Nothing Behind the Mask an Arendtian Approach to Virtual

Nothing Behind the Mask

An Arendtian Approach to Virtual Worlds and the Politics of Online Education

Joseph Sannicandro Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal December 2011

This thesis was submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of Master's of Arts.

Joseph Sannicandro, 2011

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to extend whole-hearted thanks to all the faculty members at McGill who have aided me on this project in its multiple, evolving forms, especially Jonathan Sterne, Cornelius Borck, and Thom Lamarre. Special thanks to Darin Barney, my supervisor and the Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship, for support and guidance, and for forcing me to do better. Additionally I am very grateful to the McGill University Arts Graduate Travel Grant and Media@McGill for funding conferences in which parts of this project were tested. I am also grateful for helpful feedback from Dr. Morris Kaplan, who inducted me into the life of the mind and demonstrated that Arendt could be read against common reception, and Dr. Steven Gold, who helped me focus, in so far as that is possible. Much of the initial drafting of this thesis took place in the small Italian village of Pisciotta, due in no small part to the continued generosity of the Marcoccia family. Of course I thank my family for supporting me over the years even when they didn‘t understand what I was up to. And to Pia, for her loving support throughout a long writing process that left me more distracted than I would have liked. Lastly, I must express my unpayable debt to my primary intellectual interlocutor Samuel R. Galloway for his insightful responses to my work during the course of this project.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ……… 1 Contents ……… 2 Abstract- Résumé ……… 3 Introduction ……… 5 Nietzsche‘s Body, Arendt‘s Mask ……… 19 The Corporate University and the Virtual Classroom ……… 42 New Masks, New Stages? ……… 77 Work Cited & Consulted ……… 104

ABSTRACT

Proceeding from an analysis of contemporary practices of online education courses taught in virtual environments, I seek to recuperate a notion of social identity in Hannah Arendt‘s vision of a political stage; social identity as a mask that actors wear when acting politically. I avoid the language of mediation, instead seeing the ‗Mask‘ as ever present. I offer this mode of inscription as being central to our understanding of medium specificity, and apply it in particular to my analysis of the use of Second Life (SL) in online learning environments. I take the use of SL in university courses as an example to think through what happens when education- which I understand as being essential to citizenship, a practice that depends on appearing in public- shifts to a space of virtual publicity. I examine the history of the modern university and the role that technologies have played in the growing corporate reorganization of the university. I defend the university as, ideally, an autonomous site from which, in Nietzsche‘s words, the ―untimely‖ can emerge. I look to the political thought of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical ground for understanding avatars and virtual community, following Norma Claire Moruzzi in reading the mask of social identity as a site of political engagement. I explore the appositeness of Hannah Arendt‘s articulation of public, political personae or masks in On Revolution, as well as her critique of Plato‘s metaphysical bifurcation of Being and appearance, and her understanding of (Jewish) identity as non-territorial- and therefore virtual- to contemporary debates concerning cybersociality and online community. I read her against common reception to argue that the conception of political actors animating her texts is best illuminated when read heuristically through contemporary discourses of technology. In so doing I develop an Arendtian view of politics and social identity that is amenable to and invests itself in modes of resistance enabled by cybersociality. From the perspective of critical pedagogy, I aim to think through ways of utilizing technologies as potentially repoliticizing, and I identify the properties online learning must demonstrate in order to create new sites of resistance.

RÉSUMÉ

Partant d'une analyse des pratiques contemporaines de cours de formation en ligne a enseigné dans les environnements virtuels, je cherche à récupérer une notion d'identité sociale dans la vision de Hannah Arendt sur une scène politique, l'identité sociale comme un masque que les acteurs portent quand il agit politiquement. J'évite le langage de la médiation, au lieu de voir le "Mask" plus que jamais présent. J'offre ce mode d'inscription comme étant cruciales pour notre compréhension de la spécificité moyenne, et il s'applique en particulier à mon analyse de l'utilisation de Second Life (SL) dans des environnements d'apprentissage en ligne. Je prends l'utilisation de SL dans les cours universitaires comme un exemple de penser à ce qui arrive quand l'éducation-ce que je comprends comme étant essentiels à la citoyenneté, une pratique qui dépend apparaître en public-se déplace vers un espace de publicité virtuelle. J'examine l'histoire de l'université moderne et le rôle que les technologies ont joué dans la réorganisation des entreprises de croissance de l'université. Je défends l'université, idéalement, un site retiré par d'autres institutions, un site à partir de laquelle, dans les mots de Nietzsche, le «prématurée» peut émerger. Je me tourne vers la pensée politique de Hannah Arendt, comme un motif théorique pour comprendre et avatars communauté virtuelle, après Norma Claire Moruzzi en lisant le masque de l'identité sociale comme un site d'engagement politique. J'explore l'apposition de l'articulation de Hannah Arendt de public, personae politique ou des masques dans Essai sur la révolution, ainsi que sa critique de bifurcation métaphysique de Platon de l'Etre et l'apparence, et sa compréhension de (juif) identité en tant que non-territoriales-et donc virtuelle aux débats actuels concernant cybersociality et de la communauté en ligne. Je lui ai lu contre la réception commune pour faire valoir que la conception des acteurs politiques animant ses textes est la meilleure lumineux lorsqu'il est lu à travers les discours contemporains heuristique de la technologie. Ce faisant je développe un point de vue d'Arendt de la politique et l'identité sociale qui est susceptible d'être et s'investit dans des modes de résistance possibles par cybersociality. Du point de vue de la pédagogie critique, je vise à réfléchir aux moyens d'utiliser les technologies comme potentiellement repolitiser, et je identifier les propriétés d'apprentissage en ligne doivent démontrer de manière à créer de nouveaux sites de résistance.

INTRODUCTION

To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea what one is. -Nietzsche1

When we interact with computers, when we project ourselves into the worlds they offer, the machines provoke reflection on self, life, and mind. In this sense, life on the screen brings philosophy into everyday life. -Sherry Turkle2

In many ways, this work is a work about failure. The failure of the university to live up to its ideals, and the failure of professors and students to defend them. The failure of online education to live up to its promises, and our own failure at recognizing these promises as a smoke-screen for neo-liberal reform, academic automation, and the increased corporate restructuring of the university. And of course my own failure in designing a research methodology suited to the present conditions. Still, failure can be a productive point of departure. Understanding what is at the root of these failures is necessary to understanding how we can hope to do better. In this work, my goal is to attend to various forces at work and better consider our responses to them. Online education is taken as an illustrative case of the political significance of constructed identities in virtual worlds, both because the practice of education has explicit political consequences itself in its ties to the practice of citizenship, as well as because I contend that all virtual spaces that serve as public fora must be afforded the same political freedoms as physical public spaces. Hannah Arendt‘s unfailing attention to the question of the political is as useful a tool for understanding these issues as any we have, and she also reminds us of what we stand to lose if these spaces are not defended.

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, ―Why I am So Clever,‖ from Ecce Homo, in On the Genealogy of Moral and Ecce Homo. Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 254. 2 Sherry Turkle, ―Our Split Screens,‖ in Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice. Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney, eds. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc, 2004) 101.

Since first emerging in the 1980s, and coming to prominence during the 1990s, e-learning has taken many forms- from emulating pre-digital distance education models, to augmenting face-to-face-discussion, to mobile delivery of mini-courses- and has largely left many promises unfulfilled. The spread of reliable broadband Internet connections over the course of the last decade has enabled types of online learning and collaboration that were not feasible prior to this development.3 The impact that this new infrastructure will have on higher education remains to be seen, but it stands to reason that as the cost of university education rises ever higher, online courses will become a more attractive method of learning for institutions and students alike. Cost alone is not the only factor driving online education; availability for adult learners and the ability to expand education beyond what has traditionally been offered have also played a role. In order to avoid a ―technologization‖ of learning, that is to say overemphasizing the necessity for particular hard- and software, it is crucial that discussions and implementation of e-learning focus on pedagogies that suit the nature of these spaces, and expand upon critical pedagogies that have already been developed and that may be well-suited to new methods of communication. Such an analysis may also bring into focus what Darin Barney has described as ―the distance between certain historical but persistent ideals concerning the role, orientation, ethos and practice of the university and the material reality of what it has become under the auspices of neoliberal, technological capitalism.‖4 Persistent indeed, these ideals still animate much of the work done at the university, in so far as one can still invoke the university as a concept or place.5

3 To take one example, the genesis of The State University of New York Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) comes from this development, as director Jon Rubin created his first collaborative courses around new media and video editing. http://coilcenter.purchase.edu/ 4 Darin Barney, ―Miserable Priests and Ordinary Cowards: On Being a Professor.‖ Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. 23-24. Fall 2010. 381-387. 5 Of course here are many different types of universities, and these variations are particularly apparent when comparing international traditions, embedded as they are in different cultural and historical contexts, and having based their approach to pedagogy on different traditions. My analytic recourse to the term university is therefore used in a slightly exaggerated capacity. I feel this is justified as the effects of the corporate university and neoliberal reform extends beyond America, as state funding for higher education is cut worldwide and reliance on student loans is

The tension between these ideals and the present conditions must be considered when evaluating the role of online education in the future of the institution, and of learning in general. In keeping with critical pedagogy in the tradition of figures like John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Peter McLaren, I maintain that a politics always surrounds the act of education, and that there is more to learning than simply transmitting knowledge from professor to student. This has always been the case, however as the humanities have been marginalized the ―transmission model‖ has become more dominant. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian instructor of critical pedagogue par excellence, describes this as the ―banking model,‖ in which students are conceptualized as receiving objects into which teachers ―make deposits.‖6 Online learning isn‘t necessarily in opposition to this model, but in fact is often oriented in such a way as to optimize the conditions of the banking model, connecting individuals directly to course material while filtering out the ―noise‖ of the classroom. This is to be expected, as online education has emerged during a period of intense neoliberal reform and the corporate restructuring of the university, and hence its form and function mirror these values. I am not arguing strictly in favor of online education, but identifying the criteria that must be met to afford virtual spaces the same political freedoms as physical spaces, simultaneously offering a critique that applies to all classrooms. The development of the ―virtual classroom‖ is occurring in two separate, albeit related, fronts. The traditional, ―brick-and-mortar‖ classroom has become increasingly ―wired,‖ as universities have sought to incorporate new technology into its classrooms, curricula, libraries, labs, and dormitories, with debatable results. It is not a rare site to see students in seminar rooms or auditoriums sitting in front of their laptops; recording lectures, taking notes, looking up information, or succumbing to the temptation of many digital distractions. Professors are as likely to engage these new tools in clever ways as they are to neglect them entirely. In fact, the blended delivery of ―click-and-mortar‖ seems to have

growing in places previously unseen. 6 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (1970) Myra Bergman Ramos, trans. (New York:

already replaced the idyllic traditional classrooms of the past, as virtually all courses make use of an online syllabus, professor‘s web-page, course materials, digital databases, and the internet to some degree. Other virtual classrooms have more in common with distance education programs of the past, with the entire course ―meeting‖ in a virtual space of exchange. The students who are enrolled in such classes may be traditional or ―non-traditional‖ (ie. adult) university students, some on-campus, others enrolled from afar as was typical of past distance learning initiatives. Many universities have long been making use of online modules in both types of classrooms, including asynchronous tools such as Moodle and Blackboard, to distribute course materials and foster discussion outside of the classroom. Some have also begun using synchronous tools, such as Skype, FlashMeeting, and Second Life to foster real-time interaction, either in place of physical meetings or to augment them. We should be wary of the increased corporatization of the university and the role that new technologies have played in this ongoing restructuring, however these new e-learning practices also raise important pedagogical and philosophical questions regarding the nature of (self-)representation, publicity, collaboration, and action. How does self-representation in online education courses function? How does it differ from a traditional face-to-face setting, and what are the (political) implications of this shift? The social relations and virtual spaces produced via new media technologies problematize existing ontological categories, such as the division between public and private, local and global, and even the category of intelligence itself. The virtual classroom provides a setting for exploring the contours of these changes. The dichotomy between online/offline is overstated, and one I‘d like to challenge. Our personal identities online and our engagement with digital communications media are increasingly integrated into our lives in complicated ways that defy easy categorization. Though I will try to emphasize some of the aspects of online courses and the ―virtual classroom‖ that generate new possibilities, it is not my intention to valorize online education over traditional university settings. I argue that it is

Continuum. 2006). 70.

imperative that these shifts be understood so as our responses to them, as educators, can best preserve the ideals of the university while advancing critical pedagogies. Like education, citizenship is better understood as a practice, an action we engage in rather than something we are owed or credentials we acquire. Emphasizing to students the political significance of our social identities should be of primary importance to educators, as one of the main functions of institutional education remains the production of political actors, of citizens. Irrespective of what sort of environment one teaches in - be it the ideal gathering around a seminar table, the large auditorium common to many large research universities, or in an entirely online environment- this function shouldn‘t be neglected. Rather we should ask what sort of citizens are being produced under the auspices of the neoliberal university, and what role e-learning plays in the process. Has the era of Humanist education ceased to be an appropriate preparation for the obligations of citizenship? If so, what is best to replace it? As often de-politicizing technologies pose a challenge to active citizen engagement, it is imperative that the use of technology in the classroom be framed in ways that emphasize the value-laden nature of technology and that the use and structure of technologies, when employed, foster ideals in keeping with the political freedoms we have defended in other public spaces. In what follows, I seek to recuperate a notion of social identity in Hannah Arendt‘s vision of a political stage; social identity as a mask that actors wear when acting politically. I avoid the language of mediation, instead seeing the ‗mask‘ as ever present in our publicity and denying metaphysical claims to an a priori human behind the mask. I offer this mode of inscription as being central to our understanding of medium specificity and the effects of various media, and apply it in particular to my analysis of online learning environments. Further, I argue that the virtual avatar is the latest ―mask,‖ not a replacement for another presentation. I take the use of Second Life in university courses as an example to think through what happens when education- which I understand as being essential to citizenship, a practice that depends on appearing in public- shifts to a

medium of virtual, digitally-mediated publicity. Online education therefore takes on added political significance as the public is increasingly appearing and speaking/writing in virtual spaces. I examine the history of the modern university and the role that technologies have played in the growing corporate reorganization of the university. I defend the university as, ideally, an autonomous institution, a site from which, in Nietzsche‘s words, the ―untimely‖ can emerge. I contend that the political thought of Hannah Arendt lends itself as an appropriate theoretical ground for understanding the political significance of avatars and virtual environments, following Norma Claire Moruzzi in reading the mask of social identity as a site of political engagement: "Politics as Masquerade." I explore the appositeness of Hannah Arendt‘s articulation of public, political personae or masks in On Revolution, as well as her critique of Plato‘s metaphysical bifurcation of Being and appearance, and her understanding of Jewish identity as non-territorial- one could say, virtual- to contemporary debates concerning cybersociality and online community. Proceeding from the axiom that identity is itself always performed, I argue that the self-creation of the avatar functions heuristically, allowing students to gain self-consciousness of the inherent performativity of identity.7 I read Arendt against common reception to argue that the conception of political actors animating her texts is best illuminated when read through contemporary discourses of technology. Most importantly, Arendt‘s approach to the question of technology foregrounds the importance of attending to the question of politics, be it in the design of technologies or addressing our peers in the town square. In so doing I develop an Arendtian view of politics and social identity that is amenable to and invests itself in modes of resistance enabled by cybersociality, in particular by virtual classrooms. I aim to think through ways of utilizing these technologies as potentially re-politicizing, and I see new communications technologies as creating new sites of resistance, while emphasizing the aspects of new technologies that are necessary for protecting political freedoms.

7 Perhaps most notably by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. See also Esther Newton‘s Mother Camp, one of the studies that inspired Butler's groundbreaking work.

It is often assumed that cybersociality—those modes of interfacing with others through sites like Facebook, Second Life, MySpace, eBay, Twitter, Craigslist, or even Grindr8—is a derivative and thus inauthentic existence moving only through a world of mere ‗representations.‘ Arendt was never interested in questions of authenticity, and hence my utilization of her work is appropriate in challenging those who would further depoliticize such modes of engagement. Instead of focusing on the infinite regress of unmasking, which emphasizes the revealing of that which is hidden, or the broader distraction of searching for an imaginary origin, I will contend that the self-awareness of our constructed appearance can catalyze a shift in political engagement. This is dependent on the means of engagement being designed and implemented to ensure the qualifications outlined below. In order to explore these theoretical claims more concretely, I turn to empirical observation and experiential descriptions of various classroom settings to look at potential benefits, and detriments, of a ―virtual classroom‖ in contrast to the traditional classroom. In an online setting, participants create an avatar to interact within the online environment. This can be a simple profile with an image and short biography in many asynchronous settings, or a 3-dimensional avatar in synchronous, multi-user virtual environments. Particularly in the latter, students are given an opportunity to play with their identity, creating alter-egos that can present different races, gender, and/or sexual orientation. In so doing, participants must reflect upon the nature of representation and appearance itself, a fact that some professors have worked explicitly into their curricula. Linden Lab‘s Second Life (SL) is taken as an example of this type of classroom. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and participant-observation of courses utilizing SL, I suggest that such courses are at their best when facilitating collaboration amongst participants. Such collaborative projects don't depend upon knowledge

8 Grindr is a smartphone application marketed to gay men, designed to facilitate erotic encounters between ―strangers,‖ a practice which challenges our conventions regarding the public/private distinction (by re-shaping any space as a potential site for ―cruising‖) and the role of sex in public life, as well as foregrounding how such services explicitly interface physical bodies. The user is not primarily oriented in front of the screen, but integrates the function with the lived, embodied experience.

transmission from the instructor so much as situate the instructor in the role of facilitator, ―steering‖ the discussions. In fact, the term cyber is actually derived from the Greek ―to steer,‖ which also contains a political significance, as it is the term from which 'governor' is derived. The role of the professor in a face-to-face setting may do this as well, but it is significant to highlight instances of online education that do not reify the ―transmission model‖ and obsess over outcomes and metrics. There is a growing body of work making explicit recommendations for types of online pedagogy and design of curricula, advising on how best to teach in online courses, how to construct ideal learning environments, and what the principles underlying online pedagogy should be.9 These studies tend to treat education as a science, and are correspondingly oriented towards evaluating outcome. Many works on Second Life focus on the mechanics of the interface, the novelty of the introduction of a full 3-D environment complete with sound, or an anthropological account of its uses and ―communities‖ engaged in its world.10 I try to take a different approach where possible, attending to the space which foregrounds technology as a setting which necessitates new negotiations, a space in which actors participate to engage in dialogue and collaborative world- building. I situate this work with those that think through the problem of online representation and the complex ways it interacts with our offline identities, as well as how our own changing conceptions (my emphasis takes as its starting point a rejection of humanism,) are articulated, or obscured, by the discourse and practice of ‗virtual‘ spaces.11

9 Cf., for instance: Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg; with the assistance of Zoë Marie Jones. The Future of Learning Institutions in the Digital Age. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009); Rena M. Paloff and Keith Pratt. Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999); Doreen Starke-Meyerring and Melanie Wilson, eds. Designing Globally Networked Learning Environments. (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008) 10 Tom Boellstorff. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. (Princeton: Princeton University press, 2008); Meadows, Mark Stephen. I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. (Thousand Oaks, CA,: New Riders Press, 2008) 11 Cf. Luciano Floridi, Philosophy & Computing:; An Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 1999); Donna Haraway, ―A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialists Feminism in the 1980‘s,‖ from Feminism/Postmodernism. (New York: Routledge, 1990). N.

I am attempting to identify trends in motion, and though I am not necessarily interested in making predictions as to future developments, I am using these trajectories as points of departure to rethink received notions of community, mediation, and the body, and to emphasize the sites of political negotiation open to us. Regardless of the role that new technologies play in our lives, the task of politics doesn't change. As we face tough battles and negotiations ahead with regards to our educational institutions and their future(s), it is important to ensure that any inclusion of new technologies or virtual worlds in the classroom not merely be Trojan horses for more neo-liberal reform, depoliticizing ―participation,‖ exclusion, or an impoverished education. It is crucial therefore that free and open projects be supported, and the interests of privatization resisted in favor public access.12 Online education needn't mean for-profit education,13 though there is great variation regardless of not-for-, for-profit or non- accredited.14 The promise of online learning echoes the rhetoric of earlier distance and correspondence education, and has primarily been championed by university administrators and the industries that have the most to gain in supplying the

Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies In Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sherry Turkle, ―Our Split Screens,‖ in Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice. Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney, eds. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc, 2004) 101 12 The University of Phoenix, for instance, a for-profit institution of higher education, is the most recognizable brand in online education in the United States. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Apollo Group, Inc, a company publicly traded on the NASDAQ. They engage in extensive advertising campaigns, and its current enrolment of the equivalent of 224, 880 full-time students makes it second only to the State University of New York in total student body. The Almanac of Higher Education". The Chronicle of Higher Education LVI (1): 5. August 28, 2009 13 Many alternatives exist, both for- and non-credit. For instance, the UK‘s The Open University, the largest university by student population in Europe, P2PU, or the Art School in the Art School. The Mozilla Foundation‘s Open Badges project functions as an autonomous accreditation agency, which, if done well, would bolster the reputation of free, non-credit alternatives. There are also proposals in the works to create open virtual worlds designed for educational use. For instance, Paul (Steve) Prueitt recently announced on the Distributed Learning list-serv group a proposition made to President Obama to create a 3-D simulation world for social, public, commercial free, learning. More on this and other projects and manifestos can be found at http://www.liftingpedagogy.com 14 Trident University, a fully-online accredited for-profit private university, presents a fascinating case. The founding faculty were disillusioned by the decrease in faculty influence, as technology was used to replace professorships, and reliance on course lecturers increasing. In the for-profit setting of Trident University, they are able to pay professors more, and boast 90% doctorate rate amongst their instructors.

hardware and software such courses depend upon. In Digital Diploma Mills, David Noble describes this process as ―the automation of higher education.‖15 Noble details the ways in which university administrations have pursued increased technologization of the university, contributing to the corporatization of the university and weakening academic freedom and the autonomy of the institution that is central to its ideals. The university has increasingly claimed ownership of their faculty‘s educational offering so as to commodify their educational offerings. For Noble, these changes fundamentally alter the structure of the university, and precipitate broad institutional change. I agree with Noble‘s assessment, however I see an opportunity to enable positive changes to the structure of the university by explicitly subverting the aims of the administration. The use of new technologies within courses cannot be forced on the faculty, should be designed by the students and teachers rather than administrators, and should make use of the many free and open tools already in use and available. In addition to aiding students in gaining new media literacy, innovative pedagogical methods should make use of aspects of online learning that challenge the corporate structure of the modern university.

