blt's (bodies, locations, times)
where am i?
here i am.
is this a digital space in which i am composing and being composed?
digital because i am linked into the internet and clicking through these webtext chapters?
digital because i am typing on a computer and listening to an itunes® song (heaven's a lie, lacuna coil), because as i write i typically listen to one song over and over again and for the past five years or so those songs have typically been digital songs stored on my computer?
digital because you are accessing it from a digital book and reading it, i suppose, on a screen?
or digital because you could link to heaven's a lie and listen to it while you read?
(where was i? oh yes, where am i?) actually i'm sitting in a chair in my living room still listening to lacuna coil, though all of that will get (indeed, has now gotten) complicated because in spite of the stream-of-consciousness style that i'm vaguely channeling, this text will almost certainly end up being a composed utterance (prior, 2009), that is, a text that has gone through a teleological history of composing, not just a momentary response to the immediate situation, so it will emerge out of a mish-mash of multiple episodes of composing, different times of the day, different moods, maybe no music (or different music). for example, as i'm writing this sentence, i'm sitting in seat 26f on american flight 1383 heading from chicago o'hare to seattle tacoma and i'm not listening to lacuna coil. and now i'm back in my living room but listening to a different song (as sure as the sun, black rebel motorcycle club). and now i'm...well, i could have written a few dozen different sentences indexing the chain of embodied chronotopes of my composing (see prior & shipka, 2003), and yet all these travels and travails of writing are folded into the flat space of this single paragraph. if you're still reading (or re-reading) this response, then the chronotopic complexities may be accumulating in your reading.
where are we?
ralston calls attention to hyperlocal practices where geographically located social spaces come to be digitally/virtually enhanced, particularly by the unpaid voluntary labor of people in the "community." but place and community are troubled terms to be trading in, made no easier by new layers of digital mediation. the normal group's collective re-representation of the normal group's collective documentation of the 2008 watson conference might be seen as a hyperlocalization of that repeated event. location, time, and people are fused not so much in chronotopes, but as chronotopic trajectories (see roozen, 2009). the normal group's video (gotcha) illustrates the point as they invite viewers to follow them from the focal sites of the formal watson conference into the background of their editing, into their evaluative response (whether delivered directly or via the juxtaposed image of a cartoon text), into dreamland in the back of the room, and finally into the streets of louisville—a chronotopic thread with a respectable provenance (the road being one of bakhtin's canonical chronotopes, see also jack kerouac on roads and dreams, or were those hallucinations?).
as we write place into and over our lived experience, how will the new economies of the digitzed hyperlocal/hyperglocal develop over time? ralston sees them as offering a more active participatory stance toward media. yet if active participation in media rests on modes of affluence (on participation in the accelerating production of digital obsolescence that requires repeated capital expenditures by local collectives as well as by individuals), then i have to wonder about a sustained and stabilized hyperlocal future.
what are we when we are wherever we are?
rhodes and alexander's installation—their digital re-mediations of their digitally mediated installation as well as their materially and digitally mediated production of that installation along with the audience's embodied reception of that work—raises a question of subjects. in particular, they argue we are bodies, not only material bodies but intimate, sexual, desiring bodies. (okay, i've switched here to tori amos's version of real men, actually on its 9th repeat already, thanks for the counting itunes®.)
their installation pushes rhetoric to confront its deeply rooted and layered antipathies (platonic christian puritan western rational) to the body, to forge some new embodied and sexual stance.
installation rhetoric may highlight performance through its complexly layered noisy perceptual space, but more to the point it aims to sketch a queered rhetoric, one whose content and style (breaking up seamless flows) contests the unmarked place of privilege of dominant anti-body and/or heterosexist practices.
voloshinov and bakhtin highlighted that genres refract ways of seeing and living reality, so fiddling with the subject—with body and affect, sexual activity and gender diversity—could generate a deep (tectonic) shift in the representational traditions of rational argument-centered genres of scholarship.