Despite this limitation, Caillois' account does in fact open the possibility for thinking psychasthenia through contemporary technics or, better, for thinking our technoculture as the catalyst of a positive form of psychasthenia. Indeed, when he characterizes psychasthenia as an organism's active “assimilation to the surroundings," Caillois opens up a very different genealogy of technics than that presented by Grosz (and Weiss). Rather than restricting the impact of contemporary technologies like VR to a prosthetic function (one that, as I have pointed out, effectively reduces VR to the status of disembodied simulation), Caillois' account of psychasthenia opens up the potentiality of technics—a potentiality that has always been part of the human—to modify not only the content of our lived experience but also our mode of living.
One hint of this potential comes by way of Caillois' interpretation of Eugène Minkowski's phenomenological analyses of pathological temporality, where what is at stake is a shift from vision to tactility—that is, from geometrical perception of space to embodied constitution of space through dynamic self-movement:
The magical hold ... of night and obscurity, the fear of the dark, probably also has its roots in the peril in which it puts the opposition between the organism and the milieu. Minkowski's analyses are invaluable here: darkness is not the mere absence of light; there is something positive about it. While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is "filled," it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence "the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light" ... Minkowski likewise comes to speak of dark space and almost of a lack of distinction between the milieu and the organism:" Dark space envelops me on all sides and penetrates me much deeper than light space; the distinction between inside and outside and consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are designed for external perception, here play only a totally modest role." (30)xxii
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