5. Trauma, Media, Cyberspace
9. 9
Welcome to the Pharmacy
Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual Reality
Ann Weinstone
It has become a truism to say that virtual reality (VR) is addictive. Case, the protagonist of William Gibson's Neuromancer, dreams of connection to the net like a junkie jonesing for a Wx. In Jeff Noon's novel Vurt, you get to cyberspace by tickling the back of your throat with addictive, government-produced feathers. Verity of Kathleen Ann Goonan's Queen City Jazz sports nanotechnology implants that compel her to enter virtual worlds into which she sinks with feelings of deep bliss. As in Vurt, in Pat Cadigan's Synners, everything's an addiction: cyberspace, people, rock and roll.
But let's move away from Wction. Graphic cyberartist Nicole Stenger, a self-professed Neoplatonist, writes: "What if the passage to a new level of humanity actually meant abolishing indeed the natural one, or at least some part of it? … Will it not require immense effort to recover from this enhancement of the senses, from this habit of perfection?"[1] Michael Benedikt, editor of Cyberspace: First Steps, deems VR "a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology."[2] Ad copy in a May 1995 issue of Wired for "Origin," a VR game, reads, "You must die to learn how to live.… Death is not an option. It's an addiction." And an article in The New York Times titled "The Lure and Addiction of Life on Line" displays a graphic of a bespectacled male, tapping away at a computer located inside of a panopticon-sized rendering of a globe to which the avid user is happily chained.[3] From advertisements to scholarly texts, it is difficult to Wnd any writing about VR that does not engage in and rely on the rhetorics of addiction. William Gibson dubbed cyberspace a "consensual hallucination." That was 1984. In 1996, critic Robert Markley rechristened VR "a consensual cliché."[4] Surely, the "addictiveness" of cyberspace contributes to the sense of tired familiarity. My questions are these: Why does cyberspace have to be addictive? What work is addiction doing in discourses of virtual reality?
I'm concerned here with the production of what might be called "hyperreal transcendence." Jean Baudrillard, in his influential schema "three orders of simulacra," identifies a Wrst, "natural" order in which "a transcendent world, a radically different universe, is portrayed … in contrast to the continent of the real." Second-order simulacra are additive and productive; they enhance the real. Science Wction belongs to this order. Third-order simulated simulacra collapse the distance between the model and the original, the space across which transcendence has traditionally been produced. Baudrillard writes that the aim of simulation simulacra is "maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control.… Models no longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real; they are, themselves, an apprehension of the real, and thus leave no room for any Wctional extrapolation—they are immanent, and therefore leave no room for any kind of transcendentalism."[5]
I propose that a third-order, hyper-real, transcendence has survived the collapse of the distance between the model and the original. This transcendence relies on rhetorics of disembodiment, immortality, and extrahuman reproductive and generative powers within virtual spaces. Such spaces include scholarly and technical essays about VR or cyberspace, science Wction, advertisements for VR games, VR game narratives, and other advertising copy that borrows from current discourses of virtuality. Although "virtual reality" is clearly a locus for fantasies about transcendence of the body, it is my purpose here to show exactly how these fantasies rely on rhetorics of addiction, and how, within the context of a general "transcendentalizing" of the concept of code, they attest to the advent of an expanded notion of writing that no longer does the antiauthoritarian work of deconstruction but constitutes a refigured zone of uninterrupted presence.
In Of Grammatology, Derrida wrote that "scientific language challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing and all its implicit metaphysics."[6] Derrida published this inaugural section of his landmark work in 1965 during a time when cybernetic concepts and rhetoric were disseminating through diverse Welds such as psychology, anthropology, literary studies, and molecular biology. The cybernetic urge, he wrote, is to "oust all metaphysical concepts," those such as soul, life, and memory. "[Cybernetics] must conserve the notion of writing … until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed." Even at this early date, Derrida intuits that the yet-to-be-fathomed historico-metaphysical character of cybernetics involves a "movement of inflation … which has also taken over the word ‘writing,’ and that not fortuitously." This inflation is a saying of "writing" to designate everything from action to experience to the unconscious, to the pictographic, the ideographic, and indeed, "all that gives rise to inscription in general" (Grammatology, 9). Despite holding out a certain hope for "scientific" or nonphonetic language, he ends the section
In the Western tradition, transcendence commences with the penetration of the self by a supraenlivened Other, whether that other be a king, a god, nature, the voice of logos, the law, or an abstracted version of vitality itself. My initial point will be that following the established Western logocentric tradition, rhetorical relationships of addiction between VR users and VR narratives are the "software" with which hyper-real transcendence is produced and sustained. In other words, VR demands, as the price of transcendence, that the user become of the medium, of the other, through a relationship of compulsion, penetration, repetition, and bodily subsumption. Following this, I argue that the transcendental teleology of logocentrism achieves reproduction in VR discourses in part because the attribution "life" is shifting from the realm of the biological (DNA) and natural language to the postvital and code. Code is coming to function as the transcendental, unifying, and ideal substance of life—for the nonreferential, 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. To ingest, to become code, thus becomes the possibility condition for what I see as the conservative, Platonic notions of transcendence at play in narratives of VR.
RHETORICAL SOFTWARE: WHAT's INCLUDED IN THIS PROGRAM
In On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences, Richard Doyle develops the notion of rhetorical software. Viewing language as rhetorical software de-emphasizes language as a site of meaning and representation, and foregrounds instead the activity or force of language. Doyle writes:
Rhetorics work more on the model of contagion than communication or representation; they pass through Welds and agents as intertextual forces that recast knowledges and their knowers while sometimes remaining in the realm of the unthought.… There can be no easy distinction between writing and its "objects"; both are elements of an interface. The relations that make up this interface are maps of power. [7]
The urge for the author of a project such as this to define "virtual reality" takes on an imperative cast when the ubiquity and fluidity of usage is taken into account. But it is precisely this ubiquity, this transferability, this anything-goes mutability that marks the extreme rhetoricity of the term, that marks it as a fast-moving cultural force or agent. Consider that if VR can be located, it consists of animated games, some rudimentary VR "environments," the rare commercial VR arcade, unwieldy data gloves and visors, military and medical simulation programs, and an international communications network, the Internet, that is still primarily text-based. To this list I would add the essays, advertisements, Wctions, and other narratives that are actively and forcefully participating in the production of VR. The heterogeneous contents of Cyberspace: First Steps attest to the presumption that natural language, code, and hardware are all reagents of VR. Here, Wction, cultural critique, anthropology, and essays about VR architecture and design are all recognized co-constructors. Rather than attempting to define VR, my modus operandi will be to include whatever is said to be included, in other words, to let the rhetorical software spin out its instructions, to see where it goes, what it produces.
Building on Doyle's notion of rhetorical contagion, or interfaces that produce maps of power, I want to follow two contagious or contiguous rhetorics that exemplify the Western tradition of linking addiction to transcendence and comprise crucial subprograms of the rhetorical softwares of VR that are producing transcendence out of addiction. I will start with William Burroughs's Wrst novel, Junky, published in 1953. The influence of Burroughs's cut-up method of writing, particularly his novel Naked Lunch, on William Gibson's originary articulation of the cyberpunk mise-en-scène has been widely discussed.[8] Fronted and backed by notes from a sobered author warning against the physical and spiritual poverty caused by addiction, Naked Lunch serves largely as a cautionary tale. In Junky, however, no such cautions are in evidence. Here Burroughs explicitly maps, and to an extent valorizes, connections between addiction and transcendence.
Moving backward, I read discursive connections between transcendence and addiction in light of the professed idealism, or citational Platonism, of much of the constitutive rhetoric of VR. Discussions of cyberspace often make reference to Platonic idealism. Michael Benedikt speaks of a "mental geography" (Cyberspace, 3) that has existed for every culture. He relates cyberspace to ideas of a transcendent, heavenly city and to ancient Greek deductive geometry, which relied on idealized geometric forms to exemplify the nature of perfect reasoning (Cyberspace, 19). Michael Heim, author of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, terms cyberspace "Platonism as a working product." "The computer," he says, "recycles ancient Platonism by injecting the ideal content of cognition with empirical specifics.… The computer clothes the details ofempirical experience so they seem to share the ideality of the stable knowledge
DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION (IT's AN ADDICTION)
One of the most compelling and brilliant challenges any contemporary writer has raised against the absurd jurisdiction of death.
