Japanese. “[Rei Toei] is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what […] they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood” (121). Existing only in the virtual world, Rei Toei is a database
composite created by information software. “And there were always rumors about Rez and different people. But that was people” (Gibson, Idoru 45). This marriage between an information construct and human flesh is obviously impossible and therefore questioned by Rez’s loyal staff, particularly by his head of security, Keith
Blackwell. The main character, Colin Laney, is hired as a computer analyst to investigate gossips surrounding Rez by Blackwell. In other words, Laney has to explain the idoru to him: the virtual idol’s appeal to her audience. In the meanwhile, a teenage girl, Chia McKenzie, is sent to Japan by the Seattle branch of the Rez’s band fan club to figure out whether the gossip of Rez and Rei Toei’s wedding is true.
Gibson’s Idoru focuses on the relevance of various urban settings in cyberspace and technological body modification. The novel features the near-future Tokyo where human and nonhuman beings interact through networks of computers link with both physical space and cyberspace. In cyberspace, characters create their own virtual personae with self-images to communicate with other people by various
computer-mediated communications. The hacker community “Walled City” is a virtual recreation of Hong Kong’s demolished Kowloon City. As Masahiko Mimura, an otaku who is one of the citizens in Walled City, explains the origin of this virtual community to the protagonist, Chia McKenzie:
“Walled City is of the net, but not on it. There are no laws here, only agreements.”
“You can’t be on the net and not be on the net,” Chia said, as they shot up a final flight of stairs.
“Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile—” (Gibson, Idoru 276)
Unlike the Internet, Walled City has “no laws, […] only agreements.” This virtual city is outside the rules enforced by the government. It begins with a “shared killfile,” a set of mechanisms to delete incoming messages that the users try to avoid, and then:
Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people
who founded [Walled City] were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn’t do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made something like a killfile of everything, everything they didn’t like, and they turned that inside out. (Gibson, Idoru 292)
Because of the high regulations and policed urban areas on the Internet, the users of the Internet create a virtual space which exists “of the net, but not on it.” They go there to get away from the laws. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder claims that because cyberspace as a database cannot appear to us without interfaces which open it up, the interface has a similar status to that of fantasy in Lacanian theory1 (Nusselder 5). Walled City, as a huge database, forms the basis of the worldview: the
representation or conceptualization of codified objects constitute the world which is accessible only through interfaces like video-goggles or tip-sets. According to
Nusselder, “The interface is the gate leading humans into cyberspace, connecting us to the matrix while simultaneously, because of its particular formations, still separating us from it as a whole” (4). As the crucial medium, the interface connects the human reality to the realm of virtuality. It is a virtual space that is not real but appears to be.
The interface immerses the user in this virtual environment. These interface objects, being digital and interactive, transcend familiar reality and offer the citizens of Walled City abilities to surpass the limits that the government imposed on them.
1 Lacan uses the three orders, the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, to analyze human reality. For Lacan, the real is not only opposed to the imaginary but also exterior to the symbolic. Fantasy as an inevitable medium for “interfacing” the inaccessible real and the world of imaginary depictions and symbolic representations that humans mentally live in. In virtual worlds, the virtual identities consist of both realistic and symbolic self-representations. Imaginary elements mediate the codified object and its representations which evinces a likeness to the model of the new media object (Nusselder 6). Therefore, just like Lacan regards the formation of an object to be mainly determined by the limitations of the human mind, Nusselder considers technological interfaces determine the appearance of an object. That is, humans create their virtual Selves with the interfaces of computer technologies.
Take the virtual version of Venice described in Idoru for another example. The user of the Sandbenders system software designs the theme and constructions of his/her own virtual utopia according to his/her preference. Chia uses her Sandbenders to design a virtual Venice that serves as an entertainment for her to deploy the free time. On the plane to Tokyo, Chia stays away from Maryalice, the blond woman sitting beside her, by sneaking into the virtual realm with her Sandbenders. “Chia picked up her glasses, slid them on, and hit big red. –My ass out of here. And it was.
There on the edge of her bed, looking at the Lo Rez Skyline poster” (Gibson, Idoru 42). As Chia puts her glasses on and hits the “big red,” she leaves her physical existence on the plane. The glasses become an interface which projects Chia’s consciousness onto cyberspace. Her consciousness enters her virtual room, a simulated realm reproduced based on her bedroom in reality. Cyberspace may function as the utopic, wish-fulfilling ideal world. At the beginning of this chapter, I quote Gibson’s description of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” from his
Neuromancer. His statement signifies that we cannot detach the fantasies
accompanying computer technologies from desire. In Nusselder’s opinion, we should stop considering cyberspace as an objective fact or objective information. Instead, cyberspace is “a product of human imagination, in which we use known metaphors for a new domain of information and communication” (Nusselder 17). In virtual spaces, the user’s self-representation consists of imaginary and symbolic elements.
