ANTH245-2007-11-19

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Blogs and|as Selves

Business

• Final papers -- please discuss
• Responses -- new plan

Recap

• Salam Pax and Second Life
  • What kind of community?
  • What kind of person?
• Lyotard and Manovich
  • These activities are a kind of databasing of the self
    • the representation of self-hood in new media
    • not merely passive -- since self *is* text to some degree [ASK--What is self?]
  • Posts on the network:
    • "A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent. One’s mobility in relation to these language game effects (language games, of course, are what this is all about) is tolerable, at least within certain limits (and the limits are vague); it is even solicited by regulatory mechanisms, and in particular by the self-adjustments the system undertakes in order to improve its performance. It may even be said that the system can and must encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own entropy, the novelty of an unexpected “move,” with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes."
  • And thwarting the language games ...
    • "We know today that the limits the institution imposes on potential language 'moves' are never established once and for all (even if they have been formally defined). Rather, the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without. Examples: Does the university have a place for language experiments (poetics)? Can you tell stories in a cabinet meeting? Advocate a cause in the barracks? The answers are clear: yes, if the university opens creative workshops; yes, if the cabinet works with prospective scenarios; yes, if the limits of the old institution are displaced. Reciprocally, it can be said that the boundaries only stabilize when they cease to be stakes in the game."

Segue

• Todays readings focus on the topics of community, identity and "vulgarity"
• These themes intersect with themes discussed earlier in the coruse
  • Manovich
  • Lyotard
  • Anderson

The Vulgar Spirit

• Blog as a "speech genre"
  • Private diary? Personal letters? Op Ed? News?
• The Vulgarity debate
  • High-brow vs. Low-brow blogging
• Hegemony
• Deep Play: "cultural sites where multiple levels of structure, explanation, and meaning, intersect and condense, including the cultural phantasmagoria that ground and structure the terrain on which reason, will, and language operate but cannot contain."