PADM 7 (1) pp.

7795 Intellect Ltd 2011

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media

Volume 7 Number 1
Intellect Ltd 2011. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/padm.7.1.77_1

TONY RICHARDS
University of Lincoln, UK

Embalmed/unembalmed:
Territorial aporias within
the performative field of
tele-presence

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Prevailing theories tend to fall back upon notions of a captured or transported inten- first-person
tionality when adjudicating on matters of agency within tele-present spaces. Even quantum physical theory
Heideggerian-inspired theories that would wish to question dualistic Cartesianism prosthetic compass effect
(Heim 2002) tend to judge or weight an activity according to its ability to transplant performativity
a sensation of being-there (Heidegger 2008 & Ladly 2007) on the part of an enacting
subject. While older, so-called, passive media spaces (cinema, for example) tended to
disregard problems of embodiment, many emergent performative spaces (e.g. telematic
or augmented reality applications) inevitably come up against issues of embodiment
and the extensible transplantation of intentionality outside of originating territories.
In opposition to theories that carry forward such notions of a transported intention-
ality, this article raises questions concerning what I propose to term the prosthetic
compass effect through carefully unteasing some of the implications of Derridas com-
plication of the Austinian concept of performativity. I achieve this by focusing upon a
rather problematic case study. Through reflecting in some detail on a proposed appli-
cation of hunting animals internationally across a tele-presencing Internet connection,
this article will investigate some thorny issues of embodiment across territorial bor-
ders and the attendant undecidability of presence and undecidability of place. To
answer to these difficulties I will finally propose the application of Arkady Plotnitskys

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Tony Richards

quantum-mechanically inspired apparatus of quantum mechanical reproduction as

a better tool for conceptualizing such mutable territorial topographies.

INTRODUCTION
It is also said that different or distant places can communicate between
each other by means of a given passageway or opening.
(Derrida 1982: 309)

For well over a decade now the general shape of prevailing media practices have
been changing with some notable rapidity. Gaining some theoretical traction
on this changing topographic media landscape has proved to be quite a diffi-
cult undertaking. In one such attempt at this task, Gauntlett (2004) points out
that the prevailing traditional linear or mass media-based communication optic
provides a very poorly calibrated compass or orientation towards these new and
emerging practices (the Internet, second life spaces, social networking, mobile
and ubiquitous computing, computer games, etc.) as well as other more pro-
tean forms of emergent practices that as yet have no discernable shape (tracked
for instance by Rheingold (2002) on a somewhat anthropological expedition
to Tokyo, Japan). Such emergent media are clearly no longer representational
apparatuses that merely interpret the world for an audience placed at some
distance, but now inter-actors are intimately and operantly changing or
performing in it. Such texts do not any longer then have audiences. A good
example here would be augmented reality games. For McGonigal (2003), aug-
mented reality games do not take place behind a protective screen but involve
acting upon or being-in-the-world. Similarly, other mixed reality applications
allow for environments to be interacted with in ways that do not merely label.
These environments become electronically augmented performance spaces
that are to be carved up depending upon our purpose. For the mapping of such
mutable topographical coordinates, Gauntlett seeks to develop analytic tools
to help excavate these new bottom-up participatory spaces, rather than forcing
upon them tools tempered for the previously dominant linear-industrial age. In
criticizing such out of date tools, he decries

[A] tendency to celebrate certain classic conventional and/or avant-

garde texts, and the focus on traditional media in general, is [within his
proposed media studies 2.0] replaced with or at least joined by an
interest in the massive long tail of independent media projects such as
those found on YouTube and many other websites, mobile devices, and
other forms of DIY media.
(Gauntlett 2008)

While not focussing specifically on the sorts of tele-presencing media that will
interest us here, he does suggest a number of methodological positions that
usefully critique representationalist media methodologies and which can help
us to navigate through some introductory issues. Though I find Gauntletts
model of the performative to be not as developed as I would like, it will nev-
ertheless provide a useful starting point for a critique of the representationalist
media studies 1.0 model.

THE STAGE DIVIDES: ITERATING THE DIFFERENCES

In order to see what this digital switchover from prevailing linear-
representational 1.0 spaces to immanent mixed reality 2.0 spaces might
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 Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within the performative field of tele-presence

theoretically entail, I will briefly look at Gauntletts usage of the Butlerian 1 This, in a sense, is quite
similar to the
concept of the performative (Gauntlett 2002). For Gauntlett and many oth- never-finalized
ers recently (e.g. Bogost 2007; Kember and Zylinska 2010; McKenzie 2001; liveliness of Artauds
Richards 2008), performativity (Austin 1975) forms a highly influential frame- theatre of cruelty
(Artaud 1958).
work that helps clarify some key mediatory differences. As we will see a little
later, notions of performativity also proved to be very important within a the- 2 Arguing for
semantically active
oretically rich section of the disciplinary field of gender studies (Butler 1990, audiences, for
1993, 1997; Sedgwick 2003) for pointing to the unfinished or relatively open example, in TV Living:
Television, Culture and
nature of gender performances. Gauntlett reworks Butler to paint a picture of Everyday Life
playful mediatory spaces where subjects reflexively play with an identity that (Gauntlett and Hill
is less and less given, imposed or finalized: 1999).

3 As opposed to being
The Internets scope for anonymous interaction, and therefore iden- distanced through a
separable
tity play, is significant for the way in which it fits in with con- temporo-spatial
temporary queer theory. Queer theory suggests that people do not representational layer.
have a fixed essence, and that identity is a performance (Butler 1990; Representation should
not be thought of
www.theory.org.uk/queer). We may be so used to inhabiting one iden- merely as something
tity that it seems natural to us, but its a kind of performance about something else
nonetheless. but also as something
that supposedly does
(Gauntlett 2004: 1819) not perform within an
environment. It is the
conceit of
As well as within the discipline of gender studies, performativity has also proved representation that it
to be influential as a concept within the more obvious domain of performance stands back from the
studies. Here it has helped to conceptually frame for its theorists the equally world. We will be
pointing out later that
open affordances of contemporary dramatic simulation, complicating the pre- while performative
viously taken-for-granted supplementary or parasitic moment (Phelan and aspects invade any
Lane 1998) of traditional forms of closed theatrical representation. Such pre- and all
representations (their
viously dominant stage-based citations of fixed plays, or finished products, quantum-mutable
now come to bleed over as performances connect or mesh up with worlds nature), mixed reality
or telematic spaces
beyond the constative confines of such stage-based divides.1 And yet, it must involve a particularly
be pointed out, whilst performativity is of undoubted utility within a number potent form of
of performance-related disciplines or domains, Gauntletts particular flavour of prosthetic
performativity.
performativity seems a little restricted and in need of some refinement.

