Page 222 - Cyberculture and New Media

Tony Richards 213
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(and to his somewhat pre-portfolio or ‘industrially’ situated dad). The key
moment in the film comes when the dad recognises his own attitudes are
those of a passing age and that he must give way to these new and more
mobile identities: his son should be able to choose the mode and identity he
likes. Here we have a marked move in the figure of the problematic position
of the ‘offspring’ from ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ where Arthur
Seaton is punished for his coming-out-of-the-collective through his use of
music, drink and adulterous affairs. The traditional pre-reflexive ecology of
the time was not yet ripe for choice.
32
Turkle, S., Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon &
Sschuster, New York, 1997.
33
Filiciak, M., ‘Hyperidentities’ in The Video Game Theory Reader ed.
M.J.P. Wolf & B. Perrron (Routledge, 2003) New York and London. pp87-
102
34
Ibid p95-97.
35
ibid. p91
36
Derrida, J. ‘Signature, Event, Context’ in ‘Margins of Philosophy’ (Press,
London ) p.149
37
Bulter ibid. p.13
38
As father of Speech-Act theory Austin spoke of acts which could not be
judged on any constative truth value but which inaugurate or perform an
activity in the very act of saying. This causal-inaugurating of such acts of
speech are what Derrida (like his ongoing deconstruction of the speech and
writing opposition) problematises back into a citational anteriority, making of
the performative a sort of arché-citation much like the famous arché-writing
he makes of speech which he then goes on to mobilize as a borrowed and
retargeted (against the very conceptual framework borrowed from) tool to
work on the tradition.
39
This is one of Austin’s famous performatives with which Derrida takes
issue: self-presence as non-iterable (within ‘Signature, Event, Context’) and
in sympathy with which Butler anchors the reading to engage with questions
or notions of sex/body (as probmematisers or contourings of ‘gender’).
Gauntlett ignores this important influence, as some fast and loose freedom
with the concept might then have been threatened by such noted conceptual
filiations.
40
One need only think here of the ‘verb’ and its connection with the ‘verbal’.
A ‘doing’ word can only seem here to ‘be done’ when it is an originary
‘doing’; as is assumed in a performative speech act.
41
We have to reinforce that the performative that Derrida uses is stretched
from the contradictions noted within Austin’s theory. Austin’s ‘performative’