Lemke, 'CULTURAL DYNAMICS AND VIRTUAL CULTURE', Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture v2n01 (February 28, 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/aejvc/aejvc-v2n01-lemke-cultural The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture __________________________________________________________________ ISSN 1068-5723 February 28, 1994 Volume 2 Issue 1 LEMKE V2N1 CULTURAL DYNAMICS AND VIRTUAL CULTURE Jay Lemke City University of New York JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU ABSTRACT This introduction to the EJVC special issue _Cultural Dynamics and Virtual Culture_ provides an overview of the purposes and content of the special issue. It also seeks to sketch the broad outlines of a general conceptual approach to the dynamics of computer-mediated communication as a cul- tural subsystem and to the potential role of this subsystem in general processes of cultural change. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE [1] "Virtual culture" is a useful term for both the subcul- ture of computer-mediated human activity and for its tools and artefacts. In relation to this special issue of EJVC, the term "virtual culture" more specifically tries to generalize the experiential phenomena of "virtual reality" to include the virtual realities we construct in hypertext and hypermedia systems and the virtual communities we par- ticipate in through computer-mediated communication and in- formation access. There are virtual cultures of electronic discussion groups and remote data access on the internet, and virtual realities contructed through text and multimedia with which different users may interact in different ways, as well as the more spectacular virtual realities of real- time, multi-sensory immersion technologies. [2] "Cultural dynamics" is a perspective on human culture in general, one that foregrounds processes of change, and which assumes that human cultures are complex dynamic sys- tems of social practices and material, ecological processes. As such, cultural systems are not like inert objects: they must work constantly just to maintain themselves, and in- evitably they must also change, in ways small and large, more slowly or more quickly. [3] How do the phenomena of virtual culture play a role in the dynamic processes of social and cultural change? What models, paradigms, and opportunities do the various aspects of virtual culture now offer society and culture as a whole that may lead to wider and more profound changes in our fu- ture? What changes and trends now visible may develop or evolve into these possible futures? What are people actually doing today in the realms of virtual culture that has signficant potential for social and cultural change, locally and globally? [4] To better understand what is happening in virtual cul- ture, to make better choices as we participate in it and create it, we need some theoretical understanding of its wider social and cultural significance. The goal of this special issue is to focus scholarly intellectual discussion on particular examples and phenomena of virtual culture and their role in cultural dynamics generally. The articles in this issue embrace a diversity of theoretical perspectives, and include rich descriptions of lived virtual culture, its activities and artefacts, as well as specific visions for the future. [5] Culture is everywhere. In education and scholarship, in literature and the arts, in political and social institu- tions, in the workplace and the home. Virtual culture has the potential to transform all these social domains and our participation in them in many ways. Among the most profound kinds of cultural change, I believe, are changes in systems of values and perceived interests that guide actions and choices. No less significant are changes in social relations of power and privilege, from material power and control, to information and communication access. [6] The economics and politics of virtual culture; its material artefacts, processes, and human activivities; its role in our systems of meaning and value -- all must be in- terrogated if we are not to stumble blindly into the cyber- spaces of our future, or be led in directions we might not wish to go by those with greater power to pursue their own interests. [7] This special issue seeks to provide a nexus in the web of discussions of these issues, as a contribution to under- standing, and as a stimulus to debate. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE: PRESENT AND ABSENT [8] A special feature of this special issue is the inclu- sion of poetic discourse (Amato and Dickel), offering us a distinctive sensibility and a medium of expression for the human response to virtual culture that is not limited by the specialized conventions of contemporary academic discourse. Discourse theory recognizes that poetic, narrative, conver- sational, and expository genres complement one another in our modern culture and that no view of culture as a phenomenon can pretend to richness of description if it limits itself to only one of these modalities of communica- tion. Conversational discussions of virtual culture are not included here, but take place through EJVC's associated listserv discussion group IRVC-L@byrd.mu.wvnet.edu. No nar- rative contributions were offered for the special issue, though sections of narrative do occur in some of the arti- cles. So, we are especially fortunate to be able to hear the poetic voice in our culture as we try to