Avatars as Masks

The status of the avatar as it relates to identity is a crucial question for understanding how users perceive their actions and judgments in a virtual environment, and I contend that the process of this creation itself functions heuristically, revealing the multiplicity of the construction and performance of our conception of self. As education is one of the primary sites of subject formation, the university and its evolving practices makes it an important site for intervention and resistance. Aid in understanding the complexities of the relationship between the avatar and identity comes not only from studies of new communications media,

15 David F. Noble. Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002)

but more importantly from philosophical analyses of representation. I deploy an Arendtian concept of the Mask to account for the political significance of social identity in public space. I suggest that contemporary practices of the avatar, including its construction in SL but also other practices such as managing social networking profiles and online discussion boards, serve as the latest Mask, not a replacement for another presentation. The Mask we create, individually and collectively, and our self-awareness in creating and wearing it, shapes our conception of ourselves.16 Arendt‘s understanding of the res publica which separates and connects actors in their interest is already unbounded from crude understandings of territoriality and thus opens space for conceptualizing virtual political action. Arendt‘s sketching of the subject is not one that follows in the Heideggerian tradition of presence, and from this perspective the avatar or persona can be viewed as a potent ―sounding-board‖ for actors to speak truth to power.17 Most importantly, this experience can augment 'real life' by bringing into relief the ways in which we always already create and perform our identity. Following Arendt, I contend that doing politics is the most apt way of learning politics, and thus seek to legitimate and encourage modes of political intervention enabled by digital communications technologies. I contend that avatar construction in online educational environments is such a mode of political intervention, a mode that is further empowered by a self-consciousness of its political implications. Furthermore, I maintain the discursive exercise of marginalizing or demeaning these practices is depoliticizing in so far as it discourages such awareness. Surely politics is only possible in a shared public space in which citizens can appear, hence giving the question of virtual appearance a political significance as well as a social and educational one. This requires an unpacking of the relationship between the avatar and the body, which I will carry out below. This line of questioning inevitably leads to claims of ―virtual community‖ that

16 Cf. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd Edition. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), particularly re: The Unknown Soldier, ―Action,‖ S. 24. 17 The constitution of the legion Anonymous, a group commonly described as ―hackers‖ or ―hactivists‖ may be the strongest example of such.

must be confronted. I wade into this daunting question of community following the lead of Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, arguing that community isn't a positive substance to be produced, but rather is a negative aspect, a void created by the mutual obligation of shared existence. I will shift the discussion away from the ―authenticity‖ of virtual community, instead emphasizing the importance of appearance (and self-consciousness of appearance and its poetic dimensions) to politics. Education remains a productive point of departure from which to launch such a repoliticization of online identity construction, as the practice of education both reproduces and cements existing hierarchies, and is already understood as serving the function of producing, or preparing, citizens for public life. Changing our conception of knowledge hierarchies and our understanding of the practice of citizenship by changing our pedagogical methods is certainly not a new strategy, but there is an opportunity to advance new, potentially emancipatory practices by building into their architecture practices that are non-hierarchical and collaborative. Jacques Rancière wrote The Ignorant Schoolmaster in the early 1980s during a heated national debate on education in France, in which he looks back on ―the great thinker of emancipation,‖ the post-French Revolution era schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot. Jacotot‘s great insight was that the teacher needn‘t be an expert who transmits and explicates knowledge. Rather, one can teach what one does not know, and the capacity for intelligence is shared equally. This hypothesis of capacity is truly revolutionary, particularly within a technological society in which the ―experts‖ have seized control of all institutions of power. Pure scientific transmission of knowledge may never have been possible, and the advancement of this myth has contributed to the obscuration of the act of interpretation itself that underlies human knowledge. Rancière's work is important in that it challenges the myth of Progress via his critique of teaching through explication. He begins from an assumption of equality, as opposed to explication which posits inequality. This ―pedagogical fiction of our time [has] been cast on a global scale,‖ and therefore ―any critique of progress... must

intervene on the level of the progression, the speed or pacing, the practice of historical writing itself.‖ Rancière intervenes in such a way with his book, interpreting the past in order to place ―equality- virtually- in the present.‖18 Early educational reformers, such as John Dewey, speculated that future technologies may allows for the types of changes that seemed impossible to implement a century ago. Rancière's method may not depend upon technologies, yet the opportunities they create for the reexamination of received concepts allows for the reintroduction of the lesson of intellectual emancipation to be applied to all forms of learning, of learning as a practice, or equality as something ―to be verified.‖19 The first chapter will examine the theoretical claims that serve as a foundation for my analysis of the avatar in online education. I begin by turning to Nietzsche to think through the status of the body and its relation to education. I draw on Nietzsche to reaffirm a commitment to the importance of the university as a site removed from the center, a place from which the ―untimely‖ can emerge. I analyze a Nietzschean understanding of subjectivity that emphasizes action and deed, particularly in some of his work on theatre and politics. I pick up this thread in Arendt‘s work, following Norma Claire Moruzzi in reading the mask of social identity as a site of political engagement. The following chapter examines recent trends in online education, tracing this developing within the larger narrative of the corporatization of the university and the role that technology has played in this transformation. After recounting the recent history of the university, I assess several institutional approaches to online pedagogy, course design, and interfaces. I compare 4 types of classroom experiences: synchronous-online, asynchronous-online, blended-traditional, and traditional. I place particular emphasis on Second Life (synchronous-offline) in order to contrast the status of the body online against the face-to-face setting of the classroom, drawing on the framework established in the prior chapter. The use of virtual environments in education serves as a point of departure to think through the changing relationships between publicity, the body, and politics.

18 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Kristin Ross, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). xix-xxiii.

Virtual classrooms can not only emphasize learning as a practice, but the various e-learning initiatives and open universities make this an ideal time to reassess the lessons of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and an implementation of universal teaching, that is the belief in the equality of intelligence, that ―everything is in everything.‖ I place a particular emphasis on the collaborative world-building that is carried out by classes meeting in Second Life, an emphasis that can be easily extrapolated to other collaborative projects, such as wikis, translations, and a variety of media production. Online education and online collaboration are not to be conflated, and they are often at odds. I argue that when they do coincide, the common, collaborative endeavors are of educational value, particularly as they foreground the political nature of even a virtual space. Thus the concluding chapter defends the political significance of such world-building by extrapolating from Arendt‘s writings on World, while also making clear that such spaces must be enshrined as public spaces free from the encroachment of privitzation. These practices help bring into relief the contingent and historical constructions of the human and of identity in general in ways that open positive potentialities. I analyze our changing conceptions of publicity and the mask, asserting that when certain political and normative conditions are met, such representations can offer potential sites of resistance, in part because these practices help bring into relief the contingent and historical constructions of the human and of identity in general in ways that open positive potentialities.

19 Ibid. xxii

CHAPTER 1 Nietzsche's Body, Arendt’s Mask

Several voices speak in the poet: Let us listen to their harmonious chorus, In which the seemingly dominant voice Is but one among the others. -Luis Cernuda20

One who is just…puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical scale – high, low, and middle. He binds together those parts…and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. -Socrates21

As the privileged site of the production and replication of knowledge, the university has been linked to new media since its earliest incarnations. Aristotle describes the wax tablets used to practice writing in ancient Athens at Plato‘s Academy, and later Medieval scholasticism depended upon scribes, resulting in the genesis of the university.22 The birth of the printing press and later mass production and the creation of a reading public in turn radically altered the practices of the university, and the emergence of national literary publics, and nationalism, saw the university explicitly assume the role of training state bureaucrats and civil servants. German media theorist Friedrich Kittler relates a history of the university as a media system in his essay ―Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder,‖ emphasizing the ways in which media have shaped pedagogy

20 Luis Cernuda, "Díptico español," in Antología Poética. (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1975) 194. Translation taken from: Juan Goytisolo, State of Siege. (1995) Helen Lane, trans. (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002). Original Spanish: ―Hablan en el poeta voces varias:/ Escuchemos su coro concertado,/ Adonde la creída dominante/ Es tan sólo una voz entre las otras‖. 21 Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato. (translated with notes and an interpretive essay) (New York: Basic Books, 1968) 123. (443de) 22 Giorgio Agamben, ―Bartleby, or, On Contingency,‖ in Potentialities. Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. (Stanford: Meridian, 1999) 140-145. Agamben describes this not as the tabula rasa, but a rasura tabulae , an image of the pure potentiality of thought. ―The writing of thought is not the writing of a foreign hand, which moves a stylus to graze the soft wax; rather, at the point at which the potentiality of thought turns back on itself and pure receptivity so to speak feels its own feeling, precisely then…, it is as if the letters, on their own, wrote themselves on the writing tablet‖

throughout history.23 We can only speculate as to the affect that the profound shift of digital media will have on pedagogy and the university, but the destabilization of existing categories has already begun. To best situate the potential of digital media in the context of formal education requires a rethinking of the purpose of education and the university in light of post- and anti-humanist critiques of Enlightenment Humanism. One cannot properly reflect on the role of the university in society without acknowledging the influence of the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment, which posited universal human Reason and a universal subject. This lineage has been thoroughly critiqued by a variety of thinkers for an equally diverse variety of reasons.24 Nietzsche most brilliantly makes the case against such thinking, brutally critiquing the past in an effort to transform his readers‘ very way of thinking, to have the courage to affirm life. Nietzsche powerfully responds to the problem of metaphysics, critiquing rationalist influence on the university. He stresses the importance of the body, lays the groundwork for an expanded conception of what constitutes a body, and generally destabilizes all naturalized concepts, making room for potentiality and self-shaping. In his prognosis for the university, Kittler writes: Actual knowledge needs places to produce, store, and transmit itself independently of any company. What better places are there than universities? This applies just as much to digitally processed data as to the digitalized data of history. ….Whereas in Gutenberg‘s time the university had to renounce its storage monopoly, its leading role in processing and transmitting now remains as crucial as ever. Following Kittler and Nietzsche, I maintain that the university should be defended

23 Friedrich Kittler, ―Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder,‖ (Critical Inquiry 31(1) 2004: 244. 24 Norm Friesen has suggested in a recent blog post ―Education has always been Posthuman‖ that education has long been ―posthuman,.‖ He cites the European traditions of Bildung and Apprentisage, developments in cognitive science, and educational psychology since at least E.L. Thorndike that, as early as the early 20th century, had blurred the distinction between man and animal. Interestingly, Nietzsche was moved to write Human, All-Too-Human to counter the ―true but deadly Darwinian doctrine of the essential continuity of man and animal.‖ Walter Kaufmann, ―Human, All-Too-Human: Editor‘s Note,‖ in The Portable Nietzsche. (New York: The Viking Press, 1968) 51.

as a site from which the untimely can emerge, a relatively autonomous place removed from military and corporate influence, free from the utilitarian instrumentalization of the market. As Jonathan Sterne has written, ―colleges and universities are special places because they afford opportunities for intellectual activity- research, teaching, dissemination- that is not immediately driven by the exigencies of industry, the need to sell magazine or newspapers, mainstream polity, or other instrumental agendas.‖25 According to Nietzsche, when education presumes a transmission model it functions as a sort of inscription of morals. As the site of this inscription, the body is central to the practice of education expanding upon the dynamic sense of what constitutes the body. What happens when education goes ―virtual‖? If, instead of sitting around a seminar table (or, more commonly, being stuffed in an auditorium), students meet in a virtual setting, piloting mutable avatars in place of their physical bodies? The utilization of avatars in online education -that is, the distancing of the physical body from- seems to present a challenge to this understanding. The disciplinary structure of the classroom is upset, yet the interface of the computer imposes its own sort of discipline upon the student. I attend to the orientation of the student body, both in class and behind the screen, drawing on Nietzsche‘s work on the body, the will, and action, particularly with regards to theatre. I follow the influence of the latter in particular on the work of Hannah Arendt, and distil from this a theory of the Mask which can be applied to our understanding of our personal identities online, and the political significance such identities assume in virtual spaces. This understanding can augment 'real life' by bringing into relief the ways in which we always already create and perform our identity, not as individuals but as one among peers. The avatar becomes the latest mask of the human rather than merely a sort of mediation between discreet, preexisting unities. Aid in understanding the complexities of the relationship between the avatar and identity comes not only from studies of new communications media,

25 Jonathan Sterne, ―The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies: A Re- Introduction,‖ International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1853-1872.

but also from philosophical analyses of representation. Giorgio Agamben writes that ―the Face‖ is not an image, but a threshold. Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature, or any specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insubstantial of all: it is the truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing itself, that is, their being nothing other than a face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear.26 Agamben‘s use of the term transcends the physiological face. Without conflating the two, we can read Agamben‘s use of ―the face‖ as resonant with the way I intend to deploy the concept of the Mask below, and suggest that contemporary practices of the avatar, including its construction in SL but also other practices such as user profiles or screen-names, may contribute to task to which Agamben refers.27 ―Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is,‖ Nietzsche writes in ―Schopenhauer as Educator.‖ This being is ―in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators.‖28 If the goal of ―Nietzschean education‖ is to emancipate the true self, to overcome the momentum of tradition, than a decisive break from Humanist education is required.

The University and Virtual Presence

In ―The Crisis in Culture‖ Hannah Arendt writes that ―truly political activities, …acting and speaking, cannot be performed at all without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by the many.‖29 It is my

26 Giorgio Agamben. ―The Face,‖ in Nudities. (2009) David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) 94-5. 27 Cf. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd Edition. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), particularly re: The Unknown Soldier, ―Action,‖ S. 24, Compare Arendt on Author‘s ―voice‖ contra Agamben‘s ―Face.‖ 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, ―Schopenhauer as Educator,‖ in Untimely Meditations. (1874) R.J. Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.) 129 29 Hannah Arendt, ―The Crisis in Culture,‖ from Between Past and Future. (New York: Penguin

contention that encounters in virtual space constitute such a presence, and as public spaces must be protected as such. I understand such encounters in virtual space as an expansion of the body, itself composed of a meat-body (m-body) and an electronic-body (e-body) elsewhere in space (and time as well, most directly relevant to an examination of the utilization of asynchronous tools in e-learning) In the Arendtian tradition, citizenship is dependent upon the right to be seen, the ability to appear in public. As more of the practice of formal education, indeed our lives, occurs through appearances in virtual spaces… Though few professors have begun teaching courses in virtual worlds such as Second Life, teaching in web-based modules utilizing wikis or Learning Management Systems (LMS) is increasingly common. Many scholars and educational activists have concerned themselves with the question of access, responding by creating an autonomous accreditation agency,30 open universities,31 liquid books,32 and recently even a proposal to build a virtual world akin to SL for the sole purpose of non-commercial education.33 In addition to broadening access, such initiatives also emphasize expanding media literacy, often incorporating critical race, gender and social justice themes. These emerging e- learning practices can also be deployed in ways that require potentially emancipatory pedagogies and create more inclusive access to the university and to bodies of knowledge, helping to reach admirable goals related to internationalization, collaboration, and even job training.34 Nietzsche argued against education that attempts to make people ‗current‘ or ‗timely,‘ instead advocating for that which isn‘t restricted by the fetters of the past. The university faces many challenges in the coming years, including rapidly rising tuition, declining public support, increased precarity of academic labor in

Books, 1968) 217 30 The Mozilla Foundations Open Badges project, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges 31 For instance: Thomas Gokey and the Art School in the Art School, http://www.theasintheas.org/, The Public School, http://all.thepublicschool.org/, and P2PU http://p2pu.org/en/ 32 Cf. Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska, et al. http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/ 33 Paul (Steven) Pruiett‘s http://liftingpedagogy.com/ 34 As much as we‘d like to ignore such clearly instrumentalized goals, clearly job-training is a goal of many in higher education. It is our job as educators, then, to justify how philosophy or critical theory may have actual use to a business student or engineer.

the form of contracted lecturers who lack academic freedom, mounting student debt, and increasingly precarious job-markets over-saturated with college graduates. Many in society do not recognize the benefit of learning and research that goes on at university, and hence the tendency to reduce everything to measurable investments results in an instrumentalized view of even learning. The humanities, as has been argued by Darin Barney, must be defended against those who question their ‗utility,‘ for it is in the humanities that the question of ends is regularly raised for consideration, thus cultivating the human capacity for judgment.35 In order to defend our ground, however, the university is going to have to change. In order to ―become what we are,‖ we must be willing to change.

“Indeed, our body is but a (social) network composed of many nodes!”

Learning environments such as Second Life present us with a potential venue to challenge the disciplinary regimes that have emerged in and around brick-and- mortar institutions, as well as with regards to the body and the human(, all-too- human). Even when questions of equity and access are foregrounded, such as the reforms in the United States after World War II and the student movements of ‘68, many students continue to be marginalized nonetheless as society-wide biases are played out in the classroom. This includes but is not limited to women, LGBT students, minorities, the disabled, adult or senior students, single-parents, and students from low-income backgrounds. Such students already confront more barriers to entry, and the hope is that the increased flexibility of online education –time, cost, location, appearance- will extend the benefits of education to more people. It would be a mistake to claim that the spaces afforded by the internet levels these differences,36 or even to claim that these differences should be levelled. On the contrary, positions on the margins can often be productive as

35 Darin Barney, ―The Question of Education in Technological Society,‖ from Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education & the Internet. Joe Lockard and Mark Pegrum, eds. (New York: Peter Lang, 2007) 277 36 Cf. Lisa Nakamura, especially Cybertypes, on the persistence of race on the internet.

identities of resistance to hegemonic forces.37 Even so, difference can be maintained and respected in a more just way. So how do these online courses understand the body, and how does this relate to the avatar? In my analysis, the body should not be understood as something ―natural‖ but as a construct with contestable borders. Not as something unitary and singular, but multiplicitous and polysemous. Nietzsche spent much of his work tracing the genealogy of morals in order to reveal their contingency, and much of his work is similarly designed to destabilize reified concepts. He challenges universal morals because they pretend in humanist fashion that the individual is being liberated through education, whereas in many ways they are not only reproducing social structures, but reifying them. The body, as the site of inscription, becomes a site of resistance to this practice. Time and again throughout his oeuvre Nietzsche returns us to questions of the organic, physical body- commenting on diet and indigestion, the senses, air quality- but his understanding of the body is broader than just the organic, human body. ―Every relationship of force constitutes a body- whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon they enter into a relationship.‖38 We can understand, for instance, the body politic in such terms, providing an understanding of the forces of action and reaction without recourse to metaphysical notions. It was Nietzsche who perhaps more than any other set the stage for the de- centering of the Subject in the 20th century when he wrote, in On the Genealogy of Morals, that ―there is no ―being‖ behind doing, effecting, becoming;— ―the doer‖ is merely a fiction added to the deed— the deed is everything.‖39 In much

37 Much of what is most interesting politically in feminist and queer studies plays with this notion, and it is in part for this reason that I make much of the ‗drag analogy in an earlier paper on Second Life. When Sloterdijk notes that print media such as literature and philosophy have been marginalized, I take a similar approach. 38 Gilles Deleuze. Nietzsche & Philosophy. (1962) Hugh Tomlinson, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) p. 40. I enjoy Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, though it must be said that is somewhat idiosyncratic and seems designed to support his own work. Despite this it remains a fair reading of Nietzsche's corpus, not unlike Heidegger‘s Nietzsche, and both works are similar in approach to Nietzsche‘s own Schopenhauer as Educator, which is as much about Nietzsche as its purported subject. 39 Friedrich Nietzsche. ―On the Genealogy of Morals,‖ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Walter

of his work he responded to what he perceived as misguided notions of the will and of consciousness to expose their harm. The world appears to us through our senses, through our embodied reality, and thus he must defend the senses against their doubters. The metaphysicians tell us that our senses lie to us, to which Nietzsche responds by invoking the great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. …. ―Reason‖ is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses…. Heraclitus is right….that being is an empty fiction. The ―apparent‖ world is the only one: the ―true‖ world is merely added by a lie.40 In reasserting the reality of appearance and defending the senses, Nietzsche is not just asserting the primacy of a physiognomic understanding, but also challenging much of established philosophy, laying the ground for Husserl and Heidegger‘s phenomenology, and later, deconstruction. We see here that he also lays the blame on ―Reason.‖ What does he mean by this? ―With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dialectics.‖41 Not only does Nietzsche see in Plato‘s Socrates the beginnings of the slave morality, in which the plebs were taken more seriously than the values of the noble, but he there locates his related critique of Reason. As Deleuze makes clear, ―genealogy does not only interpret, it also evaluates,‖42 it produces. And it is ―opposed to absolute values‖ as much as it is opposed to ―relative or utilitarian ones.‖43 Deleuze argues that Nietzsche‘s philosophy needs to be understood as pluralism, which for him is merely another word for empiricism- in fact it is the only true philosophical way of thinking.44 This pluralism extends to our sensory perception, and to our body, ‗soul,‘ thoughts, consciousness, and will. The same genealogical method Nietzsche applies to morals is applied to our understanding of ourselves.

Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Modern Library, 1992.) First Essay, Section 13. 40 Friedrich Nietzsche. ―The Twilight of the Idols,‖ in The Portable Nietzsche. Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: The Viking Press, 1968) 480. 41 Ibid. 475. 42 Deleuze, Nietzsche, 6. 43 Ibid. 2.

―[A]ll that happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will; the world became to it a multiplicity of doers; a doer (a ―subject‖) was slipped under all that happened.‖45 This fiction of the doer is one of the core metaphysical notions insidiously buried in the tradition of Humanism that Nietzsche is attempting to dismantle, returning the attention to the material reality of the body, granted an expanded definition of the body. Nietzsche lays out these connections with the multiplicitous body perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the first part of Beyond Good & Evil, ―On the Prejudices of Philosophers:‖ Willing to me seems to be above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a word- … let us say that in all willing there is, first, a plurality of sensations, namely, the sensation of the state ―away from which,‖ the sensations of this ―from‖ and ―towards‖ themselves, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without our putting into motion ―arms and legs,‖ begins its action by force of habit as soon as we ―will‖ anything. …in every act of the will there is a ruling thought— let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the ―willing,‖ as if any will would then remain over!46 The influence on Deleuze is clear, in his understanding of a plurality of forces acting on an object, indeed the object itself as a force. Nietzsche claims that the synthetic concept of an ―I‖ behind our actions is erroneous, and contributes to our self-deception. Nietzsche continues, after the passage cited above, to note that the will always commands obedience- ―I am free, ‗he‘ must obey‖- itself a demonstration of the multiplicity contained in us all. This multiplicity becomes masked by the fiction of the ―I,‖ which institutes itself as the cause of thoughts. Nietzsche never tired of emphasizing that: a thought comes when ―it‖ wishes, and not when ―I‖ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ―I‖ is the

44 Ibid. 4. 45 Nietzsche, Idols, 496. 46 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, from Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Modern Library, 1992) 215.

condition of the prejudice ―think.‖ It thinks; but that this ―it‖ is precisely the famous old ―ego‖ is, to put if mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ―immediate certainty.‖47 This fact itself is not a question of language or grammar, but our misunderstanding grows out of their ambiguity. Every activity requires an agent, he goes on, and since thinking is an activity there must be an agent behind this. But in this line of thinking he sees the mistakes of atomism, the same old assertion that there must be a self-contained unity at the heart of all things, a first- mover, an origin. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche identifies this as one of the Four Great Errors, ―The error of false causality:‖ The conception of a consciousness (―spirit‖) as a cause, and later also that of the ego as cause (the ―subject‖), are only afterbirths: fist the causality of the will was firmly accepted as given, as empirical. ….we no longer believe a word of all this. The ―inner world‖ is full of phantoms and will- o‘-the-wisps: the will is one of them.48 Likewise, the motive is a similar such error, the error of imaginary causes, nothing but a surface phenomenon of consciousness. For Nietzsche, such phenomenon are more likely to mask causes than to represent them. He counts the ego as such a case. In particular- and not unlike Freud, on whom he was a major influence- Nietzsche believed that consciousness was the region of the ego which was effected by the external world. Deleuze clarifies that this relationship is less one of externality as inferiority/superiority.49 That is, consciousness is never self-consciousness, but rather consciousness of unequal forces.50 This extends to a larger conception of the body as well as consciousness, because as always Nietzsche rejects dualities. Nietzsche gives more evidence of this relationship of active and reactive forces that constitute bodies in Beyond Good & Evil when he summarizes that a ―the person exercising volition adds the feelings

47 Ibid. 214. 48 Nietzsche, Idols, 494. 49 This is a relationship which I eluded to earlier in the introduction in the context of Rancière and the pedagogization of society. Note we are identifying unequal forces, not capacity, as is Rancière‘s focus. More on this in the next chapter. 50 Deleuze, Nietzsche, 39.

of depth of his successful executive instruments, the useful ―under-wills‖ or under-souls— indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls— to his feelings of delight as commander.‖51 One might update this claim and say that- ―indeed, our body is but a (social) network composed of many nodes!‖52

“Speak So That I May See Myself”

According to Arendt, the ―central political activity is action,‖ and this activity is, unlike labor or work, only possible amongst others. In fact, ―…to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.‖53 Arendt is unsympathetic to a Marxist reading because it doesn‘t maintain this important distinction. She briefly traces the history of man-the-laborer and man-the-maker, animal laborans and homo faber, which have at various times been valued one higher than the other. In either case, action is confused or lost. At the same time she is working to challenge the hierarchy of vita activa and vita contemplativa, which likewise have been reversed over the centuries. From Aristotle until Marx, it was the latter that was given priority. Plato and Aristotle extolled the virtues of contemplative thought, ultimately to proliferate as the notion of Christian otherworldliness.54 Vita activa is the conventional Medieval (Latin) rendering of the Aristotelian formulation bios politicos. In Greek, politiko$ means statesman.55 Though Aristotle recognized many human activities, only two constitute the life of the statesman: action (praxis) and speech (lexis).56 In Arendt‘s account, because of this elevation

51 Nietzsche, Good & Evil, 216. 52 Samuel R. Galloway, ――Indeed, the body is but a social network...‖‖ (paper presented at Gender, Bodies, Technology, hosted by Virginia Tech‘s Women‘s and Gender Studies Program, Roanoke, VA, 22-24 April 2010). Galloway draws his title of his paper by paraphrasing this line from Nietzsche. 53 Arendt, Human Condition, 188. 54 The danger here is in restricting man‘s capacity to act in the world, indeed to perceive the world. 55 For an account of the significance of these terms, cf. Sloterdijk on Plato‘s ―Statesman‖ in ―Rules for the Human Zoo.‖ 56 Arendt, Human Condition, 24-25.

of thought begun with the Greeks, the later reformulation of bios politikos as vita activa lost its political significance. Not because ―work and labor had risen in the hierarchy of human activities,‖ she explains, but rather that ―action was now reckoned among the necessities of earthly life.‖57 In this world, contemplation was ―the only truly free way of life.‖ Marx (and Nietzsche, it could be argued) inverted this hierarchy, calling for a return to life and labor. But Arendt notes that in inverting this relation, the fundamental ―conceptual framework is left more or less intact.‖58 Marx believed that in technology there exists the potential to liberate man from toil. In Arendt‘s thinking, he conflates labor and work, defining man as animal laborans. Here she locates the great contradiction and tragedy of his work; Marx defines man in terms of his capacity to labor ―and then leads him into a society in which this greatest and most human power is no longer necessary. We are left with the rather distressing alternative between productive slavery and unproductive freedom.‖59 This contradiction in Marx‘s thought is directly the result of his inability to distinguish between labor and work, capacities of man that have very different characters. Nietzsche doesn‘t exactly make such a distinction, so far as I know, but Arendt is informed by a Nietzschean reading nonetheless. Arendt rightly points out that this desire to be freed from labor hardly originated with Marx. Even the Greeks harbored this desire, but at that time it was attainable by only the few, the elite. In fact, for Aristotle, it was only these who were free to think, to live the vita contemplativa free of the bounds of necessity, that were truly human. Others passed by their lives as do animals.60 Therefore she argues that neither thought nor action is subordinate or superior to the other. Early in the text she makes it clear that she is systematically limiting her examination to the vita activa: labor, work, and action. However, immediately preceding this, she has just proposed

57 Ibid. 14. 58 Ibid. 17. 59 Ibid. 105. 60 Ibid. 19.

that we ―think what we are doing.‖61 Of course, The Human Condition is a work of thought, and thought underlies the whole process.62 She is not giving direct attention to the vita contemplativa, but she makes it clear on several occasions that the two must be thought of as equals. Labor is cyclical or processual, dictated by biological rhythms, and similarly so is action, through which politics occurs. They are both processes that recur, in which no lasting trace is made.63 It is not only the conflation of work and labor that troubles Arendt, but the conception of politics as making something, because this understanding would collapse the distinction she is working to re-articulate. Like her mentor Heidegger, Arendt makes a distinction between thought (for Heidegger, meditative thinking,) and scientific or cognitive thought (for Heidegger, calculative thinking.)64 Both thinkers are influenced by Nietzsche‘s writing on the matter. In turning towards modern science and technology, she says that: all that the giant computers prove is that the modern age was wrong to believe with Hobbes that rationality, in the sense of ―reckoning with consequences,‖ is the highest and most human of man‘s capacities, and that the life and labor philosophers, Marx or Bergson or Nietzsche, were right to see in this type of intelligence which they mistook for reason, a mere function of the life process itself, or, as Hume put it, a mere ―slave of the passions.‖ Obviously, this brain power and the compelling logical process it generates are not capable of erecting a world, are as wolrdless as the compulsory processes of life, labor, and consumption.65 Her task is, as always, to maintain distinction. Calculative thinking, or cognition, should not be valued over contemplative thought, which allows for the appearance of world, and for political action which allows men to appear to one another. It is

61 Ibid. 5. 62 I wouldn‘t be the first to note that it is when Arendt most dedicates herself to a work of contemplation that she focuses on the subject of Action. Cf. Roberto Esposito‘s Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. (1998) Timothy Campbell, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) 80. 63 She does admit that an action can becomes a cause, a chain reaction of other actions. 64 Arendt, Human Condition. 170-171. 65 Ibid. 172.

these questions which will take on crucial significance in my account of the Mask in virtual spaces.

Cynical Posthumanism

What political questions emerge, then, when our conception of the subject is in flux, indeed comes to accept that it is in flux? The stability of the world, that which we built collectively and that which will outlast us all, is essential for Arendt as a means of stabilization. Later I will argue that such (relative) stability of world must be an element of any effective virtual world. First, I will attempt to resolve the question of how to accept this instability while also preserving the body, and what sort of critique can grow out of such understanding. Deleuze & Guattari give us one possible synthesis with their poststructuralist project which conceives of capitalism as a system of re- and de-territorializing forces, the subject becoming just one manifestation or node in a larger network of connections. This lends itself to the modern day conception of society, but is not without its shortcomings. Though I think this is worth exploring further, perhaps there is too much emphasis on the supposed non-hierarchical nature of these connections.66 67 Peter Sloterdijk is perhaps most attendant to the currents I‘ve traced in Nietzsche, and has laid out in his own work the ways in which this approach opens up a space for reconsidering questions of what it means to be(come) human. Being a thinker who rejects dualisms, he is less concerned with dialectics as with consciousness. The obsession of modern philosophers, since at least Kant, with ―rationality‖ and a false conception of Enlightenment has resulted in what Sloterdijk describes as an ―Enlightened False Consciousness.‖ In

66 The problem remains as ever that in attempting to represent reality in some way, we lean on structures that can only approximate it. That said, it‘d be interesting to think through the questions surrounding the Google search algorithm and the weight given different connections. Also, Cf. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, p. 474: ―Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms: in themselves such judgments are stupidities. … the values of life cannot be estimated.‖ 67 The Autonomia school also gesture in a direction of synthesis, for instance in the work of Antonio Negri or Franco ―Bifo‖ Berardi, but I‘m not convinced that their approach escapes the

―Cynicism‖ he argues that cynicism has become the dominant mode of False Consciousness in the modern world, and the reason ―for the complete exhaustion of ideology critique.‖68 He puts forth Diogenes of Sinope as the example par excellence of the cynic of the ancient world, or kunikos (kuniko$) in Ancient Greek. Figures like Diogenes, however, defined by their negation and renunciation, are distinct from the modern cynic which is a universal condition by which the plebeians cope with their lack of power. The cynic of modernity is ―no longer an outsider.‖ A psychologically inclined reading, Sloterdijk acknowledges that cynicism asserts a sort of realism, an admission that the ―times of naïveté are gone,‖ and an expression of the will to self-preservation.‖69 Always a good reader of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Sloterdijk carries with him an implicit anti- humanism that orients him distinctly against the earlier readings of Marx. Whereas most 20th century thinkers are obsessed with systemization and resolving contractions, Sloterdijk is aware that paradox defines our experience of the world and that some contradictions cannot and should not be resolved. The paradox at the heart of this essay is the emergence of the Enlightened False Consciousness, a paradox he explores ―physiognomically.‖ This articulation is clearly informed by his understanding of Nietzsche‘s materialism, and his other work is consistent with this reading as he grounds his understanding of the world in a human perspective, yet one that in constant flux and need of negotiation. In part because cynicism has cut itself off from humor and satire, which defined it from the Greek era until at least the 19th century writings of Heine (and Nietzsche), contemporary activist philosophies such as Marxism and Freudianism have resulted in this contemporary condition. However, despite his statement that Marxism keeps open the possibility of emancipation, Sloterdijk seems to ultimately suggest that this understanding only reinforces modern cynicism, as in fact the entire conception of the existence of Enlightenment is mistaken. What does this understanding of our present condition afford us? In

trappings associated with humanist liberation that I sketched out above. 68 Peter Sloterdijk. ―Cynicism: The Twilight of False Consciousness,‖ (New German Critique 33: 1984) 190. 69 Ibid. 192.

Thinker on Stage, Sloterdijk outlines Nietzsche‘s materialism, a philosophy of the body, and we see where the importance of physiognomic thinking lies.70 Sloterdijk is one of the latest German thinkers to pick up the mantle of Nietzsche and Heidegger, arguing for an expanded definition of media and a posthumanist (or antihumanist) critique. In this short treatise Sloterdijk offers a brilliant re- reading of Nietzsche, beginning with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first major published work. Too much attention is given to the Dionysian, he argues, in both the original and later manifestations of Nietzsche‘s thought. As with his recent work on ‗rage,‘ in which he argues for a balance of Eros and Thanatos, his argument here is not against the Dionysian. Instead he points out that Apollonian and Dionysian forces are not set in opposition, but rather that the two are both necessary. In asserting a cynical Nietzschean materialism, Sloterdijk has laid the grounds for a practical materialism, a philosophy of the body, and one which can take into account the complex relations we have with technology. Sloterdijk‘s later work points towards potentially transformative, and dangerous, paths ahead. In ―Rules for the Human Zoo‖ Sloterdijk revisits Heidegger‘s famous 1946 antihumanist manifesto, ―Letter on Humanism.‖ Heidegger was himself responding to the misappropriation of his work by the French, Sartre in particular.71 He seems to suggest that Humanism has failed in its own stated goals, and no longer serves the purpose of ―taming‖ man that was for so long its purpose. He writes: The question of humanism is more than the bucolic assumption that reading improves us. It is, rather, no less than an issue of anthropodicy: that is, a characterization of man with respect to his biological indeterminacy and his moral ambivalence. Above all, however, from now on the question of how a person can become a true or real human being becomes unavoidably a media question, if we understand by media the means of communion and communication by which human beings attain

70 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism. Jamie Owen Daniel, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.) 71 The cynics among us might suggest that he was repositioning himself to be more influential in the French intellectual ―market,‖ as he was not held in very high regard in Germany after the war

to that which they can and will become. (Emphasis mine.) 72 Sloterdijk‘s definition of media would seem to include the body itself, and this is consistent with my line of argument thus far. The history of the university is intimately tied to the history of Humanism as a taming power, and yet Sloterdijk suggests that in fact this was always an illusion. Sloterdijk argues that the period of print culture, from the widespread dissemination of printed material and higher literacy rates in the late-18th century until the end of World War II, and the beginning of the era of television, the goal of reading, indeed of education, was to tame the beast of man, to counter the more bestializing tendencies of, for instance, the Roman blood sports. Education, the modern university as well as the public primary and secondary schools, made it their goal to shape individuals into citizens, into real human beings. Humanism was the ―telecommunication in the medium of print to underwrite friendship,‖ and indeed philosophy itself is transmitted as such ―thick letters between friends.‖ The university is not the only central institution to emerge as a consequence of literacy. …the nation-state itself was to some extent a literary and postal product: the fiction of a fateful friendship with distant peoples and sympathetically united readers of bewitching common (or individual) authors. If this period seems today to have irredeemably vanished, it is not because people have through decadence become unwilling to follow their national literary curriculum. The epoch of nationalistic humanism has come to an end because the art of writing love-inspiring letters to a nation of friends, however professionally it is practised, is no longer sufficient to form a telecommunicative bond between members of a modern mass society. Because of the formation of mass culture through the media, radio in the First World War and television after 1945, and even more through the contemporary web revolution, the coexistence of people in the present societies has been established on new foundations. These are, as it can uncontrovertibly be shown, clearly post- literary, postepistolary, and thus

due to his brief yet unapologetic association with National Socialism. 72 Peter Sloterdijk. ―Rules for the Human Zoo: a response to the Letter on Humanism,‖ Mary

posthumanistic. Anyone who thinks the prefix `post' in this formulation is too dramatic can replace it with the adverb `marginal'. …The period when modern humanism was the model for schooling and education has passed, because it is no longer possible to retain the illusion that political and economic structures could be organized on the amiable model of literary societies.73 If this period has passed, if we are indeed in a transitionary period, than what will follow? Has literature been pushed to the margins? As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, change can and does come from the margins, so this is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially because the elitist role of the university has been challenged by the need for equal access (or at least widening participation), such a rethinking of the university may help us redefine the university, or some successor institutions, that can serve both goals as separate institutions. If we accept that the foundations of society, the very way in which we live together, has been ―established on new foundations,‖ then such a rethinking of the university is crucial.

On Avatars and Masks

Truth, for Arendt, is ―worldly, public, and performative rather than essential or private,‖74 and it is for this reason that Norma Claire Moruzzi argues that the theatrical mask is such an attractive metaphor to Arendt. In On Revolution, Arendt describes the original use of the word persona in Roman theatre. Stemming from the Latin meaning approximately ‗to sound through,‘ Arendt notes that the mask it referred to served two purposes: ―it had to hide, or rather to replace, the actor‘s own face and countenance, but in a way that would make it possible for the voice to sound through.‖75 This is crucial, for in Arendt‘s conception, it is in speech that man is most fully human, that is, capable of

Varney Rorty, trans. (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, 2009): 16. 73 Ibid. 14. 74 Norma Claire Moruzzi. Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) 36. 75 Hannah Arendt. On Revolution. (New York: Penguin, 1963) 106-107.

political action. It is worth bearing in mind here that the avatar in SL functions very much like this mask, as the user‘s voice is projected into the virtual environment for others to hear. Unlike earlier virtual environments, such as the graphical-text environments described in the work of theorists like Ken Hillis, SL makes use of audio so that users can speak to one another as they would in person. SL makes use of algorithms which cause the voice to travel as they would in a physical environment; e.g. voices fade as one travels away from the source, increases in volume as one approaches. Users, particularly professors I‘ve observed teaching in SL or those giving papers at virtual conferences, make use of this feature.76 There is also a text box for chatting and conversing, which can be used by those who do not wish to speak or who do not have the proper equipment, and in my experience, at least in educational and casual / social situations, there doesn‘t seem to be a bias towards one or the other. Often, users employ both methods, especially useful for communicating to a group certain information while speaking with an individual. One can also imagine the usefulness for students communicating in non-native languages, for whom reading is easier than listening and speaking. Moruzzi employs Julia Kristeva‘s psychoanalytic theory, the notion of the abject in particular, in order to recuperate a notion of the social in Arendt‘s work that is more inclusive and takes both the body and psychic life into account, rather than simply action and thought. She tells us on the first page or her book that she reads ―[Arendt‘s] works against themselves in order to breakdown some of the strong distinctions," most importantly the division between political and social, found in her thought.77 By locating this device within Arendt‘s own thought, she is able to produce a thoroughly Arendtian conception even though it runs counter to her strict distinction drawn between social and political action. This deconstruction is faithful to Arendt‘s thought while taking into account the advances made since her death. Importantly, Moruzzi also draws on Joan

76 In such settings as a lecture it is possible to regulate one‘s settings to hear better or block out noise from participants around you, and so on.

