Plans for 2011: Sentimentalism, Textual Control and Virtuality

Happy new year, everyone! :)

This blog has been around for one year now. I have sometimes enjoyed writing it, sometimes felt harassed by an imagined obligation to feed it, and sometimes I have all but forgotten about it altogether. Some of the things I was planning when I started it 365 days ago worked out well, others fizzled out, and still others never happened. In short, it’s a blog.

So since life is what happens while we are making other plans, here are some of those plans for 2011 and beyond. I’m basically looking at three projects concerning the study of signs and media, and chances are that each of these three topics will take up some of the space on this site as well.

1. Sentimental Signs

I’m still not giving up on my effort to describe the connection between semiotics and sentiment in the late 18th century and circa 1900 as two aspects of one constellation, interrupted by a discourse of subjectivity that remains inscribed into the talk of signs as its alternative. Within this limited and specific but culturally relevant constellation, to think of an emotion as a state or action of a subject is to deny its ultimate commensurability with representation; but to think of emotion as a means of communication is to deny its attribution to a well-defined subject. If that doesn’t seem to make much sense right now, perhaps it will when I get round to sorting out my ideas on the topic further.

2. Cultural Constructions of Virtuality

When we describe what “virtuality” is supposed to mean, we often refer to cutting edge technology, some of it still in the realm of imagination, some of it functional but hardly in practical use. Full-body sensor suits, holograms with tactile feedback, or at the very least a pair of 3d glasses that completely enclose your skull seem obligatory. But when we use the term “virtuality” to describe other phenomena, it suddenly shifts into something commonplace: Second Life and World of Warcraft as virtual worlds, social networking turned virtual in Facebook, and even the general “cyberspace” of the web as presented via Google and the “virtual” communication via email have become common figures of speech.

I no longer believe that these are just sloppy ways of talking. Or rather, while they clearly are sloppy — email is not a virtual reality by any definition of the term –, they still tell us a lot about the cultural place of this idea of virtuality. The technology connects to that idea, but not as virtuality’s definition; rather, it becomes virtuality’s controlling metaphor, as some uses of World of Warcraft are like diving into a fully immersive sensory experience, and meeting all our friends online is as if we were given a second, digitally produced reality.

So I think that this is one way to better understand some aspects of our current use of technology: By paying attention to the differences between, and secondary practices reconnecting, the technologies and the cultural practices of virtuality. I want to see what that perspective has to show us.

3. Textual Control

To be completely honest, my interest in textual control started off as a fascination with some problems of theory. Most of all, I was interested in the way that censors and other controlling institutions had to produce a discourse about the media they were trying to control, and how that discourse looked similar to that of literary theory and other kinds of media studies: In each case, media phenomena had to be identified, described, and set in various kinds of context. In short, censors have to (speak as if they) know something about what they censor; the episteme of their trade is an, albeit often massively disfigured, epistemology of texts.

However, this academic interest has been overtaken by the many ways in which we have begun, in 2010 more so than ever before, to try and control, or to prevent others from controlling, our use of new media. In Germany and internationally, some of these attempts have been laughable, others have been so effective they hardly leave room to breathe, and in a way, both seem frightening. I think we are about to make decisions that will form the environment in which we exist thoroughly for a long time to come; again, not simply by inventing new technologies, but by construing cultural concepts on the back of their innovation, constructs that are only to some extent defined by the technical apparatus. If theory can provide any valuable insight at all, it has to be valuable in understanding and informing these choices we have already begun to make. So that is another topic I will be thinking and talking about here and in other places.

So I’m planning to talk about semiotic sentiment, cultural virtuality, and textual control. But for now, I’m talking about making plans. What are yours?