Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

X. This remains the case despite Steuer's understanding of virtual reality—"defined as a real or simulated environment in which a perceiver experiences telepresence"—as introducing “an alternative view of mediated communication in general," one that breaks with the notion that media are only important as a "conduit." Although Steuer's redefinition of virtual reality effectively breaks with a reductive understanding of it in terms of specific hardware and shifts the focus to the interaction between the mediated environment and the participant, it does not break with the standard notion that what is communicated in the telepresence circuit is information. If it is the case, as Steuer claims, that "[i]nformation is not transmitted from sender to receiver," this does not mean that the informational position is rejected. Indeed, what is experienced in mediated environments as Steuer describes them if not information? See Jonathan Steuer, "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence."

xi. Despite Gibson's embrace of an informational understanding of perception, his theory includes elements that could, potentially, serve to complicate such a view. By mentioning Gibson's differentiation of perceptual systems in relation to the variable of “breadth" (which “refers to the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously presented”), Steuer suggests as much:

Breadth is a function of the ability of a communication medium to present information across the senses. J. J. Gibson (1966) defines five distinct perceptual systems: the basic orienting system, which is responsible for maintaining body equilibrium; the auditory system; the haptic, or touch, system; the taste-smell system; and the visual system. Inputs to several of these systems from a single source can be considered informationally equivalent (Gibson 1966). However, the redundancy resulting from simultaneous activation of a number of perceptual systems reduces the number of alterative situations that could induce such a combination of perceptions, and therefore strengthens the perception of a particular environment. (Steuer 1992, 81)

See Steuer, "Defining Virtual Reality,"81. Though Steuer here accepts the informational basis of Gibson's theory, we shall have occasion later not simply to question this, but also to rescue Gibson's intriguing understanding of proprioception from the informational reduction it undergoes in his theory.

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xii. Jones furthermore argues that the privilege placed by Western philosophy on theory is simply a higher order extrapolation of this privileged detachment of sight.

xiii. Indeed, one might understand Jonas' move here as an effort to merge the generalized function of vision (which must be distinguished from the specific sense modality of sight) with the generalized function of touch. Hints in this direction can be found in his discussion of the "mental side" of touch, which is closely bound up with the generalized function of vision:

There is more than mere coincidence in the fact that in his hand man possesses a tactile organ which can take over some of the distinctive achievements of his eye. There is a mental side to the highest performance of the tactile sense, or rather to the use which is made of its information, that transcends all mere sentience, and it is this mental use which brings touch within the dimension of the achievements of sight. Briefly, it is the image-faculty, in classical terms: imaginatio, phantasia, which makes that use of the data of touch. Only a creature that has a visual faculty characteristic of man can also vicariously “see” by touch. The level of form-perception at the command of a creature will be essentially the same for both senses, incommensurable as they are in terms of their proper sensible qualities. Blind men can “see" by means of their hands, not because they are devoid of eyes but because they are beings endowed with the general faculty of "vision" and only happen to be deprived of the primary organ of sight. (141-142)

We shall return to this deep correlation of vision and touch later, in relation to the work of Merleau-Ponty. Incidentally, the differentiation of vision from sight bears on the misapplication of Gibson's theory by VR researchers. As Hillis suggests, the latter seek to extend to, in his terms, the necessarily interpretative faculty of vision, what Gibson says about sight. (See Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations, 126–127; 132.) If we restrict Gibson's theoretical claims to the domain of sight (as he suggests we should), what he says about perceptual invariants begins to make more sense and indeed to resonate with Jonas' similarly biologically inflected claim that "only the simultaneity of sight, with its extended present' of enduring objects, allows the distinction between change and the unchanging and therefore between becoming and being" (144–145). Restricted in this way, Gibson's claims, at least potentially, leave room for processes of reception that would involve the “self-movement" of the observer and thus the role of other sensory modalities.

