From: "Mary Murphy and Eric Salstrand" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: Re: Community as a fiction Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 21:30:36 -0500 Steve, I hope we can explore this some more and perhaps others will jump in as well. Given the obvious, that the virtual community cannot simply be reduced to the Internet, what relationship does the virtual have with the imagined community? What are the differences between the two concepts? How in turn do they relate to the inoperative community of Nancy or the coming community of Agamben? In the attempt to expand a little on what I previously said, let me clarify a little more what I mean by the virtual. I am working primarily with Deleuze's conception here. As he writes in his book "Bergsonism: "The virtual...does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation." What is interesting to me about this book is that Deleuze directly discusses the relationship between fiction and community I referred to in my last post, but he does so in a much more negative fashion. He writes: "And while society makes itself obeyed, it is thanks to the story-telling function, which persuades the intelligence that it is in its interest to confirm the social obligation." In Deleuze's view for Bergson both intelligence and instinct result in a closed society and "only emotion differs in nature from both intelligence and instinct, from both intelligent individual egoism and quasi-instinctive social pressure." I would interpret this creative emotion of which Deleuze speaks as being related to the social imaginary in the positive sense of re-writing the story. Through art and this re-writing, a virtual space is opened in which the ordinary narratives of the ordinary story-telling function are dis-rupted, dis-placed and de-layed. This allows the movement from the virtual to the actual to occur and the reaction to this event in turn allows a new virtual to re-emerge in order to repeat the process. As Deleuze writes: "This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls. It leaps from one soul to another "every now and then" crossing closed deserts...and from soul to soul, it traces the design of an open society, a society of creators, where we pass from one genius to another, through the intermediary of disciples or spectators or hearers...Memory then appears as the coexistence of all the degrees of difference in this multiplicity, in this virtuality." Thus, the vital links in the community as a fiction are memory, the imaginary and creative emotion. Through these elements something novel occurs that breaks with the violence of tradition and the grim Law of the elders. eric
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005