Lacan is looking for questions to his answers
Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life, Chapter 3.
In this chapter the author delves into methodological considerations at the time of conducting research within Second Life. In fact Boellstorff’s claim is precisely that he started research in SL , with “any specific topic in mind” (61) but a question of methodological nature: What can ethnography tell us about virtual worlds?
A good number of pages are devoted to that question and also to author’s legitimate claims on the polemic issue between actual world vs. virtual “contexts.” “To demand that ethnographic research always incorporate meeting residents in the actual world for “contexts” presumes that virtual worlds are not themselves contexts;” (61) says Boellstorff. The author then establish his position considering that actual world sociality cannot explain virtual world sociality, the latter maybe refer the actual world but it develops in its own terms, and is not just a derivative of the primer. The author’s goal in this sense is to demonstrate the existence of a “relatively enduring cultural logic” shared and common to the residents of SL.
This chapter in my view is of great importance as a model for heuristic and epistemic procedures in virtual environments, especially conducting academic research, which is labeled by Boellstorff as Virtual Anthropology. I will comment briefly upon two more ideas very interesting to me from this chapter:
• Participant Observation Defined by the author in line with anthropologists’ standard procedures, as the examination of ‘cultural objects’ (texts, dances, music, codes of law) but prioritizing the every day contexts in which people live. Considering the particular ‘context’ and conditions in which avatars (not persons) live in SL, some interesting findings are at the corner. I am thinking in Bourdieu’s method (habitus) in its virtual/digitalized transfer. This question is very important to my own digital aesthetic survey in SL, because Bourdieu talks about schemes of perception, conception and action.
• Cultural relativism, Ethics and the question of situated knowledge All of these, salient questions in this chapter, it seems to me that Boellstorff address them from a vantage point in terms of an ethnographer’s method, but also from theoretical foundation on digital aesthetics in which time, space, visibility and identity are not discrete entities, but part of a flux (or streaming). This point will connect with N. Katherine Hayles’ article Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environents I have mentioned before Anna Munster’s approach to this very question, in terms of flickering meanings and temporal/spatial condensation.
But I will address those topics in a broader way a bit further.
Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environents
I found this article extremely interesting and well documented in terms of (cutting edge) brain functioning research, there are not, possibly, a pair of concepts/dimensions more important in the analysis of virtual world, than those of body and embodiment. The author’s claim againts the split of body and mind, traditionally sustained as the paradigm of ‘scientific’ research, but then she also recognizes how difficult can be overcome our cultural habitus.
From y perspective, the three major points of this reading are:
• Bodymind, which is the concept the authors coins to refer the complex relationship between body (an abstract concept, culturally produced) and embodiment (the complex interactions between the conscious mind and the physiological structures, result of millennia of biological evolution) the author proposes a dynamic flux “from which both the body ad embodiment emerge” (298)
• Technologies and human brain co-evolve based on scientific reseach, cognitive sciences and (cognitive) tool’s design have demonstrated that embodied experiences change through interactions with information-rich environments, and these interactions “have the potential not only to condition, but actually to shape the central and peripheral nervous system … [T]he flexibility of the human neural system enables new synaptic connections to form in response to embodied interactions.” (300)
• Body and embodiment bridging as extensor emergent phenomena through which form an “unbroken field of transformation” says the author, tha for them constitute the emergent dynamic we call reality. Virtual reality art (it is worth note that Hayles’ outcome comes from analyzing and reflecting on 3 virtual reality artworks) can play a vital role in shaking the belief that our bodies and the world exist independent of relation. They (the artists) intend their art to enact engagements that make vividly real the fact that everything in our world including (or rather especially) the human mindbody, emerges from our relation with the ongoing flux.” (313)
These are the reasons why Hayles speaks about, distributed cognition and distributed agency as ’natural‘ features of the posthuman: not just a biological organism or a cyborg seamlessly (joined with machines says Hayles. (319)
I find an interesting aspect, that of consciousness for the posthuman, regarding identity and connecting also with one of Boellstorff’s points, as ceasing to be the seat of identity, becoming instead (according to K. Hayles) an epiphenomenon. “We do not exist in order to relate; rather, we relate I order that we may exist as fully realized human beings”, concludes enigmatically, N. Katherine Hayles. (320).
In my next entry I will talk about Speculations on a Marxist Theory of the Virtual Revolution by Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado and I will bring to discussion some parts of an essay written in march this year, for another course in which I mention a basic framework to underpin this subjects on mind, body, embodiment, digital flux and other basic aesthetics categorization based on Anna Munster and Sean Cubitt (note the link to his, in my blog) thought. Meanwhile it is time for my next foray in SL..
