The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. - Donna J. Haraway

I was this ensemble. . . . . . - Helene Cixous

Intracultural is a word I have used to indicate that every individual is the locus for her own personal culture. Since all individuals, groups, and the interactions among them are mixtures of various sorts, an individual, in her contradictory multiplicities and changefulness, can be said to have her own idiosyncratic culture which impinges on other individuals similarly to the way different communities do with each other. When we try to reduce something to an irreducible state, it immediately slips away and becomes its opposite. An individual is a community of selves. And, conversely, just as no utterly singular individual exists, so too, no homogeneous collective. There is always disjuncture, always the fluid boundary of the individual.

Elsewhere I have claimed that it can be useful to invent and name poles of duality which do not truly exist, in order to have a means of conceptualizing the constant transformations that are the way we create ourselves and the world. Deleuze and Guattari in their essay "The Smooth and The Striated," have called the process "complex difference." I have called it the buzz-daze, a more visceral description of how it can feel at times trying to understand something which is always slipping away. But if we think of intracultural difference as the relations and communications between individuals, each with his or her own private culture, perhaps we can begin on a more intimate, focused scale to find ways toward the intercultural in a larger, societal sense. Indeed, this is the only reason to rename by a single vowel something which is so similar. If intracultural and intercultural are basically the same process, the difference between them had better warrant the attention. I really believe it does. One of the fears people often express about electronic culture is that we will lose individual voice to the mash of communal activity, and that with too much open space, we won't know how to locate anything. I think the real, unspoken, and mostly unrecognized fear has to do with loss of hegemony. The individual is the constituent of any collective activity and so cannot be lost. Of course, I mean this in a general sense, and certainly not that specific individuals cannot be silenced. Our white patriarchal tradition has been crushingly successful at that, which in fact, is what impels me to make a case for intracultural difference. Our fear of loss of control, loss of power-over things, events, and people, this fear, not the control itself, limits the human capacity for dynamic reciprocal change and is, in its current pathological form, probably ultimately fatal to the human species. But culture and its assumptions tend to change by littles, and change where the boundaries are most permeable, that is, intraculturally. Paradoxically, when we try to enhance and extend communal strength, we end up having to focus on individuals. If our intracultural spaces are not chiasmically vital, intercultural spaces probably will not exist to any great extent.

These different versions cannot be folded up into some kind of unity, nor into property. The one does not replicate the other. - Luce Irigaray

The concept of mastery is what propels the criticism "not very good" which, as criticism, is always a comment about a difference in skill or knowledge. Yet even mastery is a relative thing to the extent that it is based on a chosen idea of what makes some work preferable to others. When we insist that experts should define the highest level of expertise, we mean only that experts are the ones most formed by an exclusive viewpoint, a constantly narrowing, reductive concentration on "what is good" within a given context. I do not mean to characterize the idea of expertise as mistaken, however, or to claim that everything is of equal value in all cases. Within any cultural context, some skills, some work, will be valued more than others. The thing we tend to forget is that any value is mutable even within its own setting, and not necessarily translatable intact across realms. In other words, value is always a contextual element. It is not that development of aptitude, or attainment of greater skill, is undesirable. Rather, it is the idea of mastery that offends. When we say Master we mean precisely a hierarchy of imposed value that claims domination and priority over not just another person's work, but the other person.

Either we are all artists and we need to perceive ourselves and encourage ourselves as such or else we are none of us artists and the ones that pose as such are simply those who say "I mean it" with a slight grin. - Edwin Schlossberg

Writing this essay, struggling with the apparently opposing concepts of Control and Acceptance, had me remembering an experience of a few years ago in a suburban hotel lounge in Kansas City. I recall sitting about halfway back in the dim room at a table with a friend listening to a lamentably mediocre jazz group when, after the second set, an old horn player in the audience was recognized and asked to sit in with them. He did, and for those few numbers, the otherwise tepid musicians expanded to the easy bravura of the old jazzman. They really came alive and played to their best capacity. It was a heartening, even exhilarating, thing to witness. But I still have a question that continues to rotate for me about this small event: Was the horn player's role a sharing of joie de vivre, energy, and experience, or was it a kind of guru mastery? Not being one of the musicians that night, but only an observer, I can't know for sure. But I suspect that he was doing both, and so, manifesting the paradoxical requirements of something like ecological stability. After all, stability isn't a vast stillness, but a process and constant movement. Human cultures are often thought to exhibit similar characteristics to ecological systems, which require species to have enough flexibility to adapt and change, but also enough specificity to withstand being eliminated by intrusion. If a plant, for instance, is too adaptable, it takes over surrounding environs, reducing complexity and inducing greater and greater simplicity and uselessness. Being too changeful, then, is a dead end, in the same way as is being too specific and unchanging. Or rather, if not a dead end, a cul-de-sac where an extreme turns and heads back toward its opposite. The jazzman and his instant band were playing in the richest and most creative human moment, where experience and knowledge inexplicably blend with the spontaneous urge to change.

