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10. 10
If "Reality Is the Best Metaphor,"
It Must Be Virtual

Marguerite R. Waller

What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

— DOUGLAS COUPLAND,Microserfs

We can look forward to a richly textured and complex cyberspace, where we are at all times human, and can become bits of pixel dust flying through a virtual landscape.

— 3-D, multiuser, interactive, on-line virtual-reality producer

"Avatars are Next," the June 1996 issue of Wired announces on its cover, above a glossy foldout of Bill Gates in bathing trunks floating on a lemon yellow air mattress in a sensuous Hockney-blue swimming pool. "Mr. Bill goes Hollywood! Special Gatesfold Issue," reads the caption underneath the (photomontaged) naked torso. The U.S. Congress's attempt in February 1996 to conceptualize the Internet as an incitement to indecent sexual conduct (in Section 507 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the so-called Computer Decency Act) is clearly the lampooned subtext of this juxtaposition of sexualized body with the concept of the avatar. The antithesis of sensuous, avatars are bandwidth-conserving, virtual Wgures that take the place of users’ physical bodies in the three-dimensional, interactive, multiuser virtual environments that software developers in 1996 insisted would be the telos of the development of the World Wide Web. The Wired cover implies that the nerd community Wnds Congress's association of digital media with sex ridiculous (however flattering they may Wnd it to be constructed as sexually dangerous). Not unusually, sexuality is being invoked by the state as a justification for extending its own reach (and that of the corporate interests it represents).

But the sex/gender politics of Net free-speech advocates are not necessarily more progressive. As feminist commentator Laura Miller argues in "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier," the metaphor of a frontier beyond the jurisdiction of Congress,

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deployed by opponents of federal regulation, draws on a conventional construction of gender that threatens to reinscribe women as victims, reinforcing "the power imbalance between the sexes, with its roots in the concept of women as property, constantly under siege and requiring the vigilant protection of their male owners."^[1] The unintended consequence of this conceptualization, she worries, is that "the threat of regulation is built into the very mythos used to conceptualize the Net by its defenders" ("Women and Children," 50).

My worry, therefore, embraces both sides of the debate over free speech on the Net. The skirmish between Big Brother and the software pioneers seems to be shaping up rhetorically as a classic fraternal competition "between men."^[2] We may read it as a contest between fundamentally congruent "male" subject positions, both of which incline to disempower "female" subject positions and both of which stand to increase their own political and economic capital by the appearance of a conflict. The power-producing relationality at play in this turf war, however, simultaneously threatens to subvert the claims of each position to its own, independent ontology. Both parties, therefore, can be expected compulsively to deny their relational status. John Perry Barlowe insists in his "Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace," "Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here."^[3]

It is this more subtle metaphysical issue, the occlusion of relation, implicated in but not reducible to, the constructions of sexuality and gender deployed by both Netizens and Congresspeople, that I Wnd the most pressing issue in designs, uses, and discussions of cyberspace. I will argue that, in fact, the current wave of Internet development (both practically and discursively) is in some sense driven by a desire to make cyberspace safe for essentialist subjectivities of whatever ideological/political persuasion. I will unfold this argument in terms of a certain notion of addiction. My interest is not "cyberaddiction" per se, in the sense of individuals who spend what they or their associates consider too much time on-line, but rather the construction of cyberspace—both rhetorically and electronically—as a clean, clear realm in which we can transcend positionality while remaining (or becoming more fully) "ourselves." I am not, that is, using "addiction" as the binary opposite of "free will," a tendency in popular discourse that Eve Sedgwick has brilliantly analyzed in her "Epidemics of the Will."^[4] I am associating the term, instead, with the interdependent, contingent status of subject positions, themselves multiple and relational, and with strategies for denying or appearing to escape this relational status.

