental conspiracies, must become the hero of the film by subverting the evil designs of a shadow government bent on the control of nature. 25 Writing 12 years later in the online publication Slate Magazine, science journalist Arthur Allan echoes Schickel’s opinion when commenting on the depiction of geneticists in books and films: ‘In the new genetic thriller, the scientist is no longer mad, because he has no illusions of mastery. Instead, he’s a lone and often belated moralist, eaten up with remorse and anxiety, pushed into unsavoury experimentation less by runaway curiosity than by unscrupulous corporate overlords.’ 26 Allan, like Schickel before him, believes that the traditional portrayal of the mad scientist has changed, making the scientific character more sympathetic to the audience members. While I agree with Schickel and Allan that depictions of scientists in films have changed since the arrival of Dr. Frankenstein on the screen in 1931, usually such changes have not demonstrated an improvement in the moral character of the cinematic scientist. While the scientist has evolved

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______________________________________________________________  from a loner to a character more integrated into society, such a change has resulted in negative consequences for the scientists. Audiences may very well find depictions of power-hungry scientists who seek financial gain, such as those in The Island or The 6th Day, far more troubling than ‘mad scientists’ who lose control of their mental faculties. The monetary imperative represented by the former type of films implies premeditated and rational action on the part of the scientists. More recently, films outside of the traditional science fiction genre have also explored similar ideas, but in a different manner. As Laura Schuster points out in her chapter included in this volume, the mind-game film, which often deals with paranoia and the uncertainty of reality for its characters, depicts the merging of science and the trappings of government, including power and money. Relying on the technology of cinema itself, films like A Scanner Darkly (also based on a Philip K. Dick novel) disorient the audience in the way they depict characters and story. This disorientation results in the audience being wary of accepting technology either depicted or utilized by the film. Frankenstein on Film: Family and Science in Opposition Most people recognise the story of Frankenstein not through the original novel, but through the viewing of Universal’s 1931 version of Frankenstein directed by James Whale. Based upon a 1930 London stage play written by Peggy Webling rather than the original novel, the movie stars Colin Clive in the role of Henry Frankenstein and Boris Karloff as the now renamed ‘Monster.’ 27 Though different from the novel, the film contains many of the same themes and elements essential to the story. In Whale’s version of the story, the Monster transforms into a shambling brute, inarticulate and scared of Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz. This vision of Frankenstein has become the quintessential view of the dangers of science. However, the film’s main themes have more to do with family and ‘traditional’ values than with science. Whale sets in opposition the relationship Frankenstein has with his fiancée Elizabeth and his relationship he has with his creation, The Monster. The two come from different worlds, with The Monster tucked away in the isolated castle far from the doctor’s more tranquil domestic world. The doctor’s need to finish his creation so that ‘it lives’ drives him to ignore Elizabeth. Whale emphasises Frankenstein’s physical transformation as he moves between these two worlds. While with Elizabeth, he wears dapper suits and appears quite sane. His keeps his hair kempt and appears relaxed. However, while engaged in work in his laboratory, Frankenstein takes on a different demeanour. His hair flows messily; his eyes open wide like a maniac. He becomes abrupt with those around him yet retains a vitality he 7.

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______________________________________________________________  lacks when with Elizabeth. As he completes his work, Frankenstein becomes secretive. The screenwriters and Whale establish a dichotomy between Frankenstein as a fiancée and husband to Elizabeth and Frankenstein as scientist and ‘father’ to the Monster. The term incommensurable, coined by the sociologist of science Thomas Kuhn, seems to best describe this set of relationships, because it captures the essence of the two roles of Frankenstein and their relationship to one another. Reminiscent of Stevenson’s schizophrenic protagonist Dr. Jekyll and his antagonistic other half Mr. Hyde, only one of the two personas of Frankenstein ever presents itself, and ultimately, only one can exist at the end of the film. An analysis of the different characters reveals a juxtaposition of incongruent pairings. Frankenstein cannot maintain concurrently his relationship to his offspring, the Monster, and his relationship to his partner, Elizabeth. In a traditional family, familial bonds would unite the three. However, because of the Monster’s genesis at the hands of only Frankenstein, the three individuals function as two sets of pairs that cannot reconcile their relationships to one another. In turn, the two sets of pairings interact differently within the larger society, represented by the village. Frankenstein fashions the Monster from the sewed together parts from the corpses of dead humans, into which he has placed the brain of an insane criminal. Frankenstein creates the Monster to better determine how the spark of life comes to reside within a body. In doing so, he brings about the formation of life as a single parent; i.e., the creation process lacks the presence of a woman. Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth remains mostly absent from the proceedings and stands in as a passive player in the drama. Absent from the process of the Monster’s creation (except at its revival), she serves no role in his development. She becomes Frankenstein’s companion only when it becomes convenient for him to allow her into his life, namely when he leaves the lab. Frankenstein functions as the sole guardian to the Monster, and a poor one at that. The times when Frankenstein works in the lab remain clearly distinct from when he interacts with Elizabeth as her partner. Whale intentionally separates Frankenstein as scientist (in the first part of the film) and Frankenstein as partner (in the second half of the film). Clearly, the viewer takes away the message that there exists an incompatibility between the life of a medical researcher reproducing through artificial means and the life of a husband becoming a central figure in a traditional family. These two worlds remain separate throughout most of the movie, except at the end of the film when the Monster interrupts Elizabeth and Frankenstein’s wedding festivities.

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______________________________________________________________  Only a few characters, all of who have personal ties to Frankenstein, observe his work. At no time does Frankenstein allow society as a whole to enter the confines of the laboratory. Elizabeth and Frankenstein’s friend Victor enter the lab only once: when Frankenstein reanimates the Monster. Even so, Frankenstein locks them inside the lab, confining them to his world. In this way, science and society remain apart. Science becomes a secretive affair, hidden behind watchtower walls and comprised of shadowy figures and strange machines. When Frankenstein leaves his work behind and joins Elizabeth to marry her, society re-enters the story. This holy consecration, unlike the abominable one performed earlier, concludes in front of the eyes of the community. A joyous celebration occurs when Frankenstein and Elizabeth wed because society deems such a union as both natural and normal. Tragically, while interacting with people after his escape, the Monster kills (albeit accidentally) a small girl by drowning her. Poignantly, the filmmakers use a child as the victim. She represents the future of normal reproduction destroyed by the oncoming wave of abnormal offspring created within the walls of science. The father of the girl discovers her body and carries it to the village celebrating the nuptials of the couple. Realising what has caused the girl’s death, the villagers rally around Frankenstein who will redeem himself by destroying his offspring. Society, represented by the villagers, has to destroy the Monster in order to restore the natural order. Frankenstein, who has reentered society earlier through his marriage, needs to destroy what he had created in order to restore normalcy to all of society. Not only does society shun the act of creation, but the creation itself. As long as it exists, society cannot function properly. Blade Runner: Defining the Human Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner-based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - offers the audience a more nuanced examination of the theme of how society defines humanity. 28 In the year 2019, the Earth has become highly polluted, almost all natural animals have died, and most of Earth’s population has left for space colonies, leaving the infirm, mutated, and underclass behind. Replicants, artificial humans constructed by corporations, live in the off-world colonies acting as soldiers, workers, and sex slaves, performing tasks too menial for humans. While physically similar to humans (but with increased strength and endurance), the replicants display stunted emotions. The scientists have made them without feelings and genetically programmed to die within a four-year span (to guard against the possibility of the development of self-awareness). Because of an earlier violent revolt, replicants live only in the outer colonies, 8.

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______________________________________________________________  banned from earth under the penalty of death. Like the Monster in Frankenstein, society deems the very existence of the replicants as undermining the ‘natural’ order of life remaining on earth. This inability to differentiate humans from more evolved replicants symbolises the failure of humans to maintain control over technology. 29 Just as humans in Blade Runner’s alternate future have laid waste to their cities because of the use of nuclear weapons, humans now lose their ability to identify the replicants they built to serve them. The replicants’ revolt also demonstrates this fear: losing control of a creation and having it run amok, similar to what the Creature does in Frankenstein, or a revolt of the lower (artificial) classes against their masters. The story focuses on Rick Deckard, a police officer, known as a blade runner, sanctioned to ‘retire’ replicants who have returned to Earth. The results of a Voight-Kampff test, which measures emotional and physical responses, especially breathing and pupil dilation differentiate between humans and replicants. The current incarnation of replicants, the Nexus 6, possesses intelligence comparable to that of an average human being. However, replicants do not have emotions though some believe that the Nexus 6 line might be able to develop emotions such as empathy with time. In his pursuit of a group of five replicants nearing the end of their ‘natural’ life spans, Deckard starts to examine his own motivations and questions the biological and cultural divide between humans and replicants. Part of his inquisitiveness results from his meeting with Rachel, the niece of the owner of the Tyrell Corporation, one of the largest manufacturers of replicants. Rachel is a replicant, implanted with false memories from Tyrell’s real niece; thus, she does not know of her true origins. Because of her false memories, Rachel has almost developed true emotions. She fails the test, but only after Deckard administers more than twice the standard number of questions. When Rachel confronts Deckard, trying to prove her humanity to him, she offers a photo of herself as a child as proof of her human heritage. Deckard reveals his knowledge of events she has told no one previously, proving her artificial origins. The news devastates them: if technology can construct memories, then it can construct objects that serve as memory devices, such as photos. Blurring the clean division between natural and artificial life forces the characters, and the audience, to re-examine their own definitions of what it means to be human, and focus on similarities rather than differences. This blurring of the human/non-human, natural/artificial boundaries established by reproductive technology raises another fear. If we cannot trust our memories or photos we have of ourselves, than how can we know who or

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______________________________________________________________  what we truly are? However, this portrays the very point of Tyrell’s work. As Tyrell says, his business creates replicants ‘more human than human.’ The final distinction between the two groups, humans and replicants, dissolves at the climax of the film when Roy Batty, one of the escaped replicants Deckard has been hunting, saves Deckard from falling off a building, preserving his life. The gesture becomes especially poignant because it occurs moments before Batty dies because of his pre-programmed lifespan. Batty has exhibited empathy towards another living creature, becoming more human than those who pursued him do. Like the Creature from Frankenstein, Batty has sought his maker, and in doing so, has come to realise the value of life. However, unlike Shelley’s creation, Batty has this realisation before he dies, saving the life of the man bent on his destruction: Because the film focuses so intensely on Batty’s figurative reaching out for life, his literal and inexplicable reaching out to save Deckard becomes highly symbolized gesture that transforms this monster into the truly tragic romantic figure that Shelley’s Monster never becomes. 30 Blade Runner questions our notions of humanity by making the replicants of the film appear lifelike, while at the same time bringing into question the real nature of life. Once replicants gain the ability to empathise then they deserve equal treatment: not as slaves, but as individuals. The society that manufacturers and enslaves these naïve creatures becomes guilty of heinous crimes, more problematic than the crimes committed by replicants trying to escape their forced captivity. Blade Runner represents - and indeed serves as a progenitor - of the subclass of science fiction called cyberpunk. As Harrison discusses in her chapter in this volume, cyberpunk is a literary genre depicting the use or potential use of technology coupled with resistance to the changes brought about by said technology, including the coalescing of power in the hands of a few. In the case of Blade Runner, the technology and resistance to it occur in both the creators and the created: the humans who wish to control the replicants through only approved use and the replicants desire to undo the abbreviated lifespan programmed into their own genetic code. GATTACA: Genetic Essentialism and Undue Expectations Instead of depicting a world with replicants, a world where manipulation of humans has become the norm provides the scenario for Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film GATTACA. 31 In the not so distant future, humans have nearly perfected genetic engineering, allowing couples to select

9.

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______________________________________________________________  desirable traits for their offspring, rather than leaving the process to chance. This process creates ‘natural’ children, the old process of reproduction now labelled unnatural. Society has labelled these individuals conceived without the benefit of genetic engineering ‘faith births’ or de-gene-erants. Though officially illegal, genoism - discrimination against individuals based on their genetic make-up-exists, in both hiring practices and daily life. Relegated to menial labour, faith births register with the state and endure random interrogation and detention when crimes occur. Society assumes that only a de-gene-erant could be morally or genetically faulty enough to break the law. In the society of GATTACA, genes predicate the life of all children regardless of their method of birth. Genetic tests indicate mental, physical, and emotional deficiencies, often limiting the choices afforded to children as they grow. The analysis of DNA charts everything about a person including their probable cause of death. Invariably, this knowledge ‘seems to dampen human initiative, while living up to one’s technologically determined potential can also be daunting.’ 32 The society in GATTACA embraces genetic determinism and eugenics taken to an extreme. GATTACA exemplifies the fear that discrimination based upon difference in reproductive process will become a problem. Echoing the eugenics movement in this and other countries in the early twentieth century, the world of GATTACA relies on advanced technology rather than selective breeding to create better offspring. The film, however, reverses our current state of affairs by making those created through this alternative technology the ones society rewards and values rather than those conceived through traditional methods. Members of this society have divided into two classes, with the genetically inferior subject to harassment, prejudice, and regulation. The film introduces the audience to one of these faith babies, Vincent Freeman, who dreams of becoming a flight engineer for the corporation Gattaca, and eventually going to Titan, the 14th moon of Saturn. At birth, Vincent’s parents received the news that he had a 99% chance of dying young due to an abnormal heart. His parents have treated Vincent like an invalid, though he does not exhibit any physical limitations. Not wishing to tempt fate twice, Vincent’s parents create his brother Anton ‘naturally.’ He becomes Vincent’s physical, but not necessarily his intellectual, superior. Unable to find work, and not appreciated by his parents as much as his sibling, Vincent strikes out on his own. Frustrated by his inability to get a non-menial job (he works as a janitor at Gattaca), Vincent decides to buy the identity of a genetically ideal individual, Jerome Eugene Morrow. Because of the nature of this society, genetic profiles have become the most precious commodity. A highly touted swimmer Morrow became disillusioned with his life after finishing second in a championship meet. A cripple, Morrow cannot walk because of an accident - presumably due to a failed suicide attempt -

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______________________________________________________________  and lacks any spark to live. Utilizing Jerome’s bodily fluids and clippings (hair, blood, urine, etc.), Vincent takes on the name and identity of Jerome (while Jerome now only uses his middle name, Eugene) and gains employment at Gattaca, this time as an engineer rather than a janitor. In a society that places so much faith in technology, people trust readouts of DNA rather than believe in their senses. Technology has provided humans with the ability to achieve near-perfection. At the same time, they have become myopic because they trust the results provided by technology without question, believing machines infallible. They fail to use their senses because they believe totally in the technological applications found within society. While employed at Gattaca, Vincent (as Jerome) takes up romantically with Irene Cassini, a fellow space-travelling aspirant. Though conceived in the laboratory, Cassini has a secret. Something went wrong during her development, and she, like Freeman, has a weak heart. Like Morrow, Cassini cannot live up to the expectations placed upon her by a society that values genes above all else. Trust in humans rather than in technology remains the key to improving the race because superior genes do not necessitate superior morality. The filmmakers depict the use of technology in improving the species as unproblematic: Unlike most bioethics texts that discuss gene therapy, however, GATTACA maintains that many of the problems associated with the new eugenics, such as genetic discrimination, genetic prophecy, and the homogenization of society, are not due to the technology itself. Rather, GATTACA proposes that these problems will only arise if the belief that individuals are no more than the sum of their genes becomes a matter of consensus: a black box. 33 There is nothing wrong with seeking to improve the physical characteristics of individuals as long as we seek to improve the emotional ones as well. Genetically engineered humans might be physically superior but they suffer from the same emotional weaknesses that their predecessors did, including discrimination. Enhancement needs to be as much about the spirit as about the body. 10.