ISSUES WITH MEDIA 1.0 AND ITS IMMANENT STUDY

One of Gauntletts main issues with the prevailing modelling of media studies
1.0 is that it tends to adopt an inappropriately pre-reflexive or pre-performative
reading of the contemporary users pragmatic relation with 2.0 media. He
points out that while these perspectives were methodologically contestable
within previously dominant mass media industrialized contexts,2 today they
are positively anachronistic as audiences transform into active produsers
(Bruns 2008) and so step over the dividing lines of their variously positioned
stages; becoming now highly active hyperexpansive-diegetic performers or
inter-actors. Any valid conceptualization of such performances-within-the-
augmented-real3 (Liu and Davenport 2005) should abandon old third-person
constative models and theoretically realign to these more generative first-
person performative models.
What then, we may be entitled to ask, is the relation between these two
differing genres of media space? We will need to think through these differ-
ences in order to get a better grasp of what is at stake in the change from 1.0 to

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Tony Richards

2.0 mediations. A rather schematic oppositional table might help us to estab-

lish some of the key differences to help orient us further as we move towards
our case study. I have taken the liberty of labelling the second column Imme-
diation to underline the non-representational nature of these newer forms of
involvement. It seems to me that the traditional term media (as in a layer that
comes or mediates between) does not do justice to the immanent nature of
these emergent spaces.

Mediation 1.0 Immediation 2.0

Closed texts Open texts

(Stage divided but semantically (Stage erased and syntactically
playful) playful)
Top-down Bottom-up
(Paternalist, cultura/colere) (Autonomist,
subculture/anarcultural)
Third-person First-person
(past participle: citational echo) (present participle: experiential
origin)
Constative Performative
(Pre-reflexive) (Reflexive immanence)
Industrial Post-fordist
(Does not take-a-stand on its being (Does take a stand on its being =
= fixed identity) hyper-identity)

As we can see, the differentiation between these two genres of mediational

space goes hand in hand with a transformation within the surrounding social
sphere also. In general then, within a move from the left-hand column to the
right, we progress from a centrally organized or centripetal state-provisional
space of national third-person subjecthood (as exemplified and symbolically
supported by nationally inclined media broadcasters such as the British BBC)
towards an untethered more centrifugal space of cosmopolitan free reflexive
individualism. Here the lifelong subjecthoods (Dovey 2000; Giddens 1991;
Lash and Lury 2007) that accompanied the fordist industrial age now dis-
solve away within cyberspace. In Second Life, for example, we can play with
our gender. Notions then of unified identity cede ground to what could var-
iously be called partial, mutable, venn or hyper-identities (Filiciak 2003). In
such a context, the constative imposition of an external framework seems to
loosen to a first-person interiority of reflexive-immediate interests. How does
such first-person generative performativity function?
In exploring how such performativity is classically seen to operate, we will
be in a much stronger position to investigate how performativity is deformed
or made problematic within telematic or mixed reality performance spaces that
tend to straddle disparate territorial stages or domains. I will reveal this prob-
lematic straddling within the main case study below. In preparation for this the
next section is necessarily long and theoretically involved in order to prepare
us to clearly ascertain the sheer undecidable complexity of such spaces. Such
complexity problematizes, as we will see, any McLuhanesque digital global
village (Levinson 2001) or Heideggerian virtual being-there (Heim 1994)
conceptualizations of tele-presencing and must make way for the recognition
of a more mutable or undecidable prosthetic compass effect.

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 Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within the performative field of tele-presence

4 In some interpretations
FIRST-PERSONHOOD: REFLEXIVE PERFORMATIVITY of quantum physics
According to Austin a constative utterance sits above or describes its particu- (Bohrs Copenhagen
interpretation, for
lar object from an external position, as a sort of third-person agency placed example), the choice
outside of an action that is presumed in itself to be interior to itself. A typ- of whether light is a
ical example would be IT IS RAINING in that it describes something that is wave or particle is
actually said to have a
causally separable from the representational statement being made. In classical performative effect on
media-productive terms, this would take the form of an external (temporal- the object itself. Thus
we are not talking
spatial) reporting of a prior or ideally independent it that does not cross over here about a
from the other side of the stage divide to become an active part of the reporting representation
performance itself. Algorithmically, subject-A comments on object-A; subject-B divorced from its
object, but an
listens to report on object-A from subject-A. We should clearly not mistake the observation that can
reporting-of for causing the rain. In terms of such an important canonical sepa- be said to change the
ration of the functional spaces, and taking the differing actions of running and very behaviour of the
light and so on.
apologizing as illustrative examples, Austin points out that

This difference is marked in English by the use of the non-continuous

present in performative formulas [. . .] We might say: in ordinary cases, for
example running, it is the fact that he is running that makes the statement
that he is running true; or again, that the truth of the constative utterance
he is running depends on his being running. Whereas in our case it is
the happiness of the performative I apologise which makes it the fact
that I am apologising: and my success in apologising depends on the
happiness of the performative utterance I apologise. This is one way
in which we might justify the performative-constative distinction -as a
distinction between doing and saying.
(Austin 1975: 47)

A report then (that someone is presently performing a run) depends upon

the truth-verifiable reporting of a notionally fixed, past-participle, pre-reflexive
event-capture or frame that is perfectly external to the reported upon phe-
nomena, in a very similar manner to an optical apparatus involved in observing
any phenomena of the discipline of physics. These apparatuses should clearly
be external to and not implicated within the constitution of the phenomena
that its (peer reviewable) observer is presently involved in examining. This
reporting-of-reality should certainly not then be performatively implicated
in being-a-part-of that from which it should adequately measure or take its
distance.4
In this last regard, we will focus our gaze later upon the important the-
oretical work of Arkady Plotnitsky. Plotnisky, as we will see, demonstrates
that performances cannot easily be transported or transplanted electronically
across disparate territorial divides without some excess or undecidable duality
haunting their activity. Two disparate stages cannot be united within one-third
domain. For Plotnisky, this will not be a question of sovereign or nationalist
territory, but will be a thoroughly ontological problem. It is a key contention
of this study that an awareness of the problems of undecidable performativity
would be of benefit to the further study of complexly interactive or telematic
performance spaces. Far from a McLuhanesque global village of an intimate
networking of disparate spaces (McLuhan 2001), Plotnisky points towards an
undecidability of place and action that might work to recognize such split or
mutable identities within telematic spaces instead occluding them. Although
this takes us a little further into the argument than is required at this time, I

