Ann Burlein
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Abstract
This paper explores how the practice of critical thinking in religious
studies is being re-shaped by the Internet. My jumping off point is
pedagogy: information technologies seem to embody world religions
for my students at the same time as their use makes it more difficult
for students to engage with issues of justice. Arguing that different
media facilitate different scenes of interpellation, I contend that
the web’s style of immersion through interactivity solicits a different
kind of citizen: one who assumes access to racialized/ethnicized others
as both a consumer right and as proof of technological liberation.
[1] Incorporating information technologies in the classroom has sharpened
for me a paradox long familiar to religious studies: while information
technologies embody world religions for my students, their
virtuality makes it more difficult (for my students at least)[1]
to engage with the dilemmas of justice involved in studying
“other peoples’ religions.”[2] My thesis is that this paradox
arises because using the Internet encourages[3] students to adopt a different subject
position vis-à-vis our object of study, one that works less by instantiating
the traditional subject/object distinctions on which modern critical
thinking depends in favour of positioning students as users immersed
in a net of virtual connections. As a result, incorporating multiple
media in the classroom entails re-envisioning what we mean by critical
thinking in ways adequate to the processes of subject formation in
cyberspace.
[2] Underlying this thesis is the post-structuralist insight that
the self is constituted through and in repeated language practices.
Following Althusser, theorists use the term interpellation
to indicate the counter-intuitive nature of such subject constitution
(1972). Rather than there being, first, a pre-existing subject who
then speaks, the concept of interpellation places primacy on the repeated
enunciations through and in which people come to recognize themselves
within a particular identity and thus come to occupy a particular
role in a wider social world. Yet unlike Althusser’s privileged example
of a cop calling “Hey, you!”, today such repeated enunciations include
mediated as well as face-to-face interactions. As Poster puts it,
“First printed pages, then broadcast media, and now networked computing
shift the scene in which the individual becomes and continues to practice
selfhood” (2001, 9).[4]
[3] Framing these various scenes of interpellation in terms of “first,
then, now” is not meant to suggest that these shifts are best understood
as a linear progression. Rather than familiar technologies being banished
by the advent of the new, these scenes overlay—and interact—with each
other in ways that inter-complicate their effects.[5] Even if a particular classroom does not itself
use a mix of print, video and Internet, students live in that mix:
their formation as subjects emerges in a space that juxtaposes and
overlays print, broadcast, and digital media. Thus before plunging
into the pedagogical paradoxes of digital media, I will briefly sketch
the dynamics of these other scenes of interpellation.
First. The Print Ego: Cognitive Interiority
[4] Just what do I mean by a subject formed through, and in complex
dependency on, writing and books? Poster invokes Rene Descartes: withdrawing
to his study, sitting by the fire in his dressing gown, and after
starting to write, discovering himself to be “a thinking thing”—and
as such, to be autonomous, set apart in essence from the world of
material objects (2001, 6, 120). This subject/object distinction is
not limited to philosophical idealism: Poster could easily have invoked
John Locke, whose image of the mind as a blank page on which sensory
impressions get imprinted seems modeled on the printing press.[6]
[5] As Locke’s image suggests, the development of print culture deepened
Western assumptions regarding a subject/object distinction. While
retaining the duration and stability characteristic of writing (as
opposed to the simultaneity and ephemerality characteristic of speech),
print extended its spatial reach and thereby “democratized” its form.
According to Poster, “The material character of print as disembodied
signs, stable on the page, open to visual reception, and generally
received in isolated circumstances all nurtured the growth of critical,
cognitive functions and a cultural identity priding itself on those
traits” (2001, 13). Books speak to “us” as this sort of modern subject.
Part of what we mean when asking students to “think critically” is
for them to adopt precisely this stance of distance vis-à-vis the
object of study. Rather than unquestioningly accepting a point of
view, we want them to stand back, scrutinize, and evaluate its claims.
In short, we require them to become a certain sort of critical subject
in the very act of asking: “Does this correspond with, or contradict,
what I know?” This subject is cognitive (mind vs. body/ subjective
vs. objective). Yet it is also political, linked as literacy was,
on the one hand, to the democratic citizen that developed in tandem
with the modern nation, and on the other hand, to the contracting
subject of the free labour—along with its specifically American dream
of class mobility.
[6] As this politico-economic dimension indicates, this critical
subject does not just concern “the life of the mind.” According to
Brian Massumi, “reading, however cerebral it may be, does not entirely
think out sensation…. A knitting of the brows or pursing of the lips
is a self-referential action. Its sensation is a turning in on itself
of the body’s activity, so that the action is not extended toward
an object but knots at its point of emergence: rises and subsides
into its own incipiency, in the same movement” (2002, 139). These
physical sensations of effort form the background against which thought
stands out as such. Such background sensations contribute toward the
formation of a perceptual imaginary that turns inward in reading,
generating an “imaginary” body.[7]
[7] For such sensations are never only physical. As Bakhtin argued,
they entail “a feeling of generating both meaning and evaluation,
that is, a feeling of moving and assuming a position as a whole human
being” (1990, 307). Such sensations constitute an ego: we imagine
the pleasures of being recognized as culturally intelligible and/or
we imagine the shame of being unable to compel such recognition (Butler
1990; Sedgwick 2003, 35-38, 97). To paraphrase Freud in a different
context, this ego is bodily (1989, 636-637): Sedgwick speaks eloquently
of “the kind of skin that sheer textual attention can weave around
a reading body: a noisy bus station or airplane can be excluded from
consciousness, an impossible ongoing scene refused, a dull classroom
monologue ignored” (2003, 114).[8]
[8] As part of the formation of print culture, then, along with the
modern subject-who-thinks there developed a theory of private space
and of the private body, a sense of interiority that is also a sense
of bodily ego—all forming part of both readerly and writerly subjectivity.
Poster elaborates: “. . . authors configure a strong bond between
the text and the self of the writer, a narcissistic, mirroring relation
as the text is fundamentally an expression of the author—his or her
style, mind, or feelings” (2001, 69). In his essay “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin called this a work’s
aura: As long as a work of art could not be easily reproduced, it
was surrounded by an “aura” that expressed the work’s unique and intense
bond with the artist (and was often imagined as the spiritual or creative
“genius” of the artist) (1969, 220-221). If one side of critical thinking
vis-à-vis print entails adopting a stance of distance from which to
evaluate an object, the “other” side of critical interpretation entails
learning the pleasures of a certain kind of intimacy: encountering
that aura, imagined as author’s deepest “self,” the imaginary body
of the author’s creative spiritual activity that is imprinted on the
page and to whose presence one could return again and again. In contrast,
my students often misunderstand “critical thinking” as tearing a text
down by finding its weakest points and logical holes. Teaching them
to read texts critically entails first teaching them to recognize
that the author has something to say from which they can learn: cognitive
interiority works best if one recognizes the author’s project (even
if one does not agree with it) thereby allowing oneself to encounter
and be changed by the author’s “aura.”