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Using an apparatus that allowed an active kitten to move about freely while carrying a gondola containing another, passive kitten, Held and Hein demonstrated that active or voluntary movement was central to the development of sensorimotor skills. Thus, the active kittens developed normal sensorimotor coordination, but the passive kittens failed to do so. See Richard Held, "Plasticity in Sensory-Motor Systems.

xv. Incidentally, Jonas' imaginary case very nearly approximates the situation of what Bergson, in the first chapter of Matter and Memory, calls "pure perception." Like the winged seed endowed with eyes, pure perception simply registers the flow of images without correlating this flow with any organizational principle (for Bergson, bodily affection and personal memory) that could give it meaning. In Bergson, the notion of pure perception was only a heuristic device to illustrate how the body as a “center of indetermination” is simply one image among others in a universe of images and thus can be deduced from this universe (rather than being posited as something standing over against it, as in idealism and realism). When Deleuze generalizes Bergson's notion as the basis of his understanding of cinema (in the movement-image and the timeimage), he makes the error that Jonas is accusing the philosophical tradition of making: lending vision an illegitimate autonomy from the lower sensory modalities of the body. (See Deleuze 1986). I develop a critical account of Deleuze's move in New Philosophy for New Media.

xvi. Like Osmose, Ephémère utilizes semitransparency and spatial ambiguity and an interface based on breath and balance. However, it moves beyond Osmose by foregrounding the temporality of the experience, rather than its spatiality and simplifying the spatial elements to three principle levels. Here is Davies' description of Ephémère:

In seeking to deal with the ephemerality of life, this work expands the spatiality of Osmose to encompass temporality. While Osmose was based on spatial organization of various worlds, and stasis of most elements within (except flowing particles), Ephémère relies on the emergence and transformation of form, and the ebb and flow of visibility and audibility. Ephémère contains three horizontal levels: landscape, subterranean Earth, and interior body. 'The landscape is constantly transforming through time. The relationships between the various elements and the participant are more interactive or inter-responsive. In Osmose, interaction was limited to navigation and the resulting ambiguous perceptual readings of gestalt-like compositions were dependent on the changing participant location (with the exception of the fully interactive sound). In Ephémère, gaze has been introduced as a means of interaction: rocks “open" when gazed upon, revealing landscapes which quickly fade, and in the earth, seed sprout if approached slowly with a steady gaze, blooming, then fading back into the earth. I introduced the interior flesh body as the substratum in Ephémère (quite a change from the software code that formed the base of the Osmose world) as a means of reaffirming the poetic correspondence or coequivalence between earth and body.... anecdotal responses from some of the three thousand people who have experienced Ephémère ... suggest that this second work feels much more interactive, and evokes a sensation of being swept up and away, without a secure unchanging place to return to (i.e., the clearing in Osmose), i.e., one has to surrender to the experience. (Karl O'Donaghue and Char Davies, "Interview with Char Davies." 3-4).

xiv.

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xvii. Davies comments:

I think that by using a fully enveloping virtual environment, one can get closer to recreating the sensation of being ... I release people from these physical constraints and allow them to experience “being" in a slightly different way. It almost refreshes their perception, so they can rediscover what it feels like to be here when they come back out into the world. (Wettheim, "Out of this World," 1)

See also Char Davies, Artist's Statement, 01010101.

xviii. Though it is beyond the aim of the present purpose, the issue of gender in relation to psychasthenia and the lived spatiality of the body would concern the adequacy of representation as a means to account for it. On this score, let me simply note that I have certain reservations concerning Grosz's account of the "constitution of the subject's sexed body through various forces of signification and representation-the meaning the body has for others and for itself, its socioeconomic constitution as a subject, and, above all, the psychical, economic, and libidinal constitution of bodies as sexually differentiated, as sexually specific" (193). As I see it, this account too narrowly circumscribes the domain where sex matters. One would, instead, have to ask how sex enters into the phenomenal experience of lived spatiality as I here reconstruct it.

