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Wikipedia Logo Mimic By Uncyclopedia
One of the central paradoxes of present day life is the centrality of Wikipedia in our lives. In an era of falling certainties, split identities, weakening home walls (compared to the sturdy walls of homes constructed 30 years back, with the idea of ‘forever’, as opposed to the flats today), and relativist paradoxes of knowledge, Wikipedia, through an apparent collaborative effort, seems to cognitively map the world and tries to grasp it as a whole. In fact, anybody with a faint knowledge of Internet would have inevitably been ‘wikified’: throw a nominal search word like cough or flood (though not sex) into Google, and you inevitably end up with a wiki definition on top of the search results. Since Google is the principle search engine of the world, one almost ends up his day controlled by a Google-Wikipedia nexus. It would not be a mistake to characterise this Google-Wikipedia nexus as the “big other” which controls our existence. What exactly do I mean when I call Wikipedia the big other?
We all, maybe except for the ‘psychotics’ and the ‘sociopaths’, get controlled and, therefore, go by the norms set by a certain symbolic order of the world. This means that our day-to-day existence is mediated by gestures which do not make sense to a rational-material understanding of the world. Zizek in an interesting lecture talks about this symbolic understanding of the world: when we talk to a person, in reality we may know that he farts, smells badly, has hair under his armpits and shits and urinates everyday. But our ‘normal’ perception of the person does not take into account these material realities, but is mediated by an idealised symbolic order. The person can be our lover, in which case, he maybe idealised and sublimated into a virtuous prince; the person can be our father or mother or child, in which case each of the material ‘reality’ of the person is mediated by a subjective idealised hue of that person making him or her specific to us. Thus a mother is precisely a mother because she is not a woman towards whom we can have carnal desires. The subjective idealised hue with which the woman who has given birth to us has been transformed into our mother also transforms our relationship with her. Our relationship with our mother is based on a behavioral code which makes each of us party to a contract with a strict code of conduct. The contract obligates the mother to ‘behave’ in a way the norm of motherhood requires of her and we are required to fulfill the duties required of normative sons or daughters. The irony of the contract is such that, although we think our relationship to our mother is based on ‘our’ love towards her, much of it is pre-determined by this contract of the symbolic realm which has given the woman the status of motherhood. Any deviation of the protocol, for example, a grand father’s molestation or a sexual liaison with the grand child is met with strict censure or a social boycott of the grand father precisely because of this reason. In short our day-to-day life is characterised by such symbolic idealisations whose ideological ramifications are pre-determined and beyond our rational control, although at the same time we also have subjective engagement with these idealisations. Thus when we call our lover, my baby, we not only sublimate the lover, which is the function of an imaginary idealisation outside our control, but also makes the lover our own, giving a sense a control over him.
This brings us to an important characteristic of the symbolic space: the symbolic space is the space of the law. It should be clear what it means to be party to the law. The law is the law of gestural sanctity, the deference to the norms, where by we do not grab our mothers or molest our grand children or have sex with our sons or daughters. In a less crude fashion the law is that protocol by which we arrange our day-to-day life according to the symbolic: a simple ‘hi’ to our friends or a handshake to a colleague encompasses a bid to integrate ourselves to this symbolic space firmly. One of the characteristics of a sociopath or a psychopath is his inability to understand the ‘meaning’ of this symbolic realm or gesture. In this sense a sociopath or a psychopath is a strict materialist.
That said, the symbolic space overwhelms our experiential realm more often than we think and any thought of escaping this realm to experience reality as such is mere wishful thinking. As the popular Marxist critique goes, we go to Starbucks or McDonald’s not merely to drink coffee, but also to be part of a social matrix which determines our status as middle-class citizens. Similarly, as good daughters or sons we go to church not because we believe in god, but because we do not want to upset our believing parents. As good parents, our parents get upset when we do not go to church not because they really believe that we should go to church, but because they think we will get upset, if they do not get upset at we skipping church. As Zizek says, this cyclical game goes on, through the symbolic matrix of life. In a sense, Marxism’s attempt, in terms of the commodity, is to get rid of this symbolic matrix, which Marxism characterises as commodity fetishism. Once we get rid of this fetish, we will only be confronted by a commodity’s use value: a music player would only be a music player and not an iPod (notice the symbolism in the way iPod is written).