For instance, an image of face or body with spoken language represents the user as his/her virtual self. Yet, Nusselder questions that whether this virtual self is still related to the self in reality (6). Because the avatar consists both of self-images and symbolic elements of self-representaton, this virtual persona exists as not merely a duplication of the real but an inevitable formation of it. With his interpretation of
Lacan, Nusselder considers the virtual persona to be related to the real just like the fantasy formation is related to the real. Gibson portrays a society relating to
cyberspace in which most of the characters upload their consciousness. As a mediated space, cyberspace connects the user’s body to the computer. With the digital
technology as an extension of our mental and bodily functions, humans transcend reality limitations and reconnect an enormous playground for us to gain pleasure from imaginary scenes.
However, cyberspace could be an imaginary illusion of false appearance alienating operators from the reality. With respect to space, cyberspace brings a physical elsewhere into the physical presence of the user, and offer the possibility of actually acting in that virtual space (Nusselder 50). Thus, Nusselder questions what is real and what is virtual: is the user here, at the place where s/he sits (body); or is the user there, at the place from which s/he see (mind)? As a medium to let the user perceive in a virtual elsewhere, cyberspace shows that digitization can radically cause a discontinuity between humans and the surrounding world, as well as between body and mind (50). This illusion of an experience of “being there” blurs the boundaries between the reality and virtual worlds. One example is Gibsonian cyberspace, Walled City, which provides a sociologically coherent dystopic vision of a near future. As revealed in the narrative of Idoru, “Walled City is of the net, but not on it” (Gibson,
Idoru 276). The virtual world is a portrayal of fantasy but it is not being solely an
imaginary illusion. In Freudian theory, fantasy functions as a recovery of the lost by producing a substitutive experience of satisfaction. Lacan follows Freud’s basic notion that fantasy is normally an essential support of desire (Lacan 186). For humans, modern technology substitutes for shortcomings on the biological or natural plane. In order to fulfill human needs and desires, media technologies that seek to overcomedistances and close the distinction between the virtual and the real world replace the real by a simulated version. Humans might forget the defensive function of the screen, and too easily take the real as a given within easy reach (Nusselder 7). Within
Gibsonian cyberspace, the user experiences where s/he knows that what s/he is seeing is only a virtual space, but nevertheless s/he experiences it as a fully realized world.
From a Baudrillardian perspective, cyberspace presents a form of hyperreality: “That which was previously mentally projected, which was lived as a metaphor in the terrestrial habitat is from now on projected entirely without metaphor, into the
absolute space of simulation” (Baudrillard, Ecstasy 16). In hyperreality, the concept of the reality as an object of representation no longer sustains, because fantasy and reality are indistinguishable. The transference from the real to the hyperreal leads to the collapse of the distinctions between subject/object and reality/representation by means of technological simulation. In other words, the subject leaves all of the embodied bounds of material worlds behind, and then enters a virtual world in which
“the subject is neither the one nor the other; it is merely the Same” (Baudrillard,
Transparency 22). Considering Lacanian perspective in Baudrillard’s description of
hyperreality, Gibsonian cyberspace can be translated as a desire for a realized fantasy of the escape from the embodied limitations. For example, Masahiko lives in this“multi-user domain. It is his obsession. Like a drug. He has a room here. He seldom leaves it. All his working hours he is in Walled City” (Gibson, Idoru 116). Walled City functions in cyberspace as a psychological space. The mental realm of the
human-computer interface turns people entering cyberspace into cyborgs, because these people depend on technological devices for their online lives. That is, people not only employ avatars to interact but also to “dwell” in virtual spaces (Henthorme 70).
The user invests part of himself in the virtual worlds. He is not only attracted toward
the utopian freedom from the physical body but also threatened by the possibility of a denial of the self.
Virtual Bodies in Idoru
This section borrows the term “companion species” conceptualized in Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet and critically regards virtual identities, like idoru Rei Toei, as companion species. As we saw in previous chapter, “companion species”
originally refers to the co-constitutive link between humans and companion animals.
Haraway examines the evolutionary biology history by studying how the other species are linked to humans as our helpers, workers or companions. She urges that we need companion species to constitute ourselves as humans since we are historically and presently entwined with the evolution and environments. That is, humans define ourselves through which we differ. Similarly, humans share a lot of history, events and spaces with our virtual identities since the invention of the Internet. Looking at social network identities or software agents in VR as autonomous beings, one can see the way we co-inhabit and co-evolve. Humans can engage with the virtual world and with other users by linking their physical bodies to their digital ones. According to
Haraway, “companion species” also indicates webbed bio-social-technical apparatuses of humans, animals, artifacts, and institutions in which particular ways of being emerge and are sustained (When 134). She uses this term as an alternative category to the cyborg and other living beings labeled “posthumans.” In Gibson’s Idoru, various kinds of nonhuman beings such as virtual idols and software agents offer a radical rethinking of relationship and co-presence between humans and all significant others.
Thus, I would like to regard virtual identities in Idoru as companion species and explore how to readjust the boundary between humanity and other nonhumans.
