Erkan's field diary

Erkan cannot help but attack both Slavoj Zizek and Robert Fisk - I

My dear readers, a few hours ago, i have read two articles by some notable authors whom I respect and i will use them as pretexts to state my own developing ideas. In my style of writing, i can be quite sharp, but i don't intend to be mean, rude or sharp in reality. Anyway,

First comes an unfortunate essay by Zizek in The Guardian of December 30, 2006: Is this digital democracy, or a new tyranny of cyberspace?: The hype of freedom on the web masks both disparities of power and the dangers of blurring real and virtual identities.
Prof. Slavoj Zizek focuses on Time's Person of the Year and says:

....Real-life inertia magically disappears in the frictionless surfing of cyberspace. In today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. Cyberspace's virtual reality simply generalises this procedure: it provides reality deprived of substance. In the same way that decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being the real thing, my online screen persona, the "you" that I see there, is a decaffeinated self....

First of all, let me underline that I have read all the article and i don't intend to push my arguments through fragmenting the essay. I conclude my ideas based on the whole of the essay. For many critics of modern life, this quotation might be quite meaningful and for those people, Zizek deconstructs the cyber-buzz. I would expect more from a high quality intellectual but he seems to be doing no more than exploiting a populist anti-consumer society discourse. Well, secondly, i sense an ontological standing that i don't support: The real self? Since when we have a real self? Is Zizek an essentialist? Thirdly, although this analogy might be working for some, it in fact does not work. Cyberspace has a life of its own and only one who did not experience it much can come forward with such weak analogies:( In fact, I have been thinking about this for a while. Most of the major intellectual we respect are not media literate at all. Sophisticated theoretical analyses shift to reductionist and mostly reactionary commentaries when they focus on mass media. In this respect, cyberspace becomes the new intellectualist target...
Let's continue:

......At the same time, there is the much more unsettling opposite idea of the domination of my screen persona over my "real" self. Our social identity, the person we assume to be in our social intercourse, is already a "mask" that involves the repression of our inadmissible impulses. But it is precisely in the conditions of "just playing" - when the rules regulating our "real life" exchanges are temporarily suspended - that we can permit ourselves to display these repressed attitudes. Take the proverbial impotent shy person who, while participating in a cyberspace interactive game, adopts the identity of an irresistible seducer or sadistic murderer. It is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary escape from real-life impotence. The point is rather that, since he knows that the cyberspace interactive game is "just a game," he can "show his true self" and do things he would never have done in real-life interactions. In the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated. The fact that I perceive my virtual self-image as mere play thus allows me to suspend the usual hindrances which prevent me from realising my "dark half" in real life. My electronic id is given wing........

Cyberspace is at best a space where one can play and multiply the identity games, not to show "his true self". Most of the hesitant beginners of cyberspace users think like that. I have heard similar arguments. But "virtual" is not "fiction". It is more than that. One should look at Deleuze's works where virtual is even more than the possible. I worship Deleuze's conception of the virtual, his belief in the creativity of life in contradiction to these reductionist accounts...

.....And the same goes for my partners in cyberspace communication. I can never be sure who they are: are they really the way they describe themselves, is there a "real" person at all behind a screen persona, is the screen persona a mask for a multiplicity of people, or am I simply dealing with a digitised entity which does not stand for any "real" person? "Interface" means precisely that my relationship to the other is never face-to-face, that it is always mediated by digital machinery. I stumble around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the whole of it remains forever beyond my comprehension. The other side of cyberspace direct democracy is this chaotic and impenetrable magnitude of messages which even the greatest effort of my imagination cannot grasp......

So what? Can you be sure when you meet someone face to face? Can we ever grasp the "reality" of a person? and why are we afraid of humanity's infinite creativity? There is always abuses and misuses and there is always social inequality. If one denies these, that's a problem. But what is the intellectual use of stating the obvious instead of detecting the emerging novelties? Cyberspace residents are not naive people. They know very well that "real" people I won't name now cause more trouble in this world on fire....

p.s. That's why Walter Benjamin will never be forgotten. Unlike his contemporaries, he took an emerging medium, cinema, seriously and provided some insights that we still appreciate!

Posted by erkan at December 31, 2006 01:55 AM | TrackBack
Posted to Casual analyses | Cyberculture | Habitus