Though I am not a RHIZOME subscriber, people I admire and respect read
and have written for RHIZOME. RHIZOME is global, offering a take on
events for which only a few people have a reality check. That is why I
think it important to respond to <a href="/cgi/to.cgi?t=1110">a
review written by David Hunt</a> in RHIZOME (DIGEST, 4.28.98) that
misrepresents a talk I gave on "Virtualities: Body Fictions" in the
Arts, Technology and Culture Colloquium at the University of California
Berkeley on April 8th.

Being compared to a Pong expert at a SEGA convention and to DJ Shadow
with less flowing rhymes is amusing. It is less amusing to find almost
no reflection of the ideas I presented in the forum. Instead, the
reviewer attacks a talk I did not present and describes a presentation
that has been stripped of all argumention and content. While my talk was
generally warmly received and generated a lively discussion at the end
that continued for some time in the reception, the review notes only
"people were scratching their heads." The reviewer also questions my
adequacy as a participant in this series, as well as "the notion of my
expertise." Does this mosh pit or slug fest I have stumbled into by
chance represent the future of reviewing on the web or at least on
RHIZOME?

I want to look at the way the reviewer addressed my presentation
further, in order to raise questions about reviewing more generally on
the web. Does anything go? Or should there be sites where rules
established in print still prevail? These rules include the goal of
fairly presenting the ideas and performance in question and the practice
of avoiding ad hominum argument.

1. Misrepresentation by omission.

First, the reviewer sets up a straw man in the form of what he considers
a tired old subject, "the dematerialized body" (Pong?). While my subject
is embodiment, my major premise, explicitly expressed, was that far from
dematerializing the body, cyberculture exposes the multiplicity of
bodies that each of us possesses or enjoys. I do not employ the language
of authenticity or offer a simple opposition between the virtual and the
actual in relation to the body the reviewer claims to have heard in my
talk. I claim rather that the virtual and actual interpenetrate each
other inextricably.

I don't want to give my talk again here in this forum, but I will say
the "body fictions" in question explicitly included collective bodies
and the impoverished way they are imagined and represented in our
culture, the body image or "seen" body to which we have a technically
altered relation and the "felt" or prioriocentric body that serves as
the engine for many of the so-called experiences of "disembodiment" in
cyberspace. I also briefly mentioned the use of "second skins," that
hide the organic body from view that enable us to enter worlds from
which we would be otherwise excluded for reason of their scale,
imaginariness or hostility to life. I used extensive examples to
illustrate my main point, that bodies in cyberculture, be they
collective, seen, felt, or constructed by a second skin, are far from
singular or disembodied or lacking in agency or disconnected from a
symbolic field with which we are emotionally engaged. To the contrary,
these bodies interact with and are engaged and immersed to various
degrees in a symbolic realm that entails responsability.

[…]

2. Misrepresentation by displacement.

My examples were, in his view, incoherent, drawn from too great a field
of reference. Because he omitted my argument, point by point, he doesn't
link the examples with the sense I make of them, but rather jumbles them
together. The *Star Trek* examples with which I opened my talk are two
widely divergent ways of representing collective embodiment. These
examples also illustrate "induction" into the image world, or z-axis
(depth) moves, that are a prelude to immersion. The Bruce Nauman and
other examples drawn from closed-circuit video art of the 1970's
illustrate feedback and the displacement of a mirror-relation to the
body image or seen body. They also lead into the "artificial death"
sequence I mentioned above. I used my own research on aerobics to
discuss the suppression of the invisible felt or priopriocentric body
that is mapped quite differently than the seen body. I also like to draw
on image culture from the last two decades to make the point that many
of the features we associate with computer imagery evolved earlier. The
range and breadth of these examples is also intended to violate the
sacred notion that there is something completely different about the way
images function in cyberculture.

Failing to notice or listen to my argument also enables the reviewer to
accuse me of a lack of originality, of overreliance on the artists or
theorists in question, thus failing to "weave them into a cohesive
idea." The clips I use are far from devoid of my interpretation.
Sometimes I feel a bit queasy about using art pieces in this way,
truncating them and arranging them to make my own points. Perhaps that
is why I am so eager to write catalog essays for pieces of media art,
devoted to a single artist and usually to a single piece of art.

3. Ad hominem or rather ad feminam argument.

The reviewer is from several reports a beginner in this field of
reviewing new media art, with a few writing credits under his belt.
There is nothing at all wrong with that and neophytes should be
encouraged. However, I find it ludicrous for him to declare that I have
utterly unoriginal ideas that make me inadequate to the level of the
colloquium. He explicitly mentions Carlos Sequin and Julia Scher. Why
these two out of the list of speakers? I can only say that Julia Scher
and I have overlapping presentational styles and subject matter. The
colloquium does a good job of attempting to break out of what is
elsewhere a male domain by inviting speakers like us and, most of all,
in attracting a warmly receptive and apparently devoted mixed audience.
This opportunity was my first larger forum at the university from which
I got my doctorate twenty years ago. My experience as a student back
then was one of constant humiliation, since women in academia in that
pre- and nascent-feminist period were considered fair game to ignore and
put down. I brought some of this pain upon myself, not through lack of
originality, but by violating disciplinary boundaries and offering
alternatives to received ideas. How ironic to experience the
backwardness of the put down and the silencing again in this context.

People who read about my talk in rhizomatic cyberspace can't know what
was actually said on April 8th. However, were I an editor, the
reviewer's gratutious ridicule of the subject of the review would have
been a red flag.

[…]

While RHIZOME and David Hunt have burned their bridges with me, I hope
they find their way to more constructive approaches to criticism. When I
learn something from a critique I have a very light feeling of
liberation, of breaking out of my old shell. This experience was a
leaden one of being trashed, buried with dreck. This is the lowest form
of criticism. Sure it has a place in cyberspace, but you will have to
decide whether it has a place in RHIZOME.

[Margaret Morse is author of "Virtualities: Television, Media Art and
Cyberculture" (Indiana UP, 1998).]