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would like the reader to keep in focus that, whatever the supposed constative
reporting distance taken, there is always already a certain irreducible quanta of
performative effectivity.
For now however, as something notionally separable from the account
and thus externally third-person positional in nature, these reports or medi-
ations of the supposed external event can ideally be reviewed or verified on
the grounds of some teleological approximation to a criterion such as truth.
While such truth classically concerns older third-person media, the newer
performative media clearly do not sit comfortably upon such representational-
ist foundations. For rather than imposing a truth or representation from above,
new and emergent 2.0 media now plastically co-respond and are available for
strong forms of first-person malleability. These new media do not represent so
much as include activities.
Clearly within the age of 2.0 media we seem to have something akin to
Austins interior-doing (I apologize) rather than external-saying (he is run-
ning). Such, similarly, are the knotted series of narratological ideals discussed
famously in Janet Murrays path-breaking book on tele-presencing and vir-
tual reality called Hamlet on the Holodeck (Murray 1998). Murray speaks of
an age, soon to come, that will finally involve an audience making the step
over the threshold from being an audience for a produced play to a mode
of being that existentially implicates us. We are thus actors involved within a
first-personal active constitution of hyper-narrational spacetime events. We
become Hamlet and do his scenes. In some sympathy with Murrays demo-
cratic optimism of an immersive participatory theatre, Jenkins outlines his own
take on convergence:

I will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood
primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media
functions with the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a cul-
tural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and
make connections amongst dispersed media content. This book is about
the work and play spectators perform in the new media system. The
term, participatory culture, contrasts with older notions of passive media
spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers
as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who
interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us
fully understands.
(Jenkins 2008: 3)

For Jenkins, audiences are now participants, and are thus moving on to direct
their own more playful plays. They have moved on from the merely mentally
responsive semantic interpretations of yore towards an active, performative and
highly generative motility; a syntactically playful transformational plasticity
that serves their own local concerns rather than the more normative or juridical
concerns of the aggregate or distant majority. This significant move across from
a previously distant audience or stage divide is, as stated earlier, symptomatic
of larger shifts within the more general social sphere (or base/infrastructure, to
use the old Marxist spatial metaphor).
Reflexivity, within the present stage of modernity, is a keen self-awareness
that performatively and immanently hooks the social actor up with media
apparatuses, not as third-person subjects of something that previously came

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 Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within the performative field of tele-presence

before them. Far from being extratextual actors on the outside or periphery of 5 For a classic
(pre-Derridean)
the action, we now take part in carving out these spaces ourselves. Reflexive discussion of the
performativity here then gives the sense of somebody ahead of a game they are functioning of
illocutionary force
nonetheless immanently caught up in playing. Matters of power and agency within performative
are clearly central here. We will now look further into some inherent frac- speech acts see Searle
tures within Austins concept of performativity to clarify this important status (1969)
of agency within tele-presencing spaces. These concerns with Austins con- 6 In much the same way
ceptual framework will then allow us to unpack further contradictions within as Descartes famously
these seemingly singular or atomic performed events through our case study does within his own
meditations or
below. The following section is necessary to complicate the concept of reflex- attempts to exorcise
ivity and performativity to be ready to tease out some of the paradoxes of the his evil demon of
performative enacted within that study. Through this, we will then reach a more deception and to
locate the indubitable
productive media analytic formulation that will bear some marked similarities I of his ego cogito.
to quantum physical theory.

PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTIONS: HAUNTED BY CONSTATIVES

AND VICE VERSA
For Austin, performativity was a concept that caused him much anguish. These
problems, which Austin himself pointed towards, caused him to constantly
refine his apparatus (without however managing to sufficiently abandon its
aporias or sticking points). As we algorithmically stated earlier, performative
utterances are speech acts that perform an act in the very act or occasion of their
saying, as opposed to constative utterances, which merely recite or relay a state
of affairs distantly external to and thus causally divisible from themselves. The
constative then is (ideally) merely the dead citation or recorded echo of a previ-
ous state of affairs, the truth or falsity of which is thus arguable, even if infinitely
postponed. In opposition the performative should, atomically in and of itself,
accomplish or immanently action something. This would make its truth or
falsity entirely erroneous or external to the veracity of the act. It simply, self-
sufficiently and internally is. To take Austins famous matrimonial example, I
do is a performative utterance of force, the inarguable consequence of which is
that it actions or commits the agent to an immanently occurring action within
the very same immediate and simultaneous present. So within the confines of
a marriage ceremony, court case or street bet, these various I dos verb both
as speech and indivisibly as action. As a first-person immanent process then
the act is conceptualized by Austin as a self-present freestanding substance,
or a self-standing atomic thing; a thing that would seem to fold or hold both
words and deeds together under one powerfully indivisible atomic roof.
Derrida took on this powerful and institutionally influential model of inten-
tional action within a highly influential essay titled Signature Event Context.
While pointing to performativity as an incarnation of the metaphysics of
self-presence, Derrida (1988) problematized the opposition by indicating that
Austins theory, while wishing to give the address or location of illocutionary
force5 as the irreducible immovable ground of the performative, also unavoid-
ably undermines its own claims of oppositional cleanliness. It does this through
the irresolvable problem of Austin actually being unable to situate any such
singular intentional act of illocutionary force. Derrida ably demonstrates that
Austin constantly lets in exceptions where illocutionary force needs much more
than itself to be itself. The ground just keeps on aporetically moving.6 Such
contradictory aporetic ground will prove to be very fruitful for harvesting by

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Derrida, Judith Butler and also later for ourselves. Derrida points out that the
supposed illocutionary force of the performative always already operates within
a traced, marked or iterative pre-existent network or context, a context always
beyond its own supposed immediate or sovereign-majestic terrain. As a result,
the supposed intentional or illocutionary force within any supposed act, activ-
ity or doing is not at any point a freestanding atomic entity. As we will see
within our case study below, any notionally intentional performative needs far
more than the sovereign internality it wishes to safely circumscribe for itself
to action its desires. In terms of tele-presence or telecommunications in gen-
eral, we should indeed ask: In the absence of actually travelling, how could
one transport or transpose ones wishes through telecommunicative media-
tions to another context? But also, more importantly, how can one ever properly
represent oneself to oneself or to the outside? To underline the problem of
evidencing the lived, circumscribed and knowing Cartesian monad, Derrida
uses the famously indivisible outboard representative of the self that is the
signature as his aporetic problem. The signature here being the supposed
self-standing intentional source, guarantor or integrator of ones having been
there. Strangely, signatures still seem to count as written I do guarantors, even
within our uncanny age of generalized digital production. Derrida states very
nicely for us the case of Austins famous travelling signature:

Not only does Austin not doubt that the source of an oral utterance in the
present indicative active is present to the utterance [enunciation] and its
statement [enonce] [. . .] but he does not even doubt that the equivalent
to this tie to the source utterance is simply evident and assured by a signa-
ture [. . .] in the transcendental form of a presentness [maintenance]. That
general maintenance is in some way inscribed, pinpointed in the always
evident and singular punctuality of the form of the signature. Such is the
enigmatic originality of every paraph. In order for the tethering to source
to occur what must be retained is the absolute singularity of a signature-
event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event. Is
there such a thing? Does the absolute singularity of signature as event
ever occur? Are there signatures?
(Derrida 1982: 11)

While certainly not doubting the empirical functioning or pragmatic everyday-

ness of the signature-event, or even the practical functioning of the event of
the signature, he goes on to point out the signatures somewhat impossible,
aporetic or inherently divided position. This will be absolutely foundational to
our own case study of mutable tele-present contexts below:

Effects of signatures are the most common thing in the world. But the
condition of possibility of those effects is simultaneously, once again,
the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous
purity. In order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have
a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from
the present and the singular intention of its production. It is its same-
ness which, by corrupting its identity and its singularity, divides its seal
[sceau].
(Derrida 1982: 11)

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The internal integral integrity of the stamp or signature-seal is then already 7 Derrida made a very
similar point within a
imminently and immanently problematic and does not have to await any errant famous analysis of
agency or alterity to hack or to tamper with its property. There always has to Husserls binary
be an external or determinable repetition, together with conventional mark- opposition of
indicative versus
ings, contexts and various archival mechanisms for a signature or event to expressive signs,
count as such. And to make things even more complicated for any signature- where expressive
signs were supposedly
presence, any receiving context is always already unstable and thus cannot composed of direct
guarantee, in advance, any clean receptivity for the recording or registration communion of a self
of this already problematized singularity. Needless to say, this goes also for to itself outside of
public indicative
any other incoming signature/event of communication, such as the one we language or lettering.
will very soon be investigating. We can state here somewhat algorithmically: Husserl however
One cannot transport the essence or the soul of ones signature signature, but cannot properly
demonstrate this but
equally the signature is never itself a soul-sovereign thing. Any translation or keeps on letting
transplantation is necessarily also a transformation. And yet there is also no indicative signs seep
through into
purity prior to such a movement. Though this may seem an unnecessarily expressive ones
lofty, crafty or abstract discussion, most models of communication (even the (Derrida 1973).
less linear process-based ones) tend to ignore or conveniently brush aside
this inherent and unavoidable instability within any notional transportation
of meaning.7 Notions of illocutionary force, or the expressive meaning to
say, presume to prosthetically capture and transport something untouchable.
Such problems of capture and transportation will form the nub of our argu-
ment in studying problems of embodiment within tele-presencing within my
case study below. Before this I will return very briefly to the work Judith But-
ler and her use of this Derridean-inspired unstable performative within gender
studies.
Butler is concerned with the operation of the sex and gender divide, where
the former would presumably be a scientific constative to the latters more
operant first-person acted performative. Again we have a supposed difference
between stating (sex) and doing/performing (gender). Somewhat problemati-
cally however, as with Derridas example of the signature-imprint, for Butler sex
is never simply something materially handed-over in a clean transportation
from some supposed truth of the womb, but is inherently destabilized by any
receiving or greeting context. For there is always, she points out, that nervous
or secondary-pregnant moment of difficulty contained within the awaiting of
the interpellation or pronouncement Its a boy!. This pronouncement is always
already threatened or harried by that which might fall liminally outside of it.
Outside of such seemingly reliable acts or works of norming, Butler speaks of
one such rather haunting harrying:

Is it not a purely cultural convention to which Page and others refer when
they decide that an anatomically ambiguous XX individual is male, a con-
vention that takes genitalia to be the definitive sign of sex? [. . .]. The
point here is not to seek recourse to the exceptions, the bizarre, in order
merely to relativize the claims made on behalf of normal sexual life. As
Freud suggests in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, however, it is the
exception, the strange, that gives us the clue to how the mundane and
taken-for-granted world of sexual meanings is constituted. Only from a
self-consciously denaturalized position can we see how the appearance
of naturalness is itself constituted.
(Butler 1990: 149)

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8 Barlow believes that The seeming abstraction of social imprinting does not start merely then with
cyberspace is a a decision on the application of a proper name but with the doctors seem-
sovereign terrain that
never touches down
ingly simple or factual biological identification of sex, the performative speech
on territory and thus act of boy or girl. Such words do things and sometimes, as we all know, they
is exempt from such do go wrong. Thus any pre-baptismal but nevertheless baptismal performance
laws. His declaration
is a passionate of the performative of the pregnantly awaited interpellation its a boy! always
defence of its rights finds itself haunted by an unavoidable or spectral other possibility that never-
and rites of way. theless, somewhat hauntologically, lends it its very own due. Identity is never
Rheingold (1993),
although more then a pure identity.
sensitive to the We will now apply this to topography and place and suggest that it too
difficulties of territory
than Barlow, similarly
is precisely as intimately divided. We will turn then from these abstractions
utilizes the idea of to a quite immanent or concrete case study. This case study will then form
cyberspace as a practical foundation for a conclusion that proposes a theory of performance
something uniquely of
its own. He too uses based less on certainty or closure than on undecidability. We pointed out earlier
the metaphor of that most theories of immersion and tele-presence tend to disregard rather
borders and than recognize such territorial aporias within tele-presence. This next section
frontiers to
paradoxically opt this then will demonstrate that such performative aporias are simply unavoidable.
space out from the Contra then the claims of a telematic or tele-presencing digital global village,
more restrictive
grounded spaces.
borders can always return to haunt any crossings.

