oh my god, a blog
This chapter considers ethics of practices involved in the production and recognition of difference in the three-dimensional (3D) virtual world known as Second Life. We take up a Deleuzian ontology as a means for thinking about difference and desire in, what we argue is, an ethical way. Such a perspective also offers a fresh approach from which to engage with cultures of difference sutured to the avatars (3D representations or personas) of individuals who identify as having a disability in Second Life. We contend that disability should be appreciated as an articulation of difference: as a dividuation of the life-force that constitutes all human beings. Within a Deleuzian ontology people are varying modifications of difference and as such, ‘disability’ per se can not be conceived as located in a single body or subjectivity. Rather, difference is seen as inherently valuable and as being expressed in bodies in diverse ways. We explore what the world of Second Life might look like from such a perspective. In so doing, we draw on interviews with prominent identities in Second Life who identify as having a disability and who have a social profile as activists in the disability rights community in Second Life. We consider our interview data in relation to Deleuze’s ethics, positing ‘ethical assemblages’ in Second Life as opportunities for increasing or reducing a body’s capacity to act and shaping the ways in which a body:
...can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 257).
Re-conceptualizing disability as an interplay of desire and difference opens up possibilities for new assemblages of subjectivity and ethical community in Second Life.
A note on method
This chapter is grounded in qualitative interview data generated through ethnography and in-depth interviews. Following Boellstorff (2008), we take the activities and words of the residents of Second Life as ‘legitimate’ ethnographic data about embodied difference, disability and culture in a virtual world. Boellstorff defends this research methodology, arguing that the requirement to meet interviewees in actual life would presume that virtual worlds are not in themselves real contexts.
While we have not met interviewees in ‘actual life’, our ethnography has not entirely been conducted within Second Life. We chose to allow the interviewees to define the context within which they are most comfortable meeting. Some participants in the study chose to meet via Skype. For example, Simon Stevens, who is a regular in Second Life, and has a noted identity in this virtual world, preferred to meet using text chat via Skype. Others sent instant messages from within Second Life in preference to responding to emails. Some participants chose to use voice in Skype and others expressed a preference for text in Skype, even though their speech was intelligible. Such flexibility in modes of aural and/or visual communication is specific to the Internet as a medium and allows research participants to determine the mode of their involvement in the research. As researchers, we did not question the interviewees' preferred medium for interviews; what was most important to us as the facilitators of interview process was that all interviewees felt comfortable with the channel of communication utilized. Interviewees responded to a notice placed in Second Life inviting those interested in issues relating to disability and technology to take part in interviews either via email or Skype or in Second Life itself. We bring these practical methods together with particular methods in thought that we position as Deleuzian ethics. In ‘everyday’ understandings, ethics can be understood as principals of conduct that govern or bind a community. In some philosophies, such as the work of Nietszche (1973, 1979) and Deleuze (1983a) ‘morals’ (rather than ethics) govern and bind, and morality is a performance of ‘one rule for all’. In contrast to such a moral idea (of ‘one rule for all’), ethics is understood by Deleuze, and the scholars upon which he draws (including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Leibniz, Foucault) as a matter of developing individual rules for individual situations. Every situation, day, moment, person, life form, is different from those around it (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262). As such, new methods of practice need to be crafted in order to engage with the realities of differences.
Keith Ansell Pearson is one of the scholars to have articulated most clearly the role that ethics holds in Deleuze’s thought. He argues:
A notion of ethics has to be seen not as an incidental element of Deleuze’s project but as one of its most fundamental and essential elements. Deleuze is, in fact, compelled by the very adventure of thought to think ethically and even to think an ethics of matter itself (Ansell Pearson, 1999, p. 11).
This quote highlights the relationship in Deleuze’s thought between ethics as a practice of developing individual rules for individual situations, and the task of thinking about matter as being exactly such a project. In this chapter, we employ Deleuze’s ethical conscience to move beyond the violence of lack embodied in the term ‘disability’.
What is Second Life anyway? And what’s wrong with first life?
Aleja Asturias: having now experienced Second Life (SL), I wouldn't take it back.
Denise: what makes it special?
Aleja Asturias: Lots of things ... many people talk about using SL [Second Life] as a way to do things they couldn't or wouldn't otherwise do, especially those who have disabilities.
Aleja Asturias: I discounted that for a while. Until I got here myself. (Second Life interview 1st August 2008)
Second Life is a 3-Dimensional (3D) virtual world. It enables participants to create identities in the form of 'avatars' that are visual and auditory bodies (personas) projected on and through the computer screen. These bodies interact with each other in ‘real time’ using text chat, instant messages and/or voice. Virtual worlds such as Second Life are based on three areas of technology: World Wide Web, multi-player role-playing games, and avatar worlds (Ondrejka, 2007). They are distinguishable from simulation games because, unlike simulation games, virtual worlds are built and owned by the players (who are known as residents) and there are no fixed rules. For some participants or ‘residents’ of Second Life, 3D virtual worlds have allowed them to interact socially, shop, run businesses, and access information in ways not possible in their 'real life'. For example, Cassidy (2007) argues that Second Life has provided residents David Wallace and Niels Schuddeboom, both of whom are wheelchair users, with ‘an outlet for creative expression’ (Cassidy, 2007). For many, Second Life has also proved to be a viable alternative to 'real life' employment, enabling residents like Nanci Schenkein to operate their businesses through a virtual medium (Deeley, 2008).
