From: Mark   Nunes <mnunes-AT-dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu>
Subject: Re: symbolic exchange and other things
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 15:35:15 -0400 (EDT)


> > Yes you might say there is a 4th order: the viral. [etc]

> A 4th order! Yes I suspected that he might be getting at something on 
> those lines. The loss of the physical body is already becomming evident 
> in cyberspace. With the ability to create our own form (ie. sex, gendre, 
> race, looks etc)--who needs a body?! A lethargic lumbering cumbersome 
> piece of equipment. I often ask myself: what do we have vested in the 
> real, moreover in actual things? This question I ask from the point of 
> view of post-colonial/race/cultural theory. And then somehow I manage to 
> convince myself that the loss of physicalities could be a good thing. But 
> in the end, I know I would miss them...
> 

The "who needs a body" seems a bit off track. The answer is "we do, but 
not one with any "real" materiality, apparently." The simulatory moment 
occurs not in the pure "cybergnosis" of abandoning the body, but in the 
dream of being able to create a fractal self: a simulatory presence that 
can endlessly repoduce itself on multiple screens. Baudrillard's analysis 
tracks the path of the noosphere (cf Teilhard de Chardin) from 
materiality to immateriality--> from embodied self to the projectile self 
that is mental model, but still playing at the game of entity, body. The 
desire for physical presence in a "space" that negates physical presence 
(cybersex, cyberdating, text-based virtual reality, chat _rooms_, etc) 
calls upon this third order.

About a fourth order: a viral self....I think I prefer fractal self (p5, 
Transparency of Evil) in that it calls to mind this infinite splitting of 
self. Whereas the simulatory presents an object already capable of 
multiple reproduction, the fractal says that we are not reproducing a 
"whole": instead, the whole is constantly falling into itself, revealing 
multiple, repeatable version of (the illusion of) the whole

...or something like that. More discussion?

Here's one  path I'd like to pursue: current feminist critique of 
"disembodied" cyberspace.

--mark