Shared Thematic Elements My exploration of these cultural artefacts reveals themes common to both the novels and films. These themes offer a different explanation of the

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______________________________________________________________  works’ meanings for the audience than interpretations provided by the media and ethicists debating human cloning technology. While Frankenstein depicts the effects of a monster in society, and Brave New World depicts society as monstrous, they contain some striking similarities in plot and character that go beyond the works’ depiction of the rapid change in technological innovation. One significant parallel in the two works is the role language plays. Unlike the better known portrayal of the Creature on screen, the Creature in Shelley’s novel appears quite articulate, even more shocking to those that encounter him given his appearance: From his first words, he [the Creature] shows himself to be a supreme rhetorician of his own situation, one who controls the antithesis and oxymorons that express the pathos of his existence … When we learn of the Monster’s self-education we understand the sources of his eloquence, and of the conception of a just order of things that animates his plea to his creator. 34 The Creature’s eloquence raises him above the role of just a savage brute. He remains aware of his actions and commits them with good reason. Because of Victor’s denial of his request for a mate, he continues his murderous actions. Huxley uses language as a key element throughout his work. However, in the world of the future, language has taken on less rather than more significance: Doing away with literature has severely affected the use of language. Other than insipid popular music … there are no models to guide usage and no means available to expand vocabulary or experiment with structure. Human languages and other cultural differences have been severely reduced by the World State, since stability requires mutual understanding between different peoples. 35 The ironically named Savage enters this world and maintains a true love and understanding of language due to his familiarity with literary works. Like the Creature, his eloquence cannot get help him attain what he wants: a comfortable and accepted place within society. The rhetorical power of these two individuals, the Creature and the Savage, represents just one of the traits the two share. Abandoned by their fathers and self-taught through literature of an earlier age, the two display and incredible naiveté when it comes to human nature of their respective

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______________________________________________________________  societies. They become ‘the other’ because of their methods of creation and create disturbances for their societies: the Creature through murder, and the Savage through his ideas. They both seek escape from a society that cannot accept their nature: the Creature by running to the Arctic and the Savage through suicide. The two architects of the scientific world of the two novels, Victor and Mond, also display similarities. Both become aware of the consequences of their actions but ignore these consequences at the expense of others. Victor stays quiet about what he has done, even remaining silent when it can save the life of an innocent woman accused of murder. Ultimately, his silence indirectly leads to the death of his wife Elizabeth. Mond, the Controller of the World State, understands what has been lost in a culture void of art and love. He makes the laws, laws that he can break with impunity, but does not allow others this benefit. In order to keep the world ordered and have everything in its proper place, Mond sacrifices individual freedom. The function that both Victor and Mond play in their respective texts gives us an insight into the authors’ primary concerns. In both novels, the authors criticise the reckless manner in which scientists use technology. Both works illustrate the themes of numerous stories that critically comment on scientists and their motivations for discovery. While the films attribute different meanings and degrees to the function of science in society, they depict common themes about the role of technology in society. Culture defines humanity as much as biology: The members of society impart or withhold the moniker ‘human’ on individuals, whether created through cloning, genetic engineering, or traditional methods. In turn, individuals retain this designation based upon their actions, not their origins. Frankenstein becomes a valued member of society after he destroys his offspring. Batty redeems himself by showing empathy towards Deckard by saving his life. Vincent succeeds through determination and a strong work ethic rather than his genetic heritage. Retaining one’s humanity involves making choices that demonstrate the characteristics of humanity as defined by society. Technological developments profoundly shape society: The creation of individuals through cloning or genetic engineering does more than just lead to new offspring. It alters the way society conceives of reproduction, the creation of life, and defines the natural. In Blade Runner, replicants must perform jobs once considered undesirable or dangerous by members of society. As the replicants develop qualities that are more human, the society must justify their continued segregation by develop better methods of differentiating them from humans. In GATTACA, genetic engineering creates superior individuals. However, the technology also creates a rigidly,

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______________________________________________________________  hierarchal society where personal motivation no longer matters, only your genetic heritage and the expectations you must fulfil. Society becomes morally responsible for the consequences of technology: Reciprocally, even as technology shapes society, members of society remains accountable for the effects of technology. Scientists cannot ignore the repercussions of a technology, dismissing the effects as someone else’s problem. Frankenstein ignores his creation after imparting the spark of life by abandoning him to society and causing him suffering. The world of Blade Runner abuses replicants by treating them as slaves forced to perform undesirable jobs. Moreover, society shuns and disregards natural births in GATTACA, treating them with contempt rather than respect. Just as they worry about how their new offspring will act towards them, members of society must appreciate the way they will react to their discoveries. 11.

Conclusion This essay examines depictions of reproductive technologies in science fiction books and films as a way of understanding both the mythic qualities of the texts and the arguments of the films. Read in their historical context, Frankenstein and Brave New World deal with the loss of humanity through the auspices of technology. In Frankenstein, Victor exhibited moral failure, not because he created the Creature, but because he abandoned his responsibilities for his creation. While we identify with the society portrayed in the book, we also identify with the Creature, an orphan of early-modern society who must educate himself and rise above his ‘humble beginnings.’ In Brave New World, the situation reverses, with John the Savage taking on the role of the Creature. Also self-taught, John mirrors the horror we feel for the society he has been introduced into. As Shelley did in Frankenstein through the depiction of Victor’s actions, Huxley condemns all members of society not for their use of technology but for their worship of it in place of all other human endeavours. In doing so, the members of the World State have all abandoned their responsibility as parents because of the revulsion they feel for natural conception. The films share many of these themes. Blade Runner and GATTACA depict the effects of an over-reliance on technology and the subsequent marginalization of those who fall into socially constructed categories of the undesirable. The creation of individuals through cloning or genetic engineering does more than just lead to new offspring. It alters the way society conceives of reproduction, the creation of life, and defines the natural. Conversely, even as technology shapes society, members of society remains accountable for the effects of technology. Scientists cannot ignore the repercussions of a technology, dismissing the effects as someone else’s problem. Just as they worry about how their new offspring will act towards

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______________________________________________________________  them, members of society must appreciate the way they will react to their discoveries.

Notes  

1

C. Small, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1973, pp. 14-15. 2 A. Panshin and C. Panshin, The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Los Angeles, 1989, p. 3. 3 P. K. Alkon, Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology, Twayne P, New York, 1994, p. 28. 4 C. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenthcentury Writing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, p. 3. 5 Baldick, p. 4. 6 J. Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998, p. 3. 7 Turney, p. 3. 8 Ibid., p. 185. 9 K. W. Back, ‘Frankenstein and Brave New World: Two Cautionary Myths on the Boundaries of Science’, History of European Ideas, Vol. 20, 1995, p. 330. 10 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, Norton, New York, 1996. 11 Baldick, p. 5. 12 A. Huxley, Brave New World, Perennial Classics, New York, 1998. 13 Ibid., p. 220. 14 G. A. Nance, Aldous Huxley, Continuum, New York, 1988, p. 80. 15 D. Battaglia, ‘Multiplicities: An Anthropologist’s Thoughts on Replicants and Clones in Popular Films’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, 2001, p. 495. 16 C. Corcos, I. Corcos, B. Stockhoff, ‘Double-Take: A Second Look at Cloning, Science Fiction and Law’, Louisiana Law Review, Vol. 59, 1999, p. 1044. 17 S. L. Goldman, ‘Images of Technology in Popular Films: Discussion and Filmography’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 14, 1989, p. 278. 18 Goldman, pp. 276-77. 19 R. D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994, p. 1. 20 Haynes, p. 4. 21 Corcos, pp. 1059-1060. 22 M. Z. Ribalow, ‘Script Doctors’, The Sciences, November-December, 1998, p. 27. 23 Ribalow, p. 28.

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24

R. Schickel, ‘The Mutating of the Mad Scientist’, Discover, August, 1985, p. 72. 25 Ibid., p. 74. 26 A. Allan, ‘Requiem for the Mad Scientist’, Slate, Vol. 20, Nov. 1997, viewed 6 October 2008, . 27 D. J. Skal, Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture, Norton, New York, 1998, p. 113. 28 Blade Runner (The Director’s Cut), DVD, dir. by Ridley Scott, Warner Home Video, Burbank, CA, 1997. 29 N. Galagher, ‘Bleak Visions: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Director’s Cut’, Australian Screen Education, Vol. 29, Winter, 2002, p. 170. 30 J. Abbott, ‘The “Monster” Reconsidered. Blade Runner’s Replicant as Romantic Hero’, Extrapolation, Vol. 34, 1993, p. 348. 31 GATTACA, DVD, dir. by Andrew Niccol, Sony Pictures, Culver City, CA, 1997. 32 S. A. George, ‘Not Exactly “of Woman Born”: Procreation and Creation in Recent Science Fiction Films’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, Vol. 28, Issue 4, Winter, 2001, p. 179. 33 D. A. Kirby, ‘The New Eugenics in Cinema: Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in GATTACA’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 27, 2000, pp. 211-212. 34 P. Brooks, ‘“Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts”: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity’, in The Endurance of Frankenstein, G. Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds), University of California Press, Berkeley, 1979, pp. 206-207. 35 D. W. Sisk, ‘Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias’, in Readings on Brave New World, K. de Koster (ed), Greenhaven, San Diego, 1999, p. 123.

Bibliography Abbott, J., ‘The “Monster” Reconsidered. Blade Runner’s Replicant as Romantic Hero’. Extrapolation, Vol. 34, 1993, pp. 340-350. Alkon, P. K., Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. Twayne Press, New York, 1994. Allan, A., ‘Requiem for the Mad Scientist’. Slate, Vol. 20, Nov. 1997, viewed on 6 October 2008, .

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Back, K. W., ‘Frankenstein and Brave New World: Two Cautionary Myths on the Boundaries of Science’. History of European Ideas, Vol. 20, 1995, pp. 327-332. Baldick, C., In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenthcentury Writing. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987. Battaglia, D., ‘Multiplicities: An Anthropologist’s Thoughts on Replicants and Clones in Popular Films’. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, 2001, pp. 493-514. Blade Runner (The Director’s Cut). DVD. Dir. by R. Scott. Warner Home Video, Burbank, CA, 1997. Brooks, P., ‘“Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts”: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity’, in The Endurance of Frankenstein. G. Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds), University of California Press, Berkeley, 1979, pp. 205-220. Corcos, C., Corcos, I., Stockhoff, B., ‘Double-Take: A Second Look at Cloning, Science Fiction and Law’. Louisiana Law Review, Vol. 59, 1999, pp. 1041-1099. Galagher, N., ‘Bleak Visions: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Director’s Cut’. Australian Screen Education, Vol. 29, Winter, 2002, pp. 169-173. GATTACA. DVD. Dir. by A. Niccol. Sony Pictures, Culver City, CA, 1997. George, S. A., ‘Not Exactly “of Woman Born”: Procreation and Creation in Recent Science Fiction Films’. Journal of Popular Film & Television, Vol. 28, Winter, 2001, pp. 176-183. Goldman, S. L., ‘Images of Technology in Popular Films: Discussion and Filmography’. Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 14, 1989, pp. 275-301. Harrison, K., ‘Gender Resistance: Interrogating the ‘Punk’ in Cyberpunk’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 209-227. Haynes, R. D., From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994.

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Huxley, A., Brave New World. Perennial Classics, New York, 1998. Kirby, D. A., ‘The New Eugenics in Cinema: Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in GATTACA’. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 27, 2000, pp. 193-215. Nance, G. A., Aldous Huxley. Continuum, New York, 1988. Panshin, A. and Panshin, C., The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence. Jeremy P. Tarcher, Los Angeles, 1989. Ribalow, M. Z., ‘Script Doctors’. The Sciences, November-December, 1998, pp. 26-31. Schickel, R., ‘The Mutating of the Mad Scientist’. Discover, August, 1985, pp. 70-75. Schuster, L., ‘What Does a Scanner See? Techno-Fascination and Unreliability in the Mind-Game Film’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 229-253. Shelley, M., Frankenstein. Norton, New York, 1996. Sisk, D. W., ‘Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias’, in Readings on Brave New World. K. de Koster (ed), Greenhaven, San Diego, 1999, pp. 122-29. Skal, D. J., Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. Norton, New York, 1998. Small, C., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1973. Michael J. Klein is an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric & Technical Communication at James Madison University, Virginia, USA.

PART V Merger of Cyberspace and Art

‘Cyborg Art’ as a Critical Sphere of Inquiry into Increasing Corporeal Human-Technology Merger Elizabeth Borst Abstract This chapter introduces and examines the concept of ‘cyborg art,’ which describes literal and figural visual representations of corporeal humantechnology integration. The transforming and emerging (post)human being is therefore the focus; who we are today, and who or what we may become, as humanity increasingly interfaces with technology. Overall, theoretical discussions that centre on visual representations of cyborgs (or posthumans) relate predominantly to science fiction, in particular film and television, as opposed to art. I argue that this constitutes an investigative limitation into the broad and relevant field of human-technology interface inquiry. A profusion of cyborg art and art practices abound within contemporary Western society, each differing art form, for example, conceptual, interactive, performance, digital, sculpture or painting, offering possible ‘symbolic function’ and ‘critical potential’ regarding increasing cyborgisation, and changing human physical ontology. I suggest that the artistic melding of organic and inorganic spheres alludes to the common ontology which exists between these states; the scope of advanced technologies; the dissolution and rupturing of boundaries and dualisms under postmodernism; and the far-reaching ideological implications this evokes. The goal of this text is to present the underlying theoretical breadth and creative depth of cyborg art, to introduce new cyborg configurations, and to argue for the need to develop a specific cyborg art genre as a recognised and valid area for research regarding increasing body-technology amalgamation. Key Words: Cyborg, art, corporeality, convergence, ontology. ***** 1.