Then. Broadcast Media: The Unconscious Optics of Everyday Life
[9] Benjamin contended that this sensation of intimate conversation
with an author’s deepest self began to “decay” or “wither” with broadcast
technologies. In place of “the authority of the object” generated
and sustained by going to a museum to view a painting, in the case
of film (which was Benjamin’s paradigmatic example) one of an equivalent
set of copies “meet[s] the beholder or listener in his own particular
situation” (1969, 221). (A situation only enhanced by home video;
we need no longer go to a “theatre near you”). Benjamin described
this sensibility of mass consumption as “the desire of the contemporary
masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly…Every day the
urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at a very close range
by way of its likeness, or reproduction” (1969, 223).
[10] This “closeness” is not merely quantitative. While broadcast
media retain the subject/object distinction characteristic of print,
the quality of this distinction shifts: away from a relation of cognitive
interiority to relations of desire, away from foregrounding thought
to affect. As Poster puts it, the criteria for truth shift from asking
“What relation does this bear to what I know?” to “Am I entertained
and engaged? Does what I see hold my attention or encourage me to
switch channels?” (2001, 24). Much has been written on the tendency
of broadcast media to background their relation of representation
to the outside world in favour of foregrounding their relation to
themselves.[9] As a
result, broadcast media invite identification—be it with a star, a
product, or even a politician (Poster 2001, 15). Such binary distinctions
are not absolute. People learn things from TV or film; for many students,
knowledge of Vietnam or the Holocaust often comes via docudramas.
Yet such media teach in a different way by inciting a different kind
of reflection that works through movement—moving images, moving information,
moving people affectively. (Professors exploit this difference, for
example, when we use video to punctuate a point, to give students
a way to identify and thereby, hopefully, to remember).
[11] Rather than facilitating the leisured enjoyment of interior
space, broadcast media encourage a subjectivity that is formed and
sustained through movement and affect. As Benjamin wrote in 1935:
“The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the
spectator can abandon himself to his associations.... Duhamel, who
detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something
of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: ‘I can no longer
think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving
images.’ The spectator’s process of association in view of these images
is indeed interrupted by their sudden, constant change” (1996, 238).
Yet unlike Duhamel who finds in new media only the loss of familiar
forms of intimacy, Benjamin anticipates new possibilities for critique,
proclaiming the emergence of an “unconscious optics” of everyday life:
By close-ups of the things around us, by exploring commonplace
milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on
one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule
our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense
and unexpected field of action….The act of reaching for a lighter
or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes
on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with
our moods (1996, 235-7).
[12] Using broadcast media to analyze this unconscious optic
in the classroom can help students see how racism/ethnocentrism is
not primarily a matter of individual prejudice (which is a crucial
skill in a World Religions classroom).[10] The struggle in teaching about
Orientalism, for example, is the ease with which students distance
themselves from those early travelers and government officials who
“just did not know what we know now, who were caught in a web of imperialism
from which we are free: after all, isn't America fighting a war in
Iraq not for our territorial conquest but for their freedom?” This
distancing is a way of refusing to feel the lure of “knowledge-power”:
how Orientalism produced the colonized as other by representing it
as entirely knowable. Students can glimpse the everyday workings of
these unconscious optics, however, if we watch a video clip of a “foreign”
religious ritual (I used to mute the voice-over; I have since discovered
there is no need), for they catch themselves responding with the same
discursive moves as those travelers and government officials from
“way back then.” This works well when followed up with clips from
a film like Passage to India in which the characters/ camera
see Hindu temples through an Orientalizing lens, whose various dynamics
(including its eroticism) students can then see and discuss.
[13] That’s on a good day. For an unconscious optic is paradoxical
by definition. Who hasn’t watched students go “unconscious” when viewing
films or video in class? As a student said during her oral presentation
of her senior thesis, “Now we are going to take a break and watch
a video.” Her introduction made me smile for the way it dramatized
so perfectly exactly how students think about watching a video in
class, even though as a presenter this student was using the video
to make an argument. Part of what is entailed by critical thinking
vis-à-vis broadcast media, then, is working both with and against
the pull of this unconscious: becoming aware of the identifications
at work, and analyzing what these identifications reveal and what
they position us not to see.[11]
[14] To do this, I have found it helpful to use print: specifically,
an autobiographical essay by James Baldwin which begins, rather counter-intuitively,
with a series of images that associate Joan Crawford’s “straight,
narrow and lonely back” walking through the corridors of a moving
train with the heaving and swelling of the sea and the light that
moves on and beneath water. “I am about seven. I am with my mother,
or my aunt. The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance.” Baldwin goes
on to note that he does not remember the film and that in another
part of his mind, he “was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady.
Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored
woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford, was buying something.
She was so incredibly beautiful—she seemed to be wearing the sunlight,
rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one
hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—that, when she
paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her”
(1976, 3-4). As students puzzle over precisely what Baldwin saw, they
complicate their own reductionist discourse of “the power of the media”
(a discourse which they mistake for critique); while this discourse
correctly emphasizes the one-way nature of broadcast communication,
it wrongly obliterates the creative role of reader response.[12]
[15] The creativity of reader identifications, however, is necessary
but not sufficient for changing the one-way structure of broadcast
media. This hierarchical structure (and what it means for resistance)
is, arguably, what changes with the advent of digital media: mass
communication becomes two-way.[13] The following section will draw
on this admittedly brief sketch of subject formation as facilitated
first by print and then by broadcast media in order to explore more
fully how the two-way scene of digital subject formation is now changing
the nature of critique. In the process, we will come face to face
with the paradoxes of virtual embodiment to which I alluded at the
outset.
Now. Information Has No Aura: Digital Media and the Lure of Potentialization
A. Virtual Embodiment: A Changed Material Regime
[16] While digital media work by enhancing mobility in ways that
might be mistaken for merely extending the decay of authorial aura
and the concomitant invitation to identification analyzed by Benjamin,
they do not do so by opening another unconscious optic (much less
by facilitating an intimate bond of cognitive interiority with an
author). Instead, digital media propel us into a different material
regime, one with profound, and profoundly contested, implications
for embodiment. As is often noted, digital media use an arbitrary
code that assigns the various letters of the alphabet to a series
of zeros and ones, thereby transforming language into a simple binary
pattern capable of being expressed through “a minor physical trace
such as a pulse or electron” (Poster 2001, 82). While digital texts
are still material and thus subject to limitations of time and space,
their material constraints are those of electrons. The gain is easy
and exact reproduction, the ability to alter an entire text with a
single keystroke, highly efficient storage, and transmission of information
around the globe at the speed of light (Poster 2001, 80; Hayles 1999,
26).