Riviere‘s classic 1929 article ―Womanliness as a Masquerade‖ in order to theorize ―the representation of the feminine through public masquerade.‖78 This essay ―provides the conceptual link between Arendt‘s own writing on the public mask as a source of political agency and her suspicion that political action requires the transcending of any nondominant social identity.‖79 Moruzzi argues that the mask of social identity can be worn in the social realm as a form of political action, and takes as her example the women marching on Versailles, who wore the mask of femininity and of poverty. The concluding chapter offers a very interesting reflection of the figure of Alcibiades, who blurred traditional masculine and feminine roles in his public life. She speculates that the true defacers of the hermai,80 that Alcibiades was accused of castrating, could have been the women of Athens, a protest against the impending war and their lack of inclusion in public deliberation that would directly affect them. Judith Butler‘s seminal work Gender Trouble established a strong account of the way in which identity, including gender, is always performed. For Butler, drag demonstrates the way in which gender is performed, and calls attention to the social construction of identity in general. Furthermore, the performativity of drag foregrounds the element of performativity because of its self-consciousness. I argue that Moruzzi‘s concept of the mask, when applied to avatar-based programs such as Second Life, serves the same end as drag in this context; it creates a self- consciousness of the performance. In the concluding chapter, I will connect this to Arendt's figure of the Pariah, but for now it is enough to note that the benefit of attaining such self-consciousness is the destabilization of roles that were previously considered to be ―natural,‖ opening a space for contestation. This is especially significant because Moruzzi‘s recuperation of the social allows us to understand how the mask of social identity can count as authentic political action in Arendtian terms. As Dana Villa demonstrated in his book Politics, Philosophy, Terror, the importance of self-distancing and the mask plays

77 Moruzzi. Speaking through the Mask, 1. 78 Ibid, 15. 79 Ibid. 27. 80 The Hermai were heads of the god Hermes atop rectangular pillars with male-genitalia attached.

a central role in Arendt‘s conception of public life. This fact already calls into question traditional notions of authenticity, one more reason that Arendt can be so usefully employed in theorizing ‗virtual worlds.‘ Arendt‘s exclusion of the physical body from the discourse of the political stems from her distinction between private and public. Private matters are those that cater to the body explicitly; a political actor must be free of these base concerns. Arendt based this upon the classical Greek polis, and therefore women and slaves were obviously in the former category, as private citizens whose labor dealt with the immediate concerns of the body, growing food, preparing meals, cleaning, providing shelter, and so on. ―But is free, enacted agency necessarily restricted only to those who can emancipate themselves from the demands of the body?‖ Moruzzi asks.81 Arendt premises even this ―highly restricted version of political agency on an understanding of the political as fundamentally embodied, although some bodies are apparently more privileged, more performative, and less essentialized than others.‖ Moruzzi then turns to Arendt‘s On Revolution, a work that examines and contrasts the French Revolution and the American Revolution, asserting in the end that the former failed because it was corrupted by ―the social question: the miserable body and its immediate needs.‖82 But Moruzzi questions this conclusion in part because the American revolution succeeded in part because it consigned an entire segment of the population- slaves from Africa- to labor so that the land-owning elite could be ‗political.‘ Moruzzi‘s recuperation of the social not only blurs Arendt‘s once strict delineation between the political and the social, but also challenges Arendt‘s reading of these two revolutions. It is through action and speech that our identity is revealed, and in fact this revealing is also an act of production. One might again think here again of Nietzsche, who tells us: Only artists, and especially those of the theatre, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each himself is, himself experiences, himself wants; only they have taught us to value the hero that

81 Ibid. 12 82 Ibid. 15.

is hidden in each of these everyday characters and taught the art of regarding oneself as a hero, from a distance and as it were simplified and transfigured – the art of ‗putting oneself on stage‘ before oneself. … Without this art we would be nothing but foreground… [The stage] taught man to view himself from a distance and as something past and whole. In my account, I contend that virtual spaces such as Second Life have precisely this function of putting oneself on stage before oneself (and others.) We are always already speaking through the Mask, always already performing on a stage. What once appeared to be the totality of the body was therefore also (just) a masquerade performed by political actors in a given historical context. With this in mind, the avatar becomes just the latest form of the mask, not a replacement for another presentation. The avatar-Mask‘s self-conscious construction allows Moruzzi‘s point to be easily understood. Media theorists, such as Mark Andrejevic and Wagner James Au, have remarked that the latest developments in virtual worlds seems to have vindicated Sherry Turkle‘s position in her groundbreaking Life on the Screen. In a world of text-based chat rooms and fantasy role-playing games, her claim that users would be ―swept up by experiences that enable them to…challenge their ideas about a unitary self,‖83 or that the computer brought postmodern theory ―down to earth,‖ demonstrating seemingly abstract theories in practice, seemed far fetched. However, in an objective-less and relatively sophisticated environment such as SL, we now have case studies and anecdotal evidence to support her suspicions from 15 years ago. Online classrooms offer us the ideal environment for conducting more rigorous studies in this area. In the next chapter, I will relate some of these studies of virtual classrooms, including some of my own research and observations into courses taught using Second Life and online wikis. I describe examples from four categories of classrooms: synchronous-online, asynchronous-online, blended- traditional, and traditional face-to-face. Though I attempt to highlight the

83 Quoted in Wagner James Au. The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World. (New York: Collins, 2008.) 71.

advantages and limitations of each setting, I have chosen multiple examples in each group to emphasize the limits of the judgments we can make based solely on the nature of the classroom. After all, there is more to education than delivery. I situate my analysis within a history of the increased corporatization of the university, with particularly attention given to the role that digital communication technologies have played.

CHAPTER 2 The Corporate University and the Virtual Classroom

…and regarding the sounding out of idols, this time they are not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are altogether no older, no more convinced, no more puffed-up idols— and none more hollow. -Nietzsche84

Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already saw- with ruse. In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled. -Walter Benjamin85

The university has long been a site in the struggle for enlightenment, an institutional center founded on the values of self-knowledge and critique. In order to carry out its work, the university was set aside from other institutions and associations to preserve its autonomy. This was surely never a perfect or complete separation; interference inevitably came from religious and military institutions, as well as pressure from the state to prepare bureaucrats, managers, or technicians for service. This latter condition, as evidenced by the role of universities in France and the British Empire, contributed to the creation of many of the bureaucratic aspects and systems of modernity.86 The elitism inherent in these institutions was challenged by the reforms of liberal democracies, and the public university emerged as a means to grant access to higher education to those who had been excluded. Certainly as progressive thinkers we must cheer this development, particularly if we believe that education plays a critical role in preparing individuals for the responsibilities of citizenship and ‗the good life.‘ The involvement of the state, however necessary its financial investment may be,

84 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche. Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: The Viking Press, 1972) 466. 85 Walter Benjamin. ―Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,‖ in Reflections. Edmund Jephcott, trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 162. 86 Cf. Ian Angus, Love the Questions, and Arendt, ―Bureaucracy,‖ in The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially p. 371. She looks at the genealogy of totalitarianism from this colonial bureaucracy.

paved the way for future interventions which have gradually undermined the university‘s autonomy. In accordance with the larger trends towards neoliberal economic reform, particularly in recent years following the ―global financial crisis‖ of 2008, public funding for universities continues to be decreased and is continually at risk of further cuts, resulting in universities that are more reliant on corporate funding and producing marketable innovations.87 American-style private universities have relied on students' access to student loans, shifting the burden of paying for education to the student, while allowing for the inflation of university costs and propping up student loans as a new financial commodity.88 89 The emergence of this ‗corporate university‘ is a fundamental betrayal of the ideals on which the university was founded. In the context of this thesis, neoliberalism describes the spread of free- market values to all (or most) global institutions, emerging in 1971 after the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreements and President Nixon‘s suspension of the gold standard.90 Neoliberalism fuses political and economic liberalism, but one can reject the economics implications of neoliberalism without necessarily rejecting the tradition of political liberalism. The individualistic ―freedom of choice‖ is one of the fundamental ideologies of liberalism, both political and economic. Some of the potentialities I highlight in the context of online education may seem to be consistent with a liberal political model, even if resisting neoliberal economic policy. For this reason, I will not pass explicit judgment on the political tradition known as liberalism, which would require a thesis of its own. In this chapter, I will examine recent trends in online education, tracing this development as part of a larger narrative of the corporatization of the

87 Andrew Gillen, ―Tuition Bubble? Lessons from the Housing Bubble,‖ The Center for College Affordability and Productivity, 2008. Accessed December 5, 2011. http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Bubble_Report_Final.pdf, 11,18. 88 Justin Pope, ―College prices up again as states slash budgets.‖ MSNBC.com, Accessed Dec 9, 2011. http://on.msnbc.com/SlashFunding 89 MediaMattersForAmerica, ―WSJ Falsely Blames Increased Government Aid For Rising Higher Education Costs‖ October 04, 2011 http://mediamatters.org/research/201110040011 90 The International Monetary Fund, ―The end of the Bretton Woods System (1972–81).‖ Accessed on December 4, 2011. http://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm

university. Though technology has played a role in this transformation, I argue this relationship is not a necessary one, but contingent on the nature of the technology and the institutional particularities of each case. After establishing the philosophical framework from which I will be approaching the question of technology, I assess several institutional approaches to online pedagogy, curricula, course design, and interfaces. While doing so I highlight sites of resistance in some aspects of new technologies, particularly in collaborative potentials of non-proprietary applications, open access journals, and open and free ―universities.‖ That is to say, technologies that don‘t require a buy in on an institutional level and which support ideals in keeping with the ideals underlying the mission of the university. I draw on a variety of case studies as well as my own empirical research to consider the implementation of online learning from various perspectives, taking care to attend to the orientation of each case towards technology. I compare four types of ―virtual classroom‖ experiences- synchronous-online, asynchronous-online, blended-traditional, and traditional face-to-face- placing a particular on Second Life (synchronous-offline). I do this in order to contrast the status of the e-body (avatar) online against the face-to-face setting of the classroom, drawing on the framework established in the prior chapter. The use of avatars in these virtual classrooms serves as a point of departure to think through the changing relationships between publicity, the body, and politics, relationships which will be taken up in the concluding chapter.

The University, Technology and the Humanities

Critique of the university is certainly nothing new. Plato‘s Academy, which, notably, was established on the outskirts of Athens, is often cited as a precedent to the university as we know it. Though influenced by the Athenians, the University of the Scholastic Tradition of Medieval Europe bore it little resemblance; monks devoted to copying texts replaced the leisurely activities of young Athenian

men.91 During the rise of nationalism in Europe, French, German, and British universities began to train bureaucrats and civil servants as functionaries in the newly minted nation-states. In Germany, the separate research universities and the pedagogical tradition of Bildung were deeply influential on North American universities, and in many ways is still the template for the modern university.92 The 20th century saw advances in psychology result in new approaches to pedagogy, shifting pedagogy from a liberal art to a science. The post-war period in particular experienced a greater inclusively, as campuses were made co-ed, and greater segments of the population were afforded entry through programs such as the GI Bill and the establishment of many public universities and colleges. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Distance Learning programs, using the postal services (and imagining the role of radio and TV) sought to address those who were being excluded by means of alternative access. Recent critiques of the university often seek to restore the promise of the (ideal) university as an institution central to a free and democratic society. This promise is increasingly threatened by incursions into the academy of market- centric thinking, primarily governmental and corporate actors (who are increasingly difficult to tell apart). A growing body of literature critiquing the current state of the university has emerged, much of which emphasizes the betrayal of these core values. Some defend the humanities against budget cuts and attacks on their lack of utility, while others‘ attention focuses on the growing corporatization of university administration and the effects this process has on scholarship and student development, as well as related questions of (political) economy. The use of technology in the classroom plays a central role in many of these critiques, particularly because much of the corporate restructuring of the

91 There are also famous examples on non-Western centers of learning, such as Nalanda, a Buddhist center of learning and one of the first great universities of the world with over 10,000 students and 2, 000 faculty. Founded in the 5th century, it lasted until being sacked and burned by Turks in 1193. Unfortunately the contributions of non-Western cultures to the institution of the university often go unrecognized, but as the European tradition is the direct forbearer of the universities in question here, I will restrict myself to the European tradition. 92 Norm Friesen & Darryl Cressman, Media Theory, Education and the University: A Response to Kittler‘s History of the University as a Media System.‖ (2010). Canadian Journal of Media Studies. 7(1). http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/issues/07-01/Friesen%20and%20Cressman.pdf

university often seems to be driven by technological changes and justified as preparing students to compete in a ―network society.‖93 Some see new technologies as a solution of pedagogical problems while others see them as a Trojan horse through which neoliberal reform and precarious academic labor have snuck into the ivory tower.

The situation in the USA and Canada is particularly complex, with each nation having their own particularities and challenges. As student enrollment has dramatically increased over the years and great strides have been made in reforming faculties, disciplines, and curricula in favor of increased justice and equality, the university has rightfully been praised for becoming more inclusive.94 The university also remains a site in which true critical thought and reform can originate and thrive, and hence the university is often defended on the grounds that it remains an essential institution in a democratic society, apart from government and corporate influence. In the last chapter, I cited moving appeals from Nietzsche and Kittler defending the need for an institution such as the university. There is something that is not only worth saving in the institution of the university, but arguably something that must be saved if we care about democracy

93 E.g. Zane L. Berge, ―Why Not Reengineer Higher Education?‖ in Case Studies on Information Technology in Higher Education: Implications for Policy and Practice. Lisa Ann Petrides, ed. (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 2000) 211. 94 Much of this inclusivity has come at the expense of making debtors of low- and middle-class students pushed to take out student loans to pay for their education. According to various statistics, the average university student in America, regardless of income level or attendance of private/public university, pays for 50+% of their education with student loans. This creditor- debtor relationship is characteristic of our age of post neo-liberal reform, and produces particular types of subjects that are encouraged to adopt lifestyles in accordance with this relationship. (Cf. Maurizio Lazzarato‘s forthcoming paper ―The Pastoral Power: Self-Entrepreneurship as Subjectivity Control Mechanism in Neo-Liberalism.‖ Delivered as the keynote lecture at CMS7, July 11, 2011.) Furthermore, all signs point towards the fact that the student loan market is a bubble, and as student loan debt in American has now surpassed credit card debt at almost $1 trillion, the bursting of this bubble will certainly have global effects. Some activists have begun to speculate that the yoke of student loan debt has subdued the spirit of young Americans to protest or revolt, in an attempt to explain the conspicuous lack of protests and riots in America as opposed to virtually any other country that has raised tuition in recent years (including Canada, the UK, Italy, and recently Chile.) See http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_dont_fight_back_how_the_us _crushed_youth_resistance?page=entire

and justice. Aside from the anti-institutional de-schooling camp,95 most of these passionate critiques of the university are made by those who are employed by the university and sincerely care about and are invested in the future well-being of the institution. Despite the obvious desire to maintain their own positions of privilege, internal criticism of the university is also motivated by a sincere appreciation for the benefits of higher education and research that produces knowledge. Many professors at research institutions are less interested in teaching than in doing research, receiving teaching exemptions through research grants, and often undergraduates suffer from neglect. In part to deal with this, institutions rely heavily on course instructors on a contact basis. These instructors do not have the benefits of tenure-track positions, including academic freedom, transparency in hiring practices, or job security. Critiques of the corporate university identify a shift towards computerized instruction that is grouped in with the shift towards part-time precarious labor and teaching staff and corporate style efficiency models. Some scholars have long resisted the move towards online education on these grounds. The late David Noble is perhaps the strongest critic of this camp, claiming that online learning is part of a broader trend of automating education and turning the university into a ―digital diploma mill.‖96 Noble rightly identifies very problematic trends, but importantly in the context of this paper, his investigation is into the political economy of education, and not necessarily a wholesale critique of the technology itself. Rather, I aim to tease out the potential of a virtual classroom for benefiting students, and of course the context of the courses matters greatly. How can online learning be a site of resistance to the above conditions, rather than a symptom?

95 Ivan Illich is perhaps the best-known intellectual who made an articulate case for the de- institutionalization of education, however the most radical fringe of the Libertarian movement is most closely associated with this position today. Although he distanced himself from such ideologies in no uncertain terms, the connection is inevitably made. Of interest however is the support that the home-school movement has given to online education initiatives. As with other instances of online education, the curriculum, student experience, and nature of the institutions differ widely. Cf. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Services, ―The Home Study Option‖ http://www.state.gov/m/dghr/flo/c22006.htm 96 Noble, Digital Diploma Mills.

Henry A. Giroux argues that the struggle over the future of the university is a central site in the battle for increased democracy, and both proponents and critics of online education have couched their arguments in such terms. Looking back to President Eisenhauer‘s famous speech, Giroux notes that ‗academic‖ was originally included in the draft as part of the now famous Military-Industrial complex. He re-includes the university as part of what he calls the Military-Industrial-Academic complex to make clear the troubling links between these sectors of society. In The University in Chains, Giroux traces the militarization of academic knowledge, and the increased corporatization of the university, two factors that have positioned the academy as an institution in support of dominant powers, and less able to fulfill its critical roles. The Internet, though in some ways a product of academics, has its roots in military projects, and has undoubtedly been primarily deployed for its commercial benefits. Giroux demonstrates how these factors have instrumentalized the university and marginalized the humanities and other ‗useless‘ arts, neutering their capacity to make radical critiques of society. Perhaps there is an historical parallel here, in so far as the European colonial powers incorporated the university into the mechanism of colonial governance, hindering potential critiques. Giroux goes on to posit ways in which the university can be defended as a democratic public sphere and argues that the university has long been a site of crucial pedagogy for educating students as active engaged critical citizens. Giroux ends his book with a chapter on what academics can do to break the chains, ending with a reflection on Arendt. A meaningful conception of politics, he muses, can only appear when concrete spaces exist for people to gather to speak, listen, act, and think critically. Can a community be constituted and/or sustained in a virtual space? How do such spaces intersect with physical spaces and corporeal bodies? These are crucial questions to which I will return in the following chapter, but which animate many of the course designs outlined below. The Bush years saw a dramatic increase in these trends as identified by Giroux: Grants for students turn into government-sponsored loans; Education shifts into job-training; Campuses become branded. The corporate structuring of

student debt drastically increased, including capitalized interest on private student loans and the practical impossibility of discharging student loans, both federal and private, through bankruptcy.97 These changes, most recently solidified by 2005 legislation, created a credit risk free financial commodity for lenders, fuelling the student loan bubble. Education becomes a ―measurable‖ product, but of course the questions of metrics, of how we evaluate or what is even capable of being measured, gets lost in pursuit of a return on one‘s investment. Again the humanities are in the service of these sorts of questions, and it is the humanities that are most at risk. The influence of corporate power (and capitalist logic) has furthered the reliance on metrics and the need to turn everything, even education, into measurable outcomes, which of course impacts the types of research the university is able to carry out, scientific or otherwise. These trends are also not confined to the United States alone, but Canada and many European countries have begun to scale back university funding as their mounting national debt becomes a more pressing issue. Recent student movements around the globe, from the UK, to Chile, to Occupy Wall Street, have made this a central issue.

Ian Angus' recent short work Love the Questions does an excellent job of summarizing the history and current state of the university while presenting a compelling case for the importance of the humanities and liberal arts. He offers several visions of possible futures and directions the university can take, including a ―networked university‖ in opposition to the ―corporate university.‖ His investigation is ultimately motivated by the same higher ideals other writers on the subject bring to bear. Similarly, Eric Gould has argued that democratic education must do three things: education for the greater good of a just society, argue for its means and well as its ends, and lastly must participate in the democratic social process. Such critics mount a simultaneous defense of the humanities as inherent to their argument. In ―The Question of Education in

97 Bankruptcy Code Section 523(a)(8) dictates which loans can and cannot be discharged. Editorial, The New York Times, ―Relief for Student Debtors‖ August 26, 2011http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/opinion/relief-for-student-debtors.html U.S. Code, TITLE 11: Bankruptcy > CHAPTER 5: CREDITORS, THE DEBTOR, AND THE ESTATE (§§ 501—562) > SUBCHAPTER II > § 523 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_11_00000523----000-.html

Technological Society,‖ Darin Barney convincingly argues in favor of the humanities as a site in which the questions of ends, and not just means, is routinely asked, and therefore central to any progressive society. He assumes a republican model of citizenship, based on ―the active practice of public judgment about collective ends and the means to achieve them.‖98 Though technology may prove a challenge for citizenship, it can be overcome and renegotiated so as to benefit the obligations of citizenship.

Virtual Classrooms Perhaps if the use of synchronous communications platforms like Second Life and asynchronous models (such as those using Moodle, blogs, and message forums) are demonstrated to be useful in certain educational contexts they may also be beneficial to other forms of public life. In ―Critical Pedagogy and Cyberspace‖ Colin Lankshear, Michael Peters, and Michele Knobel identify ways in which cyberspace may open greater potential for critical pedagogy (in the traditional of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Henry Giroux). The authors identify the challenges in transitioning from ―the space of conventional printed text to that of the digitally coded ether.‖99 The potential for dissemination of knowledge and collaboration create new opportunities, but many elements need to be reworked and rethought in order to made critical pedagogy in cyberspace viable. Schooling is understood as a form of cultural politics, and thus critical pedagogy assumes the task of exposing and challenging hegemonies and ideologies while empowering students and the social groups to which they belong. As the culture shifts towards increased integration of digital augmentation in our daily lives, the more critical engagements with forms of cybersociality becomes an imperative. The authors identify destabilization of text, and of body and subject, as a potentially transformative moment. Users transform their own multiplicity, echoing Donna

98 Darin Barney, ―The Question of Education in Technological Society,‖ from Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education & the Internet. Joe Lockard and Mark Pegrum, eds. (New York: Peter Lang, 2007) 277. 99 Colin Lankshear, et al., ―Critical Pedagogy in Cyberspace,‖ in Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces. Giroux, Henry A., Colin Lankshear, Peter McLaren, and Michael Peters, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996). 149.

Haraway in the collapse of the boundaries of the body.

Numerous studies analyzing current and potential applications of e- learning technologies have been published in the last decade. There is a much longer history of scholarship on earlier forms of distance education, and the parallels can be striking.100 The emphasis in these cases tends to be on access. In ―From ―Equal Access‖ to ―Widening Participation‖: The Discourse of Equity in the Age of E-Learning,‖ Robin Goodfellow traces the history of increasing access to education, looking at the failure of most developing countries to increase access to education on the scale the developed world has experienced. He analyzes the role that distance learning has played in the past and speculates on the future role e-learning may play. Though distance learning had existed since the 1800s, he argues that the 1920s saw the marriage of distance learning and mass broadcasting via radio technology, launching a trend that has evolved into e- learning as we know it today. From the beginning of distance learning, the twin hopes of emancipatory learning and great profitability have been intertwined. Thinking about the role technology (broadly speaking) plays in education opens a space for the reexamination of role of the university in society, particularly in regards to active citizenship. I do not share the view implicit in much of the scholarship on e-learning, pro- or anti-, that assumes an instrumental and often determinist stance. Technology is not neutral, but rather value-laden, not autonomous but human controlled and contextual. We make political and socio-culturally informed decisions and interpretations. We must think about how technology uses us, so to speak, the types of subjects created via new technologies, particularly communication technologies, in order to best assess the implications of a shift towards online education. It is with these questions in mind and this framework of thinking technology from which I will depart to consider the use of technology for learning. Perhaps autodidactic non-proprietary, non-commercial applications of learning, with ‗virtual‘ sites of learning as the classroom, can offer a means to imagine the potential benefits of online learning.

100 Robin Goodfellow, ―From ―Equal Access‖ to ―Widening Participation‖: The Discourse of Equity in the Age of E-Learning,‖ Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education & the Internet.