Lacan G./G. Toledo
In this chapter the author delves into methodological considerations at the time of conducting research within Second Life. In fact Boellstorff’s claim is precisely that he started research in SL , with “any specific topic in mind” (61) but a question of methodological nature: What can ethnography tell us about virtual worlds?
A good number of pages are devoted to that question and also to author’s legitimate claims on the polemic issue between actual world vs. virtual “contexts.” “To demand that ethnographic research always incorporate meeting residents in the actual world for “contexts” presumes that virtual worlds are not themselves contexts;” (61) says Boellstorff. The author then establish his position considering that actual world sociality cannot explain virtual world sociality, the latter maybe refer the actual world but it develops in its own terms, and is not just a derivative of the primer. The author’s goal in this sense is to demonstrate the existence of a “relatively enduring cultural logic” shared and common to the residents of SL.
This chapter in my view is of great importance as a model for heuristic and epistemic procedures in virtual environments, especially conducting academic research, which is labeled by Boellstorff as Virtual Anthropology. I will comment briefly upon two more ideas very interesting to me from this chapter:
• Participant Observation Defined by the author in line with anthropologists’ standard procedures, as the examination of ‘cultural objects’ (texts, dances, music, codes of law) but prioritizing the every day contexts in which people live. Considering the particular ‘context’ and conditions in which avatars (not persons) live in SL, some interesting findings are at the corner. I am thinking in Bourdieu’s method (habitus) in its virtual/digitalized transfer. This question is very important to my own digital aesthetic survey in SL, because Bourdieu talks about schemes of perception, conception and action.
• Cultural relativism, Ethics and the question of situated knowledge All of these, salient questions in this chapter, it seems to me that Boellstorff address them from a vantage point in terms of an ethnographer’s method, but also from theoretical foundation on digital aesthetics in which time, space, visibility and identity are not discrete entities, but part of a flux (or streaming). This point will connect with N. Katherine Hayles’ article Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environents I have mentioned before Anna Munster’s approach to this very question, in terms of flickering meanings and temporal/spatial condensation.
But I will address those topics in a broader way a bit further.
Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environents
I found this article extremely interesting and well documented in terms of (cutting edge) brain functioning research, there are not, possibly, a pair of concepts/dimensions more important in the analysis of virtual world, than those of body and embodiment. The author’s claim againts the split of body and mind, traditionally sustained as the paradigm of ‘scientific’ research, but then she also recognizes how difficult can be overcome our cultural habitus.
From y perspective, the three major points of this reading are:
• Bodymind, which is the concept the authors coins to refer the complex relationship between body (an abstract concept, culturally produced) and embodiment (the complex interactions between the conscious mind and the physiological structures, result of millennia of biological evolution) the author proposes a dynamic flux “from which both the body ad embodiment emerge” (298)
• Technologies and human brain co-evolve based on scientific reseach, cognitive sciences and (cognitive) tool’s design have demonstrated that embodied experiences change through interactions with information-rich environments, and these interactions “have the potential not only to condition, but actually to shape the central and peripheral nervous system … [T]he flexibility of the human neural system enables new synaptic connections to form in response to embodied interactions.” (300)
• Body and embodiment bridging as extensor emergent phenomena through which form an “unbroken field of transformation” says the author, tha for them constitute the emergent dynamic we call reality. Virtual reality art (it is worth note that Hayles’ outcome comes from analyzing and reflecting on 3 virtual reality artworks) can play a vital role in shaking the belief that our bodies and the world exist independent of relation. They (the artists) intend their art to enact engagements that make vividly real the fact that everything in our world including (or rather especially) the human mindbody, emerges from our relation with the ongoing flux.” (313)
These are the reasons why Hayles speaks about, distributed cognition and distributed agency as ’natural‘ features of the posthuman: not just a biological organism or a cyborg seamlessly (joined with machines says Hayles. (319)
I find an interesting aspect, that of consciousness for the posthuman, regarding identity and connecting also with one of Boellstorff’s points, as ceasing to be the seat of identity, becoming instead (according to K. Hayles) an epiphenomenon. “We do not exist in order to relate; rather, we relate I order that we may exist as fully realized human beings”, concludes enigmatically, N. Katherine Hayles. (320).
In my next entry I will talk about Speculations on a Marxist Theory of the Virtual Revolution by Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado and I will bring to discussion some parts of an essay written in march this year, for another course in which I mention a basic framework to underpin this subjects on mind, body, embodiment, digital flux and other basic aesthetics categorization based on Anna Munster and Sean Cubitt (note the link to his, in my blog) thought. Meanwhile it is time for my next foray in SL..
Lacan G./G. Toledo
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