One further caveat: I want to make clear from the outset that I do not see this construction of, and relationship to, cyberspace as inevitable. In the press packet of one of the eight or ten companies currently specializing in

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the creation of the three-dimensional virtual environments I will focus on here, one article asserts that the electronic, multiuser virtual play space the company has designed to link seriously ill children in hospitals will allow the children to "rediscover the simple joys of childhood." The play space, called "Starbright World," developed by Worlds Incorporated working with Steven Spielberg's philanthropic Starbright Foundation, was intended to "empower the kids to be in a different environment than their hospital room" and to forget temporarily their illnesses. "It is not expected … that children will use the network in any type of support group fashion. In fact the kids may not talk about their medical conditions at all," the projects’ managing director is quoted as saying.^[5] The hospitalized children themselves have not all borne out this prediction. A recent article in Wired reports that the ill children using the network discuss everything from family dynamics ("brothers are always in your face") to the subtleties of their illnesses and treatments. "They tell each other just everything. We sit there in awe," Colette Case, a Starbright coordinator at Stanford University's Children's Hospital, is quoted as saying.^[6] In other words, they are using their virtual environment to address what is happening to them physically and emotionally in the "real world." In this instance, users have not been colonized by the metaphysics of transcendence that the network was supposed to instantiate. Thus, despite my emphasis in the remarks that follow on amplifications and remystifications of the Western metaphysical subject— associated historically with a politics of domination, whatever its various idealisms—I also indicate ways in which properties of the medium could operate, and be read, otherwise. In German director Werner Herzog's Wlm Fitzcarraldo, the European Fitzgerald's plan to transport a boat over a mountain and bring opera to the Amazon unpredictably intersects with his indigenous workers’ plan to offer a gift to their gods. The result of this intersection is the failure, the success, or the unreadability, of the project, depending on how one looks at it. I share this suspicion that difference will out, whether happily, catastrophically, or illegibly.

A plethora of articles in the print media claim that three-dimensional, multiuser, on-line virtual environments, for which we may soon have to coin a shorter term, constitute a new medium—a communications "revolution," "a whole new metaphor for interaction and connectivity."^[7]Wired strongly concurs that the development of these spaces could imply a cultural shift on the order of, though unlike, those associated with the invention and propagation of the cinema, the telephone, or television.^[8] The developers of this medium take it to be the telos in an evolutionary process whose origin is said to be the immobile, black-and-white letters of the printed page. Print evolves into the interactive DOS command-line interface, which becomes the two-dimensional Macintosh-style interface, which leads, now, to much more "intuitive,’ "immersive," "three-dimensional" (although one's eyes are

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still focusing on a two-dimensional computer screen) virtual environments—electronic rooms and landscapes, computed on the fly as user-avatars navigate through them, meeting and interacting with other users’ avatars in real time.

This is not the occasion for a lengthy commentary on the implications of this linear, narrative, historiographical schema, but note that it both ontologizes the medium as "natural" and posits it as the successor mode to writing, the privileged arena of knowledge, politics, and so on in the First World nation-state. Such a medium would, indeed, be a Wtting home for the universal(izing) subject familiar from Euro-American, masculinist political culture. Or, as I have heard graduate students say in irreverent response to the claim that computer users can escape "racegenderclass" in cyberspace, "Online everyone is free—to be a white male." A more cross-cultural and historically ample narrative has been offered by French historian Roger Chartier, whose evocative genealogy of "reading revolutions" includes the move from scrolls to quires during the Wrst centuries of the Christian era, the separation of words instituted by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes during the high Middle Ages, and the fall of book prices (due to piracy) in eighteenth-century England, France, and Germany.^[9] And there is no reason to limit this genealogy to the culture of the codex. For Sue-Ellen Case, the interactive computer screen descends just as logically from theater, Wlm, television, performance art, and the post–World War II American city.^[10] I will include comics and cartoons in this mix of ancestral media.

Worlds Inc's prototype Worlds Chat, the Wrst three-dimensional, multiuser, on-line environment made available to the public on the World Wide Web (in April 1995) is fairly typical of the medium. Worlds Chat Wrst introduces users to an avatar gallery from which they may choose a Wgure (male/female human, animal, or inanimate object) that will serve as a visual representation of themselves to other users. After inventing a user name, which is displayed over the head of the avatar, the user Wnds herself looking at a screen depicting a large room, the hub of a fancifully designed space station, within which the closest dozen or so avatars of other users can also be seen. The avatar is controlled by the mouse, while conversations are typed in a chat box at the bottom of the screen. Using various keyboard commands, one can limit the range of these communications ("whisper") to designated interlocutors. To change locations, the user either "walks" her avatar through doors, up stairs and escalators, and around corners, or teleports directly to other parts of the space station by pointing and clicking on a schematic map. One particularly popular room includes a mirror in which the user can see her avatar's reflection. Crashing through the "glass," the avatar enters a labyrinth, and, negotiating that, encounters a minotaur at its center. The newest version of Worlds Chat has added features that make the space more varied and less Euclidean, but add persistence of on-line identity

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by encouraging the visitor to use the same name and avatar during repeated visits.

