Daydreaming, cold fever and Earl Grey. A Rocker Stripper-apprentice likes to share his understanding of Bachelard.
09/29/2008
Lacan’s Divan
Well I have been a bit detached from SL and computers in general in the last few days, (we experienced a Family cold) so actually, there is not something really new to tell about incursions in Sl. Although I have to mention that I went to this a very strange nightclub and became part of a group called: Supreme Rockers (supposedly I have to learn how to become a Rocker Stripper, lol!). The group starts sending me emails like this one:
Group Notice From: Renzo Goodliffe
Hello Rockers, some of you may be a little frustrated by our "No sex in the club" rule, so to give you a place where to free your wildest instincts or just have cool hot fun, we are opening a FREE SEX CASTLE on our lands in association with the WITCH'S SHOP ! In that great new place near our club, you can freely use and test the great line of product of that Sex furniture’s maker! GRAND OPENING PARTY this Thursday at 3 AM SL TIME with a big special contest for the occasion, but you can already visit!
This notice has an attachment
The handy advice contained in the “No sex in the club” rule, made me wonder about the different idiosyncrasy, purposes, attitudes and overall aims of SL residents while wandering the “always on process of revelation” SL spaces. To such on-going revelation process, and to my possible new status as (future) Rocker Stripper (in training!) I would like to connect several ideas of this week’s reading:
• First: it comes to my mind the idea of places connected to (and engendered by) sociability, visibility and daydreaming (Bachelard?) which Tom Boellstorff deploys in Chapters 4 and 5. It is sociability what defines a place as such in virtual worlds; and the role of visibility (in both, literal and metaphorical sense) is crucial. According to a Boellstorff’s understanding of several authors (Thomas, Virilio, Weheliye) the “connection between identity and knowing …is problematized by the visual” (p. 92).
• Second: I would like to make a broader consideration around visualization and visibility, especially because in a previous reading (Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution) visualization and its transformative power in virtual communities are helping to profusely reveal the double nature of commodities: material and ideological, while, at the same time, contributing to the ’invisibilization‘ of labour. Consequently the bounds between labour and leisure time might be blurred in the virtual realm as a precondition of a new ethos in SL, concerning visibility, landowning building (but also owning and building different personalities) and community which in the context of SL are, all of these, are constitutive of a commodity economy, which has consequences in the (re) definition of persnohood and society.
• Third is the idea of the “house” not just as the convergence of time and space related activities, but as the quintessential status of “full” (so to speak) SL residency. Also the embodiment of different time/space/identities flickering stashes (A. Munster). So far what I have enjoyed the most within my forays in SL, is the prevalence of a certain very subjective, daydreaming feeling. To this point I would like to connect an always very appealing idea (to me) from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, according to him the house is one of the greatest integration powers to mankind, the place where thought, memory and dreams ‘stay, prevail’ through daydreaming’s binding principle of integration: “[…] the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitutes themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time” (Gaston Bachelard “The Poetics of Space, p.7).
The emphasis in daydreaming condition is relevant as allocating itself (through its own dynamic) the issues related to space, time, presence and co-presence signaled by Boellstorff, Ikegami, Messinger and Taylor (in this week’s reading). In my view these are fundamental issues to a discussion, not just of virtual worlds aesthetics, but also to a processes of personhood, agency, rapture and temporal discontinuities (space and time are not culturally constructed on the same basis in SL, Boellstorf (106)). All of these subjects merit the effort of a future line of survey within the super-structural order of virtual sociality.
• Fourth, Lacan’s aim by the moment would be to explore within SL diverse fashions of daydreaming as the evidence of co-presence and participative construction of parallel realities (as the ones mentioned in the analogy between SL and the Tokugawa aesthetic circles, in Ikegami’s article) the issue of ideology pervaded into virtuality and vice versa and the images of the Zapatista revolutionaries (mentioned in the previous reading of Hodge and Coronado) and their mediated strategic presence through the internet, to render visible, in a double metonymic playing, the masked face of them, the ‘invisible ones’, los sin rostro (them, without face) as accurately quoted in Mexican news and media in the early nineties. By the way I would like to show the class some few minutes of the Xantolo fiesta de muertos, just to corroborate Ikegami’s emphasis on aesthetic, carnavalesque (Bahtkin, Kristeva, etc.) and daydreaming powers as dynamic triggers in the construction of more horizontal or non-hierarchical spaces for sociality, wheter in actual or virtual worlds.
OK it’s time to get back to bed with a warm cup of Supreme Earl Grey and 2 caplets of Tylenol.