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xix. In this respect, Davies' environments help demonstrate Irigaray's adherence to the technophobia constitutive of Western philosophy. For a critique of Irigaray along these lines, see Weiss, Chapter 6.

The important question to pose here is whether this technophobia is necessary and, given the resonances of our analysis in Chapter 1 with Irigaray's privileging of tactility as primordial, whether there is reason to believe that it is not. The task then would be to specify what a technics of tactile indifferentiation, as this is thought out of the maternal, might look like.

xx. See also Caillois' footnote where he likens this instinct to the Freudian death drive (“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," 32, note 44).

xxi. For a critique of this technophobia in Heidegger, see Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, Chapter 4, and Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, volume 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Part II.

xxii. Caillois is here citing Minkowski, "Le temps vécu."

CHAPTER 3

i. On this point, see especially chapter 6, "Nations, Identities, and Global Technologies," in Poster's book.

ii. Lisa Nakamura examines the "whiting out" of race in her exposé of the conventions of chat-room culture (“Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet". This criticism is the inspiration for the essay collection, Race in Cyberspace, eds. B Kolko, L. Nakamura, and G. Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2000). See especially the essays by Nakamura, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Beth Kolko.

iii. Apter predicts that “postcolonial theory and aesthetic practice will cyberize' themselves quite soon (if they haven't already), pushing the envelope of the politics of global subjectivity as they place the diaspora online" (223).

iv. See Lisa Nakamura's analysis of Internet advertising ("Where Do You Want to Go Today? Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality" in Race in Cyberspace, 21–22).

v. Effectively, this means the conventions which govern believability of character in that medium or in a particular online community:

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"Each individual is a character and participation is successful to the extent the character is believable by others" (15).

vi. Many would be quick to point out that gender, race, and class conventions not only structure the explicit possibilities for selfinvention but also dictate the ethos of online interaction. See, for example, the introduction to Robert Markley's collection, as well as the Introduction to Race and Cyberspace.

vii. This claim finds verification in more empirical studies of chat-room behavior, such as that of Amy Bruckman, "Gender Swapping on the Internet," in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, ed. P. Ludlow (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996).

viii. Poster suggests that the typed words on the screen take on the role played by the body in face-to-face discourse: “online interaction is disembodied communication like letters and print, where the enunciation is separate from the body of the sender. But the communication is like speech in that it is simultaneous. The important question is the way identity is performed in these contexts. Participants are interpellated by each other, suturing identity in performatives but the construction of the subject occurs entirely on the screen, determined entirely by the words entered on the keyboard" (75).

ix. In a general sense, my claim here follows arguments made by Lisa Nakamura and Jennifer Gonzalez. In her analysis of racial performance in the text-based Web space Lambda-MOO, Nakamura suggests that "everyone who participates is passing"" because “it is impossible to tell if a character's description matches a player's physical characteristics" (Nakamura 1995, 182). In her analysis of race and identity as digital assemblage, Gonzalez claims that “passing' (or pretending to be what one is not) in cyberspace has become a norm rather than an exception" because “much of the activity online is about becoming the fantasy of a racial other" (Jennifer Gonzalez, “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage," in Race in Cyberspace, 29).

x. Even a white male logging on as himself—that is, as a white male— must pass, in the sense that the text-body he creates can only garner "believability" from its participation in stereotyped norms.

xi. This figure of the body as residue is what concretizes the structural incompleteness of all performative interpellations—what motivates the formal iterability that maintains their openness.

xii. In this respect, it functions analogously to the mimicry through which women and minorities (and perhaps white men as well) become citizens: there, too, the lived reality of the body must be left wholly behind in order for the individual to acquire a “new body"— what Lauren Berlant calls a "prophylaxis for the person"—that

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will permit participation in a national fantasy ("National Brands/ National Body: Imitation of Life," 113).

xiii. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the End of the Mechanical Age, 17, cited in Foster, 139. If I am right to see in online interpellation a generalization of passing and if I am right that this generalization foregrounds the (at once constraining and enabling) role of the lived body as what gives existential meaning to representational modes of agency, then Stone's notion of multiple agency warranted to the physical body must be revised. Specifically, we must reject Stone's discursivizing of the virtual citizen:

By means of warranting, [a] discursive entity is tied to an association with a particular physical body, and the two together ... constitute the socially apprehensible citizen.... Because so much of such an identity is discursive and is produced through the actions of texts, I have elsewhere referred to it as legible body, that is, as textually mediated physicality. The legible body is the social, rather than the physical, body; the legible body displays the social meaning of "body" on its surface, presenting a set of cultural codes that organize the ways the body is apprehended and that determine the range of socially appropriate responses. (Stone, 41, last emphasis added)

As I see it, this discursive conception of warranting forms the Achilles' heel of Stone's analysis. When she celebrates online multiplicity as a form of subjectivity that is liberating because it transcends the lived body, Stone displays a kind of euphoric Cartesianism, all too common in postmodern thinking, which views the body as the first prosthesis. Despite her efforts to retain the category of the physical body, it is all but impossible to fathom what role it could possibly have in underwriting the “transgendered body" that seems rather to be produced by the technological structure of the Internet. Indeed, Stone is unequivocal in proposing the naturalization of the transgendered body in cyberspace as an outright replacement for the physical body.

xiv. For this reason, cyberspace can plausibly be said to take up the legacy of "nonexpressive, nonhumanist modes of performing and producing ‘blackness' and ‘whiteness"" in African-American culture (Foster, 141).

xv. At the very least, this calls on us to take stock of the body's crucial role as the mediator of speech acts and other symbolic gestures in the process of interpellation. As Portuguese philosopher José Gil has brilliantly demonstrated, "symbolic efficiency" derives from the activity of the body as a translator between codes, the operator of what he calls the "infralanguage." It depends on the articulation of the force of language with the affective energy of the body: "For the [magical action of words] to have effects [on the body], words must release forces in the body; these forces must react directly on organs, on their physiology, and the body has to offer itself as a receptive surface of forces" (Gil, 143). In this respect, Gil's work forms a crucial corrective to the performative idealism of Butler and Stone: because the body comprises the site where discursive force is constituted, it simply cannot be reduced to a product or materialization of discursive performance and it cannot be abstracted away as a mere prosthesis.

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On Gil's account, the body matters because it is the site where performative significations get correlated with the affects that grant them their meaning and substance. In relation to Poster's conception of interpellation as a purely formal process, it helps clarify how the physical body is not, and can never be, simply absent because it insists that, in order to make a difference, to matter, even something as formalized as the virtual “text-body” must be “translated” into affective bodily forces or, more simply, that it must somehow be made to have an impact on the physical body of the user. We can thus conclude that the lesson of online interpellation is precisely the lesson of Gil's analysis: interpellation is empty if it is not coupled with a bodily becoming; interpellated “identities" matter only insofar as they are translated into bodily forces.

For this reason, Gil's analysis helps us answer the question raised earlier concerning the function of online interpellation—that is, interpellation once it is freed from its social function. Rather than a vehicle for materializing a socially intelligible identity (and one that would in some way or other adequately express the user's actual identity or identity needs), as virtually every commentator on the phenomenon assumes, online interpellation forms something like a laboratory for experimenting with the process of translation that links represented identities with bodily affectivity. Certainly the documented prevalence of online gender- and race-bending would lend strong support to such an interpretation; indeed, as we might be tempted to ask, what else could be at stake here than the desire to explore how it would feel to be interpellated as an other, where "feel" means experiencing the symbolic reactions of others and of oneself as these are translated into bodily forces?

xvi. For a nuanced discussion of the imbrication of Fanon's critique of colonialism with gender politics, see Fuss, 27–36.

