rethinking culture through embodiment reverberates throughout Alain Mil-lon’s recent discussion of the role of the body in media environments. Indeed, according to Millon, it is “across the virtual body that our culture constructs its own body image.” That is why the conceptualization of the virtual body is a directly political issue, one that will determine not only the image but also the degree of agency our culture is willing to accord the body.
By postulating an opposition between “the cyberbody of cyber-culture” and the “virtual body of computer modelization,” the body
“supposedly liberated from spatiotemporal constraints” and the body
“immersed in these limits,” Millon is able to specify the terms in which the externalist–internalist distinction comes to inhabit virtual reality, and, through it, the world itself (9). Thus, he asks:
Is the virtual body simply a body without a corporeal envelop, a body without weakness, a body of pleasure without desire, in the end, a body without life? Isn’t it rather a body in power, a body that antici-pates all the forms but also all the thoughts to come, a body that furnishes the opportunity to pose the question of the person and its status, but also of its proper limit? (15)
Ultimately at stake in this questioning and in the distinction it supports are the irreducibility and priority of interior life, of the primordial organism, of the operational perspective. Millon makes this clear when he claims that the body “is not an envelop but an aggregate in which desire, suffer-ing, and need find their place” (40); the body, he writes, forms an “obstacle and a resistance to all forms of transparence” and is living only “when it is opaque, complex, confused, flexible, and in perpetual mutation” (16).
“In this perspective,” he continues, “if there is a need for a liberation of the body, it is uniquely to affirm a more powerful interior life, all the while continuing to understand that the body remains … a presence” (40).
It is precisely the primordial operation of the organism that is at stake in the cultural debates surrounding the virtual body and it is entirely to Millon’s credit that he understands this to be of direct concern to the social and cultural significance accorded the body: “The analysis of the virtual body … thus participates in a more global reflection on the manner in which our culture understands the body … [and] especially the way in which … it constructs a singular image of this body.” Here, virtual reality is shown to comprise a chance for our culture to affirm
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the body as the primordial agency that it is, one that, as we have seen, includes imaging as part of its constituting power. The analysis of the virtual body thus constructs an “object that is a dense and opaque body, a body that has its limits and its weaknesses, an intimate body and one that, especially, refuses transparence and total clarity [netteté]” (18).
Forging such a cultural image of the body is crucial if we are to fore-stall the instrumentalization of the body and all that follows from it, above all the foreclosure of being-with or the finitude of our form of life.xv Far from being a mere “instrument” or the first “medium” (as some versions of posthumanism allegexvi), the body is a primordial and active source of resistance; indeed, it is as resistance—as the “living expression of some-thing simultaneously organization and obstacle to its organization”—that the body forms the source of excess supporting all levels of constitution (or individuation), from the cellular to the cosmic.xvii As source of excess, the body possesses a flexibility that belies any effort, such as that of cyber-cultural criticism (and behind it, of cyber-cultural constructivism), to reduce it to a passive surface for social signification. The body is, affirms Millon,
“an entity that becomes a person, a creative subject, a being or an indi-vidual according to the circumstances” (59).
As a technology that lays bare the enabling constraints of the body (that is, the body’s necessity), virtual reality comprises our culture’s privileged pathway for laying bare mixed reality as a technical–tran-scendental structure, which is equally to say, for exposing the technical element that lies at the heart of embodiment. To see why, let us turn to a pair of mixed reality works that correlate the contemporary generaliza-tion of psychasthenia—the confusion of the organismic with the repre-sentational and the ensuing exposure of imaging as a dimension of the organism—with the concrete context of virtual reality technologies.