understand how that culture is being changed by our participation in the virtual communities of computer-mediated communication. [9] Two contributions to the special issue (Jamison and Yeaman) take up the metaphor of the cyborg to explore the ways in which we are already becoming integrated, as social personae and as interacting organisms, with the electronic extensions of our selves that network us into new kinds of communities in which we can be new kinds of human beings. Additional planned contributions extending these perspec- tives to issues of blurred and multiple gender identities and to the creation of a social persona in multi-user online interactive communities (MUDs and MOOs) could not be com- pleted in time for this issue, but will hopefully appear in EJVC in the future. [10] Two further contributions (Harris and Shade) look, respectively, at the psychodynamic effects of virtual expe- riences and at the implications for academic culture of vir- tual communities. The wider implications for the civic cul- ture of citizenship and a more detailed examination of the educational revolution presaged by on-line hypermedia are two more contributions that were proposed for this issue and which will hopefully still appear at some later time. [11] Leslie Regan Shade, in a set of early notes generously contributed to this issue, presciently focussed attention on the contradiction between lone-wolf competition for academic status and rewards vs. the co-operative and collaborative ethos which increasingly fast, easy, and convenient high- bandwidth CMC now encourages in the scholarly community. She suggests, and I would assert, that we ought to consider how competitive vs. collaborative scholarly practices play a part in the social construction of masculinity vs. other possible gender roles (see for example Lemke 1993a on gender and science). There are great opportunities here. Women can redefine scholarly roles by creating models of mutually sup- portive intellectual communities. Men can critically reexamine the negative effects of atavistic masculine competitive-aggressive values on the productivity and sanity of the academic system we have fashioned and still dominate. [12] Leslie Harris points to another, far more direct, way in which computer-mediated experiences, from video games to seamless virtual realities, may play a role in cultural evolution: by shaping the development of the psyche in the same ways that ordinary lived experiences do. This raises many questions about possible postmodern technologies of the self, and the potentially dangerous amplification of specific cultural ideologies through designed virtual expe- riences. All communications media strengthen the coupling of the social to the individual, and most of them amplify the social variants of a small number of individuals for con- sumption by larger populations (popular assemblies, print publications, broadcast media). CMC has the potential for a more horizontal organization of many-to-many, though the context of our present culture and its economics seems al- ready to be driving it back toward the vertical few-to-many paradigm that preserves the powers that be (cf. Lemke 1993b). [13] Harris is particularly sensitive to the limits of manipulation by virtual media that arise from the unpredict- able and diverse ways in which individuals will react to them, but also recognizes that the seamless verisimilitude of virtual experience could combine with the psychodynamics of desire to lead us much further into our own, or others', fantasies. As we develop new ways to balance Ego's reality- principles with the wish-fulfilling virtual realities of our desire, it is possible that human psychodynamics itself will evolve. The waking dreams of VR blur the lines we draw be- tween the day and the dream. [14] P. K. Jamison explores the present and historical am- bivalence toward the "cyborg" solution, the dream and night- mare of conjoining the human and the machine, resolving the cultural conflict between them and the ideologies they represent. Is the cyborg an expression of our fear of tech- nocratic mechanization of the humane? Or does it gove form to our dream of humanizing the machine? Do we fantasize an end to our struggle to avoid domination by and through tech- nology, by yielding to the enemy's embrace in the most in- timate and bodily way? assaying a victory through surrender? Or do we hope at last for a progressive human alliance with technology, to turn the tables on those who have so long used it against the rest of us, amplifying the ordinary hu- man into a power equal to any? [15] Perhaps the cyborg discourse only gives form to pres- ent realities, to our recognition, against the biases of our own culture, that we have never been autonomous individuals commanding external technologies, but have ever been nodes in the criss-crossing networks of social interactions and material processes that make up our ecological communities (cf. Lemke 1993c, 1994, in press). We are as much the projections of our technologies as they are extensions of ourselves. XXXXXX YYYYYY, in his article for the special is- sue, also explores deeply our uses of the cyborg image, from fantasies for possible futures to interpretations of present realities. [16] Yeaman examines the metaphors of common speech associ- ated with our interdependence on the technologies of the everyday, and the ambivalent feelings we have about how new technological ways of doing conflict with the common