9 I must point out that

this is meant as a
rather ironic or sly nod THE APORETIC STATE(S) OF TELE-PRESENCE: MR UNDERWOODS
to a McLuhanesque INTER-TERRITORIAL HUNTING ENGINE
quasi-religious or
teleological belief in My example involves the highly practical affair of hunting real animals across
the purity of global
village electronic
an Internet connection, the aim of which is that one can tele-technologically
communications that, hunt in a place where it is legal to kill, but from a place where it is not,
for McLuhan, ideally via the transportation possibilities of the Internets connectivity. Far from
forms a sort of
intimate matrix or this being some simple step outside of the restrictive platonic cave of rep-
nervous system. Many resentation (as the inventor or provider of this proposed service inherently
modern network supposed), this simple neoliberal entrepreneurial act provides us with a very
analyses also tacitly
repeat this notion of concrete example of the difficulties of place and topography haunting the
distanced-intimacy in supposedly clear communicative scene of John Perry Barlows cyberspace8
either positive-
completion or
(Barlow 1996).
negative-entrapment In 2005 a native Texan, one John Underwood (BBC 2004), bought him-
guises. In a somewhat self a piece of Texan territory and planned to erect on it an expansive animal
nostalgic Rousseauan
manner, McLuhan compound where distantly situated (prosthetically tele-present) hunters could
looks back to a lost fire at the very same animals that it would be illegal to hunt within their own
village life as the presently embodied territories. From Mr Underwoods seemingly quite simple
paragon of a presence
that the babel of sovereign entrepreneurial act, a number of thorny issues are born. These issues
writing put asunder. reveal themselves when approaching closer some of the split ends of emergent
What
telecommunication
tele-technologies. What are some of the difficulties involved in constructing
(in the form of this such a cross-territorial hunting tele-technology?
writing) originally The practical process for constructing Underwoods apparatus is itself
damaged,
telecommunication actually quite simple. A rifle is mounted on a servomotor-driven mount that is
itself (in electronic then in turn mounted by a camera-eye to help envision and thus direct its terri-
form) will now fix. torial movements. This camera-eye or video technology (analogous somewhat
Somewhat
idealistically then, it to those videoconferencing tele-technologies that bring people from geomet-
would seem that rically separate or foreign lands closer together9 ) then links across an Internet
bridges can be built to
reawaken the lost
connection to the final end-user/consumer, who, through the adjustments of a
origin. For an control, moves the distantly placed rifle carefully around, following the tracks
important outlining of and traces of its tele-distinguished quarry, and, when ready, firing off a shot

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 Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within the performative field of tele-presence

through the depressing of a mouse button to kill it. 10 After this trigger is pulled this nostalgia/
and the decision transmitted across expanse of the Internet, the now dead- expectation, in the
canonical cases of Plato,
ened kill, at the other geo-distant wet or business-end, can then be optionally Rousseau, Saussure and
stuffed, mounted and sent physically back to its distinguished tele-present Levi-Strauss, see
Derridas magisterial
hunter, along with an accompanying signed certificate of authenticity from one Of
of Mr. Underwoods witnesses placed at the coordinate-of-the-kill itself. These Grammatology (1998)
employees then witness the skill so undoubtedly deployed, recorded and cap-
10 Or perhaps the trigger
tured as evidence-by-proxy of this inter-actors intentional standing-reserve. of some semiotically
If we pause upon this scene for a moment, we find the reworking of a quite appropriate
classical model of communications technology. What then of such common prosthetic that
reproduces the tactile
technological recordings that would seem to allow us to transport or transplant feel of the more
our intentions towards entities placed distantly across borders? situated prosthetic
that is the rifle.
Under classical conceptions, recording technologies store up pre-existent
live intentional acts in much the same way that phonetic writing would seem
to transcribe and transport a prior speech or thought. Through an indeter-
minate and perhaps inordinate stretch of spacetime these intentional acts
would finally be freed within an ideally symmetric and effective or reinvigo-
rated discharge or reading. This final deployment should perfectly map out,
or match up to, the intentional expectations experienced at the time of the
depositing of that original trace left upon any recording apparatus. Much as
with Formula 1s time-shifted KERS technology (Kinetic Energy Recovery Sys-
tem), the force, energy or charge is imprinted, deposited, saved or stored up, to
be cashed in at some other elsewhere and elsewhen point in spacetime.
Nothing could apparently be more transparent, neutral or non-ideological
than this input-storage-output model: the embalming>unembalming process
ironically hinted at within our title.
Taking this briefly sketched classical Cartesian model as a metaphorical
piece of tracing paper to place over and recover Underwoods idea, we have
the simple bootstrapping breach or broaching of the self-reflexive or self-
generating performative act, much like any supposed self-present intentional
context-free speech act from the western teleological tradition. It would seem
to be nothing more, or in excess of, the recording and recovery of some pure
quanta of intentionality (the classical Cartesian res cogitans), shot through,
driven or piloted along some neutral encapsulating telescopic physical embod-
iment or extension (the secondary Cartesian res extensa). Like some occupant
of a SUV-Hummer vehicle, our intentionally deposited trace would seem to sur-
vive any crash with a foreign boundary or figure of alterity. The foundations of
our intention should be left intact after such a border-crash through the protec-
tion of our vehicle. Again what of this classical conception of intentionality, that
such border-crossings live off? This again is neither a lofty nor an abstract or an
unfair question to ask. We could say of such a self-generating or bootstrapping
performative that

[T]his mode of sovereignty functions as a foundationist event also

known as an explicit performative and a bootstrap performative in
which the act of referring to the event or thing actually creates the event
or thing. This form of subjectivity is illustrated by many terms the auto-
logical subject, the parvenu, the self-made man, die autonomie. [. . .] The
subject-in-love is experienced and understood like the self-governing
subject insofar as both are ideologically oriented to the fantasy of the
foundational event [. . .] it is what exfoliates the social skin.
(Povinelli 2006: 45)

