On Mon, 3 May 1999, Kafkaz [Kathy Fitch] wrote:
Michelle, Let me second the welcome. I'm always happy to make the acquaintance of a fellow plant killer. I've recently discovered that pots of heather make good plants for windowless (as my office is) spaces, for heather looks pretty much the same when it's dead as it does when it's alive.I'll have to get me some of that. I once decided that I would start a plant hospice. If your office plants were "near" dead, you could bring them to me, pay me five bucks, and I would let them die in my office. Thereby taking the guilt and onus upon myself :-) Got to find some way to supplement my low salary!
A subject is at least a thousand people.
I'm not so much concerned with what a subject "is" in terms of definitions -- but rather concerned with the way the subject is constructed rhetorically in our discourse over new modes of communication. In my humble opinion, a "subject" is what we say it is -- and the definition shifts historically and contextually and culturally. To attempt to define the "subject" whether as one or a thousand, is only a demonstration of this. But -- western notions of the subject ARE inextricably tied to individualism/uniqueness/production. And I would argue inextricably tied to technology.
Every new technology justifies itself with a dual gesture... at once forward (to the future, to its "advanced" capacities, etc) and backwards (to the prior technologies it supplements, replaces, and "improves."). So hypertext gestures back at a subject that it replaces and forward at a "new" improved subject. I think it can tell us a lot about 1) technologies relationship to our cultural constructions of the subject 2) how our pedagogies/theories are situated and influenced by the claims made for and about new technologies/subjects 3) the political (in the broadest sense) consequences of these complex interweavings.
I'm still thinking about your "cyberspace as cybermall" question. Occurs to me that I've seen two main metaphors for cyberspace so far: the panopticon and the mall. Makes me wanna say, "Hey, let's throw schools in there, too, thus paying homage to *all* our greatest human institutions." <wry grin>hmmmm. I have to believe there are no better panopticons than the malls. Why else all those mirrors?? Self policing of your body image, your old clothes, and your "lack". (Am I projecting here too obviously :-)
I don't object to consumer being used when what is happening is economic consumption. So we may as well be consumers at amazon.com or ebay... but to cast the reader as consumer seems to have some interesting implications. If the author, in western culture, has been the fundamental subject -- it seems it was based on a model of production. You were/are unique insofar as you produce something original and unique. Your "self"ness is encoded and made permanent in the writerly act. Now we move to a model of consumption -- You are what you eat :-) your "self"ness is made up of your selections among items in a finite system. Now I understand that readers of hypertext also "construct" something through the connections they make and that readers are active in that sense. I'm talking about what is being priveleged as a cultural force in making the subject. I don't necessarily see the change as negative, but I do see it as a change that has important ramifications for teaching and learning and writing.
Yeah, I know. Terribly utopian. Visionary flights on a Monday, no less. But, since we've not yet figured out how to get along without *any* sort of economy, it's kinda fun to think about the various sorts we might have.
Maybe I'm just having one of those surly mondays!
Michelle
WSU - V