However, the critique and escape from the symbolic realm is not only difficult, as one might think, it is literally impossible. For example, the fact of my malehood, my gender and its characterisations, is determined by this symbolic space, which includes my name, the way I use my urinal and the way I look at people daily. My gender and its normative characterisations are, therefore, a symbolic mediation through which my subjectivity as a male and the way I interact with the world around is determined. Any disruption of the symbolic space cannot happen without simultaneously rewriting my subjective existence or the social space in which I inhabit. The impossibility is, therefore, an impossibility of ours and our social space’s existence in the present form. Derrida would characterise such an impasse as aporia, a deadlock, from which we can hope to escape only by rewriting existing protocols and norms that is the law itself.
Now that we have a context through which to understand the symbolic, I want to repose the original question. Is Wikipedia, fast occupying the space of the big other and is it determining our symbolic day-to-day existence? I will provide some leads through which one can even begin to analyse this phenomenon. For example, I want you to look at a Wikipedia article, in this case an entry on the caste Nair. The article starts with the assertion that-
“Nair (Malayalam: നായര്, pronounced [naːjar]), is the name of a Hindu forward caste from the southern Indian state of Kerala. They are a Kshatriya caste of Kerala belonging to the Nagavanshi order.”
The article clearly and unambiguously suggests that “Nair” is a forward caste belonging to the Kshatriya community, a mythical warrior community in India. But numerous sociologists have stated and proved that “Nairs”, along with other upper castes in India like Reddys and Kayasths are in fact “shudras”, a hierarchically lower order compared to the “kshatriya” status claimed in the wiki article, and their rise in caste hierarchy (not varna hierarchy) is the result of their proximity to the coloniser, the British, in India. To add to this ambiguity, the discussion page of the same article has suggested unequivocally that “Nairs” are in fact shudras and has made a proposal to change the same in the article. In spite of these assertions in the “unconscious” (discussion page as the reservoir of the truth which is suppressed) of the article itself, the public space, the article itself, demonstrates a compliance to the obverse norms of the symbolic space: an anxiety to keep up with appearances. Any attempt to “correct” the article, and change the status of “Nairs” to “shudras”, would immediately be thwarted. The article would have seemingly changed back to the “kshatriya” status in minutes. This makes Wikipedia qualify itself for one of the primary characteristics of the big other: its status as the symbolic space which determines our reality and its illusory promise of a subjective space in it. It redetermines the subjective status of “Nairs” across the world, by redefining and creating their history as “khshatriyas”, when at the same time providing an illusory editorial freedom for any one reading the article.
This is one of the articles I am familiar with, and there are several contentious articles whose neutrality can be questioned in the same fashion: articles on Jews, holocaust, various other castes, science etc. can be interrogated to find out the myth of the neutrality that Wikipedia touts as its fundamental quality. Wikipedia’s stated policy of maintaining neutrality and providing a NPOV (neutral point of view), is in fact an attempt to comply with the symbolic realm, which is the realm of the law. One of the most popular cases which illustrate Wikipedia’s status as the big other is, of course, the Wikipedia article on Jimmy Wales himself. The entry according to an article in the LRB by David Runciman (yes it is still possible to site a non-Wikipedia source), details
“the claims of a…girlfriend, the Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden, that she only discovered he (Jimmy Wales) was ending his relationship with her by reading about it on Wikipedia.”
This incident points towards how even an intersubjective relationship is mediated by the presence of the symbolic big other: break up, like love has to be mediated in the symbolic order. Only this time, the symbolic order was Wikipedia. Since our day-to-day knowledge horizon is almost always determined by Wikipedia, the question I want to ask is how much of our subjective and objective world of the law, the symbolic order, is Wikified? What are the ideological effects of this Wiki effect on us and the social space in which we inhabit? How much is it important to resist the Google-Wikipedia nexus which has the power to determine our day-to-day existence?
Wikipedia is not without its critics. Some of the contentious arguments around Wikipedia can be found in Antipedia, an article by Anil Dash. Similarly, attempts to formulate resistance strategies against Wikipedia can be found at http://www.wikipedia-watch.org. A whole entry on Jason Scott’s issues with the Wikipedia article on swastika can be found here and a more technical analysis here.
These strategies illustrate how politically contentious our symbolic sphere is after all, and the seeming stability of our symbolic sphere, a closure of sorts, is actually a wound ready to be split open any moment. The symbolic sphere can, therefore, at any moment be severely intruded by the invasion of the “real”, which constantly shows us the periliousness of our existence, the seeming fruitlessness of our very living, which is characterised by depression of various sorts in our life. In effect, a plea for long-live Wikipedia is in fact our fragile plea to hang on to our life in all its illusory beauty. People love to get wikified.
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July 15th, 2009 at 8:09 AM
hello james,
thanks for a brilliant piece. here is my observation and maybe a criticism in disguise (not to be taken harshly, but in full sincerity of seriousness, i guess). i’ll have many more occasions to polish my viewpoint(s) through this symbolically real or really symbolic space!