[17] This gain entails, if not the loss of the old material regime,
at least its lessening. N. Katherine Hayles conceptualizes this as
a shift in how signification is understood: while using a computer
still involves a keyboard, the experience of hitting a key is no longer
the direct one of physically impressing a visible mark which gets
darker the harder you hit.[14]
Instead, she contends that the “computer restores a sense of word
as image—an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water”
(Hayles, 26). Poster, too, stresses that in analog media like a record
the grooves are cut by analogy with acoustic waves, so that the stylus
tracing those grooves reproduces the shape of the perceived sound.
In digital reproduction, however, the code that replaces sound with
zeros and ones is arbitrary; it preserves no relation, not even analogy,
with perceptual embodiment (2001, 79-80). While the listener or reader
is still processing information in analog mode (most of us remain
oblivious to the zeros and ones), insofar as our thought processes
must pass through a machinic assemblage that works directly on digital
code, using a computer entails entering into this mediated space.
[18] There is much debate about what it means to “enter cyberspace.”
Do we enter a space of “no relation” to embodiment in ways that leave
the body behind completely? Or does digital technology simply make
evident what psychoanalysis has argued all along: that the body is
constituted not purely organically but also psychically (through imaginary,
or arbitrary, relations)? My contention in this essay is that both
these interpretations, in their rush to “tidy up” the messiness of
the emerging scenes of digital communication, miss something crucial:
the complex sorts of subject constitution that can arise when language
is practiced through, and as, multiple media. In the space opened
by contemporary digital media, thought and sensation still co-emerge
(perhaps as Massumi’s furrowed brow and pursed lips, or as Sedgwick’s
“force-field” enabling students to shut out class by answering email),
but also in new kinds of imaginary relations and new forms of bodily
habit. Because this new digital subject is so nascent—given the developing
state of digital technology, much less of its cultural usage—it is
best glimpsed through contrast (just as Benjamin used painting to
think film).
[19] It was precisely the hope of exploiting this contrast that spurred
me to incorporate the web into my Intro to World Religions class.
Teaching Hinduism with a standard textbook, for example, had made
it painfully clear that a focus on history and texts, with rites of
passage thrown in, left students with a very strange picture of Hinduism.
I wanted to use the web to correct for the textual bias of traditional
religious studies. Thus as preface to reading an anthropological analysis
of puja (Fuller 1992), I required students to visit the “Online Guide
for Educators” developed by the Sackler gallery in conjunction with
its exhibit on puja (Ridley 1997).[15] Instead of my declaring that Hindu puja is
a multi-sensory ritual (and one that is especially intense visually)
students can have a “virtual experience” “for themselves.” Likewise
when we study Islam, instead of my claiming that the sacred truth
of the Quran is also and inseparably aesthetic (along with an article
explaining the same point), students combine their reading of the
Quran with various sites that feature calligraphy and chanting. Coupled
with sites that take them through the physical and verbal choreography
of Muslim prayer, students get to “experience for themselves” how
a religion lived through multi-dimensional practices helps Muslims
walk the straight path.
[20] Shifting the medium of access from books to the web facilitates
a change in how students relate to the material. Most noticeably,
this shift makes less available, or perhaps less desirable, the classic
move of assimilating other religions to Protestantism (“Oh, they have
Amitabha like we have Jesus”), much as scholars in the 1700s recognized
other peoples’ social formations as “religions” by fitting them into
the Protestant model (Baird 2000). This is because the web works less
by encouraging students to adopt a stance of critical distance through
asking “Does what I see correspond with what I know?” and more by
immersing them in the material. By soliciting students to enter into
what they “view” on screen, the web helps shift them out of the distancing
that can accompany traditional kinds of objectification.
[21] Students don’t talk in terms of objectification, of course.
In their paper analyzing the pros and cons of the different media
we use in class,[16]
students most often write that the web sites make what we study “easier
to imagine,” whereas books make everything seem “far away” simply
because it is “in a book” (even though they know it in fact isn’t:
many have visited a mosque within walking distance from campus). To
me, it seems that students are skilled at distancing themselves from
what they read. Rather than facilitating critical thinking, this form
of distancing hinders intimate engagement. The web, by contrast, seems
coded for them (at present at least and however naively) as immediate,
as a “real encounter.” Much like their experience with participation-observation,
this “reality effect” makes it harder for them to assume Protestantism
as a standard in ways that gloss over differences between a Pure Land
and the Christian heaven, for example, or Muslim understandings of
the Quran and Protestant notions of “the Word.” Instead of it just
being the professor’s picayune insistence that the academic study
of religion entails analyzing specific differences for each religion
(alongside the similarities students love to find), using the web
puts the onus for developing critique on students: “seeing and hearing
for themselves” helps students see the value of such analytical frameworks.
It’s as if even a limited “virtual experience” of the aesthetic nature
of the Quran’s truth, or the visuality of Buddhist bodhisattvas and
Hindu icons, gives them sufficient confidence to know what they know
and therefore frees them to be more open to recognizing what they
don’t know. The result can be (although not necessarily and certainly
not in every case) one in which they can consider where their understandings
of religion provide a window into another religion and where their
understandings create a blindspot that hinders their understanding.
[22] Yet shifting from “objectification” to “immersion” does not
entail un-learning Orientalist lenses. There is an obvious paradox
in using cyberspace to embody religion. While the web makes other
peoples’ religions “real,” its reality and embodiment are virtual.
In what sense, then, are students “seeing for themselves”? They relate
to the web as an “experience”—but of what kind? By its means they
are empowered—but to do what? I raise these questions not to champion
a more “authentic” embodiment (as if field work were not also immured
in problems of objectivity and illusions of authenticity), but to
pose the problem of virtual pedagogy. Insofar as the concept of interpellation
suggests that subjectivity emerges in the process of language practices,
then using digital media in the classroom entails more than putting
down one tool and taking up another. Changing the nature of our language
practices encourages a changed subject. Rendering this changed subject
“critical,” then, requires us to re-ask key questions of the discipline—especially
how to study others in ways that enable two-way dialogue. Digital
media “enframe” differently both what we ask as well as who we become
in the act of asking.[17]
[23] The different “we’s” that emerge within different media have
everything to do with the diverse methods, styles, and possibilities
of embodiment that each form of media facilitates: cognitive interiority,
identification, and/or immersion. Hayles observes that after she started
using a computer, she came to appreciate the reliability of a book’s
more solid presence in contrast to the “unexpected metamorphosis,
attenuation and dispersion” that characterize digital texts even at
the most basic level: when you open a book you know it will always
work—not so your computer, a website, or even the Internet (1999,
48). Hayles interprets this as more than uncertainty or insecurity;
she contends that digital texts are “flickering signifiers”: “When
a text presents itself as a constantly refreshed image rather than
as a durable inscription, transformations can occur that would be
unthinkable if matter or energy, rather than information patterns,
formed the primary basis of the systemic exchange. This textual fluidity,
which users learn in their body as they interact with the system,
implies that signifiers flicker rather than float” (1999, 30). Part
of how we habituate to flickering signifiers is through the computer’s
repeated solicitations to interactivity: from scrolling and hitting
an enter key, to that blinking cursor reminding us to do something
lest the text disappear to be replaced by our favourite screen saver.