As the experiences of these individuals suggest, 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life can facilitate rich user experiences and change the roles of producers, providers and users (dubbed ‘produsers’ by Bruns, 2008); the ‘residents’ of virtual worlds are the creators and no longer clients or merely users of these environments. It might seem that such virtual environments, which augment collaborative abilities by ‘removing the real-world limitations placed on social and /or collaborative behaviour (language, geography, financial status, etc)’, ‘compensating for human inadequacies in processing, maintaining or developing social and /or collaborative mechanisms’, and ‘creating environments or distributed tool-sets that pull useful end results out of human social and /or collaborative behaviour’ (Coates, 2003) provide an ideal solution to the accessibility issues experienced by people who identify as disabled in the actual world. Yet, as Mitcham pointed out over a decade ago, ‘the problems with design are not just technical or aesthetic, but also ethical’ (Mitcham, 1995, p. 187). Just as these technologies have the capacity to link users isolated by disability, geographical location and social circumstances, those who can benefit the most (socially and physically isolated people with disabilities) will be further excluded if accessibility issues remain of secondary importance.
In this chapter, we use the term ‘accessibility’ in its broadest sense; internet accessibility is about ensuring that anyone, using any browser or device, is able to access any content on the Web. This definition is consistent with Letourneau’s (1998) position that accessibility ought to be concerned with ensuring that all users (regardless of ability) should be able to access virtual environments using current and previous versions of browsers as well as emerging non-browser technologies such as mobile devices, Web TV and so on. The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) and the recently approved version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) guidelines, and the US Section 508 Standards for Web accessibility provide designers with guidelines that can help them to create Websites that are accessible to a broad range of users, including those with visual impairments, hearing impairments, mobility impairments and learning disabilities. Comparable guidelines for virtual worlds such as Second Life have not yet been developed. Moreover, as Peters and Ball (2007) argue, when accessibility is a challenge in the first place (real world) and in its second place (Web 1.0), the problem of how we will meet the challenges of accessibility in the ‘third place’ (Web 2.0) is still to be solved.
There is generally widespread agreement that there are significant technological barriers associated with highly visual environments such as 3D virtual worlds and Web3D. Judy Brewer, Director of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, outlined some of the challenges during her presentation at an ‘in world’ public conference held in June 2007. Here, Brewer described the pleasurable experience of her acquired virtual abilities (cited in Qi, 2007, para. 4). However, in the same speech, as we have observed elsewhere (Hickey-Moody & Wood 2008b), she also articulated the limitations of this environment for users with visual disabilities, those with hearing impairments and users with cognitive or neurological difficulties. While acknowledging that accessibility software does exist, Brewer also noted the need for an environment that would enable Second Life content creators to create accessible spaces more easily.
Hiroshi Kawamura, President of the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) Consortium, has echoed similar concerns. Kawamura expresses unease about the fact that there is a potential split in the disability community over the new technologies, stating:
To some disability groups, Second Life is wonderful. They can participate in a world accessible to them without having a disability. Of course, Second Life is completely inaccessible to blind people right now. Whether or not it is just Second Life, it is emblematic of a handful of issues that surround the Web 2.0 phenomena. They are:
· Highly visual content, multimedia, maps
· User-created content (an increasing phenomena, with a wide variety of accessibility)
· Disproportionate cost compared to the benefit (we can’t ask Flickr photo sharing users to describe a billion photos) (Kawamura cited in Fruchterman, 2007, para. 2).
People with visual impairments often have additional reasons for wanting to access 3D virtual worlds, since such environments offer a rich channel of communication. So Second Life presents researchers with paradoxes relating to accessibility (Hickey-Moody & Wood, 2008a). The people who could gain the most from being involved in Second Life are those who frequently can’t access the technology. Or, if they can access the technology, often it hasn’t been designed in a way that means a visually impaired person can use it. But there is a third kind of barrier to accessibility, which is cultural accessibility. Being part of a ‘disability friendly’ community is a project that often raises more questions than it answers. Burnett (2007) argues that despite the ‘carnivalesque’ quality of virtual worlds, much of the activity and the architecture is banal and reflects the norms and realities of ‘first’ life. Similarly, Molesworth and Denegri-Knott (2007) describe virtual worlds as parodies of a consumer society and they argue that new explanations are required to understand the implications of these experiences for evolving culture. This chapter primarily explores this third issue, through examining the ethics of disability friendly communities in Second Life and asking how such insights might be used to envisage new possibilities in virtual and ‘actual’ life.
The examples showcased here are drawn from our ethnographic research, involving a series of interviews with the founders/coordinators and members of the virtual community within Second Life. As we have suggested, these are groups that hold an awareness of disability identities. The four individuals whose experiences inform this chapter (referred to by their virtual avatar names are: Polgara Paine (Manager of Wheelies), Simon Walsh (founder of Wheelies who is known as Simon Stevens in Second Life) and Aleja Asturias (GimpGirl)[1]. Our fourth research participant, Namav Abramovic, is a disability-rights activist in Second Life. Each participant (and the ethos of the groups to which they belong) can be seen as underpinned by different understandings of disability. Our research has shown that the most productive readings of disability tend to be those that mine sites of embodied difference and celebrate difference, rather than those that set out to ‘repair’ difference.
