Settling Accounts

On accounting

I've been a member of the internet-addicted community for some years now; it was March of 1996 that I got my first modem-enabled computer dialing up to speeds of 14.4K (!). I was hooked. It was like a drug; the coding, the chatrooms, the web searches that required a gentle hand and a clever mind. But online communities, the heart of the internet's popularity explosion, around since the WELL's inception (and conception) in 1984, were not really a part of my world; most were hosted by Prodigy and AOL and required fees to join. A few interfaces such as IRC created "channels" or chatrooms in which individuals could converge and ramble on about their lives, but IRC, unlike today's communities, was more fluid: users had multiple "nicks" and could change nicks at will, and you were never really sure about who you were talking to--I mean, sure, you could find out their IP address, the name of the server hosting the channel, their ping time, etc, but as for the person behind the nick, well, you could be anyone, including creepy voyeurs and pedophiles.

I don't remember my first "account" creation that gave me a stable internet presence. It might have been my hotmail, but definitely by the time I got my Yahoo! email, I had registered on several sites--a lot of them for casual games, a few on early blog-like sites. Today I have so many accounts, I can't account for them all. There's my credit card company account, my Papa Johns account, my Amazon.com account, Shockwave, various fan sites, facebook, delicious, my blog, my various emails and IM accounts, WebCT, job search engines, my MLA and PCA memberships, some more casual games sites, Bluffton Alumni...etc etc etc. There are accounts for sites that don't really account anything (such as Icanhascheezburger.com), and accounts that are attached to my bank accounts security sensitive accounts (like mypurdue).

Derrida says that postmodernism is marked by an "archive fever," a need to constantly count and account for (accompter) people, places, and things by rendering them into text--that permanent, substitution-vehicle that stands in for us long after we're gone. What does it meant to have an "account," then, but to re-iterate and re-cite one's own self-hood, to nominate yourself as part of a count, to ask to belong to a certain set? To call oneself into being through text, through the legitimating power of an email address--after all, most accounts require you to prove your identity or confirm your account by responding to an email sent by the automated program. Yes, I am real. Yes, I exist.

These "accounts" name us, they classify us as members, and they give us a place within a larger schema. They, not surprisingly, mirror many of the usually hidden aspects of language and governance, making them transparent. Who are you? When were you born (i.e. are you a legal adult)? What do you look like (in the case of avatars)? How can others identify you? Substitution upon substitution that makes us "present" online, that presents us online, that re-presents us to the world. The text and image stand in for us, they reserve our place among the counted.

Presence and presentation are, of course different. One can still create multiple accounts with the same site. One could change one's avatar to be older, younger, a different gender, blonde, fat, thin, elfin, wizard, troll, or sheep. Clever people have created MySpace pages for everyone from Hitler to Heidegger, Aristotle to Zola, and yes isn’t it cool how digital “presence” shows us that all identity is a performance. But for those less overtly ironic identities, those accounts we take seriously, the ones that are supposed to equate presence and presentation for operations in the “real” world--what does it say of us, this endless profiling, selecting, electing and editing of our selves into text, into image? Into something that will remain long after ourselves (thanks to the Internet archive project)? Does blogger.com really need to know my gender? My state of residence? My likes, dislikes, favorite quotes and movies?

Part of me gets frustrated with the multiple username/passwords I have to remember every day. Part of me wants to create a universal ID that allows me to log-in efficiently to every site or community I am a member of. Then the dystopian imagination kicks in, and I think of the Mark of the Beast, of Big Brother tracking my purchases, my involvement, my movements across cyberspace. Paranoia is another condition of postmodernity, and it is also a condition of a dystopian imagination.

For now, I suppose I’ll do like everyone else, and use the same two or three web identities for everything, the same password with variations, for everything. So if you see an unwiredmascot or a pandoratrue somewhere, it’s most likely me. It’s just easier to keep account of accounts this way.

The End of the World: Prelim studying

The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Introduction: Rabkin

"The modern popular literature of the end of the world continues humanity's permanent questioning of its place and its permanent quest for a reason to exist. We forever reimagine the pligrimage in and out of history, seeking the well at the world's end, to drink the knowledge the gods withheld from Adam" (vii). Rabkin connects the apocalyptic impulse in art to the existentialist quest--how, though, does the resulting art provide that knowledge, enact that quest, create that history for its readers? What do the books *do*, not what do they explore or explain. How do they work on their readers to either provide an answer or to provide an echoing feeling of nothingness?