Indeed, Hayles suggests that the difficulty students have in “entering
into” books might derive from missing these bodily actions, which
are as indispensable for their reading/thinking process as holding
a pen is for me when I read (much less that cup of coffee). In place
not only of the pleasures I take in physically possessing a book or
flipping back through the pages of what I wrote that day, but also
of the pleasures of interior intimacy that I seek when I read, digital
texts facilitate a different embodiment and therefore a different
pleasure: embedded in a computer file, such texts become visible “at
the whim of the reader” (Poster 2001, 92-3). It is this enhanced potential
for (inter)action that virtuality solicits as its pleasure and that
constitutes the space which is virtual embodiment.
[24] This enhanced potential for (inter)action on the part of the
user is controversial, for it challenges the legal and ethical norms
of property on which the “culture industry” is based. To take one
example, this summer a hijacked print of The Hulk circulated
on the Internet two weeks before the film’s premiere. Writes Frank
Rich for the New York Times: “An executive at one of the Hollywood
majors told me that there is simply no way now to reverse the mass
piracy of any and all material, audio or video, past or present, from
the moment it is available in pristine digital form like a CD or DVD.
… The question is: How do all those lovely entertainment seeking kids
weaned on “Harry Potter” grow up to become thieves? Surely they know
that stealing copyrighted songs and movies is akin to shoplifting
sweaters at the Gap….” (Rich 2003, 27). Seeking to re-frame this question,
Poster notes that 40% of business software applications installed
worldwide in 1997 were “stolen,” and concludes: “These startling statistics
reveal a willingness to violate legal and ethical norms that are essential
to the legitimacy of capitalism. Had Henry Ford’s products been stolen
at this rate in the 1920s, we would no doubt never have seen the advent
of the automobile industry” (2001, 43). Perhaps, then, it is not just
that students do not “know” that downloading music is theft, nor (in
the academic version of this problem) that they simply lack the critical
skills to evaluate the information they find on the web: it is also
that information has no aura. Rather than soliciting its user
to turn inward and bond with an author’s creative “genius,” electronic
materiality fosters a different bond: between human and machine.
[25] While the computer is often likened to a prosthesis, the bond
created when using a networked computer is not the same as the bond
required for using a mechanical prosthesis such as a pen. The latter
involves psychically investing the prosthesis until it becomes an
extension of one’s body (Grosz 1994, 79-85). There are some continuities:
using a mouse, for instance. Yet not only does the digital code sever
the tie that analog media preserve with embodiment, but the subject/object
distinction so dear to the modern subject, and so crucial for its
sense of inside and outside, is replaced with electronic relays whose
virtuality entails (what Poster analyzes as) underdetermination:
they become actual through user (inter)action. Yet as a result, the
enhanced potential for (inter)action that two-way communication enables
also involves changing the “subject”: “…virtual objects, through their
interfaces, open to the human subject in such a manner that the subject
is immersed within them and reconstituted as an element of the
object” (Poster 2001, 27; emphasis added). Inserted into a machinic
assemblage, we are called into being, not as Descartes’ “thinking
thing” nor as Locke’s blank page, but rather as users: we take up
an identity as a “node” operating as one point within a larger circuit
(Poster 2001, 16).
[26] This change in the “subject” indicates that (contrary to what
some suggest) while there are power-relations at work in information,
such relations discipline us differently from the early modern power-knowledge
regimes that Foucault analyzed in Discipline and Punish: “Good
handwriting, for example, presupposes a gymnastics—a whole routine
whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points
of the feet to the tip of the index finger” (1977, 152). Such mechanisms
of detailed scrutiny and careful choreography enable early modern
disciplines to call us into being, still—as students, children,
teachers, soldiers, workers, administrators—through inducing practices
of self-constraint and self-scrutiny as well as physical and behavioral
competencies—all working together to produce the phenomenon Foucault
termed “docile bodies”: power increases through increasing our individual
capacity. Yet these are no longer the only power-knowledge regimes
to which we are subject. While the practice of linking characteristic
of hypertext (to take one example) shares the modern strategy of increasing
power by maximizing individual capability, it does through repeated
solicitations to (inter)activity. Even when hypertext links are written
into the formatting (as in the web sites we view in class), how one
takes the link is not pre-scripted; such links do not work by directing
agents along pre-arranged paths.[18]
Instead, meaning is generated through immersion. While the reader
of a poem “will tarry over a passage, furrowing his way into level
after level of enveloped sense,” observes Massumi, “[t]he hypertext
reader doesn’t tarry, she surfs…” In surfing, the site you just left
overlaps with the link you are taking now—very much like a wave. As
Massumi puts it: “They doppler together.” Meaning arises through this
dopplering: rather than turning intensity inwards to form a sense
of interiority or “skin,” hypertext distributes intensity outward.
Meaning now happens in the form of resonance and interference patterns,
as the accumulated effect of taking “one more link” (Massumi 2002,
138, 277 n.13).
[27] Massumi attributes surfing’s pull to this dopplering. We are
compelled, he contends, not by the content of any particular screen
or even by the combination of screens we view, but rather by “an accumulation
of effect …continuing across the linkages. This accumulation of effect
is to a certain degree a potentialization of the relay” (2002, 141).
In sum, in digital media, it is potential that seduces.
[28] The promise of potentialization entails not only 1) an imagistic
text as changeable as water (as Hayles contends), and not only 2)
a form of meaning that emerges as distributed across links (a là
Massumi), but also—and perhaps most crucially—3) a dissolution of
identity. The virtual works by dissolving identity’s salience in
favour of the lure of becoming, the solicitation to make of ourselves
(and our lives) an enterprise. Understanding the pull of this lure
requires us to think about its socio-economic context. In contrast
to modern societies in which states legitimated themselves through
a rhetoric of the social, in late modern societies grappling with
a globalizing economy and a pluralizing populace (for globalization
is not just about the movement of companies and products but also
about the need to move labour across national borders), states legitimate
themselves through a rhetoric of privatization: through their ability
to maximize the ability of private subjects (be they individual citizens,
corporations, or voluntary associations) to maximize themselves. Governments
govern “at a distance” through norms of entrepreneurial selfhood as
well as administrative technologies such as assessment, audit, and
budget whose power relations are exercised less through the linear
architecture of the Panopticon and more through feedback loops that
solicit enhanced forms of self-discipline (Sassen 1995; Rose 2000,
1991). According to sociologist Nikolas Rose: “One is always in continuous
training, life-long learning, perpetual assessment, continual incitement
to buy, to improve oneself, constant monitoring of health and never-ending
risk management…. We are not dealing with subjects with a unique personality
that is the expression of some inner fixed quality, but with elements,
capacities, potentialities. These are plugged into multiple orbits,
identified by unique codes, identification numbers, profiles of preferences,
security ratings and so forth: a ‘record’ containing a whole variety
of bits of information on our credentials, activities, qualifications
for entry into this or that network” (Rose 2000, 325).