The Washington Post, as quoted on the back cover of Junk
by William Burroughs
I confess I know something about heroin, about junk. I've never been a user, but my family members, friends, and lovers have. Long before I read Junky, I heard what I would term "junk myths," urban lore about the transcendence-producing powers of junk.
- Junk Myth #1: Junk makes you live longer. Junk time is slower than real time.
Burroughs: "When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing.… Most addicts look younger than they are."[10] "I'm forty-one now. I feel about twenty-Wve or so. Look it too. Living in Vurt really slows down the rate of change."[11] - Junk Myth #2: Junk endows the user with special powers. Junk is magic.
Burroughs: "I do want usable knowledge of telepathy." (Junky, 152) Stenger: "Communicating at the speed of light on the computer networks induces euphoria, boosts intuition." ("Mind," 57) - Junk Myth #3: Junk replaces human cells by turning them into junk.― 166 ―Burroughs: "I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration." (Junky, 117)
"There never seems to be enough time when your brain is being eaten by a cyber-virus.… Hardwire your neurons. Critics are calling Burn: Cycle ‘a totally synthesized, fully transcendental, bio-controlled, electronic rush.’[12]
This is junk rhetoric. It's also commodity rhetoric. Spend a lot of time using our product (junk), trade your brain cells for cybervirus (junk/code), and get a "transcendental" rush. In Junky, what gets traded in is the sensual, affective body and its pains. What it gets traded for is transcendence. Not the transcendence of the high—Burroughs spends little time reflecting on the sensation of being doped up—but a transcendence brought about by being an addict: immortality, extrahuman powers, reembodiment. Burroughs writes, "A man might die simply because he has to stay in his own body.… Junk is an inoculation of death" (Junky, 97, 127).
Burroughs repeatedly makes the point that this trade, this inoculation, cannot be made except through addiction. The addict is not addicted to junk, but to junk as a way of life, to habit. "The point of junk to a user is that it forms a habit" (Junky, 99). Addiction removes the addict from real time or, in VR terms, RL (Real Life), a removal that can only be effected, according to Burroughs, by the addict becoming of that alternate world, that is, becoming junk.
The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junk time and junk metabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. (Junky, 97)
This isn't new. As Avital Ronell has noted, "Precisely due to the promise of exteriority which they are thought to extend, drugs have been redeemed by the conditions of transcendency and revelation with which they are not uncommonly associated."[13] Robert Markley offers the cyberspace update when he writes, "In cyberspace, the individual resolves the divisions within her nature only by allowing herself to become an effect of the technology that re-creates her" ("Boundaries," 73).
And what exactly was (Keith) Richards’ appeal? "Hey, man, look at him," says McKagan. (The Guns n Roses bassist and a former heroin user.) "He's cool, he's bad, he can get his blood transfused."[14]
In two recent novels, Jeff Noon's Vurt and Kathleen Ann Goonan's Queen City Jazz, the main characters are "impure"; their bodies have permanently incorporated technologies that give them special powers to merge with virtual worlds. Scribble, the protagonist of Noon's novel, has been bitten by a dreamsnake, a creature of the Vurt, Noon's name for VR locales and their virtual inhabitants. This bite, like the knowledge-giving snake of Garden of
In Queen City Jazz, because Verity's DNA has been replaced with tellingly named "Enlivenment," or nanotechnology, she may directly access and control virtual and material realms. In each of these narratives, access, and the knowledge and powers it brings, is paired with the rhetorics of addiction. The protagonists’ choices to enter virtual worlds are never free from compulsion as they answer the call of their "permanent cellular alteration." In each novel, as in Junky, the protagonists seek fuller mergings with transcendent virtual worlds through penetration, repetition, immersion, and the replacement of the "natural" body with technologies of virtuality.
Verity's name is an obvious reference to the association of virtuality with transcendent knowledge. Initially, she lives in a community that forbids contact with Enlivenment. But Verity's cellular longing for the Enlivened city of Cincinnati pulls the narrative toward its denouement and her consumption/assumption of Enlivened systems. There, the binary code that has replaced or supplemented a portion of Verity's DNA becomes the vehicle for a direct, unmediated apprehension of new and powerful knowledges.
