Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:18:35 -0500
From: thaddeus murawski <tmuraws1-AT-nycap.rr.com>
Subject: Virtualization/Subjective/Subjectivation 


Bill

I should have made myself clearer-shorthand jargon gets in the way. what
I meant by referring to Foucault and subjectivation is not the
subjective as: inner space of choice, personal preference, autonomous
preference—but what Foucault refers to by subjectivation as the process
by which and through which we are formed as subjects.
It is in reference to this formation process that I was referring to
Baudrillard's notions in Simulations—That the death of the real has made
the process of making us subjects a process that is even less grounded
than before (although the process never had objective grounds the death
of the real and the embrace of the virtual makes this process even less
grounded than before.) This makes identity (the site of the subjective)
more fluid, easier to throw off, easier to change—in fact identity
merely becomes a virtual identity and we loss touch with what the notion
of identity used to mean (as a site, even if imagined) of our
subjectivity.
So in a sense you are right that plugging into the virtual is making us
less subjective; more subject to power to constitute us (the process of
subjectivation in Foucault). I think we are really saying much the same
yet the dense theory jargon often does more to confuse communication
than to encourage it. It is almost as if derrida has invented these
terms just to further prove his point about differance.

Ted