[29] It is the lure of becoming that renders the paradoxes of virtual
embodiment so deeply ethical. How do we learn from other traditions,
cultures, and people in ways that critique, resist, and dismantle
the complex histories of oppression, appropriation, and exploitation
encoded in our forms of knowledge? How can we genuinely open to others
when we have so many ways of opening that are really about closing?
Without a form of critique adequate to the emerging practices and
discourses of digital media, it becomes all too easy for surfing to
be nothing more than what its travel metaphor suggests: a form of
postmodern play that reinscribes the Orientalist illusion of other
cultures as a “timeless spiritual present here for you.” Think of
the MCI ad which promotes its Internet services by asking: “Where
do you want to go today?” Curiously, while the web is fabled for foregrounding
the performance of identities (as in chat rooms or MUDs and MOOs),
it nevertheless seems also to re-vivify desire for authenticity (“see
it for yourself”), empowering my students’ sense of entitlement as
Americans vis-à-vis “other peoples’ cultures” even as they participate
in a space that professes to erase boundaries simply by virtue of
its technology. While it is mistaken to dismiss virtuality out of
hand as “false consciousness” (however tempting), neither do I want
my students to take at face value the Internet's use of “multiculturalism”
to construct American global hegemony. Such a subject position has
no room for the kind of critical engagement that I strive to foster
in the classroom. What kind of critical practice, then, could help
students trace the configurations of power at work in the contradictory
invocations of “virtual ethnicity” that lie at the heart, not just
of the deployment of the web in a religious studies classroom, but
also (as the next section will demonstrate) of the discourse of liberation
that surrounds the Internet itself?
B. Virtual Ethnicity: Can a Subject that Assumes Access be
Critical?
[30] I take the phrase “virtual ethnicity” from Mark
Poster, who raises the question of virtual ethnicity in terms of the
territoriality of cyber-space: “If an argument can be sustained that
a virtual realm has been set into place, can there be a ‘virtual ethnicity’?
Does such a virtual ethnicity imply a new articulation of the relation
of individual to community, or is it a ‘false’ ethnicity, as some
would have us believe?” (152). For me, the question was raised most
powerfully by my discomfort in my own classroom. As I indicated in
the preceding paragraph, much of my interest in teaching World Religions
stems from engaging students with issues and questions of pluralism.
I had turned to the web as a way to remove obstacles to that engagement.
Yet using the web subtly shifted the terms of the debate in ways that
made it more difficult for us to glimpse—much less reflect upon--the
unconscious optics of racial/ethnic stereotypes.
[31] One way to say it (although I am not sure this is the best way,
or even really quite true) is that using the web to diminish the distance
students feel vis-à-vis print had the unintended consequence of framing
our study within practices of mass consumption, fostering what Benjamin
described as “the desire of the contemporary masses to bring things
‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” After all, the web (at this point
at least) is “enframed” as consumer space: from MCI’s query “Where
do you want to go today?” to the fact that in order to view a web
site in class I often have to click off an ad. Yet framing information
as consumption plays havoc with the traditional distinction between
the devotional and the academic study of religion. That students relate
to education as a form of consumption is by now nothing new. Nor is
it unusual for students in an Introduction to World Religions class
to be searching in terms of their own religious beliefs. Yet re-designing
my course to incorporate the web upset the fragile balance that I
had previously been able to facilitate in the classroom.
[32] In sum, my traditional ways of reframing this dynamic of religious/
spiritual commodification failed to work, fell apart. “What happens,”
I would ask my students, “when a culture’s sacred stories, symbols
and practices become instantly accessible across the globe to people
who lack any real life connections to the culture and people in question?
What are we doing when we ‘learn from’ other people in a way that
frees us from dealing with other cultures as real people with real
life histories, not to mention the complex and often uncomfortable
history of power-relations that shapes our access? Is this anything
other than a ‘kindler, gentler’ Orientalism—and kinder to whom?” Yet
no sooner would such words leave my mouth, than students would be
quick to tell me (often, surprisingly, speaking with one voice, in
a unanimity that compelled my attention): “No one owns religion, religion
is just not the sort of thing you can own.” True enough. Perhaps even
truer than they know, given the contemporary debates about ownership
of cultural products that have been sparked by digital media. Not
only did appealing to my critical touchstones of identity and appropriation
make barely a dent in this sort of glib multiculturalism—such critical
tools seemed actually to beget the glib rhetoric of a Benetton ad
on the part of my students: “Aren’t we now living in a global village?
Doesn’t the Internet make ‘a world without limits’ possible?”
[33] Thus if the web’s style of immersion “embodied” religion for
my students, by shifting them out of more traditional stances of objectification
and evaluation it pulled the ground of critical thinking out from
under not just my students’ feet but my feet as well. And try as I
might, I could never seem to find a position from which to foster
a critical evaluation of the practice of religious/ spiritual consumption
in which we all of a sudden found ourselves engaged, invested, and
immersed. In this “we” I include myself. I disagree with scholars
who dismiss postmodern forms of religiosity as buffet religion driven
by the immature desire to avoid commitment. While much of my passion
for teaching World Religions derives from engaging students with the
power relations and cultural violence effected in what many critics
have decried as appropriation,[19] conservative assumptions of essence no longer
seem adequate to address the functioning of knowledge-power in digital
media.
[34] For my students are right on several counts. The two-way communication
of digital media does not follow traditional economic logics of possession
and scarcity. If I copy a file for you, you now have it but I still
have it too. Or consider programs like Adobe Acrobat, which one does
not pay to download. Even deeper, as Miranda Joseph has noted (in
her discussion of gay and lesbian critiques of The Gap for its usage
of gay styles), exploitation is not the same as appropriation: “One
should be able to enjoy seeing someone else make good use of the product
of one’s labor, and in Marx’s view, one would if one did not see that
someone as Other, if one recognized one’s communal relation to that
Other” (2002, 43). Yet the recognition of communal relations with
one’s Other is not, I would contend, what our solicitation through
promises of access is primarily about. The two-way aspect of digital
communication means that anyone with access to the Internet can not
only receive information but also transmit or broadcast information
to anyone else with access—but this is not just anyone. The digital
divide so talked about in the 1990s is rooted in the racism that dogs
American education policy: Jonathan Sterne has documented how government
funding for computer instruction in public schools during the 1980s
favoured upper middle class and white students (2000, quoted in Nakamura
2002, 108). While access is usually spoken of as a matter of merely
getting on-line, its racial politics suggest that access involves
much more: namely, interpellation—becoming the kind of self that one
must be in order to use the web. For Joseph, too, is right: my students’
near unanimous insistence that “religion is not the sort of thing
anyone can own” would not be so troubling if the forms of access enabled
by the web encouraged them to “recognize their communal relations
to that Other.”
