the online body breaks out? asence, ghosts, cyborgs, gender, polarity and politics

Online bodies, or cyber-bodies, seem to be constantly involved in issues of boundaries. This paper explores some of those issues. A brief outline of some offline boundary anxieties is given, such as being overwhelmed by germs, work or the foreign. It is then argued that boundaries online are even more porous and unclear. The term 'asence' is introduced to point to an existential anxiety about the ambiguities of being suspended between presence and absence. It is shown that asence and the problems around the sustaining of mood, explain some aspects of online life including flame, netsex, and the intensity of mourning. A sense of online presence may only be able to arise through asencing of the offline body and its discomforts. Ethnographic examples come from the Mailing List Cybermind. The vagueness of the virtual body is compared with other common western constructions of virtual bodies such as ghosts, and it is suggested that such constructions still have strength despite widespread cynicism about mind (online) and body (offline) splits. Computers seem to have become a place for haunting and disembodiment, which produces confusions when it becomes time to act offline. Other useful metaphors may not be able to be used. Haraway's model of the Cyborg is often claimed to overcome these problems, collapsing borders between human and machine, human and animal, sentient and non-sentient, female and male. However it seems to fail in these tasks because the cyborg myth has its own directions independent of our intentions, and this myth is directed by the discourse of techno-capitalism. It may prove more useful to strategically exaggerate oppositions, or to explore their ambiguities, than to dampen them by theoretical hybridisation.