Deleuzian ethics: a brief exegesis
Before we further discuss ethical practices in the context of Second Life, we outline our Deleuzian conception of ethics and explain just why we think such a model of thought is useful when thinking about Second life. As we suggest above, ethics differs from morality, rules and prior judgment because these ideas invoke binary, inflexible systems of thought, such as senses of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Morality both implicitly and explicitly takes up histories of religious belief in a transcendent God as a being of supreme good; a being that is ‘better’ than the everyday person who can but hope to know God. Social rules can similarly become abstracted from physical realities in a manner that privileges transcendence. When this happens, social rules can lose meaning; they can become a performance of a historical social condition rather than a responsive engagement with a situation. Another way of expressing this point is to suggest that prior judgment discounts the potentiality of a situation. For example, to have decided that a situation is unworkable prior to entering it forecloses the possibility of success. To believe that a person is incompetent denies them the chance to act freely, or without oppressive pressure, and to be productive. In contrast to beliefs that abstract opinion from lived events, ethics is an engagement with practicalities.
More than this, ethics is an engagement with practicalities that performs an awareness of context. It is this awareness of context and acting in response to such awareness that makes an act ethical. No act can abstractly be considered ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’. Rather, ‘ethics’ is a way of thinking that constitutes paying attention to practical details in relation to their political, historical and social context. There are possibilities for agency generated through the celebration of difference held within such an approach. These sentiments are echoed in Simon Steven’s celebration of ‘freak’ identity. Our transcript from an interview with Simon via Skype illustrates this point:
Denise: And what do you mean when you use the term ‘freak’?
Simon: Someone deemed by their appearance as socially 'other’. -- eg speech impairment, drooling, helmets, spasms etc.
Denise: Ok, so you don't see the term as offensive? I mean when I hear that term it conjures up those old freak shows - you know where people who were different were put on display as if they were a spectacle rather than just different.
Simon: Yes, freakism is a power dimension.
Denise: Power can be both ways, you mean?
Simon: Yes the freak can stare people into a position.
Denise: Some have said the medical profession treats people who are different as freaks by putting them on display like in medical rounds etc.
Simon: Yes
Denise: Are you saying that (like Foucault) where there is power there is resistance and resistance can be power?
Simon: Yes
This brief interview transcript suggests that the difference embodied in the subject position of the ‘freak’ can hold as much power than the medical gazes which initially generated the discourses that categorized/imagined the ‘freak’. Some brief examples of such a respect for difference, ethics, or practice of good conduct, in Deleuze’s writings follow.
Deleuze imagines ‘matter’, or the material world, as one substance. Everything is a different articulation of the same essential substance; a unique expression of the one material. Deleuze develops this idea from the writing of Spinoza. Taking up Spinoza’s philosophy, he argues:
The great theories of the Ethics . . . cannot be treated apart from the three practical theses concerning consciousness, values and the sad passions (Deleuze, 1988, p. 28).
These ‘three practical theses concerning consciousness, values and the sad passions’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 28) constitute building blocks for Spinoza’s philosophy.
His first thesis, concerning consciousness, is that our consciousness is an illusion. Spinoza argues that, rather than being the origin of our thoughts and actions, we are the affects that our thoughts and actions have on us. We act, and through acting, produce ourselves. For Spinoza, the idea that consciousness creates thoughts and actions leads to philosophies that are based in dualisms of substance. A popular example of such a dualism of substance can be found in Descartes' mind/body split.
Deleuze takes up this Spinozan belief that we are the affects that our thoughts and actions have upon us. He employs this idea to replace the thought that our consciousness is the location from which our thoughts and actions arise. For Deleuze, subjectivity is produced, not given (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007). His major critique of theories of identity (Deleuze, 1991; Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, 1987) is that they can be based on the notion that we are causes and not effects. The second aspect of Deleuze’s thought that in which he draws significantly on Spinoza, as well as Nietzsche (1973, 1979), is in his critique of morality. We outlined the basic premise or logic of this critique above. Deleuze explains the difference he perceives between morals ethics, and morals as follows:
There’s a fundamental difference between Ethics and Morality. Spinoza doesn’t make up a morality, for a very simple reason: he never asks what we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what’s in our power, ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. In this sense Spinoza is profoundly immoral. Regarding the moral problem, good and evil, he has a happy nature because he doesn’t even comprehend what this means. What he comprehends are good encounters, bad encounters, increases and diminutions of power. Thus he makes an ethics and not at all a morality (Deleuze, 1978, p. 7).
Finally, Deleuze takes up Spinoza’s call to reject the ‘sad passions’. For Spinoza, ‘sad passions’ are forces which erode life. Deleuze explains this idea through saying:
“Sadness will be any passion whatsoever which involves a diminution of my power of acting, and joy will be any passion involving an increase in my power of acting. This conception will allow Spinoza to become aware, for example, of a quite fundamental moral and political problem which will be his way of posing the political problem to himself: how does it happen that people who have power [pouvoir], in whatever domain, need to affect us in a sad way? The sad passions as necessary. Inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power. And Spinoza says, in the Theological-Political Treatise, that this is a profound point of connection between the despot and the priest—they both need the sadness of their subjects. Here you understand well that he does not take sadness in a vague sense, he takes sadness in the rigorous sense he knew to give it: sadness is the affect insofar as it involves the diminution of my power of acting” (Deleuze, 1978, p. 4).
We now examine exactly how Deleuze takes up Spinoza's Ethics in terms of this critique of morality. For Spinoza (2001) and Nietzsche (1973, 1979), good and evil are illusions-or fictions- created by a world-view grounded in transcendent religious beliefs, rather than in a belief in the practical world. Deleuze later argues that ‘transcendent’ thought is re-expressed with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Deleuze, 1983b). Such transcendent moralism reduces people’s power to act and it also encourages the experience of the ‘sad passions’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 25; 1990a, pp. 242-44, 260, 282). Indeed, for Deleuze, Spinoza’s Ethics is an invitation to consider encounters between bodies on the basis of their productivity for those involved. As beings are expressions of ‘modes’ (Spinoza, 2001) and all ‘modes’ of being are expressions of the same ‘substance’, a critical aspect of ‘joyful’, or positive, encounters is that they fold back into the broader context in which they occur in ways that enrich this context. An example of this principal can be found in some users experiences of virtual worlds. Many people who spend time in Second Life acquire new knowledges and extend their social networks, both increasing their own power to act and that of the people they associate with in Second Life. Such productive assemblages are made up of ‘joyful’ encounters; meetings between two parties that increase both parties capacity to act.