[35] Using digital media to facilitate such genuine two-way recognition
is difficult in part because, as Lisa Nakamura has argued in her book
Cybertypes, the “greatest promise” of information technologies,
how they are sold to us, is as a technology that will “eradicate otherness”—be
it age, gender, physical handicap, or race—by liberating us from the
limitations and suffering of embodiment (2002, 4). Consider another
MCI ad, this one entitled “Anthem,” which proclaims: “There is no
race. There is no gender. There is no age. There are no infirmities.
There are only minds. Utopia? No. The Internet.” Alongside its promise
to erase otherness and extend equality as proof of our impending technological
liberation, the ad’s visuals feature brilliant images of racialized
and ethnicized “others”: most notably, the image of the hand of an
Indian girl crossing out the word “race” on a chalkboard.[20]
Nakamura analyzes this paradox (which promises liberation from embodiment
by intense visualization of racial/ethnic difference) as the dominant
trope in contemporary Internet ads, which often strive to contain
the subversion that two-way communication could make possible by associating
network computing with privileged forms of travel.[21]
Likewise, the discourse of liberation that surrounds the Internet
promises that access to the Internet will free us from the body and
thereby enhance, not our ability to critique norms, but our ability
to fulfill them. Nakamura illustrates by describing a cartoon which
depicts a dog logging onto the Internet; its caption reads “Online
nobody knows you are a dog.” The freedom promised by this vision of
access is the freedom to pass as part of the privileged group (2002,
35).
[36] Nakamura’s reading of the racial politics of such promises of
Internet access contrasts starkly with Sherry Turkle’s more optimistic
reading of the freedom from bodily limitation that cyberspace offers
people who perform different gender identities on line. Turkle concludes
that insofar as cyberspace enables people to move back and forth between
multiple identities, virtual reality can open people to difference.
This opening is not automatic: for some, performing identities for
which they could not easily pass in real life cements their real life
identifications into an even more inescapable prison. The difference,
Turkle argues, depends on the degree to which people can participate
in the ambiguity of virtual space as neither purely fantasy nor purely
reality (1995, 17 and 47-49). While Nakamura does not seem to have
engaged in the kind of in-depth ethnographic research that Turkle
was able to do, Nakamura’s analysis suggests that the situation is
quite different when it comes to race—precisely because most of the
cross-racial passing that currently occurs on-line resolutely refuses
to enter into the ambiguity of virtual space that Turkle extols in
favour of keeping both feet firmly planted in the realm of fantasy:
ethnicized avatars tend to be overt stereotypes, such as samurai or
geishas. When it comes to racial/ethnic identity, the possibility
for subversion offered by digital technologies remains the path not
taken (2002, 31-60).
[37] To clarify what is at stake in this contradictory deployment
of race—a deployment which resolutely refuses to virtualize race—it
helps to contrast the current state of anxiety regarding the Internet
with the dynamics of one-way interpellation characteristic of print.
I am thinking of Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the crucial role
played by the newspaper in enabling people to imagine the community
we call a nation. The newspaper solicited an individual daily with
a centralized message. More than that: each subject could envision
their individual solicitation being “replicated simultaneously by
thousands (or millions) of whose existence he is confident, yet of
whose identity he has not the slightest notion. . . [By means of what
Anderson calls ‘this extraordinary mass ceremony,’] fiction seeps
quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence
of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations”
(1991, 35-6). It is this confidence in the communal character of our
fictions that the Internet disrupts. Two-way communication on the
Internet makes it impossible to ensure that all users are solicited
by the same “message.” Even more, messages on the Internet can use
any available route to their destination, so that there is no one
central point through which they are sure to pass and where they therefore
can be intercepted or surveilled (Poster 2001, 152). Given these changes,
it is not difficult to see why institutions invested with identity-formation,
from governments to parents, express anxiety when their “subjects”
use a computer to connect in private with “unknown, unseen, untold
others”—particularly if one considers how cyberspace blurs the boundaries
between what is real and what is “merely” imagined (Poster 2001, 109).[22]
In these uncharted waters, where anonymous community begets not confidence
but panic, racialized/ethnicized traditions are visualized as a way
to stop the flow, to stabilize the reversal of power relations which
this slippery junction between virtual and real enables. These invocations
of virtual ethnicity “claim a world without boundaries for us, the
consumers and target audience, and by so doing they show us exactly
where and what these boundaries are, and that is ethnic and racial”
(Nakamura, 2002, 92, 94).
[38] Consider the following ad that appeared in Wired. Its
heading reads: “To improve communication one should be as eager to
learn as to teach.” So far so good. Yet the accompanying image could
be straight out of National Geographic, as Lisa Nakamura analyzes:
“The image of an African boy, surrounded by his tribe, performing
the Star Trek ‘Vulcan mind-meld’ gesture with a red-haired and extremely
pale boy, centrally situates the white child, whose arm is visible
in an unbroken line, as the figure who is supposedly as willing to
learn as to teach” (2002, 97). Two-way communication and connectivity
are here turned into a commodity to be sold along with networking
services. But as in Anderson’s analysis of the newspaper, here, too,
there’s more. The ad counsels: “only with the wisdom to respect the
knowledge and cultures of others can YOU create systems and standards
THEY can work with.” Through this alleged two-way interactivity of
mind-melds, Wired readers (who tend to be white, male, and
middle class) are solicited as players within a new form of Manifest
Destiny, one adequate for imperializing cyberspace not through genocide
but through “benevolence” and compassionate conservatism.[23]
[39] To such a project, virtual ethnicity is crucial. Its contradictory
images of spectacularly visual yet ultimately immaterial difference
stage scenes of cultural interpellation that are supposed to, and/or
really do, help us believe in ourselves again. Perhaps this is the
global version of Reagan’s campaign slogan: “It is morning again in
America.” Yet as various digital ads suggest, promises of unlimited
access and endless potential that claim to eradicate otherness even
as they invoke it—indeed, must invoke it—block recognition of our
communal relations with those visualized as Other.[24]
[40] I suspect it was this blockage enacted in the name of connection
that made me so uncomfortable with my students’ unanimous insistence
that “religion is not the sort of thing anyone can own.” Incorporating
the web as an instructional media lends weight and intellectual credence
to the discourse that surrounds these technologies, to the way they
interpellate us as a certain kind of multicultural subject entitled
to take a certain place in a globalizing world. For those certified
as a legitimate user, the promise that permeates these spaces is connection
(or access). What this means is that the possibility of connection
(and the right to access) is assumed; connection (or access) is what
your money buys, with the result that the work of building connections
(and earning the right of access) is either deemed unnecessary or
simply taken off the table. In either case, this is a power move,
one that works by producing and inculcating particular norms.
