Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

At issue here is the status of psychasthenia itself. Does it operate through disembodiment—that is, through a dissolution of the self into the image? Or does it produce a more complex interlacing of the body and the environment that, in some sense, reflects the technical conditions for life in our world today? For Olalquiaga, as I have already implied, the former is the case. That is why, despite her recognition that psychasthenia involves a recursive correlation between organism and environment, she effectively narrows the register of this correlation to the domain of representation. It is also why her account perfectly instances the privileging of the visual we have just analyzed. Like virtual perception in the hands of the Gibson-inspired VR researchers, Olalquiaga reduces the entire spatial problematic of psychasthenia to a narrowly representationalist framework. On her account, psychasthenia is a disorder that takes place exclusively in the visual register, through an inability to preserve a distinct body representation (a body-image) in the face of the proliferation of representations in the environment.

Grosz's account of psychasthenia likewise hypostatizes the domain of vision and the problematic of representation. Thus, she contends that mimicry, the paradigmatic instance of self-environment dissolution (and the topic of Roger Caillois' 1934 paper on psychasthenia), "is not a consequence of space but rather of the representation of space." Psychasthenia, she continues, “is a response to the lure posed by space for subjectivity. The subject can take up a position only by being able to situate its body in a position in space, ... a point from which vision emanates’ (190–192).xvii Thus, in psychasthenia, "the primacy of the subject's own perspective is replaced by the gaze of another for whom the subject is merely a point in space, not the focal point organizing space" (193).

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Like Olalquiaga, Grosz sees in psychasthenia a perfect figure for the contemporary technologized lifeworld or, to cite her more descriptive terminology, for the “deceptive simulations" of cyberspace. Insofar as it names a disturbance in the subject's capacity to differentiate itself representationally from its environment, psychasthenia marks a danger of contemporary culture—one that, for Grosz at least, has profound implications for the way in which gender has been written out of considerations of contemporary technological culture and, specifically, of virtual reality.

If psychasthenia is a danger in this sense (a danger endemic to our technoculture that is differentially experienced by differently gendered subjects), the reason is that it compromises the function of the body image as a mediator between self and world, body and environment, subject and space. Unable to represent one's position in space, and thus one's being, the psychasthenic subject suffers a kind of visuai objectification: it becomes a mere point in a space projected by another.

Less obvious than the gender politics underwriting this understanding, however, is the prosthetic model of technics that lies behind it. For Grosz, as for Gail Weiss following in her wake, the body image functions to couple the subject and its biosocial environment and thus forms the proximate agent of any prosthetic modification of the human body. It is

the condition of the subject's capacity not only to adapt to but also to become integrated with various objects, instruments, tools, and machines. It is the condition of the body's inherent openness and pliability to and in its social context.... It is the condition that enables us to acquire and use prosthetic devices (glasses, contact lenses, artificial limbs, surgical implants) in place of our sense organs.18

By insisting on the primacy of the body-image in mediating the interchange between subject and environment, Grosz ends up advancing a very conservative view of prosthetics: effectively, technological enhancements like virtual reality goggles (not to mention those she enumerates in the passage cited previously) can only have an impact on experience insofar as they are mediated by the body image. There is, for Grosz, no question that technological prosthetics might actually modify the way in which the senses work and, subsequently, the way in which the body experiences sensation; rather, as she puts it, prosthetic devices function in place of our sense organs" as the vehicle of a substitute set of data for the body-image to compute.

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Grosz's model thus remains incapable of accounting for any but the most straightforward deployments of VR technology (i.e., those in which the "coordinates" of the body-image are in no way disturbed) Likening the “deceptive simulation" of cyberspace to the "dysfunctional breakdown" of psychosis, Grosz positions psychasthenia as a purely negative condition, one that can only demarcate the limits of bodily experience rather than opening up its potential technical transformation. In sum: by narrowing the impact of VR experience to the way in which it confounds the body-image, Grosz effectively ensures its reduction to the status of disembodied simulation.

We have already had a chance to criticize this model of technics for what we might in fact call its superficiality—that is, its incapacity (or refusal) to reckon with the more primordial correlation of embodiment and technicity that we explored at length in Chapter 1. In our present context, we can add a more specific objection against its subordination of bodily action—of dynamic self-movement—to representation. By positioning the body image as the necessary link between inside and outside, Grosz invests it as the medium for the body to experience itself either “naturally” or as prosthetically extended. As the “link between our biological and cultural existences, between our inner' psyche and our external' body," the body image is taken to form the condition not only for the body's self-representation but also for its “capacity for undertaking voluntary action" (187).

As the basis for this model of technics, the body image thus becomes the condition of possibility for the prosthetic extension of the body, as well as for the experience of the biological body: "If it exists at all," Grosz notes, "the biological body exists for the subject only through the mediation of a series of images or representations of the body and its capacities for movement and action" (186). Given our earlier excavation of the “originary" transduction of embodiment and technicity, however, such an understanding would appear to produce a double reduction of biological embodiment and of technical embodiment. To the extent that these two poles of embodiment can only be articulated externally— through the mediation of the image and the medium of representation, they are effectively deprived of their anchoring in primordial tactility. In sum: rather than seeing psychasthenia as an expression of the "originary" condition for dynamic bodily self-movement in the concrete form of today's technics, Grosz can only understand it to mark a failure in the representational meshing of subject and body that, on her account, forms the condition for bodily activity.

