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Academics – Page 58 – Life as an Extreme Sport
Life as an Extreme Sport

Anthropology Letters

Robert Crawford
Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington, Tacoma

Dear Professor Crawford:
It was with interest that I read your article “Reflections of health, culture, and AIDS” and your premise of self/other, healthy/unhealthy, and how we strengthen the boundaries of the self by defining it against the other. I would be curious to know how your thesis would change if you shifted the focus from a binary dichotomy between self and other and looked at the concept of the excluded third, a concept neatly explained by way of a Goya painting, “Duel with Cudgels.” In Goya’s painting, two men are dueling. As you study the picture, you begin to notice the environment around the dueling men, including that which is directly interacting with them ”” they are slowly sinking in mud, quicksand, or some sort of mire. But you get the idea, looking at these men, that they’re unaware of the environment around them ”” they are locked in their own binary existence.

Serres’ “The Natural Contract” makes beautiful use of this metaphor and others to explain our excluded third ”” that which is left our, unacknowledged, and moves us beyond binary self/other thought. After all, in creating self/other, something is being left out, be it the ground the self and other are standing on, the air being breathed, people we can’t conceive of on the other side of the globe, or the fluids moving between us that transmit disease.

Elizabeth Grosz has said that “[b]ody fluids attest to the permeability of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside, its liability to collapse into this outside (this is what death implies), to the perilous divisions between the body’s inside and its outside.” I would argue that HIV and AIDS, its medium of transmission fluids, acts as an excluded third that joins us, and works to erase the boundaries of self and other that are fictionalized representations of idealized reality (to borrow a very Lacanian thought).

The phenomenologist Iris Young suggests that we

might conceptualize being as fluid rather than as solid substances, of things. Fluids, unlike objects, have no definite borders; they are unstable, which does not mean they are without pattern. Fluids surge and move, and… think[ing] of being as fluid would tend to privilege the living, moving, pulsing over the inert dead matter of the Cartesian worldview.

It seems that if we were to do so, and conceive of Being, of Self, as a fluid concept without firm boundaries, we would do much to remove the social stigma of infectious disease, especially that of a sexually transmitted infectious disease.

One of my students recently said that the self and the other are the sides of a coin, and that the excluded space is the coin itself ”” that which joins the two sides to one. I wonder how our ideas of healthy and unhealthy would be informed if we moved out of the Cartesian, binary worldview of one or other, us and them, and instead adopted a more fluid, less defined, and flexible concept of how we view, interact with, and describe health.

With regards,

Kelly Hills

Objects are Boundary Projects

[B]odies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice.

Objectivity is not about dis-engagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where ‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is, not in ‘final’ control.
-Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

the sound of protest

I’ve been wondering for a while now what the point of protesting [fill in the blank] is — what purpose does it serve? For example, protesting the recent bombings on Falluja isn’t going to stop the bombings; the largest protest in history didn’t stop the attack on Iraq, so why is a smaller protest going to do anything? I now think that the point is to prevent marginalizing from happening; by getting out and creating enough of a ruckus that the media — one of the creatures of the virtual that helps perpetuate mimetic circulation — covers the event, people who hold an alternate view are suddenly no longer marginalized, but instead are taking over the very mechanism that is attempting to silence them.

Critique – Media Virus and Memes

The idea of a meme is something that has always offended my sensibilities, without ever really knowing why. Obviously its most colloquial use, such as “LiveJournal-memes” is not accurate in the Dawkins-sense of the word, or the way that Dennis Rushkoff would like to see the word used. Memes are simply supposed to be one of three variants of a virus, be it a publicity stunt, a co-opted virus, or the self-generated virus. Rushkoff argues that in all instances, the virus has some sort of “sticky surface (akin to how a genetic virus works) that then allows the infection of something else into the cell or organism (with the organism in a meme being culture itself). Rushkoff uses words like datasphere to name this interconnected, technologically adept organism, and then goes on to use chaos theory to describe how it comes into being. And this is where he hits on what bothers me about memes to begin with: why bother? Yes, why bother. All Rushkoff is doing is watering down Apadurai’s concepts of ‘spheres, with the technosphere becoming the datasphere and using network theory repackaged to describe the chaotic yet “natural” behaviour of his datasphere. It’s simply reframing and rephrasing cultural dialogue and mimetic circulation in a trendy term and selling it to the masses — in fact, this selling to the masses is a key to Rushkoff’s conception of the origin of memes to begin with. In a nutshell, Rushkoff is arguing from a post-modernist view that looks at media through an ironic lens, and sees only the surface feedbacking to the surface, creating endless fractal loops that never go any deeper than the last feedback iteration.

The funny, or perhaps even ironic, thing, is that the LiveJournal-meme is probably the closest to what a meme should or would be. In this virtual space, someone posts a quiz or questions that their friends then read and repeat, with their friends reading and repeating, et cetera, as it spreads through-out this particular node of the network. For example, Person A posts a series of questions with answers, clearly fashioned as a “fill in the blank” style question. A recent one circulating was formatted something like this:
1. My LJ name is _________ because _________.
2. My friends list is called _________ because _________.
3. My user picture is _________ because _________.

Under these series of questions, Person A then repeats the question with the blanks filled in. Through years of schooling, we instantly recognize the form of the questions as fill in the blank, and proceed to do so. Persons B, C, and D all read Person A’s journal and repeat the questions and blanks in their journal, where Persons E-H see it (sometimes several times, as many people read similar journals). In relatively short fashion, the three questions have taken off like wildfire through the pocket of the virtual known as LiveJournal.

Using the terms of network theory (“node”, “network”) is important, because what we are seeing is not a meme but the creation of a non-human hub or connecting point in a complex social network. In general, these nodes are considered to be people, but in this case the hub is the series of questions itself. Instead of one person forming more and more connections until they trip some critical point and become a hub (a place of high connections), the questions themselves become a place of high connection. Graph theory often looks at this sort of connectivity in terms of static places, but in this case the hub is a non-corporeal concept.

If we speculate that there are multiple networks interfacing with one another — a wetworks or meatspace style set of nodes, hubs and connections, the connectivity of certain spaces, and a third, conceptual and non-corporeal network of ideas — we can stay within the confines of established interdisciplinary sciences to explain continual mimetic circulation without focusing on co-opting ideas that only weakly manage to portray the potential of the ideas.

In reality, where the idea of the virus applied to mimetic circulation comes into play ties back to the idea of sticky surfaces and syringes for injecting the viral particles. Instead of a virus allowing subversive memes to infect the culture, new symbols arise that allow other people to co-opt said symbol for their own purpose. The sticky surface of Michael Jackson’s latest legal problems allows people who have pet issues that can be related to the legal problems to use that as a starting point, a highly connected hub, for their own dissemination needs.