Of course we face realistic constraints, and risk marginalizes the role of education in citizenship further. Many of tools for online learning have been developed for non- commercial, non-institutional use, but their success lies in realizing an alternative that can in term influence the institution of the university from without. Innovative projects are making use of the unique properties of the Internet and web architecture to confront longstanding problems. The Mozilla Foundation‘s Open Badges project, for instance, is creating an autonomous accreditation agency to topple the university monopoly, but has designed it in such a way that it can be adopted within any institutional setting. In a working paper on the project, the team details the open-source, non-commercial origins of their project and the types of learners that stand to benefit from such a system.101 The Open Badges project recognizes that individuals learn and cultivate skills in many settings in addition to the traditional classroom, and have developed an accreditation system consistent with the ―network‖ paradigm of the Internet. Early academic works on the Internet have claimed that it embodied the ideals of the Habermasian Public Sphere, seemingly non-hierarchical and inclusive.102 Much of my early hopes regarding the use of avatars in the classroom were rooted in the ability to obscure one‘s ―real‖ identity, however I came to be critical of this designation of ‗real.‘ In Cybertypes and later essays Lisa Nakamura describes the way in which racial stereotyping persist in digital environments. Unlike Lankshear et al., she is not primarily interested in questions of access. She convincingly demonstrates that race persists on the Internet and insists that ―equal access‖ to the Internet and other new communications technologies alone doesn't solve the problem of racial and gender inequality as the

Lockard, Joe, and Mark Pegrum, eds. (New York: Peter Lang, 2007) 101 The Mozilla Foundation, in collaboration with The MacArthur Foundation, ―Open Badges for Lifelong Learning.‖ Accessed October 15, 2011: http://mzl.la/OpenBadges 102 For critical responses to this approach, cf. Jodi Dean ―Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture.‖ Public Culture 13.2 (2001): 243- 65. Sayla Benhabib, ―The Pariah and her Shadow: Hannah Arendt‘s Biography of Rahel Varnhagen.‖ in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Bonnie Honig, ed. (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

system is based on e-commerce and hence reproduces the existing inequalities of global capitalism. A casual remark from a student in a SL-based courses I will describe below about a race/gender switching assignment seems to support this: ―After searching for black skins I realized how "white" Second Life is.‖ Unlike Sherry Turkle, Nakamura is more critical of the notion of the ―distributive identity‖ made possible by computer mediation, as existing gender and racial categories continue to be reinscribed on users. Drawing on Lev Manovitch‘s concept of ―transcoding‖ to explain the transition, Nakamura identifies ways in which ‗cybertypes‘ differ from earlier stereotypes. Cybertypes are, or can be, ―more than just racial stereotypes 'ported' to a new medium." In her essay on ―World of Warcraft,‖ a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in a virtual environment not unlike that of Second Life, she brings this into further relief. Players deride others not for being Asian, but acting Asian, an important ontological distinction as it is understood by users. This draws attention to inherent problems with a ‗multicultural‘ approach that does more to exclude than create real diversity, as well further evidence of the way in which racial stereotypes from the 19th and early 20th century have persisted in new contexts amidst a larger cultural anxiety regarding the rising power of China. Though this anti-Asian stereotyping is a particular example, it demonstrates the ways in which broader political and economic concerns manifest in the supposedly disembodied freedom of virtual realms, and suggests how these interactions can be made into important opportunities for education. We should simultaneously keep open critical question of technology, while still shaping the technology, which will not go away, into something useful and beneficial and in keeping with our own goals of increased political participation, inclusivity, and education. Often, critics rush to disparage technologies, instead of critiquing the existing educational practices and pedagogies which become uncontested assumptions. Even if the pedagogies of the traditional seminar are accepted and go unchallenged, it doesn‘t follow that these pedagogies should be directly translated into new methods of teaching in other media or that what is lost is necessarily an essential aspect of education.

New media require new methodologies and new readership skills. I believe that we must examine our pedagogies, create new cyber-pedagogies that make the most of the media we have at our disposal.

E-Learning Categories

In the balance of this chapter, I will examine four categories of virtual classrooms, describing the experience of various courses in each category. I am contrasting these courses not only against each other but drawing parallels between courses in different categories. I hope to identify aspects of education in general that reach across format, while attending to their limits. I begin with Synchronous-Online, relating two different instructors approaches to setting an online courses in Second Life. Asynchronous-online courses are more flexible, yet that very flexibility sets them apart from the traditional classroom more so than a course in Second Life, which at least in terms of classroom dynamics functions not unlike a face-to-face meeting. Though signals of comportment, and other sensory perception might be restricted or absent, the class is gathered at the same time, virtually communing at the same moment. The individual focus of a course distributed in time requires a different approach to fostering collaboration and engagement. Those courses that do not do this, that only link an individual learner to the material, is in opposition to the model of learning prized in critical pedagogy. The dissemination of such a form of education could have negative implications for citizenship and engagement in a democracy. I will unpack this further in the next chapter. Some of the approaches to dialogic and collaborative asynchronous-online courses use the same virtual environments to augment their traditional courses. This category I call Blended-Traditional, and I compare an A- O courses by the same instructor to one taught in B-T. Lastly I describe several other Blended courses, underlining that fact that to some extent even the tradition face-to-face classroom is blended and constitutes a ―virtual classroom,‖ bringing the hermeneutic circle to a close and clearing a point of entry into rethinking education. Andrew Feenberg, a noted philosopher of technology, demonstrates in his

article ―Building a Global Network: The WBSI Experience‖ the challenges early experimenters with online education met with, and offers some strikingly relevant advice, despite the fact that this article was written in 1992 about experience from a decade prior.103 The nature of the institutional partnerships are also telling in their own right. Feenberg was one of the professors asked to teach in the inaugural online educational program of the La Jolla, California-based Western Behavioural Sciences Institute (WBSI.) He was joined by many other distinguished researchers and educators from the top universities in North America, including Harvard, Yale, and the University of California. These pioneers faced many challenges, both technical and pedagogical, particularly in the first two years. The program was eventually very successful, by their own standards, with the participants, both teachers and students, testifying that they found ―computer conferencing to be an effective educational medium.‖ The participants in this program were mostly businessmen, politicians, and executives who could not afford long absences from work, but who could benefit from the types of experiences, and knowledge, gained from this sort of program. Even at this early stage, some common refrains of online education are present. Unlike earlier distance education programs, whose stated aim was to include those who had been marginalized by the institution (women, for instance), this online education initiative, and many that would follow, are consistent with a neoliberal expectation that the individual is a ―customer‖ whose individual needs should be served by the marker. Education becomes about their particular needs. As a private endeavor, this course was also very expensive, and an existing elite of businessmen made up the class. Without claiming to universalize this case, Feenberg‘s account represents a common early approach, and from this workshop the professors gained important insight that others working in asynchronous- online environments can still learn from. Feenberg describes how a ―virtual community‖ was formed through the shared experience of making this new medium work bound the participants in a

103 Andrew Feenberg. ―Building a Global Network: TheWBSI Experience,‖ from Global Networks: Computers and International Communication. Linda M. Harasim, ed.

way that is difficult to relate. The two-year program included yearly face-to-face meetings in La Jolla, a now common practice used in other distance programs. (Some distance learning programs include foreign service in addition to solely meeting in online environments.104 Current programs that use this model unsurprisingly have an international focus, not just of their students but of the educational focus of their degrees.) It is unsurprising then that Feenberg and his peers emphasized the international diversity of their early participants, learning about national crises, such as civil war in Colombia, through the personal engagement with their Colombian participants.105 One of the most active participant was a student who was stationed in a remote area in the Arabian peninsula, and hence he was very active and comforted by his participation in this ―virtual community.‖106 . In the 20 years since Feenberg published that article describing his experiences, however, the Internet has gone mainstream, and it is much easier to sympathize with the feeling of being a part of a ―virtual community.‖ A sense of community was also formed in other ways, unplanned results of a mistaken attempt to initially design the course so that it would be more akin to a face-to-face seminar. This training program put its students in ―the embarrassing position of children on the first day of school.‖107 More importantly, these distinguished professors had to relearn how to teach, for their first attempts failed miserably. Feenberg notes that most teachers learn to teach only after having been students, observing the dominant role by being on the subservient role. One of the difficulties with new media is that the earliest adopters have no precedent and therefore do not know how to teach most effectively in the medium they are working with. When trying to import a model from a different medium, i.e. the classroom or lecture notes, disaster strikes. New pedagogies are warranted, but it is not always apparent what methods will be most successful and

(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993.) 104 For instance, the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, CA, the School of International Training (SIT) in Brattelboro, VT, or the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership at the University of Portland, Oregon. 105 Feenberg. ―Building a Global Network,‖ 190. 106 Ibid. 188.

appropriate. In fact most professors have never thought much about pedagogy, instead simply emulating their past experienced.108 Unfortunately, the teaching of teaching is often not taken seriously, or else is just bundled in a degree granting professionalization program. Feenberg describes a practice he calls ‗weaving‘ as the ideal role of the professor in such learning environments. Feenberg provided introductory comments which laid out the ground rules for discussion explicitly, followed by the posing of questions illustrated by specific examples.109 Feenberg could then steer, or ―weave,‖ the conversation, but in a way that the participants felt comfortable speaking and participating. This particular method may not always be applicable, but Feenberg argues that we should be willing to design new pedagogies with the goal of engagement and participation as central components of the practice of learning. Computer mediated education is intriguing because the knowledge produced comes not just through the transmission of facts and discussion, but through the lived experience of using the interface itself. One might suspect that such observations must be dated, particularly as interfaces and our relationship to the Internet has changed in the last two decades. Yet Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair in E-learning, sites ―weaving‖ in his recent work on virtual classrooms,110 and the experience of other teachers comes to articulate the same concept even without encountering Feenberg.

Synchronous-Online: Second Life

Professor Bryan Carter's reflections on his own practices seem to support Feenberg's early contentions. Carter, currently a professor at the University of Central Missouri, began teaching online courses in 2005, though prior to that he still incorporated online modules into his classes. Among these modules was Courseinfo, a course management software that originated at Cornell University,

107 Ibid. 189. 108 Again, unsurprising, as most of the participating professors came from prestigious universities with an emphasis on research as opposed to teaching. 109 Ibid. 191. 110 Norm Friesen, The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen: Relational Pedagogy and Internet Technology. ((New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 128.

and merged with Blackboard, Inc, in 1998. Before moving on to actually teaching courses online, Carter created Virtual Harlem in 1997, long before the launch of Second Life. He continues to use Virtual Harlem in his African-American and American literature courses. The current ―evolved‖ environment of Virtual Harlem is made up of over 10 square-blocks, consisting of 3 ―islands.‖ The first was funded by the National Black Programming Consortia. The second island is an expansion of the original simulation. In 2004 professor Carter was invited by the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne and named ―Professor Invite‖ to be project leader on the development of Virtual Montmarte, which became the third island. Virtual Monmartre includes discussions of the 18th Arrondisement in Paris, where jazz was introduced to the French by black US troops fighting under the French flag during World War I, because they weren't allowed to fight under the US flag. ―Business owners, musicians, artists, educators, and students interacting with one another, and the environment, helping to create a lively engaging interactive community where lifelong learning can take place in sometimes unexpected locations.‖111 All these ―residents‖ are brought together by their interest in this particular historical time period. Although Carter's classes meet in these locations, the space is open to all those who are interested. (All one has to do is sign up and create a quick, free avatar.) These residents contribute to something greater than themselves, as the Virtual Harlem project lives on as a space for future users to explore and engage with. Carter appears in Virtual Harlem as Bryan Mnemonic, his avatar alter ego. He may lecture, but he takes advantage of the environments particularities that alter the traditional role of the professor. Carter admits that his methodology is different when teaching in such an environment, as opposed to in a traditional classroom. ―It has to be because of the many additional opportunities for interaction and engagement with objects and other individuals... building, role play, etc.‖ Like Feenberg, he concurs that the role of the professor must shift from the traditional role as ―center of knowledge in the learning environment,‖

111 Quoted from a video: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/04/14/building- community-virtual-harlem-and-evolving-role-modern-educator-new-digitals

instead acting as a guide, mentor, or steering the interactions, all roles that he contends are ―pretty much all the same.‖ He continues that ―rote information can be obtained from so many different sources now [that] we guide [students] on how to incorporate that info they access into usable projects and help them contextualize it with our course content.‖112 This is consistent with those early experiments in online learning, however though the environments have changed, in ways that make it easier to see how such a role for the professor is appropriate, this sort of pedagogy is not a new innovation.113 In addition to class meetings, students also make use of other online tools, for instance Moodle, a free source Learning Management System (LMS). Utilizing a LMS allows the class to carry on asynchronous dialogue via discussion boards, provide links to digital course materials, link to external sources, and carry out administrative duties related to the course. SL itself is a virtual environment in which students construct and pilot an avatar, as well as further adding to the architecture of the virtual world. This allows participants to augment synchronous education (whether online or face-to-face) in potentially useful ways, particularly for disciplines in which collaborative work is an important part, for instance the learning of foreign languages or Art & Design. An analysis of student communications in a course taught by Professor Kristin Scott tells a similar story. Scott is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She teaches a Cybercultures class at New Century College blending traditional face-to-face with online meetings, using her website, a wiki hosted on PBworks.com, a WordPress blog, and Second Life. All of these are free services that are open source and customizable. It is necessary that the online communications respect the privacy rights of the students and be maintained in accordance with The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), a law regulating the university‘s power to release personal academic records of its students.114

112 Bryan Carter, e-mail message to author. April, 2011. 113 Cf. the Universal Teaching Method discovered by Joseph Jacotot, described by Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 114 FERPA applies to any educational agency or institution that receives funds from the U.S.

On her website is the course description and schedule, and link to the course wiki at PBworks, information on Second Life, and a link to the course blog. A wiki is a real-time collaborative editing system, made famous by Wikipedia. PBworks uses its own proprietary software, but makes basic features, more than enough for most courses, available for free, and is only one example of the free alternatives to often inflexible and expensive software marketed to universities. The student may first navigate to the professor‘s website, where she can see a syllabus and course description: Virtual reality, avatars, cybernetics, anime, cyborgs, hacking, cyberpunk, and digital revolutions are all just a few of the elements studied within the burgeoning field of ―cyberculture.‖ This course will investigate specific themes such as the social and political movements that take place within cyberspace, the formation of virtual communities, and cyber-identities and bodies. Additionally, we will explore digital and cyber-(re)presentations in everyday culture, such as within films, novels, websites, and video games. Through readings, in-class and online discussions, writing, a cyber- ethnographic/research project, and virtual experiential learning, students will gain a greater understanding of cyberspace, its culture/s, and the relationships that exist between machines/humans and society/technology.

This is a 6 credit hybrid course, which means your course will be split between real and virtual class time. Three hours a week, Mondays from 1:30 – 4:20 p.m., we will meet in the physical classroom (Innovation Hall 336). The other three hours a week will be spent in ―virtual class‖— designated virtual reality or social networking sites (such as Second Life or Facebook), having online discussions, or meeting in groups ―in-world.‖ The three virtual hours you attend each week will be flexible; you will either choose to meet in one of several time-block options made available by the instructor, or you will choose your own three hour time-block/s, depending on the goals and assignments for that week.

Further paragraphs outline the detailed expectations of taking part in a hybrid- online course, including spending time each week in the designated virtual environment, engaging with the group, the blog responses, and the group and individual wiki projects.

The first assignments are understandably geared towards orienting the

Department of Education. The Canadian equivalent is the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). In Europe, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights covers most data privacy, with various local and federal laws within.

students in each aspect of the class, which is appropriate and relevant to the readings that week due to the subject of the course. Reviewing the archive of the course is an interesting documentation of the course. The most recent blog post is the first thing a viewer sees. Scrolling down to this first post, the professor introduces herself, but doesn‘t spend at much time establishing ambience, as they will meet in person once the term begins. On the blog, the first page students see, under ―about‖ posted December 23 2008 (long before the term begins):

Welcome to Cyberculture! Posted on December 23, 2008 | 20 Comments Welcome to your Cyberculture course blog!

Hi folks – welcome to your course blog. Each week, you will be expected to blog a response to an assignment, as posted by the instructor. You may respond to theposted assignment each week by clicking on the ―comments‖ link at the top of this blog, under the blog entry title (until someone posts the first comment, it will read ―no comments‖). The assignments will vary – between responses to your readings, thoughts about class discussions, your virtual world explorations and other cyber- ethnographic journeys, and other assignments. Even though you only have to respond once a week, be sure that you check this blog before each and every class for updated reading assignments and any announcements I might post! (If, for example, we had a huge snow storm and classes were canceled, this would be the first place I‘d post that information, though I‘d also send out an email).

She continues, asking them to establish WordPress accounts if they haven‘t yet, and to reply to this post to demonstrate that it worked, to which all 20 members of the course complied. The first assignment, during the first week of the term, is formatted similarly, asking students to post their responses to the weekly readings under the post, as well as a reminder to visit the PBworks wiki and begin that week‘s wiki assignment. 17 of the students respond, though one student‘s response (―ok‖) didn‘t meet the conditions of the assignment. The PBworks wiki page features a standard setup with customizable options. In this case, the page is open to the public. The instructor monitors the content and edits where appropriate to maintain compliance with FERPA. The ―Front Page‖ is a static page, and includes all the instructor‘s contact information,

her email, office hours, Second Life name, links to her websites, course blog, and course site. The welcoming message reads:

NCLC 350: Cybercultures @ GMU on Facebook!

Course Syllabus

Required Texts: The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy eds. (Routledge, 2000) Other readings assigned (available online through class website or as handouts)

This wiki is for Kristin Scott's NCLC 350: Cyberculture class at New Century College at George Mason University. Students will find their weekly assignments for both their real and "virtual" classes here, as well as various resources, links, and so forth. This wiki is editable by students, which means that you can also contribute to the materials and discussions here.

The communications and projects posted here are in addition to the weekly blog responses on the course blog. Each online module reinforces the others, disseminating communications and making cross-navigation easier. Below the welcome message is the Table of Contents, linking to the necessary pages within the wiki site:

1. Weekly Assignments 2. Cyberculture Groups 3. Final Group Digital Ethnographic Research Project and Presentation 4. Protection of Human Subjects Procedures & HSP Handout 5. Additional Resources 6. Second Life Mentors (…)

The right hand frame has three windows: Navigator (starred pages, case study, changing gender/race, etc), SideBar (Frequently used links), and Recent Activity (mostly at this point recent edits made by the instructor), each customized according to the instructor‘s preference. The first assignment posted in Weekly Assignments instructs the students to: register a free profile in SL, create an avatar, are instructed by Scott to pick a gender neutral name, get free SL items such as clothes and avatar ―skins,‖ send instructor ―friend request‖ in-world, and

offer to connect on FB. Once they‘ve done this, they are asked to respond in the comment section, providing their real name, avatar name, describe their experience so far in Second Life, any difficulties they‘ve encountered, technological issues, or unhelpful SL occupants. All 20 students replied, though we can see that the student I‘ll identify as ―ok‖ posted her response a week late due to technical difficulties and a stated inability to access the school computer lab within her own schedule. The average reply is a short paragraph in length, but even these early, relatively informal impressions reveal a variety of experiences. One student says: So far, my experience has been very positive. I had difficulty at first, because I am not familiar with SL at all. It took me some time to find new clothes, skins, etc. It also took me some time to figure out how to get around. I eventually went to a place called "Levels", where they help newcomers, and I made friends with a very helpful girl. She showed me how to do a lot of new things, and how to get a lot of stuff for free. I am still having trouble, however, figuring out where to go and how to get there. I find myself getting bored in SL because all I know to do is get free stuff and change my avatar. But altogether, I have had a lot of fun! Many of the students shared a similar experience; as newcomers to SL they found it engaging, but quickly become bored once they complete their stated objective. These students do not yet understand the dynamic of the environment, and hence their exploration is initially limited. (―I am still having trouble…figuring out… how to get there.‖ Another student with the same experience makes more progress, commenting: ―once you get the hang of the movement stuff navigating is pretty easy to me and also i like the SL urls they are very helpful [sic]‖115 The point of this exercise is to give the students a dry-run to become familiar with the mechanics of SL. Being a course on Cyberculture, inevitability some of the students are bound to have previous experience and enthusiasm for the subject. One student admits much experience using SL prior to this course, but confesses that she still feels ―a complete lack of connection with the SL communities/world because I honestly do not know what to talk about with the other people in SL.‖ Navigating alone and without a purpose, her interaction with others were mainly

115 ―SL urls‖ are URLs that transport the user from the web browser, opening the application of Second Life, running on the computer, not in the browser, to a specific location, such as a mall, an

confined to conversations with helpful ―residents‖ explaining how the environment functions and how to attach items. Interesting, she states that feels uncomfortable approaching those she does encounter, that she just wouldn't know what to talk about.‖ This student feels more comfortable in ―real life,‖ but without understanding the etiquette of the environment, experiences an anxiety much like some experience in ―real world‖ social settings. Even so, SL clearly presents a different set of expectations, as various groups collide with different objectives, confusing newcomers and veterans alike. This student concludes her response with an anecdote of encountering an avatar claiming to be a vampire in need of her blood. This Cybercultures course is using SL to augment course readings and face-to-face meetings, and so the students are engaging with the space for particular purposes, not holding substitute class meetings. In Professor Carter‘s course, the group meetings in Second Life were the only instances the participants were brought together, and so the importance of having a dedicated meeting space (a classroom in Virtual Harlem or Virtual Montmarte) is more urgent, and prevents the sort of incursions the student above describes.