You wanted power, she told herself. Now you must use it.… A binary code from deep within her surfaced.… A new scent Wlled the air, laden with information that went directly into her brain through her nose and was translated by her mind into knowledge bringing both dread and Werce exhilaration.[15]
Conversely, the Vurtually Immune are Vurt's "flightless birds," those who, for whatever reason, are not susceptible to the addicting, orally administered feathers that move human consciousness between RL and VR. Scribble says, "I had met one (of the Vurtually Immune) a few years ago and the look of despair in his eyes would never leave me" (Vurt, 26). In the remainder of this essay, I want to explore the question of why some of us want to be virtual, to ingest, to inject, to become binary code, in the light of another constitutive rhetoric that says we already are code: DNA.
EVERYTHING IS WRITING … BUT CODE IS THE MOTHER OF ALL
You can't wear the thongs of the cybernetic machine mask for long without feeling its seduction, knowing the grace that comes when the cyberlink between cortex and text becomes seamless and complete, feeling the code stamp itself upon the jelly of your flesh so that you metamorphose into a soft machine, knowing that it feels so … so right, and hurts so good.
Porush, Out of Our Minds
Welcome to the new world of point and click biology.
Incyte Pharmaceuticals advertisement, June 7, 1996
It's a real floaty, godlike trip.
Steven Tyler, Aerosmith singer, speaking of a heroin high
Reprising Plato's opposition of writing to truth; of writing to presence; of writing to voice, Derrida says, "Writing is irresponsibility itself, the orphanage of a wandering and playing sign. Writing is not only a drug, it is a game."[16] In Plato's Phaedrus, the world of the simulacrum is fatefully linked to writing, to the pharmakon, a word signifying both drug and remedy. Writing contaminates; it weakens true, interior memory and substitutes rememoration and death for presence, memory, and life. Writing kills the father because it substitutes a nonliving representation for his living speech. In the Western logocentric tradition, only this speech carries the authority of logos: of presence, intellection, and reason. Thus, writing assumes a simulacrum of transcendent powers by representing the authoritative speech of the father. This substitution, this killing, intoxicates, effecting a release from authority, allowing the user to forget the artificiality of writing itself, to forget the simulacrum, to propagate the dangerously powerful effects of an errant technology.
Logos is living presence, unmediated intellection, "the hidden illuminating, blinding source."[17] This is the same blinding source that the escaped prisoner from Plato's cave approaches as he moves upward and away from enchainment and the shadows toward the sensible and the visible, and then, the sun.
Whenever I'm feeling particularly paranoiac re: the God problem, I imagine that we're all just brains in bottles somewhere, thoughts in a void, … & this phenomenological world is some cheesy Total Recall vision we're renting from The Company who stays in business keeping us from the horrible ecstatic truth.[18]
Further on, Derrida notes that "Socrates’ brand of magic is worked through logos without the aid of any instrument, through the effects of a
During the 1970s, techniques for recombining and cloning DNA became available for the Wrst time. Prior to this, as Evelyn Fox Keller notes, "The notion of ‘genetical information’ … was not literal, but metaphoric."[20] Once the four amino acid components of DNA were known, represented by the letters A, T, C, G, and sequences could be combined and cloned at will, the metaphorical association of DNA with "data" and "program" became an identity. As Richard Doyle writes:
The conflation of what life "is" with the "action" of a configuration of molecules conventionally represented by an alphabet of "ATCG" produced an almost vulgarly literal translation of Jacques Derrida's famous remark, "il n'y a pas de horstexte." Literally, the rhetoric of molecular biology implied, there is no outside of the genetic text. No body, no environment, no outside could threaten the sovereignty of DNA. (Beyond Living, 109)
Doyle writes that by the mid-twentieth century an invisible, unifying property, "aliveness," becomes located in the genome. But the notion of life as a hidden unity rendered molecular biology open to cybernetics, or information theory, and the "metonymic displacement of an organism by a code-script" (Beyond Living, 116). This displacement "plunges research ever deeper into the genome to a place beyond the molecule, the postvital." Today, "the postvital organism is nothing but coding" (Beyond Living, 17). Of the rhetorics of A-Life (Artificial Life), Doyle notes that the "conceptual move from the notion that life is a ‘text’ to the idea that ‘information’ can be ‘life’ is a short one" (Beyond Living, 110). Traditional A-Lifers look for the
