Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign - Softcover

Hillis, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822344483 ISBN 13: 9780822344483

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

A wedding ceremony in a Web-based virtual world. Online memorials commemorating the dead. A coffee klatch attended by persons thousands of miles apart via webcams. These are just a few of the ritual practices that have developed and are emerging in online settings. Such Web-based rituals depend on the merging of two modes of communication often held distinct by scholars: the use of a device or mechanism to transmit messages between people across space, and a ritual gathering of people in the same place for the performance of activities intended to generate, maintain, repair, and renew social relations. In Online a Lot of the Time, Ken Hillis explores the stakes when rituals that would formerly have required participants to gather in one physical space are reformulated for the Web. In so doing, he develops a theory of how ritual, fetish, and signification translate to online environments and offer new forms of visual and spatial interaction. The online environments Hillis examines reflect the dynamic contradictions at the core of identity and the ways these contradictions get signified.

Hillis analyzes forms of ritual and fetishism made possible through second-generation virtual environments such as Second Life and the popular practice of using webcams to "lifecast" one's life online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Discussing how people create and identify with their electronic avatars, he shows how the customs of virtual-world chat reinforce modern consumer-based subjectivities, allowing individuals to both identify with and distance themselves from their characters. His consideration of web-cam cultures links the ritual of exposing one's life online to a politics of visibility. Hillis argues that these new "rituals of transmission" are compelling because they provide a seemingly material trace of the actual person on the other side of the interface.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken Hillis is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality and a co-editor of Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire.

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""Online a Lot of the Time" tackles the complex subject of telepresence more convincingly than anything else around. It suggests that the sign/body of an online digital avatar occupies a 'middle ground, ' analogous to the 'middle voice' produced through the novel's technique of free indirect discourse, in which the avatar functions as more than an image but less than an autonomous agent. Moreover, because of the psychic investments that operators project into the avatar, it also functions analogously to a fetish--or rather, a telefetish. Building on previous theorizations of the fetish, the book makes a decisive intervention by showing that these concepts can fruitfully be extended into the virtual realm. With an impressive range of references, including commodity theory, media theory, the history of the telegraph, and a host of other areas, "Online a Lot of the Time" is essential reading for anyone interested in virtuality and its effects."--Katherine Hayles, author of "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary"

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Online a Lot of the Time

RITUAL, FETISH, SIGNBy Ken Hillis

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4448-3

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................ixIntroduction Rituals of Transmission, Fetishizing the Trace.....................................11 Rituals.......................................................................................472 Fetishes......................................................................................793 Signs.........................................................................................1034 "Avatars Become /me" DEPICTION DETHRONES DESCRIPTION..........................................1335 So Near, So Far, and Both at Once TELEFETISHISM AND RITUALS OF VISIBILITY.....................203Afterword Digital Affectivity...................................................................261Notes.............................................................................................267Works Cited.......................................................................................287Index.............................................................................................303

Chapter One

Rituals

In reading the literature on ritual one is struck by the ongoing, evolving sets of disputes among researchers, often anthropologists, over the definitions, meanings, and purported utilities of the idea of ritual. "There is the widest possible disagreement as to how the word ritual should be understood" (Leach 1968:526). Ritual is a Western academic invention (Bell 1992:ch.1; 1997:253) that "will not stay neutral" but can be made to conform to whatever purposes the researcher intends her or his analysis to serve (Bell 1992:14). Ritual is a slippery concept, variable in its meanings, mechanisms, and dynamics. Many activities are considered rituals and many perspectives of analysis compete, contradict, and inform one another. Ritual is less a formal category of human behavior than a historical and cultural invention to distinguish various modes of religiosity, cultural determinisms, and rationality (Bell 1992:14; 1997:ix-xi). Nevertheless, the idea of ritual has been widely popularized and taken up by all manner of cultural actors. Ritual has real affect, and individuals, consciously or not, are inventing new forms of public and private ritual practices. This chapter discusses the concept of ritual as articulated by various theorists in order to provide a multilayered definition of the term, its disjunctures, and its applicability to online settings.

In their traditional and commonsense understandings rituals are associated with ceremonial performances that signal an exceptional event or transition in status in the life of a community, social group, family, or individual. Rituals may be state sanctioned, as in the funeral of a sovereign or head of state, or more localized, such as the baptism of a child. They are understood as rites of passage set off from daily routines. They may signal, for example, the importance of birth, marriage, and death-events a newspaper editor once referred to as "the hatched, the matched and the dispatched." Rituals work to induce qualities of social coherence and order among participants. This is why they are often understood as stabilizing and containing social relations that favor the maintenance of elite or dominant powers. In a ritual, everyone participates; there are no observers. At a funeral, for example, everyone is expected to pay respect to the deceased; it would be taboo to denounce the dearly departed during the ritual. Such rituals, we are given to understand, have invariant rules of conduct rooted in hierarchy governing how people should (and should not) act during what is positioned as a sacred moment.

Traditionally, people associate the idea of the sacred with religion, and many commonsense understandings of ritual draw from religiously inflected practices. Religion is constituted in a set of ideas and practices by which "people sacralize the social structure and bonds of community" (Bell 1997:24). Religion, like ritual, works to ensure the primacy of group or communal identification. At base, however, this traditional understanding of ritual assumes that rituals are only performed to induce a sense of unity or collective social cohesion among people-as noted above, to stabilize and contain. Such naturalized and commonsense understandings of ritual bear a considerable debt to the ongoing influence of mile Durkheim (1857-1917), a founding figure of sociology. Durkheim developed his theories of ritual in part by reading the published ethnographies of nineteenth-century anthropologists. When early anthropologists, as part of the colonial encounter, first observed the indigenous practices they would identify as rituals, they were studying premodern cultures organized according to highly developed and hierarchical understandings of group identity. The ceremonies they observed frequently engaged the entire society or a significant number of its members so as to constitute a noteworthy subgrouping within the society. This reportage and Durkheim's analysis of it focused on ritual as a group process and associated it with the maintenance of tradition that, in turn, has been associated by many subsequent ritual theorists with the idea that a ritual is invariant. Tradition is always a social force, so it is not hard to understand how rituals have come to be associated in theory with the production of group cohesion through traditional, invariant practices. As a consequence, however, we are left with overly narrow popular understandings of what qualifies as a ritual and what does not, including ideas about the "proper" social scale at which a ritual occurs. That is, we generally equate ritual with a group and with an assembly of this group in the same place.

It is important to note that the indigenous cultures observed by early anthropologists were not yet unduly inflected by modern capitalized social relations marked by the privileging of the individual and practices of individuation. They were positioned geopolitically as static, without a modern sense of progress and therefore of mobility. Protestant-inflected, on-the-go Western modernity defined itself in opposition to this purported stasis, and it is interesting to consider the relationship between this created opposition and a Protestant deemphasis on most forms of ritual, as in "they have rituals, we don't." Protestant and, more generally, Western privileging of the individual has difficulty fitting into these theories except insofar as they position individualism as a problem that ritual might help solve (for example, Durkheim 1965 [1912]).

Today it would be difficult to find a culture uninflected in some way by capitalized social relations and modern forms of individualism. Would this mean that ritual no longer exists-that it has been completely dismissed as atavistic, given capitalism's interest in continually transforming the status quo and upending tradition in favor of mobility, flexibility, and flow? Scarcely. Not surprisingly, in an increasingly networked and individuated world rituals also operate in more complex, hybrid, potentially messy, contradictory, and less binary-dependent ways. There is no compelling reason why a ritual need always be religious in nature. Neither are there compelling explanations, for example, for why...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822344483
• ISBN 13: 9780822344483
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland