Oscillation and resonance
Posted on August 24, 2001 @ 12:07 in Research
I just re-read Julian Dibbell's speech My dinner with Catherine MacKinnon and I just had to grin, again. With humor and self relativation Dibbell tells the story of what happened when he ended up in front of a Yale Law School class (and dinner afterwards) together with MacKinnon, some time after he had published the influential article A Rape in Cyberspace. I'll just gloss over 99 percent of what's in those two articles and suppose that you're familiar with the Rape in Cyberspace article (because if you're not, you oughta haul your virtual butt out to ftp.game.org and read it now!) and just focus on a point of the speech that really struck me today.
Dibbell writes:
Now, what had Mr. Bungle done, exactly? Well, in a sense, not much. He had typed some words and caused them to be communicated to the understanding of others. And let me make it clear that no one present that night was so confused as to doubt that words were the only weapon Mr. Bungle had wielded. But they also had several additional things to say about what he'd done. They called it "uncivil," they called it "despicable," and lastly but most precisely they called it "virtual rape." And I say precisely because I think the phrase captures as well as any can the ambivalence with which Bungle's victims seemed to regard his actions -- the way their response seemed to oscillate irresolvably between outrage and mere annoyance, between a tone that equated his actions with real-life rape and a tone that recognized them as nothing of the sort. And I want to emphasize that oscillation, because I think that if you don't get it, you don't really get virtual rape at all.
Oscillation between what's real and what's virtual about "virtual reality" is a really nice way of capturing the back and forth experience of dwelling in a MUD or MOO, but I think that the idea is even broader applicable. If you think about gaming, or even just watching a movie or reading a book, those are not straightforward experiences in which the individual simply acts or absorbs what s/he is presented with in one clearly definable state of mind. Rather, the individual is continually switching between different frames of knowledge, different frames of experience in order to make sense of the situation on as many levels as possible. This maybe is what allows creative solutions to surface: making idiosyncratic, novel connections between different realms of knowledge and action. Observing a person watching a movie or reading a book however doesn't show this process explicitly. It is only with more interactive activities such as mudding, gaming, hacking, writing a novel or playing football that the outcomes of this creative process become visible. And oscillation between the realm of the (idiosyncratically) imaginable (and a MUD/MOO after all is the imaginable in a slightly more persistent, if still rather ephemeral form) and the everyday, common sense situation is probably a good way of thinking about it, because it captures the always-not-yet-finished, the-always-open-for-revision nature of the process.
Dibbell ends his speech with an expansion on the idea of constant oscillation and tries to make a little more sense of the nature of the MUD/MOO:
I think the MOO is a game, and I think it is also much more. I think of it, finally, as a kind of conceptual DMZ -- a permanently, radically liminal ground on which the real and the imagined meet on equal terms. I don't think this ground is an entirely new one, historically speaking. I think that it has always existed, as an abstraction, whenever humans have had the courage to comprehend the relationship between the real and the symbolic in its fullest complexity. But as a concretization of that abstract space -- and one that can be lived as well as comprehended -- I do believe VR is something new, and I believe very much, therefore, in its potential to bring a new level of sophistication to the debates that rage around the intersection of sex, violence, and representation.
I'd never before quite realized the extent to which this paragraph resonates (to use Rhonda Metraux's term) with the approach that I used in my own analysis of MUDs/MOOs. Again we have oscillation, this time between the different roles of the MUD/MOO, or maybe better between the different models the individual applies for understanding something like a MUD or MOO. The MOO is a game, Dibbell rightly says, but it is also much more. In addition I think it's even more than a conceptual DMZ or a liminal ground, but those are more fragmented, individual understandings. Interestingly enough Dibbell uses the idea of a "liminal ground." I use the idea of liminality, a state of 'being betwixt and between,' derived in my case from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, to make sense the way social/cultural rules apply or don't apply in a role-playing MOO. This state of liminality is indeed nothing new and although the MOO can be a tool for comprehending the relationship between the real and the symbolic, the world and the word, I think that implying that the MOO always and invariably functions like that is just a touch too much wishful thinking. In many respects the MOO is just a game, something that people do because they think it's fun and entertaining. But the MOO can function as a tool for experiencing that oscillation between real and symbolic and that might indeed, as Dibbell says, have a lot to do with the fact that the MOO is an inhabitable form of the symbolic. Unsworth also discusses the MOO as an inhabitable model in his article Living inside the (Operating) System and writes:
...the MOO--an inhabitable model of Unix --is then a third-order simulacrum of the world, in which information is not only a representation of labor, and a source of power, and a form of value, but is also quite literally the form that the species-being takes, "not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference."
But, and this is an important point in Unsworth's article, the MOO, this symbolical inhabitable model, is firmly grounded in in the social, cultural, historical and economical contexts that spawned it. The MOO is rooted in symbolical universe of the Unix filesystem, which in turn is rooted in the social, political, economical structures of AT&T's post-anti-trust Bell Labs and the emerging computer-mediated "fellowship" of Usenet. One of the most interesting results of my research on the performance of gender in a role-playing MOO is the importance the players place on somehow establishing the gender of the other players behind the characters they are interacting with. The MOO is a liminal ground where players can play and experiment with the different forms that the social body takes, because the MOO, in Turner's words, is not a place where there are no rules, but where the social rules are temporarily suspended. That the everyday social forms are suspended does not mean they don't apply, but that the player has control over how s/he applies or doesn't apply them. But I think it's not ultimately the fact that the player is "in between," in limen in the MOO that allows hir to reflect on those rules, but the fact that is a constant, and in the case of the role-playing MOO often a conscious back and forth between the realm of "virtual reality" and the realm of "reality." In absence of a physical body the players are looking for the Real Body, that is to say, the cultural fiction of an unambiguous archetypical male or female body. The fact that is often overlooked is that even in F2F, physical interaction one does not perceive an unmediated, absolute image of reality, but that the only thing we see in "reality" are the same socially, culturally mediated fictions of bodies. The MOO, in a Baudrillardian sense, is just another fantasy reality, another simulacrum hiding the fact that everyday reality already is a cultural fiction. But whereas Disneyworld anaesthetizes any sense of reflective oscillation (except Baudrillard's) the MOO seems to call it up more often... or maybe that's just because it's new... or because it's textual... do graphical MUDs/RPGs generate the same self-conscious ruminations or do they drown them out in Disneyesque eye and earcandy?
Dibbell ends his speech, delivered at the Virtue and Virtuality: A Conference on Gender, Law, and Cyberspace conference with these words:
So I would argue, in closing, that if the law is to have anything to say about VR at all, it would do best to resist its own tendency to reduce oscillation and conflict to unambiguous resolution and instead direct its efforts toward preserving VR as the haven of ambiguity that it is.
The recent surge of internet and digital content legislation and the increased wiretapping efforts might be understood as an effort to stem the dangerous thought that just like in VR the world is, quite literally, what we make it and if we were to decide that copyrights or the current governmental system don't work anymore, that would piss off quite a few people benefitting from it... and we can't have that, can we?
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