Nicole Stenger, a computer animation artist, explicitly identifies herself as an "idealist" who has decided to "follow the light" ("Mind," 49). Transcendence is mapped in her essay along familiar lines: dis- or reembodiment into a "realm of pure feelings" ("Mind," 53), and the assumption of godlike powers of generation, which include the power to create and name new "cyberspace creatures." She speaks of "living twice" ("Mind," 52), that is, of producing binary-coded duplicates of herself and of her longing for "a D day when this substance (VR) would Wnally escape and invade what we call reality" ("Mind," 49). Of reembodiment, or becoming code, Stenger writes, "On the other side of our data gloves, we become creatures of colored light in motion, pulsing with golden particles.… In this cubic fortress of pixels that is cyberspace, we will be, as in dreams" ("Mind," 52). Finally, Stenger sees DNA-directed reproduction and evolution as a penultimate form of evolution and the ascendance to binary individuals as the more desirable state. "Wouldn't the drive for cyberspace be so irresistible that some of the basic functions of human life might fall off like ripe fruit? Human reproduction, for instance.… What if cyberspace were the Wnal act of a natural evolution of a family? A mutation into the virtual cloning of individuals?" ("Mind," 56).
Other writers take a more critical, or at least a more quizzical, stance. Yet throughout VR discourses, the relationship of addiction to transcendence remains unexamined. This oversight leads to weirdly mutated versions of hyper-real transcendence that share foundational elements with logocentrism, even when it is logocentrism that is being critiqued. David Porush calls for "the re-assertion and re-adaptation of the genetic code (passion, imagination, the irrational) over the industrial one (rationality) that has tried to suppress it."[21] According to Porush, cybernetic code can never provide an adequate model for the metaphoricity, the nontotalizability of human consciousness. Postmodern literature, "the enduring attempt to model in words the activities of the mind in all its irrationality" ("Frothing," 259), provides more promising maps for evolving technology and ourselves ("Frothing," 247–49). Porush pays homage to "long habits of associating
The establishment of cyberspace as an exteriorized, irrational zone will be an accessory, Porush claims, to the death of logocentrism. Yet the zone is described, in its aims and effects, in largely Western logocentric terms. I am sympathetic to Porush's emphasis on the irrational, the passionate, the imaginative, and even the spiritual potentials of VR mediums. However, transcendence here still seems to require the reinstatement of mental voice and intellection as more "ideal" than writing and bodies; the apotheosis of godlike powers; and a mind-over-matter notion of imperialistic control. And while Porush denigrates the powerful, ubiquitous "industrial" Code, his version of transcendence still requires a relationship between humans and code of compulsion and substitution. The transcendee must become of the same substance as the drug: a synthesis requiring that genetic code and "industrial" code be commensurate, transparently commutable, translatable. Only this enables Porush to claim that once we are able to directly mindlink to the technology, cyberspace will become "an expression of pure cognition" ("Frothing," 260). "Logocentrism will be dead … the word will be obsolete."[23] Yet for Derrida, writing is the locus of the separation from the father, or logos, precisely because it threatens the ideality of pure intellection and its pharmakeus: the voice from the mind. So when Porush dreams of a world of "pure cognition" and asks, "why write when you can broadcast your thoughts?" ("Out of Our Minds," 234), he seems to be powerfully reinstating exactly the dualisms of which he wishes to rid us.
In the Timaeus, Plato writes of a "receptacle," a chora, a matrix, or a plane from which mimetic forms come and go. Plato likens this receptacle to a mother and the source or the spring to the father. The matrix is "an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible."[24] Investing code with sublime life, VR becomes both
Yet mortality anxieties contaminate the digitized subject as well. This substitution of the postvital mind for bodily presence, junk cells for mortal cells, Code for DNA, depends on repetition. The pharmakon is both drug and remedy. In order for it to "work," the user must become it; the user must become an addict. Theuth, the inventor of writing, claims that the pharmakon, writing, "enables us to repeat, and thus to remember" ("Rhetoric of Drugs," 6), a claim that the God-King rejects on the grounds that writing is irresponsible repetition that does not enhance authentic memory. In Junky, Burroughs writes that the junkie is addicted to habit, to repetition as the vehicle for substitution of junk cells for human cells, for transcendence of the "the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh" (Junky, 152), for secession from Real Life. In VR discourses, the insistent rhetorics of addiction must work continually to reproduce hyper-real transcendence by repeatedly inoculating and intoxicating the anxious user with an idealized, vitalized, information Code.[25] There is no safety, no sure promise of resurrection. The fallible physical world and its machines haunt the ghosts.