Introduction Cyborg art focuses on technology as intimately interfaced with the human body, no longer existing as an attachment or tool, but incorporated within or altering the body’s inherent structures. These ‘cyborgian technologies’ include pacemakers, synthetic organs and valves, artificial joints and ligaments, genetic engineering, assisted/artificial reproduction technologies, external gestation, xenotransplantation, cloning, cryonics, biotelematic implants, direct carbon and silicon links, and the creation of transgenic entities - all technologies in existence today, in varying degrees of application and stages of development. 1 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner

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______________________________________________________________ emphasise that these ever-evolving ‘Dramatic shifts in science and technology force us to rethink conceptions of ourselves, humanistic philosophies, and the very nature of reality.’ 2 The myriad of cyborg artworks created today offers ample avenues for enhancing awareness and understanding of these developing corporeal human-technology links. Additionally, most cyborg art, whether situated within popular culture, fine art or performance art realms, is presented on the internet which potentially reaches a large audience. Despite this, cultural theory and analysis relating to cyborg art remains limited, adding to its elusiveness as a concept, and lack of recognition as an art genre. I introduce eight cyborg-inspired artworks in this chapter, created by artists H. R. Giger, Joachim Luetke, Justin Fox, Philip Hitchcock, Viktor Koen, Christos Magganas, Dave McKean and Heidi Taillefer. These artists represent a diverse array of nationalities: Swiss, German, Australian, American, Greek, English and Canadian, identifying the global level of interest towards, and examination of, the cyborg concept. This chapter is based on an in-depth study of cyborg art, which developed in response to Chris Hables Gray’s call for critics to pay attention to the growing cyborg aesthetic, and the critical potential of humantechnology interface art. 3 The base study includes qualitative empirical data obtained from both research participants and artists whose artworks are included in the study. Contributions from Luetke, Fox, Hitchcock and Magganas sourced via email questionnaires are included here, alongside theoretical discussion pertaining to the ideas and concepts which each artwork depicts. The artworks selected for this introductory text are metaphorical and figural cyborg representations, with a focus on the convergence of flesh and metal. Each artwork is situated within four key cultural-biological dimensions of humanity: birth, death, gender and ethnicity; and within three key spheres of corporeal-technological developments: prosthetics (machinic technologies), telematics (electronic - computer and telecommunications technologies) and genetics (biotechnologies). These artworks centre on futuristic corporeal interface as both celebrations and warnings. As Best and Kellner surmise, ‘Unless we first imagine various futures, both good and bad … we will have nothing to guide us in the constitution of a viable world.’ 4 2.

Birth There is limited artistic representation focusing on birth/gestation and technological interface. The concept of ectogenesis, or external womb technology, however, has captured the attention of a selection of artists, and has also become a heavily debated issue today. 5 H. R. Giger, the eminent and enigmatic Swiss artist, was one of the first artists to focus on this concept with the creation of his pen and ink artwork Birth Machine in 1967. His

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______________________________________________________________ bronze sculpture Birth Machine Baby, 6 shown below, is a continuation of this work, and depicts one of the muscle-bound cyborg foetuses or babies from Birth Machine, sitting in a bullet shell holding a gun and wearing protective (and cyber-punk inspired) goggles. The mechanised baby is armed and prepared for his or her biomechanical birthing process - of being ‘fired out’ into the impending technological world. 7 The bullet shell metaphorically represents an external womb, and the cyborg foetus within represents the increasing visuality of the foetus today.

Image 1 - Birth Machine Baby (1998) Bronze Sculpture 8.5 in. x 21.5 in. Artist: H. R. Giger J. B. S. Haldane, a British scientist, coined the term ectogenesis in 1924 to describe how human pregnancy would one day occur in an artificial womb. He believed that by the year 2074 the use of an ‘exowomb’ to gestate a baby full-term would become increasingly viable and popular. 8 Advances regarding artificial reproduction research indicate that it may one day be possible for an embryo to grow to full-term outside of a woman’s body. To date, Professor Yoshinori Kuwabara has kept a goat foetus alive for three

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______________________________________________________________ weeks in an artificial womb filled with a liquid substance which mimics amniotic fluid, and Professor Hung-Ching Liu has grown a human embryo successfully for six days in an external incubator/womb. 9 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker refer to these developments as the ‘flesh-eating technology’ of technoscience. They suggest that the end of pregnancy parallels the end of history and the constitution of the human body as it has existed for thousands of years. 10 Donna Haraway surmises that the visible foetus is developing into an icon of technoscience, 11 due in part to the proliferation of reproductive, gestation and birthing technologies, and our increasing ability to actively participate in the creation of our own progeny and evolution. 12 Birth Machine Baby also stands guard outside Giger’s museum located in Gruyères, Switzerland, in the form of a large street sculpture, identifying that the cyborg baby or foetus has indeed ‘gone public.’ 13 Birth Machine Baby is ultimately a metaphor for humanity’s propensity for self-destruction, violence, and over-population, which can lead to social and environmental chaos. Giger alludes to the way in which our destinies are irretrievably linked to technology, and the accountability that is necessary in order to manage this increasing union with care. 14 Michael Klein 15 identifies that science fiction films and books do not posit the destructive nature of the artificially reproduced off-spring as a pivotal concern, but rather the destructiveness of those creating the processes which enable cyborg or posthuman entities to be ‘made’ or manufactured as opposed to being ‘born.’ 3.

Death While birth and gestation merged with technology is depicted in art, the concept of death interfaced with technology (or necrotic cyborgs) is rarely represented. Gunther von Hagens’ anatomical art whole-body specimens shown in the Bodyworlds exhibitions 16 are among the most well-known representations, however they do not present the convergence of flesh and metal as such. Kreator: Enemy of God, 17 included on the following page, is created by Joachim Luetke, the notable German artist who is one of only a few artists to visually represent the junction between death and technology. Kreator: Enemy of God is a section of a larger artwork which shows macabre necrotic female cyborgs lined up in succession in military styling, with growing human foetuses positioned in their mechanical wombs. The necrotic cyborgs’ breasts are shown smooth, without nipples, implying that the babies when ‘born’ will perhaps be intravenously fed. Luetke’s artwork alludes to the concept of neomorts, which are cadavers whose bodies are kept functioning in order to be utilised in some way, such as the completion of a gestation cycle. Cyborgisation has reconfigured the meaning of death today,

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______________________________________________________________ the lines increasingly blurred between the living and the non-living, creating a new category: the ‘living-dead.’ 18

Image 2 - Kreator: Enemy of God (2005) Digital Art Artist: Joachim Luetke The flesh and metal symbiosis in Kreator: Enemy of God creates a stark and poignant contrast between the human and machine, as the soft, organic, warm, live body is juxtaposed against the hard, metallic, cold, dead machine. In addition, these mechanical corpses and their ectogenetic foetuses allude to Haraway’s premise that increasingly life is viewed as a ‘system to be managed.’ 19 Ultimately, this artwork metaphorically demonstrates that human beings may eventually begin to feel dead, if they relinquish the ability to give life. Luetke presents a collection of his often frightening, menacing and foreboding artworks in his extensive 2000 art volume Posthuman: The Art of Joachim Luetke, where historical gods and demons are merged with future visions, and transgressions relating to gender, life, death, religion and spirituality are provocatively evoked. 20

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Gender Cyborg imagery avidly depicts notions of gender, particularly the representation of conventional feminine and masculine signifiers. Female cyborgs are often sexualised and passive while male cyborgs are typically muscular and active. 21 However, Justin Fox, the well-known Australian artist and founder of Australian INfront (the online collaborative artist support base) has created Bionic, 22 shown below, who ruptures normative notions of gender. Bionic is a poignant metaphorical vision of Haraway’s post-gender premise; 23 an androgynous dual-gendered cyborg presented as strong and powerful. Bionic’s femaleness is subtly depicted by her face, breast shape and the silhouette of her dress, yet her hair configuration is male, and the circuitry and shapes superimposed on her dress show a phallic symbolic protrusion, alluding to her joint gender status. Bionic also does not avert her eyes but rather challenges the observer’s gaze, and her stance shows control and determination rather than objectified passivity.

Image 3 - Bionic (2001) Graphic Art Illustration Artist: Justin Fox Fox designed Bionic to be shocking, beautiful, kinky and discomforting, and above all to have an impact. He surmises that the ‘Cyborg is already “cool” and it’s only going to get cooler;’ 24 the fantasy is not just wearing technology, ‘But having it mix with our flesh and bones.’ 25 Anne

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______________________________________________________________ Balsamo argues that we need to ‘Search for cyborg images which work to disrupt stable oppositions’ of gender, and Bionic clearly answers this call. 26 Cyborg artworks such as Bionic promote a reconceptualisation of ‘The current socio-cultural-biological consideration of gender’ where traditional concepts pertaining to gender can be transformed from a ‘male/female binary into a trinity of male/female/metal.’ 27 Gender, sexuality, and sex organs are increasingly viewed as existing on a continuum today, therefore discussed more in relation to degrees rather than polarities. 28 Blending, morphing and fluid transformation is therefore a dominant theme of postindustrial, postmodern society. The notion of fluidity collapses the modernist Western episteme of gender binaries into postmodern gender polymorphism, exacerbated by the scope of advanced (medical) technologies which can refashion the ‘natural’ body. 29 The fluidity of sex in relation to transgendered, transsexual or even intersexed (hermaphroditic) individuals is what ‘confronts us’ in society today. 30 Many people find the concept disconcerting and abject, while others find the notion liberating. Ultimately, artworks which explore the ‘opening up’ of the gender system and gendered scripts provide inspiration for those who feel they do not sit at the polarities of female and male subjectivity, and their socially determined ‘equivalent’ sexual and gender identities. 31 5.

Ethnicity Ethnicity and critical race studies, 32 have been largely omitted from visual cyborg theory and analysis, with discussion focusing primarily on computer access and use, cyberspace, and feminism. 33 Guillermo GómezPeña, the well-known and controversial Mexican performance artist and author, is one of only a few non-European artists working with visual ideas of ethnicity and body-technology interface, 34 and Philip Hitchcock, the renowned American sculptor, is one of only a selection of European artists merging race, body and technology themes. Hitchcock’s mixed-media sculpture The Black Knight, 35 included on the following page, presents a powerful black male cyborg with engineered or synthetic muscles, and a telematic and phallic helmet, thus being eroticised both in flesh and metal. Yet The Black Knight is not shown to be hyperaggressive, as is common with male cyborg iconography. 36 Jeffery Brown affirms that black male superheroes in general are depicted as ‘violent beasts’ inscribed with aggressive characteristics and violent tendencies. 37 The Black Knight is a non-threatening cyborg entity; a mix of medieval and futuristic, creating a new vision of humanity. He is also a complex and sophisticated fusion of the three main spheres of corporeal-technological developments in existence today - prosthetics, telematics and genetics - as opposed to a crude and manual augmented entity.

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Image 4 - The Black Knight (2007) Wall-mounted Mixed-media Sculpture Artist: Philip Hitchcock The Black Knight’s corporeal aesthetics include four rings linking his neck-chest transmitter plate into his skin. Four wires are also positioned on each side of the plate which link into his helmet, possibly enabling him to see and hear what is being relayed to him, either by his own design, or via others’ input and control. Hitchcock metaphorically represents the paradoxes prevalent within technological interface; both pleasure/fear, beauty/abjection, and control/being controlled - leaving it up to us to decide The Black Knight’s fate. Hitchcock states his work is ‘metaphorical for the human condition in modern society’ 38 alluding to the survival strategies required for living in today’s Western culture, where gender, sexuality and race discriminations still exist. 39 In 2000, Hitchcock published a collection of his earlier artworks in his expansive art volume Dark Impressions: The Art of Philip Hitchcock. 6.

Prosthetics Viktor Koen, a multi award-winning digital artist and illustrator, created Nutrition Man, 40 shown on the following page, as a figural depiction of technological augmentation of the body via prosthetics. Koen’s futuristic cyborg represents the enhanced techno-body in motion, where propulsion units and machinic technologies are propelling him into the posthuman age.

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______________________________________________________________ The technology serves as a metaphor for superior nourishment of the human body - interface technology as boosting natural systems. Stelarc, the controversial and renowned Australian performance artist who centres his artistic focus on prosthetics and robotics, is one of the staunchest proponents of the inadequacy of the body’s functioning systems, and the outdated concept of aging. 41 He refers to the natural body as ‘obsolete’ (no longer viable), and theorists in general agree that the quest for enhanced strength/beauty, longevity and immortality fuels the force and compulsion of technoscience. 42

Image 5 - Nutrition Man (2005) Digital Art Illustration Artist: Viktor Koen Increasingly, technologies are no longer an appendage or an extension to the body, but directly incorporated and assimilated within the body’s inherent organic structures. Today, many parts of the human body can be replaced with prosthetic technologies and devices. 43 Therefore terms such as ‘prosthetic couplings’ are increasingly used to define new cyborg configurations. 44 Yet, corporeal-prosthetic melding can generate wary reactions from individuals, as prosthetic limbs and devices are often viewed as artificial components invading and contaminating the (natural) body, challenging what Elaine Graham calls the human body’s ‘ontological hygiene.’ 45 Koen’s cyborg represents this penetration, as technology is grafted or interfaced into nearly every inch of his body. Stelarc suggests that humanity should not view prosthetic/machinebody interface for purposes of enhancement in a Faustian way - that we are selling or relinquishing our souls in order to have the so-called forbidden

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______________________________________________________________ advantages and energies that technological augmentation can provide. 46 He supports Andy Clark’s premise that we have always been ‘natural born cyborgs’ and it is our teleological destiny to become increasingly integrated with, and augmented by, technology. 47 Augmentation and adaptations of the body are also projected to become just as common and socially accepted as procedures such as cosmetic surgery, blood transfusions and IVF. 48 Stelarc believes that technology is what defines being human, therefore feelings of guilt, shame or fear towards the interface are misplaced. He affirms that the desire to prolong life and to be stronger and healthier is a ‘natural’ human compulsion. 49 Nutrition Man aptly represents this desire. 7.