"When the world ends, what really ends is not all of creation but--only--the world as we know it" (viii). And the "as we know it" includes, most importantly, all thsoe little acts of human creation--art, literature, the buildings of cities, the social hierarchies of communities. This is what we despair at in dystopian fictio: The loss of the humanities, the death of the liberal arts. For without these, we are absent from the universe; we might as well have not existed, if not for the trace of being left in our creations. Fahrenheit 451 is most explicit about this, in making each person a book and a book each person. And what of the dystopian books themselves? They fortell of their own destruction, they warn of the loss of their warnings. They stand between Us and their own destruction.

Ch 1: Gary K Wolfe. The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End

"As in most post-holocaust fiction, the 'end of the world' means the end of a way of life, a configuration of attitudes, perhaps a system of beliefs--but not the actual destruction of the planet or its population" (1). This, I think, is the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fictions--in dystopian fiction, the world has ended as we know it, but humans flourish (perhaps too much!). In post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the world's population is gone, humanity itself has disappeared not just in the attitudes, values, and beliefs we now hold, but in body as well.

The BSG effect: "Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrtative wtih a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimisitc, such a fantsy is very much in keeping with tradition of millenarian thought" (3). What is missing here is a close reading of a text that can show *how* the texts create desire, how they persuade, create identifications with readers, what they argue, what answers they provide. What is the role of revelation? What is the mechanism of that optimism, that hope? (Note: Optimism--opt= eye, to see. Theory. To envision. To make present symbolically).

What is the pleasure of the text for the READER?

"On the simple level of narrative action, the prospect of a depopulated world in which humanity is reduced to a more elemental struggle with nature provides a convenient arena [TOPOI???] for the sort of heroic action that is constrained in the corporate, technological world that we know" (4). Wolfe goes on to describe other benefits this topoi provides the *writer*, but does not discuss the pleasure(s) for the reader. Yes, we all enjoy a good heroic story with clear cut good and evil, a simple story of pure survival, but I think the dystopian texts are more narratively complex than that, when we examine them through Brooks' idea of the arabesque nature of plots. It's not just the plot that matters, but the story--not the events that occur, but how they're told--that matters. It's the "stylized" part of Burke's "strategic answers, stylized answers" that gives us the equipment for living, that persuades us that this equipment is the right equipment. In other words, the flashback, the revelation, the backstory, is more important than the subsequent events. BSG is interesting not because we want to see them reach earth, but because we are given a future without a past, and a story that slowly reveals that past, piece by piece, episode by episode.

Ch 4 W. Warren Wagar "Round Trips to Doomsday."

"With the exception of a few modern men of science, writes Mircea Eliade, 'humanity has never believed in a difinitive end of the universe'....Ends that lead to fresh beginnings and further ends appear regularly in science fiction, reflecting some of the most characteristic anxieties and ideological paradigms of late industrial culture" (73). Jameson echoes this connection to late capitalism in his Archaeologies of the Future--certainly our socio-economic situation contributes to our attitudes toward history (it's our terministic screen)--but literary texts emerge from more than just an economic position.

This chapter would be helpful to explore BSG: All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Ch 5 Brian Stableford "Man-made Catastrophes."

This chapter briefly addresses causality and links to Christian eschatology--I need to look at it further.

Ch. 6 W.W. Wagar "The Rebellion of Nature."

For comparing traditional literary natural apocalypses with Doctor Who's "Utopia"--what do both say about the nature of nature? Of history? Of our organizing of time? Of humanity's understanding of the infinite? Of Time?

Some thoughts on icons as memes

From an IM conversation with Lou...

Icons are a way of linking the idea of "meme" with "community" online. Icons, on Live Journal and for other online communities (and occasionally IM windows) were originally meant to be images of the user to attach to a community blog-to give a visual, social cue that users could link to the person posting. Over time, icons started skewing away from being representational of the users. Fans started started using screenshots of their favorite characters, they started framing and photoshopping them to fit with their (the community's) attitudes toward the fandom.

Some people excel at making them, so they get together to form a community for posting and sharing their icons. Other people steal or borrow, reference the users, and links are made between journals, between communities, between people.
What's interesting is when you see that icons are supposed to be representation of the user but instead are representations of the attitudes of the community. Icons have let us lose all possible touches iwth the physical body and individual and venture into communal space.

Icons are enthymematic--shorthand for situations and they generate narrative as well as mimetic desire.

Again, though, people wouldn't do this without communities in which to share them: check the old school fandoms of Kirk/Spock. People made the vids and fics for the conventions, for the 'zines, to mail to each other....not for their own enjoyment. And that's not even getting into RPG--a community built around people not being themselves.