In Rigid Waves and Liquid Views, Monika Fleischmann and Wolf-gang Strauss present two technical mirrors for the self which function less to reflect the social gaze than to potentialize technical vision as a dimension of organismic being. Both works engage the myth of Narcis-sus and Echo to undermine the autonomy and closure of the visual reg-ister; to do so, both specifically, though differentially, interrogate the act of disappropriation and disembodiment involved in the “mirror image”
(and also in the psychoanalytic interpellation it supports—namely, Lacan’s famous “mirror stage”). The first work, Rigid Waves (1993), reproduces the apparatus of the mirror image only to decouple self and reflection (see Figure 0.2). As the artists explain, Rigid Waves
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transforms the acoustic mirroring of Narcissus and Echo into visual form. Narcissus gives up his body to his mirror image.
The “self ” becomes another (body). His own movements are only an illusionary echo. As the observer approaches the mirror, he is confronted with a mirror image that does not correspond to his normal perception of things. He sees himself as an impres-sion, as a body with strangely displaced movement sequences and, ultimately, as an image in the mirror that smashes as soon as he comes too close. He is unable to touch himself. A small camera hidden in the picture frame is used to place the observer in the image. The computer-controlled projection surface is controlled by an algorithm that calculates the distance to the observer. Rigid Waves is a virtual mirror which does not ref lect but rather recog-nizes. Sight and movement, approaching and distance are triggers for the unusual images. This is an attempt to see oneself from the outside, to stand side by side with oneself and to discover other, hidden “selfs.” In this fractured mirror, we are able to find our-selves, our “self ” has been liberated. But how will I ever recognize myself again?14
Figure 0.2Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Rigid Waves (1993), digital interactive work that disjoins the mirror image from the self, thus free-ing “autonomous” self-images. (Courtesy of the artists.)
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Rigid Waves operates a disjunction of self from mirror image or, rather, of mirror image from self, thereby replacing the integrationist operation of mirror identification with the disintegrationist creation of autonomous self-images—images of the self unstuck from the self they image. The mobile spectator is empowered to control the changes the image under-goes, but cannot coincide visually with the image (because movement generates distortion) or touch the image (because proximity causes the image to shatter into pieces).
Situating perception between two perceptual limits (the distance required to see, on the one hand, and the distance required to touch, on the other), Rigid Waves thus liberates the self, as the artists proclaim, in an act of dispossession that leaves motility as compensation for loss of visual mastery. Their anxious query—“How will I ever recognize myself again?”—expresses the structure of transcendence inherent in motility as an existential dimension of human being. Because movement always displaces the self, thus preventing it from coinciding with itself, move-ment can only provisionally—or, perhaps better, only partially—com-pensate for the loss of visual identification.
Not surprisingly, the second installation, Liquid Views: The Vir-tual Mirror of Narcissus (1993), aims to complete this compensation (See Figure 0.3). It does so by coupling motility (specifically, tactile motility) directly with the deformation of the mirror image so that the
Figure 0.3Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Liquid Views (1993), digital interactive work that confronts the viewer with the scattering of his or her image. (Courtesy of the artists.)
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viewer never loses control over the disintegration of the (self-)image.
Thus, if Rigid Waves works to unfasten the self-image from the self (and vice versa), Liquid Views proffers a compensatory interface that reasserts—albeit, on radically different sensory terms—the embodied viewer’s control over the body-image correlation. Again, let us allow the artists to describe the work:
The central theme of Liquid Views is the well in which Narcissus discovers his reflection. He initially sees water as someone else, as another body. Like the small child in the various “mirror stages”
described by Lacan, he decides to recognize his fictive body as him-self. This installation has the objective of arousing the observer’s curiosity and seducing him to undertake actions that bring him into contact with his senses.… Instead of pressing keys and buttons, the observer must experiment with his own sense of touch.… Attracted by the sounds of water and a room of shimmering lights, the visitor approaches the virtual well. Seeing the image of himself he is tempted to touch it. Touching the image with his fingertip, the image in the water breaks up. Drawn by the sensation triggered by touching his own image in the water, the observer immerses himself in the situa-tion. (Fleischmann and Strauss, “Images”)
What is striking about the experience of Liquid Views is that the image’s scattering, far from ending engagement (as we might expect), in fact catalyzes a transition to another realm—to the realm of the disinte-grated image. That is precisely why Fleischmann depicts the installation as an effort to open the access to the self closed up by Narcissus’ “drown-ing in himself”: “The central theme is the transition from the upper to the lower world…. The Narcissus of the media age is watching the world through a liquid mirror that questions our normal perception.”15 If this means that the “mirror becomes the actor,” it acts necessarily in conjunction with the embodied spectator, whose immersion in the situ-ation is enabled by the self-reflexivity characteristic of touch as the most primordial of the senses, as the root of premodal sensation.
