In line with Barthes' notion of the performative "text" (in Barthes R, 1977, 'Death of the author', Image, Music, Text, Fontana, London, pp. 142-48, CQUniversity Course Resources Online (HUMT20012)),  the "self" can also be thought in terms of a performance. He writes:

...there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered [my bold]—something like the I declare of king or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely ‘polish’ his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins. (Barthes 1977, pp. 145–146) 

Transmedia

The "consumer" becomes an 'active player’...

Stephen Dinehart speaks about ‘the power of Transmedia storytelling’ to transform '...once passive audiences into active real-world protagonists':

‘...media making heroes saving humanity from its isolated, godless, consumer self, by co-creating a culture of viewers who can become active protagonists in interactive worlds—both real and virtual—imbued with the classical ideals of love, responsibility; a place where being rather than seeming to be propels us, and indeed every man, to a better future.’

Dinehart's notion of 'transmedia play' reminds me of Derrida's 'play of signification'.


Dinehart says, "...even in this room...I am already becoming artefact...".


"I" is artefact, then, a kind of "total artwork" in itself; where, "I" is an active spectator, as it were, according to Wagner's formulation of a spectator in his book 'The artwork of the future', referenced by Dinehart here. (Dinehart takes the notion of the "total artwork" from Packer, R & Jordan, K (eds) 2002, Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality, Norton, New York.)

Gregory Crewdson on ABC's 'Art Nation', 26 June 2011, 17:30

Prudence Fllint on ABC's 'Art Nation', 26 June 2011, 17:30

Mark Featherstone, 'Virilio's Apocalypticism'

Featherstone, Mark 2010, 'Virilio's Apocalypticism', in Kroker, Arthur & Marilouise (eds), Theory Beyond the Codes, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=662, viewed 20 May 2011. 

"In the hyper-capitalist world, if we choose to adopt Kroker's name for the new form of high speed, high tech, totally virtual capitalism, there is no telos, there is no apocalyptic end, no fatal moment of collapse, since, as Wilson [69] points out, death is distributed across the system."  

• Nietzsche and humanity's tragic nature

Featherstone writes, Virilio's:

"...problematic resides in the hubristic forgetting of tragedy that has evolved through hyper-modernity and the need to rehabilitate the Ancient idea of humanity as a tragic creature of the limit that is made necessary and possible by the apocalyptic culture of post-modernism. This culture simultaneously and paradoxically marks the moment when we run into the limit of terrestrial time and space and forget about our earthbound limited nature. In this respect my focus is less on Virilio's conservatism or his desire to restrict humanity; rather I am interested in what I perceive to be his concern to maintain the experience of the limit in a global age where we simultaneously inhabit a state of global fullness and completion and precisely for that reason have no sense of that truth. It is this paradox, this conflation of the destructive potential of completed modernity and the total inability of humanity to understand this condition as a sign of the limitation and potential end of its own existence, primarily because of its location or immersion in a vortex of information that screens out critical thought and knowledge, that forms the basis of Virilio's apocalypse and necessitates the creation of institutions able to think through the end times in order to pull us back from the brink."

 "The central point about the end of this time-line is, of course, that the post-modern neo-liberal liberation of speed from all ideas of limitation, where ideas of limitation refer to either utopian ends or social speed limits such as trade regulations meant to govern the movement of capital, is evidence of the hubris and the forgetting of tragedy that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Virilio all see as the core problematic of the modern society of nihilism, technology, and speed [64]. In each case I think it is possible to argue that Nietzsche and Heidegger, and now Virilio, recognise that the inability of humanity to appreciate the necessary phenomenological resistance of the world upon its movement and speed will produce catastrophic consequences in the form of the emergence of a last man bored by a technological world that he can no longer relate to and that completely prohibits his continued movement through space. This is, of course, the famous theory of inertia that Virilio [65] employs to show how the empire of speed has started to collapse into a society of immobility and stasis characterised by walls, borders, camps, and prisons that he generalises through the ideas of global foreclosure, incarceration, and lock down."

 "the American determination to conquer or overcome obstacles, to create smooth space suitable for the speed of movement for capital and human flows, in many respects reproduces Hobbes' capitalist metaphysics of legalised movement in real space. It is this innovation that transforms the phenomenological world of embodied experience into a metaphysical or virtual abstraction that humans, or perhaps we should say those post-humans plugged into the network society, experience through inter-face with technology. Virilio's [73] America, the land of Hobbesian materialist metaphysics realised, is for this reason comparable to Baudrillard's [74] Nietzschean land of fascinated banality. It exists as a land of deserts, a featureless landscape, a smooth Euclidean space, that has come to define post-modern globalisation as a catastrophic space awaiting the arrival of its apocalypse."

 "...Virilio's apocalypticism, the critical imaginary capable of translating the everyday catastrophe of modernity that has led our world to the point of infinite density into an apocalyptic sign that may enable us to overcome our technological thirst for annihilation and re-think our phenomenological being as bodies embedded in society and world."

