With this conclusion, we are now in a position to fathom how the mixed reality paradigm (together with the second generation of virtual reality technologies that comprise its technical support) contributes to a revalued conceptualization of the body. With its picture of an originarily technical organismic perspective, this paradigm effectively repudiates all externalist accounts of the body, including constructivist theories that have recently held sway in critical discourse. It thus offers an affirmative model of bodily agency that conceives of the embodied organism's constitutive coupling with the social (paradigmatically, the technically mediated world of images, including linguistic images) in a fundamentally different manner than does (for example) Judith Butler's theory of performative iteration. The latter, in the final instance, subordinates the agency of the body (the force of iteration) to the content of the social images that following the paradoxical operation of (linguistic) performativity, open up the space of its exercise.xiv
On the mixed reality paradigm, by contrast, coupling with the domain of social images occurs from within the operational perspective of the organism and thus comprises a component of its primordial embodied agency. One crucial consequence of this difference is the principle of indirection, loosely modeled on the autopoietic principle of organizational closure. This principle states that the organism undergoes change by reorganizing in reaction to external perturbation.
More precisely, because external images (including ones that are fantasized, i.e., of endogenous origin, as well as other images explicitly “from the operational perspective") have an impact on the organism as part of its primordial operation, they cannot be said to modify the organism directly (they do not comprise an informational input). Rather, they affect the organism indirectly, through the self-reorganization it undergoes in response to perturbation from the outside. Therefore, operating beneath the complex reappropriation of social images that Butler conceptualizes as performativity is a yet more primordial level of bodily, or organismic, processing. The latter forms nothing less than the enabling transcendental—the technical-transcendental—structure for the effects that Butler describes.
INTRODUCTION
13