Whether persistent or not, the avatar is supposed to make negotiating the computer interface more like operating in the physical world, an objective I will say more about in a moment. It also works well from a technical standpoint that the avatar and the predownloaded environment economize bandwidth. Sending and receiving avatar images can be handled with a 14.4 modem, far less than video conferencing would require, while the Worlds Chat server needs to track only an avatar's position in order to make the user's computer display the appropriate visuals for that position at any given moment. As of spring 1996, Worlds Chat had been downloaded to more 200,000 PCs, and the company was registering 1,000 new downloads a day.

The same company's Alphafiorld began as a kind of programmer's hobby space. A flat plane of green, surrounded by mountains (bearing a remarkable resemblance to Palm Springs), Alphafiorld allows users to stake out property and build on it. The houses, gardens, trees, fountains, revolving globes, advertising pavilions, newspaper stands, and mailboxes with which users cover their lots persist over time and become part of the landscape that others log into. It is, in this sense, a highly interactive, user-designed environment. Users are again represented as avatars, all white and male when Alphafiorld Wrst went on-line in fall 1995, but now more varied and, for those with programming skills, customizable. Conversations appear in comic-style bubbles over the heads of the avatars. Modes of locomotion include "walking," "flying," and "teleporting" and are controlled by combinations of keyboard command and use of the mouse. The user can also switch back and forth between Wrst- and third-person points of view. Conversations, many feel, work best in third person, where the user sees her own avatar as well as those of others, as if from a camera somewhere behind the avatar's right shoulder (belying any simple assimilation of virtual to physical reality). In concert with the metaphor of homesteading, users "immigrate" to Alphafiorld, which involves sending the server an e-mail address and getting a visa number in return. The procedure tends to keep Alphafiorld personae consistent, which, along with the persistence of the user-constructed city-scape, seems to foster the growth of community. An Alphafiorld newspaper was quickly established, and one couple held their wedding there. By spring, 1996, Alphafiorld was growing at the rate of 500 new citizens a day, and had already reached a population of 60,000.

Directly inspired by the "Metaverse," the locale of much of the action in Neal Stephenson's cult cyberpunk novel Snowcrash, Alphafiorld also Wgures in the next large venture envisioned by virtual environment developers.^[11] The plan is to link cyberspaces together—not only the worlds created by one company but also those introduced by a growing variety of enterprises, including Microsoft, Compuserv, Time-Warner, Disney, and various banks,

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businesses, and game manufacturers. A user can already send e-mail to other Alphafiorld users by clicking on the mailboxes in front of their houses. Clicking on a newspaper stand takes one to the text of the newspaper on the company's Web site. Soon an avatar may be able to walk through a door from Alphafiorld to Worlds Chat, shifting connections from one server to another without having to log off one and onto the other. The hybrid metaphor of the "home page" could give way to that of the "home," a virtual house furnished with objects linking it to other Web sites that may themselves increasingly be configured as three-dimensional, multiuser environments. The vision coming into focus in the summer of 1996 is that of an infinitely extensible, open platform—as opposed to a collage of separate spaces and kinds of space—on which increasing numbers of people would spend increasingly large portions of their lives.^[12] Franz Buchenberger, president of Black Sun Interactive (a developer of virtual reality tools that takes its name from a cafe in the Metaverse), insists that within a few years all technical barriers to this vision will have disappeared and "everybody will walk around cyberspace as an avatar."^[13] I would reiterate, though, that it has not always been obvious that this would be the direction in which three-dimen-sional, on-line, multiuser virtual environments were heading. When I began researching the medium in 1994, there was a decidedly ateleological sense that the technology was intrinsically fascinating while its possible applications were still to be imagined. Seamless extensibility (with its probable colonizing, homogenizing effects) assumed the status of manifest destiny only in 1996.

Contemporary with this "evolution" of the personal computer interface, a paradigm shift in scientific analysis has also been taking shape. Already used for simulations and modeling of various physical phenomena, three-dimensional computer visualization is now being developed as a means to synthesize and abstract—the more positivisitic metaphor used is that of "mining"vast quantities of heterogeneous statistical data. That is, the data processing power of the computer is being linked with its graphical capabilities to create easily grasped, navigable, three-dimensional visuals out of data so complex and heterogeneous that they would not otherwise be accessible. Like images in Dante's Paradiso, these visuals do not refer mimetically to any physical reality, but rather are tailored to maximize the collaboration between computer memory and the human sensorium. For example, data sets acquired over twenty years of Weld experience in the Great Barrier Reef can be synthesized, or "mined," to visualize the interrelations of currents, weather, and Wsh populations leading, theoretically, to more accurate environmental impact assessments.^[14] Not only can two-dimensional numbers and words be explored in a more intuitive three-dimensional visual form, but the three-dimensional images may be animated, allowing the interactive exploration of processes taking place over time. And furthermore, with

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multiuser technology, geographically separated investigators can meet together electronically in these data spaces, exploring them collabora-tively—an uncanny instantiation of the "consensual hallucination" conceived of by cyberfiction writer William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer.

Howard Rheingold, early in his book on virtual reality, quotes Heinz Pagel explaining the epistemological implications of this new tool. Pagel reasons, in the epigraph opening a chapter Rheingold calls "Grasping Reality Through Illusion":

The primary research instrument of the sciences of complexity is the computer. It is altering the architectonic of the sciences and the picture we have of material reality. Ever since the rise of modern science three centuries ago, the instruments of investigation such as telescopes and microscopes were analytic and promoted the reductionist view of science. Physics, because it dealt with the smallest and most reduced entities, was the most fundamental science. From the laws of physics one could deduce the laws of chemistry, then of life, and so on up the ladder…. The computer, with its ability to manage enormous amounts of data and to simulate reality, provides a new window on that view of nature. We may begin to see reality differently simply because the computer produces knowledge differently from the traditional analytic instruments.^[15]

Scientists have characterized these techniques as "the biggest thing since the experiment," a remarkable claim, with potentially complex implications for the scientific and the public community's understanding of what constitutes scientific knowledge.

But at least one visualization project, proposed at a conference hosted by the California Institute of Technology, does not involve conceptually resituating diverse scientific knowledges according to their "instruments of investigation." The conference position paper proposes extrapolating "very precise information" otherwise "hidden" in large volumes of complex data to create detailed, long-range ecological scenarios. These scenarios would then be made available to a broad cross-section of people on the World Wide Web for interactive viewing, revising, interrogation, and debate. The proposers of the project hope that a large constituency of users—not only scientists but also farmers, environmentalists, urban dwellers, business people, long-range planners, policymakers, and educators—would become collectively involved in visualizing the terrifying future consequences of current developmental trends, leading to large-scale changes in patterns of human thought and desire. The dispersed but vital cyber community brought into being would become a significant new political force, a consensus-building power base, overseeing sustainable development locally and globally.^[16]

The series of assumptions embedded in this proposal are internally consistent, and to an antiessentialist, alarming. First, knowledge or information

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is constructed as separate from the investigating subjects. This assumption makes plausible the idea that information can alter people's desires and behavior in the absence of any challenge to the political, economic, philosophical, and psychological vectors involved. The subject is reinscribed, that is, as the neutral, autonomous, self-determining entity one keeps encountering in more commercial pitches for virtual reality. This subject, in turn, accedes to power through participation in "consensus-building," a form of political discourse invented by the eighteenth-century European "man of reason," and closely related to the consensus-style protocols of conventional Western scientific discourse, without having to acknowledge that others are constrained or effaced by participation in its logic. This logic, as we have seen, reifies the relational differences that underwrite "identities" in terms of self and other, truth and untruth, and sets up the sense of danger and mess that the subject then yearns to transcend. Directly related to this issue of subject construction is the failure to recognize the contingent epistemological status, noted by Pagels, of computer-generated "information." However idealistically motivated one's use of "knowledge" may be, if it effaces the politics underwriting the production of "facts" and the use of "knowledge" to legitimate authority, then it, too, contributes to the construction and epistemological exploitation of disempowered "others." (Why do we need a computer image to argue against the testing of nuclear devices in the Pacific Islands when we have the evidence of the "jelly babies" that mothers there are giving birth to?) Epistemologically and politically, then, this plan would seem to encourage the construction or performance of homogeneous subjects predisposed to seek the "transcendence" that will take them out of relation with their diacritically related fellow humans.

