Chapter 4
The Body of Cyberspace
«There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural subject is my body.» (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
Unity and Materiality
What is a body I should now ask? What is a body in such a place like Cyberspace? Why is the materiality of the body aligned with the immaterial substance of Cyberspace so relevant? Why is it so important at this stage to bypass the dichotomy of life that western civilization planted in our minds: real vs. virtual, truth vs. falsity, mind vs. body?
The objective of this thesis is precisely to find in digital technologies the
un-common ground, the ‘un-safe zone’, the ‘break point’, the non-essence. My objective is to return to the notion of matter and to the concept of body, not as a site or surface nor as biology, but as a process of materialization, and of a bodily experience that would stabilize over time and over space, producing another effect of ‘fixity’, and another version of surface.
Cyberspace can be understood as a new artificial construction ‘custom made’ for the user, a construction referred and made for the body. There are certain demands of the body that cannot be avoided and the materiality of the body can’t be thought a part from the materialization of the norms of regulation of the environment itself. The materiality of our body is, thus, indissociable from the norms that regulate its materialization and from the signification of those material effects.
The matrix of computer generated environments and the effects of the matrix itself should be the ground of bodily life, so that the genealogy of that matrix would be foreclosed from any sort of critical inquiry. The ‘unsettling’ matter of the body in Cyberspace, can therefore be understood as an initialization of new possibilities, new ways for bodies ‘to matter’.
It is precisely in this process of re-evaluation and re-placement that the virtual disappearance of the body as biology in favor of a body as unity and totality of body and mind, as the alternative effect of ‘fixity’, takes place, adapting therefore to the interests of Cyberspace. Mind and body belong together creating the space called Cyberspace. The unification of the body/mind can be considered as an achievement due to a certain movement from within, a certain change, an active change, since it is the expression of a new condition of ourselves. There is no conflict between the term ‘body’ and the term ‘mind’, they are a synthesis of their actual substances, an ontological unity that creates the expression of the ‘body/mind’.
Body/mind obeys, consequently, to new commands in Cyberspace, to laws to which it is itself a subject. Subject of a new reality, subject of a new kind of action, an ideal action, symbolizing the expression of its unity. In Cyberspace what was a simple passion of the mind or of the body, is now a unique passion, what is now an action of the mind is an action of the body. Body/mind in Cyberspace is capable of doing and perceiving a plurality of things, and its actions depend on itself alone interacting with the digital environment.
Mind and body are one, and there could never be one without the other, they feed each other, as if the body in Cyberspace was a mind game. As Ernst Bloch said «Wherever we go, we go too.»[1] It is precisely self-knowledge and self-revelation of the body/mind in Cyberspace that occurs so that the attempt to know ourselves comes along with the communication of the event itself. Body activities are images that arise from the overflow of exchange of communication, as the result of its expenditure. The peculiar action of the body/mind is in letting the center grow from inside, as complex penetration of movements, in reaction to what we have in front of us and in front of a change, of friction and fruition of the medium.
During the process of ‘remapping’, I tend to use the metaphor of the biological body, in terms of the desire that remains for and within it, aligned by its way of perception, and thus experiencing its ‘mind’ component. The body in Cyberspace therefore does not experience a simulation or enactment of a virtual reality, it does not experience the process of pretending or feigning, it does not become the representation of behavior or characteristics of one system through the use of another system via the computer, but it is a re-location, a presentation of the body, set apart for a particular purpose. The purpose is communication through a body which has been re-assigned with a new state of being.[2]
Open Topology
The body, its unity and totality of body and mind, the hybrid body/mind, is actualized in Cyberspace through the realization of a feature I define open topology. From the Greek word ‘topos’, I borrow the meaning of ‘place’ and the representation, in mathematical analysis, of the common region of a series of factors that have a number of characteristics in common. I consider the open topology as the ground of collected efforts, of linking experiences, of openness between two existential features of humanity, features that create a map, a surface, a configuration of structural entities: the mind and the body. It is in the context of this schema of structural entity that the body/mind, the open topology comes alive in Cyberspace.
The features of the open topology, of the body in Cyberspace, representing a ‘common region’ or a mean of measurement of itself, of its dimension and of its experiences, are the object of my inquiry.[3] I consider these features to be the site, the locus, the topos, in relation to objects, figures, signs, that become intrinsic to the ‘open topology’ and essential to its being and its well-being.
Can the open topology be considered as a means of measurement? The open topology feels the location of Cyberspace, it becomes readable through itself. The open topology is a component of what it measures, being a measurant[4] in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s terms. Measurants are ‘bodily’ and are comparable to dimensions. Thanks to our
open topology we sense, look and have the power to understand. It is the open topology, the measurant for its being and for the variables that constitute and surround Cyberspace.
Open topology span, measure out, they are the location of power, representing the power of its own being. An open topology is a ‘total event’, reaching out to the locations continuous of itself, it feels these locations with its openness and its surface, as a body/mind and in the body/mind when it internalizes them. Cyberspace is experienced as ‘there-with/in-my-body’, it is precisely the open topology that brings together the ‘there’ of the location of Cyberspace with the ‘here’ of the location of my body.
