Page 212 - Cyberculture and New Media

Tony Richards 203
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tautologically pointing toward the figure of somebody standing on the ground
of their own two feet. There is here within this ‘reflexive-performativity’ a
sort of giddy auto-erotic freedom (a much simplified Nietzschean self-
making) which would see itself as existing a level-above and beyond the old
traditional or grounded identities. Sherry Turkle along the similar lines talks
of new media as spaces that allow us to explore and expand our individual
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identities . On this model networking sites (also ‘Second-Life’ and
videogames) would allow us to create ourselves again and show ourselves as
new faces each time anew to the world (a morphous or protean being-outside-
the-world).
An interestingly befuddled argument on the morphous and playful
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performativeness by Filiciak would merit further symptomatic investigation
for the problem of identity which would seem to be both free (in that like
Gauntlett he celebrates the protean nature of “postmodern” identity
opportunities within games) yet sees the player as soon to be swallowed up
into some cyberspatial self-forgetting (which presumably would land us back
into a form of slavery?). He argues thus:

We are creating our “self” not as a linear process of
construction and striving towards some original target –
each identity we create is a temporary formation. Erosion
of our individual “self” in macro scale is reflected in the
fall of collected identities, like a nation [...] we cannot talk
anymore about a single identity that produces temporary
identities subordinate to itself. Thus in the era of electronic
media we should rather talk about hyperidentity, which is
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related to identity as hypertext to a text.

However four pages earlier we find that such playful opportunities
for morphing our identities is based yet again on a model where the player
finds themselves con-fused with the textual universe within which they find
themselves wrapped up. The power of Cinematic identification again finds
itself rehoused:

The process of secondary identification taking place in
cinema theatres depends paradoxically on distance while in
the case of games we encounter something more than just
intimacy. Identification is replaced by introjections-the
subject is projected inward into an “other”. The subject
(player) and the “other” (the onscreen avatar) do not stand
at the opposite sides of the mirror anymore-they become
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one.