Taking cues from Spinoza, in Expressionism in Philosophy, Deleuze conceives bodies as ‘finite modes’. These are individual articulations of modes that are expressions of an ‘infinite substance’. Working with this conception of bodies, Ansell Pearson argues that, for Deleuze:
“The ‘great ethical question’ concerns whether it is possible for these bodies to attain ‘active affections’, and, if so, how.” (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 13)
As these examples suggest, ethics, and the use of the word ethical to name practices that are a performance of ethics, differ from morality. Although ethics has preference for certain affects/outcome (specifically, for the enhancing of potentiality) ethical practice does not require the evaluation of an assemblage or body in terms of what is internal to it (inherently good or evil) or what it ‘is’, but rather, what it can do, or what it produces.
Deleuze draws on Bergson and Spinoza in developing his conception of ethics. Explaining the conceptual material that Deleuze takes up in drawing on these philosophers, Ansell Pearson (1999, pp. 11-12) states:
“This is not to say that Spinoza and Bergson’s thinking on duration are one and the same since clearly they are not. Duration (duratio not tempus) belongs for Spinoza to quite a specific realm of existence, namely, the domain of finite modes where it refers to the individuality of distinct things (Deleuze takes the line that there is no ‘instantaneity of essence’ in Spinoza and that the ‘continual variations of existence’ that characterise a mode’s power of acting and its constant passages to greater and lesser perfections are only comprehensible in terms of duration …). Duratio is to be understood modally rather than temporally; unlike infinite substance, a thing’s essence does not follow from its essence but is dependent on external causalities for its endurance …. Bergson’s conception of duration is radically different in that it refers not to the realm of distinct entities and things but rather to the virtual realm of creative processes and becomings” (Ansell Pearson, 1999, pp. 11-12).
So, for Bergson, his process of creative evolution, the relationship between organic and non-organic life, takes place through flows of time. The ethical question the Bergson asks of bodies pertains to their capacities to gain knowledges of themselves, that is, knowledges of how they evolve over time and how they are able to produce joyful passions in themselves and also in others. Ansell Pearson explains:
“Bergson separates his thinking from Spinoza’s conception of substance … arguing that Spinoza’s causalism and determinism are unable to allow a genuinely inventive character to be given to duration” (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 12).
Another ethical question with which Deleuze, after Spinoza, is concerned, is that of how a maximum of joyful passions might be achieved by a body. The ethical nature of Spinoza’s work is derived from his belief that “we do not know what a body is capable of and what affections it can attain (what bodies can do always necessarily exceeds our knowledge at any given time, just as the capacities of thought always exceed the nature of consciousness” (Ansell Pearson, 1999, p. 13).
‘Ethics’, therefore, is an intrinsic part of Deleuze’s philosophical project and it plays a role in each one of his attempts to articulate a philosophy … and to think ‘beyond’ the human condition. Ethical life arises for Deleuze out of the context of naturalism, a particular philosophical conception of the world … The difficult challenge that ethics provides … is to think ‘ethics’ both transhumanly and germinally, that is, in terms of the ‘living beyond’ and the ‘living on’ (Ansell Pearson, 1999, pp. 14-15).
Moving on from this understanding of ethics, we take the idea of being ‘ethical’ as giving a performance of ethics; as offering an application of the principle of creating different ways of operating or acting that are specific to a given situation. This performative aspect (the doing) and the broader contextual change that is effected by this performance, is the ‘activation’ of ethics. Ways of acting can thus, to a certain extent, be seen as ethical or unethical in the respect that they do or do not extend the capacities of those involved both ‘in terms of the ‘living beyond’ and the ‘living on’’ (Ansell Pearson, 1999, p. 15). Deleuze maintains a strident focus on context; performing an ‘ethical’ action is not about making your self feel good, effecting immediate gratification. It’s about acting in a way that both allows one’s self and those in one’s surroundings–other people, animals, environment, ecology, to flourish. Here, Deleuze’s thinking becomes ethological.
Ethology, agency and context
“I just bought … a t-shirt with crotch strap, custom made, which reads 'as a drooling spastic, i am wearing my nappy with pride.” (Simon Stevens, Interview). This quote from Simon Stevens offers a humorous example of the relationship between agency and context. The ‘crip’ movement and the collective politic behind reclaiming signifiers of disabled embodiment could be argued to be the ground upon (or from) which Simon claims the agency to joke about wearing a crotch strap and a nappy. Such a statement would have been nearly impossible 50 years ago. We use this quote here to highlight the importance of context when considering the grounds for possibility and acting ethically. Ethology is grounded in exactly such an awareness of the politics of context.