A second idealistic application of three-dimensional multiuser virtual environments is the massive use of the technology to address the ills of public education in the United States. In congressional subcommittee and in a memo prepared for advisors to President Clinton, developers have suggested that students transcend their schools by going on-line. Students could not only see and hear, but interact with "top instructors" from anywhere. They could collaborate with each other in virtual groups on the construction of a virtual polis whose laws they could vote on and in whose evolution they could become participant observers. They could take Weld trips with friends to a virtual Smithsonian, role play life in colonial Boston. The medium would overcome students’ alienation by giving them a community of peers and mentors, as well as interactivity with the best educational resources the world has to offer. The developers themselves place an epistemologically radical spin on this scenario, suggesting that learning would therefore take place, not by setting up subject/object relationships, but by "being and doing." "Knowledge," the students would learn, "is that which can be applied, shared, or tested."^[17] I will return below to this claim and to what it overlooks.

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Avatar. n. Hindu mythology, the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god. 2. an embodiment or concrete manifestation of an abstract concept.

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language

Phone home.

E.T.

In the remainder of this discussion of subjectivity, the metaphysics of addiction/transcendence, and conceptualizations of cyberspace, I will focus on the growing appreciation of the immediacy (in both senses— speed and intimacy) with which users can apprehend and communicate information in a three-dimensional visual medium. Psychologists of vision and computer visionaries agree that a human driving a car down the street processes far more visual information, far better, than any computer could. According to cognitive scientists the human brain is faster than even the fastest supercomputer at pattern recognition, and, furthermore, we process pattern—even two-dimensional pattern—with the same tools we use to perceive three-dimensional space.^[18] Inversely, humans process numbers and alphabetic text slowly and poorly relative to computers. The most efficient way to interact with the microprocessor, then, does seem to be to join the speed with which the computer can organize and process data with the speed and complexity of human, three-dimensional pattern recognition. The animated, three-dimensional graphical interface would, therefore, appear to be the optimal workspace and playground for any self-respecting human/computer cyborg, whatever her theoretical and political orientations.

But will this interface be the site of a seduction away from Western logo-centrism or of a more subtle, deep-seated entrenchment? Many Wrst-wave commentators enthusiastically anticipate a painless metamorphosis of users into gracefully decentered Derridian subjects. Western desires for identity, self-sameness presence, and mastery will give way to the jouissance of multiple personalities, consciously performative and completely fluid sex/gender roles, the dissolution of binary opposition, of self/other, presence/absence.^[19] I am suggesting that this interface also needs to be theorized in relation to a structure of addiction/transcendence associated with the denial of difference and the logic of the same.

Doing so, however, leads quickly to the realization that categories of all kinds tend to become slippery in the exploration of the properties of a new medium. Theories of the subject derived from and addressing the subject of text-based print culture, or even of cinema, for example, may be misleading in the attempt to theorize three-dimensional, interactive, multiuser, on-line

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virtual existence. Compounding this complication is the realization that the on-line virtual environment resembles nothing so much as one of our least studied, most marginalized entertainment media. What the developers, scientists, educators, and retailers are saying, in essence, is that large numbers people will be spending large amounts of their lives being represented as, and interacting with … CARTOONS!! Leaving aside for the moment the question of how "interacting" differs from both reading and being a spectator, cartoons themselves differ from both verbal texts and pictorial images, disrupting a commonplace distinction between the two. The miscegenating "comic book" has not been claimed by either literature or visual art in the traditional academic curriculum. Academic culture, which privileges the phonetic word over the image and makes "visual culture" a special departmental interest, has conditioned even Wlm theorists to have little or nothing to say about the hieroglyphics of animation.

