deixis / recursivity / mirror stage / L70 shaman LFG

[I'll be posting this content as I compose and edit it.]

...I don’t consider myself to be generally suspicious of computers’ increasing colonization of our (whose?) space and time (mistaken suggestion of agency there), nor one immediately dismissive of marathon Warcraft raids nor obsessive electronic tinkering as unhealthful interests in something less than real. (The “unhealthful” charge seems most often connected to notions of being “unproductive,” anyway—unproductivity being the private end of public productivity, the scarce moments of healthful rest work buys.) At the same time, I am troubled by some of the ways Turkle makes her case for computers’ (a blurring definition) ability to pose certain questions; I don’t dispute that computers (and here, hear again: I’m impelled to make some caveat; I’m no longer sure what I mean by “computer”) pose the questions Turkle suggests, but I don’t think they are unique in doing so.

In “Challenging the “I,”” Turkle suggests that “it is almost impossible to express the “anti-ego” theory in language” because we have only egocentric signifiers to work with (like “I”). The quality of deixis challenges this reading, though—

deixis: n. The function of a deictic word, one whose referent is dependent on the context in which it is said or written. In the sentence I want him to come here now, the words I, here, him, and now are deictic because the determination of their referents depends on who says that sentence, and where, when, and of whom it is said.

—the "I" by which Turkle feels bound is just a pointer, as suited to gesturing toward a congress of vying subprograms as toward a unified subject. It floats in space (fig. 1). And intuition confirms this, despite Turkle's suggestion of the contrary. The "I" who wants the cookies squabbles with the "I" who fears the body will get fat. Other comments on the subject I've made already.

Again, I don't dispute that computer culture confronts us with these questions. But my initial, unleavened suspicion (which I suspect can be problematized) is that the reason Turkle presents such confrontations in such exceptionalist terms is because the computer reliance that begs these questions obscures the other sources that were begging them already; computer reliance, in other words, isn't so much the opening up of a new epistemological frontier as it is the closing of that frontier to provide the conditions for a simulation of its reopening.

For Lacan, the Mirror Stage names the period in an infant's psychological
development in which the child, attempting to compensate for its the fractured, chaotic nature of its uncoordinated body, reaches out to an imaginary whole self in the mirror. Something of this plays out with avatars, perhaps— level 60s laying waste online while the player’s body languishes outside —but I wonder if it’s not too unfaithful (or passé) to borrow the mirror stage as metaphor for something happening on a wider social scale.

I’m thinking here of E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis (basically, that “humans like life” and are psychologically healthier when surrounded by visible evidence of it— greenery, animals —or perhaps, too, though I’m not sure he says this, suggestions of the potential for it— city parks, SUV commercials) and studies concerning children with ADHD and the apparently therapeutic effects of the outdoors on their attention spans.

So I wonder how the mirror might figuratively corresponds to “society’s” attempt to compensate for the paucity of non-human life within urban centers with a mass production of machines that simulate life: mirror-images of busy animation, life, on which we’re dependent for healthy identity. In this case, given that the production of these mirrors has often entailed the destruction of biophillia’s former, biological objects, we’d be not only alienated from the biologically diverse environment that Willson alleges us to crave instinctually. Indeed, when we’re dependent only on our own self-referential products for definition, I’d expect us to be insulated from other things as well, by a material clutter made in our own image.

But I’m off to the airport, so cleaning this up will have to wait.