Abstract
How do we conceptualize virtual materiality in terms of the avatars and weapons seen in computer games, for example, as well as virtual discourse and subjectivity as phenomena intra-acting with real-life materiality, discourse and subjectivity in children's everyday lives? How do we understand the intra-activity of such elements in children's night-time dreams? In this article, I discuss some of these issues, while bringing together Karen Barad's agential realism and Giorgio Agamben's concept of ‘potentiality’ to enhance and refine my analytical approach to real–virtual enactments. This theoretical framework allows me to question the potentialities of gaming, movies and dreams as they enter intra-activities with the comprehensive set of apparatuses that enact a child's agency, subjectivity and relational practices. The analyses and conceptual refinements that I present here are based on empirical data involving interviews with and observations of children between 8 and 14 years of age.
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Notes
In this article, I do not engage in substantial discussions about bullying or practices of inclusion/exclusion. My interest in the social interactions of children in real and virtual life merely feeds the experienced need for methodological sophistication that fosters my ambition here. For deeper analyses of bullying practices, see Søndergaard (2008, 2011, 2012) and Schott and Søndergaard (2013) (in press).
The study is part of the project ‘Exploring Bullying in Schools’ (eXbus), which is centred at the Department of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark: www.exbus.dk. The research was funded by the TrygFoundation and DPU/AU from 2007 to 2012.
Within the field of computer-gaming practices, it is often expected that the researcher must be a gamer him- or herself. Although anthropologists have long discussed the dangers of ‘going native’ when conducting fieldwork amidst cultures that are too similar or too close to their own, some specializations have established quite the opposite prerequisite: a researcher must be black to study black communities, a woman to study women's societal conditions, a gamer to study gaming practices. Hence, to clarify: I have played some of the games that the children in my study were engaged in, but I will never get anywhere close to their level of competence or be able to adopt any of their insider gamer identities.
‘Performativity’ is inspired by Judith Butler (1990, 1993), but in Barad's theory, the concept is taken to mean not only iterative citation, but iterative intra-activity (2007, p. 184).
Within a post-structuralist framework, the concept of subjectification inspired by Foucault and Butler would emphasize a simultaneous subjection to and coming to subjective existence and agency through discursive power (Davies, 2000; Søndergaard, 2002). A further development of the concept of subjectification within an agential-realist framework would emphasize the simultaneous subjection to and coming to subjective existence and agency through the intra-action among a wide variety of non-human and human forces, including discourse, matter, subjects, technology, space and time, and so on. With an agential-realist approach, these processes of enactment would be seen as intra-acting practices, and agential cuts would be analysed in their local enactments and iterative becomings (Højgaard and Søndergaard, 2011).
To get an idea of the scenarios found within these games, please visit: www.google.dk/images?sourceid=navclient&aq=0&oq=Total+War&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLRdaDK276DK283&q=total+war&oi=imageresultgroup&sa=X and www.twcenter.net/#.
Counter Strike: www.google.dk/images?sourceid=navclient&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLRdaDK276DK283&q=counter+strike&oi=imageresultgroup&sa=X and http://planethalflife.gamespy.com/cs/.Grand Theft Auto: www.google.dk/images?sourceid=navclient&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLRdaDK276DK283&q=Grand+Theft+Auto&oi=imageresultgroup&sa=X and www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftauto/.
Lucy Suchman does some very interesting research within this area (2011a, 2011b). See also Suchman (2007).
School children in Denmark are allowed to attend recreation centres after school until they are 14 years of age. In many of the institutions geared towards children between ages 10 and 14 there are special computer-gaming rooms where the children can play single-player games or group games online. There are usually rules for how long a child can stay in the computer room before other children are allowed to take over, and there are particular restrictions on the kinds of games that are available to them and/or what they are allowed to download from the internet; furthermore, there may be rules about whether they can save their gaming results to continue playing a game later. Most institutions have a dedicated educator who has responsibility for organizing and monitoring activities in the gaming room.
See also Couze-Venn's work on a reconceptualization of the interrelated becoming of concepts like human-world, nature-culture, human-animal and self-other, and his engagement with the work of Simondon to conceptualize individuation and individualization in a non-Freudian and non-subject-centred way. This work has some of the same conceptual ambitions as those I pursue here, with regard to qualifying aspects of the ‘human’, virtuality and potentiality (Venn, 2010).
As Agamben points out, the concept of ‘potentiality’ has a long history in Western philosophy. Many scholars have been interested in further developing its conceptual implications – most recently, Massumi (2002) with inspiration from Deleuze, and in Denmark Juelskjær et al (2011), Mathiassen (2013) and Staunæs (2011).
This refers to terrorist attacks in Norway, where one man killed more than 70 children and adults in downtown Oslo and on a nearby island (Utøya) in July 2011.
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Søndergaard, D. Virtual materiality, potentiality and subjectivity: How do we conceptualize real-virtual interaction embodied and enacted in computer gaming, imagination and night dreams?. Subjectivity 6, 55–78 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.23