In following weeks, the students complete their blog posts and wiki assignments successfully with few absences. The first few weeks used Second Life to explore different aspects of virtual communities. Assignment 4, for instance, was designed to focus on the political economy of SL. By now, you've been in Second Life long enough to know that although you can easily navigate this virtual environment without any money (or Lindens - the currency of SL), almost from the beginning, you are exposed to an onslaught of consumer goods for sale: from skins, shapes, clothing, jewelry, and hair to land, furniture, and automobiles. This virtual assignment will give you the opportunity to explore a few different aspects of a metaverse economy. After the group has become familiar with these aspects of the environment, they begin one of the terms large projects. In addition to the group wiki project (for instance, Group 2‘s ethnography of college texting practices) the students are given a Gender and Race Switching Assignment. Participants are instructed to alter their avatar‘s race and/or gender for at least two weeks, (hence the island dedicated to a particular theme, or whatever location the creator of the SLurl designates.

instruction to select a gender-ambiguous name), and then complete a response paper recounting their impressions and tying in relevant readings from throughout the course. Like Professor Carter‘s class, the question of identity, particularly non-dominant identities, is foregrounded by the subject matter. Though the students are aware of one another‘s ‗real life‘ classroom identities, they are interacting primarily with avatars from the general SL populations of millions of users. (At any give time there are tens of thousands of users populating SL.) Each student wrote a detailed account of their experiences, over 1,000 words, with pictures of their varying appearances and excerpts of dialogue with other avatars. The students commentary is often very interesting, and supports the accounts of both Turkle and Nakamura. A student considering changing the race of her character notes the scarcity of black skins, and realizes how "white" Second Life is. Many of the students who identify as female in their daily lives originally chose female avatars. When they swapped their avatars gender, they immediately noticed that their interactions with others became noticeably brief, unfriendly, and occasionally even hostile. One particular student felt that she was ―more social‖ as a male, however more responses concur with the following: I am treated completely differently as a man than a woman […and] I know that I act differently in second life as a male. When I talk to guys or ask them for help they aren‘t as helpful because I am a male- it‘s as if they have nothing to gain by talking to me. With girls I noticed I would say things like I like your clothes and they would think I was coming onto them. Though it may be a stretch to assume that these experiences have any bearing on their ―real-life‖ identity performance, the students roundly concur that they have learned something from the experience. ―All these emotions I felt in Second Life really gave me insight in something I can not experience in real life,‖ one student claims. The ease of altering the visible markers of difference allow for even those mildly curious to experience being embedded in social relations with radically different social codes. One female student admits to having ―always wanted to dress up as a guy in real life with my friends . . . this gave me the courage to finally do it [and this assignment] gave me insight into how males are treated differently than females.‖ A male student also gained insight as a result of his

experience with a female avatar. ―If this is how dudes always act in real life,‖ he writes self-critically, then ―I kind of feel bad as guy.‖

The students also admit that over the course of the term they have developed an attachment to their avatar, and few explicitly make reference to their reluctance to alter their appearance, which they now conceive as being linked to their ―authentic identity.‖ A student recounts her thought-process: ―I had to step back for a second and ask myself, ―why did I not want to change the avatar‘s sex?‖ …I […] discovered that I have become emotionally attached to my avatar.‖ One of the most eloquent accounts comes from a student who altered her avatar numerous times, not just for the assignment. Even with a fluid avatar appearance, she came to deep insights regarding publicity and appearance. My original avatar started out as a feminine girl, shortly after became a little brown monkey, and finally transformed into a male meerkat. In David Silver's, "Introducing Cyberculture" he states that Sherry Turkle "finds that while some users use cyberspace to repress an otherwise less- than-functional "real" or offline life, most use the digital domain to exercise a more true identity, or a multiplicity of identities." We can‘t know for certain that these reflections are in earnest or if they are just echoing the conclusions of the theorists they are engaging with. In the case of the student cited above, the attempt seems to be an appropriate example to ground their experience. The student continues:

I always felt more ―true‖ with a non-human identity because I wasn‘t quite sure how to represent myself as a gender. In real life, I try to be gender neutral because I do not like being held to certain standards in society because they feel forced, and if straying from those standards makes me thought of as different and/or usual, so be it. Because my SL identity settled in a place where I felt comfortable, I knew this assignment was going to be challenging. Whether or not these experiences accurately reflect the experiences of the participants is beside the point, as the avatar role-playing certainly helped the students understand some of the more complicated facets of the material they were reading for class. Such activities might not be appropriate for different subjects, but I argue that it certainly supports an approach to identity and media consistent with the theoretical construction and potential outlined in chapter 1.

Asynchronous-Online: PBworks

Doug Tewksbury, an assistant professor in Communication Studies at Niagara University, also uses PBworks wikis in his classes, but unlike Scott, he uses the wiki for everything. Tewksbury taught an asynchronous-online summer course called Writing For the Web, in which the 7 students engage entirely via the course wiki. The wiki is set up much the same as Scott‘s, but with more pages along the top navigation bar: Workspaces, Lessons, Syllabus, Readings, Getting to Know You, The Sandbox, Wiki Help. Like Scott and Carter, the subject matter is appropriate for a course in an online-environment; the goal of the course was to teach writing for the web, which often occurs working remotely with others via digitally mediated means. The course description notes that this was a course about information, and that it was designed to teach effective writing for digital environments ―including web pages, social networking sites, wikis, blogs, and other digital platforms.‖ The course was conducted over a four-week period, with each week subdivided into five ―daily‖ lessons. A weekly assignment was due each following Monday, roughly corresponding to a short term paper. A ―Web Writing Portofilio‖ in the form of a website served as the final project.

As this is a short-term summer course with no face-to-face meetings, the instructor has to make the students feel welcomed and comfortable with the mechanics of the course. Unlike Scott, Tewksbury‘s wikis can only be accessed by those given permission. Once logged into the wiki, students were greeted with this welcoming message prior to the start of the course:

June 17th: Welcome to Week 1

Welcome to CMS222, Writing for the Web.

This is our course Wiki. It will be the center of the course once we begin (we won't be using Blackboard in this class). Look here for course announcements, readings, assignments, etc.

If you're not already familiar with Wikis, they function much like a

Wikipedia that is only for our class. You can edit any page yourself - there are no restrictions on this: You have as much access as I do.

You might find this video to be helpful. We'll be having an optional wiki training session in the first weeks of class to make sure that everyone is up to speed. …

The instructor uses this message to set the tone for the nature of written communication that is appropriate for the virtual class. He makes reference to challenges presented by not meeting face-to-face, and encourages a class dynamic that makes use of the comment function. Like Scott, the first week of the course combines readings and activities designed to familiarize the student with not only the subject matter but also the mechanics of the virtual classroom. He also includes his contact information, explaining his 15-minute rule policy. Distance learning can be frustrating, but there ―are advantages to this in terms of flexibility and working at your own pace.‖ While acknowledging the difficulties that inevitably arise due to the technological aspect of the course, students are asked to first try to figure out their own problems for at least 15-minutes before contacting the professor. The video he mentions links to a YouTube video explaining how wikis function ―in plain English.‖ Tewksbury encourages the group to ―look on the web for solutions,‖ consult ―the electronic manual for the program,‖ and ―browse the help files for PB Works,‖ all the while guiding the students towards these resources.

In order to give the students practice at editing the wiki, as well as serving the practical function of making introduction, the group is asked to complete two short-assignments as a prelude to the first class meeting. Their first assignment is the ―Wiki Orientation Exercise,‖ due by the first meeting. This simply asks them to add a page to the wiki, insert an image, upload a document, add text, and so on, in order to demonstrate their capacity for engaging in a wiki-based course. Detailed instructions are included by the instructor in the form of a PDF document. Next they should follow their professor‘s lead and add a section about themselves on the ―Getting to Know You‖ page, using the skills they‘ve demonstrated in the orientation exercise. ―One of the downsides of being in an

online class,‖ Tewksbury admits, ―is that we don't get to know each other on a personal level (nor am I particularly interested in being some faceless, interchangeable administrator of a course, either).‖ The students are encouraged to edit the wiki page, creating a section about themselves including a profile picture, name, email, background, year and major in school, goals, and experience with writing and web-design. He also throws in two ―fun facts‖ to lighten the mood and encourage the students to open up. Tewksbury‘s own profile features a picture of himself in what seems to be his office, looking professorial in a tweed sort-coat yet smiling widely and looking the part of the tech-savvy, slightly nerdy junior faculty member. Of the seven students participating in the course, 6 are ―traditional‖ university students aged 18-21. One of the students, however, was a local man in his mid-30s who dropped out of Niagara University in the late ‗90s a semester shy of graduating. The students generally chose reasonable profile pictures, and described themselves in writing that at least tried to be appropriate.

The ―Lessons‖ section features instructions from the professor and links to the course material in the form of a detailed overview of each day of the course. Like other sections designed primarily for communicating information to the student participants, it is closed to comments. Students post their assignments in the ―Workspaces‖ section, where group members read and comment on each others work. The instructor posts a weekly address, reminding the students to read his comments on their work and to expect a grade emailed privately to each participant. He uses this address to remind the students about the nature of asynchronous communications in the course - ―Makes sure to be encouraging and complementary. Email is used for group and private communications.‖ - and give advice and encouragement- ―Excellent job everyone. Your comments were exactly what I was looking for: Thoughtful, analytical, constructive comments, recognizing praise and offering suggestions. Well done!‖ Each of the students completed their assignments, engaged with one another‘s work, and completed their final project (though quality, as always varied.) The subject matter and the assignments were appropriate for the medium of the course. Surely an asynchronous course such as this will not lend itself to

every class, however it needn‘t be used exclusively for online-only courses.

Blended-Traditional: Face-to-Face with online

Tewksbury also uses the same wiki format to augment his face-to-face courses, for instance in his course ―Communicating for Social Justice,‖ which includes material that deals explicitly with Internet related activities from WikiLeaks to music piracy. ―Communicating for Social Justice‖ is a first-year seminar for Communications majors and minors designed to orient students in the field. In the semester I observed, the course met in a face-to-face setting at Niagara University three times per week for one hour. In part because of the nature of the class and in part because of the short, distributed face-to-face meetings, the utilization of the PBworks wiki opened up the potential for more in-depth conversations and sharing of resources. In addition to using the wiki in this way, Tewksbuty experimented with what he calls a 'wikiclass,' ―a hybrid approach where there were five dates during the semester where there would be an online course or assignment rather than a face-to-face class meeting.‖116 This allowed the classroom dynamic to be altered while exploring the role of digital communications in practice as well as theory. Interestingly given the nature of the course, computer (and cell-phone) use were disallowed during the face-to-face meetings. Compared with the ―Writing for the Web‖ course I detailed above, this class had a relatively high enrollment of 35. The wiki itself also included more sections, the additions pertaining to the face-to-face meetings: ―Doug‘s Powerpoints‖ and ―Exam Question Bank.‖ Tewksbury‘s initial post explained the function of the wiki and that it could be replacing Blackboard, the popular learning management system customarily used by Niagara University and hundreds of other universities, colleges, and high schools. Unlike Blackboard, PBworks is free, open-source, and easily customizable. Tewksbury emphasizes that in the wiki, all participants, including the professor, have the same permissions. He tells them, ―You can edit any page

116 Private email correspondence with Doug Tewksbury.

yourself - there are no restrictions on this: You have as much access as I do.‖ This is essentially true, but perhaps a bit disingenuous as the professor does maintain a few important distinctions: he controls permissions (who is given access to the space), and importantly he can see whether or not students have logged into the wiki. These are necessary and minor differences in my view nonetheless, and all edits, made by any participant, are visible in the ―Recent Activity‖ list, a window of which appears on the right-frame of the FrontPage. Similarly to the fully online course, the first wiki-based assignment is designed as both orientation and community-builder, instructing the participants to create a ―Getting to Know You‖ entry and a ―Student Journal‖ page, in which they will publish their work to be viewed by the instructor and their classmates. Many of the students chose to present their profiles in colors such as pink and purple, or with colorful background colors, generally difficult to read. Perhaps because the students spend time together in their weekly meetings, the profile images they selected included many that were less serious in tone, or otherwise communicated unfortunate and likely unintended messages (a male student in facepaint holding a trophy, surely something he was proud of yet glaringly out of place, or the young blond freshman girl whose picture includes the sole word ―Dicks‖ cropped out of a nearby sign.) The five ―wikiclasses‘ consisted of watching a film or some other form of media, responding to questions, and creating a response and posting it in the ―Student Journal‖ page. Unlike in the fully online courses, here is almost no commenting (only occurring in the exam questions, and later incorporated into the wiki and deleted, signaling it was done in error). The students do not work on group projects or collaborations, but they can view each other‘s work. The engagement is happening face-to-face in class, dialogically, and so the wiki is not set-up so as to require discussion. The wiki is used to access course materials and submit assignments, and see what others are up to. This suggests that the collaborative and dialogic aspects of the tech is best utilized when not augmenting face-to-face interactions, (unless specifically tied to the assignment in a way to utilize those aspects).

Other academic possibilities for innovative blended online-traditional education exist. The State University of New York‘s center for Collaborative Online Learning (COIL), for instance, uses similar methods to facilitate a shared virtual classroom between two international face-to-face classes. COIL courses link face-to-face courses meeting in different locations, different nations, via online interaction. The style varies depending on the nature and location of the class and the predilection of the instructor(s), but the shared ―virtual‖ meeting fo the course deeply affects the design of the face-to-face meetings. The syllabi are created collaboratively, and the online tools selected are those best suited to the particularities of the course.

Traditional Classrooms? Professors teaching courses in traditional face-to-face settings, either small seminars or large lecture halls, are increasingly utilizing the Internet in learning. For instance, a McGill professor may post all of his slideshows and lecture notes on his website, along side the syllabus, links to course material, and supplemental material. This is mostly a question of access and posterity, as many studies show that merely transplanting course materials in this way does not significantly ―improve‖ learning. In fact, such repurposed material is often derided as ―shovelware.‖117 A professor may also allow her students to email assignments, distribute syllabus online, or email the class documents, as well as use an email list to share reading notes and questions before class. Another professor may create a Moodle with recommended readings, a space to share new stories, and a message board, which may or may not be monitored depending on the professors desire.

I don‘t mean to suggest that every course that incorporates email or Moodle into its operations is equivalent in some way to an online course, but nor is it appropriate to take a particular manifestation of an asynchronous-online course

117 Robert S. Stephenson , ―The Harvey Project: Open Course Development and Rich Content‖ by Robert S. Stephenson…(185) This raises questions on the nature of how we evaluate education, which I will get to below.

and universalize it in contrast to an ideal of traditional classroom learning. The dichotomy of online versus offline is overstated, as there is clearly a gradient of types of experiences and educational outcomes. In his latest work on e-learning, The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen, Norm Friesen invokes a phenomenological method of experiential analysis, contrasting his self-admittedly hyperbolic accounts of the classroom (book, pen, ink) and the computer (at desk, in front of computer screen, mouse/keyboard). He argues that this approach, exaggerated for heuristic purposes, clarifies strategically misleading language often employed when discussing online learning, emphasizing other aspects of learning that are excluded by focusing solely on the question of outcomes and efficiency.118 Employing a critique in keeping with Freire‘s ―banking model‖ of education, Friesen is critical of the ―transmission model of communication‖ as being reductionist, reducing all communication, including education, as at core a flow of information. There is a good deal of value in these arguments, and I agree that attending only to questions of performance and of outcomes masks important differences in the educational experience of the student. Friesen places value on the relational, and ethical, aspect of the classroom, implying that ―virtual classrooms‖ fall short in these terms. This doesn‘t account, in my view, for the hybrid spaces that account for most classrooms today, a small sample of which I‘ve described above. Nor does it account for the ways in which these hybrid spaces blur existing categories and encourage practices that can create meaningful relationships and collaborations even by Friesen‘s standard. Friesen‘s emphasis on embodiment, comportment, and life-world assumes the superiority of an a priori, naturalized understanding of what constitutes the human, the sort of perspective I critiqued employing Nietzsche in the last chapter. In Friesen‘s account, the computer sets up a life-world ―with own manifold, experiential times and spaces.‖119 Certainly, the inverse must also be true. The computer sets up two worlds, the experiential time and space of the computer as

118 Norm Friesen, The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen: Relational Pedagogy and Internet Technology. ((New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 6, 87.

apparatus in physical surroundings and the virtual imaginary of the mind. In this extreme formulation, we are approaching the tired old Cartesian mind-body duality that we had hoped to have moved beyond. Friesen‘s account is overly materialistic in that it presumes the body as only the meat-body, that the only benefit to creating this second world would be a false sense of disembodiment. Though he admits that ―books, movies, and other media can provide for very powerful experiences,‖ he places greater importance on ―the direct experience of the world around us.‖120 Again, I argue that this dichotomy is unproductive. It is obvious that an online experience is different, but this simple difference is not enough to infer a value judgment. In my view, our body is composed of larger media systems, something even Nietzsche hints at (as in the aphorism from The Gay Science I cited in the previous chapter) and Sloterdijk makes explicit in his treatment of Greek myth.121 Freisen‘s priority placed on the ―lived physical experience‖ results in his establishing of polarities that can be misleading. Friesen claims that recognizing these differences emphasizes the limitations of the computer life-world, how it prevents certain types of experiences, such as encumbrance and disruption from being simulated or represented.122 But we needn‘t be simulating or representing anything. Friesen misses the mark in this way by ignoring the investments created via the social relations facilitated by the computer life-world. Disruption and encumbrance bring with them risk and care, and the individual encountering these experiences faces an obligation. Friesen alleges that this the computer life- world distances the user from risk and care. Yet I would counter that this ignores the evidence of those who are deeply invested in the life-world, whether it be a game such as World of Warcraft or just a second life on the screen. This to say nothing of the types of physical disruptions and encumbrances that are still experienced by the individual in other facets of their lives. Users cultivate real

119 Ibid. 111 120 Ibid. XIII. 121 Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation. (2006) Mario Wenning, trans. (New York: Colombia University Press, 2010) 5. ―….the connection of god-hero- singer constitutes the first effective media network.‖ 122 Ibid. 111.

attachments, and take care to preserve the results of their work. These conditions are not necessary, but are cultivated, with more difficulty than the physical world but not absent them entirely. To take one example, anthropologist Wagner James Au relates an incident from Second Life that is significant in illuminating similar issues in SL. Erika Thereian is a popular resident of SL, normally depicted as the stereotypical white California girl; an attractive, tall, sun-tanned, blond beauty. A well-known designer of ―skins‖ would often ask her to wear his latest creation to help drive interest; a sort of SL celebrity endorsement. When Thereian wore an African- American skin, she found herself the victim of explicit discrimination and hostility, and even received cold reactions from friends. One friend asked the paradoxical question of when she would return to being herself again. Teaching needn‘t be about explication. Nietzsche's most explicit writings on education concern his relationship with his own ―teacher,‖ found in his third untimely meditation, ―Schopenhauer as Educator.‖123 This is telling, as Nietzsche never met the great philosopher face-to-face, but rather only through his work, through the example of his life. Such a ―virtual‖ encounter deeply influenced Nietzsche, as did his imagined future community. In many ways, this article is as much a reflection on Nietzsche himself, as he describes the virtues he saw in himself. Even this reading is consistent in so far as he actualized the potential in himself via relationship and inspiration, and more deeply, his kinship, and sense of an equality of capacity, with Schopenhauer. I will take up the implications of these communal characteristics in the next, and concluding, chapter. Online education is being incorporated into higher education is a variety of ways. By examining a sample range of possibilities, I hope to have demonstrated that there are aspects that all classrooms share that are consistent with the traditional, unrealized ideals of the university while offering a resistance to the corporatizing influence so often accompanying technology in the classroom.

123 Friedrich Nietzsche. Untimely Meditations. R.J. Hollingdale, trans. )New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 3 New Stages, New Masks?

Even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking glass. -Kraftwerk124

Celebrity is no substitute for political equality. -Morris Kaplan125

Nah ist/ Und schwer zu fassen der Gott - Hölderlin126

The ―virtual classroom‖ of synchronous-online education such as we explored in Second Life contrasts sharply with many of the assumptions underlying analyses of asynchronous-online education. In terms of the class mechanics – lecture, discussion, presentation, group work- the class meetings in Second Life are analogous to the course meeting in a face-to-face setting. Second Life offers a collaborative world-building that is carried out, not by individuals in isolation, but by the collective efforts of its many participants. Education that foregrounds this emphasis- one that can be easily extrapolated to other collaborative projects such as wikis, translations, and media production- has an inherent educational function in orienting students towards digitally mediated communication technologies as more than just hyper-individual transmissions of information. Online education and online collaboration are not to be conflated; indeed, they are often at odds. Many asynchronous-online courses are designed in a way that doesn‘t make any use of the dialogic or collaborative capability of the Internet. I argue that when they do coincide, the common, collaborative endeavors are of heuristic value, demonstrating the political nature of even a virtual space in a way that informs

124 Kraftwerk, ―The Hall of Mirrors,‖ Trans-Europe Express. (Dusseldorf: Kling Klang, 1976.) 125 Morris Kaplan, ―Refiguring the Jewish Question: Arendt, Proust, and the Politics of Sexuality,‖ in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, ed. (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) 116. 126 Friedrich Hölderlin, ―Patmos,‖ Hymns & Fragments. Richard Sieburth, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Near is/ And hard to grasp, the God.‖

our relation to all space. An often-cited goal of universities is to promote good citizenship.127 As our public appearance is increasingly presented in digitally- mediated settings, education must respond to the challenge this poses to the practice of citizenship. This concluding chapter defends the political significance of such world- building in education by extrapolating from Arendt‘s writings on World, while also making clear that such spaces must be enshrined as public spaces free from the encroachment of privatization which threatens political freedom. Such engagement in virtual space helps bring into relief the contingent and historical constructions human identity as described theoretically in the fist chapter. I analyze our changing conceptions of publicity and the mask, asserting that when certain political and normative conditions are met, such presentations can offer potential sites of resistance against the depoliticizing tendencies of digital communication technologies. The avatar is not a substitute for another presentation, but a new manifestation of the mask. The mask, in whatever form, is what allows for politics, it is how we appear in public. In order for this mask to activate its political potential, its appearance must be recognized. Though Arendt did not write about media or the Internet, I argue that her work lends itself towards a defense of the political significance of virtual worlds, and that her work is an appropriate guide in identifying how seemingly virtual modes of appearance can be mobilized in World-sustaining ways.

