How Tangible is Cyberspace?

A philosophical analysis of disembodiment and embodiment in virtual/augmented realities by Paol Hergert.

The following excerpts were taken and adapted from Paol Hergert’s thesis entitled The Material Revolution: On the Apparent Reversal of Digital Trends of Disembodiment and Dematerialization.

In his 1981 satirical masterpiece History of the World, Part 1, Mel Brooks shares his thoughts on media critics as part of his first scenes, a depiction of the stone age, as follows:

Announcer: And here, in a cave about two million years ago, the first artist was born. [a cave-wall featuring a drawing of a buffalo is shown, next to a visibly proud artist]. And, of course, with the birth of the artist, came the inevitable after birth — the critic. [a person urinating on the drawing is shown].

Similarly, every new media technology (or form of art) has been closely followed up by critiques of those new technologies. Before making a plea for the cinema as the medium of the future, influential early 20th century psychologist and film theory pioneer Hugo Münsterberg, for instance, rhetorically asked whether it was “not for quite a while the fashion among those who love art to look down upon the tricks of the film and to despise them as inartistic?”, and that he “felt it as undignified for a Harvard Professor to attend a moving-picture show” (Hugo Münsterberg on Film 172). However, it did not take Münsterberg long to realize his mistake, as shortly after he states: “the more photoplays developed, the more it was not their task simply to be an inexpensive imitation of the theater, but that they should bring us an entirely new form of art” (173).

Accordingly, digital spheres have been under a lot of scrutiny over the years, for a multitude of reasons. At this point, one argument will be of particular interest: the argument that the digital revolution, the advent of the information age, has disembodied and dematerialized the interaction between users, as well as the various new media these new technologies have brought with them. Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard can be seen as the antecedent critics of the changes that occurred due to these emerging technologies, but they in turn were largely influenced by the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, especially by Walter Benjamin and his theory of the aura.

It is important to note that disembodiment is not necessarily meant in an invective sense. In his article “Virtual Reality; Eine Medienphilosophische Erörterung” (“A media philosophical discussion”), Stefan Münker writes of two camps that could not be further from each other: the prophets and the skeptics. Building off of theories put forth by theorists such as Marvin Minsky, Margaret Wertheim and Nicole Stenger, Münker states that the prophet anticipates the cyber space with high hopes. The prophet, Münker writes, believes that the powers of the mind will triumph over the raw force of things, and, quoting Minsky, that “the bloody mess of organic matter will be overcome” (143). The skeptic, on the other hand, believes virtual reality to be a medium of de-realization and disembodiment. The skeptic asserts, that the progressive expansion of electronic media will result in humanities’ incremental loss of its use of sensory organs and sentience (144). Disembodiment, therefore, is seen both as a curse and a blessing, depending on who one pays attention to. Of René Descartes’ infamous dichotomy between the mind and the body (cogito ergo sum), Hubert Dreyfus writes: “if this were our true condition, then the mediated information concerning distant objects and people transmitted to us over the Internet as telepresence would be as present as anything could get” (in Zhao, 2008: 53). One could therefore assume that Descartes would fall somewhere in the middle on the disembodiment-as-good-or-bad-spectrum, because “the world and even our own bodies are never directly present to us…all that we can directly experience is the content of our own minds” (cont.).

Disembodiment and dematerialization are generally assumed to be intrinsic consequences of digital media, because of the implicit immateriality of digital information, and because the user’s interaction with the media is estranged, or alienated, from instinctual corporeal authenticity. The first claim is likely based on an antiquated (almost spiritual) understanding of digital content as immaterial. Whether or not one sees the alleged immateriality of digital data as enrichment or impairment, this immateriality simply does not explicitly exist. Münker accordingly states that digital data is always originally produced mechanically (145). And yet, in this case, it is perhaps fastidious to distinguish between implicit and explicit immateriality, and more important to note that for the user, digital data is (practically) impalpable. One of the characteristics (and advantages over the media of previous eras) of the information age is this very dematerialization of information. In her article “Cyberspace as/and Space,” Julie E. Cohen similarly states that “in the transition to the information economy, property, labor, and money become not only commodified, but also disembodied” (243).

The current step in the evolution of the information age, namely the incorporation of virtual and augmented reality technologies into the mainstream, takes this disembodiment one step further. In his book Digital Sensations, Ken Hillis, borrowing heavily from Hubert Dreyfus’ What Computers Still Can’t Do, accordingly states the following:

The West has a penchant for turning its philosophical assumptions into technologies. With VR, one assumption being transformed from idea to action is that a series of extant social relations based on an individualistic understanding and practice of pluralism might be relocated to a disembodied datascape — an immaterial landscape ‘wherein’ military exercises, commercial transactions, virtual ‘on-the-job’ training, and so on increasingly ‘take place.’ (xv)

With the exception, perhaps, of military exercises, these “disembodied datascapes” and “immaterial landscapes,” which Hillis futuristically attributes to the coming virtual reality environments, were, even when he published his book in 1999, already in place. For instance, online banking was introduced to the market in the early 1980s, thereby “disembodying” commercial transactions and virtual on-the-job training already existed in the form of online tutorial videos. As for the disembodiment of military exercises, virtual reality devices which train individual soldiers for deployment have been in use as early as the 1930s. Additionally, just three years after Hillis’ prophetic claims, the United States Army produced and published America’s Army in 2002, a video game (of the onlineshooter variety) in which up to 64 players could engage in virtual combat with each other as a means of preparing for real-world deployment. In his book Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, Scott Bukatman states the following with similar enthusiasm:

Cyberspace is a celebration of spirit, as the disembodied consciousness leaps and dances with unparalleled freedom. It is a realm in which the mind is freed from bodily limitations, a place for the return of the omnipotence of thoughts…the return of the animistic view of the universe within the scientific paradigm. (208)

A more negative point of view on the topic is propagated by Btihai Ajana in her article “(Dis)embodiment and Cyberspace: A Phenomenological Approach,” who, building off of Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulacra and hyper realities, states that “with the implosion of the hyperreal and the diffusion of signs, all possibilities are lost into a state of immanency in which illusionary freedom is synonymous disembodiment” (n.p.). At a later point in her article, Ajana attempts to deconstruct the idea of the cyberspace, as a utopian playground for Cartesian dualism, by means of comparing a user’s interaction with a computer to Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of the blind man’s walking stick not being an object, but an extension of himself (1962: 143) (cont.). Ajana (perhaps a bit shortsightedly) adapts Merleau-Ponty’s inversion of Descartes’ mind over body tenet to the digital sphere, suggesting that the user is not only not disembodied (nor could he/she ever be, because all interaction is always embodied), but also that the computer is a mere tool comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s walking stick, when in reality, it is so much more: a computer that is connected to the internet and equipped with input/output devices is an amalgamation of a multitude of media that can entertain, teach, employ, etc. the user. It is, as Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. states “a window through which one looks into a virtual world” (1999: 16), a metaphor that can be developed further: a window distinguishes itself not only by its transparency, but also by its capacity to be opened. After the introduction of the internet and the world wide web, the metaphorical “looking glass into a mathematical wonderland” (Sutherland, 1965: 506) achieved a kind of three-dimensionality that allows the user to not only look out of this window/looking glass, but to reach into it as well. The walking stick, conversely, has one function: to attempt to compensate for the user’s lack of sight. Cyberspace does not compensate what is not there, it rather creates new, and enhances what is already there.

Referring to research conducted by Tom Furness, Myron Krueger, and Jason Lanier in his article “Virtual Reality Technology: A Tutorial,” Frank Biocca states that “for some researchers active in the development of this medium, the ultimate goal of the technology is nothing short of the amplification of human perception and cognition” (23), which is reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of the blind man’s walking stick mentioned above. Biocca goes on to state that “while similar goals can be found in the development of other media…no medium in history has been so self-consciously designed as an extension of our senses” (cont.). Warren Robinett similarly states that “the electronic expansion of human perception has, as its manifest destiny, to cover the entire human sensorium” (1991, 19). If implemented into virtual and augmented reality technologies, these demands would unquestionably lead to a more embodied user experience. But embodiment being one of the buzzwords of recent philosophical discussion demands the establishing of some epistemological rules as to the use of the word. First it is important to negate René Descartes’ esoteric claims of a separation between the mind and the body (and the implicit claim of a superiority of the mind therein), as all thought-processes are rooted in bio-chemical processes inside the human body, such a separation cannot hold its ground in times of empiricist science. Embodiment, one could therefore assume, is always there, as every interaction a user has with a machine (to come back to the topic at hand) is ultimately mediated through the body.

In the age of virtual realities, there needs to be a philosophical agreement on the separation between one’s primary (or corporeal) body and one’s secondary (or virtual) body. Similarly disagreeing with Cartesian notions of an absolute separation between one’s corporeal body and one’s mind, Murray and Sixsmith argue that “the experience of VR brings its embodiment with it,” and further, going off of Frank Pasi’s 1995 article “Written in the Flesh,” that “our clothes and techniques of the body work not only upon the body-object, but also upon the body lived, producing our embodied experience” (319). When a user enters, so to say, a virtual reality environment, his/her mind leaves his primary (corporeal) body implicitly to a certain extent and enters a virtual body. The experiences the user has in the virtual sphere, however, are largely linked to his/her corporeal existence. Hinting to a study at a later point in their article, Murray and Sixsmith note that “there is clear evidence that people bring their everyday, real-world understandings and social experiences to new virtual encounters” (320). They describe the findings of the study as follows:

A recent study…of how people navigate through a virtual cityscape, in which a computer allowed them to progress anywhere, found that they remained ground- and road-centered, avoiding obstacles such as buildings and trees This indicates that people’s experiences in VR are not purely cognitively oriented, but embodied. In real life, of course, one cannot travel through buildings and other objects. It is possible in cyberspace, but study participants rarely took advantage of this possibility. Thus, to walk along roads in cyberspace is to remain within the same embodied sociocultural patterns that exist in the real world. (cont.)

