first, what was given was the outline of the talk, not the talk - below is a bit of what I want to emphasize.
Theses: 1. Culture is always already virtual. not always obvious; a distinction is usually made for example between virtual and real worlds, and 'material culture' / physical anthro. was common for a long time in the us. I'm making an ontological argument, not an epistemological one, for better or worse maybe worse. 2. Culture is always already abject and inscriptive. I take abjection in the sense of Chaasseguet-Smirgel and Kristeva; again, sorry if you find this obvious. For me the polarity between abjection and inscription is paralleled by issues in qm of superposition on one hand and issues of corporiality on the other. This is an argument of collapsing epistemologies. 3. Abjection and inscription are entangled, irresolute, corroding both truth functions and definitions. Again you may find this obvious; I'm referencing distributive laws which collapse disttinction and I'm thinking of entanglement almost in the qm sense, as fundamental. 4. Culture is all the way down; every organism is a priori cultural. Quick speciation is cultural; amoeba can learn and pass learning on. This relates, again it seems obvious to everyone, to Heinz von Foerster's notion of negation, of course Varela figures in here. It's the swerve away from that's fundamental and relates obviously to Thom's notion of capture w/in catastrophe theory. 5. Culture is intimately related to alterity. This has to do with the notion of rewrite/rewryte that I've used before in terms of being online - not to mention Marshall's idea of ascence and Levinas. 6. Virtual worlds permit logical, physical, organic, sexual, linguistic, and psychological flows, without fundamental bases. This has to do with ideas of liquid architecture and my own sl work and enters into a psychoanalytics of vr. 7. Virtual worlds are the future of the exploration of inscription, culture, and the imaginary. Instead of the social model Web-N etc. What else enters here is a real economy of virtual world construction and access. 8. A parabola leads from virtual worlds to the true-real physical world, which is already produced, itself as virtual. This is covered above, also has to do with social transparency. 9. Physics is the structure of the true-real physical world. I tend towards a platonism in physics, my bad. 10. The appetition of physical returns us to thesis 1. Because it's ultimately about inscription and the psychoanalytics of inscription which creates a circulation here. Btw SL is no more fascistic than it is democratic - if anyone finds their position problematic, drop in to OpenSim which is open source, bottom up, and community oriented. Alan _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
