This page contains materials intended
to facilitate class discussion (excerpts from readings,
outlines of issues, links to resources, etc.). The
materials are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page is subject
to revision as the instructor finalizes preparation.
(Last revised
3/3/02
)
There are two ways to view these images of information
identity:
(1) One interpretation is that these are images
of the people who inhabit the new information
work as non-identities. Elements of this interpretation:
Computers are just calculating machines
Sherry
Turkle, "Who Am We?":
"As
recently as 10 to 15 years ago,
. . . The computer
had a clear intellectual identity
as a calculating machine. In an
introductory programming course
at Harvard University in 1978, one
professor introduced the computer
to the class by calling it a giant
calculator." (p. 237)
Computer users are "nerds"
and "geeks" (i.e., people with
non-existent or socially under-developed
identities)
Alternatively, computer users are themselves
machine-like. They wear sunglasses that
betray no identity or feeling. They are
all like Keanu Reeves playing like Arnold
Schwarzenegger as the "terminator."
In a word, they are "cool."
(2) The other interpretation is the one that
has been gaining ground in the past 10 or 15
years:
Once the computer became a machine of
media (i.e., communications) and
also a machine of work and power,
then it obviously became more than a calculating
machine.
The computer became a machine for making,
changing, and experiencing human identity.
These are images of a new kind of identity
in cyberspace.
What is Identity? — A
Primer in the Contemporary Debate About Identity
in the Humanities and Social Sciences
"Liberal individualism" in the Enlightenment
"age of reason" (contrast modern identity
and Freud)
Identity politics (contrast poststructuralist
notions of identity)
Postmodern identity. Influential theories:
French poststructuralism—e.g., Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari on "schizoanalysis"
and "deterritorialization
"Hybridity" theory in race,
gender, and postcolonial studies
Artificial-intelligence studies and the
"society of the mind" thesis (e.g.,
Marvin Minsky)
Cyborg theory:
Donna
Haraway, "A Manifesto for
Cyborgs"
"Irony
is about contradictions that do
not resolve into larger wholes,
even dialectically, about the tension
of holding incompatible things together
because both or all are necessary
and true. . . . By
the late twentieth century, . . .
we are all chimeras, theorized and
fabricated hybrids of machine and
organism; in short we are cyborgs."
(p. 28)
Hybridization of boundaries between
(1) human and animal, (2) human
and machine, (3) matter and pure
spirit (see pp. 29-31)
Cf., Bruno
Latour on technology in We
Have Never Been Modern
What is Identity? — The
Difference Computers Make
Sherry Turkle's psychological research into
the interactions of users with computers and
her "windows" of "identity"
metaphor (pp. 236-37, 242-43 in Trend)
The influential paradigm of the MUD
Julian Dibbell's 1993 article in the Village
Voice on "A Rape in Cyberspace"
The computer appears to make possible the implementation
of theories of postmodern identity.
Who are "you" in a MUD (or chatroom,
or Usenet group, or even e-mail listserv) where:
You have no necessary body
You have no necessary name
You have no necessary gender
You have no necessary race
You have no necessary age
You have no necessary social group with which
you are identified
Is there a "you" online at all, or
does making a "you" require reconstituting
a facsimile of the "RL" rules of gender,
race, age, etc. that anchors you as a "you"?
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen
R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1983) [pub. in French, 1972]
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1987)
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been
Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993)
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986)
Marvin Minsky and Harry Harrison, The
Turing Option (New York: Warner Books, 1992)