I particularly liked the analysis that is so a-Freudian, as for Freud, the symbols worked not in the clear and distinct propositional language of law, judgment or the ego. They worked through the process of displacement and condensation in the unconscious. This is where Lacan differs with Freud, as for the former, the ‘symbolic’ embodies the normalized and the law, and the ‘real’ in turn embodies the powers of resistance.
But, when you say, the critique and escape from the ‘symbolic’ realm is not only difficult, as one might think, it is literally impossible, then I have a nuance here. If we take a closer look at the Zizek’s position, the ‘real’, unlike the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘imaginary’ escapes the order of representation altogether. Going by the above, I think, a non-conscious attempt at luring the ‘real’ (as critique and escape) with the ‘symbolic’ is made. This would send zizek into a labyrinth.
As a reference to ‘Derrida’ (surprisingly, he comes to rescue Zizek), the mention of rewriting the laws is made and I take it to be the real ‘real’, the resistance to the existing norms, a way to circumvent the aporia. This then is the space of the ‘real’, the space of frenzy, the space envisioned by not only Zizek, but also Bataille, the space of the death drive and not the sex drive (reproduction). This is the space of ‘meontology’, the pure nothingness of the void in the Other, the pure materialization of the void and the snapping with the symbolic order.
Therefore, the article favours the prerogative-ness of the real over the symbolic, albeit un-[consciously].
himanshu
July 15th, 2009 at 7:42 PM
Hello Himanshu,
Thanks for the reply. Critique of the symbolic realm is not an escape into “real”, and I do not think I have made such an assumption in the article. This is due to two reasons, one of which you have correctly identified: the “real” cannot be represented (one cannot escape into something which refuses representation). And the Lacanian triad (the imaginary, symbolic and real) is not some thing which exists independent of each other to facilitate such escapades into each other. They coexist and overlap each other, the reason why I have pointed at the sudden bouts of depression one experiences when one stares down the void, that is when one loses ‘faith’ in the symbolic. And I have not ventured to make such clear distinctions in the article either. For example, in the article, I have not clearly distinguished imaginary and symbolic.
Having said this, I have made an assumption of a “real” which is not a Lacanian “real”, but a Marxist “real”, in the article. This is in fact the subconscious of the article. For example, I have pointed out that Marxism tries to pose a critique to commodity fetishism to show us the use value of a commodity, thereby breaking down the entrenched social values of the symbolic space. Even while making such an assumption as a Marxist I am aware that the use value of Marxism is not the Lacanian real, but lies precisely at the symbolic realm itself. A Marxist can critique a Godrej chair and call it a piece of furniture whose primary function is to facilitate sitting, rather than produce the effect of vanity. But use value itself is symbolic, in the sense that language itself is symbolic, which facilitates us to call a piece of wood a chair. In this sense the critique of the symbolic space happens in the symbolic space itself and not as an escape into the Lacanian “real”. The escape is in fact into a radical rewriting of the symbolic itself.
At the same time Zizek has pointed out to an instability of this symbolic space, the realm of the big other, the law, in the post-modern age. This has resulted in two effects: one is the creation of a paranoia. The suspension of the big other results in the creation of several minor big others whom we paranoiacally assume to control us. The creation of the Muslim terrorist is such a paranoiac assumption. Paranoia creates the terrorist and not the other way round, as common sense suggests. The effect of the suspension of the big other also creates, identitarian claims in the form of Dalit assertions, minority assertions, various gender assertions etc. But what is paradoxically getting masked under the claims of the suspension of the big other is the overwhelming assertion and existence of the big other: capitalism.
Thus the ideological effect of capitalism is such that it creates the effect of the suspension of the big other when at the same time the reality of the big other gets overwhelming day by day. I wanted to point out the existence of the Google-Wikipedia nexus as such a symptom of the existence of this big other. The effect of the existence of capitalism as the big other exists in our identitarian claims as well. The reason why many Dalit intellectuals prefer capitalism over local culture or statist doles: for example, somebody like A.S Ajith Kumar in Keyboard: Facing the Music asserting the liberatory potential of a synthesiser over harmonium is such an ideological affect of capitalism.