Computer avatars (animated Wgures, which are, by an apt semantic coincidence, controlled by and conceptually related to the "mouse") were devised to make interaction with other users and with the electronic environment more "intuitive." That is, they are intended to situate what the user sees on screen within an already naturalized human response loop that mimics "the sophisticated and nuanced response to environmental cues."^[20] So "where" and "what" would a group of hypothetical students be as they take a Weld trip into the submicroscopic center of a helium nucleus deep in the heart of the sun, some dimension of themselves embodied in three-dimensional icons navigating through computer animations?^[21] How will students, scientists, friends, and consumers come to know themselves, to think and behave, significantly differently in the mirror of this interactive graphical interface? And how will the experience be different for subjects situated differently (in terms of gender, race, class, age, and so on) in "Real Life?"^[22]

Theoretician of comics Scott McCloud offers a provocative commentary on the ways we relate to the stripped down iconicity of cartoons (see Figure 2). A form of amplification through simplification, "cartooning isn't just a way of drawing," he maintains, "it's a way of seeing."^[23] Intensity, liveliness, and focus are achieved by drawings in which every line counts as a signifier. McCloud goes on to attribute the peculiar attraction of the cartoon character to its likeness to the sketchy mind-pictures we carry around of ourselves. When you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself, he surmises, "The cartoon is a VACUUM … an empty shell that we inhabit that enables us to travel in another realm. We don't just observe the cartoon, we become it."^[24] I would extrapolate that cartoons, as McCloud theorizes them, operate like anti-Oedipal rhizomes, drawing reader/viewers and cartoon images to form improvisational matrices of intensity. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Wgure this relationship through the mutual deterritorizations and reterritorializations of the orchid and the wasp:

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The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.… There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome.^[25]

To borrow further from the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, the human sensorium becomes nonstratified. "It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced."^[26]

I follow Deleuze and Guattari in distinguishing this relation from the Oedipal relations of "voyeurism" and "identification." The latter operations imply, inscribe, and depend on a hierarchically organized subject who either objectifies that which he looks at or heightens his own sense of mastery by eliding his consciousness/gaze with that of a character—an ego-ideal—whose own represented relation to the world is that of subject to object. "Identification," that is, implies a whole range of circumstances having to do with the construction of "identity" that leads us back to the subject of classical Western metaphysics. As Anne Friedberg succinctly puts it, "identification … replicates the very structure of patriarchy. Identification demands sameness, necessitates similarity, disallows difference."^[27]

A second way in which comics are distinguished by McCloud from other kinds of text has to do with the continuum—what from a "stratified" perspective looks like miscegenation—they set up between words and pictures, between graphics we "read" and those we "look at." McCloud observes (and illustrates):

When pictures are more abstracted from ‘reality’ they require greater levels of perception, MORE LIKE WORDS. When words are bolder, more direct, they require lower levels of perception and are received faster, MORE LIKE PICTURES.^[28]

McCloud is not an academic theoretician and seems not to be aware of the conceptual consequences of this failure to patrol the boundary between the phenomenal and the abstract. Jean Baudrillard, by contrast, has made a career of deploring such lapses:

Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference … that was abstraction's charm.… the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.… With it goes all of metaphysics.^[29]

The "loss" of distinction between the map and the territory, like the loss of distinction between the word and the picture, subverts the system of binary

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opposition upon which a certain understanding of signification depends. The old patriarch in Baudrillard, who Wnds this "loss" perverse, recognizes that when the binary opposition between concrete and abstract (not between signified and signifier or referent and sign, but between literal and Wgural) disappears, so does the possibility of mooring the movement of signification in a "real," however hypothetical or socially constructed. The problem becomes, as Baudrillard so quotably has written, that "there is no real … that is not already a nonoriginal ‘reproduction,’ or, more accurately, an iteration of an abstract code or matrix, a simulacrum."^[30] If the trick of Western Platonic structures of knowledge and authority, as Judith Butler has compellingly argued, is discursively to construct "matter" as a pre-discursive category that both grounds and is transcended by description, analysis, and other kinds of representation, then the "magic" and "charm" that Baudrillard complains of losing are the magic and charm of epistemic dominance, the same kind of dominance we saw Wgured in the proposed use of computer imaging.^[31] It follows that, since the literalness of the receiving/perceiving subject is included in this loss, the question of transcendence is rendered completely moot. Baudrillard's residual nostalgia for transcendence then functions (with multiple-edged irony, I think) to index the impotence of theoretical knowledge relative to the powerful tides of political and emotional conditioning.

