- VIRTUAL REALITY AS EMBODIED POWER OF IMAGING
The potential promise of second-generation virtual reality/mixed reality for rethinking culture through embodiment reverberates throughout Alain Millon'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 cyberculture" 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 anticipates 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, suffering, 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 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).
BODIES IN CODE
14