Forging such a cultural image of the body is crucial if we are to forestall the instrumentalization of the body and all that follows from it, above all the foreclosure of being-with or the finitude of our form of life.x Far from being a mere “instrument” or the first “medium” (as some versions of posthumanism allegexvi), the body is a primordial and active source of resistance; indeed, it is as resistance—as the “living expression of something simultaneously organization and obstacle to its organization"—that the body forms the source of excess supporting all levels of constitution (or individuation), from the cellular to the cosmic.xvii As source of excess, the body possesses a flexibility that belies any effort, such as that of cybercultural criticism (and behind it, of cultural constructivism), to reduce it to a passive surface for social signification. The body is, affirms Millon, an entity that becomes a person, a creative subject, a being or an individual according to the circumstances" (59).
As a technology that lays bare the enabling constraints of the body (that is, the body's necessity), virtual reality comprises our culture's privileged pathway for laying bare mixed reality as a technical-transcendental structure, which is equally to say, for exposing the technical element that lies at the heart of embodiment. To see why, let us turn to a pair of mixed reality works that correlate the contemporary generalization of psychasthenia—the confusion of the organismic with the representational and the ensuing exposure of imaging as a dimension of the organism—with the concrete context of virtual reality technologies.
In Rigid Waves and Liquid Views, Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss present two technical mirrors for the self which function less to reflect the social gaze than to potentialize technical vision as a dimension of organismic being. Both works engage the myth of Narcissus and Echo to undermine the autonomy and closure of the visual register; to do so, both specifically, though differentially, interrogate the act of disappropriation and disembodiment involved in the “mirror image (and also in the psychoanalytic interpellation it supports—namely, Lacan's famous “mirror stage"). The first work, Rigid Waves (1993), reproduces the apparatus of the mirror image only to decouple self and reflection (see Figure 0.2). As the artists explain, Rigid Waves
INTRODUCTION
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