The scientists at the Caltech conference, the members of the U.S. Congress, and the capitalist marketplace are perhaps even less ready than Baudrillard to give up the panoptical position, the centered and centrally located subject, whose utopian desire is to transcend relation, to see universally, producing a version of "reality" that supports their kind of subject position. (This is not to be taken as a moral critique, which would merely put me in the same position. As science-Wction writer Octavia Butler compelling suggests in the three novels of her Xenogenesis series, nonbinary, non-logocentric forms of domination are just as conceivable as the binary forms we are more familiar with.^[32]) We have seen how the shift to three-dimensional virtual reality potentially unmasks the authoritarian production of knowledge and other artifacts of the European episteme that have relied on a matter/mind, phenomenological/analytical dichotomy. Now I would like to consider how the flow of subjectivity into the "visual pixel dust" of cartoon avatars nevertheless permits us to carry on with business as usual, even to feel a sense of traveling home after a long exile. What is homelike about these virtual spaces—and for whom—and where does the importunate urge to phone such a home come from?

Dismantling the "biunivocality" of the "White Man" (their term) "is no mean affair," Deleuze and Guattari remark in their essay on faciality. "It is never a question of a return to the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is part of the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and

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plugged into becomings spiritual/animal."^[33] How, for example, to think non-Platonically about the relationship of avatars and their environments to physicality is a complicated question that needs to be framed diachronically as well as synchronically. Artist Judit Hersko, describing her own series of avatarlike shadow images, based on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of witchcraft, comments:

The contrast between the immaterial nature of the presentation and the strong physicality of the images expresses the shift that occurred in the human psyche during the transition from the middle ages to modernity when the bodies of actual women served as the battle ground. The process played out during this period of marginalizing the body by declaring its desires feminine vices and exorcising them at the stake seems to be intricately entangled with the … emergence of the sanitized body and the scientific mind Wt for industrial production.^[34]

In other words, Hersko reminds us, the body (as matter) has for some time been constructed as our premier arena of control, this body has been closely associated with women, and our experiences of our bodies are thoroughly and variously mediated by both these circumstances.^[35]

Thus when A. R. Stone insists that "the physical/virtual distinction is not a mind/body distinction," I would partially agree, within a synchronic frame. One could think of the electronic avatar as a "narrow bandwidth extension" of the already marginalized, Cartesian body.^[36] There is no reason not to believe, though, that even within contemporary computer culture the sense of physical extension varies greatly depending on the user's "real-life" sense of her/his physicality. What happens, for example, if one has a strong sense of the "to-be-looked-atness" that some feminist theorists have associated with being a young, white female? How does the avatar extend (or not) a racialized body?^[37] What if one is used to sensing other people with the surface of the skin, through the soles of the feet, by smell? And this is to leave completely bracketed any question of the users’ linguistic patterns.

If we read avatars and bodies diachronically, it becomes much harder to escape the conclusion that the physical/virtual distinction is deeply implicated in the mind/body split. Having outlived its usefulness as arena-of-control, the body of nineteenth-century science and industry becomes marginalized even further. The term avatar, significantly, comes from the Sanskrit word for the embodiment in human form of a Hindu deity. The human user in this analogy becomes a godlike, incorporeal being. The incorporeal electronic avatar, paradoxically corresponding to the god's physical embodiment as a human, is understood as a technical construct under the god's control. The human user, rewritten as "human spirit," is then "freed" to rove at will through the universe. The old nineteenth/twentieth-century (Euro-American) body, with its vestigial sensorium and markers of race, gender,

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mortality, and other "constraints" of identity and situation, is replaced by one or a series of new navigating entities, now obediently and flexibly allied with, rather than opposed to, spirit/mind, which is, it should be noted, more than ever in charge. This maneuver parallels developments in genetics and evolutionary science, where the rhetorical construction of DNA as the source and governor of life depends on abstracting genetic code from its physical instantiation, an abstraction that then permits computer scientists to attribute "life" to their on-screen simulations of genetic recombinations.^[38]