sense of prior experience. At the core of this ambivalence, and of Yeaman's analysis, is the real conflict between two cultural and ideological approaches to the adoption and use of new technologies: a technocratic rationalism, arrogant in its claims to universal definitions of the functional and the true, and a more circumspect postmodern humanism, ready to reflect, to critique, to question, to deny, and to resist. A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR CULTURAL DYNAMICS [17] Technology cannot usefully mean just the artefacts a community produces, it must at least also mean the processes and social practices that contribute to their production. But once we shift perspective from things to activities, we see that things are participants in activities no less than are persons, social actors, organisms. It is the activities that are fundamental, that define a community and a culture. And these activities are physical, material processes, as well as social and cultural practices that have meanings for us. The participants in these processes/practices/activities are all sorts of what the semantics of our language calls "things" be they tools, organisms, or persons. The existence and the identity, the material function and the social mean- ing of a person, a computer, or a tree depend totally on the network of ecological processes and cultural activities, in- cluding meaning-making activities, that define an ecological-social system. [18] This "ecosocial" perspective (Lemke 1994, in press) teaches us to see double. To see a human community as both an ecosystem and a meaning system, to see its activities (including the "things" that participate in those ac- tivities) as both cultural practices, defined by their mean- ing relationships to other practices, and as material pro- cesses, defined by the network of their couplings to other material processes. Every action, every object, every hap- pening is part of two systems of happenings, enters into two kinds of relationships to other happenings: material rela- tionships of physical, chemical, and biological exchanges of matter and energy, and semiotic relationships of similarity and difference in cultural meaning and social value. In all matters in which humans participate, directly or indirectly, these two systems so strongly interact as to be for all in- tents and purposes a single, ecosocial system. [19] An ecosystem that includes a human community with its cultural beliefs and values is a material system many of whose processes cannot be described or predicted without reference to the actions of the humans in it, and so to the beliefs and values, the meanings of events, on which those actions are at least partly, and are often critically, based. Likewise, a human culture, as a dynamic, evolving system, is a system of meaning-making practices, both those that assign meanings and those that enact meaningful ac- tivities, and which do so at all times and places materially and physically, so constituting elements of an ecosystem which behaves according to the general laws of such systems. [20] It is only fairly recently that we have begun to un- derstand those laws, not simply of ecosystems, but of com- plex, dynamic, self-organizing open systems generally. These are systems defined as interdependent networks of doings, happenings, activities, in which, physically, chemically, biologically, and socially, the consequences of many doings provide inputs for or trigger other doings. These networks can be self-regulating, but they are not stable. In order for such systems to persist they have to transact with their external environments, changing them and changing themselves in the process, leading to the need for newly adaptive strategies of transaction each next time around. Such sys- tems tend to "colonize" their environments, leading to the production of supersystems which then have exactly the same dynamical logic. [21] In the case of large-scale, evolved self-organizing systems, like the Earth itself, this process also works from the top-down: larger systems differentiate and spin off sub- systems on smaller and smaller scales, meeting up with the emerging complexity rising from the smallest scales, to meet, at least from our human point of view, somewhere in the middle, in us. Not only are we composed of smaller self- organizing systems, our organs and cells, and function as constituents in larger ones, communities and ecosystems, but across all these scales, at each level the systems are spe- cial cases of the general logic of dynamic self-organization (see e.g. Salthe 1985, 1993). Human communities are not just _like_ ecosystems, they _are_ ecosystems, but ecosystems of a special kind, co-dependent with the human cultural meaning systems they support. [22] This is hardly the place to explore the general fea- tures of ecosocial dynamics and change in such systems (see Lemke 1994, in press), but I think that the conceptual per- spective I have just sketched may help in thinking about virtual culture. Of course we are already cyborgs, if by cyborg we mean that our behavior as organisms and as social actors depends as much on the processes we participate in with technological artefacts as on the processes we partici- pate in with other elements of the non-technological ecosystem. Indeed what are "we"? If we define human individ- uals as something more than just biological organisms, if we are defined by all the process that shape our developmental trajectories from