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Insofar as they explicitly capitalize on the decoupling of vision from dynamic self-movement that occurs in psychasthenia, Char Davies' virtual environments proffer a very different understanding of the psychasthenic condition of contemporary technoculture. For the same reason, they sketch out a vastly divergent feminist intervention into the domain of virtual reality, one that, to the extent it celebrates the dissolution of the schematic differentiation of body and world together with the resulting “indivision" of the flesh, would seem to have far more resonance with the work of Irigaray than with that of Grosz.xix

Given our extended analysis in Chapter 1, it should come as little surprise that the crux of this understanding centers on the inadequacy of the body image as a basis for intercorporeity and, ultimately, for thinking the technical conditions for the indivision of the flesh as it constitutes the real condition for experience in our world today. Insofar as they aim to reverse the reduction of the body to the image—that is, to reassert the role of dynamic self-movement beneath any experience of the image, Davies' environments thus draw on another dimension of psychasthenia: namely, the way in which it facilitates a tactile experience of the body's interpenetration with the environment.

For this reason, Davies' environments call on us to read Roger Caillois' original description of psychasthenic mimicry against its later appropriation by a certain feminist project. For Caillois, psychasthenia comprises a disturbance first and foremost in embodiment; it marks the organism's inability to live its experience from its (operational) perspective—that is, from some space proper to it:

There can be no doubt that the perception of space is a complex phenomenon: space is indissolubly perceived and represented.... It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself. One can already recognize the characteristic scientific attitude and, indeed, it is remarkable that represented spaces are just what is multiplied by contemporary science. Finsler's spaces, Fermat's spaces, Riemann-Christoffel's hyperspace, abstract, generalized, open, and closed spaces, spaces dense in themselves, thinned out, and so on. The feeling of personality, considered as the organism's feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined; one then enters into the psychology of psychasthenia. (Caillois)19

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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.

Thus, 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.

It 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).

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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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In endorsing the description of what is, after all, a shift from perception to affection, from vision to tactility, Caillois effectively opens the way for a deployment of psychasthenia beyond the body-image. Indeed, his interpretation of Minkowski underscores the capacity of tactility to operate the psychasthenic indifferentiation as an incorporation of touch, a passage from the domain of exteroception where touch (like vision) operates as an interchange with the environment to the undifferentiated experience of tactility as dynamic self-movement.

In this respect, Caillois's account of psychasthenia makes common cause with our earlier analysis of Merleau-Ponty's final project. Indeed, the displacement of the "body schema" that underwrites Merleau-Ponty's final ontology—its dissolution into the “indivision" of the flesh—parallels the conceptualization of psychasthenia beyond the body-image. It does so to the precise extent that such a conceptualization necessarily displaces vision, as well as the division it supports, in favor of an undifferentiated ontology of dynamic self-movement. In this sense, what is important is what takes the place of the body-image, or more precisely, what can take place once the body-image is dethroned as the mediator of all bodily experience.

On this score, moreover, the conception of psychasthenia as an affirmative activity of the body finds support in recent neuroscientific research. Thus, for example, Antonio Damasio's differentiation between static and “on-line" body images makes salient just how much our experience of our bodies owes to direct real-time monitoring of its continuously changing states.20 Although it is undeniable (as Damasio admits) that we do experience static images of our bodies, the fact that these provide scant information about our actual embodied states suggests just how much richer the (misnamed) body-image is than a mere representation of the body.

Because it gives a detailed account of spatiality as a constitutive modality of bodily experience (and not simply an effect of representations, even bodily representations), Merleau-Ponty's work helps us to correlate psychasthenia with an ontology of embodiment (of the flesh). In this way, it serves to highlight the insufficiency of the ontology of projection that forms the correlative of Grosz's deployment of the body image as mediator between body and environment and that is derived, as we observed in Chapter 1, from a certain misreading of Freud's claim that the “ego is first and foremost a bodily ego ... the projection of a surface." Eschewing such a projective ontology from the very outset of his development of the "phenomenal body" in the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty shows himself to be concerned with articulating the specificity of his conception of the body-schema against other, reductive understandings, most notably, the body-image. The body-schema, specifies Merleau-Ponty, is more than simply a “continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic and articular impressions of the moment."21 It is also more than a de facto synthesis of a particular set of bodily components, “a superimposed sketch of the body" (99). Rather, as we have seen, it is a "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world, a form' in the sense used by Gestalt psychology" (100); or, more precisely still “a way of stating that my body is in-the-world," a “third term, always tacitly understood, in the figurebackground structure" (101).