Thank You,
James Michael
July 16th, 2009 at 12:29 AM
Dear James,
thank you for the reply. my further observation is as:
if the triad of the Lacanian/[s] are not separate entities allowing for the escapades into the other, but instead are the overlapping ones, then, where is the need to escape into the other? one is already dwelling in multiplicities and herein, i would correlate one’s acceptance of, say, capitalism, or the marxian notion of commodity fetishism. here, one would resist the symbolic, by, allow me to say this, fetishizing the real, a concept that you mention by the name of paranoia. now, the problem here is the aggrandising of the political, the praxis or the paranoia of the praxis, wherein the resistance to break away simply fails because one is basing oneself on the symbolic. a catch 22 or a catch between the blades of scylla and charybdis.
the creation of minor big others is a good way you have put it, but, then i feel this would relegate us to ever resisting, but ever elusive ‘real’. that is why i said the concept as aggrandizement of the political.
do we have a choice?
what about durkheimian idea of the symbolic as the conscience collective, to be dealt with deviance or the pathological through its exclusion.
hope to hear your viewpoints.
himanshu
July 16th, 2009 at 4:23 PM
Assuming that symbolic space is a big black hole in which both Zizek and Lacan have been entrapped with no way possible for escapades to a distinguishable patterns of light and thereby both Zizek and Lacan cry out in the name of Trinity. The symbolic assumes the Real and the body of each Other in the hell of darkness is fetishized by the Other and smell of sweat entrenches deeply producing greater anxieties of an emancipation from this nauseating time and being. The leaping desire launches a scathing insertion of Other into Other producing a meta-critique of paranoia while releasing tremendous energy and fissures the Selves into multiplicities of quotidian imaginary of insatiate orgasm, un-hitherto unaccomplished in the Ur-capitalist conditions of preaching and puking in the seminar rooms of global metropolis while disinfecting the libratory potential of an under-class of sahibterns of the third world academia who have self-helped to wither their cognitive apparatus which should have performed as wikified machine of academic accomplishment with an index to conceptual categories and names of prominent IMFL brands and proper mixtures of utopiac and hallucinatory ticklish substance that motivates the post-Linguistic Subject to approach an elusive Real………..
July 16th, 2009 at 6:22 PM
hello nagarjuna,
if only the assumption of their being trapped inside the blackhole could be true, they would not have reached the houeholds of cultural studies pundits so much so as they have. your writing style is so post-colonial critique type and this is a challenging (read only challenging) read (whether you intend it or not).
i liked the way you used the phrase meta-critique of paranoia and this is precisely what the unconscious does according to Lacan. it shows us the gap that neurosis re-creates a harmony; a real that may well not be determined. therefore, the paranoia and to be unable to escape the paranoia, the scathing critique.
lastly, iam reminded of a saying by Malone:
“the forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness”
himanshu
July 16th, 2009 at 6:28 PM
ha ha
You are partially right.
I did puke, but did not preach, in a seminar recently.
Love
James.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:14 PM
It is nice that Bobby has brought up ” google-wikipedia” nexus. This public-contributed equivalent to the Britannica Encyclopedia has its greatest strength as its weakness, namely the people who contribute to the articles.
Wikipedia represents the next level of advertisements. Imagine a “fair and lovely” commercial that would mix up scientific facts with irrational views to give a fake credibility to the product. This is precisely what they found out when they tracked the IP addresses of computers. Most frequent non-factual editing of details regarding companies and their products were done from PCs inside eminent MNCs.
But, on a positive note, however, the oversimplified scientific pieces on wikipedia have usupporting references for their articles and hence there is a little bit more credibility in these sections.
July 21st, 2009 at 9:28 AM
Thanks Anivar.
I have updated the link as per your suggestion.
Now the link will take the readers to the history page of the article where the original discussion can be found.
However, this proves that even the unconscious is not free of censorship from the cabals of power – this time the cliques that constitute the editors of Wikipedia. As far as your BBC links are concerned, the John Seigenthaler incident mentioned in your Better Than BBC link was the beginning of the end of editorial freedom in Wikipedia. The more stringent measures that were brought to ensure “consistency” has in fact resulted in powers getting restricted to a chosen few. I will just paste what Jason Scott has to say about this. The link to his analysis is there on my article. It is long, but pertinent. Here it is:
“…As we look at Wikipedia from the inside, towards these mechanisms that exist, that to me is the most fascinating aspect. Because again, because of Jimbo’s not wanting to directly control rules, except for, like I said, where he sets foot in, you end up with a mess like Seigenthaler. Seigenthaler is the third one, the publisher. He’s the one that everyone
knows.
Seigenthaler was a man who was a newspaper reporter, a newspaper publisher, worked with Robert Kennedy, had a long and distinguished career. Somebody put in an entry saying that he was suspected of shooting John F. Kennedy. Seigenthaler found out about it. Seigenthaler for some reason was pissed.
Seigenthaler did not do what Wikipedians had done from time immemorial. He did not go onto wikipedia and start editing, and join the big ball of fun. He went and published an article in USA Today, he took it out of town, and talked about this.