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Tony Richards

11 Edmond Locard was

the founder of the
In line with this reading of the supposedly causally intimate act that Povinelli
modern science of here outlines so well, we should not read Mr Underwoods prosthetic appa-
forensics and spoke ratus as so easily parcelling up any clean intentional or cleanly performative
of an exchange
principle that could state. We have situated here, within the coordinates of our example, I believe,
evidence the imprint a quite irresolvable, undecidable and haunting aporia that short-circuits such
of a killer upon the a bootstrap metaphor of the originary performative. We are simply unable to
scenery of a crime as
well as the imprint of logistically or mathematically fix onto the absolute geometrical origin or posi-
the scenery upon the tion of the act in-itself. To underline this impossible aporia of geo-metric and
body or garments of
the killer. The signs
geo-graphic positioning we need to further, and in some detail, revisit this
here would be of an trans-territorial hunting machine.
indexical nature. If we go back around then to view this example, we have to ask where and
under what classical (transcendental Kantian) conditions of possibility does
12 Further study here
might explore
the shooting itself take place? If the aim of Underwoods well-designed little
Derridas notion of schema is to allow for the killing of certain animals within a domain where
the necessary such killing is legal, but from a domain where it is not, then where has the
presence of a
counter-signature act taken place to be able to adjudicate upon its presence, absence or its sta-
for the cashing in of ble ontological value? Where exactly is the place of the act? For when I am, as
any signature. As can a hunter, placed within a place where it is illegal, I am not located within the
be imagined, he
locates and displays place of the animal that it is illegal to kill, in the place that I am. I am also, of
many aporetic and course, not indexically holding the gun that holds the bullets that would have
overlapping scenes
and scenographic
the fingerprints of my signature-singularity placed upon them (at the scene of
traces within the a Locardian11 principle-of-exchange) and taken away as evidence of an index-
necessities of ical imprint or coupled with a charge; recovered later as a just coordinate of
counter-signification.
my former signature-presence. The smoking gun is, within our example, of
course somewhat problematically mounted and situated within a territory that
is owned within a different legal system. The territorial context of Texas is the
seemingly sovereign terrain upon which Mr Underwood underwrites or signs
his rightful ownership of the gun and the right to hold it within this territorially
underwritten12 compound. This land then is clearly within the purview of an
owner who is not I and is not where I am placed.
Here then we have an important question that is altogether something
more than a sophistic philosophical thought experiment and one that contains
some very important legal implications. For where was I at the time of the
shooting? According to the traditional jurisdictional laws of intentional pres-
ence, I (together with my body) was most certainly placed within a place
where it was illegal to shoot, but the shot was surely not shot there, even
if it may be argued later to have been shot from there. Along these lines, but
countering the ability of this last classical intentionalist rule to properly adju-
dicate or hold its ground(s), one may then subsequently countercharge that the
intentional act of an actor is to be placed within the place where it is illegal
and so can be followed from the target back (if that is the place?, and this is
still very much the question) to the intentional source and so be situated upon
the solidity of the ground upon which the invigilating law itself should also co-
presently stand. Our forensic-decisional algorithm would dictate that the place
of the thought, res cogitans or intentional act should be in a sense extradited
from the geographic site of the physical killing to the legislative territory of
my-own occupied or embodied territory, where I should then be fit and able
to presently stand trial. This sounds quite paradoxical and this is very much
our intention. And yet this paradoxical topo- or tropo-graphic grounding still
does not solve the remaining problem that this animal was killed by a weapon
positioned, or situated, within a distant legal space where it is perfectly legal
to perform the killing. The performance was on another stage, even if directed

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 Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within the performative field of tele-presence

from afar (a divided mise-en-scne). So where has the animal died? Has it died 13 For a more
thoroughgoing
within the tele-present (from-afar) illegal place of my supposed intentionality evaluation and
or in a physical-present place (on-the-scene) where the killing of the thing application of
Derridas
itself is perfectly legal? Surely this too can be further complicated? Where, hauntology to new
really, is where? media spaces see
To be impartial and following the so-called rule or arch of intentional Lockwood and
Richards (2008). In
presence, let us flip this scenario. If the place or coordinate of an inspiring this contribution it is
intentionality is judged to be the present marker of the act, then what if the argued that any
coin is reversed or placed in the other direction? What if in a space where it particular computer
gamic position can
is legal to kill, a button or trigger is depressed that extends this electronic never be coordinated
prosthesis to a space where it is illegal to kill this same naturalized animal? into something like a
geometry of place
Surely one should not be extradited (and brought to trial) from our intentional- or an irreducible
legal space, given the setting up of such an intentional decree as the classifying network address. It
or archiving-rule? Such a confident archiving fever certainly starts to feel a is also nothing like
an offline or an
little questionable as a marker of singular presence (Derrida 1995). For such online place of
archives or markers are becoming mutable and distributed. Logically, because stability that one
intentionality may have been adjudicated to be the presence-effect or place could hack into to
displace or make
in one direction, it must surely be deemed acceptable that one must be able homeless. It is
to originate or perform an intentional act on one stage, even if it bleeds over, neither a home nor a
position, as it is the
so to speak, into this other. Is there then a univocal or decidable direction very non/place of the
in either of these two directions? If not, then are we truly left within a sort uncanny, the
of actioning-limbo or on the undecidable edges of a paradox that can call unheimlich and of
the being-between-
for no final Hegelian truce, synthesis, sublation or Aufhebung? So where has there. It is not
Underwoods machine left us? however a being-
It is this articles contention that we are stuck or situated on the porous- between-there that
disrupts or invades
double-border of a technological aporia or the uncertain site of an intimate any prior offline
and animate topographical crime that cannot be located as the actual mise- presence. There is no
presence or
en-scne of a crime. There is simply no readily available or easily identifiable pre-online offware.
pre-technological territory to grasp onto. Contrary to theories that offer a Algorithmically we
McLuhanesque global transportation of our intentions or actions, such a geo- can say: There is no
outside network but
expansive tele-presencing tele-technology does not (and here we would take equally no
this local or ontic example as tentative evidence of a larger ontological rule) unsubstitutable
introduce any clean and present extension of intentionality to just any network address.
The message, the
indeterminate elsewhere or anywhere and is not then a clean or ideal inten- letter or any other
tional/performative act-upholding mechanism. We cannot then ask or expect weighable asset,
much like the
any decidable direction within such a field of the undecidable and so, as in the signature or the
quantum mechanical wave or particle problematic, we are forced to enact a status of the animal
decision that is thoroughly haunted. It is this haunted sense of decision that I discussed above,
does not always
will now push towards a conclusion. reach its destination,
as there is no unified
message or context
DECISIVE DECISIONS: ON THE PROSTHETIC COMPASS EFFECT outside of the
hauntological
To enact the decision we are forced to take, on deciding the place of the act network. Derridas
hauntology is a
we have been describing here in some detail, one must mystically reboot what I neologistic
would propose to call here the prosthetic compass-effect, by performing what quasi-homophone of
is called within legislative circles a bootstrap doctrine; a sort of fresh doctri- ontology that
points to the
nal decision on the scope of the space of jurisdiction. This doctrinal decision, simultaneously
it is important to understand, comes upon some countervailing borders even haunted difference
if that doctrine, effect or reboot is not concretely contested by any empirical and deferral (i.e.
analogous to
party. Here we are reminded of Derridas argument above about the performa- quantum physics
tive signature and of Butlers troubled gender. Contexts intimately trouble the space-time
placement problem)
decision. The necessity of such a mystical reboot, we must note, bears witness