I think it is possible, after the foregoing, to make two claims. First, that the connection between addiction and transcendence was clearly established in the Western tradition, within which I include Burroughs, and was available as a constitutive, founding rhetoric for discourses concerning VR. This tradition already connected writing and drug addiction to dis- or reembodiment, life extension, and special powers. As a thought-game, I suggest imagining that the program for "addiction," for bodily subsumption, ongoing intoxication, repeated supplementation, has been deleted from every or any particular VR text. My own experience attempting this has been that when the "addiction" program is deleted, the transcendence program stops making sense. The thrill is simply gone. For those who have read Neuromancer, imagine that for Case, jacking in is just another day at the job. Or even that he has cool, hallucinogenic experiences while in cyberspace, but, y'know, RL calls. Would anyone even want to read about it? A real question.
Second, for Plato, and for most of Western culture until quite recently, "life" was instantiated in presence, in voice, and particularly in the voice of the God-King, leaving the inter(inner)loper, the dangerous supplement,
POSTCODESCRIPT
Allucquère Rosanne Stone has written that "software produces subjects."[26] Since subjects also produce software, I arrive at the idea that some of us desire to produce ourselves as addicted subjects, and that we also desire to be produced as addicted subjects. Stone terms virtual realities "spaces of transformation, identity factories in which bodies are meaning machines, and transgender—identity as performance, as play, as wrench in the smooth gears of the social apparatus of vision—is the ground state" (War, 180–81). While Nicole Stenger imagines herself as a "hermaphrodite" angel, able to produce binary clones of her "self," and cybernauts as gods of new entities they invent and name ("Mind," 52), Stone proffers various renditions of an unstable "New Creature" (War, 167) who practices "multiplicity," "fragmentation," and "liminality." Stone describes herself as happily "hooked on technology" (War, 3). As does Stenger, she participates in and relies on addiction software, on rhetorics of what she terms the cybersubject's "generous permeability, an electronic porosity" (War, 166). Stone's Wgure for this cyberprotean subject is the Vampire, a border creature of compulsion, regeneration, postvital, potentially immortal life. The question remains one that has been asked of the cyborg: How many ways does the addicted subject swing?[27] Neoplatonist or Queer? Virtual Mind Jockey or Transvampire and In Your Face?
Rather than choose, I notice that these questions begin to characterize the larger project for which this essay is profoundly preliminary. This larger project explores the manifold manifestations of the centralization of addiction in the production of subjectivity for certain late-twentieth-century folks. In her groundbreaking essay, "Epidemics of Will," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick contemplates the "peculiarly resonant relations that seem to obtain between the problematics of addiction and those of the consumer phase of international capitalism."[28] Any form of human behavior may come under the purview of "addiction attribution," even those, or especially those, such as exercise, that
My essay suggests that in Western culture addiction has always served to reproduce both the conservative law of the father with its Platonic notions of transcendence and the sovereign subject; and the operations of multiples, of models without originals, of the marginal, the monstrous, the escapees. Some of the transformative effects of addiction softwares are effects of desires that may always work against encounters with mortality, multiplicity, and difference, regardless of who is writing the software. In this case, those of us who have deemed transcendence deadly but who continue to write ourselves as addicted subjects, may want to ask if and how we are participating in the reproduction of what we have rejected. Or more in line with my own desires, queer the conjunction of addiction and transcendence and make it our own.
Some call it a cerebral overhaul, others hypnotic. Some believe its 50,000 volts of immediate gratification while others dare whisper Anarchy. [30]
You can't swap death for life. Not even in the Vurt.… We're neither free nor safe, until we've earned it. (Vurt 310, 316)
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
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:
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
Figure 2. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northhampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), 49. Understanding Comics © and ™ Scott McCloud.
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
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,
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.
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.