Ethology has been thought about as the study of the formation of human customs or beliefs, or as the study of human behaviour. The term ‘ethological’ is derived from the Latin ‘ethologia’; the art of depicting character, and the Greek noun ‘ethos’ (custom or character) with the pluralizing suffix ‘logia’ (Logy in English). The logic of custom and art of character. Deleuze’s version of ‘ethology’ is fairly specific: he is concerned with understanding the nature or character of all organic life; “Deleuze’s conception of biophilosophy is, ultimately, and first and foremost, ethical” (Ansell Pearson, 1999 p. 9). So, Deleuze’s focus extends beyond understanding how people or animals or both operate, to examine how both operate in relation to broader ecosystems, how these complex systems are impacted upon by human, animal and non-organic life. Human relationships with waste, non-organic form and organic matter all constitute aspects of ethology.
“This ethological dimension of ethics, which concerns relations between affective bodies, operates both within the order of nature and also informs the ethical becoming of human bodies, to the extent that … Deleuze explores the possibility of a becoming-animal and a becoming-molecular of the human” (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 12).
Deleuze advances this very idea of ‘ethology’ as an ethics that extends beyond the human. If ethics is related to ways in which the self acts upon the self and upon others, ethology is an ethics of existence. Not human existence but all existence.
Deleuze’s notion of ethology is grounded in the concept of ‘creative evolution’, which he takes from Bergson (1998b) and Spinoza (1998a, 1990a). For Bergson, ‘creative evolution’ is the relationship between organic and non-organic life forms across the flow of time. Deleuze’s notion of creative evolution is grounded in a synthesis of Bergson’s conception of duration or Bergson and Spinoza’s conception of duration[2].
Actions have no transcendental scale to be measured upon (the religious or theological illusion), but only relative and perspectival good and bad assessments, based on specific bodies. Thus the Ethics is, for Deleuze, an 'ethology', that is, a guide to obtaining the best relations possible for bodies, bodies being considered in a universal sense that extends beyond the human form, to relationship between bodies and their environment (for example, the crip movement) the ways in which they manage waste (for example, nappies) and their impact on the world around them.
Difference and desire through an ethical lens
Disability can be seen as a transcendent notion in the respect that the idea of a dis-abled body automatically invokes the notion of an ‘able’, or normal body. Diprose (1991, p. 71) offers critical comment on this point:
To label something or someone defective or inferior relies on the assumption that the ‘proper’ stands alone. Yet, some notion of the proper as sameness does silently underscore the evaluation of differences with real effects (Diprose, 1991, p. 71).
As Diprose (1991) suggests, the ‘whole’ or the ‘proper’ can never actually stand alone. Indeed, nothing can be perceived as standing ‘alone’ per se. ‘One’ can only be known in relation to another (Hickey-Moody, 2006 p. 192).
Understanding the idea of the normal body and its binary opposite, the abnormal body, as transcendental constructs of medical discourses, allows for their contextualisation and their deconstruction. The medical construction of intellectual disability and abnormality is contingent upon a prior construction of normality and such medical constructions of normality are literally powerful abstractions (Hickey-Moody, 2008). The processes of classifying a body as disabled can be seen as acts of ‘territorialisation’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 332-4, 317-323), in which bodies are mapped in terms of dominant medical norms. We now turn to examine transcript excerpts from our interviews with prominent identities in Second Life who identify as having a disability and who have a social profile as activists in the disability rights community in Second Life. We consider our interview data in relation to Deleuze’s Spinozist articulation of ethics, positing ethical assemblages in Second Life as opportunities for increasing or reducing a body’s capacity to act.
In the first of our interviews, Simon Stevens (AKA Simon Walsh in ‘actual life’) describes Wheelies, the club he founded in Second Life, as a community for ‘everyone’. When asked if many of the members of Wheelies are mobility impaired, Simon asserts ‘again, this is a myth, we all have impairments’. The attraction to Wheelies explains Simon, is the music, live artists, dance and contests. Simon goes on to explain that part of the attraction is also because Wheelies is a safe place to have fun with no pressure to disclose anything about one’s abilities or disabilities in actual life.
Polgara Paine, who has taken over the responsibility as Manager of Wheelies and relocated the club to a new ‘virtual island’ owned by Polgara and her partner Chade, shares Simon’s philosophy, emphasising that they don’t want a ‘disabled community’ but rather, an inclusive community that celebrates difference. Polgara explains ‘We want a community where everyone is welcome’, though she acknowledges the philosophy has caused some ‘interesting discussions’. Understandings of welcoming behaviour are indeed relative. The new virtual island that is home to Wheelies is called Taupo, and it provides a community for people associated with Wheelies with houses, apartments, shops, a hot tub, pool house/art gallery, workshop, garden, visitor's centre and planned facilities including an educational centre, plaza with games, beach area for swimming and floating. Wheelies also employs people who identify as disabled to run the club – positions include a Manager, DJs and a landscape gardener. Employees at Wheelies are guaranteed a minimum income and some choose to live ‘rent free’ in the Taupo community in exchange for their services to Wheelies. To our minds, Wheelies is a community that is not exclusive, yet performs a preference for supporting the work of members who live with specific kinds of embodied differences and identify as being ‘disabled’ in actual life. By bringing together people who do and do not identify as having a disability in actual life, Wheelies offers a space in which cultures of relation are not formed around disability identity or politics but, rather, around shared pleasures. People who do not have an actual disability might share experiences of being led by a guide dog, or dancing in a wheelchair, with the avatars of users who configure their virtual identity to reflect an actual impairment or disability. Alternatively, other users with actual disabilities can choose to leave visual signifiers of these embodied states behind in Second Life. Both demographics become different from their actual selves through their virtual involvement in Wheelies.
Simon explains the creation of Wheelies as an attempt to construct a disability friendly and supportive environment, through stating:
Simon… this is why wheelies is different
Denise: Why is wheelies different in that regard?
