10. The Self (?)

"Identities seem contradictory, partial and strategic(61)"

–Donna Haraway, "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the reinvention of nature"

 

 

"Because enjoyable activities have clear goals, stable rules, and challenges well matched to skills, there is little opportunity for the self to be threatened(62)."

–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Flow: the psychology of optimal experience"

 

 

"Where does the captain of the ship, the master of the soul, reside? As soon as we consider these questions for even a short while, we realize that the I, or the self as we shall refer to it from now on, is also one of the contents of consciousness. …[T]he self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years. …[T]he self is in many ways the most important element of consciousness, for it represents symbolically all of consciousness’s other contents, as well as the pattern of their interrelations. …At one point we are saying that the self directs attention, at another, that attention detirmines the self. In fact, both these statements are true: consciousness is not a strictly linear system, but one in which circular causality obtains(63)."

–ibid

 

 

"[T]he social mode of the computer nets, evokes unruly multiplicity as an integral part of social identity(64)."

–Allucquere Rosanne Stone, "The war of desire and

technology at the close of the mechanical age"

 

 

"In the postmodern world there is no individual essence to which on e remain true or committed. One’s identity is continuously emergent, re-formed, and redirected, as one moves throught the sea of ever-changing relationships. In the case of "Who am I?" it is a teeming world of provisional possibilities(67)."

–Kenneth Gergen, "The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life"

 

 

"Young enough in the first days of the net to react and adjust quickly, [hackers] had long ago taken for granted that many of the pre-net assumptions about the nature of identity had quietly vanished. Even though they easily understood and assimilated conflictual situations such as virtual persona as mask for an underlying identity, few had yet thought very deeply about what underlay the understanding identity. There is an old joke about a woman at a lecture on cosmology who said that she understood quite clearly what kept the earth hanging in space; it actually rested on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what the turtle was standing on, she replied that the turtle was standing on the back of yet another turtle, and added tartly, ‘You can’t confuse me, young man; it’s turtles all the way down.’

"Is it persona all the way down?

"Say amen, somebody(65)."

–Allucquere Rosanne Stone

 

 

"We are rather like whirlpool in the river of life. …[F]or short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself. The stability of a whirlpool is only temporary. The energy of the river of life forms living things–a human being, a cat or dog, trees and plants–then what held the whirlpool in place is itself altered, and the whirlpool is swept away, entering the larger flow. …We want to see ourselves as permanent and stable. …To protect the [supposed] separateness, we set up artificial, fixed boundaries, stuff that slips into our whirlpool and can’t flow out again. So things clog up our whirlpool and things get messy(66)."

–Charlotte Joko Beck, "Nothing Special: living Zen"