Telematics Christos Magganas, a Greek multimedia artist, has created Hermes, 50 shown below, to metaphorically represent wireless telematic ideas merged with the human body. In Greek mythology, Hermes was a messenger to the Gods. 51 Magganas has transformed Hermes into a cyborg messenger, receiving and sending the plethora of globally transmitted messages which exist today. The messages enter and exit Hermes’ cranium and his back, where signal shafts are interfaced with his spinal cord, tapping into the energy source in order to assist the exchange of electronic data. The divine cherubs have also been morphed into the ubiquitous iconic computer screen.

Image 6 - Hermes (1997) Digital Art Illustration Artist: Christos Magganas Telematics is derived from the junction and infusion of computers and telecommunications systems, for example, portable computers such as laptops and advanced mobile phones. 52 Futuristic ideas such as wearable

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______________________________________________________________ wireless computers which can fit into buttons or on clothing and fashion accessories are also increasingly being explored, signalling an end to the desktop computer era. 53 Computer-mediated communications networking, including cable and satellites, are increasingly linking and interfacing dispersed individuals and institutions to data-processing systems, enhancing both the pace and availability of human interaction. As such, telematics is a central topic of discussion today as geographical borders diminish, and the speed of communication increases. 54 Magganas is interested in the role of the body and embodiment in the digital cyborg or posthuman era, management by ‘remote control,’ Greek mythology, 55 and the ‘“shrinking” of the world through communications technology.’ 56 Roy Ascott contends that ‘With the convergence of computers and telecommunications, the “thinking system” becomes planetary.’ 57 Pierre Lévy agrees, envisaging a future collective society linked by electronic networks, where ‘A nomadic distribution of information will fluctuate around an immense deterritorialized semiotic plane’ 58 - the global equidistant internet. The quintessential cyborg is often viewed as a cybernetic communication network entity, created by, and existing within, the realms of information, communication and control. 59 Hermes alludes to this quintessential state, as his lower torso is shown dissolving and disappearing into pure energy. 8.

Genetics Lastly, the advanced developments existing within the sphere of genetics generate a wealth of artistic inspiration for the creation of new transgenic, triadic and quadratic entities. Dave McKean, an award-winning English artist, has created Feeding the Machine, 60 included on the following page, which shows a triadic fusion of animal, human and machine components. McKean’s ‘techumanic tribrid’ has an upper body covered with reddish fur, and a human-machine head and face pushing through the mouth of a second face, symbolising our evolution from animal, to human, through to machine, and increasing science and technology convergence. As Best and Kellner state, ‘“Human beings” today can easily be part human, part animal and part machine.’ 61 Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics in the late 1940s, was the first to suggest that animals, humans and machines all had similar cybernetic systems of control and communication, 62 and increasingly artists, writers and theorists such as Donna Haraway, Eduardo Kac, Dave McKean, Faith Wilding, Murray McKeich, Philip Hitchcock, Heidi Taillefer and Viktor Koen are showing their interest in the common ontology which exists within these spheres, and the far-reaching ideological inferences this evokes.

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Image 7 - Feeding the Machine (1999) Surrealist Artwork Artist: Dave McKean Feeding the Machine alludes to Lewis Mumford’s concerns that our increasing integration with technology will ‘anesthetise us,’ destroying our creativity and empathy. 63 McKean’s tribrid is depicted as devoid of vigour, passively awaiting ‘progress’ or ‘nourishment’ which cannot ultimately satisfy him. This artwork is also a metaphoric representation of Martin Heidegger’s warning regarding the negative effects of our increasing reliance on and usage of technology; the way this dependence will slowly destroy our capacity for thinking in any way other than one which is ultimately machinic. Heidegger believed that the ‘essence’ of technology is nothing technological. Rather, it is a technological understanding of being, where human beings increasingly begin to see nature and each other as ‘standing reserves,’ subjected to the logic of instrumentality; mere resources to be mined and controlled. 64 Heidegger surmised that individuals and ‘things’ are enframed as a result of increased applications of technology; viewed as ‘one big gas station,’ 65 and therefore easily used and subsequently discarded. In this volume, Leighton Evans 66 links Heidegger’s premise to online social networking sites, where he argues people also become resources, or standing reserves. Individuals using these networking sites are therefore exploited by the technology; able to be collected, displayed and easily discarded. These ‘users’ exist in an environment where online profiles

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______________________________________________________________ and stratifications are key determinants contributing to the notion of friendship. Heidegger feared that in an increasingly technologised society, ‘calculative thinking’ will be practiced as the only way of thinking. 67 The essence of technology therefore exists as a productionist metaphysics, depleted of creativity and social enrichment. 68 Mumford suggested that goals to ‘humanise the machine’ are having the paradoxical effect of ‘mechanizing humanity,’ and subsequently dehumanising society. 69 Feeding the Machine symbolises these concerns, metaphorically pointing to the way the transformation from ‘natural being’ to ‘mechanised being’ is not always considered a progressive transition. Heidi Taillefer, the celebrated Canadian graphic artist and painter, moves even further into exploring the junction between organic and inorganic realms with Venus Envy, 70 shown below. Taillefer combines human, animal and technological components, and plant matter, within one image. In this artwork, human female flesh and form covers internal technology and machinery; snakes are presented as hair in the manner of Medusa, and fruit, flowers and plants are also intimately incorporated within this female cyborg’s corporeality. In addition, mechanical pipes are shown filling the artificial breasts with milk, ready for the growing human foetus floating in the fluid of the transparent artificial womb sack.

Image 8 - Venus Envy (1999) Painting: Oil on Canvas 44 in. x 60 in. Artist: Heidi Taillefer Venus Envy depicts a new millennium quadratic entity, a fusion of Eduardo Kac’s interspecies creations ‘plantimals’ (plant and animal genetic

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______________________________________________________________ mix), and ‘animans’ (animal and human genetic mix). 71 Quadbrids are rare entities created in response to what Best and Kellner call the new postmodern ‘Multiverse,’ 72 which refers to the way boundaries are collapsing between all organic species, such as bacteria, fish, plant, insect, animal and human, and machine. Ascott affirms that silicon, molecules, pixels, bits, atoms, neurons and genes are all increasingly converging. He therefore suggests that a new interspatial ‘moist domain’ exists between the ‘dry world’ of technology and the ‘wet world’ of biology. 73 Taillefer’s Venus Envy also represents the paradoxes often felt towards technoscience and its applications, alluding to the ‘miracles’ and ‘monstrosities’ which can be developed and created today, and the ideological struggle over the distinction and disparity between the natural and (the fascination with) artifice. 74 The cyborg and posthuman body can be seen in transition in the twenty-first century, passing ‘Through a series of gateways that seem now without end.’ 75 Boundaries are increasingly collapsing and rupturing between species and the machine as a result of our biotechnological capabilities and knowledge. Yet, despite this, and the prevalence of tribrids depicted in art, the concept of triadic (and quadratic) merger is extremely limited in theoretical cyborg or posthuman discussion. Theorists and artists continue to grapple with the question of what it means to be human today in an increasingly technologised, mechanised and digital world. As such ‘The cyborg has been used to fill the void in attempting to make sense of who we are and what we might become.’ 76 The cyborg is therefore deemed a symbol or icon of the technoscientific age, its dual status of being both organic and non-organic providing a symbolic function for society, by existing as a mediator between these two realms. 77 9.

Conclusion This contribution has demonstrated the way cyborg art points to important and relevant themes regarding increasing body-technology fusion, including: sites of possible being (prefigurative representations); transgression (the crossing of traditional Western ideological binaries and boundaries, such as male/female, organic/artificial, culture/nature, human/animal, born/made and public/private); and cyborgian paradox (the human desires and fears felt towards advanced technologies, and the ‘marvels’ and ‘monsters’ which can be created). The artworks also allude to the dehumanising impacts of, and increasing human dependency on, technology; the instability of the symbiotic body/identity as constituting soft (warm) flesh, and hard (cold) machinery; and the way skin no longer serves as a barrier and boundary to the inner corporeal realm. The potency of cyborg art centres on the way this artistic focus articulates concepts pertaining to the changing human body which are often ‘inexpressible’ in words alone, and draws attention to the hidden underlying

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______________________________________________________________ processes of our increasing cyborgisation. Artists who focus on the interface using two-dimensional art, sculpture or performance, can be thought of as global innovators, both seekers and producers of meaning. These artists are provocateurs and visionaries, generating ideas, questions and constructive criticism. Artists help us to understand our relationship with technology in more tangible ways, by exploring reality as it is now and future projections. 78 As Michael Zimmerman affirms, ‘Only by questioning the presuppositions, perils, and promises of the technological age will humanity have any hope of discovering authentic ways of living within the dangerous and the wondrous possibilities opened up by that age.’ 79 Andrew Murphie and John Potts rightly acknowledge artists as ‘the “antennae” of society, foreshadowing in their art the social impact of technological change.’ 80 Ultimately, cyborg art is a discursive tool for addressing the increasing interconnection and relationship between humanity and technology. This artistic focus can therefore be viewed as having critical potential, serving as a possible catalyst for increasing theoretical analysis relating to, and societal awareness of (and interest in), advanced corporeal technologies. Cyborg art can (and should) have social value and function, as this art genre offers versions of the technoscience debate which are often not considered, and forms of resistance not immediately apparent. 81 Overall, cyborg art visually represents the altering human body and the scope of developed, invented and discovered corporeal technologies, which impact on all of us - and future generations. Visual culture theorist W. J. T. Mitchell alludes to the importance of paying attention to art which explores various developments of technoscience and using it for critical reflection, discussion and debate. He states that: Perhaps this moment of accelerated stasis in history, when we feel caught between utopian fantasies of biocybernetics and the dystopian realities of biopolitics, between the rhetoric of the posthuman and the real urgency of universal human rights, is a moment given to us for rethinking just what our lives, and our arts, are for.82 I suggest a need arises to embed cyborg art in the realm of corporeal human-technology interface debate; to recognise cyborg art as constituting a specific critical and relevant art genre; for cyborg art to be acknowledged as a significant arena for exploring issues surrounding changing human physical ontology; and for cyborg art to be valued as complementary to theoretical discussion focusing on increasing body-technology convergence.

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Notes 1

S. Best and D. Kellner, The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium, The Guilford Press, New York, 2001, p. 184. 2 Ibid., p. 151. 3 C. H. Gray, Cyborgs, Attention, & Aesthetics, 1998, viewed 27 February 2005, p. 3, . 4 Best and Kellner, p. 276. 5 I. Aristarkhova, ‘Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine’, Body & Society, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2005, p. 45; S. Coleman, The Ethics of Artificial Uteruses: Implications for Reproduction and Abortion, Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, 2004, p. 2. 6 Image 1, H. R. Giger, Birth Machine Baby, 1998, Bronze Sculpture. H. R. Giger Sculptures. Bronze: 8.5 in. x 21.5 in., viewed 15 December 2006, . 7 L. Barany, Birth Machine Baby, 2007, viewed 1 April 2008, ; H. A. Glaser, ‘Intrauterine Technology for the Year 2000’, in H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon II, C. Miles and J. R. Cowan (eds), Morpheus International, Beverly Hills, CA, 1985, p. 40. 8 C. Rosen, ‘Why Not Artificial Wombs?’ The New Atlantis. A Journal of Technology & Society, Vol. 3, 2003, p. 67. 9 F. Simonstein, ‘Artificial Reproduction Technologies (RTs) - All the Way To the Artificial Womb?’ Medicine, Health, Care and Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2006, pp. 360-361. 10 A. Kroker and M. Kroker, Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s, in Cultural Texts, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1996, p. 17. 11 D. J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman©_ Meets_Oncomouse™. Feminism and Technoscience, Routledge, New York, 1997, p. 174. 12 A. Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life, Gateway, Washington, DC, 1997; G. Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2002. 13 J. Dumit and R. Davis-Floyd, ‘Cyborg Babies: Children of the Third Millennium’, in Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-tots, J. Dumit and R. Davis-Floyd (eds), Routledge, New York, 1998, p. 1. 14 E. Gelber, ‘A Rare U.S. Showing of H.R. Giger’s Work’, Churn Magazine, Vol. 6, 2002, p. 15, viewed 2 April 2008, .

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M. J. Klein, ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology’, in this volume. 16 G. von Hagens, ‘Anatomy and Plastination’, in Gunther von Hagens’ BODY WORLDS: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, F. Kelley (trans), G. von Hagens and A. Whalley (eds), Institut for Plastination, Heidelberg, 2005, p. 9. 17 Image 2, J. Luetke, Kreator: Enemy of God, 2005, Digital Cover Art. Group/Single Shots by Harald Hoffmann. Compiled by J. Luetke, viewed 15 March, 2008, . 18 C. H. Gray, S. Mentor, H. Figueroa-Sarriera, ‘Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms’, in The Cyborg Handbook, C. H. Gray (ed), with S. Mentor and H. Figueroa-Sarriera, Routledge, New York, 1995, p. 5. 19 Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman©_ Meets_ Oncomouse™, p. 174. 20 J. Luetke, Email Questionnaire, 2007. 21 D. Devoss, ‘Rereading Cyborg(?) Women: The Visual Rhetoric of Images of Cyborg (and Cyber) Bodies on the World Wide Web*’, Cyberpsychology & Behaviour, Vol. 3, No. 5, 2000, pp. 840-841; C. Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996, p. 10. 22 Image 3, J. Fox, Bionic, 2001, Graphic Art Illustration. Magazine Cover Concept. Australian INfront. Justin Fox, viewed 14 April 2006, . 23 D. J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991, p. 150. 24 J. Fox, Email Questionnaire, 2007, q. 7. 25 Ibid., q. 6. 26 A. Balsamo, ‘Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism’, in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, G. Kirkup, L. Janes, K. Woodward, F. Hovenden (eds), Routledge, London, 2000, p. 156. 27 S. Dixon, ‘Metal Gender’, Ctheory.net, 2003, p. 2, viewed 5 October 2006, . 28 D. J. Hester, ‘Intersexes and the End of Gender: Corporeal Ethics and Postgender Bodies’, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2004, p. 221. 29 Y. Volkart, Monstrous Bodies: The Disarranged Gender Body as an Arena for Monstrous Subject Relations, 2004, viewed 12 December 2006, . 30 Hester, p. 218.