Evelyn Fox Keller is highly critical of the Wrst move, using the Nobel Prize-winning work of Barbara McClintock on the transposition of genes to discuss an alternative, nonhierarchical model in which DNA is just one element in a complex web of interactions among the nucleus, the rest of the cell, the cell's environment, and the organism's environment. Genes function "only with respect to the environment in which [they are] found," Fox Keller quotes McClintock as saying.^[39] Ann Weinstone comments on Artificial Life, "Code is coming to function as the transcendental, unifying, and ideal substance of life—for the non-referential, the unmediated—while at the same time, it retains attributes, or the trace if you will, of writing, replacing the body with a less mortal letter."^[40] N. Katherine Hayles has suggested that the desire expressed in the cybernetic construct of the body-plus-computer-plus-simulation is to leave the body and have it too—to use the human sensorium's pattern recognition faculties without having to deal with such reminders of geographical, temporal, and political situatedness as disease, pollution, commodification, and sociologically marked bodies.^[41]

Read this way, the destabilization of binary opposition, subversion of ontology, and gender-bending encountered by/through the subject of "life" on the screen are all recuperated by a seductive new phallicism, even as they appear to decenter the old. An intoxicating phallicism that does not seek agency, stability, and identity by separating from and dominating bodies, objects, or physical territories, but by engaging in weightless, transparent interactivity, this "virtual reality" claims not the Wgurality of its literal, but the literalness of its Wgures. "Reality is the best metaphor," claim virtually all of the press releases from Worlds Inc. Diacritical difference, both the irreducible différance underwriting signification, and the contingent, historical manifestations of this différance that the rhetorical hype assumes we should want to "transcend," are rigorously effaced, visible at best as the recreational interests of a transcendental subject whose sovereignty and self-presence are never seriously in question. On-line graphical virtual reality seems to fulfill the old positivist dream of a common language in which noise, ambiguity, and misunderstanding are reduced to a minimum, and communication can aspire to transparency. We are "home free"or Wnally at home for the Wrst time—having triumphantly closed the alienating gap between representation and reality.

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In criticizing this model of graphically based electronic communication, I do not mean to essentialize the body. It is, I have argued, the virtual reality rhetoric that perpetuates and intensifies the coding of a physical, material body separate from mind. My sense of the importance of physicality has more to do with a model of knowledge and communication as transparency. Biology, temporality, culture, gender—the kinds of differentiation that present themselves as obstacles to knowing and communicating within the logic of the same—constitute precisely the via, the means to know and to communicate, when meaning is understood to be metaphorical, contextual, and relational rather than ontological. It is by knowing that we do not understand, by encountering aporias, that we (incompletely) glimpse the contours and contingencies of our subjectivities and can begin to communicate otherwise than solipsistically or imperially. What Henri Lefebvre calls "the enigma of the body," the material body's ability, within the Western episteme of the last several centuries, to produce differences, to be the bearer of the new, including the supreme novelties of old age and death, has been one of the most effective means we have had to counter the depredations of the desire for transcendent transparency.^[42] If instantaneous, transparent, mutual readability within a homogeneous or, to use Lefebvre's term, "abstract" space is the ideal result of three-dimensional interfaces, then, even before the very important question of access is broached, it would appear that the transcendence of difference being claimed for our avatars is a self-colonizing high.

"Transparency … is in fact the perfect boobytrap," writes Lefebvre. "Someone who knows only how to see ends up … seeing badly. The reading of a space that has been manufactured with readability in mind amounts to a sort of pleonasm."^[43] Ted Nelson, who coined the term "hypertext" to describe what he imagined would be a heterogeneous space of nonrandom intertextuality, warns that the evolving paradigm of the World Wide Web, in which any location can be connected with any other, models thinking as an ultimately meaningless mass of logically circular "spaghetti code."^[44] In physics, if all points are equally connectable to all other points, what is described is not a space at all, but a spatial singularity—a black hole— whose gravitational force compresses everything into a single point from which no light can escape.