All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability, but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view. . . . - Donna J. Haraway


There's been a history of seeing difference, in terms of culture . . . as problematic. For me, difference is celebratory. - Gurinder Chadha

We understand, or make meaning, largely by contrast and comparison, that is, what is different and what is like. Things that are alike seem to fall "naturally" into neighborhoods, classes, drawers, teams, and other categories. That seems easy enough. Or at least it is what we often do without thinking. In some ways, one might say this is a means of tending to history, or what is known. Contrasting what is different – or unknown – with what we already know catalyzes the process of making meaning. Known is the past, Unknown the future, memory and desire, these are always the components of the present. Without differences, therefore, we are not even alive, not even present.

I am not sure where I originally found the following passage on how to think about differences. I discovered it, serendipitously, while cleaning out the Scrapbook on my Macintosh. Obviously, I lifted it from somewhere, almost certainly from an electronic source, and irresponsibly, without also lifting the citation information. I think it not only speaks eloquently to the points I am trying to make about cultural differences, but in its living so anonymously in my electronic holding space of things to keep, also speaks somewhat to a consideration of what our electronic future might be – not a lack of individual voice and difference, but perhaps some model, or models, for speaking and working other than mastery and ownership. (Nevertheless, if someone knows who authored this statement, I would love to hear from you. I have tried to find out, but to no avail.)

A respect for differences means one does not wish to make multiplicity uniform, to control (persons, resources, nations) for the sake of some old tradition or some new efficiency. . . . A respect for differences approaches the universal through celebrating the specific, and a respect for the specific is an act of desire--as energy yearns toward matter, as the unspecifiable expresses itself through metaphor and the precision of form. A respect for the specific synthesizes differences into new wholes by recognizing and expressing their disparate longings. It implies a respect for the movement of life. It implies a totally different politics-- of celebration, of creative collaboration.

The perplexing issues of inter/intracultural differences with which our society is so pervasively engaged, are, as one might expect, also being played out on the morphing fields of electronic virtual space. There are some modulating aspects in this environment, however. Among them are: the famous anonymity factor; the supposed open access to the Internet; and the enhanced sense of community and connection. These elements are so intertwined that speaking of one of them is to speak of the others.

Anonymity is often one of the first things we either love or hate about the Net. This is the much-touted ability to speak in public without being subject to racial or gender bias or any of our other prejudices related to physical appearance. But the truth is, to remain anonymous and still work or play regularly on the Internet, a person has to consciously maintain invisibility. The Net's inherent structure of community and connection seeks the identities of individuals. Indeed, our impulse to identity seems to indicate that we do not really want to be anonymous at all, but rather only that we do not want to be strait-jacketed into rigid, pre-formed categories. On the Internet, many choose to reformulate identity in various ways, perhaps sometimes by simply not mentioning a disability. Some create multiple characters which they inhabit at different times. An interesting convention having to do with identity inside a MOO is that it is considered very bad form not to "describe yourself" in the function of MOO software that lets each character have a description available to all. A person can change her description whenever she wants, and it does not have to correspond to any real life incarnation, but all are expected to have something there for others to "see." In the intracultural region, individuals cannot be imagined generically. They must be specific.

As a society we hunger for a renewed vision of multiplicity to match a technology of possibilities. - Michael Joyce

The question of access to electronic technology, and specifically to the Internet, is as complex as the problem of maintaining good schools in our cities and the related dilemma of preventing white flight in the face of racial integration. In fact, it is one and the same problem. The vast majority of those who have access to the Internet, and to computers generally, are people with sufficient economic wherewithal, that is, white, educated, and predominantly male. How quickly this changes will almost certainly measure how quickly we will come to understand inter/intracultural dynamics.

This direct mapping of the worst problems of human culture onto electronic culture is to my mind the single most distressing perspective we must take in looking at what electronic technology holds for us. No matter how radically new a technology, no matter how much we change in order to use it, there is no fresh start. We bring what we are with us, hoping only to shed old parts for new. In this sense, anonymity also plays its part as villain, and is quite different from the unknown author of my Mac Scrapbook discovery. As the experience of most MOO sites can attest, when interaction among people is intense and multiple, and the possibility is in place of behaving without being accountable for one's actions, animosity and even downright malevolence sometimes rise like scalding steam as social constraints are lifted. We have what came to be known in at least one MOO as "sandbox sandinistas." In almost all of these public virtual spaces, a visitor can find, to varying degrees, instances of behavior that range from annoying insistence on game playing to actual organized terrorists who rationalize trying to damage the system and harrass the occupants. My own admittedly simplistic opinion of this phenomenon is that our society prefers the relatively easy fundament of inculcating accountability and fear of punishment to the complex dynamic of responsibility and caring. If social constraints exist only as some form of punishment for hurtful behavior, we will never stop punishing. Only people who care not to hurt are truly responsible. Getting to that point is vastly more difficult than enforcing rules, and requires we find an answer to Stephen Toulmin's tormented question in the PBS series A Glorious Accident, "Why are people so nasty to one another?" I predict that electronic space will continue to be afflicted with anonymous terrorists for some time to come.

