Fictionalization. Re-evaluation and/or Annihilation

Hypothesis:

In the lecture on Wednesday, Prof. Chun posed the question of what and how do media – and the theoretical accounts more or less associated with them (and with what, for want of a better word, I will call the “postmodern” world, even though I have come to realize how problematic the term “postmodern” is) do.

One approach to this question that I would like to explore in my post – particularly in light of the readings for the past two weeks – is the issue of the re-evaluation and/or annihilation (and/or possibly “convergence”?) of the categories of “the ethical”, “the political”,“the aesthetic” (even “the economic”, by implication) – traditional categories of “dividing” and understanding reality – that media and their theoretical (more or less) counterpart might induce and which might be consonant with the (yet incomplete, I would argue) triumph of postmodernism as “a world view” (Jencks, C. (1991) “The Postmodern Agenda” in Jenks C., ed. (1991) The Postmodern Reader, New York: St Martin’s Press). Suggestive of this phenomenon(/a) is, to some extent, McKenzie Wark's re-reading of Plato's allegory of the Cave and his apparent “upside-down” paradigm (relative to Plato's), according to which games are closer to pure Forms than reality – representation becomes the matrix of reality.

Specific points - “evidence” of a necessity to re-evaluate the categories under scrutiny:

- In his essay A Rape in Cyberspace, Dibbell points to a disturbance of “the ethical” (and not only) in our “late-modern “ world: “And perhaps most challengingly it asks us to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by a voodoo doll” (p.12). Should the same system of values in operation in “real” life – if, indeed, we agree with Jenkins that “We have learned to care as much about creatures of pigment as we care about images of real people”, an alternative “fictional” one, or no one at all be applied in the case of the “virtual rape”? A danger that I would particularly like to point to in relation to potential answers to this question is that the application of the un-altered category of the “ethical” to/in the fiction that is the cyberspace (without differentiating between “the fictional” and “the real”) might perhaps fictionalize the category – relocate it into the realm of representation (in the Platonic sense). At the same time, abolishing the good/evil mode of evaluation for fiction (the cyberspace, the digital), situating it (cyberspace) beyond good and evil, might undermine the status of this category for/in the “real” world. If the good/evil divide is not universally applicable, why should it be applied at all? So, it seems that neither option is a desirable solution (or a solution at all).This complex apparent aporia is, in my view, a paradoxical ethical dilemma concerning the re-evaluation of “the ethical” necessary in the contemporary world.

(And, yet, wouldn't it be great if all rapes happened in cyberspace?)

- Danah Boyd – in her Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life – puts forth the argument that the participation in public networks creates “good citizens”. The issue that I am interested in is the notion of “good citizen” in the media-dominated contemporary world. As Prof. Chun indicated, Boyd's argument operates on a Kantian and Habermasian account of the “good citizen” as the informed citizen, fully involved in information production and consumption. As the status of information itself is being called into question, however, I believe that the notion of “good citizen” also needs to be re-evaluated and redefined in order to remain relevant. Could Wark's “gamer” (ultimately a fictional identity) perhaps become the paradigm for the “good citizen” of the (post-?) postmodern world?

- Thirdly, I would like to briefly address the aesthetic status of games that Jenkins also engages with in his article (Games, the New Lively Art). In my view, an “official” acknowledgment of cinema as “the seventh art” is connected to an acceptance of the postmodern paradigm of fragmentation. But what would the acknowledgment of games as “the eighth art” entail?

Granting aesthetic value to games, I would argue, could mean the ultimate subjugation of “the aesthetic” to “the entertaining” – an inversion that is – in a sense – in the same line with Wark's reversal of Plato's (metaphysical) theory. This acknowledgment would perhaps also put into place a model of “impotent” inescapable participation (implying playing the game while at the same time being played by the game) as a norm for engaging with art.

A (provisional) conclusion:

Perhaps the media – “pure” representation (in the Platonic notion of the term) – actually relocates the above mentioned categories in or within the realm of representation. In other words, the media somehow fictionalizes these categories, with the result of a (necessary) radical re-evaluation and/or annihilation that, for the moment, remains generally not-explicitly-and-fully-engaged with (from a theoretical standpoint).

Attempting to assess the difference that MCM 0100 made in my mode of thinking, I would claim that the realization of this induced and required re-evaluation and/or annihilation is one of the most significant discoveries that I have made in this course.