Insofar as they explicitly capitalize on the decoupling of vision from dynamic self-movement that occurs in psychasthenia, Char Davies' virtual environments proffer a very different understanding of the psychasthenic condition of contemporary technoculture. For the same reason, they sketch out a vastly divergent feminist intervention into the domain of virtual reality, one that, to the extent it celebrates the dissolution of the schematic differentiation of body and world together with the resulting “indivision" of the flesh, would seem to have far more resonance with the work of Irigaray than with that of Grosz.xix
Given our extended analysis in Chapter 1, it should come as little surprise that the crux of this understanding centers on the inadequacy of the body image as a basis for intercorporeity and, ultimately, for thinking the technical conditions for the indivision of the flesh as it constitutes the real condition for experience in our world today. Insofar as they aim to reverse the reduction of the body to the image—that is, to reassert the role of dynamic self-movement beneath any experience of the image, Davies' environments thus draw on another dimension of psychasthenia: namely, the way in which it facilitates a tactile experience of the body's interpenetration with the environment.
For this reason, Davies' environments call on us to read Roger Caillois' original description of psychasthenic mimicry against its later appropriation by a certain feminist project. For Caillois, psychasthenia comprises a disturbance first and foremost in embodiment; it marks the organism's inability to live its experience from its (operational) perspective—that is, from some space proper to it:
There can be no doubt that the perception of space is a complex phenomenon: space is indissolubly perceived and represented.... It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself. One can already recognize the characteristic scientific attitude and, indeed, it is remarkable that represented spaces are just what is multiplied by contemporary science. Finsler's spaces, Fermat's spaces, Riemann-Christoffel's hyperspace, abstract, generalized, open, and closed spaces, spaces dense in themselves, thinned out, and so on. The feeling of personality, considered as the organism's feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined; one then enters into the psychology of psychasthenia. (Caillois)19
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