Simon: Wheelies, everyone gets on (SKYPE interview with Simon Stevens 2/08/08)
3D virtual worlds such as Second Life are clearly technological developments that are exciting and pleasurable for some users. On the other hand, in a repetition of enduring exclusions experienced in ’actual life‘, some people with certain forms of sensory and cognitive impairments can still denied opportunities for such participation. Arguably, the most significant barrier to accessibility in an environment that is primarily user-generated is not technological, but is rather, the attitudes of the community (Hickey-Moody and Wood, 2008b).
Virtual worlds such as Second Life can and should be made more accessible to those with cognitive and sensory disabilities. There are already some exemplary initiatives in place, many of which have been developed by the residents of the communities themselves. These include:
· The development of browser based alternatives that enable users to access these worlds via the Web rather than a special client application (for example Ajax Life and MovableLife).
· The use of Internet Relay Channel technologies (IRC) enabling those who cannot access the virtual world to still participate in meetings using IRC via a Website such as the system used by the GimpGirl community in Second Life.
Development of alternative accessing devices using technologies such as the Brain Computer Interface, Eye Gaze controllers, head tracking devices and a hands free movement controller to improve the immersive experience for all users.
· ‘In-world‘ accessibility solutions such as a virtual guide dog and virtual cane developed by resident members of the Wheelies and Virtual Ability island communities enabling visually impaired users to navigate the virtual world by issuing commands through the chat channel to the virtual dog or cane (for example to find an object or follow an avatar).
· E.V.A. voice chat which is an ‘in-world’ voice based system that narrates text displayed in the chat channel.
So on one hand, 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life are clearly technological developments that are exciting and pleasurable for some users. On the other hand, in a repetition of enduring exclusions, some people with certain forms of sensory and cognitive impairments are still denied opportunities for such participation. Arguably, the most significant barrier to accessibility in an environment that is primarily user-generated is not technological, but is rather, the attitudes of the community. Web content accessibility guidelines have been in existence for almost a decade (World Wide Web Consortium: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 1999), yet studies undertaken by the UK Disability Rights Commission (2005), Red Cardinal (2006) and the United Nations Department (2006) have shown that ‘there is a global failure to provide the most basic level of web accessibility for people with disabilities’ (United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility 2006).
Annable, Goggin and Stienstra (2007, p. 145) ponder the challenge posed by the fact that technologies that can be so productive for people with disabilities are often still disabling. Goggin and Newell (2007) extend this discussion further in considering the power relations of disability within the broader cultural and social context. They argue that, ‘people with disabilities still face a long struggle to be accepted in society, as equal members of their national communities and cultures’ (Goggin & Newell, 2007, p. 166). It is not surprising, in the wake of landmark court cases such as the Bruce Lindsay Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (2000), the National Federation of the Blind of California on behalf of their members, and Bruce Sexton v Target Corporation (2007) certifying a class action on behalf of users with visual impairments, that advocates for accessibility resort to political and legal activism to raise community awareness of the rights of people with disabilities. As Tremain (2006) points out, ‘a political movement whose organizing tools are identity-based shall inevitably be contested as exclusionary and internally hierarchical’ and it will also effectively extend the very power relations it seeks to contest (p. 194).
Above, we introduced Deleuze’s critique of morality as opposed to ethics; his assessment of the cultural production of values. For Spinoza (2001) and Nietzsche (1978, 1973), Good and Evil are fictions created by a world-view grounded in transcendent beliefs, rather than in the practical world. Deleuze argues that ‘transcendent’ thought is expressed via Kant’s philosophy[3], orthodox religion, and psychoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 1987, 1996). These three forums respectively create a ‘transcendent moralism’ that reduces people’s power to act - or engage with practical specificities as cause for action. We would like to contend that negative representations of people with disabilities as unworthy of ‘inclusion’, or as ‘holding back’ the mainstream, can act as transcendent knowledges of disability, in which disability is produced as ‘other’, as ‘special’, ‘scary’, extraordinary and in need of control or repair. Namav Abramovic, a disability-rights activist in Second Life, and Aleja Asturias, who runs Gimp Girl in Second Life both agree that online culture can be exclusionary. They devote considerable time and energy to making Second Life disability friendly and accessible:
Namav Abramovic: My first thoughts about accessibility ... perhaps text-only SL could be designed, or have you seen the IRC->SL relay that gimpgirl uses to include blind members in meetings? May I teleport you and show you the IRC->SL relay?
Namav Abramovic: we're here now.
Denise: Hi Aleja. Nice to meet you.
Namav Abramovic: this relay allows blind people to talk to those in SL, or, those who don’t have the CPU power to handle SL
Aleja Asturias nods. This is what an IRC user will look like in SL.
Denise: OK so do they login to the website somehow and then their chat is relayed here via Instant Messaging?
Aleja Asturias: If you go to our website (http://www.gimpgirl.com), you'll see a link to access the IRC channel right on the web. - We didn't create the relay service. For more information on how to get a relay visit: http://www.quickfox.net/services/slgateway] You buy a relay box here in SL and set up the channel.
Denise: Thank You :-). Here on your sim or somewhere else to purchase?
Aleja Asturias: It's made and purchased elsewhere.
Aleja Asturias: We found out about it through a community for people with autism and yes, the details should be there. You don't see that many groups using the relays specifically for accessibility purposes but it seems like a natural accommodation.
Denise: it is a great idea - do many people who visit GimpGirl use
it?
Aleja Asturias: It would be great to see all disability related groups have relay as an option. The number varies but someone is always on during a meeting or event.
