The answer, as we have seen, is the capacity of our embodied form of life to create reality through motor activity. However, the crucial point here—and this is what makes mixed reality so promising—is that this question did not need to be posed so long as perceptual experience (with only atypical exceptions) remained within a single experiential frame—so long, that is, as experience typically occurred within a single perceptual world as a coupling to a single form of extension or homogeneous outside.
This, it should be obvious, is precisely what has changed with mixed reality, understood as one of those events, dear to Walter Benjamin, where a quantitative amplification self-modifies into a qualitative difference.vi As the experiential correlate of contemporary technics, mixed reality comprises a norm determining what perception is in the world today. Put another way, today's mixed reality paradigm makes ubiquitous (specifically as a technical phenomenon) what we might think of as the experiential condition of mixed reality—that is, mixed reality as the condition for all real experience in the world today. In this function, mixed reality opens a domain of “transcendental sensibility" (Deleuze) or of the “sensible-transcendental" (Irigaray)9. This transcendental domain, paradoxically, is entirely within the empirical world, though invisible to traditional philosophical modes of capture, and deploys technics as its nonsupplementary core or “essence."
If, in a certain sense, mixed reality specifies how “media determine our situation"(following Friedrich Kittler's media-theoretical deepening of Foucault's epistemo-transcendental historiographylo), it does so in a way that foregrounds, not (as in Kittler) the autonomy of the technical, but precisely its opposite: the irreducible bodily or analog basis of experience which, we must add, has always been conditioned by a technical dimension and has always occurred as a cofunctioning of embodiment with technics. Here, the transcendental function of mixed reality as a specification (our contemporary specification) of technics is to stimulate or provoke the power of the body to open the world.vii
BODIES IN CODE
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