[41] The contours of this digital form of knowledge-power can be
glimpsed through contrast with the experience that students tend to
have when they visit a “real life” site. Although participation-observation
also raises complex questions about authenticity and critical thinking,
one of its values in an introductory class is that students more often
than not return to class with a sense that whatever religion they
went to is a whole world, with respect to which they know something,
but rarely enough for them to feel confident interpreting even just
the two rituals they observed. While the amount of information on
the web can also be overwhelming, this overwhelm does not reflect
back onto the object studied. Instead, there is a sense of endless
sites to see (Massumi’s “potential of the relay”) which induces either
boredom or the strange entitlement that results when unquestioned
access is what your money gets you the right to. In contrast, part
of learning about another religion, culture, tradition, or person,
is an experience of “lack of access”: not everything is immediately
available. Yet when our subjectivity is formed through promises of
instantaneous access as our right, it becomes hard to consider how
relations of power structure this access and shape our will to know—much
less to consider who we become when we are called into being not only
by the figure of a cop yelling after us "Stop, in the name of
the law!", but by promises of unlimited access. While the shape
that digital critique will ultimately take is still emerging, the
experience of incorporating the web into a World Religions classroom
suggests that one way forward lies in developing a critical practice
adequate to the complex feedback loops that lurk in virtual ethnicity
and that lie at the heart of the paradox of virtual embodiment.
Notes
This work was supported, in part, by funds provided by the University
of North Carolina at Charlotte.
[1] A word about context,
for teaching is intensely situated. When I first began teaching with
the web, I was teaching in a small (2000 students) liberal arts college
for women with strong (and quite recent) Baptist connections. Located
in Raleigh, North Carolina, its setting is one of privileged placement
in the emerging global economy, given its proximity to information
and biomedical technologies and high end service industries—all of
which are big employers in the Research Triangle. Most of my students
came from what had been the college’s primary constituency: small
North Carolina towns. I evoke this sociological setting because the
pedagogical use of information technologies is framed within our general
cultural ideology about education as a necessary (although no longer
sufficient) condition for entry into these growing sectors of the
economy. To use information technologies in the classroom is to engage
with this fantasy—one that is conflicted and more often than not unacknowledged.
[2] The phrase “other
peoples’ religions” gestures, of course, to Wendy Doniger (1988).
I use the phrase in general to refer to the complex relations of knowledge-power
as they circulate in the project of religious studies. See Burlein
2002, xi-xii.
[3] Throughout this
paper, I use verbs like “encourage” and “facilitate” in an effort
to avoid the pitfall of technological determinism. While a particular
technology works within specific material constraints as well as within
the complex of historical expectations that led to its invention,
these factors are far from completely determining the historical and
cultural contexts of its use much less the micro-practices that people
devise by its means. For elaboration, see Poster 2001, 154 and 85-6.
For excellent collections of essays which make it clear that technology
does not exert a single ideological effect, see Brodwin 2000 and Hopkins
1998, particularly 1-97.
[4] Thinking about
media as shifting the scene of subject formation and thereby facilitating
the emergence of different kinds of selves helps clarify the projections
and resistances that occur in the classroom around media, which are
linked to historical developments in ways that can foster generational
differences (Poster’s “first, then, now”). As Poster elaborates: “Book
readers may find no use for virtual reality systems, film, and the
rest, even complaining that the book is superior to these media when
in fact they merely register their preference for one form of technology
over others. They often fail to see how individuals constituted by
other media—film, television, virtual reality—might prefer these over
books because, constituted in a different technoculture, they have
developed different capacities of reception, perhaps visual imaginaries,
producing meaning out of visual and aural information and data flows”
( 2001, 84). I see this most clearly in the pleasure I take watching
my friends’ kids (most of whom are exposed only minimally to broadcast
and digital media) become sufficiently captivated by books to live
within them: their characters, their worlds. For an academic, there
is something oddly compelling about witnessing subject formation of
this kind, formed in and through imaginary relations with books. I
suspect that such investments in the process of books becoming “second
nature”—which Freud would analyze as a form of primary narcissism
(Sedgwick 2003, 115; Freud 1989, 556)—play no small role in the tensions
that arise with students whose self has been formed in different ways,
through different media, or whose self-constitution privileges a different
media as its “second-nature.”
[5] Friedrich Kittler
(1990) develops this notion of inter-complication in a different register
when he argues that introducing a new media changes the medial ecology
in ways that lead older media to adapt the environmental niche that
they had carved out for themselves. For an argument contesting the
common lament that digital technologies mean that “young people do
not read anymore,” see Clayton 2002, 807-8.
[6] Jager 2002, 154-5.
Jager takes Locke as symptomatic of a shift from the late ancient
and medieval understanding of the self (and interiority) as a “book
of the heart” inscribed by God (or the conscience) toward the Enlightenment’s
more secular understanding of the self as a “book of the brain.”
[7] Kittler and Johnson
date the full development of this sensory imaginary (which compensated
for the inability of print to accommodate sound or moving images)
to about the 1800s (1997, 39-44, quoted in Poster 2001, 83). While
I use the psychoanalytic term “imaginary,” Massumi employs the term
“virtual”: “It is the strength of the work of Pierre Levy (against
Baudrillard) to emphasize the participation in the virtual of earlier
technologies—in particular writing—and (following Deleuze) to insist
on a distinction between the possible and the potential as an integral
part of any thinking of the virtual” (2002, 137). For more on Deleuze’s
use of the term “virtual” and an argument that his use is broader
than digital technology, see Burlein 2005.
[8] In her analysis
of high school subject positions, Sherry Ortner puts a different spin
on the resistance that textuality can offer. She notes that the possible
subject positions available in U.S. high schools have remained shockingly
constant over time, in ways that seem to her almost Levi Straussian:
“The high school jocks and freaks, the cheerleaders and the sluts
[which are their female counterparts], the popular kids and the nobodies,
keep coming year after year” (2003, 92). Ortner contends that one
of the forms students use to resist the way this grid forces them
into identities is intellectual cultures. It is not hard to see how
those of us who identified in that way end up in the academy. What
is harder to analyze is what happens to those of our students for
whom the resistant intellectual culture is not textual but digital.
[9] The most famous
academic example is, of course, Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra.
The most famous popular example is arguably The Matrix (which
references Baudrillard).
[10] For a fascinating elaboration of this way of reading
film that links Benjamin’s notion of an unconscious optic with recent
developments in neuroscience in order to make new suggestions for
pedagogy and pluralism, see Connelly 2002.
[11] José Munoz has
developed an analysis of this kind of critical strategy, which he
calls disidentification: developing the ability to stand both within
and outside a cultural representation: “read[ing] oneself and one’s
own narrative in a moment, object or subject that is not culturally
coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject” but without denying
its “politically dubious or shameful components”—all in order to “wedge
open a space in the social” from which to effect cultural change (1999,
12, 21).