Similar to the need for an epistemological separation between corporeal- and virtual bodies, one has to differentiate between conscious and subconscious embodiment. Obviously, the user of virtual or augmented reality technologies can never (or at least not in the near future) experience virtual reality environments as a fully, corporeally embodied experience, but this full-embodiment should not be the ultimate goal of virtual reality technologies to begin with. I argue that a successful simulation of a virtual reality environment is in the first instance dependent on immersion, which would be required to be at a level of persuasiveness that would make the respective user ‘forget’, or go beyond, his/her corporeal senses and bodily functions that are not immediately required for performance in the respective virtual reality environment. Similar to Goin and Goin, who describe that at the dentist we suddenly “become all mouth” (1981: 62), the contemporary virtual reality user becomes all hands, eyes, and ears, in his secondary (virtual) body. Accordingly, a person in the real world is not consciously taking each individual step when he is out on a walk either. To that effect, Murray and Sixsmith state the following:

Foster (1992) provides a vivid example of this in her discussion of the body of the dancer, where she argues that our corporeality can be manipulated through training…Foster does not see the dancer’s training as just a finer tuning of corporeal awareness, but contends that ‘over months and years of study, the training process repeatedly reconfigures the body’…such phenomena suggest the possibility of a manipulable body, a plastic corporeality, a malleable body image. (324)

For Marie-Laure Ryan, “the disappearance of the computer — which constitutes the culmination of the trend toward increasing user-friendliness in computer design — requires the replacement of arbitrary codes with natural modes of communication” (113). The reversal of trends of disembodiment, and in this case, aspects of alienation and de-familiarization, seems therefore intrinsic to digital spheres. The technological restrictions of the past have necessitated engineers to build rudimentary input- and output devices, such as the keyboard, the computer mouse, and monitors, thereby leading to disembodied and de-familiarized interfaces between users and computers. However, contemporary advances in the fields of virtual and augmented reality technologies will help reverse those trends and implicitly embody (and ‘naturalize’) the experience contemporary and future users (will) have when dealing with their computers. It could be contrarily said that the reversal of those trends of disembodiment and de-familiarization are not intrinsically thanks to virtual and augmented reality technologies, but that this reversal has been going on since the invention of the touchpad, to name one example. Furthermore, that the evolution of the digital computers has always gone hand in hand with trends of embodiment and familiarization. The introduction of iconographic symbols via the invention of the graphical user interface, for instance, has already, to a certain extent, familiarized the user’s interaction with the computer. However, virtual and augmented reality technologies have implicitly made possible the crossing of the “looking glass into a mathematical wonderland” of which Ivan Sutherland speaks in his “Ultimate Display” (506) into Carroll’s metaphorical wonderland (508).

The driving factor behind the familiarization and embodiment of user’s interactions with their computers has always been user friendliness (which, in turn, largely influences the commercial success of the various media). In a similar sense, one of the tremendous advantages of virtual and augmented reality technologies is their intuitiveness. An elderly person, for instance, putting on a headset and data gloves will instantly know what to do (given that his/her virtual body and movements mirror their corporeal body and movements, as is the case with most of these technologies), which is substantially different than a scenario in which they were given a traditional input device such as a mouse and/or a keyboard, for instance, which are not grounded in natural/corporeal realities.

In his “An Insider’s View of the Future of Virtual Reality,” virtual reality and futurology celebrity Jaron Lanier states that “with a VR system you don’t see the computer anymore — it’s gone. All that’s there is you.” And he is right, but only to a certain extent, as the computer is obviously not gone but only appears like it is. This “absence” is achieved, paradoxically, by its move into absolute visibility. An old German saying states that one can miss the forest for the trees. This describes the phenomenon of the “disappearing” computer perfectly, as perfected (read: fully immersive) virtual and augmented reality technologies, via, among other things, their vast processing power, seamlessly integrate into the user’s perception. The disappearance of the computer, as well as the absence of the corporeal body thereby lead to full immersion in virtual reality.

In his book The Absent Body, Drew Leder, draws on phenomenological ideas put forth by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, et al., and states that “our relationship unfolds in the space created by our technologically supplemented bodies, not merely that of our natural flesh” (34). Furthermore, he argues that “via a phenomenological osmosis, the body brings within itself novel abilities, its own temporal history, and tools that remain spatially discrete…the demand of the world gradually lead [him/her] to reshape the ability-structure of [his/her] body” (cont.). Based on this “dialectical body-world relation” (cont.), Murray and Sixsmith accordingly conclude that “insofar as we take technologies into our experiencing by perceiving through them, the technology becomes embodied” (325).

Paol Hergert is a recent graduate of the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, where he majored in cultural studies and sociology. His research interests lie in comparative media studies and social theory. He has previously worked at NYU’s Deutsches Haus, and is currently making a living as a freelance writer.

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