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V. Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification, Palgrave, New York, 2003, p. 188. 32 T. Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005, p. xxvi. 33 B. E. Kolko, L. Nakamura, G. B. Rodman, ‘Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction’, in Race in Cyberspace, B. E. Kolko, L. Nakamura, G. B. Rodman (eds), Routledge, London, 2000; C. Sandoval, ‘New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed’, in The Cyborg Handbook, C. H. Gray (ed), with S. Mentor and H. Figueroa-Sarriera, Routledge, New York, 1995. 34 G. Gómez-Peña, Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, Routledge, London, 2000. 35 Image 4, P. Hitchcock, The Black Knight, 2007, Wall-mounted Mixedmedia Sculpture. Philip Hitchcock designs: Fantasy, viewed 7 December 2007, . 36 Devoss, p. 841. 37 J. A. Brown, ‘Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Superhero’, African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, 1999, p. 30. 38 P. Hitchcock, Artist Bio, n.d., para. 3, viewed 1 April 2008, . 39 P. Hitchcock, Email Questionnaire, 2007. 40 Image 5, V. Koen, Nutrition Man, 2005, Digital Art Illustration. Men’s Journal, 2005, viewed 28 November, 2007, . 41 Stelarc, ‘From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Posthuman Entities’, in Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-human Pragmatism, J. Broadhurst Dixon and E. J. Cassidy (eds), Routledge, London, 1998, p. 117. 42 Aristarkhova, p. 56; V. Kuni, Cyborg Configurations as Formations of (Self-)Creation in the Fantasy Space of Technological Creation (I): Old and New Mythologies of Artificial Humans, 2004, p. 3, viewed 12 December 2006, . 43 R. Wilson, ‘Cyber(Body)Parts: Prosthetic Consciousness’, in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, M. Featherstone and R. Burrows (eds), Sage, London, 1995, p. 243. 44 J. Zylinska, ‘“The Future…is Monstrous”: Prosthetics as Ethics’, in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, J. Zylinska (ed), Continuum, New York, 2002, p. 216.

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E. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2002, p. 33. 46 P. Atzori and K. Woolford, ‘Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc’, CTheory.net, 1995, para. 10, viewed 18 June 2007, . 47 A. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003. 48 Simonstein, p. 363. 49 Atzori and Woolford, p. 6. 50 Image 6, C. Magganas, Hermes, 1997, Digital Art Illustration. Private View, viewed 28 April 2006, . 51 L. L. Stookey, Thematic Guide to World Mythology, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 2004, p. 4. 52 R. Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, E. A. Shanken (ed), University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, p. 212. 53 Best and Kellner, p. 150. 54 R. Packer and K. Jordan, ‘Overture’, in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, R. Packer and K. Jordan (eds), Norton, New York, 2001, p. xxvi. 55 C. Magganas, Email Questionnaire, 2007. 56 C. Magganas, Christos Magganas, n.d., para. 3, viewed 16 April 2007, . 57 Ascott, Telematic Embrace, p. 216. 58 P. Lévy, ‘The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace: Collective Intelligence’, in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, R. Bononno (trans), R. Packer and K. Jordan (eds), Norton, New York, 2001, p. 339. 59 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 212. 60 Image 7, D. McKean, Feeding the Machine, 1999, Surrealist Artwork. Mupinc Surrealism, viewed 20 April 2006, . 61 Best and Kellner, p. 161. 62 N. Wiener, Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd Edition, MIT Press, New York, 1961. 63 L. Mumford, Art and Technics, Columbia University Press, New York, 1960, p. 9. 64 M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt (trans), Harper & Row, New York, 1977, p. 19.

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R. Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction, Cornell University Press, New York, 1999, p. 171. 66 L. Evans, ‘A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking’, in this volume. 67 P. Standish, ‘Only Connect: Computer Literacy from Heidegger to Cyberfeminism’, Educational Theory, Vol. 49, No. 4, 1999, p. 422. 68 M. E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics and Art, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, p. xiv. 69 Mumford, p. 5. 70 Image 8, H. Taillefer, Venus Envy, 1999, Painting. Oil on Canvas. 44 in. x 60 in. Artworks, viewed 15 December 2008, . 71 E. Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots, University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 2005, p. 243. 72 Best and Kellner, p. 137. 73 R. Ascott, ‘Beyond Boundaries. Edge-life: Technoetic Structures and Moist Media’, in Art, Technology, Consciousness: Mind@large, R. Ascott (ed), Intellect, Portland, Oregon, 2000, p. 2. 74 Springer, p. 77. 75 A. Murphie and J. Potts, Culture and Technology, Palgrave, New York, 2003, p. 115. 76 S. Short, Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005, p. 163. 77 K. Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2002, p. 31; Graham, p. 202; K. N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999, p. 24. 78 S. Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, MIT Press, London, 2002, p. 50. 79 Zimmerman, p. xxi. 80 Murphie and Potts, p. 39. 81 C. H. Gray, ‘In Defence of Prefigurative Art: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Orlan and Stelarc’, in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, J. Zylinska (eds), Continuum, New York, 2002, p. 182. 82 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, p. 335.

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Bibliography Aristarkhova, I., ‘Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine’. Body & Society, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2005, pp. 43-59. Ascott, R., ‘Beyond Boundaries. Edge-life: Technoetic Structures and Moist Media’, in Art, Technology, Consciousness: Mind@large. R. Ascott (ed), Intellect, Portland, Oregon, 2000, pp. 2-6. —––, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. E. A. Shanken (ed), University of California Press, London, 2003. Atzori, P. and Woolford, K., ‘Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc’. CTheory.net, 1995, viewed 18 June 2007, . Balsamo, A., ‘Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism’, in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. G. Kirkup, L. Janes, K. Woodward, F. Hovenden (eds), Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 148-158. Barany, L., Birth Machine Baby. .

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Benesch, K., Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2002. Best, S. and Kellner, D., The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium. The Guilford Press, New York, 2001. Brown, J. A., ‘Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Superhero’. African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, 1999, pp. 25-42. Clark, A., Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003. Coleman, S., The Ethics of Artificial Uteruses: Implications for Reproduction and Abortion. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, 2004. Devoss, D., ‘Rereading Cyborg(?) Women: The Visual Rhetoric of Images of Cyborg (and Cyber) Bodies on the World Wide Web*’. Cyberpsychology & Behaviour, Vol. 3, No. 5, 2000, pp. 835-845.

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______________________________________________________________ Dixon, S., ‘Metal Gender’. Ctheory.net, 2003, viewed 5 October 2006, . Dumit, J. and Davis-Floyd, R., ‘Cyborg Babies: Children of the Third Millennium’, in Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-tots. J. Dumit and R. Davis-Floyd (eds), Routledge, New York, 1998, pp. 1-20. Evans, L., ‘A Phenomenological Analysis of Social Networking’, in Frontiers of Cyberspace. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 55-77. Foster, T., Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005. Gelber, E., ‘A Rare U.S. Showing of H.R. Giger’s Work’. Churn Magazine, Vol. 6, 2002, pp. 10-15, viewed 2 April 2008, . Glaser, H. A., ‘Intrauterine Technology for the Year 2000’, in H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon II. C. Miles and J. R. Cowan (eds), Morpheus International, Beverly Hills, CA, 1985, p. 40. Gómez-Peña, G., Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back. Routledge, London, 2000. Graham, E., Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2002. Gray, C. H., Cyborgs, Attention, & Aesthetics. 1998, viewed 27 February 2005, . —––, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. Routledge, New York, 2001. —––, ‘In Defence of Prefigurative Art: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Orlan and Stelarc’, in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. J. Zylinska (eds), Continuum, New York, 2002, pp. 181-192. Gray, C. H., Mentor, S., Figueroa-Sarriera, H., ‘Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms’, in The Cyborg Handbook. C. H.

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______________________________________________________________ Gray (ed), with S. Mentor and H. Figueroa-Sarriera, Routledge, New York, 1995, pp. 1-14. Haraway, D. J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, New York, 1991. —––, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman©_Meets_ Oncomouse™. Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, New York, 1997. Hayles, N. K., How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999. Heidegger, M., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. W. Lovitt (trans), Harper & Row, New York, 1977. Hester, D. J., ‘Intersexes and the End of Gender: Corporeal Ethics and Postgender Bodies’. Journal of Gender Studies, Vol.13, No. 3, 2004, pp. 215225. Hitchcock, P., Artist Bio. n.d., viewed .

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Kac, E., Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots. University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 2005. Kimbrell, A., The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life. Gateway, Washington, DC, 1997. Klein, M. J., ‘Modern Myths: Science Fiction in the Age of Technology’ in Frontiers of Cyberscape. D. Riha (ed), Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2012, pp. 255-279. Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., Rodman, G. B., ‘Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction’, in Race in Cyberspace. B. E. Kolko, L. Nakamura, G. B. Rodman (eds), Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 1-14. Kroker, A. and Kroker, M., Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s, in Cultural Texts. St Martin’s Press, New York, 1996. Kuni, V., Cyborg Configurations as Formations of (Self-)Creation in the Fantasy Space of Technological Creation (I): Old and New Mythologies of Artificial Humans. 2004, viewed 12 December 2006,

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______________________________________________________________ . Lévy, P., ‘The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace: Collective Intelligence’, in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. R. Bononno (trans), R. Packer and K. Jordan (eds), Norton, New York, 2001, pp. 335-344. Magganas, C., Christos Magganas. n.d., viewed 16 April 2007, . Mitchell, W. J. T., What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005. Mumford, L., Art and Technics. Columbia University Press, New York, 1960. Murphie, A. and Potts, J., Culture and Technology. Palgrave, New York, 2003. Packer, R. and Jordan, K., ‘Overture’, in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. R. Packer and K. Jordan (eds), Norton, New York, 2001, pp. xiii-xxxi. Pitts, V., In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. Palgrave, New York, 2003. Polt, R., Heidegger: An Introduction. Cornell University Press, New York, 1999. Rosen, C., ‘Why Not Artificial Wombs?’ The New Atlantis. A Journal of Technology & Society, Vol. 3, 2003, pp. 67-76. Sandoval, C., ‘New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed’, in The Cyborg Handbook. C. H. Gray (ed), with S. Mentor and H. Figueroa-Sarriera, Routledge, New York, 1995, pp. 407-422. Short, S., Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005.

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______________________________________________________________ Simonstein, F., ‘Artificial Reproduction Technologies (RTs) - All the Way To the Artificial Womb?’ Medicine, Health, Care and Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2006, pp. 359-365. Springer, C., Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996. Standish, P., ‘Only Connect: Computer Literacy from Heidegger to Cyberfeminism’. Educational Theory, Vol. 49, No. 4, 1999, pp. 417-435. Stelarc., ‘From Psycho-Body to Cyber-systems: Images as Posthuman Entities’, in Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-human Pragmatism. J. Broadhurst Dixon and E. J. Cassidy (eds), Routledge, London, 1998, pp. 116-123. Stock, G., Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2002. Stookey, L. L., Thematic Guide to World Mythology. Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 2004. Volkart, Y., Monstrous Bodies: The Disarranged Gender Body as an Arena for Monstrous Subject Relations. 2004, viewed 12 December 2006, . Von Hagens, G., ‘Anatomy and Plastination’, in Gunther von Hagens’ BODY WORLDS: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. F. Kelly (trans), G. von Hagens and A. Whalley (eds), Institut for Plastination, Heidelberg, 2005, pp. 9-37. Wiener, N., Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd Edition, MIT Press, New York, 1961. Wilson, R., ‘Cyber(Body)Parts: Prosthetic Consciousness’, in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. M. Featherstone and R. Burrows (eds), Sage, London, 1995, pp. 239-260. Wilson, S., Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. MIT Press, London, 2002.

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______________________________________________________________ Zimmerman, M. E., Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics and Art. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990. Zylinska, J., ‘“The Future…is Monstrous”: Prosthetics as Ethics’, in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. J. Zylinska (ed), Continuum, New York, 2002, pp. 214-235. Elizabeth Borst is a PhD candidate at The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Her interests centre on visual culture, including representations of the cyborg and posthuman body in art, postmodern theory relating to fashion and subculture, and the aesthetics and impact of mega-malls.

Digital Dance: Encounters between Media Technologies and the Dancing Body Zeynep Gündüz Abstract This chapter explores the collaboration between human bodies and interactive technologies in relation to the cultural practice of contemporary dance. Aiming to counter-balance the increasing fear of disembodiment of the dancing body, it offers a phenomenological approach to examine the partnerwork between physical bodies and abstract digital technologies. In addition, this chapter examines the consequences of the integration of digital technologies for the existing cultural practice of dance and the roles of digital technologies incorporated in stage performances and illustrates these changes via the case study Apparition (2004). Key Words: Embodiment, phenomenology, interactive technologies, interactivity, virtuality, dance, cultural practices. ***** 1.

Introduction ‘Slowly but surely, the ancient art of dance has gone digital.’ 1

In dance, human bodies and technologies have often been seen as incompatible, even antithetical. 2 Accordingly, technologies have frequently been accused of ‘dehumanising’ the body and its dance. 3 Moreover, the increasing intimacy between dance and digital media through technologies such as telematics and motion capture, causes dance practitioners to fear that technologies are generating a ‘disembodiment’ of dance, which implies the extraction of the physical body from the choreography. At present, however, much scholarly work positions itselfs against the ‘disembodiment’ of dance in its engagement with technology since it is by now clear that dance and dance performance is not only an art form, but a cultural practice that changes as the dancing body is affected by cultural and technological shifts. 4 In this chapter, I will contribute to the current investigations on embodiment by offering a specific theoretical perspective through which I will interrogate the relationship between human bodies and a specific type of

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______________________________________________________________ digital technology; namely, interactive technologies based on gesture mapping and motion-tracking software. The last three decades have witnessed an increase in the application of interactive technologies in various art forms. Within the field of dance, the notion of interactivity seems to hold an almost unchallenged high place in comparison to other types of digital technologies. 5 In the light of staged performances, theatre theorist David Saltz describes this as: ‘sounds and images stored, and in many cases created on a computer, which the computer produces in response to a live performer’s actions.’ 6 According to Saltz, digital interactive media have other characteristics than those of traditional (or linear) media, such as responding in ‘real-time’ to the input of the performer. As a result, interactive media enhance the spontaneity or variability of a live performance; they enable new possibilities of staging narratives; and also produce a novel relationship between the performer and media. 7 Accordingly, interactive media expand the existing cultural practices of theatre and performance. With respect to the collaboration of contemporary dance and digital media, my aim in this chapter is threefold. Firstly, I will underline the necessity of the artform of dance for the interrogation of the relationship between humans and digital technologies. In addition, I will show how digital media may help to address certain issues that arise in dance, such as the metamorphosis of bodily form and the ‘stubborn’ fight against time, space, and gravity. 8 Secondly, I will argue against the apparent fear of disembodiment of dance by showing how the specific type of interaction in its engagement with technology bridges the gap between bodies and digital systems. In order to do this, I will take a phenomenological approach grounded in Mark Hansen’s theory of ‘bodies-in-code,’ and in dancer and researcher Susan Kozel’s notion of ‘hyper-reflection in dance.’ I will apply my arguments to the selected case study Apparition (2004), a dance performance created by the media artist and composer Klaus Obermaier. The analysis will also help illustrate my third aim: to pinpoint the changing perceptions of technologies and the cultural practices of dance. 2.

