Intro:
The issue of locating terms that are associated with the human condition (identity, community, transcendence, etc) in a digital space is only made possibility by a type of thinking that does not locate the power of text in one particular medium. With the emergence of poststructuralist thinkers this power has lost its points of origin, real life no longer serves as the point of reference for the text, and print words move from the transmitters of experience to the experience itself. It is in this new area of textual exchange that this paper positions it’s argument, because the argument only makes sense if the reader can read not just technical or literary language, but a whole panoply of different texts into the subject matter (anthropological, sociological, psychological, to name a few).

Thesis:
This paper explores how the digitalization of identity does not mark its end nor its irrelevance, but rather code’s material constraints forces any articulation of identity to develop through the terms of its own undermining. Identity in this sense can be thought of as a process mimicking a substance, a necessary localizing of the subject in a digital context through means that instantly open the subject to discrediting and alteration.

Subsection One: Text and Anti-Text. How the digitalization of identity creates a necessary and functional irony.

-The introduction of digital landscapes as a need to give metaphor to the binary operations of Code. (William Gibson’s Burning Chrome)
-Conceptions of the body as immaterial and fluid in this digital space, portrayals of extreme fragmentation that actually reinforce the real life/digital dichotomy. (Still talking about Gibson here, but perhaps there is a better example?)
-The implosion of that dichotomy (reference Baudriallard here?) through the emergence of the digital signature (MMOs, Avatars, Users, Facebook, etc, but also online personal banking, personalized shopping etc), and explain -how the irony of establishing ontological categories of being in the context of an arbitrary space- the need to inscribe this being (be in through an image, text, or whatever) has to set its constructing in the context that the digital is intrinsically meaningless and an already mapped out (through rules) terrain. By flipping the act and the agent of that act (the act comes before an agency- because this agency has to be introduced into this space-) this irony locates us within a semiotic field and the discourse of the sign, contradicting notions of a preconceived center that is located outside of the field of discourse. (for examples, will reference Derrida, Grammatology of Hard Drive, and perhaps another text).
-What then is of interest is not the dissolution of being, but rather how its compulsive desire to be included into the discourse reconfigures the construction process (which, for our purposes, has been present in all types of perception, be it digital or not). (Again reference Derrida-opening section talking about this problem). In the case of a text about the digital or a digital text (though they are not the same process), the reader is presented with notions of identity that, through this compulsive desire to establish being, have to channel through a type of irony (described above) that leaves identity to be easily contradicted and penetrated. It is a weak notion of identity which identifies its own weakness, its inevitable demise then reconfiguration through some sort of process (be it called revolution or something more mundane, like booting up or jacking in)
-Primary Source Argument: Lexia to Perplexia and Hayle’s Analysis. Will look at how Lexia to Perplexia uses the adventure structure to integrate a user as machine minded. One who finds both their own sense of exploration inextricable tied with computer function, all within the confines of the psyche of the observer (user). After this I then want to comment on how Hayle’s analysis provides a critique that, while interesting and very useful, has to be self-defeating to a certain extent. She argues that the experience with Lexia to Perplexia is the construction of a Creole language, yet she also argues such construction is based on each user-to-computer experience and subsequently constantly changing and different. Her analysis has become contradictory in that it looks to ground the experience (her experience) as an explanation for a function that is always changing, to ground her voice-as-authority when we are to believe that voices in this practice (Lexia to Perplexia) are always changing. Hayles then can be read as an anti-text, which as I argue, is a necessary part of any electronic literature.

Sources:
"Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive.", Kirchenbaum
Lexia to Perplexia, Memmott
Writing Machines, Hayles
Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida
Simulations, Baudrillard

Subsection Two: Architecture and the Wired Reader. The emergence of a hyper-audience and the penetrated reader.