The story never stops beginning or ending. It appears headless and bottomless for it is built on differences. . . . The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. - Trinh T. Minh-ha

But despite, or rather because of, my fears that electronic culture – which is truly our future – will mirror the maladies of our world the way it is now, I want to find a balance in knowing that we do always change; and in fact, certain possibilities for that may be opening before our screen-weary eyes.

If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, then it is not a broad enough coalition. - Bernice Johnson Reagon

When Florence Ormezzano erected the HiPitched Voices "roof" in Hypertext Hotel in 1993, it signaled the beginning of an unusual project. One which even now is not easily characterized. We had just attempted, only weeks before, the first virtual meeting of our far-flung group. It was a breathtaking scramble of intermittent talk among ourselves and an even larger number of MOO inhabitants and passersby. But now, with Florence's roof over the Voices wing of the Hotel, we began to explore what it might mean to write so publicly that the very act of writing is also the act of publishing. And further, what it is to write with others we had only met electronically through our email list. Since the Hotel was a public place, our partners could (and sometimes did) come from outside our own collective – we may never have met them at all. We were learning the effects of unexpected pastiche, of writing on the fly, of the cognitive and creative advantages made by densely multiple linking. It was not always a pretty sight. But it surely had its moments.

We began a little tentatively, some of us, while others ran ahead, pitched the roof, pasted in whole or parts of previous works, and began new ones, all the while shouting back directions to the rest of us on how to follow. Indeed, many women in the HiPitched Voices collective had no interest whatsoever in the MOO (or had no way to access it), others who had tried it remained skeptical, and some of us who were actually doing it felt some ambivalence. I was one of those. But my mixed feelings were made of a desire for the technology to facilitate us a little more, and frustration at some of the hurdles that must be clambered over or lived with, not any doubt that what we were attempting was anything less than a different sort of future. I suspect that many of the others in the group would quickly deny such a grand claim. A little less grandly then, what I mean to say is that the work we did in Voices had hopeful elements about it that I think are important to consider. Though many as they joined HiPitched Voices worried about not knowing enough, being too much a beginner, each was also ready at every turn to offer what she knew to anyone who needed it without stint and without the qualification of holding priority. We were not equal in our experience, but we shared. We brought together what we knew, and shared it.

Perhaps we all need to witness our own organizing patterns in comparison with others. The way to enhance this process is to bring [it] more clearly to the surface. - Edwin Schlossberg

Most of our own discussion of what we were doing took place on the Voices email list. Very often this is where the meta-story was told of making a leap across the intracultural border.

Anne: When I first read Kathryn's early writings I felt they were very personal. But when she linked the "There's no name for me" passage into Le Guin's "She Unnames Them" it completely changed how I saw both pieces. The short story was suddenly shot through with immediate present significance. The rather dry, humourous, historical tone of Le Guin's story connected with the anguish and frustration of a particular woman stuck in a nameless relationship in contemporary NY; and the brief exchange between the two women in Kathryn's story was linked to centuries of relationship control.

Other times, we grappled with ways of saying things that had to retain some ambiguity because of the haze of complexity which, after all, was the major challenge of the kinds of connections we were trying to make.

Priscilla: I've linked in some poems that are (roughly) about the [hypertextual] world of psychotherapy. . . . They're written in a very introspective, first-person voice -- but what I'm hoping is that the environment of the MOO will help them work much differently. I'm interested in how/whether biographical and autobiographical content (fiction and nonfiction) merge and interact differently in a collaborative hypertext than in traditional forms. . . . how the most personal thoughts and associations of one person's experience act on and produce associative "links" in other people without clear (understandable and name-able) connections (the very nature of hypertext).

Of course, there were some examples of dissonance within HiPitched Voices, what must come in worthy cooperative undertakings. This is the sound of untranslatable value finding the walls of its own context, disagreement not sweetly dissolved by warm persuasion, difference that requires the grace of acceptance. But in Voices that took the form of only small grumblings and pointed fingers. The loudest disagreement was actually silence, that of the ones in the group who were not interested in the MOO work. What never happened was a flamewar, that dramatic staking-of-territory encouraged by the frontier nature of virtual electronic media. I won't point too strenuously to the fact that the Voices group was a feminine endeavor, but nevertheless believe for myself it was a crucial factor. The Voices culture became by the very fact of gendered roles in the larger society. And indeed, the hypertext work on the MOO can be seen as a form with which women are already rather familiar. It is a rich field constituted of many differences and fluxing combinations of disjuncture, which to some extent describes the traditional feminine experience. Women, whose identities are so often other-oriented, learn to accommodate differences by respecting and accepting them. Moving among the rooms of stories, poems, confessions, and critiques in the Hotel, I began to accumulate a sense of this thing which is not one thing at all. It takes time, however, requires a kind of patience for longer rhythms to gather the episodic fits and starts, gaps and shards. But it does form somehow, much as a busy day becomes a contiguous whole.

Most of the work done in the Voices wing of Hypertext Hotel was apparently lost in moving the Hotel to the web. Some of the fragments that remain exist here in a brief linked excerpt. Consider it a small sample, something to open a door to a place where one must go . . . . to see how this begins.


Back to Part 1 of Fretwork