Dance as Marker of Changing Natural and Cultural Perceptions According to Katherine Hayles, living in a rich technologicallymediated environment brings with it changes and shifts in habits, postures, enactments, and perceptions. Technologies have an impact on our perception of the body; each new technology demands a new understanding of our anatomy as well as a new comprehension of time and space. However, the effect of technology, specifically the changing proprioception and sense of

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______________________________________________________________ embodiment, need time, thought, and experience to be registered in the ‘mindbody.’ For her, art is capable of bridging the gap or discontinuities between rapid technological innovations, an abstract understanding of the human body, and our embodied experience. Hence, artworks that incorporate technologies and the interaction between technology and the body not only help us understand these points, but they may change experience itself. 9 Cyborg art is an example of the social and cultural shifts on perceiving the human body and its embodiment, as Elizabeth Borst illustrates in her article published in this section. Referring to literal and figural representations of corporeal human-technology integration, cyborg art explores the questions ‘who we are today, and who (or what) we may become’ through our engagements with technologies. For Borst, the ‘bodytechnology amalgamation’ illustrated in cyborg art, implies a reconfiguration of the understanding of human corporeality through its encounters with technologies, rather than its disembodiment. 10 Dance as art form is also helpful in illuminating changing perceptions and experiences of the body by means of digital technologies because the desire to question one’s physical existence is inherent within it. Notwithstanding common associations of dance as ‘just something physical,’ dance is, in fact, a reaching beyond oneself, indicating: An active interrogation of time, space, the engagement between the intellect and the senses, the real and the imaginary. … It is ultimately fluid and changing, … an interrogation of the world at the same time that it is a celebration of our existence in the world. 11 For dance theorist Michel Bernard, the body’s desire to reach beyond itself is closely tied to the essential qualities of the ‘dancing state,’ or its ‘orchesalité.’ 12 This dancing state consists of the understanding of dance as: an undefined corporeal dynamics of metamorphosis (dance as a state of being drunk in the sensation of one’s own movements); a paradoxical way of constructing and deconstructing time (the dancing body continuously reconstructs and deconstructs its mode of being in time); a dialog with gravity (the dancing body is in a constant play with the rules of gravity). And finally, the dancing body encompasses the quality of being reflexive and auto-affective, which indicates the dancing body’s desire to return back to itself; the body that experiments with form, time, and gravity ends its journey by folding back to itself and affecting itself.

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______________________________________________________________ These four points are practised in some contemporary dance lessons where dancers are encouraged to move in ways unfamiliar to their everyday movement patterns. Peter Jasko, dancer and choreographer based in Belgium, encourages dancers to experiment with movement types, dynamics, and temporality by improvising with the dance material in ways that are unfamiliar to their habitual movement patterns. 13 As a result, the body teaches itself innovative ways of moving because the discovered new sensations not only expand the body’s movement vocabulary but affect the body’s experience of being-in-movement. In her lessons, dancer and choreographer Keren Levi emphasises the notion of choice; she advices dancers to choose taking risks such as falling on the ground when going ‘offbalance’ or getting disoriented by ‘letting the top of the head lead the movements.’ 14 This is necessary because only then do ‘surprising things’ happen concerning the dynamics of movements and temporality that push the limits of the body. Digital technologies incorporated in dance practice are capable of expanding the physical experience of dance through their own means that create new types of self-images. Motion capture technologies, for example, can expand the concepts of the body’s engagement with form and gravity simply by extrapolating and capturing movements from the dancer’s body by specific ‘markers.’ 15 Merce Cunninghams’ Biped 16 (1999), a staged dance performance that brought together virtual dancers created by motion capture technology and ‘real’ performers, is an early example of this phenomenon. Furthermore, motion-tracking technologies, which are mainly used in interactive performances, register and display the dancer’s mapped image in ‘real-time,’ while allowing the movements of the physical body to have an influence on the visual imagery and sound used in the performance. Glow 17 (2006), a solo dance performance created by the choreographer Gideon Oberzanek and programmer Frieder Weiss, is an example that illustrates the real-time manipulation of visual imagery by the dancer’s movements. According to visual arts scholar Margot Lovejoy, digital media are interesting for artists because they are capable of disrupting the history of experience, vision, and representation followed since the Renaissance. 18 This implies that a renegotiation of our ‘conventional’ perception of time and space (not mediated by technologies), which has been challenged by cinema, is even further contested by the perception of cyberspace, virtual environments and virtual bodies made possible with digital media. 19 With respect to the interruption of our ‘conventional’ perception, interactive media are no exception in as much they challenge and cultivate existing ‘norms’ of seeing and experiencing the physical body, such as remodelling the

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______________________________________________________________ physiological, temporal and spatial features of physical movement. In addition, they reconfigure the ‘conventional’ interaction between physical bodies and physical environments, shifting this to a renegotiation of a ‘cultural’ perception that entails an interaction between the physical body and a digital environment. Consequently, the increasing collaborations of dance and digital media require close examination because, being intimately tied to bodily awareness, sensual presence, and kinaesthetic experience, dance ‘more than any other art form has been reconfigured in terms of new media projects.’ 20 This reconfiguration of dance is then closely connected to the ways digital media enable new modes of ‘extended’ (cultural) perception of the body and the experience of dance, and/or or the way it illustrates the shifts in habits, postures, enactments, and perceptions as suggested by Hayles and illustrated by Borst through the example of cyborg art. 3.

Types of Dance Practices Incorporating Interactive Technologies A considerable increase with regard to the integration of digital technologies in choreographic practices was witnessed at the beginning of the 1990s. In this sense it can be pointed out as a starting year for what today is referred to as ‘digital dance’ and ‘digital performance.’ Digital performance entails all types of performance practices where computer technologies play a major role in the creation and exhibition stages of the artwork rather than supporting an aspect of the performance’s content. 21 Like other digital arts forms, the sub-genre ‘digital dance’ conforms to the parameters of digital performance and it indicates a relatively new arts practice that lies at the intersection between art, science, and software programming. 22 Current dance performances created with interactive technologies may be classified in three categories. The first type of performance shows similarities to installation art and it relies heavily on audience participation. Loosely referred to as ‘performative installations,’ these installations exclude professional dancers and intend to generate an unstructured performance event. 23 Nevertheless, they are closely engaged with choreographic concepts because they celebrate and activate kinetic awareness above other senses. Furthermore, choreographic installations are not necessarily performed in theatres but can take place in non-theatrical environments and rely on audience participation. The artwork carries a considerable amount of unpredictability because the reactions of the audience may differ from the reactions anticipated by its creators. As the audience becomes a part of the performance, the roles of performer and audience intertwine. In this sense,

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______________________________________________________________ these artworks are linked to the ‘democratic ideals’ that governed some of the performances in the 1960s, such as the Happenings. 24 Moreover, this type of performance event requires the choreographer to work differently as s/he is no longer choreographing dance movements, but the visual imagery and sound used in the ‘performative installation.’ Thus, in the context of these works, choreography requires not only the shaping of physical movements in time and space but also the shaping of the movements of the images and sound essential for the materialisation of the performance event. An example of this type of performance is trajets 25 (1999-2000), created by Susan Kozel and Gretchen Schiller. No established name exists for the second type of performance, which is in line with performances created for a theatre setting. 26 Here, I am referring to performances that take place in a theatre where the interaction occurs between performer and technology, while the audience observes from their seats. In these performances, the stage is likely to be quite plain, meaning an exclusion of décors and props, and the dancers wear simple bodysuits. The dancers’ movements have been rehearsed and the choreography is mostly ‘set,’ or it is based on structured improvisation, and the performers are only free within a set of strictly constrained parameters. The aesthetics of the artwork is not solely based on the virtuosity of the performers’ dance technique; rather, it depends on how the dancer adjusts his/her movements to the ‘virtuosity’ of the technology. The limits placed on the physical movement of the dancer are necessary because sophisticated as they are, current interactive technology based on motion tracking can not yet follow the speed and complexity of the dancer’s body as accurately as desired. Nevertheless, motion-tracking software is essential for the materialisation of these performances, and the dialogue between body and technology constitutes the major concern for its aesthetics and dramaturgy. Apparition, the selected case study of this chapter, is an example of this type of performance. The third type of dance practice that integrates interactive media consists of the combination of the first two types. It is either a staged dance performance performed by professionals that allows audience participation at certain moments of the performance, or it may involve an interactive installation that combines professional performers and audience. Wolf Ka’s D.OT.N.A.N.A 27 (2004) is an example of the former and Passage (2007) from the company kondition pluriel 28 the latter. However, this hybrid type of performance practice that brings together professionals and audience are rare in comparison to the first two categories.

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______________________________________________________________ Despite the conceptual and aesthetic differences of these three types of artworks, they all contribute to the existing cultural practices of dance, and they require the development of other understandings concerning the creation, exhibition, and perception of dance as art form. 4. Defining Interactivity in the Context of Staged Dance Performances Currently, interactivity and interactive media are growing ‘trends’ that extend across social, everyday life routines to political and artistic contexts. In everyday life, the existence of interactive media enable what now constitutes our daily basic actions, such as e-mailing or surfing the Web. In politics, interactivity refers to active participation of citizens in politics via encounters with interactive media that, ideally, enhance democracy. 29 In art, interactivity refers to a specific mode of engagement between the participant or performer and the artwork. 30 However, interactivity is a much used and abused term, and it refers to different meanings in different contexts that generates various understandings of the term. For example, in the case of politics, interactivity seems to emphasise an ideological concept, whereas in everyday life practice, the emphasis lies on the technological capacities of the medium and the communication and distribution of certain types of information between two or more people. As for the artistic level, interactivity seems to encompass both an ideology and the technical capacities of the medium but also a type of experience of the performer or audience. In the case of dance, this experience is likely to emphasise an increased sensual/kinaesthetic awareness of movement/space possibilities through engagement with interactive technologies. To be able to create such a dialogic exchange between the artwork and the ‘interactor,’ performances created with interactive media require certain elements. The first is a sensing device capable of reading human movement, or input, such as infrared lights, sensors or motion tracking cameras that ‘sense’ the presence of the performer and translate aspects of the their behaviour into digital language. The sensors are placed either on the performer’s body or on certain spots in the surrounding area. The second requirement is a pre-programmed computer that is systematically related to the input. Subsequently, the installed technology needs to be activated and continuously transformed by the movements of the audience or performer either by making physical contact with a physical object, or by moving within ‘electronically sensitized’ sections of real space. Finally, this output needs to

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______________________________________________________________ be translated in ‘real-time’ into phenomena, such as image and sound that humans can perceive and respond to. 31 Within the context of staged dance performance, in this text, interactivity is defined as a mode of physical and cognitive engagement between the performer and the artwork, enabled by computer-based digital interactive media that generates real-time digital responses in the form of sound or image. This type of interaction generates ‘whole’ body participation, rather than engagement with an isolated body part, such as clicking on the computer mouse. It also involves the exploration of the ‘entire’ spatial setting of the performance, rather than looking at a screen and observing the action. Moreover, this physical interaction establishes a dialogic exchange between the performer and the artwork: as the physical responses of the performer triggers responses from the interactive system, the technological responses trigger cognitive responses from the performer, which activates new physical responses and so forth. Finally, the ‘material’ form of the artwork (perceptible images and sound) changes on the basis of the movement of the performer and the ‘real-time’ response of the system. And this is what distinguishes the interactive artwork from the noninteractive ones. As practitioner and scholar in digital dance, Sarah Rubidge points out: The experience of seeing or hearing a work anew, of recreating its meanings in accord with one’s own, everchanging, perspective and interests lies at the heart of the artistic experience. The non-interactive work does not respond to the viewer’s activity in kind. That is, the material form of the work does not change as a result of the viewer’s interaction. Rather the work submits itself to the viewer’s imaginative play, without relinquishing its material integrity. 32 However, it is a misunderstanding that interactive media of necessity change or add to the form of dance movements. According to Rubidge, dance performances created with interactive technologies are not necessarily innovative with regard to the dance forms, meaning that the performers make use of existing dance vocabulary that varies from classical to post modern dance. Nevertheless, these performances challenge choreographic conceptions because they generate a ‘conceptual jump’ in the perception and conception of an existing practice. 33

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______________________________________________________________ The notion of virtual imagery and virtual bodies is perhaps one of the most prominent accompanying changes in the practice of dance and conceptual leaps concerning the understanding of the dancing body. Although, to certain dance practitioners and choreographers, virtuality implies a ‘disembodiment’ of dance; for others virtuality makes possible a renegotiation of corporeality. 34 Aiming to illustrate the differing perspectives on the integration of interactive media in dance practices, the following section will provide a brief insight concerning the questions of disembodiment of dance generated by the incorporation of digital media. 5.