-This section will be a detailed look at House of Leaves and its relationship to architecture and audience.
-This section will explores how the establishment of an audience changes the precepts of the one being watched (and watcher and watched often rapidly fluctuate).
-The concept of space becomes important here (Jameson and Benjamin) and is an issue muddled in House of Leaves. Thinking specifically about the editorial notes in this record, and how their textuality (not actually referential to an outside source) disguises the actual borders of this space of the house (which seems to do this on its own as well).
-Primary Source Argument: But these presumed authorities and outsiders of House of Leaves seems to serve a similar function to the interaction of “identities” on the internet (ie digital signatures). Because both (editors and these internet “identities”) engage in the act of editing, they are encased within the subject matter as they try to distance themselves from it, they help establish what they look to critique. Architecture then in a digital sense is not so much to observation of an object, but the object manifests itself through a debate or discussion about it.
-This, in turn, dislocates a distance necessary for a body to distinguish itself from an object of viewing, at the same time there is still a connection between different bodies. It is not merely a swallowing of the object and the viewer of the object into a psychic or schizophrenic landscape that isolates the individual from any outside connection, but rather this process of implosion is a critical mode of connection. To return to the metaphor of architecture, it is no longer a group of eyes in one place looking at a target, but rather the target is everywhere and only becomes engendered through the act of looking (in House of Leaves it is through the comments of the three editors). It is a de-centering of the eye because the space of looking is only a space through its function (as the subject of a sentence or paragraph about it is the only evidence of its existence), and this space does not exist in absence of this function. An adequate example would be something like a transmission tower or a node.
-This again fits within the paradigm of a body that establishes its own inadequacies, as the audience feels the compulsive desire for this critique, an objective environment, but cannot hope but undermining their intentions through their articulation.

Sources:
“Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Benjamin
Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson
House of Leaves, Danielewski
“Metapictures”, Mitchell
“From Work to Text”, Roland Barthes

Subsection Three: Politizing the Digital, Dangers of Not Reading the Digital Body as a Political Body.

-This subsection will address how this digitalization of identity must include an acknowledgment of political forces; otherwise it risks (by not addressing it) passively reinforcing dominate cultural values at the expense of peoples and cultures that remain voiceless. While the (re)configuration of identity in a digital context opens the body to a play of signifiers and rebuilding, this does not automatically assume that this will be a space of advanced gender perception or cultural sensitivity. In fact, there is a significant risk that the tools and tactics deployed to configure and reconfigure identities will be popularize forms of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc (a good and troubling example of this is the use of “homosexual labels and terms” on internet forums and chat sites, often these labels are used in very dynamic and subtle ways).

Primary Source Argument: Their will be three main focuses in this subsection. The first is the use of a linear history in Necronomicon and how a reliance on this model has troubling (and contradictory) implications for digital identity. It introduces a digital landscape and highlights the necessity of thinking digitally for the future, yet Stephenson does not challenge a conception of historical progress and consciousness that is over a century and a half old (stemming from the Hegelian model). He implicitly suggests codes place in his text as one that does not challenging this model of history, subsuming code under this historical narrative (which is an imperial and Western narrative).

-The second focus will be the troubling consistency in popular digital fictions of a regressive female role. In Burning Chrome, Necronomicon, and House of Leaves (the list goes on as well), female sexuality is unabashedly on display. Male fantasies are rampant and there are often long digressions into the actions (to be) performed on the female body. Not only is the masculine fantasy present, it is mean to be a universal fantasy (the women in House of Leaves and Necronomicon seem to be thinking exactly what the man are thinking in terms of meaningless hookups and sexual appetite). This stereotyping is troubling in two important ways for this paper. It first ascribes a set of attributes and expectations to a group (women) without that group having an opportunity to demystify these labels attached to them. Second, and more specific to the digital, it locates gender in terms of a biology not present in the codified body. It assumes the consistency that we apply with biological determinism to a type of gender only founded on performative acts of construction/reconstruction. The binary divide between man and female remains intact, while the more explosive dynamics of gender remain unexplored (the possibility of a man who becomes a women, vice versa, a man/women, or neither). (An example I will use besides these texts will be cross-dressing, and some of the explosive implications this has in terms of a digital context, ie when a man adopts a female avatar or is presumed to be female- and vice versa).

-The final focus will be on Navidson as a global subject, and how his association with a “globalized” world presents a problematic tendency to write the history of one people on top of another. His profession as a photographer testifies to this, as his “capturing” of a people or a place introduces this reality into a global consciousness, but only in a one-sided manner (for the photographer and those viewing the photograph). This issue becomes even more pressing when we consider House of Leaves insistence on the medium of expression, and its ability to distort a seemingly transparent message, and how this medium presents two groups in an asymmetrical fashion (the photographer holds all the power, the one being photographed has none). It may seem like a minor point in House of Leaves, but the absence of this other perspective assumes the predominance of one narrative and the negligibility of another. This is present not only in Navidson’s more overt arrogant characteristics, but the importability of these other cultures (in this case importing them to bolster Navidson’s credentials as a photographer) negates their actually pivotal role in determining this western globalism (Said and Bhabha).
-Possible Thread to Tie In: Internet as a place open to multiple narratives, or a place foreclosed in advance by reproduction of a western (and imperial) narratives.

Sources:
Gender Troubles, Butler
Culture and Imperialism, Said
“DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation”, Bhabha
House of Leaves, Danielewski
Necronomicon, Stephenson