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xvii. Shohat and Stam seem oddly oblivious to the necessary interpellative failure that forms the enabling mechanism of a politics of affect, despite their full awareness of what the primacy affect enjoys in the domain of media culture:

Within postmodern culture, the media not only set agendas and frame debates but also inflect desire, memory, fantasy. By controlling popular memory, they can contain or stimulate popular dynamism. The challenge, then, is to develop a media practice by which subjectivities may be lived and analyzed as part of a transformative, emancipatory praxis. The question of the political “correctness" of texts is ultimately less important than the question of mobilizing desire in empowering directions. The question then becomes: How can we transform existing media so as to mobilize adversary subjectivity? Given the libidinal economy of media reception, how do we crystallize individual and collective desire for emancipatory purposes? (166, emphasis added)

This passage echoes the argument developed by Lawrence Grossberg in We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture.

xviii. It is in this sense that we must reject Emily Apter's rejection of affect. Specifically, we must refrain from conceptualizing affect as a residue or simulation of a lost essence or identity, as Apter does. Although she is quite right to claim that affect takes up “where the critique of performativity leaves off: that is, at the point where antiessentialism has become a given and the market in identityproduction is oversaturated," she is far too quick to condemn this upsurge of affect "as a return to easy[,]' to feelings washing about in a depoliticized space of the transnational commodity."As she sees it, affects can be nothing more than “the residue of the real; ghostly afterimages of attitudes, performances of human-ness, and attempts to simulate being a subject.... As the leftovers of instincts, as the residues of mythic' behaviors that haunt the staging of the subject, affects become crucial to sustaining the illusion of identity, however dismantled." "Affect," in short, "is about miming the human when the human has come increasingly to be embodied in posthuman constructions": "the aesthetics of affect clearly participate[s] in the identity politics of performative mimicry" (20).

By thus confining the analysis of affects to a representationalsimulational framework, Apter fails to appreciate their fundamental tie to the body and their potential to open an entirely

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different avenue for thinking community, one that welcomes the bankruptcy of performativity as an opportunity to reforge a notion of the human based on the commonality of embodied singularity. The affects generated through the failure of online performative indentification are not the happy, unifying, "easy" feelings Apter describes. Indeed, by undermining identification via such culturally sanctioned individuating categories as race and gender, affects cannot but be lived as confusing, if exhilirating, experiences of bodily excess and singularity. Far from being “the theory lite' version of virtual subjects who have little real stake in national, ethnic, or gender affiliations," affect thus emerges as the central category of a conceptualization of the human as virtual in a very different sense-as always in excess of any particular determination.

"Relocating the Remains" has been documented in an exhibition catalogue and accompanying CD-ROM (Piper, Keith. Relocating the Remains). This catalogue contains an often insightful recapping of Piper's evolution by Kobena Mercer, "Witness at the Crossroads: An Artist's Journey in Post-Colonial Space." A version of the project can be found on Piper's inIVA Website, www.iniva.org/piper. My account of Piper's work addresses the CD-ROM, where what is at stake is the effort to open Piper's work to the domain of the virtual, to extend “the metaphor of the expedition' ... through a labyrinth of user interactive‘virtual' spaces" (http://www.iniva.org/piper/ Cdrompage.html). The Website produces new versions of the three spaces featured on the CD-ROM, in the process expunging all of the works, both old and new, that were incorporated into the CD-ROM. To my mind, the Website can at best suggest some of the effects produced by the virtual extension carried out in the CD-ROM and in particular by the works focusing directly on contemporary technology. However, for an interesting analysis of the work that focuses primarily on the Website, see Ashley Dawson, "Surveillance Sites: Digital Media and Dual Society in Keith Piper's Relocating the Remains."

xx. Mercer furthermore argues that Piper's work —specifically his engagement with the world of sports-can be contrasted (favorably) with the work of other black male artists like Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim and Jean-Michael Basquiat on account of its "ability to bring the analytical and the expressive into dialogue." He continues: "Piper takes account of identification as an emotional tie from which one cannot extricate oneself at will" (58).

xxi. See Mercer, 54, for a subtle analysis of how Piper's work from the early 1990s enacts this complexification.

xxii. As Piper recounts,

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