The Symbolic and the Virtual Event

When, in May of 2007, "fandom exploded" online, the "event" seemed fixed and obvious to the journalists who covered the happenings: the owners of the blogging platform LiveJournal deleted some of its members' journals without notice or consent, causing thousands, if not millions of pages of creative works, conversations, and games to be lost to the ether of the Internet. Although not a politcal or state driven event, although little was physically at stake in the subjects' right to being, the situation that has since been termed "Strikethrough07" (or Strikethru07, or simply Strikethrough) raises several questions not only about the nature of subjectivity in online communities, but of the nature of the event as described by Alain Badiou when the event in question takes place in the symbolic and virtual realm. Specifically, Strikethrough07, when analyzed as an event, shows the difficulty of presentation and represenatation online, of subjectivity as described by Badiou, and of naming in the event.

What seems necessary here is to extend or perhaps amend our understanding of the symbolic--of the rhetorical--in Badiou. Kenneth Burke's description of a "situation", which is clearly different from Badiou's "event", may nonetheless be helpful. For this paper, we will examine the traces left by Strikethrough, the representative documents surround the unpresentable event itself. We hope that through a thorough examination of Badiou's "event," Burke's "situation" and Foucault's "ennunciative event" we can describe how events like Strikethrough are possible in virtual and symbolic spaces, and the consequences for all three ideas of an erruption of the established structure.