Second Life in the Classroom, or, the Classroom in Second Life?

When Arendt wrote that the ―giant computers‖ proved that rationality is not the highest of man‘s capacities, her emphasis was on their inability to create a World, a sense of ‗worldliness‘ through their calculations.128 This doesn‘t necessarily

127 Scott R. Sechrist and Dorothy E. Finnegan, ―Risks and Rewards:Good Citizenship and Technologically Proficient Faculty‖ in Case Studies on Information Technology in Higher Education: Implications for Policy and Practice. Lisa Ann Petrides, ed. (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 2000) 128.

128 Arendt, Human Condition. 170-171. See pp. 31-32 of this thesis.

speak to her thoughts on mediation, as far as she made any such explicit arguments, nor can we necessarily extrapolate from this what she might have thought of the Internet. She did however devote much thought to the space of appearance and recognition, and it is here that I will turn. How are we to apply her insights to a world in which digital communication technologies do more than compute rationally, but make possible the creation of a virtual space of appearance, a space whose existence calls into question many of our own preexisting categories of space? Online education remains an open question, the posing of which foregrounds the questions raised above. Having already addressed the concerns regarding the political economy of online education and technology in the classroom, I will turn to the positive possibilities inherent in the medium and the way in which we can think through existing notions of publicity. Arendt presents us with a theoretical ground from which to think through the avatar as a Mask, which is always present in the dyadic relationship that constitutes the exchange between individuals that make up the community.

Unlike other virtual worlds, Second Life is not a game, although to newcomers, it appears as such. It has no set objectives, but rather offers itself as merely a setting for users to populate. SL invites its users to define their own experience, providing the environment or forum in which interactions of various types can take place. This results in a wide variety of groups engaging in various activities that includes, in addition to gaming, socializing, cosplay/ role-playing, historical re-enactments, construction of cities and buildings, museums and art galleries, and educational experiences including classes and conferences. Before entering SL, the user must register an account, create a profile, and design an avatar to 'embody' this persona. Users are given many customizable parameters that they can manipulate to create their avatar, and are given further opportunities once 'in-world' to accumulate free or paid 'skins,' clothes, and other items to alter the appearance of their avatar, ranging from non-human forms to high fashion. What is enabled in terms of identity performance in the shift from textual interfaces (that allow description) to graphic interfaces (that allow depiction, and

more crucially, the ability to speak and listen)? Though this has potentially wider applications, Second Life is particularly useful in educational contexts as students are well positioned to understand avatar-identity play in-world as a heuristic device that makes clear the ways in which identity is always already performative. This makes the experience of using SL potentially transformative, in addition to what is learned in the duration of the academic course, to say nothing of the benefits of increased media literacy and social interaction. Though identity is always created and sustained via performance, and is dependent on recognition from others, this is often not understood and hence our capacity for self- overcoming, in the Nietzschean sense, is hidden. It is in this understanding that the potential emerges, as once one grasps this fact, one can manipulate one‘s appearance and reception. The question of world building is one that is highly relevant to the aims of the university as I‘ve described them. The process of creating the world is an ongoing one, one which each new life begins anew just as the process of humanization is an ongoing process. Arendt argues that ―whoever wants to educate adult really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity,‖129 and for this reason she carefully restricts the term education to the preparation of a child for adult. Education in this sense should be restricted from the public, political life, however recognizes that as human society is ―not finished but in a state of becoming,‖ the education of children takes on a political significance in inducting newcomers into the world.130 But ―school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be.‖131 She distinguishes learning from education, which must have a predictable end to signal entry into the common world as an equal. Arendt argues that work means contributing something to the world which will outlast the builder. This contributed to the lack of recognition that artisans, including artists, received in the ancient world. The modern author conception of

129 -Hannah Arendt. ―The Crisis in Education,‖ in Between Past and Future. 1961 (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). 177. 130 Ibid. 185, 195. 131 Ibid. 188.

authorship developed in tandem with the modern liberal state and capitalism, as conceptions of private property developed and were extended to intellectual property. It is through work that the world, the common place in which we may appear and act is constructed. With the proclaimed ‗death of the author‘ and the ‗death of man‘ it may be that such as understanding of work is again fitting. If this is so, then humanist education is no longer adequate preparation for meeting the responsibilities of a network society. Following Arendt, I contend that doing is the aptest way of learning, that one has only understood what one has done for oneself,132 thus media education should legitimate and encourage modes of political intervention enabled by digital communications technologies. In the case of virtual classrooms presented in this thesis, Second Life seems to foreground this relationship in so far as the construction is for the use of those who will come after. I wonder if the collaborative building of virtual space in SL may meet Arendt‘s criteria. Can the polis exist outside a purely physical construction, and if so, can a virtual agora provide a space for genuine political speech acts? The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.133 Action is not simply limited to speech, but to speech and deeds, in the company of one‘s peers. This expression, in the company of one‘s peers, needn‘t mean being physically present, but extends to other media, such as in writing. One can easily see how a public is constituted through the use of the Internet to transmit recordings, including writing, sound, and video, and that the virtual spaces of the Internet thus constitute a public sphere in which one can act. It requires a bit more unpacking to think through the ways in which deeds other than speech-acts can occur via digitally mediated technologies, but I would argue that such actions

132 Ibid. 180. 133 Arendt, Human Condition, 198.

can and do occur.134 This public thing, the res publica, means the founding of something new whose end cannot be known in advance. In all cases, action for Arendt must also refer to the plurality of actors, in their absolute distinctiveness from one another. The community is, for Arendt, something that is intersubjective, and as such our identity is something relational. Arendt‘s understanding of identity, in particular her articulation of the Jew and the homosexual, opens itself to thinking about the role that virtual mediation can play in users‘ experience of their own social identity. Can this experience be made available for politicization? It hinges in part upon Arendt‘s definition of ―worldliness‖ and the specific access to understanding worldliness opened up to the Pariah.135 Worldliness for Arendt means the ability to see oneself as a unique individual within a larger world of shifting contingencies, an experience with a political and historical context. The Jew, in this instance, is given special insight as an outsider. In her first independent scholarly project, Rahel Varnhagen: Life of a Jewess, Arendt began to sketch out her notion of the parvenu and the pariah, categories that she would articulate more fully in her later work. It is true that in some of her work, particularly in The Human Condition in which she makes the case most explicitly clear, Arendt seems to staunchly defend the separation of public concerns from private, defending the political against the encroachment of the social, which for her includes the ―private matters‖ of gender, sexuality, and so on, echoing her insistence that education be separated from public life. Of course we don‘t need to accept her arguments wholesale, especially after decades of feminist and queer theory, and the insights of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. We can accept social constructivism and still support Arendt‘s insistence on distinction, and her treatment of identity and her own private life points the way.

134 The most obvious contemporary example is surely the ongoing activities of ―hacktivist‖ groups Anonymous and LulzSec. The posting of a nude self-portrait by the Egyptian blogger Aliaa al- Mahdy might be another example, regardless of the veracity of her alleged motives. http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com/ 135 Like the Jew or homosexual of the late 19th century, a similar experience can be observed in modern drag shows in denaturalizing the category of gender, repositioning it as a product of contingent historical practice. This is one reason why figures such as Michel Foucault were skeptical of ―identity politics.‖

The Pariah becomes one who self-consciously affirms her minority identity, including social exile, while cultivating the power of observation. The parvenu must alienate herself from her group, yet unable to shed the appearance of exoticism, passing as ―normal‖ while still being constantly reminded of one‘s difference. Proust remains the example par excellence of this figure. Here social identity comes to bear in political matters, not as the bare biological conditions of life interfering in public life, but in so far as the construction of these identities is situated in a particular historical and political context, and thus is open to political intervention. Arendt‘s use of Proust is to exactly this end, demonstrating how political and social identity became intertwined in such a way as to transform the Jew and homosexual into ―exotic specimens,‖ as Morris Kaplan deftly argues in ―Refiguring the Jewish Question.‖136 Once this insight has been made, one which is backed up in Arendt‘s reflections on herself as well as the Jewish people in general, we can start to tease out both a theory of virtual community, one which enriches our understanding of the political significance of social identity. Arendt‘s articulation of community is more complicated than might initially appear. Politics means being able to act, and action means venturing forth in speech and deed in the company of one‘s peers. This conception of appearance prefigures a conception of a public, one which needn‘t be physical or territorial. She is well known for sharply delineating the social from the political, and the public from the private, the affairs of the household, yet their is plenty in her oeuvre that demonstrates that even for Arendt this delineation wasn‘t as firm as it may appear. What do we make of the public/private division in Arendt‘s work, and how does it relate to her conception of the political, particularly in a world increasingly mediated by technology? The always already present mask of public appearance should be understood as precisely a political manner, as, following Rancière, the political in part constitutes the struggle for agreement as to what will count, that is what will appear, as publicly political, that is, apparent, in a

136 Kaplan, ―Jewish Question,‖ 116-118.

given context.137 Thus we are inclined by such conventions to conceive of some identities as ―natural,‖ rather than as constructions based on political struggles. This relationship between politics and appearance foregrounds our ability to re- construct the border between public and private.138 The political relationship between appearance and publicity is a major theme in Arendt‘s work, and must be unpacked to properly understand the conception of ―politics as masquerade‖ that I am further advancing in this paper in regards to virtual classrooms. Again, I take my lead from several excellent interpreters of Arendt, beginning with Moruzzi‘s account of politics as masquerade, a notion she formulates under the influence of Joan Riviere and Julia Kristeva. I also look to Morris Kaplan‘s reading of Jewish and homosexual identity as an important contribution towards reorienting our understanding of the political significance of social identity for Arendt, as well as for helping to formulate an understanding of deterritorialized identity as applicable to discussions of the virtual. Like Nietzsche, Arendt relentlessly historicizes the question of identity. The 19th century saw the abuse of scientific ―objectiveness‖ in the racialization and naturalization of ―Jewish‖ and ―homosexuality‖ as identities rather than as contingent, historical practices. Kaplan argues that ―The politics of naturalized identities is at odds with democratic commitments to plurality and contestation.‖139 In a letter to her mentor Karl Jaspers she mentions being in America and keeping her ―old name‖ in part to (publicly) identify herself as a Jew. She herself embodies the figure of the ―conscious pariah,‖ refusing to be reduced to a function of social status. She writes ―I am more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death.‖140 This act- a self-naming- is clearly a political act as a sign of solidarity,141 not of faith or some ―deep rooted truth.‖

137 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 50-58. 138 Cf. Linda Zerilli (2005), Michael Warner (2002), and Morris Kaplan (1995). 139 Kaplan, ―Jewish Question,‖ 130. 140 Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner, eds. Hannah Arendt- Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992) 29. 141 Cf Jodi Dean‘s use of the term in Solidarity of Strangers

This refusal to change her name is itself a type of action in its conspicuousness, as conspicuousness itself requires a public 142 Arendt argues that the self is created through the mutual recognition of appearing in public amongst others, that we are ―not recognizably human otherwise.‖ Because appearing in public is one of the ways in which we come to be shaped as self-conscious individuals, always in relation to others, the communications technologies by which we communicate, beginning with language and writing, and including contemporary digital practices, play a vital role in understanding the types of subjects we are and can be. Identity isn‘t something essential, but something socially constructed, therefore we can bring to bear the work of the last several decades of psychoanalytic, social construction, feminist/queer theory in the process. Technology is not simply a neutral tool to be used, an object to be instrumentalized, but also a setting in itself that uses us. If we proceed from the position that we are humanized via our relationship with technology, then the means by which we appear to others is necessary to understanding our political opportunities and challenges today.143 As I argued earlier, the process is not necessarily best understood as a process of mediation, which would posit an a priori metaphysical unity of the human which is being mediated. Instead, the human is produced reciprocally in the process, and thus the language of inscription and circulation is more appropriate. Arendt‘s account of the political and the necessity that it be distinct from the social is still convincing, even if we have come to understand where the border lies a bit differently.

(Virtual) Community The university as an institution holds a special place in society as a primary site in which associations are formed. Can the type of ―community‖ that originates from

142 Kaplan, 108. 143 This is a view convincingly taken up by Bernard Stiegler, Donna Harraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Joanna Zylinska, and others. Problematizing an understanding of the human as ―natural,‖ these sorts of arguments proceed from the position that our conception of what differentiates us as humans has always been a reciprocal relationship with technology. Stiegler, for instance, describes early man walking as a bipedal as a result of using his hands to utilize tools for controlling fire, a development that also led to physiological changes related to the increased ease

a virtual world such as Second Life hold up to any but the most impoverished definition of community? Or is our line of questioning already off the mark? We must be clear on how Arendt treats community in order to best extrapolate the implications of her political thought to virtual space. I look to Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito in unpacking the complicated question of community. He asks, is community just ―wider subjectivity?‖ Intersubjectivity? A unity of unities? All these views assume that ―community is a ―property‖ belonging to subjects that joins them together: an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as belonging to the same totality…, or as a ―substance‖ that is produced by their union.‖144 This view of community is shared by such different schools of thought as ―Gemeinschaft, American neo-communitarianism, ethics of communication,‖ and even the communist tradition. His first intention is to distance his project from the dialectics of part understandings of community; individual and totality, identity and the particular, the origin and then end, or ―more simply of the subject with its most unassailable metaphysical connotations of unity, absolutely and interiority.‖145 This way of viewing community has resulted in political philosophy that sees community as its object. It is from these unchallenged, indeed ignored, assumptions, that ―the community remains doubly tied to the semantics of proprium,‘ belonging. The result is a tragic distortion of the form of community, its very unthinkablity (which is key for Esposito) becomes untranslatable in the lexicon of political philosophy. This distortion results in the term being wrongfully deployed, skewing our impression in favor of communities opposite, exclusion. Esposito finds his point of intervention via a genealogy of the word community itself, from the Latin communitas, derived from cum munus. He hopes that from this excavation will come a ―notion of community that is radically different from those that have been dealt with up to now.‖146 The cum is relatively straight forward. It signifies togetherness, something

of digesting proteins from meat, in turn resulting in larger brain capacity. 144 Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. (1998) Timothy Campbell, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) 2. 145 Ibid. 2.

held in common; that is, improper. ―Common‖ denotes what is not proper, ―what belongs to more than one, to many or everyone, therefore that which is ―public‖ in opposition to that which is ―private‖ or ―general‖ (though also ―collective‖) in contrast to ―individual.‖147 Esposito takes pains to differentiate the community from Society, and even from, or at least to problematize the conflation with, the res publica. This is because of the triple meaning of the munus; a gift, an office, and an obligation. This third meaning limits the emphasis of the initial juxtaposition of public and private, bringing to community an enduring sense of obligation. It qualifies the sort of gift at issue, referring only to a gift that is given, not to what one receives.148 "Community isn't a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves." Such an understanding of community seems to imply a practice based on an obligation but that is not actualized by such a giving. It is not defined by a process of addition, but of subtraction, of a lack. Esposito compares this constitution to the empty space of a vessel, not unlike Heidegger‘s jug in ―The Thing.‖ The totality of persons united not by a property but by ―an obligation or debt,‖ a limit that is considered as an onus. We are dealing with not subjects, or subjects of their own proper lack. Finite subjects who are cut by a limit that cannot be interiorized because it constitutes precisely their ―outside.‖149 The common past of community‘s obligation, the mutuality of giving and the reciprocity of obligation, is not something to be realized, lost, or found. He traces this meaning through a complex history of political thought. Esposito is tracing the history of the ―immunitary paradigm‖ as a reaction to the obligations of the shared munus, those who are affected versus those who are exempted. This is clearly outlined as being a destructive practice, and he is attempting to suggest a (bio)political response to this trajectory, beginning with Hobbes, by again

146 Ibid. 3. 147 Ibid. 3. 148 This is contrasted against immunity, or immunitas, in which refers to the beneficiary of the gift. ―We say I owe you something, not you owe me something.‖

refiguring the meaning of community. Community is the appearing of existence outside itself. Too much immunity, too much armor, turns the protection of life into the negation of life. This is the heart of Esposito‘s larger project, and is in line with the argue I made earlier regarding Nietzsche and metaphysics.150 The question of community borders on death. The absolute individual is the modern who is ―isolated and protected, but only if they are freed in advance from the ―debt‖ that binds them one to the other; if they are released from, exonerated, or relieved of that contract, which threatens their identity, exposing them to possible conflict with their neighbor, exposing them to the contagion of the relation with others.‖151 The gift weakens the subject, hollows him out. The contemporary meaning of community emerges in the middle ages, following the Christian influence. It starts to be linked to the concept of ―belonging,‖ and its borders must then be defended. Immunity begins to play a more central role, and the ―community‖ begins to then acquire the formal traits of ―true juridical-political‖ institutions. As community was stripped of its complexities, with the formalization of military and juridical components, the complexity lived on in theological discourse via the notion of koimnonia, coming from the Greek. We are united as recipients of a gift (from God,) though clearly this is an inversion of the obligation to give, instead configuring our shared res in the form of a received gift. ―We are brothers in an otherness that withdraws us from our own subjectivity, to a point that is void of subject.‖152 Esposito‘s following chapters trace the reappearance of immunity in political philosophy via Hobbes, the memory of common danger resulting in fear, through the guilt of Rousseau‘s community, and the role of Law in Kant. For Rousseau, past and future are evil because they alter the presence of the present. They move presence from a level of being to having. They double presence and re-present it.

149 Ibid. 6-7. 150 Esposito is certainly not the only modern thinker who has worked on ―immunity.‖ Derrida‘s well-known essay ―Plato‘s Pharmacy‖ comes immediately to mind, in which he makes much of the fact that pharmakos means both cure and poison. The work of Sloterdijk, Agamben, Agnes Heller, and Donna Haraway also revolve around the theme of immunity. 151 Ibid. 12.

[I]n order to survive its own constitutive inconsistency, presence needs to be made ―present to‖ itself as a subject: the subjective consciousness of existing that moves beyond an unreflected existence by duplicating it. How? Perhaps the avatar, or the construction of a profile-cum-avatar of any sort, may contain the potential for such a recognition, in so far as one is forced to reflect and create a stylized re-presentation of the self to be placed in relation to others. Esposito answers his own question as such: ―Through that form of reconstructing the self that is constituted by memory.‖ That is, memory plays a critical role in the production of the sense of unity of the subject across time. The subject interiorizes time, which connects this genealogy with Heidegger. Heidegger retraced community as a negative property, highlighting the importance of the void or nothing, the ecstatic opening of brushing up against this void. Finally it is Bataille, with sacrifice and non-knowledge, who posits the ―sovereign experience‖ that Esposito leaves us with. Arendt plays a central role in ―Law,‖ the chapter on Kant. As an interpreter of Kant, Arendt argues in favor of ―the communitarian character of judgments of taste.‖ Aesthetics requires a consensus made possible only by a pre-existing ―common sense,‖ a sort of paradoxical ―subjective universality.‖ ―The subject of aesthetics is We.‖153 Community‘s place is sought in judgment, not reason. The law limitlessly puts the subject in its debt. Nietzsche recognized the danger of Kant‘s categorical imperative as dangerous to life, because the law can be imposed. The obligation of community can‘t be coercive as such. Our finitude is what makes community impossible, a realization only arrived at only when we attempt to actualize community. According to Esposito, Arendt moves in ―the direction of an explicit withdrawal of the community from the semantics of the will.‖154 Arendt joins the cum to a notion of distance rather than proximity, and Esposito uses as an example her image of the table that both divides and brings together. ―The community is what places all in relation to one another in the

152 Ibid. 10. 153 Ibid. 72.

modeality of their reciprocal difference...‖155 The World must be something, perhaps need only be something, that connects us as finite subjects. It is again for this reason that the world must outlast the individuals in order to provide relative stability. Much of Esposito‘s ruminations on community functions on the level of the imaginary, of how our understandings and wishes function creatively to produce dynamics in the world. He seems thinking community as ―necessary, demanded, and heralded by a situation that joins in a unique epochal knot the failure of all communisms with the misery of all individualisms.‖156 This opening line anchors the aims of the work, his motivation for undertaking a rethinking of the meaning, and destiny, or community. Community is not a recognition, it is not a common bond that connects individuals. Surely, the typical deployment of ―virtual communities‖ is by no means approach the meaning of community put forward here. In fact, there are passages in Communitas that might call into question the use of prosthetically mediated social relations. The same principle of representation, conceived of as the formal mechanism directed toward conferring presence on the one absent, does nothing other than reproduce and strengthen that void to the degree in which it isn‘t able to conceptualize its originary (and not derived) character. However if one understands community in such a way, there isn‘t a loss to be made up for, but the no-thing encountered is instead the very character of our being-in-common.157 In this sense, it seems inappropriate to talk about ―virtual communuity‖ in online space in general. Second Life does represents the potential to become an agora, a public space in which actors can speak and listen.

154 Ibid. 79. 155 Ibid. 79. 156 Ibid. 1. 157 Ibid. 141-2.

The Web (of Relationships) and the (En)Act(ed Stories)

Arendt argues that the mass media tends to depoliticize citizens, whose practice of citizenship becomes overrun by the social, an early version of an argument made often today by critics of modern society and network technology. Politics is at the center of her thought, and for her the condition of politics is human plurality. Most theorists of democracy echo this sentiment. This isn't to say that she prioritizes the political over the social or economic, but rather that she argues for the maintenance of proper distinction between them, and works to counter the blurring that has occurred under the conditions of modernity.