The connection of the open topology with the digital environment of Cyberspace, I visualize as depth, as an objectified depth, as a determinate dimension. The reason for the visualization is because of specific relations that tie the body with objects and surfaces that are detached from usual experience but attached to a new communication, a new insight, a new materiality or methodology. I question that before and under, an objectified or measured reality, or depth of reality, in Cyberspace there is another depth that is not an axis or a straight and clear line but something that is more like a medium, a ground of and for communication to be experienced by the body. It is precisely the depth of Cyberspace that demonstrates the consistency of the medium, as a determinate matrix, resisting to any possible reduction of spatial configuration. The depth of Cyberspace is not a matter of space nor time, it becomes a close interaction between the open topology and the digital world, on the basis of an active participation of the lived body. This interaction realizes itself thanks to the way the body realizes and acknowledges the environment, and the acknowledgments are brought together in depth by the body, by the openness of the surface of our topology, by an envelopment of the various planes and dimensions, arranging everything around us and implementing everything in us.
The relationship of depth between the open topology of our body and the electronic environment, contributes to the creation of a dynamic bond to Cyberspace. This dynamism is given by the many dimensions of both the open topology and Cyberspace itself. There is no division of the dimensions, instead a unity is created, and this unity contributes to the process of communication and to the feeling of implacement and belonging. Each dimension intertwines between the embodiments of the subject and the surrounding world that benefits from this structuring. It is a sort of dual location, or dual presence. Deconstructing the possibility to have a singular locus or a singular dimension either in my body or in the digital environment, the locus is in both at once. It is precisely the lived body, the user, that becomes the dynamic bond to the place.
Alter-Ego
The actualization of the open topology in Cyberspace is the feature that enables the body to ‘be here’ in Cyberspace. The body is the vehicle of the ‘here’[5], its carrier, it is the necessary and sufficient condition of being located, of the ‘being implaced’. The body is ‘with us’, we will never loose it and that is a fact, it is a physical reality. The body in terms of biology is abandoned, but we embrace it through its knowledge and its experience.
Who is here is now the question? I have eliminated the option of the biological body as a character and user of the digital environment, in favor of a unity of body and mind, in favor of the open topology, in favor of a body of memory, as stated in Chapter 3 of this thesis, in favor of an alter-ego[6].
What is not the ‘biological me’ is an ‘other-one-of-me’, and the question is now to see how the ‘other-one-of-me’ can be within the ‘biological me’, as part of it. This also means seeing how the ‘other-one-of-me’ behaves in the phenomenological sphere of the ‘biological me’. The body in Cyberspace experiences something that, even if evident and becoming more and more familiar, is absent from its biology. This something, in the realm of the ‘biological me’, can be define as alter-ego.
What is the sense of the alter-ego? How does the body/alter-ego make sense in Cyberspace? This is precisely the phenomenological research that has to be done in Cyberspace, a research that is guided by the alter-ego itself. It is the alter-ego that opens the research and the search for what is foreign to the user, for the ensemble of signs that yet have to enter in his vocabulary. The theme of the research is whatever the user feels, and everything that presents itself to the its eyes will be followed by its explanation or motivation. It is in this instant that the body in Cyberspace becomes the ‘guiding light’, the thread that allows the user to navigate the digital environment. The way the alter-ego will guide the user is according to its own new perceptions, to its own new nature and thanks to the acquirement of the new shared culture of Cyberspace.
The passage from the ‘biological me’ or alter-ego, necessitates a deeper journey inside myself, in my interior life, intellectual life, sensible life, it requires a journey within my Monad, within the folds of my Monad, in order for me, user of Cyberspace, to live ‘myself as myself’, and in order for me to acquire my new status as body in Cyberspace. The alter-ego at this point becomes a reflection of the ‘biological me’ and analogous to it. The objective was precisely to find and to acquire what was considered, in relation to the ‘biological me’, foreign. The foreign elements have not been reduced or eliminated, nor negated, on the contrary everything has been implemented in me in the ‘biological me’.
In this exercise of phenomenological adjustment, of training, of one body with the other, the new semiotic of Cyberspace will appear in its unique form, at the right time, such as when the ‘bodies’ are ready to put into action the ‘shift’ from one to the other. The ‘shift’ itself will be implemented in the codes of the body and therefore become just as natural. This phenomenological exercise could also be considered a sort of pedagogical training that contributes to shaping man with its culture, and therefore man and culture form themselves, and don’t consider themselves as shaped before hand or, even worst, formed for ever. Is it not the task of Phenomenology to make the world gain a new life over and over again?