Foucault, M 1981, ‘The order of discourse’, in R Young (ed.), Untying the text: a post-structuralist reader, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, pp. 48–78. (CRO – CQU Library, HUMT20012 Code).

The discursive event...

• 'caesurae': a sense pause in verse; any break, pause or interruption
• 'This narrow gap...chance, the discontinuous and materiality at the very roots of thought.’
  

Autobiography and memoirs.

Against the Hegelian logos.

'The computational object, on the border between the idea and a physical object, offers new possibilities.' (Turkle, S & Papert, S, 'Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete', http://www.papert.org/articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html, viewed 28 April 2011.)

Notes on Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technololgy, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century'

An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit

• creature of social reality and (science) fiction
• Foucault's biopolitics
• organism<<production, re-production, imagination>>machine
• socialist-feminist culture and theory; post-modernist; non-naturalist; utopian imagining...'a world without gender...perhaps a world without genesis...maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history' (p. 425).
• non-oedipal narrative (a different logic of repression)

Dependant on an original unity:
1. Individual development (psychoanalysis): individuation / gender formation.
2. History (Marxism): labour.

Whereas...
3. 'The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense' (p. 426).

• no polarity or hierarchical domination

'...cyborgs...are the illegitimate offspringof militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism' (p. 426).

'...cyborg appears in myth, precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed' (p.427).

• Haunted / 'Ghost in the machine'

Distinctions:
animal - human
organism - machine
physical - non-physical

• cyborg: a simulation of consciousness
• 'cyborg myth about transgressed boundaries' (p. 428)
• most academics have seen deepened dualisms associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture; domination of technics and an imagined organic body.

Fractured Identities

Catherine MacKinnon's radical feminism...

'In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is nt simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject or even potential subject since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product' (p. 433).

'It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection...are...multiple, pregnant, and commplex.'Advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the 'Western' sense, the end of man is at stake' (p. 434).

(Concept of 'the end of man' as in Foucault?...)

The Informatics of Domination

• White Capitalist Patriarchy ==>> Informatics of Domination (p.435)
• 'Late Capitalism'
• dichotomies ideologically questioned (p. 436)

'...systems of Myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective and personal self' (p. 437).

'The boundary is permeable between tool and myth...Indeed, myth and tool mutability constitute each other.'

'...translation of the world into a problem of coding.'

'...a quantity called information.'

'The organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out.'

'A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes bread down; it fails to recognise the difference between self and other.'

(...See Aram Bartholl's 2009 'urban intevention' Are you human? http://datenform.de/areyouhumaneng.html...)

'fabrication of our imaginations' (p. 438)

'Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, copies without originals.'

'...the difference between machine and organism is thoroghly blurred; mind, body and tool are on very intimate terms.'

The 'Homework Economy' Outside 'the Home'

• 'More than our imaginations is militarised...' (p. 441)
• '...technologies that offer ultimate mobility and perfect exchange.'
• '...high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance' (p. 442).

Women in the Integrated Circuit

• (Market) '...ever bigger new markets for ever less clearly needed commodities...' (p 443).

Notes on Foucault

from...
Wikipedia n.d., 'Michel Foucault', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault, viewed 5 April 2011.

My own thoughts are in brackets and Courier.

• Influenced by Kant and Nietzsche
• Irrationalities

The History of Madness

• In the 18th Century madness seen as the reverse of Reason;
• the 19th, mental illness

( ...the 'hysterical' woman...)

"...madness was silenced by Reason, losing its power to signify the limits of social order and to point to the truth."

• the rise of Science

The Order of Things

• underlying conditions of truth; discourses; episteme (change over time)

(...What are the 'underlying conditions of truth' for Network Culture? How does these relate to the hypertextual language of the Network?...)

Foucault: "man is only a recent invention"; the "end of man" is at hand.

(...In relation to the Enlightenment? Discovery that Man cannot be all knowing, that Reason is not the only avenue for Truth? Or, that humanism is potentially catastrophic to the individual(particularly a Networked liberal humanism)?...)

• Gaston Bachelard's 'epistemological rupture': where an unconscious obstacle (unthought / unconscious structures) to scientific thought is ruptured.

The Archaeology of Reason

• events: 'statements' appearing in time.

Discipline and Punish

• visibility

(...the individual is made more visible as a result of the new materialism (?) of Network Culture?...)

The History of Sexuality

• against theories of repressed sexuality...
• power-knowledge.

(...ideas of that which is repressed, invisible etc...)

Haraway, D 1994, 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century', in A Herrmann & A Stewart (eds), Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Westview Press, Oxford.

Cyborg Mythology

Off to the library...'The Gendered Cyborg' (Haraway), 'Theorising Feminism' (Haraway) and 'Strangers to Ourselves' (Kristeva).

Contemplating Derrida's

instinct of the autobiographical animal

in his 'The Animal That Therefore I Am'.

...amongst other things.