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Quoting Allucquere Rosanne stone:
One of our Western insustrialised cultural assumptions is that subjectivity is invariably constituted in relation to a physical substrate - that social beings, people, exist by virtue of possessing biological bodies through which their existence is warranted in the body politic. Another is that we know unproblematically what "body" is.
This is part of the intro to her article on Sanford Lewin. Lewin was a psychiatrist who constructeda female persona, Julie Graham, that became more real than Lewin himself on Compuserve:
i was stunned at the conversational mode. I hadn't known that women talked among themselves that way. There was so much more vulnerability, so much depth and complexity. And then I thought ot myself, here's a terrrific opportunity to help people, by catching them when their normal defences are down and they're more able to hear what they need to hear
This is already a fascinating aetup, as it seems to have ticking away underneath the idea that what these women need is not in fact actual female company or support, but rather an "innoculation" of masculine wisdom presented in a capsule of femininity. So, Lewin saw himself as a healer entering an alien community - a beekeeper, possibly, rather than someone creeping into the festival of Bona dea in drag.
But the brief became severely distorted, and Lewin's persona - Julie Graham - developed her own history and personality, and indeed an active netsex life, presumably not entirely within the original Asclepian remit. So, he developed an entire parapersonality, and subsequently created a boyfriend for her, whom he also manifested online. When he tried to kill Julie Graham off, the outpourings of emotion and support were such that he had to ressurect her, and his subsequent attempts to introduce "himself", Stanford Lewin, through the agency of Julie Graham were largely unsuccessful, because compared to Julie Graham Stanford Lewin just wasn't very interesting. If we're talking about a Harawayan structure here, then the structure in which the social interaction occured became - what? - corrupted? Was Julie Graham a parapersonality, or a form of "unvoiced" MPD facilitated by technology, or a virus infecting and reinfecting through individual, interface and context?
You've almost ceratinly already covered Lewin, of course, but it's an interesting jumping-off point. For example, one of the trade-points of barbelith is physical reality and physical location. At the moment, for example, Rothkoid is *physically* in Australia, and pretty pissed off about it, which he can express in threads about barbemeets in London - as a parapresence? To extend this, two recurrent threads in the Conversation are "what do you look like?" (an invitation to post either physical descriptions or images) and "How do you imagine people on Barbelith looking?", which appear largely to coexist successfully. Elsewhere, the Creation had the Barbe-slash thread, in which members of Barbelith were both embodied and sexualised, frequently with bodies and sexualities that are "factually" (airquotes there) not valid, or perhaps valent. Growing out of and into that, a certain type of Barbeloid attempts to assert their primacy by imagining other members into sexual scenarios, in which the target is rephysicalised - embodied and reified simultaneously, in a sense - in what appears to be a form of attempted technological voodoo...
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