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Tony Richards

of any seemingly
self-sufficient entity. As
to the stage of an aporetic scenic crime or more properly of an aporetically
with other Derridean criminal scenario. Through the illustration of this quite simple case study, I
word-concept believe, any model of a performatively secure sovereign actor acting across the
interventions such as
undecidability, connection of a cyberspatial or tele-present prosthesis (and there are many of
diffrance, them), cannot use reflexivity or classical performativity (of the relatively pure
dissemination, the species suggested by Austin) as its fixed and certain alibi. This goes also for
hymen, the ash and
the trace nothing is, in any theory that draws upon a global village shrinking of the world hypothe-
and of itself, a secure, sis. One such theorist Walter J. Ong (1990) classifies such electronic means as
signature or significant
whole. Everything here
implements of secondary orality, as he believes that they would repeat what
is always already a he sees as the intimate presence of speech. The act however, as I have tried to
variation of the errant demonstrate, cannot be adjudicated on the basis of a decisional tending to the
and the wanton. There
can thus be no clearly actors own lived intentionality: the supposedly lived act is in its very self (if one
delineating or can still use this word) intimately divided.
cartographic positing or Though any concrete or performative act cannot unproblematically be
positioning of the
haunt. The haunt shown to stand on either legal territory or ground (in Texas or wherever else),
cannot thus be found it certainly cannot stand upon its own performative or signature-originating
and is not a matter of
an insufficiently
ground either. It is not a question only of overt legal ground but also of our
empirical or positivistic own undecidable being-there. We cannot, in any event, transplant or trans-
research. As always a port ourselves across some seemingly antiseptic embalming technology and be
trace it cannot be
confidently peeled back transported merely out-there, to then later be unembalmed or resuscitated
or uncovered. There are leaving some prior uncontaminated signature act. We cannot then extend any
only traces of traces. so-called being-there or presence (Heidegger 2008; Heim 1994; Ladly 2007).
Ontologies then are
nothing but masked or This then is where the logic of the undecidable disrupts any presence of place.
masquerading In the concluding section, through the work of Plotnitsky, we will see why we
hauntologies-in-hiding,
which new media
must add such Derridean deconstructive undecidablity of the performative to
spaces unmask more bring to light this irreducible prosthetic compass effect.
clearly in their
unmasked
dis-placement:
unmasked as ghostly
de-markations or TOWARDS A CONCLUSION: THE DUAL INVAGINATED BORDER(S) AND
dis-embarkations. In an
analogous move to THE PROSTHETIC COMPASS EFFECT
Derridas undecidable
dual coining of I am able to be both here (in L.A.) and there (in Dallas), both then (1963)
diffrance (i.e. and now (2002), but I am always present, moving, live, in command
differ+defer), our essay [. . .]. If early television promised to bring us the world, on the Web, our
coins the double notion
of staging to own volition in relation to this travel gets foregrounded. Microsoft asks,
foreground the Where do you want to go today?.
consistently haunted
spatio-temporal nature (McPherson 2006: 203)
of game stages as both
space-stage(over-there)
and time-stage According to McPherson, there would be a teleological promise within emer-
(deferred-until-then) as
well as their irreducible
gent tele-technologies that extends the ontological reach of early televisions
inmixing. Such complex live and lived ontological promise (after Dienst 1994; Feuer 1983; Hubbell
inmixing holds-off any 1946) and where the new would bring to fruition the long voyages and dreams
cartographics of the
gamespace. Thus a of the old. Although the concrete and syntactic borders of the media have
game-stage, as moved (in the sense that they are now performative, tele-presencing and
fundamentally different interactive), they nevertheless partake of the same sovereign and sancti-
to the paradigmatic
linearity of the fied and supposedly indivisible ground of the transported act. If we revisit
theatre-stage, is never the column from earlier and zoom out a little, we can perhaps see some telling
a singular onto-logistic
space and/or time as
continuities between the conceptions of both 1.0 and 2.0 media in terms of
its staging is thoroughly their dual adherence to borders and their formative protection of what one could
undecidable. As with the conceptualize, after Derrida, as the desire for the saving of the ownmost (see
current example of an
undecidable theatre of Hgglund 2008).