Lacan G./G. Toledo (Please note that this is a blog written in co-presence)
Lacan’s Divan
Well I have been a bit detached from SL and computers in general in the last few days, (we experienced a Family cold) so actually, there is not something really new to tell about incursions in Sl. Although I have to mention that I went to this a very strange nightclub and became part of a group called: Supreme Rockers (supposedly I have to learn how to become a Rocker Stripper, lol!). The group starts sending me emails like this one:
Group Notice From: Renzo Goodliffe
Hello Rockers, some of you may be a little frustrated by our "No sex in the club" rule, so to give you a place where to free your wildest instincts or just have cool hot fun, we are opening a FREE SEX CASTLE on our lands in association with the WITCH'S SHOP ! In that great new place near our club, you can freely use and test the great line of product of that Sex furniture’s maker! GRAND OPENING PARTY this Thursday at 3 AM SL TIME with a big special contest for the occasion, but you can already visit!
This notice has an attachment
The handy advice contained in the “No sex in the club” rule, made me wonder about the different idiosyncrasy, purposes, attitudes and overall aims of SL residents while wandering the “always on process of revelation” SL spaces. To such on-going revelation process, and to my possible new status as (future) Rocker Stripper (in training!) I would like to connect several ideas of this week’s reading:
• First: it comes to my mind the idea of places connected to (and engendered by) sociability, visibility and daydreaming (Bachelard?) which Tom Boellstorff deploys in Chapters 4 and 5. It is sociability what defines a place as such in virtual worlds; and the role of visibility (in both, literal and metaphorical sense) is crucial. According to a Boellstorff’s understanding of several authors (Thomas, Virilio, Weheliye) the “connection between identity and knowing …is problematized by the visual” (p. 92).
• Second: I would like to make a broader consideration around visualization and visibility, especially because in a previous reading (Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution) visualization and its transformative power in virtual communities are helping to profusely reveal the double nature of commodities: material and ideological, while, at the same time, contributing to the ’invisibilization‘ of labour. Consequently the bounds between labour and leisure time might be blurred in the virtual realm as a precondition of a new ethos in SL, concerning visibility, landowning building (but also owning and building different personalities) and community which in the context of SL are, all of these, are constitutive of a commodity economy, which has consequences in the (re) definition of persnohood and society.
• Third is the idea of the “house” not just as the convergence of time and space related activities, but as the quintessential status of “full” (so to speak) SL residency. Also the embodiment of different time/space/identities flickering stashes (A. Munster). So far what I have enjoyed the most within my forays in SL, is the prevalence of a certain very subjective, daydreaming feeling. To this point I would like to connect an always very appealing idea (to me) from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, according to him the house is one of the greatest integration powers to mankind, the place where thought, memory and dreams ‘stay, prevail’ through daydreaming’s binding principle of integration: “[…] the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitutes themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time” (Gaston Bachelard “The Poetics of Space, p.7).
The emphasis in daydreaming condition is relevant as allocating itself (through its own dynamic) the issues related to space, time, presence and co-presence signaled by Boellstorff, Ikegami, Messinger and Taylor (in this week’s reading). In my view these are fundamental issues to a discussion, not just of virtual worlds aesthetics, but also to a processes of personhood, agency, rapture and temporal discontinuities (space and time are not culturally constructed on the same basis in SL, Boellstorf (106)). All of these subjects merit the effort of a future line of survey within the super-structural order of virtual sociality.
• Fourth, Lacan’s aim by the moment would be to explore within SL diverse fashions of daydreaming as the evidence of co-presence and participative construction of parallel realities (as the ones mentioned in the analogy between SL and the Tokugawa aesthetic circles, in Ikegami’s article) the issue of ideology pervaded into virtuality and vice versa and the images of the Zapatista revolutionaries (mentioned in the previous reading of Hodge and Coronado) and their mediated strategic presence through the internet, to render visible, in a double metonymic playing, the masked face of them, the ‘invisible ones’, los sin rostro (them, without face) as accurately quoted in Mexican news and media in the early nineties. By the way I would like to show the class some few minutes of the Xantolo fiesta de muertos, just to corroborate Ikegami’s emphasis on aesthetic, carnavalesque (Bahtkin, Kristeva, etc.) and daydreaming powers as dynamic triggers in the construction of more horizontal or non-hierarchical spaces for sociality, wheter in actual or virtual worlds.
OK it’s time to get back to bed with a warm cup of Supreme Earl Grey and 2 caplets of Tylenol.
Lacan G./G. Toledo (Please note that this is a blog written in co-presence)
Comments