Further, Haraway poses a fundamental challenge to the anthropocentric model of subjectivity and experience. In Haraway’s opinion, “there are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends” (Haraway,
Companion 6). This statement shows her thought of the anti-anthropocentric concept
that “subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders are the products of their relating” (7). According to Cary Wolfe, both animal studies and disability studies rethink questions of subjectivity, bodily experience, mental life, intersubjectivity, and the ethical and even political changes in light of new knowledge about the lifeexperiences of nonhuman animals and the disabled (Wolfe xxix). These studies not only reformulate the question of the knowing subject and the disciplinary paradigms, but revisit the relationship between nonhumans and humans. Wolfe takes Temple Grandin’s case as an example to denaturalize many of the taken-for-granted modes of human perception and experience. In Temple Grandin’s case, disability becomes a unique form of “abledness” in opening up transspecies modes of identification, and thus discloses the underlying models of subjectivity that ground the dominant discourses in disability studies (136). To use Derrida’s insistence, “there is not one opposition between man and non-man; there are, between different organizational structures of the living being, many fractures, heterogeneities” (Derrida 66). Animal studies and disability studies direct us toward the necessity of posthumanist studies.
Gibson redefines the conception of what the virtual idol is like. From analyzing her appearance and the way she interacts with humans, I think Rei Toei represents a new form of being surpassing the boundary not only between humans and nonhumans but also between the organic and the technical. Colin Laney, the main protagonist, is hired to investigate into the rumor saying that Rez the rock star wants to marry an information construct called Idoru. What Laney has anticipated the idoru’s appearance
is that
it had been as some industrial –strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. That was usually the way in Hollywood, and the formula tended to be even more rigid, in the case of software
agents—eigenheads, their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity. (Gibson, Idoru 229)
This anticipation of the virtual idol’s appearance suggests an underlying narrative of conservative view points of sexuality and gender. Humans create virtual idols or animated computer creations to serve as singers or catwalk models. These virtual idols are designed by computer programmers to simulate human female idols with slender figures and tender personalities in order to match consumer preferences of nowadays.
Designed as a corporate commodity by the male software programmers, the virtual idol becomes a digital representation of an ideal figure for male in popular culture.
That is usually the way when it comes to portraying the virtual idol. Take the virtual idol in the film S1m0ne (2002)2 for example. Viktor Taransky, the protagonist,
happens to get a computer program and uses it to create a computer-generated woman, Simone. Viktor seamlessly incorporates Simone into the film to give a fantastic
performance, exactly controlled by him. And the movie immediately achieves remarkable success. With his adroit manipulation of the mass media, Viktor successfully makes Simone an ideal actress that everyone adores. He cheats the audience into purchasing Simone’s albums, various types of derivative products and
2 S1m0ne is a science-fiction film directed by Andrew Niccol. In this film, the protagonist, Viktor Taransky, experiments with a software inheriting from a programmer and uses it to create a virtual actress, Simone. With a high-tech computer and his careful manipulation of the mass media, Viktor successfully makes Simone, being really good at acting and singing, a wonderful idol. He cheats the crowd into buying Simone’s album, various types of derivative products and even Simone’s live performance ticket. In the end of the movie, Viktor faces the dilemma of achieving both fame and wealth as the manager of a big star or revealing the truth that Simone is not a human being but only a computer program.
even her live performance tickets. Viktor disguises the virtual idol as an artificial image performing a media career in ways according to the demands of the managers.
As this brief summary suggests, while Viktor disguises the virtual idol as an artificial image performing a media career in ways according to the demands of the managers, the existence of this modern android blurs the boundaries between the biological body and the artificial body. However, Rei Toei is nothing like the usual virtual idol as represented in S1m0ne. Laney’s first face-to-face experience of the idoru conjures up a totally different image from those usual synthespians in Hollywood. Laney
describes his first sight of Rei Toei as the following:
Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast. […] In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations.
[Laney] saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon. The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk. (Gibson, Idoru 230) From the idoru’s image, Laney recalls an ancient landscape and legendary echoes which have no obvious connection with its cyberworld (Cavallaro 79). Laney sees more clearly as the light of Rei Toei’s face reflects in the lenses as he seats himself next to her. Rei Toei is “[a] hologram. Something generated, animated, projected”
(Gibson, Idoru 231). Such description suggests that information of Rei Toei’s body is mediated by a projection. Rei Toei is a database composite carrying traces of a personal history. As Laney describes, “[Rei Toei] is not flesh; she is information. She
is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative” (233). This virtual idol is not only an artificial intelligence, but an architectonic system of
information and data. That is, Rei Toei’s cyberbody flows in a world of temporal and spatial dislocation. Though Rei Toei lacks flesh, Laney can see clearly her hands and the way she eats:
Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei, and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was simultaneously veiled with a flawless
Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei, and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was simultaneously veiled with a flawless