Putting the body into "cyberspace": imagining the experience of being an active agent in a wired world
Chapter 3: Embodying the Wired World
Many writers hope that in a wired world, "the body" will disappear. The most extreme proponent of the anti-"meat" school is Hans Moravec. In his Mind Children, he proposes the transplantation of individual human "minds" into a computer, removing "our biggest handicap, the limited and fixed intelligence of the human brain" (1988, 109). And it need not just be one sort of body. He continues: "if you found life on a neutron star and wished to make a field trip, you might devise a way to build a robot there of neutron stuff, then transmit your mind to it. Since nuclear reactions are about a million times quicker than chemical ones, the neutron-you might be able to think a million times faster. (114)" Moravec says that what he is arguing that "pattern-identity" is what makes an individual , not "dull body-identity" (117). He says that his essence is "the pattern and the process going on in my head and body, not the machinery supporting that process. ? The rest is mere jelly. " This is a pure example of the body as information school.
Less extreme is a writer such as Sobchack, working from a Marxist, phenomenological framework. In approach that is representatives of many approaches from critical leftist theory epitomised by Baudrillard, she writes that media technologies together:
"? form an encompassing electronic representational system whose various forms 'interface' to constitute an alternative and absolute world that uniquely incorporates the spectator/user in a spatially decentred, weakly temporalized, and quasi-disembodied state. ?the electronic is phenomenologically experienced not as a discrete, intentional and bodily centred projection in space, but rather as simultaneous, dispersed, and insubstantial transmission across a network." (Sobchack; 2000, 149)
These ideas have penetrated far beyond academe. Thus a letter writer to the Guardian newspaper in 1995 said: "It used to be impossible to relate to anyone without your body coming into it somewhere, even if just as your handwriting or your voice. But in these dimensions [the Internet], you can relate to people in all sorts of ways just by using your mind". (Quoted in Burkitt; 1999, 134) The penetration has reached the highest levels of the US Government. A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, which was co-authored by Alvin Toffler and sponsored by Newt Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives said: "The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter." (Quoted in Hayles; 1999b, 18)
(a) Rescuing Embodiment From the "Natural"
That selection of examples illustrates the reach of anti-body, anti-embodiment, themes have reached. With the help of Hayles I want to demand notice of what Bynum (1999, 267) calls "the stuffedness of the body". To re-embody the wired world, it is necessary first, however, to consider the body in the pre-wired world, something we falsely think of as "natural", as part of "the often taken for granted dichotomy between nature and culture" (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe; 1992, 3). The "Western" body approves certain shapes for each gender, hair in some places and not in others for each gender, and privileges certain body shapes and colours as the "ideal". Those who seek to shape their own body as a prosthesis in the current Western environment (for example by body-building and plastic surgery) usually seek to accentuate that utterly cultured model (Balsamo; 2000, 496).
It is only through change that we are coming to recognise the important role of the body in many actions that had been considered "natural". For many, writing is now a difficult, unnatural process: "a kind of drudgery ?pen and paper [are] well suited for jotting down a telephone number, but not much beyond that" (Johnson; 1997, 140). Writing once seemed "natural", but its creation through the cultivation of individual and societies' habitus can now be more clearly recognised. So, perhaps, reading a book. Using those books that adapt existing forms most easily to cyberspace - dictionaries, encyclopedias and the like - already seems clumsy when I am forced to revert to the codex.
Lanier suggests that virtual reality makes it difficult to define the boundary of the body (Featherstone; 2000, 612). This claim, however, ignores the reality of the embodied agent. Certainly proprioceptive coherence may mean that agents come to perceive their bodies' boundaries to be in different places to where their current, but still "non-natural" boundaries are envisaged. An implanted heart valve, be it from a pig or made of plastic, is certainly within the boundaries of the body - something that very quickly becomes a harmonious part of the body, even if maintained by drugs. So to a hip joint. Beyond that, this writerly body already feels that a keyboard is in some sense within its boundaries, something that can be used as an extension of their fingers considerably more easily than a pen. It is not hard to imagine a courier who relies on goggles that provide directions on which way to turn feeling them to be part of her body. Bodies' boundaries have, however, always been constructed by practice and habitus.
(b) Sensation in a Wired World
Kroker and Kroker (2000, 98) claim that the "virtual class" is forcing "a wholesale abandonment of the body, to dump sensuous experience into the trashbin, substituting instead a disembodied world of empty data flows". This does not, however, correspond to experiences in our current partially wired world, in which pornography sites are among the most commonly visited and sought. Estimates suggest that the online porn business is worth around $US1 billion annually (Batista, 2000, para 5). While the Krokers might like to dismiss this as nasty, commercial data flows, it would certainly seem to be associated with sensation. Even simple text messages can also carry a charge of sensation, as Griscom (2000), says, in defending the value of the e-mail love letter, in comparison with more image-rich possibilities. Suggestions that the involvement of "technologies" (from the quill pen to the violin) in sensation is something new can be rebutted by long accounts of social and technical involvement in human sexuality (Slaton, 2000). Again, there is no such thing as "natural" sensation (or sex).
As the e-mail love letter makes clear, sensation is as much a matter of (if any distinction can be made at all) mind as body. Sismondo (1997, paragraph 11) is one of the few writers who embodies what he calls virtual realities. He says that they are:
"ideally tactile environments, full of sensual experiences. More centrally, the technology makes use of body knowledge, our ability to respond physically to situations, to communicate using more than our vocal chords or the tips of our fingers. VR treats us as fully embodied creatures and then stimulates and trains our bodies in ways that are appropriate to the virtual environment."
We need only look at the origin of much of our present "wired" technology to see the embodiment and relation to sensation. The first webcam was invented by two Cambridge scientists who wanted to find out if their coffee-pot was full without walking down the stairs (Balkin; 2000, paragraph 3) - definitely an embodied usage: sensation -- thirst. I order my groceries at home on the Internet because I prefer the sensation of sitting in my study to that of walking around the supermarket exposed to screaming children. Patrons of a backpacker's Internet café ¡nywhere in Asia are enjoying the sensation of returning, briefly, to a wired environment that feels something like home.
(c) Embracing Death
Reading the work of those who like to imagine themselves as information, "pattern-identity", rather than as living bodies, what stands out is the desperate desire for transcendence arising from a fear of death. Moravec (1988, 4) says "too many hard-earned aspects of our mental existence simply die with us" and suggests under his scheme "if the machine you inhabit is fatally clobbered, the tape can be read into a blank computer, resulting in another you" (1998, 112). He looks for "schemes that would allow an entity to restructure itself so as to function indefinitely even as its universe ended" (1998, 101).
We are, however, mortal bodies, and so we will remain. It is not possible to extract a "pattern-identity" from our bodies, because it is inextricably contained in our "body-identity". Habitus cannot arise in a bodiless vacuum. This more than a harmless fantasy: there is a serious danger in this view of technology - particularly "virtual reality" -- as transcendent. As Haraway (who however ironically has promoted the cyborg - still situated within a body - as an escape, particularly for females) said: "it produces death through the fear of it ? [disavowing] ? we really do die, we really do wound each other, that the earth is really finite" (Quoted in Land; 1995, 209). The "meat" is where we live, and where we will die.
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