(Interview with Aleja Asturias and Namav Abramovic in Second Life 2/08/08)
Aleja has ensured that GimpGirl is accessible to users who identify as having significant visual impairments and to those who do not have access to a computer with enough power to run Second Life. Clearly, as the interview transcript included above suggests, there are communities of users who identify as disabled working with new technologies in Second Life to further enrich the experiences of a wide range of people with disabilities.
Ethical assemblages in Second Life
The term Deleuze gives to connected bodies is assemblage. This is a term that enables social relations to be conceptualised as dialogic or interactive without prioritising some bodies (human) while ignoring others (for example, computers). It is also a term which emphasises the multiple nature of any encounter (which never simply involves two bodies interacting, but rather involves several/many) and which problematises any notion of sovereign agency (for each body in the assemblage affects the others, and none acts alone). Thinking social relationships as assemblages means moving away from the notion of the social being as individual to understanding social beings as always already connected to other bodies. It means thinking about all of the different forces from which bodies are composed, and those that they help to produce. It means conceptualising the social body through its material and sensory engagement with the world, rather than through its ‘rational’, or transcendent thinking or processing of the world. It means focusing on surface affects and connections more than interiorities, identities or psychological selves.
Subjectivity, for Deleuze, is therefore not an a priori feature of social relations. It is instead something that the body develops or produces in order to interact and communicate with other social bodies. It is through the process of becoming a subject, which Deleuze calls subjectivation, that a body develops an identity, a sense of self, and a position from which to speak. Subjectivation is necessary for social interaction to take place, yet it is also limiting for it reduces a body’s range of potential (its internal differenciation; its potential to become-other Deleuze 1994, p. 207). Understanding the socio-political affects that different modes of subjectivity produce is a central component of a Deleuzian ethics. The problem facing the ethicist is one of definition of the scope of evaluation, or of the assemblage. No assemblage is autonomous (as rhizomatic connections have shown (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 3-25). Any evaluation needs to take into consideration not only the impact of the assemblage on the bodies within that assemblage–but also on bodies which surround it. There is a continual process of folding, which is not always considered, but needs to be. Second Life constructs ethical assemblages which extend the capacities of the bodies that constitute the assemblages. This extension of capacity is then folded into the subjectivities of those involved, they are part of a continual process of becoming through which positive possibilities for both Second Life, and what it can be, and the development of those who spend time in Second Life, are actualised. Deleuze and Guattari are adamant:
Very specific assemblages of power impose significance and subjectification as their determinate forms of expression … there is no significance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 180).
Social codings of people are products of despotic and authoritarian assemblages of power (Hickey-Moody, 2008). Social discourses construct social faces of people and bodies through attributing particular significances to the physical features and capitalist market value and arguing that these are signs of a specific kind of subjectivity or cultural value. No space is provided for the proliferation of alternative, relational and sense based knowledges of people which would be ‘ethical’ or a performance of ethics. (Hickey-Moody, 2006, 2008)
Corporeal imaginings of bodies are described by Spinoza as bodily affect. Affects are a product of the contextualized, embodied nature of the imagination. Bodily affects are brought about through corporeal relations and the material residues of experiences that live on in the human imagination. These material residues are traces of experiences past that provide points of departure, and points of reference, for future experiences. These traces inform the construction of human passions. Passions either add to, or detract from, a body’s capacity. Joy, sadness and desire, the products of embodied relations, orientate a body’s thoughts and actions. Theorizing the embodied relations between individuals and wider collectives requires conceptions of affects, passion and emotion as physical events. Within such a framework, participants in virtual communities that include people with disabilities are part of a shared community by virtue of physical proximity. They share sensory tropes developed within Second Life.
Conclusion
Denise: You have chosen to project yourself as someone in a wheelchair? Why is that?
Simon: Self identity
Denise: So it is important to you to look authentic to your RL [real life]?
Simon: I haven’t got time to be someone else” (Interview with Simon Stevens via Skype)
As this quotation shows, Simon’s self-identity, in all of its embodied specificity, is inseparable from his sense of self and self worth. He is a unique articulation of difference. For Deleuze and Guattari, each body’s embodied mind is a performance of difference, the mind is the ‘idea’ of the body; human consciousness is a product of corporeality. So, just as every human body is diverse, every human mind is different. It is thus impossible to compare the individuality of each body; every person has ‘the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262). The fundamental relationship between Spinoza’s philosophy and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the body is evident in Deleuze and Guattari's (1987, p. 262) contention that every body is ‘…a longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between formed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects’. Here, the body is an extension of substance, a variation of the two universal attributes of substance: thought and extension. Deleuze and Guattari mobilize Spinoza’s ideas in order to think every body as unique and the mind as an extension of individual form. Human bodies are consistently re-making themselves through processes of becoming. Re-conceptualizing disability as a play of desire and difference opens up possibilities for new assemblages of subjectivity and ethical community in Second Life.
References
Annable, G., Goggin, G. & Stienstra, D. (2007). Accessibility, disability, and inclusion in information Technologies: Introduction. The Information Society: an International Journal, 23(3), 145-147.
Ansell-Pearson, K. (1999). Germinal life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze. London; New York: Routledge.
Bruce Lindsay Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (2000). No. H 99/115, in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Disability Discrimination Act 1992, 24 August 2000 1-25.
Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: from production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
Burnett, R. (2007). Critical Approaches to Culture + Communications + Hypermedia. Retrieved September 28, 2007, from http://www.eciad.ca/~rburnett/Weblog/archives/2007/02/second_life_2.html
Cassidy, M. (2007). Flying with disability in Second Life. Eureka Street 17(8). Retrieved 19 April 2009, from http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=2787
Coates, T. (2003). My working definition of social software... Retrieved 19 April 2009, from http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/05/my_working_definition_of_social_software/
Deeley, L. (2008). Is this a real life, is this just fantasy? Retrieved 19 April 2009, from http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/body_and_soul/article1557980.ece
Deleuze, G. (1991). Empiricism and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1983a). Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Althone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1983b) Kant's Critical Philosophy Althone Press, London.
Deleuze, Gilles (1998a) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy City Light Books, San Fransico.
Deleuze, Gilles (1998b) Bergsonism Zone Books, New York.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition Colombia University Press, New York.
Deleuze, Gilles Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990a) Zone Books, New York.
Deleuze, Gilles The Logic of Sense (1990b) Columbia University Press, New York
Deleuze, Gilles (1978) DELEUZE / SPINOZA Lecture given at the Vincennes - 24/01/1978. Online URL http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2
Accessed 12/05/05
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984) Anti-Oedipus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1996). What is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, New York.
Diprose, R. (1991) ‘‘A ‘Genethics’ that Makes Sense.’’ Cartographies: Poststructuralism & the Mapping of Bodies & Spaces. Ed. R. Diprose and R. Ferrell. North Sydney: Allen, pp. 65 -76.
Fruchterman, J. (2007). Beneblog: technology meets society: Brighton Beach brainstorm. Retrieved February 15, 2008, from http://benetech.blogspot.com/2007/11/brighton-beach-brainstorm.html
Goggin, G. and Newell, C. (2007). The business of digital disability. The Information Society: an International Journal, 23(3), 159-168.
Hickey-Moody, A.C (2006) ‘Folding the Flesh into Thought’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11(1), pp. 189-197.
Hickey-Moody, A.C. (2008). ‘Deleuze, Guattari & the Boundaries of Intellectual Disability.’ International Reader for Disability Studies in Education (Eds) Gabel and Danforth. Peter Lang Publishers, USA. pp. 353-370
Hickey-Moody, A.C and Malins, P. (2007) Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, London.
Hickey-Moody, A.C & Wood, D. (2008a) ‘Imagining Otherwise: Deleuze & desiring differenciation in Second Life’, In proceedings of ANZCA 2008 conference.
Hickey-Moody, A. and Wood, D. (2008b). ‘Virtually sustainable: Deleuze & desiring differenciation in Second Life’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22(6), pp. 805-816. Routledge, London.
Letourneau, C. (1998). Accessible web design –a definition. Retrieved 26 April 2005 from
http://www.starlingweb.com/webac.htm
Molesworth, M., & Denegri-Knott, J. (2007). Digital Play and the Actualization of the Consumer Imagination. Games and Culture, 2(2), 114-133.
Mitcham, C. (1995). Ethics into Design. In R. and. V. Margolin (Eds.), Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies (pp. 173-189). Chicago US: The University of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power, Trans. W. Kaufman and R. Hollingdale (New York:
Vintage, 1968).
Nietzsche, F. (1973) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. London: Penguin Classics.
Nietzsche, F. (1978) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, New York: Penguin
Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1979) Ecce Homo: How one Becomes What One Is, London: Penguin Classics.
Ondrejka, C. (2007). Collapsing Geography Second Life, Innovation, and the Future of National Power. Innovations, Summer, 27-54.
Peters, T. and Bell, L. (2007). Otherworldly accessibility: each physical or virtual space has characteristics that make it accessible or inaccessible to people depending on their physical abilities. Computers in Libraries, 27(9), 38.
Qi, S. (2007, June 17, 2007). Experts debate how accessible virtual worlds are to the disabled. Retrieved 15 December 2008 from http://www.slnn.com/index.php?SCREEN=article&about=accessibility-in-a-3d-world
Red Cardinal (2006). eGovernment accessibility report: A study into the accessibility and coding standards of key Irish Government & Political websites, December 5, 2006.
Spinoza, B 2001 Ethics England, Wadsworth.
Tremain, S. (2006). On the Government of disability: Foucault, power, and the subject of impairment. In L.J. Davis, (Ed.), The disability studies reader (pp. 185-196). New York, London: Routledge.
United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility. (2006). Retrieved 12 December 2008 from http://www.nomensa.com/resources/research/united-nations-global-audit-of-accessibility.html
US Government (2006). Section 508 Standard. Retrieved 22 June 2007 from
http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12
World Wide Web Consortium (1999). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0). Retrieved 22 June 2007 from http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
World Wide Web Consortium (2006). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). Retrieved 12 December 2008 from http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
[1] The GimpGirl community was established outside Second Life in 1998 by Jen Cole (AKA JennyLin Arashi) and a group of young women with disabilities who were seeking a community that understood their needs and provided a safe place for women and girls with disabilities to talk about their experiences. The community was initially established via a Website that provides a range of services including email lists dedicated to particular areas of interest, a printed newsletter and an IRC chat room. The virtual community was established in Second Life in February 2008 and provides regular meetings and seminars for members.
[2] Ansell Pearson (1999, p. 13) argues that Spinozan ‘duration’ operates modally rather than temporally (unlike Spinoza’s ‘infinite substance’ which operates temporally). An object or being’s existence does not follow from its essence. Rather, a thing’s existence is dependent on external causalities for its endurance. Bergsonian ‘duration’ refers to the virtual realm of creative processes and becomings (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 13).
[3] See Deleuze (1984) on Kant’s philosophy.
posted by anna hickey-moody at 4:33 AM
0 comments