Criticism of Interactive Technologies in Dance The world of dance remains wary of the integration of digital technologies in live performances for several reasons. 35 For example, integrating technologies into the performance can postpone the working process. Gideon Oberzanek, a choreographer that has integrated interactive technologies in his works, points out that technical problems quite often interrupted the flow of his rehearsals. During rehearsals the dancers were often required to wait until the technical problems were solved, which caused severe delays in the progression of the creative process. 36 Indeed, the necessity for a long research and rehearsal period is why merely a handful of dance performances have been created with interactive media. 37 These pieces require an extensive preparation period with a full-time working team made out of a choreographer, dancer(s), programmer(s) and technician(s), and few companies can afford to work this way. At one level, interactive technologies could be seen to limit dance as artform. Scholar and dancer Erin Manning points out that even the most sophisticated technologies lack the complexity of the human body and require certain adaptations from the dancer. 38 The dancer’s adjustments of his/her movement help the computer-based system to ‘recognise’ the dancer (a fully actualised movement is necessary for software detection), usually by accentuating extremities of the body or a displacement of the whole body across space. Criticising the way interactive media ‘map’ gesture, Manning argues that these technologies compel the dancer to learn how to activate the interactive system most effectively through specific movements. As a result, the software determines the choreography that qualitatively confines what a body can do even as it accentuates what the technology can do. Oberzanek, too, explains that choreography created with interactive media is usually not challenging for the dancers - that is in terms of dance technique the dancers are not pushed to their limits. Hence, performances created with interactive media require dancers to lower their level of

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______________________________________________________________ technical virtuosity. In the context of Oberzanek’s piece, Glow (2006), the choreography no longer aims to illustrate the technical virtuosity of the dancer, but how the movement of the human body may ‘dance’ together with the movement of visuals and sound provided by the software and the computer. 39 Hence, working with interactive media within certain choreographies may require the dancers, and also the choreographer, to give up a certain amount of dance-based virtuosity in order to achieve a ‘smooth’ collaboration with technologies. Moreover, dancing with technology may give the dancer the feeling of inferiority in comparison to the ‘virtuosity’ of the technology. Lucia Tong, dancer of Troika Ranch, one of the first dance companies to work with interactive media, describes her experiences after dancing in 16 [R]evolutions 40 by Troika Ranch (2006): You know the crucial scene where I have a solo on stage and I create all those patterns on the backdrop…That scene has always made me feel weird … I felt inferior to the technology because I knew that people would be expecting to see spectacular and beautiful (technology-based) results, they were not really interested in seeing me. 41 This and other restrictions listed above, may create the impression that technology is dominating physical embodied movement. It raises questions concerning the contribution of digital technologies to the choreography and dramaturgy of performances. Moreover, it initiates questions concerning the physical body’s current and future status in dance and generates anxieties about the ‘disembodiment of dance.’ Klaus Obermaier, however, situates himself on the other side of the scale. Rejecting the opinions that perceive the integration of dance and technologies as restricting, Obermaier argues that limitations in art are necessary in order to gain alternate and creative insights concerning the primary sources one has to work with. In this respect, limitations represent an artistic strategy: Without any restrictions there would not be art at all. Each stage setting/set-up gives you limitations AND creates new possibilities. That is why they are there! Even a second, third … performer is a restriction for the first one. 42

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______________________________________________________________ Other choreographers, such as Robert Wechsler, who work with interactive systems, suggest that the partner-work between dancers and interactive technologies opens up new dimensions of the body that were previously unknown, for example by creating a body that is ‘sensually emergent, alive with image and sound.’ 43 In addition, this pro-technology group of artists counterbalance the feared disembodiment of dance by pointing out that designing interactive systems requires ‘a whole-body interface between human being and technology’ that involves all of the body’s senses, and ‘is regarded as sensual since it appears to open up the possibility of letting the whole body share in its technological surrounding.’ 44 From this perspective, limitations caused by technological shortcomings may be inspiring when used creatively. Furthermore, engaging with digital technologies is not a threat to its embodiment or the kinesthetic sensuality and experience of the physical body in dance. Thus, the latter perspective suggests the possibility of reinterpretation of the body through its engagement with digital environments and virtual imagery where a continuous interchange between bodies and technologies allows presence and pattern to interact. At the same time, it implies a re-incorporation of technologies; that is a confrontation as well as a dialogue between the incorporeal and corporeal. In order to illustrate this reincorporation and re-negotiation of corporeality within a theoretical framework and contribute to counterbalance notions of disembodiment of dance, I will now examine the notion of bodies-in-code and hyper-reflection in dance and their primary source: phenomenology. 6.

Re-Negotiating the Body, Re-incorporating Technology Phenomenology is a philosophical and existential approach to life, body, politics, and meaning, obtained in the 20th century. There are several approaches to phenomenology; however, within a dance context, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s method that celebrates the phenomenal body as our primary access to the world best suits for conceptualising the body and its interaction with technologies in the arts and in everyday life. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology has to do with descriptions of man and the world, not as objectively constituted, but as subjectively established through the lived experience of a phenomenon. It concerns itself with the ‘pre-reflective’ mode of being-in-the-world, which is ‘the prior ground or condition of both the subjective and the objective.’ 45 This beingin-the-world precedes conceptual engagement because the world is always already there before reflection begins. Subsequently, Merleau-Ponty counterbalances the Cartesian self-knowing subject as unaffected by external reality.

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______________________________________________________________ For him, subjects already exist in the world and they become aware of themselves through interaction with their physical environment and with other subjects. Moreover, the dynamic journey between the two levels of consciousness is empowering, illustrating ‘our power to re-enter ourselves,’ which is measured by ‘the power to leave ourselves.’ 46 The pre-reflective is not a stable state but a fleeting condition that ‘appears and vanishes, in a constant sliding exchange with reflection.’ 47 As it is impossible to exclude the pre-reflective from our cognitive processes, it is also unreasonable to expect to capture it fully. Hence, the pre-reflective mode of being-in-the-world is not a threat to reflection; rather it signals a vivid and circular exchange between the two modes of reflection, which Merleau-Ponty defines as ‘hyper-reflection.’ Hyper-reflection connects the rational with the non-rational, and thought with sensation; indeed, the paradoxical relationship between the pre-reflective and the reflective is fundamental to knowledge. It is through their exchange that one reaches beyond oneself conceptually, perceptually, and existentially. Kozel applies the notion of hyper-reflection to dance, linking it to the dancer’s different levels of consciousness or corporeal knowledge. For her, dance consists of a dynamic engagement between the dancer’s conscious (subjective) control over her body and letting go of the limits of this control in order to be moved by people, things or the world. She connects this simultaneous mode of giving and taking of control to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘reversibility,’ which refers to the body’s simultaneous ability to see and be seen, to touch and be touched, and the capacity to be both object and subject through the act of seeing or touching. Accordingly, she labels hyper-reflection in dance as the ‘dancing-danced.’ 48 Dancing implies the reflective process of the ‘dancing-danced,’ in which the focus lies on cognitive effort. The cognitive process that takes place when learning a new dance technique and coordination is a simple example of the reflective dimension in dance. But on the pre-reflective (pre-conscious) level, the dancer is also ‘danced’ by the force s/he sets into motion. In other words, the dancer avoids focusing primarily on coordination, but rather concentrates on the ‘flow’ of dance or the sensation of bodily movement in time and space. It is on this level that ‘surprising things’ occur concerning dynamics and form of physical movement and it this level that the choreographers, Levi and Jasko, aim for. However, this does not place the prereflective in a superior position to the reflective. On the contrary, the two modes of reflection and the exchange between them are complementary since one has to first learn complex physical coordination for it to become

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______________________________________________________________ embodied knowledge. Moreover, one would get injured if not returning back to the conscious control over the body. The notion of the dancing-danced is part of the everyday routine of any dance class. When learning a new combination the dancer is required to be very conscious of his/her body, but after the learning process, s/he is encouraged to ‘let consciousness go’ in order to allow the force of dance to take over, and to achieve unpredicted movement dynamics. Choreographer Keren Levi illustrates this point. When teaching a new dance combination, she recommends the dancers to ‘go through the dance phrase…the first time slow for the mind, and the second time fast for the body.’ 49 In the former, the dancer ‘marks’ the phrase (movements emphasising cognitive/reflective, rather than physical processes of assimilation), while in the latter, s/he ‘does’ the movements ‘full-out,’ meaning that the dancer actualises movements according to the necessary physical dynamics. Virtual imagery created in real-time by digital interactive technologies as response to the movement of the performer offer possibilities for enhancing the process of hyper-reflection in dance, or the shift between the conscious and pre-conscious modes of the dancer. Furthermore, these images refer to a specific mode of embodiment as Mark Hansen suggests in his book Bodies in Code, where he takes Merleau-Ponty’s stance as his starting point and updates it to the domain of new media art. 50 The basis of Hansen’s argument distinguishes two different ‘modes’ of the human body: the representational and the motile. The former is characterised by a predominantly visual understanding of the body as an external object, which Hansen labels as the ‘body image’. He calls the latter the ‘body schema,’ describing it as the embodied potential that links proprioception with perception and motility. The body schema, then, is located in the ‘internal’ domain that generates from: [T]he operational perspective of the embodied organism. As such, it encompasses an ‘originary’ pre-objective process of world constitution that, by giving priority to the internal perspective of the organism, paradoxically includes what is outside its body proper, what lies in the interactional domain specified by the embodied enaction. 51 Thus, the body image refers to the representational domain, while the body schema refers to the body ‘from within,’ it is that which comes before the body image and makes the body image possible in the first place.

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______________________________________________________________ According to Hansen’s argument, the body image, then, is nothing but an embodied extension or externalised form of the body schema. Subsequently, Hansen establishes an embodied connection between the physical body and the virtual images created in interactive environments. In his view, the real-time images provided by the interactive system allows the audience to recognise the images (either as literal body images or abstract imagery) as originating from their body’s spatial, temporal, and dynamic movements. 52 Taking this line of thought one step further, Hansen claims that in technically well-established interactive environments, the role of representation as well as the difference between the body image (selfrepresentation) and schema (enactive spatialisation) disappears. In such environments: [W]hatever experience one has of one’s body proper does not take the form of a representational image, but rather emerges through the representative function of the data of body movement, the way these data represent one’s body. 53 Thus, the body schema forms a medium through which the actual body ‘exfoliates’ between itself and the space. In the case of staged performances, the body schema dissolves as the dancing body transfers its physical force between itself and the boundaries of the interactive environment created for the performance. In such digital environments equipped with sophisticated technologies, such as motion tracking, the exterior images created in ‘real-time’ by bodily movement are traces of movement dynamics emerging from the body - even when they take the form of abstract images. In this sense, the images created via the onstage dancer’s direct physical influence on the technical interactive system reflect what I call ‘inside-outside-inside:’ visual - yet embodied - aesthetics. The notion of the ‘inside-outside-inside’ reflects the path that the images take, based on Hansen’s understanding of the body image and body schema as well as the dissolution between the two. Seen from this perspective, ‘inside’ refers to the images that originate from physical movement (from the ‘body within’), after which they are projected on a screen, or ‘outside’ on an external space. Nevertheless, the virtual images echo the dancer’s embodied movement qualities, even though they exclude the physical force of movement and are projected ‘outside’ the body’s boundaries. The external images, thus, fold back to the ‘inside’ or to the embodied qualities of the dancing body, and illustrate auto-affective self images. It is in this respect that the dancer

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______________________________________________________________ recognises his/her dancing self through the external images - even when the visual imagery portrays abstract patterns that do not coincide with a ‘literal’ image of a human body. The physical body is, thus, deterritorialised via engagements with technics and is reterritorialised in the form of virtual imagery. In this process, the dancer’s understanding of his/her physical body is not hindered, despite the fact that her movements are transformed into abstract virtual imagery (and/or sound). This initiates, in Hansen’s view, the understanding of a ‘body-in-code,’ which is a body: [S]ubmitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization - a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction to technics. 54 In contrast to the claim that technology will lead to the disembodiment of dance, experiencing a technical deterritorialisation through interactions with digital imagery may work to intensify the embodied sensation of dancing in a number of ways. Firstly, as the dancer perceives his/her body as the origin of the digital images created and projected in real time,’ these images may trigger a reflexive and auto-affective experience of the dancer’s ‘dancing state.’ Secondly, by observing her mapped and displayed imagery, the dancer’s consciousness of her movement dynamics increases because the dancer acknowledges that the images mirror her inner bodily sensations rather than merely represent the form of her movements. In this way, as the dancer ‘dances,’ she is also ‘danced’ by the intensity and sensuality of her movements externalised as images on screen. Put differently, the projected images perceived as body schema that originate from inner bodily sensations, reveal glimpses of the dancer’s pre-reflective mode in dance. They create a passage between the dancer’s reflective and pre-reflective mode of being-in-the-world that allows the dancer’s bodily awareness to slip from one mode to the other. This is especially useful in performances where the dancer is required to improvise with the technological system that is programmed to react in random mode (meaning the output of the computer may vary within a range of different effects) because it allows the dancer to experience and observe the visual real-time aesthetics as she generates them. In order to concretise the hyper-reflection and the technical deterritorialisation in dance discussed above, the next section elaborates on the case study Apparition, while highlighting certain prominent shifts in the

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______________________________________________________________ cultural practice of contemporary dance concerning the creation process of choreography.

7.