Even in The Human Condition, the work in which she makes these distinctions most explicit, we find evidence of ambiguity, in part because the complexities of Arendt‘s thought often get lost in reductionist readings. Furthermore, Arendt‘s thought process of ―crystallization‖ influenced the architecture of the book in such a way that the subtlety of the project is often lost, focusing only on the tripartite division of the vita activa and not on the resolution. In her chapter ―Action,‖ even a cursory reading of the section headings alone reveals the role that storytelling plays in Arendt‘s thought. This is essential, not only because speech is an act for Arendt, but because it is through speech and action that the agent is disclosed (to herself and to others.) Public space for Arendt is always the space of appearance in which stories are enacted.158 Action, as opposed to fabrication (work) is never possible in isolation. To repeat her over-generalization, when one is fabricating one relies on a blueprint, and has an image in mind of what the final product is meant to be, however in Action our outcomes can never be determined in advance. ―Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian,‖ and thus is hidden from even the actor until he is no longer caught up in the act.159 This line of thought would come to have great significance in Arendt‘s later work on

158 Norma Claire Moruzzi. Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) 143. Cf.. Arendt, The Human Condition, especially ―Action,‖ Section 27. 159 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd Edition. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958) 192.

judgment, on which I will say more below. For now, it is sufficient to note that the essential character of a man is constituted by mutual recognition amongst others, and that it is only visible to others. The following section is a reflection on the conception of eudaimon, the difficult to translate Greek conception of the good life, the well-being of the daimon, the entity who accompanies us throughout our lives but always behind our backs.160 Human essence only comes into being when life is over.161 It is for this reason that storytelling takes on added significance, in conveying meaning to an act, and why Arendt must insist that an actor cannot simultaneously be actor and spectator/judge. Peter Sloterdijk makes a related observation about the storyteller in the introduction to Rage and Time, however his account attempts to formulate the relationship as ―the first effective media network.‖ Immortal fame in the classical sense relied on the poet to sing of the heroes great achievements, to enact the story. Hence, ―the arm that holds the sword also belongs to the singer to whom the hero, and all his weapons, owe the immortal fame.‖ ―Media were not technical instruments but human beings themselves,‖ hybrid bodies formed by the larynx of one and the arm of the other.162 Citizenship is a practice, and one based on appearance, or at least the

160 Agamben points out a similar case in ancient Persian angelology. This angel, called a daena, presides over the birth of each man, and has the form of a beautiful young girl. ―The daena is the celestial archetype in whose likeness each individual has been created, as well as the silent witness who accompanies and observes us at every moment. And yet the angel's face changes over time. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, it is imperceptibly transformed with our every gesture, word, and thought. Thus, at the moment of death, the soul is met by its angel, which has been transfigured by the soul's conduct into either a more beautiful creature or a horrendous demon. It then whispers: ‗I am your daena, the one who has been formed by your thoughts, your words, and your, deeds:' In a vertiginous reversal, our life molds and outlines the archetype in whose image we are created.‖ In this case, a man must face the result of his actions at his life‘s end. This of course is quiet distinct, as in the Greek case one never has access to one‘s daimon, reiterating the point that it is only through recognition by others that one sees one‘s character reflected. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, ―The Genius,‖ in Profanations, Jeff Fort, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 2007) 17. 161 This conception can be problematized, of course. Notably the ―Grand Narrative‖ of thinkers such as Hegel, combined with the eschatological obsessions of Christian metaphysics, seems to have resulted in an obsession with imagining the demise of our own civilization. Perhaps only then we can pass judgment- one suspects it is not a coincidence that Judgment Day is a common synonym for the Apocalypse. Yet our desire for the End is also paralyzing in that it destroys our capacity for imagination, for imagining and thereby creating a Future. Action itself has become stymied by our failure to understand its own indeterminacy. 162 Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation. (2006) (New York: Colombia University, 2010) 4-5.

appearance of one‘s actions. If both the polis and identity as part of a community are not dependent on physical territory, and yet still rely on some form of communication, then digitally mediated communications technologies should be theoretically capable of sustaining political practice and citizenship. Yet the tendency of mass communication, as we have seen, is depoliticizing. Appearance needs to be made to appear, and at the same time the emphasis on the body needs to be made explicit, as we are still bodies, regardless of the form our masquerades now take. This may seem like too tall a fence to straddle, but it is precisely our current task to locate the sites for not only resistance but a shift in perspective and practice that engages in the political. Digital communication technologies tends to be depoliticizing in part because they function as tools of further bureaucratization, distancing us from one another, and power from responsibility. Participatory technology often fails short of politics because there is no response to an action. Without a response, without recognition, the responsibility and obligation of community is lost. However physical proximity does not necessarily bring nearness. As Hölderlin suggests in the opening lines of his great hymn ―Patmos,‖ nearness doesn‘t mean that something can easily be grasped. Physical proximity shouldn‘t be equated with nearness. Heidegger makes this clear in ―The Thing,‖ when he writes that ―nearness does not consist of shortness of distance…. Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness.‖163 Our understanding of community, and of public spheres, should take this into consideration, building on the insights Arendt gives us into identity construction noted above. Most crucially is that the act of world building, the World being that which we all share in common, that which we build together, that which both separates and draws us together in relation to one another, needn‘t be understood as a physical place or our constituency dependent on a territory. Further in ―The Thing,‖ Heidegger discusses how a wine jug, for instance, can become a temporary site of gathering. In this way things can becomes a local, temporary

163 Martin Heidegger. ―The Thing,‖ in Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstadter, trans. (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971) 165.

manifestation of art, but they ―do not focus a whole culture and so do not become the locus of a struggle between earth and world.‖164 Finally, Heidegger analyzes the relationship between truth and art. The work of art is never finished, as it is always engaged in a process of existing, which requires a viewer and a perceptual experience to be what it is. Unlike a tool, which is designed to do a specific job, the existence of a work or art is a continual creation. Arendt similarly distinguishes between a work of art and a speech act. The work of art continues on and is not dependent on the publicity of its creator, while an action needs to identify the actor in order to maintain its defining character. But it is not quite so simple as this. Like the work of Art, world-building is never completed. Each new person takes part in the process, and in doing so creates a space in which politics can happen, a shared public space in which to appear, and the renewal of human plurality and individual uniqueness; that is, the conditions for politics, and hope for the future. For Arendt, the plurality of men, their absolute distinctiveness and uniqueness, is a fundamental truth upon which her reflections on political life depend. She isn‘t describing the sort of individualism elevated to highest virtue that is typical of liberalism, however, but the essential truth of our equality as unique individuals who engage in speech and action. It is through action, and it‘s appearance and recognition in the other, that we can be said to live human lives. In response to Marx‘s conflation of all human activity as ‗labor,‘ she crafted a well-defined division of the vita activa into three fundamental human activities; labor, work, and action. Labor is linked to life, to the activities linked to the biological needs of sustaining life, and therefore, as a process, is not linear,

164 Ibid. 46. The Work of Art was a prominent example by which Heidegger articulated this point. What the ‗thing‘ is for Heidegger, is in some sense all the post-modern conception of art can offer us, and by extension all that many contemporary communities can offer us; temporary sites of gathering. But their Thingness is not inherent in their architecture. Japanese aesthetics, to take one example I‘ve written about at length in the past, recognizes the struggle between world and earth taking place in great art, something Heidegger demonstrated by drawing out a correlation between his own thought. The Japanese art thus draws the Being of the Japanese out into the open. Heidegger makes it clear that world and earth are necessary for art to work, and the thing cannot produce work-being. In this way, it becomes impossible to see how Heidegger could be mistaken for a post-modern thinker. He was very much an elitist; only great works could bring about the clearing in which truth of Being is brought into the open. Of course a community is not

but linked to the cycles of life. Work provides the world, which man builds for himself, including all those things that are created by man and endure. ―The human condition of work is worldliness.‖165 Work, then, lasts and makes possible memory, as inscriptions of history. Since all that is fabricated or made is the product of work, it is here that we will situate technology. Lastly, action is the activity that occurs between men, and for Arendt action is the key to politics. It is dependent on human plurality. One cannot ‗act‘ alone. This is the condition through which political life can exist.166 One can also not build a world alone. Arendt recognized the necessity for a division between the public, that which is held in common, and the private, that which is belongs to an individual. Though we may not agree necessarily with the location of her division, it is imperative that a distinction be made, and as it is constantly being re-negotiated, whether we are aware of it or not. She saw in Marx‘s thought the conflation of public and private, a result of the reduction of all activity to labor. Like later theorists of community, most importantly perhaps Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, she is trying to think community in a way that is safe from the threat of Fascist community. It is, in part, for this reason that she argued that Stalinism and National Socialism were totalitarian movements stemming from the same impulse, the destruction of the private as engulfed by the public. Arendt is often a thinker of balance, and she‘s just as cautious in regards to the encroachment of the private into the public, as she has observed in modern liberal capitalist societies. This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but, on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant.167

a Thing, but I think the analogy as it plays out in Heidegger‘s thought can be productive. 165 Arendt (1958), 7. 166 Ibid. 7. 167 Ibid. 52.

She is unique among 20th century thinkers not just because the question of the political occupies such a central position in her thought, but also because she so firmly argues for the proper division between the public and the private. Or at least, this is how she is known. The Human Condition if read properly does support this sort of division, though that is not where Arendt‘s thought on the matter ends. Though political action depends on a shared space, a public, not all public acts are political. The emphasis on communication and publicity, one facilitated by an increased possibility of ‗interactivity‘ and public expression related to digital communications technology, the emphasis on publicity has been argued to be depoliticizing. The emphasis on interactivity undermines the prospects for richer political engagement, but this has less to do with the nature of the technology as with the displaced emphasis on politics as a practice.

Media Technologies and Public/Private Division

It is generally agreed upon by most democratic theorists that under liberal market democracies the private has been unfairly privileged to the great detriment of the public. These divisions manifest themselves differently in different historical and cultural contexts, and thus the construction of the public/private divide is deeply contingent. New media technologies, and our political responses to them, in particular legislative and juridical responses, shape and reshape these constructions. Agamben‘s work on the apparatus of the mask foregrounds the function of the mask as a bridge between the moral or ‗natural‘ human and the conditions of his public appearance within the law. Like Arendt, he makes much of the fact that the original meaning of persona was ―mask,‖ writing that ―it is through the mask that the individual acquires a role and a social identity.‖ The slave of ancient Rome has neither name nor mask, a result of not enjoying the benefits of personality, namely ―the juridical capacity and political dignity of the

free man.‖ 168 As with Rancière and Arendt, the struggle for appearance and recognition is the nature of the political. The juridical overtone for Agamben is significant as recognition under the law is for him inherently tied to the apparatus of the mask, the technic of appearance. Just as ―the face‖ isn‘t only physiological, the mask too operates on multiple levels. Much of the criticism directed at new media technologies focuses on their tendency towards greater privatization, contributing to the further denigration of the public. Of course different jurisdictions produce various responses to new media, and these responses ought often to be the proper target of such criticism. For instance, in the early days of photography, it wasn‘t clear where the boundaries of acceptability were in regards to ownership of images shot in public. In the United States, it was eventually arbitrated that anyone or anything on public property is allowed to be photographed, with exceptions for some government and military sites. However, jurisdictions such as Canada have more restrictions on photographing people in public.169 With the popularization of commercial shopping malls in the late 20th century, as well as the use of commercially available video cameras and more recently digital cameras, malls were legally considered to be semi-public spaces in the US, where many of the rights of public spaces are maintained while allowing the control of a private space. In this case, the mall is now the new medium being regulated, as opposed to the town square or market, for instance. This is one example of how emerging media practices and technological possibilities take part in the negotiation of changing the boundary between public and private. The technologies themselves have undeniable impact, but aren‘t themselves wholly determinant of the outcome. Such a few would be overly deterministic and therefore impoverish the possibility for real political action in sites of resistance that are open at that particular articulation of forces. The state of California, for instance, has maintained free speech rights in malls in order to maintain the spirit of the importance of public spaces. With regards to online spaces, it is essential that public rights be maintained along

168 Giorgio Agamben, ―Identity without the Person,‖ in Nudities. (2009) David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) P. 46.

similar lines.170 Political activity, that is action and speech, must take place within a shared space. Arendt praises the role of the association in American public life, and defends vigorously the right to voice dissent in public fora. When Arendt demands a constitutional amendment protecting public dissent and protest, it is most likely that this is precisely because such a right would literally transform every public space into a freely accessible political space. In this regard, Arendt seeks to radicalize public space itself by democratizing access to a stage of appearance wherever it is encountered. One must assume that this would include ‗virtual‘ spaces, such as those enabled by the Internet. Surely, we can also locate moments in her work in which she advocates the necessity of protecting free association as in her infamous article on Little Rock. This is not an inconsistency, thought the Internet present new challenges in distinguishing between public and private space. If a private message board or listserv dedicated to white supremacy wants to restrict a combative user such as myself from posting in their community, for instance, they can and should have the right to do so as a social association, no matter how detestable we may find their views. However, just as a restaurant cannot selectively segregate in such a way, likewise nor can a public space on the internet, say the comments page on a New York Times article.171 Acknowledging the fragility of human affairs, the constitutional amendment proposed by Arendt is a practice of counter- colonization aimed at institutionalizing the generative power of pluralized action to open and sustain spaces for the appearance of freedom. We must extend this understanding to communication that is mediated via the Internet.

169 In both cases, there are variations between individual states and provinces as well. 170 It is not difficult to imagine the ways in which various new digital communications media fit into this line of thought, including the internet itself, as well the full spectrum of digital communications technologies, such as mobile telephony, various social media, and digitally mediated financial activities. 171 Cf. Hannah Arendt, ―Civil Disobedience,‖ p. 101. Cf. also the appropriative strategy at work in The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 198: ―‗Where you go, you will be a polis‘: these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere.‖ I must thank Samuel R. Galloway for pointing me towards these passages.

The avatar, both specifically in Second Life and more metaphorically employed with regards to all user created profiles, present a more complicated challenge. The avatar allows the ‗user‘ to stylize a presentation of the self, though the desires/motivations behind the process may remain unknown, even to the user herself. These ‗unknown‘ selves emerge in the process of virtual embodiment, through a process of stylization and publication not entirely removed from the publication and circulation of written texts in earlier epochs. Regardless of how disparate the array of selves may become, the body is the monument of this unknown multiplicity, ‗self‘ becoming the category under which the plurality of appearance both emerge from and are brought together by. The avatar also functions as an ‗embodiment‘ of imagination, as one can imagine multiple standpoints and can therefore embody them as well. This speaks to Arendt‘s repeated characterization of the self as multiplicitous, of thought as an internal dialogue amongst the parts. Linda Zerilli‘s account of Arendtian judgment as an imagining of oneself from a multiplicity of standpoints is useful here. Contra those who would limit this imaging to a mere representations of the opinions of our peers, she argues that this act is in fact also production.172 Those who see the imagining of multiple views as merely reproductive are in fact disempowering the imagination.173 ―To the spectator, the French Revolution does not provide cognitive confirmation that mankind is progressing; rather it inspires ‗hope,‘ as Arendt writes, by ‗opening up new horizons for the future.‖ She continues to note that judgment that at once expands our sense of reality and affirms freedom is possible only once the faculties are 'in free play,' as Kant puts it.... To judge objects and events in their freedom expands our sense of community, not because it tells us what is morally or politically justified and thus what we should do, but because it expands our sense of what is real or communicable. This affirmation of freedom would not be possible

172 Linda M. G. Zerilli. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005) 147-152. 173 Certainly there are many frustrated thinkers on the Left, frustrated at the lack of imagination and arbitrary restrictions on their actions. Cf. Jodi Dean, Lawrence Grossberg, Slavoj Zizek, etc.

in the absence of productive imagination.174 Manifesting an imagined virtual persona into an avatar or profile is a virtual performance of atavistic embodiment made political in much the same sense that judgment is political for Arendt. This can be understood as an inversion of Sherry Turkle‘s often repeated observation that computers bring post-modern theory down to earth. In this case, I would argue that our practices, empowered by imagination, function as a production of new imaginaries and theories which function performatively.175 Jodi Dean notes the limits of a conception of a public, including the discourse of multiple publics and counterpublics. She argues that the publicity is inherently tied to modern conception of politics, and is also the defining characteristic of modern technoculture. Darin Barney reiterates the ways in which this link forecloses politics, and that participation, specifically the language of interactivity, has become reified as an end in itself. Surely we cannot do away with real participation or a conception of publics, but we must make sure they are conceived of as means and not ends in themselves. As with any discussion of the political, political substance and action is always a prerequisite. As Dean has argued convincingly throughout her growing body of work, contemporary ―communicative capitalism,‖ what we see in modern liberal technocultural societies, emphasizes communication, access to information, and interactivity. These aspects are supported by the apparatus of capitalism, and therefore even those who are mobilized against the inequalities of this system must make use of the same mechanisms of publicity. This results in strengthening the system one is working against, effectively robbing publicity of its normative qualities that have been championed by democratic political theorists of the last century. Darin Barney, in an assessment of this situation, echoes Dean‘s call to abandon the discursive language of the public. He also argues that the nature of modern

174 Zerilli, Feminism, 151-2 175 I‘m not disagreeing with Turkle, as I think it is clear that a reciprocity exists. Surely we can find evidence of ‗postmodern‘ thought in earlier moments, but it didn‘t take because it was not present in the right environment at the time. Even this idea of environment is a modern conception, resulting from technologies and colonialization. My point being merely that I am not interested in finding an origin or first cause, but identifying a feedback loop and thinking about

liberal market capitalism empties the word community of its meaning, as for him community suggests a moral obligation. Though his treatment is a bit ambiguous, it is perhaps rightfully so, as community, understood as being dependent on mutual regard and moral obligation, can either be undesirable (reactionary, anti- individualistic small town ―community‖) or excessively demanding. As I demonstrated in my summation of Esposito‘s work, however, obligation is at the root of the meaning of community. Theorists like Michael Warner and Nancy Fraser have popularized the language of ‗counterpublics,‘ a move towards a pluralized understanding of publics in general. Dean argues in favor of ―civil society‖ over ―publics,‖ but in all cases the power of imagination and necessary fictions is obvious. Arendt saw a ―pseudo world‖ of machines that is less stable than we are, and for this reason the ―virtual worlds‖ of the Internet seem to fall short. However if we can build spaces virtually that last and are held in common, then there is a chance that such virtual spaces, inseparable from material space, can indeed constitute a world in the Arendtian sense. Online education courses offered by universities that use proprietary software, claim ownership of faculty- designed courses and material, and isolate students as individual receivers of the transmission of knowledge are most certainly not conducive to sustaining a World in this sense. If digital mediation and the virtual worlds created by their intersection can in fact re-invigorate the public sphere, then it must be held in common, defended against privatization and constructed in a way so as to be stable and last longer, in some form, than ourselves.

how to break into it and influence its course.

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Conclusion

Become the one you are. -Nietzsche

Like citizenship, learning too is a practice. In both cases, the discourse has shifted away from being understood as such. The potential of digital communications technologies lies in their ability to bring these practices back into relief, opening a space for questioning and the reconstitution of how we think about learning. Of course a traditional classroom can do this, but being embedded in a technological society requires an education which orients students towards a politicized understanding of technology. Citizenship in modern liberal democracies is most often understood as a set of rights, of entitlements due members. Fighting for such rights is often noble, as in the case of equal citizenship for minority groups, disabled persons, the Civil Rights movement of the African Americans, or more recent actions on behalf of the LGBT community. Yet the problem with understanding citizenship in these terms, indeed the problem with thinking community in any case, is that it is by definition an exclusionary practice. Distinction is not always a bad thing, yet it opens itself to abuse and towards replicating inequalities in the social order. Non-hierarchical, inclusive, collaborative learning environments, whether in a brick-and-mortar setting or in a virtual world, or any space in between, offer an experiential form of learning that can reorient students‘ understanding of both learning and citizenship as practices.

So doing would contribute to countering the depoliticizing tendencies of technologies that further alienate us from our responsibility to one another and to our shared World. Though potential uses of digital media may change, and new Masks will appear, the self-consciousness of the types of people we become through using social media can have radical political effects. Avatar-based learning foregrounds this artificiality through its very mode of appearance, imbuing the self-creation of our Masks with political power.

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Often the novelty of digital communication technologies are overstated. In the case of e-learning and virtual classrooms, I assert that much of the positive possibilities I have highlighted are hardly new, but brought into relief and their adoption made easier to understand by the nature of digital mediation. Postal networks that characterized earlier distance education models had a similar effect in terms of conceptions of the student ―body,‖ putting students ―in touch‖ with one another, as the ―come into contact‖ with material and instructors. What is perhaps most important is the ways in which digital communications challenges the ontological categories by which we‘ve understood space in the past, and this may have the result of refiguring our very understanding of learning, and most optimistically helping to change the structures by which power operates and reproduces itself. Arendt worried that questions of the body- of gender, sexuality, of personal identity- were politically inappropriate questions. Yet even so, Arendt understood her own actions regarding her gender and identity as being political, as she expressed to Jasper‘s in a letter about keeping her Jewish name, or her treatment of the life of Rahel Varnhagen. Arendt‘s politics is a politics of Action, but politics should not be centered upon speech to the detriment of justice. This is exactly what happens in modern technoculture that privileges interactivity and communication as ends in themselves with no commitment to larger goals. We cannot know the results of our actions in advance, a fact that necessitates responsibility and forgiveness, but also enables hope.

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