Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

Condensed into a single claim, Sedgwick and Frank's compelling, if massively reductive, argument runs as follows: the specification that (fill in with appropriate object domain) is "discursively constructed" rather than "natural" is precisely what constitutes theory.8 "[T]hat specification," Sedgwick and Frank claim, "is today understood to constitute anything as theory": "theory' has become almost simply coextensive with the claim (you can't say it often enough), it's not natural" (513). Despite the distraction of its polemical fervor, this criticism manages to capture the thoroughgoing hostility to anything biological that literally permeated the ethos of theory—that is, of poststructuralism following its productive, if also (multiply) deformational, confrontation with homegrown feminist, race, gender, and queer theoretical enterprises.

The years following this triumph of the constructivist paradigm have witnessed several waves of further rumination on the topic of the body, fueled by “inputs” as diverse as cybercultural studies and Luhmannian sociology. Yet, despite a common concern with the limitations of the antibiological imperative of cultural constructivism and a perception that making good on this concern was part of their driving purpose, these latter-day theories of the body have to date hardly succeeded in producing a viable--not to mention widely palatable—account of the role played by biological embodiment in cultural experience, identity, and community. Leaving aside speculation on the reasons for this failure, which are no doubt complex enough to merit a study of their own, I would like instead to postulate that the shift to a mixed reality paradigm in our contemporary technoculture (that is, in our contemporary culture) brings with it an opportunity to revalue the meaning and role accorded the body within the accepted conceptual frameworks of our philosophical tradition.

With its functionalist model of perceptuomotor activation, the mixed reality paradigm exposes the primacy of what, with Merleau-Ponty, we might call motor intentionality for the constitution of "reality." Although this primacy is certainly not new (indeed, it coincides, as Krueger's earlier cited claim suggests, with the proto-"origin" of the human as a distinct species), the specific conditions of mixed reality (namely, the fusion of the virtual and the physical) bring it to the fore with unprecedented clarity and force. Today's exemplary mixed reality situations—interrupting a meeting to get data from a digital database, comparing a two-dimensional architectural drawing with a real-time three-dimensional visualization, acquiring an image of oneself through the social prosthesis of common sense that is contemporary television—all have as their condition the abandonment of the dream of total immersion, i.e., the representationalist form of verisimilitude. Thus, they literally beg the question of their possibility: what makes the passage from one realm to another so seamless, so unnoticeable, so believable?

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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

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We must struggle to comprehend, then, how mixed reality can be both a minimal condition for experience of and a concrete moment in the history of human technogenesis in which the constituting or ontological dimension of embodiment is incontrovertibly exposed. (This is equally to fathom how mixed reality can harbor a “generic" technical element of experience, a technical-transcendental structure, at the same time as it demarcates a concrete technical stage of the history made possible by such a structure.) Let us say that mixed reality appears from the moment that tools first delocalized and distributed human sensation, notably touch and vision. (Following paleontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan, this would mean from the “origin" of the human.viii Placed in this context, mixed reality, then, designates the general condition of phenomenalization ensuing from the “originary” coupling of the human and the technical. It names an originary condition of real experience, a condition which can only be thought under the category of the transcendental because it can only be known through its effects.

To think our situation today, we must ask what happens when the transcendental structure underlying mixed reality—mixed reality as the technical conditioning of experience as such—gets exposed through and as the concrete technical configuration that specifies its being in the world today. Otherwise put, what remains unprecedented in the history of mixed reality (that is, of experience as such), and what is thus singular about our historicotechnical moment, is precisely the becoming-empirical, the empirical manifestation, of mixed reality as the transcendental-technical, the condition for the empirical as such.

Blindspot (1991), a recent work by American artist Tim Hawkinson, perfectly captures this leveling of the divide between the empirical and transcendental structures of mixed reality (see Figure 0.1). Blindspot is an anatomically arrayed photographic portrait of all the surface areas of the artist's body that he cannot see with his eyes. It brilliantly interweaves a paradigmatic expression of the minimal condition of mixed reality—the externalization of the gaze afforded by a reflective surface— with the technical condition of our being-in-the-world today: namely, our being subjected to and made subject by the technically-supported and technically-generated gaze of others, by the images of ourselves (including images through which we see ourselves) produced by and through society and the media.ix

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Hawkinson's (critical) intervention into the terrain more or less owned by Lacanian theory is singular because of its rigorous commitment to sustaining the collapse of the boundary separating the empirical and the transcendental. Blindspot recognizes—indeed celebrates—the inescapability of a cofunctioning of "natural" perception and technically extended perception; it thus appropriates (or better, restores) the external imaging of the body as part of the body's constituting power.

Blindspot does not simply present an image of Hawkinson's body; rather, it images his body from the standpoint of that body (or better, of the organism that appears as that body). The image—which depicts what he can't see with his eyes—forms the strict correlate of what he can see and what, for that reason, does not require depiction. At the limit, then, the image of the body presented in Blindspot is not an image of the body, but rather an expression of the power (a power of imaging) that belongs to the embodied organism insofar as it is an "originarily" technical being.