Case Study: Apparition Apparition 55 (2004) is an artwork based on moving body projections made possible by a sophisticated motion tracking and image generating system that display real-time computer generated responses to the impulses given by the dancer, in the form of abstract lines, shapes, and text. An example of digital dance, Apparition is a confrontation between corporeal and incorporeal forms, the major persistent theme of the piece being largely realised through the collaboration between the ‘live’ input of the dancers and the ‘live’ responses of the technological system. As one of the leading contemporary media artists and composers in Europe, Klaus Obermaier’s aim in Apparition is to develop the aesthetics of body projections that are based on interactive technologies, using digital media software to generate the video content in real-time in order to liberate the performer from the determination of set choreography. Accordingly, the starting point of Apparition is based on exploring the questions: What is choreography like when your partner is software? When virtual and real images share the same space? When everything moving onstage is independent and interactive at the same time? And (when) any form, dancing or still, can be transformed into a kinetic projection surface? 56 The answers to these questions reveal that interactive media expand certain existing cultural practices of dance while leaving others intact. Interactive media complicate the notion of ‘author’ and ‘identity’ of the artwork because engaging with these digital media requires choreographers to share a considerable amount of their authority with the performer and the programmer. This way of working differs from the still resonating 19th century notion, in which the creator’s scratches on paper represent some kind of unchangeable prophetic gift from a deity. 57 Obermaier has collaborated with the media engineers and designers of the Ars Electronica Futurelab and the DAMPF_lab (a European joint performing arts and technologies research project) with respect to the technical system for this piece. Apparition is centred on a camera-based motion tracking system that uses complex computer vision algorithms to

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______________________________________________________________ extract the performer’s moving outline from the background. In this way, the system constantly updates information for qualitative calculations of certain motion dynamics. The data derived from these calculations generates realtime visuals, projected back onto the body and/or as large-scale background projections that react to the performers’ movements. The choreography was created by the dancers, which required extensive rehearsals with the technology in order to get acquainted with the logic, strengths, and weaknesses of their technological dance partner. This collaboration between technicians and artists creates a unique performance environment that is activated by the human body and ‘lives only when a body is living within them, without movement they are silent and dark and lifeless.’ 58 Two well-known contemporary examples of ‘responsive spaces’ applied to the context of performance are the ‘Intelligent Stage’ (Arizona State University, The Institute for Studies in the Arts), and ‘åRSpace’ (University of Århus, Center for Advanced Visualization and Interaction). 59 In these ‘responsive environments,’ all physical actions taking place onstage can be sensed by the computer, which marks the difference between a ‘traditional stage’ and an ‘interactive stage.’ In the latter, the theater becomes an ‘intelligent’ space that transforms movements within its borders into potential data to be processed and interpreted by the computer as image and sound. In Apparition, for example, space becomes the: [M]aterialization of an overall immersive kinetic space, a virtual architecture that can be simultaneously fluid and rigid, that can expand and contract, ripple, bend and distort in response to … the movement of the performers. 60 In other words, the theatre becomes a ‘hyper-sensitive’ space where the images created by physical movement are nothing but the externalisation of the physical body’s intensity, sensuality, and velocity. The details of the visual images are not imposed on the dance; instead they originate from the body and constitute the materialisation of the body schema in the form of exterior images. It illustrates how the body functions as a body-in-code, how it deterritorialises through engaging with technologies. Creating the performance ‘environment’ emphasises the process of experimentation rather than the end result. This transforms the aesthetics of interactive performances into an ‘aesthetics of process’ and the performance into sequences or ‘potential concepts’ to be activated differently in each performance. 61 In other words, these performances are never ‘settled’ or ‘finished.’ What is created is a rehearsed, yet to a certain degree unpredictable

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______________________________________________________________ performance that comes to ‘life’ through the movement of the dancers and the reactions of interactive technologies. In addition, depending on how the system is programmed, the same movement by the dancer may trigger different reactions from the computer each time, which demands that the dancer remains alert to the computer’s reactions throughout the entire presentation of the choreography. The specific way Apparition integrates interactive media enhances the hyper-reflectivity of dance as it is based on the tension between the unpredictability of the technology and the dancer’s responsibility to create a visually and physically interesting performance developing in real-time. In Apparition, the dancer ‘dances’ but is also ‘danced’ by the reactions of the digital system as the exterior images inform the dancer of her movement variation and dynamics, body level, and location in space. The dance is shaped from within the pre-reflective mode of the dancer and from the images appearing in the external space that determine the (visual) aesthetics of the performance whilst also embodying the traces of the dancer’s kinaesthetic intensity. The images remain embodied and reflexive, demonstrating the notion of ‘inside-outside-inside’ images that originates from the body only to fold back into it. In this sense, they generate auto-affective self-projections as well as a reflexive experience of dance through externalised digital images. Thus, virtual images created by the body in dance performances created with interactive media do not exist independently; rather they illustrate the empowering technical deterritorialisation of the body and also create a pathway between the dancer’s reflective and pre-reflective state of being-inthe-world. 8.

Conclusion The desire to counter-balance criticisms of disembodiment of the dancing body caused by the integration of digital technologies in performances marks the starting point of this chapter. By rejecting claims of disembodiment of dance, this chapter points out that the engagement between the dancing body and digital technologies functions as merger that creates a re-negotiation of bodily boundaries and a re-incorporation of technologies into the domain of the body, leading to new understandings of self-images. In addition, this text shows how the qualities inherent in dance help to interrogate the relationship between humans and digital technologies. It suggests positioning the artform of dance as a forerunner to explore the shifting frontiers of the human body through its increasing encounters with technologies. Subsequently, this chapter illustrates the dynamic and everchanging ‘nature’ of the art form of dance, showing that dance is a cultural

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______________________________________________________________ practice capable of adapting to the changes caused by digital technologies within our current social-cultural life.

Notes 1

J. Shreve, ‘Borg of the Dance’, in Wired, viewed on 3 June 2008, < http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/04/51957>. 2 R. Wechsler, ‘Computers and Art: A Dancer’s Perspective’. Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE, Vol.16, No. 3, Fall 1997, p. 8. 3 R. Povall, ‘A Little Technology is a Dangerous Thing’, in Moving History/Dancing Cultures, Dance History Reader, A. Dils and A. Cooper Albright (eds), Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn., 2001, p. 458. 4 For further reading on dance and digital technologies: S. Kozel, Closer. Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. MIT Press and Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2007; S. Dinkla and M. Leeker (eds), Dance and Technology. Moving towards Media Productions, Alexander Verlag, Berlin, 2002; S. Broadhurst and J. Machon (eds), Performance and Technology. Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity, Palgrave-MacMillan, New York, 2006. 5 S. Rubidge, ‘Action, Reaction, Interaction’, Dance Theatre Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2001, p. 39. 6 D. Saltz, ‘Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre’, Theatre Topics, Vol. 11, No. 2, September, 2001, p. 117. 7 According to Saltz (2001), digital media differ from interactive media on three levels. 1-random access to media segments: digital media offer us random access to any part of a media content rather than waiting for the desired segment to appear on screen or on tape. 2-an arbitrary link between trigger and output: there is no longer a need for ‘direct’ physical link between the media content and the input that triggers it as ‘computers can use any kind of input (keyboard, mouse, tactile sensor, motion detector, etc.) to trigger any kind of output (sounds, images, lights, etc).’ 3-media manipulation, interactive media allow writing programs that manipulate digital information based on the input of the performer or participant. This implies that a trigger need not have an invariable, one-to-one relation to the media that it produces. 8 M. Bernard, De la Création Choréographique, Centre national de la danse, Paris, 2001, p. 174. 9 K. Hayles, ‘Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments’, Configurations, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2002, pp. 297-320.

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E. Borst, ‘‘Cyborg Art’ as a Critical Sphere of Inquiry into Increasing Corporeal Human-Technology Merger’, in this volume. 11 S. P. Kozel, ‘Athikte’s Voice: Listening to the Voice of the Dancer in Paul Valéry’s “L’âme et la Danse”’, Dance Research Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring 1995, p. 7. 12 Bernard, p. 174. 13 Notes made during my participation in Peter Jasko’s contemporary dance class during 8-20 September 2008 at the Henny Juriens Dance Foundation in Amsterdam. 14 Notes made during my participation in Keren Levi’s contemporary dance class during 27-30 May 2008 at the Henny Juriens Dance Fundation in Amsterdam. 15 There are three types of motion capture technologies: optical, magnetic and exoskeleton. Motion-capture is created by an optical or magnetic process of inputting movement into a computer that records the movement as a result of sensors attached to certain parts of the ‘real’ dancer’s body. The moving body parts are recorded electronically and then converted into digital data that allow the movements to be manipulated and represented within a wide array of visual forms. 16 BIPED, Performance by Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley California, April 23rd 1999, . 17 Glow, a solo dance performance, Gideon Oberzanek, Chunky Move and Frieder Weiss, 2006, video recording available at: . 18 M. Lovejoy, Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age, Routledge, New York, 2004, pp. 1-10. 19 H. Bench, ‘Virtual Embodiment and the Materiality of Image’, in Extensions, Vol. 1, 2004, viewed on 26 February 2008, . 20 Ibid. 21 S. Dixon, Digital Performance. A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2007, p. x. 22 However, digital dance is by no means a standard term, but rather a loosely used term recognised by artists and practitioners that apply new media in their works. For further reading: S. Rubidge, ‘Dance Criticism in the Light of Digital Dance’, Keynote Paper presented at Dance Criticism and

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______________________________________________________________ Interdisciplinary Practice National Taiwan University of the Arts, Taipei Taiwan, 2004, . 23 Like digital dance, ‘performative installation’ is also not a standard term and it is used to refer to certain artworks in certain contexts. For further reading: S. Rubidge, ‘Towards an Understanding of Choreography and Performativity in Interactive Installations’, in Routledge Reader in Contemporary Choreography, J. Butterworth and L. Wildschut (eds), Routledge, London (in press). 24 Rubidge, ‘Dance Criticism in the Light of Digital Dance’, Keynote Paper presented at Dance Criticism and Interdisciplinary Practice National Taiwan University of the Arts, Taipei Taiwan, 2004, viewed on 28 June 2008, . 25 Trajets (2000) is an installation inspired by dance and visual choreography, . 26 Certain exceptions concerning the location of the performance exist. A performance may not always take place in a theatre but in a location built especially for the performance. However, the presentation of the performance in a non-theatrical location does not change the principle of the separation between the stage/performer’s space and an observing audience located in the audience space. Contours (1999-2000) created by the choreographer Susan Kozel and software programmer Kirk Woolford, is an example of this type of performance. Its dome-like stage was built especially for the performance that allowed the audience to position themselves in other ways than the frontal view offered in theatres. However, the alternate positioning of the audience maintained the division between the space of the audience and performer. 27 D.OT.N.A.N.A, interactive scenic dance device, Premiered 08/05/04 Centre G. Pompidou, Paris, France, . 28 More information available at: . 29 A. Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, Athlone Press, London, 2001, p. 14. 30 M. Morse, ‘The Poetics of Interactivity’, in Women, Art and Technology, J. Malloy, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2003, p. 17. 31 Saltz, pp. 118-119. 32 Rubidge, ‘Action, Reaction, Interaction’, p. 41. 33 Rubidge, ‘Dance Criticism in the Light of Digital Dance’, .

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Bench, ‘Virtual Embodiment and the Materiality of Image’, . 35 R. Wechsler, ‘Computers and Dance: Back to the Future’, Dance Research Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 4-10. 36 G. Oberzanek. Personal communication. Amsterdam, 25 August 2008. 37 Povall, pp. 456-457. 38 E. Manning, ‘Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body’, Fibreculture, Issue 9, 2006, viewed on 6 May 2008, . 39 Dance is, of course, not only about the exposure of technical virtuosity. ‘Post-modern’ dance grounded in the ‘60s for example, cherished everyday movements as essential working material for dance. Moreover, they invited (non-professional) audience to participate in the performance, rather than observe the event from their seats. Thus, relying on the technical skills of dancers is a choice made by the choreographer on the basis of his/her personal style and artistic vision. 40 Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, NYC, USA, 2006. Choreography and Direction: Dawn Stoppiello in collaboration with the performers - Robert Clark, Johanna Levy, Daniel Suominen, and Lucia Tong, . 41 L. Tong, Personal communication, Berlin, 21 August 2008. 42 K. Obermaier, Personal communication, 20 May 2007 and 23 May 2007. 43 Manning, op. cit., . 44 K. Evert, ‘Dance and Technology at the Turn of the Last and Present Centuries’, in Dance and Technology: Moving towards Media Productions, S. Dinkla and M. Leeker (eds), Alexander Verlag, Berlin, 2002, p. 44. 45 S. P. Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, MIT Press and Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2007, p. 16. 46 Merleau-Ponty quoted in Kozel, Closer. Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, p. 19. 47 Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, p. 19. 48 Ibid., pp. 36-37. 49 Notes made during my participation in Keren Levi’s contemporary dance class. 27-30 May 2008, Henny Juriens Dance Stichting in Amsterdam. 50 M. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, Routledge, New York, 2006. 51 Ibid., p. 39.

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Physical movement may also be linked to sound i.e., the body’s movements may be programmed to initiate sound. However, Hansen focuses only on images. 53 Hansen, p. 31. 54 Ibid., p. 20. 55 Klaus Obermaier and Ars Electronica, Futurelab, 2004, . 56 S. delaHunta, ‘Apparition’, viewed on 24 May 2008, . 57 Povall, ‘A Little Technology is a Dangerous Thing’, p. 458. 58 Ibid., p. 455. 59 R. Lovell, ‘A Blueprint for Using an Interactive Performance Space’, in Dance and Technology: Moving towards Media Productions, S. Dinkla and L. Martina (eds), Alexander Verlag, Berlin, 2002, p. 90. 60 S. delaHunta, ‘Apparition’, . 61 J. Birringer, ‘Interactive Dance, the Body and Internet’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2004, p. 168.

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______________________________________________________________ Dixon S., Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation. MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2007. Evert, K., ‘Dance and Technology at the Turn of the Last and Present Centuries’, in Dance and Technology: Moving towards Media Productions. S. Dinkla and M. Leeker (eds), Alexander Verlag, Berlin, 2002, pp. 30-56. Hansen, M., Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. Routledge, New York, 2006. Hayles, K., ‘Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments’. Configurations, Vol, 10. No. 2, Spring 2002, pp. 297-320. Kozel, P. S., ‘Athikte’s Voice: Listening to the Voice of the Dancer in Paul Valéry’s “L’âme et la Danse”. Dance Research Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp.16-24. —––, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. MIT Press and Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2007. Lovejoy, M. Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. Routledge: New York, 2004. Lovell, R., ‘A Blueprint for Using an Interactive Performance Space’, in Dance and Technology. Moving towards Media Productions. S. Dinkla and M. Leeker (eds), Alexander Verlag, Berlin, 2002, pp. 88-99. Manning, E., ‘Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body’. Fibreculture, Issue 9 - General Issue, 2006, viewed on 6 May 2008, . Morse, M., ‘The Poetics of Interactivity’, in Women, Art and Technology. J. Malloy (ed), MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2003, pp. 17-33. Povall, R., ‘A Little Technology is a Dangerous Thing’, in Moving History/Dancing Cultures. Dance History Reader. A. Dils and A. Cooper (eds), Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn., 2001, pp. 455-458.

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______________________________________________________________ Rubidge, S., ‘Action, Reaction, Interaction’. Dance Theatre Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2001, pp. 37-42. —––, ‘Dance Criticism in the Light of Digital Dance’. Keynote Paper presented at Dance Criticism and Interdisciplinary Practice National Taiwan University of the Arts, Taipei Taiwan, 2004, viewed on 28 June 2008, . Saltz, D., ‘Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre’. Theatre Topics, Vol. 11, No. 2, September, 2001, pp. 107-130. Shreve, J., ‘Borg of the Dance’. Wired, viewed on 3 June 2008, < http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/04/51957>. Wechsler, R., ‘Computers and Art: A Dancer’s Perspective’. Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 1997, pp. 7-14. —––, ‘Computers and Dance: Back to the Future’. Dance Research Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 4-10. Zeynep Gündüz, has studied classical ballet and modern dance and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and a member of ASCA’s Imagined Futures project, researching the collaboration of digital media technologies and contemporary dance. Her project is granted a Mosaic scholarship offered by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).