conception to disintegration, then we are also social persons and actors, taught to conceptualize for ourselves a semblance of subjective experience, taught to conceptualize a self and an individual identity, by means of the meaning-making practices of our culture (Lemke 1993c). And the technologies of our community, artefacts and ac- tivities, play no small role today in shaping both the so- cial persona and even the bodily organism. How could it be otherwise if we conceive of human communities not as systems of doers _per se_, but as systems of doings, which in turn define the doers by their roles in these activities and pro- cesses? [23] Cyborg discourses foreground that fact that our own academic, intellectual culture has a certain horror of the bodily. The ways of the body, typically, are not our forte as individuals. We do not dwell on the vulnerability of our bodies to pain and the role of inflicted pain in the organi- zation of social systems. If we have to think of the bodily, we prefer to focus on its capacity for pleasure instead. The technological is itself a second body, and the cultural di- vide between scientific and humanistic perspectives refigures the more basic one between the bodily and the in- tellectual. At the level of the social, the community, the ecosystem, it is not so hard for us to identify with emerg- ing systems based on the virtual cultures made possible by new modes of technological communication. But at the level of the "cyborg" we are asked to make the same identification much more personally and intimately: to give up the illusory autonomy of the defended self, the social superiority of the intellectual over the technical, the protective line between the body and machines that hurt. [24] I believe that the profoundest cultural changes that may arise from the new cultures of computer-mediated com- munity will be in matters of the intimate body, in matters of fear and pain, of gender and sexuality, of body identity in relation to sensory vulnerability. If we focus only on enhancements and extensions, on powers to be gained, we merely reinforce the older framework of our traditional mas- culinist delusions of control. No self-organizing system can control itself; and no self-organizing system can be con- trolled from a lower sublevel within the system. We can fashion merely cybernetic machines that are not self- organizing, that project our fantasies of controlling our own and others' lives. But these machines, like ourselves, are born already integral parts of larger self-organizing systems. I believe that self-organizing virtual communities, and the cultural changes they represent, can best be concep- tualized by both seeing double (materially and semiotically) and looking multiply across all the levels of organization from global systems to local bodies. [25] I hope that the contributions to this special issue of the _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_ will help all of us pose more difficult and profound questions about cultural dynamics and virtual culture, and fashion more useful im- ages, metaphors, and discourses for exploring them. I invite responses and discussion on the IRVC-L listgroup (via unix listserv at byrd.mu.wvnet.edu). WORKS CITED Lemke, J.L. 1993a. "Science, Masculinism, and the Gender System". (Paper presented at the University of Delaware, Oc- tober 1993. Available on email request from author.) -- . 1993b. "Education, Cyberspace, and Change." Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture (EJVC-L@KENTVM), March 1993. [GET LEMKE V1N1, LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU; ftp /pub/ejvc direc- tory of byrd.mu.wvnet.edu; gopher gopher.cic.net under EJVC Archives, Electronic Journals.] Also Arlington VA: ERIC Documents Service (ED 356 767), 1993. -- . 1993c. "Semiotics, Subjectivity, and Science" (Paper presented at the CUNY Developmental Psychology seminar, Oc- tober 1993. Available via cs-gopher.uchicago.edu as Lemke CUNYPSY paper in the Language and Culture archives, Jan94.) -- . 1994. "Discourse, Dynamics, and Social Change." Cul- tural Dynamics 6(1): 243-275. [Special issue, Language as Cultural Dynamic, M.A.K. Halliday, Issue Editor]. (also via cs-gopher.uchicago.edu as Lemke Cultural Dynamics paper in the Language and Culture archives, Dec93). -- . (in press). _Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics_. London: Taylor & Frances / Falmer Press. Salthe, S. 1985. _Evolving Hierarchical Systems_. New York: Columbia University Press. -- . 1993. _Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology._ Cambridge MA: MIT Press. _____ Articles and Sections of this issue of the _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_ may be retrieved via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu or via e-mail message addressed to LISTSERV@KENTVM or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU (instructions below) Papers may be submitted at anytime by email or send/file to: Ermel Stepp - Editor-in-Chief, _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_ M034050@MARSHALL.WVNET.EDU _________________________________ *Copyright Declaration* Copyright of articles published by Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture is held by the author of a given article. If an article is re-published elsewhere it must include a statement that it was originally published by Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture. 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