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tele-presence, the
Both media 1.0 and 2.0 Their undecidable computer game is similarly
a thoroughly
hauntologically wobbly
Prediction Alea territory, a (sort of
Mastery Alterity posi-tronic) digitally
Veracity Unexpected displaced domain. It is
suggested (as in the present
Arch An-arch article) that a separation
(monad/qualia: (divided seal) from both poles of screen-
signature/event) absence-interpellation
theory and ludology-
Hostility to chance Hospitality to chance presence-plasticity studies
is necessary. The present
article is a sort of
contribution to that goal of
questioning the
For both iterations 1.0 and 2.0 place a border around an identity that would teleo-singularity of the
goal (entelechy) as a model
ward off what would impeach its solid rule. The right-hand column provides a for digital disciplines. The
list of entities that the left would like to do without but which haunt neverthe- scholarly ethics outlined
within this footnote is not
less as an uncanny visitor already in residence. The undecidable or prosthetic about simply being more
compassing of differing reals tells us otherwise however. The final section pro- granular within the
vides some brief notes or sketches towards a conception that would place the disciplined hunt for some
specificity of new media
emphasis more openly on this right-hand column and this repressed prosthetic quarry, though I would
compass effect that can never be naturalized as some renewable presence or certainly wish to be offering
energy (as of a magicians transported man). something as a compass that
problematises the compass
(Nietzsches God is dead
replaced here with the
compass is dead). In this
THE PRESTIGE OF REPRESENTATION OR RENEWABLE ENERGETICS: respect I would point
EMBALMEDUNEMBALMED (IN)CONCLUSIONS toward some further
important work by
Although not explicitly broaching either Butlers gender undecidablity or per- Plotnitsky (1993) in terms of
formativity, in a chapter titled The Age of Quantum Mechanical Reproduction, his usage of Georges
Batailles notion of a
Plotnitsky discusses the related Derridean concept of presence and the analogy necessarily unrecoverable
of photographic recording technologies. This fits very well with concepts of general economy that
telematics and tele-presence in relation to our case study of Underwood: marries well with his later
work on Derrida and Niels
Bohrs analogous notions of
This loss in presence make the quantum theoretical economy a general undecidability. Such
irrecoverability would
economy and the efficacity at issue analogous to Derridean alterity- mistakenly be equated
efficacity which makes us concerned not with horizons of modified past however with something
or future- present, but with a past that has never been present, and either ineffable or
un-useful. It again is a
which never will be, whose future to come [l a-venir] will never be a question of a necessarily
production or reproduction in the form of presence (Derrida, Margins, irrecoverable expenditure
that cannot be reduced to
21). There are only photographs, which would have to be described as the econometrics of a small
always always already taken too late to allow one to describe or even restrictive system.
to speak of a reality behind quantum phenomena. These phenomena are Pretending that this is the
case only harbors problems
always incomplete and, from the classical point of view, contradictory. for the scholarship of such
(Plotnitsky 1994: 105) non-geometric spaces.
Usage does not mean a
well-spent calculation. For
Like these problematic uni-conceptions of a transportable presence, notions those who would collapse
such spaces Bataille intones:
of classical reflexivity and classical first-person performativity are inadequate for Woe to those who, to the
the task of recording both the decision and the act that arises from the prob- very end, insist on
lem of the decision I exemplified within the case study above. The purpose of regulating the movement
that exceeds them with the
that ontical or regional example of Underwoods cross-territorial hunting has narrow mind of the
been to map out some of the difficulties involved in tracing out any narrow- mechanic who changes a
cast topology or ontology. We are faced more with a map that depicts what tire (Bataille 1991: 26). As
such excess of energy, the
we might call (after Derrida 2006) a hauntology13 of the act. By being unable game involves an

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Tony Richards
economics of the
gift (Mauss 2006)
that escapes any
restricted
narratological
economy of the
compassed-
coordinate.
Hauntology is about
the birth of the
prosthetic compass
effect at the cost of
the death of the
compass.
14 One metaphorically
placed into
suspended
animation on one
side and later revived
untouched at the
other.
15 I would like to thank
the anonymous
readers for
suggestions for
certain tweaks and
changes and for
suggesting further
avenues that such a
study could be taken
down. I would also
like to dedicate this
article to the loving
memory of my
brother, Martyn
Richards, who died
soon after its
completion.
92
March 8, 2011
to resolve this ontically immanent and regional act into either a logics-of-
presence-or-absence, we are left instead on the porous borders or the wobbly
membrane (under erasure) of a vast vibratory diffrance; a haunt that cannot
land us anywhere+anytime cleanly. This is the threat and the opportunity of
the so-called new media that operate on the other side of the projected ends
of the previously dominant industrial linear apparatuses of film, television and
paradigmatically of the linear book. Seemingly anarchic or accidental exam-
ples, such as our ontical example, confront us with an irresolvable double-border
or Derridean double-bind that cannot be seen cleanly from one side or another
but force us to witness any one side of a border as unable to bend over and take
up (Aufhebung) or master the difference of the other side. We are left within a
sort of double-surfaced-box or Escheresque space where the inside of one is
the outside of the others inside, as we keep on flipping undecidably between. In a
quantum decisional act, we are forced to interpretatively choose one rule of law
or another, but in choosing only one, we are fully faced with the haunted other
side of the other-law un-chosen. We cannot simply leap over to the other law,
nor retreat to this one. As with Bohrs particle wave duality problem (Com-
plementarity), the act is in one place and the other, yet in neither place and at
once.
If the mixed realities or alter-spatialities of so-called tele-presencing or
telematic spaces are still conceived of as involving the transfer of some present-
to-itself lived energy,14 this would seem to bring the representation and the
real close and immanently together. Such an implosion of spaces is simply not
the case. If such a reading of an apparently empowered tele-present immersion
were to be believed, then two territories could somehow be miraculously strad-
dled. I believe we have demonstrated the difficulties of such a reading. Rather
than falling upon revisions of McLuhans global village thesis or Heideggers
phenomenological being-there (da-sein) thesis, I would strongly recommend
a theory that would recognize not only the undecidable that has always been
inherent within mediation (for a medium by definition comes between two
notional positions) but that tele-present media, such as those I have been look-
ing at, actually allow us to recognize more openly an undecidablity that has
always been the case (but in hiding). There has been then a quite radical shift:
tele-presence here is the very art of the undecidable.
This prosthetic compassing or de-positioning then is quite problematic.
In place of a unified archive of the act we have an archive. Such an-
archiving is taking-place, as I have argued through a fundamental division
or diffrance-of-stages, evidenced by the need to apply, what I have called
here, the prosthetic compass effect that does not cover over but which fis-
sures both presence and place. The tele-present performative is thus clearly
divided and through explicitly recognizing this territorial diffrance engine
we can be awake to the mutable (im)possibilities of telamatic spaces and the
quantum division of stages. Rather than realities neatly mixing together we
should better be aware of the problems of legal differences and domains as
well as of diffrance per se. Further study might point towards the prob-
lems here for ownership, legality and patents as they find themselves dis-
persed across territories. Ownership of a presence becomes an obvious diffi-
culty when it is tele-presently dispersed and undecidable in its location (is it
here or is it there). Such tele-presence is highly mutable, and as with the
unwieldy mutability of biotech (Carolan 2010) such mutations are very hard
to pin down, for their performances are dislocated across disparate states and
stages.15
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 Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within the performative field of tele-presence

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Richards, T. (2011), Embalmed/unembalmed: Territorial aporias within the per-
formative field of tele-presence, International Journal of Performance Arts and
Digital Media, 7: 1, pp. 7795, doi: 10.1386/padm.7.1.77_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Tony Richards is a senior lecturer in media theory and production based in the
Lincoln School of Media at the University of Lincoln. He teaches both television
and new media theory and specializes in deconstructive approaches to various
post-human spaces. He has published on computer game theory, applying a
deconstructive approach to uncover its properly post-identitarian nature.
Contact: Lincoln School of Media, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln
LN6 7TS, UK.
E-mail: arichards@lincoln.ac.uk

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