[12] One of the problems
with this reductionist discourse is the way it leaves students strangely
unconscious still. For example, my apocalypticism class was reading
Stephen O’Leary on the apocalyptic sensibility of 20th
century pop culture. O’Leary concludes by analyzing the early 1970s
Coke commercial in which people of all races join hands on a mountaintop
united by a shared desire: “I’d like to teach the world to sing.”
O’Leary reads this ad as appropriating the age-old millennial dream
of a just and harmonious world, a dream that had inspired the youth
culture only to implode from within (1999, 421). One of my students
wondered aloud whether people “back then” (I remember the ad; for
her it seems a long time ago) had been angered by that appropriation,
and then in her next breath scorned how naive they would have been
to be angry, noting that she would never “trust” such an ad; rather,
she prefers those hip Sprite ads that say: "Image is Nothing
...Thirst is Everything ...Obey your Thirst." Lawrence Grossberg
(1992) has argued that in a media culture that stimulates emotions
relentlessly, people manage not so much by becoming passive, but rather
by maintaining “an active and even aggressive indifference” to the
idea of commitment. Yet as the ad for Sprite (which is a Coke product)
indicates, even indifference can be appropriated. The problem for
critical thinking in relation to broadcast media entails analyzing
how consent is not simply “manufactured” (as Chomsky would have it)
but simulated through producing a particular kind of dissonance: the
sense of being affectively located inside a sensibility while simultaneously
withholding cognitive assent to its claims.
[13] While telephone
is also two-way, in its usage it primarily enables one-to-one communication.
[14] Hayles conceptualizes
this change in materiality as changing the relation between signifier
to signified. Whereas Lacan developed a powerful understanding of
the unconscious through coupling language with the visible embodiment
of sexuality (as in castration), Hayles contends that “flickering
signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling
of language and machine” (1999, 35).
[15] Of course, “incorporating”
is more complex than simply making an assignment (as the metaphor
itself suggests). Just as students need to be taught how to read an
academic text (for interesting reflections on the difference between
academic and popular reading, see Guillory 2000), so they need to
be taught how to read the web as an academic resource.
[16] In addition
to using the web, students are required to do a semester-long project
focused either on fieldwork or on the internet. In the participation-observation
project, they visit 2 different religious institutions and do a ritual
studies analysis, interview an insider, and conclude by evaluating
the different ways of knowing that we use during the semester. In
the internet project, they first teach themselves and the class how
to evaluate a web site, then do a critical evaluation and analysis
of 3 web sites devoted to the religion of their choice, engage in
some kind of on-line dialogue with an insider from that religion,
visit a real life ritual in that religion, and conclude (like the
other project) by evaluating the different ways of knowing that they
use during the semester.
[17] For an elaboration
of this claim vis-à-vis a bulletin board newsgroup, see Lotfalian
1996, especially 154. The term “enframing” comes from Heidegger’s
classic essay “The Question Concerning Technology” in which Heidegger
contends that technology is a matter of how one stands in, and sees,
the world. Specifically, Heidegger contends that modern technology
positions us in such a way that the world appears as standing in reserve
for our use, as raw materials or resources for our projects (Heidegger
1977). For an argument that Heidegger’s analysis of the specific character
of machinic enframing does not apply to “smart” machines like networked
computers, see Poster 2001, 34-38.
[18] This is not
to say pre-scripting does not happen. For example, you can link in
to the Vatican web site, but its site includes no links that take
you out. A more complicated example would be menu-driven interfaces.
See Nakamura 2002, 101-136 for an analysis of what such pre-scripting
means in terms of race.
[19] Most notably
Ines Talamantez 1995. For a scholarly analysis of the dynamics of
such borrowing in neopaganism, see Pike 2001, 123-154.
[20] “Anthem,” produced
for MCI by Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schemetterer, 1997, quoted
in Nakamura 2002, 87.
[21] Consider the
Compaq ad placed in The Chronicle of Higher Education which
features a mesa (or in its alternate version, a rainforest) and reads
“Introducing a world where the words ‘you can’t get there from here’
are never heard …With [Compaq networked media] the classroom is no
longer a destination, it’s a starting point” (Nakamura 2002, 90-2).
[22] Insofar as such two-way communication bodes the
use of a new kind of fictionality to form new types of intimacy, community
and privacy, its use has been accompanied by panics, much in the way
that Laqueur has analyzed masturbation as a specifically Enlightenment
or modern disease/sexuality whose creators were not churchmen and
cultural conservatives with anti-sex attitudes but precisely those
like Rousseau who celebrated the individual breaking free from a cultural
world which limited autonomy and self-exploration (2003, 18-19). “Print
culture, the essential communication network of civil society and
the teacher of its most basic ways of being and feeling, depended
on and encouraged precisely those qualities that made masturbation
seem so threatening … masturbation becomes a problem because print
culture becomes a problem …The reading revolution never quite shook
off the vice it had helped to create. It had put privacy, secrecy,
and solitary pleasure on the moral agenda of the age, and when even
it itself was tamed, its evil twin continued an unruly life of its
own” (303 and 317). Masturbation substituted the solitary pleasures
of fiction for social sex. In place of the modern civil community,
masturbation created “hordes of autonomous but somehow complicit individuals
who do not cooperate because they do not need each other” (2003, 357).
The resonances with parental concerns about solitary computer use
are striking.
[23] Robin Wiegman
makes a similar point when she contends that contemporary white identity
is formed through an explicit disavowal of the white supremacist violence
that was the handmaiden to the West’s proclamation of itself as universal
in favour of an overt embrace of multicultural particularity. This
is the paradox of postmodern power: “seldom has whiteness been so
widely represented as attuned to racial equality and justice while
so aggressively solidifying its advantage” (Wiegman 1999, 121).
[24] Such assumptions
of access position “certain human beings as valuable insofar as they
provide passageway to an enchanted spiritual being, away from the
conditions of the spirit of capital” (Povinelli 2002, 67). In her
analysis of recent strategies of multiculturalism as adopted by the
Australian government, Elizabeth Povinelli contends that while confronting
its shameful frontier history creates “the feelings necessary for
social harmony in the multicultural nation, for good trading relations
with the Asia-Pacific, and for a new globally inspirational form of
national cohesion” (2002, 38), this restored confidence on the part
of the Australian citizen/nation is bought by inducing a deep insecurity
on the part of Aboriginal peoples: “If for non-Aboriginal Australian
subjects indigenous tradition is a nostalgic memory trace of all that
once was and is now only partially, for Aboriginal subjects ancient
law is also a demand: You Aborigine establish an identification with
a lost object. Strive after what cannot be recovered. Want it badly.
We do. See us celebrating it …” (2002, 56-57).
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