Hawkinson's image thus makes common cause with French philosopher Raymond Ruyer's dismissal of the body as a merely scientific—that is, objectivized and external—entity, a kind of epiphenomenon of (radical) subjectivity:

We are therefore, like all beings, pure subjectivities. Our organism (excluding the nervous system) is a set of subjectivities of a different order from conscious subjectivity. We are an object only in appearance; our body is an object only abstractly, in the subjectivity of those who observe us (or even, partially, in our subjectivity, when we see ourselves in a mirror or when we encounter ourselves as a particular image in our visual field). We are not, and other beings are not any more than us, really incarnate. Mind-body dualism is illusory because we do not have a body, because our organism is not a body.¹1

Despite appearances, Ruyer does not so much deny the (physical) reality of embodiment as displace it in favor of an ontological understanding of radical, indeed "originary," subjectivity. The body as object, along with incarnation and “conscious subjectivity," belongs to a derivative ontological plane, one that emerges from the primordial subjectivity-or, rather, the set of subjectivities—comprising the (human) organism.x

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Like motoric embodiment discussed early, as well as Ruyer's later concept of the “absolute survey," the organismic perspective is absolute in the sense that it opens access to everything—to the world, to other bodies, to my body as object.

Ruyer conceptualizes his understanding as “reversed epiphenomenalism," meaning a reversal of the doctrine that subjectivity is an epiphenomenon of physical, material properties. For Ruyer, these latter (that is, the entire physical world, including that peculiar materiality known as consciousness) are simply epiphenomena of primary subjectivity.xi In this respect, Ruyer's work radicalizes the perspective of autopoietic theory, with its categorical and concept-defining privilege of the operational perspective of the organism over any observational perspective.xii For Ruyer, a primordial dimension of the living not only remains inaccessible from an external standpoint but also can only be (as philosopher Michel Piclin puts it) “felt from within."12

By assimilating the external image of the body to the perspective of the organism, Hawkinson's Blindspot might be said to depict the operational perspective for an age of total technical mediation (of exposed mixed reality) like ours. In so doing, Blindspot lays bare the technical element that inhabits the originary subjectivity of reversed epiphenomenalism: it reveals that self-experience today necessarily encompasses the power of imaging as a power of the organism (in this respect, it actualizes what has always been potentially the case). With its technical support in our world today, imaging has become what it has always been potentially: an aspect of primary self-experience (and not simply a derivative of the image of oneself held, and thus mediated, by the other).

Viewed in this context, Ruyer's own dismissal of the mirror image (a concrete figure for the minimal condition of mixed reality) can be seen as part of the technophobia characteristic of Western metaphysical discourse.xiii Eschewing such technophobia, Hawkinson announces in works like Blindspot that concrete technical conditions for self-experience today necessarily include the “internal observational" perspective made possible—as a power of imaging—by technical image mediation.

To anticipate an argument from Part II of this book, Blindspot thus pronounces the nonpathological generalization of the social-technical-psychological condition of psychasthenia, meaning "a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the organism's body is confused with represented space".13 If such a confusion has become normative for our experience in the world today—and what else is at stake in the technical exposure of mixed reality?—this is not because the organism has lost its perspective to that of external images (the gaze of the other), as all constructivist theories allege, but rather because technical progress has exposed imaging as the crucial organismic dimension that it has always potentially been.

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With this conclusion, we are now in a position to fathom how the mixed reality paradigm (together with the second generation of virtual reality technologies that comprise its technical support) contributes to a revalued conceptualization of the body. With its picture of an originarily technical organismic perspective, this paradigm effectively repudiates all externalist accounts of the body, including constructivist theories that have recently held sway in critical discourse. It thus offers an affirmative model of bodily agency that conceives of the embodied organism's constitutive coupling with the social (paradigmatically, the technically mediated world of images, including linguistic images) in a fundamentally different manner than does (for example) Judith Butler's theory of performative iteration. The latter, in the final instance, subordinates the agency of the body (the force of iteration) to the content of the social images that following the paradoxical operation of (linguistic) performativity, open up the space of its exercise.xiv

On the mixed reality paradigm, by contrast, coupling with the domain of social images occurs from within the operational perspective of the organism and thus comprises a component of its primordial embodied agency. One crucial consequence of this difference is the principle of indirection, loosely modeled on the autopoietic principle of organizational closure. This principle states that the organism undergoes change by reorganizing in reaction to external perturbation.

More precisely, because external images (including ones that are fantasized, i.e., of endogenous origin, as well as other images explicitly “from the operational perspective") have an impact on the organism as part of its primordial operation, they cannot be said to modify the organism directly (they do not comprise an informational input). Rather, they affect the organism indirectly, through the self-reorganization it undergoes in response to perturbation from the outside. Therefore, operating beneath the complex reappropriation of social images that Butler conceptualizes as performativity is a yet more primordial level of bodily, or organismic, processing. The latter forms nothing less than the enabling transcendental—the technical-transcendental—structure for the effects that Butler describes.

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1. 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).

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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

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transforms the acoustic mirroring of Narcissus and Echo into visual form. Narcissus gives up his body to his mirror image. The “self" becomes another (body). His own movements are only an illusionary echo. As the observer approaches the mirror, he is confronted with a mirror image that does not correspond to his normal perception of things. He sees himself as an impression, as a body with strangely displaced movement sequences and, ultimately, as an image in the mirror that smashes as soon as he comes too close. He is unable to touch himself. A small camera hidden in the picture frame is used to place the observer in the image. The computer-controlled projection surface is controlled by an algorithm that calculates the distance to the observer. Rigid Waves is a virtual mirror which does not reflect but rather recognizes. Sight and movement, approaching and distance are triggers for the unusual images. This is an attempt to see oneself from the outside, to stand side by side with oneself and to discover other, hidden "selfs." In this fractured mirror, we are able to find ourselves, our “self" has been liberated. But how will I ever recognize myself again?14

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