The spectator’s touch—touch as trigger for the image’s scattering—mate-rializes the power of imaging qua dimension of organismic being. Trans-formed from an external, visual image of the self into an internal correlate of the organism’s imaging potentiality, the mirror of Liquid Views thus com-prises what Fleischmann and Strauss call an “unsharp interface,” an opera-tor of the fusion of realms constitutive of the mixed reality paradigm: “The interface is not interpreted as such. It goes unnoticed and is not consciously perceived. These natural references turn Liquid Views and Rigid Waves into virtual reality.” (Fleischmann and Strauss, “Images”)
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What makes these two works singular in the present context is the way that they support the opening of virtual reality not as a technical apparatus enabling some prescripted play, but rather as a technically triggered experience of the organism’s power of imaging, an experience of imaging as an inherently technical, originary element of the organism’s being. Here virtual reality is not built on a virtual reality support, so each work must produce the virtual; and because they can only do so through the interaction they trigger, we can rightly conclude that human experience actualizes the virtual potential of these art works.
Accordingly, what these works add to the expression of Hawkinson’s Blindspot is the direct incorporation of the concrete technologies sup-porting mixed reality: together, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views facilitate a comprehension on the part of the observer that his or her engagement with virtual reality technology is the contemporary manifestation of what can only be an originary correlation with technics.xviii
Commenting on an earlier work, Fleischmann and Strauss describe the transition from (external) image to (internal) imaging power, from the observational to the operational perspective, that informs such a comprehension. This transition renders their mixed reality works allego-ries of mixed reality as the minimal condition of phenomenalization:
While the observer is only the onlooker, this “looking” is a kind of movement. It embodies “active observation.” From a certain moment when the observer becomes immersed in the action, his “passive onlooking” is replaced by “active observation.” The observer dis-covers that he—and not the artist—is the one creating the situation.
When the situation changes and the observer becomes a player, he suddenly begins to identify himself with the situation. Observation becomes more than merely consumption.16
By catalyzing a coincidence of observational and operational perspec-tives, virtual reality artwork, as Fleischmann and Strauss describe it, perfectly captures the transformation at issue in the recuperation of imaging as a fundamental, existential power. When observation ceases to be consumption, imaging takes its proper place within the organism’s primordial operation as a general condition of phenomenalization.
Contrasted with Hawkinson’s Blindspot, therefore, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views expand the agency of the operational perspective because they directly incorporate the concrete technologies support-ing mixed reality. More precisely, by placsupport-ing the organism into rela-tion with the image as a dimension of its operarela-tion and by supporting
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the disjunction between embodiment and imaging (i.e., the otherness and the disintegrating function of the image), Rigid Waves and Liquid Views facilitate the actualization of the organism’s potential to extend its bodily boundaries and to expand the scope of its bodily agency.
What is then singular about these two works as exemplars of digital art and as mediators for digital culture is their use of the concrete tech-nology of virtual reality to stage a disconnection of the (fundamentally motile) body schema from the (fundamentally visual) body image. In the experience of Rigid Waves and Liquid Views, the viewer is technically enabled to utilize the excess of the body schema over the body image to increase his agency as an embodied being.
Such technical mediation of the body schema (of the scope of body–
environment coupling) comprises what I propose to call a “body-in-code.” By this I do not mean a purely informational body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body. I mean a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorial-ization—a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics. As I shall argue in this study, it is precisely through the vehicle of bodies-in-code that our contemporary techno-culture, driven by digital technologies, comes to constitute a distinct concrete phase in our contemporary technogenesis (our originary yet historico-technically differentiated coevolution with technics).
Indeed, if we take the experience of Rigid Waves and Liquid Views as exemplary of this phase, we can immediately comprehend how digital technologies, as the contemporary expression of the originary technical mediation of the human, broaden what we might call the sensory com-mons—the space that we human beings share by dint of our constitutive embodiment. This is because digital technologies:
1. Expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity; and thereby 2. Markedly broaden the domain of the prepersonal, the
organ-ism–environment coupling operated by our nonconscious, deep embodiment; and thus
3. Create a rich, anonymous “medium” for our enactive co-belonging or “being-with” one another; which thereby
4. Transforms the agency of collective existence (of individual and collective individuation, to use French philosopher of technol-ogy Gilbert Simondon’s terminoltechnol-ogy) from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only pro-visionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation.
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To think of the body as a body-in-code, then, is simultaneously to think of human existence as a prepersonal sensory being-with. As we will see, this is largely responsible for the promise of the digital, understood not as some autonomous moment in the history of technology but rather, first and foremost, as a stage in the ongoing technogenesis of the human.
To conceptualize this particular stage of our technogenesis—and the particular technical expansion of prepersonal bodily function that digital technologies facilitate—we will need to draw extensively on phil-osophical and psychological exploration of the “body schema” and the skin as a generalized sense organ. We will also need to develop a funda-mentally or “essentially” technical phenomenology of the body, one that takes as its primary task the elucidation of the originary technical basis of embodied experience. Part I of my study is devoted to this task. Not surprisingly, it progresses through and attempts to update the work of Maurice Merleau–Ponty, the phenomenologist most committed to the ontological dimension of (human) embodiment.
The discussion begins with two crucial and interrelated concepts of Merleau–Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception—namely, the abso-lute priority of the phenomenal body (largely akin to the operational perspective of the organism) and the primary role accorded bodily motility (i.e., the body schema) in the constitution of a systemic cou-pling between organism and environment. The argument ultimately aims to conceptualize a technics on the basis of (and adequate to) the chiasmic correlation of being and world that forms the heart of Merleau–Ponty’s final unfinished project, as documented particularly in The Visible and the Invisible and Nature. In contrast to the clearly delineated (and still subordinate or secondary) dimension of technics associated with Merleau–Ponty’s exploration of motor intentional-ity in the Phenomenology (a dimension famously telescoped in the example of the blindman’s stick), such a technics must be capable of supporting—of being—the medium of human individual and collec-tive individuation.
The theoretical argument of Part I gives way in Part II to a logic of singular exemplarity. In the four chapters of this section, theoretical analysis will be made immanent to sustained exploration of notable instances of digital culture—singular instances in which a “body-in-code” functions to open the digital as a medium of prepersonal common-ality. In line with our effort to restore virtuality as an originary technical element of human being and to expose mixed reality as its contemporary phenomenological dimension, these four chapters will implicitly narrate
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a progression backwards from the most artificial (and narrow) concep-tion of virtual reality to the most natural (and broad) concepconcep-tion.
Thus these chapters will move from the brilliantly unconventional virtual environments of artist Char Davies (Chapter 2) to the imaginary reality of fiction as exemplified in Mark Danielewski’s recent novel, House of Leaves (Chapter 5). The Internet as the medium for contem-porary community (Chapter 3) and architectural space as a predigital and originary mixed reality (Chapter 4) will instance two intermediary points along the continuum connecting these poles. Singly and as well as a whole, these Chapters will “exfoliate” crucial aspects of the essentially analog basis of the virtual that necessarily installs it, to recall Massu-mi’s argument, as the vehicle for any (concrete) technical contribution (including that of the so-called digital) to our ongoing and constitutive technogenesis.
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