Issue 02 – Spring/Summer 2008 «

Issue 02 – Spring/Summer 2008

Dialectic, the online magazine, is soon going to be Dialectic-in-Print, marking its end as a primarily cyberspace publication. It would be useful, then, to write something about the Internet and what I take it to be its interesting relationship with philosophical themes.

First off, isn’t there something strikingly Cartesian about it all? Without the impression of a physical body (no one knows how you look like, and even then, you can choose false pictures or only post photographs after fifty shots) we are suddenly given the idea that we are autonomous gods. ‘We’ the ‘invisibles’ can instantiate ourselves in whatever ways we like (one of my first pseudo-identities online was as a jazz loving rooster with a penchant love of absinthe). We become little gods before the screen, linguistically styling our existences and fashioning our fonts with flair.

This brings us onto how we become more conscious about the way in which we use language to create ourselves. The entire web is constituted by language in a way that makes evident what is often a usually quite abstract concept into something very literal. It is a world of signifiers without signifieds: what conventionally concretely connotes our identities – names, age, photographs – suddenly become optional, unstable (this is not to say that they were not unstable before, but that their instability is dragged to our consciousness in a more creative and less threatening manner). I can suddenly express my identity through a picture of a manic cat, a faked taste in Mozart, impeccable grammar (ahem). I can create several new identities: due to the non-linear spatiotemporal laws of cyberspace, I can be in more than one place at a time.

But, as with all illusions, the internet becomes something that is habitual, and with habit comes chains. The absolute freedom promised to us is thwarted. Suddenly those fellow ‘invisibles’ that interest us become meaningful, fascinating, and we can be less cavalier with our identities than we used to be. Those procrastinatory moments that were once filled with watching television, dancing around or simply staring into space, are now spent trawling through facebook profiles and pictures. Those who do not have access to the internet are suddenly condemned to ontological obscurity (when I deleted my facebook, how many times was I told that I did not exist?). We are condemned to keeping up-to-date with others and are forced from our forts of solitude to communicate and interact in the textual abyss that is the net.

The individualism that at once seems most apparent to us — freedom, power, autonomy — breaks away into creativity, instability, multiple and simultaneous instantiations. But it also opens us up to others (capital “O” optional). On the one hand, the multifarious voices that constitute the internet means that we can communicate with others in what seems to be a vastly intersubjective tapestry; our voice (itself an intermingling of different dictions) just adds to a dialogical stream of voices. We are dissolved along a stream of infinite others: communal but distinctive.

But, as with the freedom, there is also the threat of the Invisible Eye. We exhibit ourselves as public artefacts: just as we can be viewed by admirers and ‘fans’ (don’t little gods need worshippers?) we can be viewed by the threatening unknown. While these fears can be rational – we don’t want lecturers, parents or prospective employers peering into our lives – there is also the more general threat of being stared at by an altogether more sinister force. The Anonymous stare. At times, we wonder what it is like to look at our selves as if we were someone else: we begin living in the third person, taking up the perpective the Anonymous eye (and ‘I’).

What I find interesting about the internet is not the fact that it re-translates familiar philosophical problems “offline”, but that it intensifies them in more literal ways. As someone pointed out, there is something ironic in the idea that Dialectic would have spent its youth as an online creation and its newer form in the more traditional (though no less revolutionary) printing press. While there will still be an online twin for the next edition, the chaos (?) of these previous ones will be brought under the more sophisticated, neater and formal demands of print.

So with the demise of the chaos of the virtual world, I also end my little stint as editor. And on that note,

Adieu–!

…. and in the excellent non-linear time-frame that the virtual world brings into focus… welcome to the new editor, Dave J. Allen!…

… and now…

Sharmin Ahammad
Editor

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Language A(n integral) Pondering by Moreno Mitrovic

The endowment with language capacity is an insidious human property that even Linguistic training usually fails to objectify. It is that very objectification of language that is desperately called for, in order to produce and envisage a dualistic, and somewhat complementary, image of The Self.

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Libertarianism and Alienation by Dave Allen

I want to highlight a tension in the doctrine of (political) libertarianism. I define libertarianism as the view that the state should be ‘minimal’; i.e., the state should minimise its involvement in the private affairs of its citizens as much as possible. As stated, this is a very vague position, for how much is ‘as much as possible’?
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Against Atheism (and theism and agonisticism) by James Lamont

I shall explain why I feel that the contemporary atheist movement misunderstands the nature of theism. I will argue that the incoherence of the attributes of god make the statements “god exists” or “there is a god” meaningless sentences, which cannot be subject to truth or falsity conditions. I shall conclude that, ironically, atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris lets theism off too lightly…

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Take Me to the Bridge: Literature and Philosophy by Anna Greenleaves

Anna Greenleaves on what it is like to be an English and Philosophy combined student.

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The Author by Nasta Levine

Everybody makes poetry. It might not be on display, it might not even be on paper, but everybody has moments of trying to “express the inexpressible”. Resorting to clichés is an easy way, as is internally commenting upon the poetry of others.

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Jigsaw by Joe Peach

I know that, in the end, there was nothing else I could have done. What happened, happened, and I shouldn’t blame myself. Somehow, though, I am always wishing, always wondering how things might have been…

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The Day All Possible Worlds Collided Part II by Sarah Wallbank

My mind went blank and then filled with patches of multi-coloured light. Some patches were growing more than others, the smaller ones fading. An irregular bleep was ascending to an ear-throbbing intensity. I couldn’t pick out which direction it was coming from.

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The New Life of the Deceased by James Lamont

The room is an exact square, with just enough room for the deceased, the copy, the doctor and two nurses to be able to move comfortably except without ease or calm. The deceased lies on a gurney, strapped down at the waist, wrists and ankles, her copy gently stroking her intentionally-messy fringe.

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