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Far from being a mediator between the subject and the environment that would condition bodily activity (as it is for Grosz), the body-schema is thus cosubstantial with the activity of the body as a whole and is dynamically constitutive of the spatiality of the world. We might say that the body schema, like touch in the higher office accorded it by Jonas, comprises an infraempirical form: one that is immanent to bodily life without being reducible to its empirical contents and that, as we have seen, intertwines vision and touch in an irreducible cofunctioning that, in and of itself, indicts the more abstract, visual conception of the body-image.

The introduction of the body schema already makes clear the vast divide between Merleau-Ponty's motor-centered understanding of the body and the representationalist conception. Correlative with this divide is a vast difference in the role of space: whereas Grosz's (and Olalquiaga's) understanding of psychasthenia portrayed space as a geometrical, visual domain in which the subject fails to locate itself, for Merleau-Ponty (as we have seen), such a space is abstracted from a more fundamental space: the space constituted by the motor-intentionality of the body.

If, in one sense, this can be taken to mean that the body holds a certain priority over space (at least on the ontology at issue in the Phenomenology), it also means that the body does not stand opposed to space, as Caillois' analysis suggested. Rather, from the beginning in Merleau-Ponty, body and space are dynamically coupled so that changes in bodily motility (e.g., the blind man's stick) necessarily correlate with changes in lived spatiality, the sum of which is expressed in the body schema. With respect to psychasthenia, what Merleau-Ponty's analysis affords, then, is an account capable of explaining how the dissolution of the (representational) boundaries between body and space nonetheless accords with a certain bodily activity that functions to ground the recursive correlation of embodiment and technics within self-movement.

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Ultimately, this understanding of the dynamic coupling of body and space undermines the function of the body schema as such, in the sense that it can no longer function to demarcate the body from the environment. That is why, as we have seen, the problematic of the body schema more or less falls away in Merleau-Ponty's final work as his interest shifts from the phenomenological-existential problematic of the body as source of space (and world) to the ontological problematic of the flesh and the body's immanent belonging to the world.

More important in the present context, however, is the resonance of this final dissolution of the body schema with Caillois' account of psychasthenia: Merleau-Ponty's final work furnishes a conception of the body's spatiality that can account for psychasthenia as an affirmative modality in which the indifferentiation between the body and the environment, the oneness of the flesh, is opened to experience. Indeed, in a much-cited passage from his chapter on “The Chiasm," Merleau-Ponty states:

The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two lips: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born and upon which, as seer, it remains open. It is the body and it alone, because it is a two-dimensional being, that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that ... would coexist with them in the same world.... What we call a visible is ... a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle borne by a wave of Being.22

As immanent to the world, the body is penetrated by the world in a fluid interchange. This interchange, as we have seen, is why Merleau-Ponty's final work is concerned with the problem of thinking the indifferentiation, the indivision, between body and world. Moreover, it perfectly expresses the condition, the indivision, of psychasthenia, as the (no doubt) rhetorical question orienting Merleau-Ponty's entire investigation makes altogether clear: "Where," he asks, “are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?" (138).

By way of conclusion, let me now suggest in more concrete terms how Char Davies' Osmose and Ephémère function to catalyze an experience of psychasthenia and the oneness of the “flesh." Both environments are designed to effectuate a restoration of the power of embodied agency in the face of the "danger" of technically facilitated psychasthenia. By taking virtual reality as a laboratory for exploring the function of perception in a situation where there simply is no material, external world and hence no demarcation between self and environment, Davies in effect embraces the psychasthenic condition full-on. Thus, in contrast to Grosz (and Weiss), whose work attempts to restore some clear demarcation between body and environment, Davies seeks to catalyze a more primitive, undifferentiated form of self-movement as the activity that confers reality as such. By effectively drawing attention to the fact that all reality is virtual reality, her environments exemplify the way in which virtual reality technologies can support the constitution of a certain body-in-code and thereby participate in the aesthetic—mixed reality-—that seemed to announce their obsolescence.

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Davies has spoken of a “seminal" adolescent experience in a field that involved her loss of vision. Recalling her "near mystical manifestation of the confusion ... between inside and out, self and space," Davies cites her “desire to communicate that firsthand bodily experience to others" as her driving motivation and also as the reason why the “medium of immersive virtual space has proven more conducive" to her aim than any other medium. Because they deploy technics to effect a dissolution of the discrete boundaries characteristic of the body as a visually dominant agent, Davies' use of transparency, ambiguity, low-resolution imagery, and fog instance the essential technicity of the indivision of the flesh, as it informs Merleau-Ponty's final project. As Davies explains it, the use of immersive virtual reality technology allows her to catalyze a performative experience of the indifferentiation between bodily interiority and spatial exteriority, and thus, in some sense to compel participants to experience technical psychasthenia firsthand:

As an artist, I ... have two choices: I can either unplug and never go near a computer again or I can choose to remain engaged, seeking to subvert the technology from within, using it to communicate an alternative worldview ... My strategy has been to explore how the medium/technology can be used to "deautomatize” perception (via use of semitransparency, seemingly floating through things, etc.) in order that participants may begin to question their own habitual perceptions and assumptions about being in the world, thus facilitating a mental state whereby Cartesian boundaries between mind and body, self and world begin to slip. (Davies and O'Donaghue, 3)

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