Amy's 632 Paper: Writing Amy style

Topic: Utopian impulse and the Communitas/Scapegoating drive

Intro: Cheesy intro here. Thesis: While "Communitas" is a helpful concept, it may help us to include the idea of scapegoating when talking about ideal online communities.

Bridge: Girard's scapegoating and desire in "primitive" communities: Definition and justification

Main points:
1. Utopian impulse: The history of the Well/connection to counterculture
2. Connection of Utopia to Communitas (def of communitas, defs of Utopia)
3. Communitas and Scapegoating--Burke on textual scapegoating and symbolic action.

Paper to write...sometime...

Academics like to stake their claims on certain topics and arguments that they plan on working on in the future. These usually appear in conclusion sections of dissertations or books. Well, since I'm lightyears away from either of those, here is my claim on a topic that I think would go nicely at next year's ACA/PCA at the Hub in Boston.

{FullMetal Alchemist: Theorizing Disability and Subjectivity} is the intellectual property of Amy Lea Clemons, PhD Candidate at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. Touch it and I'll sue.

...not that anyone would have taken it before me...but...you never know.

I wish I could write it for Mike's class, but it has little to do with "Access" and more to do with social constructions of disability. After all, the only thing Ed and Al want to access is the Stone--they get information just fine because of Ed's military ranking.
Hmmmmmmm, says the theorist.

Oh what a tangled web we weave
actually it's not we who weave it
it's always already there
and it's deception is that it makes itself disappear
and convinces us we have the ability to unglue ourselves from it
(Foucault)

"enlightenment," ascendency, and Stargate discourse

Positivism, the belief that scientific reasoning will lead to reality, or truth. An ideology founded by and in the period we call the Enlightenment, positivism focuses on human progress through validated versions of science and technology, the teleology of which is infinitely in the future.

Mythologies: Narrative systems that seek to explore the nature of Nature, explain cause and effects, and prevent the breakdown of community (Rene Girard). Rituals do not emerge from mythology, but mythology from rituals; repeated actions meant to alleviate cultural tensions give way to stories that support those rituals. In Girard's formulation, mythology conceals the nature of ritual, which is the gratification of humanity's desire for violence, but Christianity, and the other four "enlightened" religions, reveal (apocalypse) the structure of ritual murder as a destruction of the Other and postponement of mimetic desire. In our post-Christian world, we no longer have the need to scapegoat and have no need to believe in mythologies that conceal the structures of culture. So says Girard.

Stargate: SG-1-- A strange blend of positivism, humanism, and mythology. Dead myths are revived for their misunderstood truth, "gods" are sublimated to aliens (the Other), and human progress (as technology and democracy) is touted as the revelation. There are tensions here, though. Mythology is no longer ridiculed for its primitive notions of gods and goddesses; by making the stories "real," the human relations the rituals and myths attempted to conceal remain concealed--Christianity becomes yet another myth involving aliens.

Whereas Girardian constructions of mythology present a hopeful future for humanity to recognize and thus correct our responses to the Other (human other), the narrative of Stargate presents mythology as yet another aspect of positivism, of human understanding, of Enlightenment. Furthermore, the "other" presented in in the series is problematical--nearly all of the characters from other planets are White English speaking peoples with mythologies stemming from a Western/Hellenic narrative.

This understanding of mythology provides other problematical discourses when we speak of "justice" --the early Daniel-centric episodes feature positivist, "enlightened" arguments for democracy and a sympathetic understanding of the "other;" later episodes (season 5), however, create a new mythology, a mythology of the show itself in its creation of "ascendant" beings, Daniel's own ascendance through his understanding of humanity and the universe, and the pre-ascendant, extent of bodily humanity (the end that postivism seeks to locate) "Lantians," who created humanity in this galaxy.

Why do we (at least a small portion of "we") need this new mythology? If Girard is correct, we should all be too Enlightened to fall back to mythologies--even mythologies that explain mythologies--because these stories are only ways to structure and justify human exclusion and murder of the Other. The shift in SG-1 that occured with the emergence of the "Ancients arc" discontinued the revelation of myth (A Girardian Move) that the first five seasons included. Daniel's increased militarization and his "fall" from ascendency have presented new arguments, new explications of familiar myths, and further proliferation of retrubutive justice.

To further think about: Trials and justice in SG-1, the scapegoat mechanism, rhetoric of anthropology available, arguments for positivism and progress, the Ori in relation to recent religious rhetoric (rhetoric which is definitely NOT "revealed" in the Girardian Christian sense), and the acts of "revelation" narrative naturally requires.