This broke Wikipedia. This broke Wikipedia deep, hard and fast, because while you may look at Wikipedia from the outside as being this way, it is inside an organisation. This broke Wikipedia. Friends of mine have gained access to Wikipedia’s internal help queue. They have an entire ticketing declaration for John Seigenthaler to handle any John Seigenthaler related issues.
See, because one of the things Jimbo didn’t really expect was the oncoming massive tidal wave of legality, legal threats and attacks. There is now an entry in Wikipedia … Wikipedia has a number of a declarations like I said, WP:NOT, which means Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not this, it’s considered to be this kind of an event.
Basically what happens is that as you become an administrator, you start to speak in code. This does two things, number one is that it makes it easier for you to talk to other adminstrators, and number two, it blocks out newbies, because they can’t speak the code. So instead, they kinda stay over in the back.
So for instance, there’s WP:BEANS. Somebody says “WP:BEANS”, it means “don’t stick beans in your nose”. What that means is, don’t tell people about stupid stuff that people could be doing in Wikipedia, because that just gives ideas and doesn’t forward the argument. So, someone will say “hey, WP:BEANS”. Well, if you’re a newbie, thanks.
There is now an entry called WP:OFFICE. What that is, is Wikipedia “front office”. That means that if you go to an article, Jimbo (and Jimbo has done this now on several dozen occasions that we can track), goes in, deletes something, and just says WP:OFFICE. Which means, I’m not going to tell you why I deleted it, I’m not going to discuss it, you are not to add to it, and nobody else can edit this except for me.
This organisation came in and threatened Jimbo. Jimbo decided to say “this article seems to lack neutral point of view. I am going to block it, apropos of nothing, outside of process, and we will work with them to come up with a more neutral article.” That was seven months ago, it’s been blank ever since. That’s the full entry about them. You can’t find history about them. You can’t find any of the edits that were made.
One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.
This may (still looking into it) this may be a violation of the GFDL that Wikipedia works under, where you are taking somebody’s work and just completely deleting it from view without … after they’ve submitted it, and you’ve made the change. That’s just easy. That’s an easy attack.
The more pressing thing is the fact that you have a situation where there is now an organisation working within Wikipedia, a smaller one, the administrators, the actual people, who previously should have made more firm rules finding themselves instead having to make in-the-dark, non-transparent rules…
Thanks,
James
July 21st, 2009 at 10:02 PM
James,
I feel you got my point wrong. I am not believing in celebrity status of anyone in a web 2.0 space. I evaluated it as FUD, based on Its Content. your quote says “WP:NOT, which means Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not this,” . It is a false statement. That can be only point out by linking the Wikipedia page. Same with Other quotes.In a hyper linked world false/out of context quotes can be easily easily countered by pointing the URL related to that. I hope you are not upset about that.
2 things are important here. One is looking at wikipedia as community process of building an on-line encyclopaedia & analysing its community practices.
second is looking at the role of Online hegemonic groups in knowledge creation. These groups are also present in wikipedia community . But they have to follow the rules/guidelines set by Wikipedia
Your article looks at impacts of second and ignores the importance of first. We need to select an approach like “Womenising Wikipedia” because change is only possible through continuous involving (As you can see on Talk:Nair page , i restored removal of the edit and warned that user) You can see a Better strategies and tactics of Fundamentalists at Talk:binayaksen page , we were fighting with them last 2 years to keep that page distorted by right wing fundamentalists.
If you are considering Wikipedia as a Gatekeeper like Google , we are limiting our space. Encyclopaedias are not only for research purpose.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:20 PM
For some time i have noticed that the advertisements which come in my gmail inbox are related to the content of my mails. Its not just at the subject line level, its as if somebody is reading my emails and trying to make sense of what it is about and then placing the advertisements (may be i am paranoid!!).
December 24th, 2010 at 11:44 AM
Is Wikipedia, fast occupying the space of the big other and is it determining our symbolic day-to-day existence? I will provide some leads through which one can even begin to analyse this phenomenon.In Enjoy Your Symptom:Lacan in Hollywood and out, Zizek demonstrate how cynical reason blinds the vision that we are living a lie. The enemy today in contrast to what media desperately trying to convince us is not the fundementalist but the cynic.In theory( in the academic practice of writing) deconstruct or analytically critique as much as you will and whatever you will, but in everyday life , play the predominant social game and enjoy the same symptom.In other words,one can project one’s own fascist arrogance and vehement persuasion over Wikipedia and use it in everyday life.So my question is very simple.What will happen when everyone is uploaded to the virutality of the virtual real, where mask is not understood as truth but mask. Real as virtual, virtual as real.