Virtual Bodies and Post-Modern Identity Disruptions:
MOOs and Critical Theory
Presented by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
George Washington University
In the spring semester of 1995, I taught a course entitled "Critical
Methods," required of all undergraduate English majors at GWU. The
objective of the course is to introduce students to literary and cultural
criticism so that they will understand the various methodologies used in
the humanities to make sense of texts and works of art. Because so many
of the critics discussed in the class (Derrida, Foucault, Levi-Strauss,
Lacan) derive from a continental tradition of philosophy that often seems
vatic and far removed from everyday life in the United States, I try to
present students with texts and performances that elicit an immediate
response of enjoyment which can then be theorized and discussed in light
of the criticism it illustrates or problematizes. One of the most useful
of these experiences involved the staging of a virtual classroom
discussion. Instead of coming to class one day, students were to
rendezvous in a MOO, and then write a paper about the experience of
disembodied encounter.
What Is a MOO?
- A noise made by a familiar farmyard animal.
- A MUD ("multi-user dungeon") Object-Oriented.
An imaginary geography, a world made only of words where flesh becomes
text.
Some Examples of MOOs
- BayMOO is a public MOO founded October 1, 1993 for the exploration of
the San Francisco Bay Area in text based virtual reality. Anyone can
become a member here, just connect to BayMOO as a guest,
wander around and talk to people to get a feel for the community.
-
City MOO is a virtual urban space located at St. Andrews, UK. It has
an easy interface and an international population.
- Yahoo!
contains a long list of MOOs, some of which use java rather than
telnet applications.
What's so educational about these spaces ?
The philospher Jacques Derrida once proclaimed "There is nothing outside
the text." Exploring a MOO encourages students to think about several
issues important in contemporary critical theory:
What is a "speech act"? (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida)
Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did not repeat a
'coded' or iterable statement, in other words, if the expressions I use to
open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as
conforming to an iterable model, and therefore if they were not
identifiable in a way as 'citation'? (Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event
Context")
What is the relationship between language and reality? (Hegel, Lacan)
The word is a death, a murder of the thing: as soon as the reality is
symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present
in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality. More
precisely, we cannot return to the immediate reality: even if we turn
from word to the thing -- from the word 'table' to the table in its
physical reality, for example -- the appearance of the table itself is
already marked with a certain lack -- to know what a table really is, what
it means, we must have recourse to the word which implies an absence of
the thing ... When the human being is caught in the signifier's network,
this network has a mortifying effect. (Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime
Object of Ideology)
How are discourse and identity connected?
The body is ... an estrangement from the very "I" who claims it ... What
constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be
fully material, but materiality [is] the effect of power, power's most
productive effect. (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter)
We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been
shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the
existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely
waiting for the last one to be turned up ... We no longer believe in a
primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits
us at some future date. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus)
What did students actually learn, and how did it help their writing?
- Christian and the obscene: the power of language
Christian decided that he was going to test the power structure of the MOO
by logging on with an obscene alias, "Fuckface." He managed to get the
entire GW site banned, and angered his fellow students, who had quickly
become addicted to the disembodied chat. Christian wrote an excellent
paper on how words in cyberspace take on a special power, partly because
they double as computer commands, but partly because they function in
excess of the spoken word.
- Gowri and the patriarchal: the gender of language
Gowri wrote a paper that argued that the entire structire of a MOO is
masculinist, down to even the command choices. She found the
conversations to be overwhelmingly sexist, if not sex-starved.
- Sara's imperialism: colonialist assumptions
Sara logged onto a different MOO, and chided her fellow cybernauts for
communicating to each other in Greek rather than English. She was forced
to re-evaluate her imperialist assumptions when one of them pointed out to
her that, despite the fact that the room descriptions were in English, she
had logged onto a server in Athens.
- Gabriel as deconstructionist: failures to communicate
Gabriel became interested in the ways in which irony seems doomed to fail
in the absence of tone and body language. After being misunderstood
several times in his sarcasm, he thought deeply about how language so
often fails to communicate its intended meanings.
- Maartje's addiction: caught in the web of words
Maartje was typical of many of my students. She became so enthralled by
the MOO's textual world that she found herself spending far too much time
there, and said she felt like an addict. She wrote a good paper about the
relationship between the possibilities of language and self-construction.
Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen
