At issue here is the status of psychasthenia itself. Does it operate through disembodiment—that is, through a dissolution of the self into the image? Or does it produce a more complex interlacing of the body and the environment that, in some sense, reflects the technical conditions for life in our world today? For Olalquiaga, as I have already implied, the former is the case. That is why, despite her recognition that psychasthenia involves a recursive correlation between organism and environment, she effectively narrows the register of this correlation to the domain of representation. It is also why her account perfectly instances the privileging of the visual we have just analyzed. Like virtual perception in the hands of the Gibson-inspired VR researchers, Olalquiaga reduces the entire spatial problematic of psychasthenia to a narrowly representationalist framework. On her account, psychasthenia is a disorder that takes place exclusively in the visual register, through an inability to preserve a distinct body representation (a body-image) in the face of the proliferation of representations in the environment.
Grosz's account of psychasthenia likewise hypostatizes the domain of vision and the problematic of representation. Thus, she contends that mimicry, the paradigmatic instance of self-environment dissolution (and the topic of Roger Caillois' 1934 paper on psychasthenia), "is not a consequence of space but rather of the representation of space." Psychasthenia, she continues, “is a response to the lure posed by space for subjectivity. The subject can take up a position only by being able to situate its body in a position in space, ... a point from which vision emanates’ (190–192).xvii Thus, in psychasthenia, "the primacy of the subject's own perspective is replaced by the gaze of another for whom the subject is merely a point in space, not the focal point organizing space" (193).
EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY
127