{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":131,"pdf_page":144,"physical_index":144,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5547f29c2952b64aa8ce8d6b10f65cca7c5ef7ae95562efe3f50859629dde9a8"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"Linking psychasthenia to the ascent of the scientific world view and the representational ontology that Heidegger has analyzed, for example, in \"The Age of the World Picture,\" Caillois presents it as a shift in the economy of embodiment and representation that comprises any lived experience of space. In the modern world, his argument runs, it has become particularly difficult for the living organism (the human being) to maintain its unique (operational) perspective against the manifold impersonal descriptions of space and the general triumph of the observational perspective they advance.\n\nThus, despite the centrality he accords representation, Caillois presents a far more complex account of psychasthenia than is recognized by Olalquiaga and Grosz. For him, psychasthenia is, irreducibly, a multisensory existential problematic affecting the organism not at the level of its visually apprehended symbolic significance, but rather at the more primitive level of embodiment where the impact of the representational indifferentiation is actually lived. That is why Caillois concludes his analysis by characterizing insect mimicry as a \"sort of instinct of renunciation,\" an “inertia of the élan vital\" (32), and it is also why he can liken it to the Freudian death drive: to the extent that it decouples representation from action, psychasthenic mimicry marks a certain disempowering of the organism.xx On Caillois' account, then, the \"drama\" of psychasthenia is fundamentally a part of a larger existential drama, part of the continually evolving, systemic correlation of the organism with its environment.\n\nIt is, however, undeniable that Caillois presents psychasthenia as posing a well-nigh Heideggerian danger; indeed, he positions it as the rigorous consequence of the concrete technical achievement of the “age of the world picture.\" Far from being a necessary conclusion of his analysis, however, this analysis would appear to stem from his (again, well-nigh Heideggerian) fear of the contamination of thinking by technics.xxi He thus betrays his adherence to an ontology of the individual that cannot withstand the revelation, currently being expressed in full force by our digital culture, that the human has always been technical. Rather than allowing for a co-becoming of the individual and space, as contemporary ethology most certainly would and as our introduction of technics into Merleau-Ponty's final work demands, Caillois can only see the “generalization” of space as a threat to the autonomy of the individual. In psychasthenia, as he puts it, space “seems to be a devouring force\" (30). Caillois' limitation, in short, is his inability to give up the scientific world view, an inability that prevents him from seeing psychasthenia as a chance for a different conceptualization of the individual in its constitutive correlation with technics. That is why he is compelled, in the end, to thematize psychasthenia as a pathology of the visual register: \"the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space\" (30).\n\nEMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY\n\n131","previous_page":130,"next_page":132}