The Phenomenon: ‘Body in Cyberspace’
‘Why’ the body exists in Cyberspace is not the question we have to ask ourselves, but ‘How’ the body, the body as the matter, as real and material substance, as a perceivable object, as density, comes alive. A phenomenological approach of the body would describes its ‘experience’ or its ‘awareness’, in a manner which would not reduce it to scientific data. By focusing on the act of the experience rather than on the ‘thing of being’ experienced, the body would become the location of physical awareness. We experience our body, its components are alive, it appears to our senses and our cognition.
In Cyberspace, as I have already outlined, we are reunited with ourselves, and we experience the freedom of an independent visual language that speaks directly to our senses. The body starts ‘with us,’ reality is created ‘in us’ and among our perceptions. The phenomenon ‘body in Cyberspace’ could be conceived as an idea, a sort of mental picture or representation, as a creation of the body/mind, of its intellect. But who is the real body or the real subject of Cyberspace?
The concept of the body or subject of Cyberspace lies in the deep relation between the digital environment and the user. A main difficulty in understanding the concept of body as the subject of Cyberspace, is in verbalizing this relationship in a way that does not fix the nature of the perceiving subject, nor the environment perceived, prior to the reciprocal action that takes place between them. What is expressed is a blend between the body/world relation. The body in Cyberspace might not have specific intentions nor directions towards the environment, but the body may be motivated to establish the constancy of the location. In doing so it reduces the tensions that exist between itself and the perceptual field. Perception in Cyberspace is therefore conceived as a manner of adjusting to a display of different disequilibria.[7]
When interacting with the digital environment it is with the body we see, hear, perceive, what constitutes the environment of Cyberspace, its components, are objects for our perception. When learning how to use internet, e-mail, or virtual reality, the software itself becomes the correlate of the body’s capacities and, therefore, becomes personal. The digital environment is indeed a world where its objects contain sides and interiors that are not always evident, and where the perceptual field extends beyond our field of activity. The fundamental aspects of Cyberspace require, thus, an investigation of the body as a unity in its own directionality.
The body is functionally related to the field of Cyberspace, that reveals the shaping of the body’s space within it, being Cyberspace polarized towards the unity of the body itself. When approaching Cyberspace we reset the functional values of the body gearing them towards the components of Cyberspace, enacting them with the body. Cyberspace is the recipient of the body’s projects and reveals the body’s unity.
Body parts are functionally interrelated, the icons that prepare to the navigation of Cyberspace, for example, have specific meaning for the body besides interesting the sight. The visual aspects of the icons merge with all bodily perceptions. There is a network of relations within the body, translating sensations, it a system open to the world of Cyberspace and related to it. This openness to Cyberspace means ‘directedness’ towards it, ‘directedness’ towards both its functional values and sensory data.
In Cyberspace the body is therefore engaged in a sensory investigation which implicates itself in its unity, as a unity of the system of ‘directedness’, preparing thus the user to perform an action on the environment. It is as if all the sensory properties constituted one, all powers of one, and the body of their action, their synergy, being not only a sufficient but also a necessary condition for the perception of the digital world.
It is when the digital environment becomes ‘fixed’, acquired, acknowledged that a specific ‘directedness’ of the body is established, and a communion, a synchrony, a relation or co-existence between the body and the environment takes full shape. Cyberspace gains life through the body and vice versa, giving form to the phenomenon of the body in Cyberpsace.
«We have learned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of its always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body. But by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world we shall also rediscover ourselves, since perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were the subject of perception.»[8]
What I have just described is somehow a notion of freedom referred to the capacity that each man has to change his situation, and change his existence, by changing its significance. Freedom in Cyberspace is not absolute but is embodied, even incarnated, it is: «... by becoming involved in the world through stable organs and pre-established circuits, that man can acquire the mental practical space which will theoretically free him from his environment and allow him to see it.»[9] In this sense freedom in Cyberspace is certainly not antagonistic towards the acquisition of experience, of skills, and habits, of a specific structural and perceptual sedimentation. This is exactly what gives the body the sense of conscious location, its perception and involvement with the world.[10]
Being-in-Cyberspace
The pact, established during the previous paragraph, between the perceiving subject, or user of Cyberspace and the environment itself or the objects of the digital world, could correspond to the ‘openness’ of Martin Heidegger’s being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein.)[11] In order to understand fully the concept of ‘dynamic openness’ towards the world, applied to the digital environment, we need, like Heidegger himself did, to establish an important fact, such as that the world exists, that precisely the world of Cyberspace exists, that it is a reality. It is only by establishing the existence and the function of Cyberspace that we can attempt to think, through Heidegger’s philosophy, of the significance of the basic condition of existence which he called Being. Being (capitalized) is the primordial condition, ‘ground’, which allows everything else (beings, with a small ‘b’) to come into existence. Therefore to better understand ourselves in Cyberspace we need to see how we exist in that location, during our interaction with that world. On a further level, to mark the significance of existence, Heidegger gave the name Dasein to the type of being. Dasein translates as ‘being-there’. So, according to Heidegger, before anything else we exist, we are ‘there’, we are in the world and that is how we should conceive ourselves if we are going to understand our lives. To stress the importance of this existence, Heidegger gave to Dasein’s activity of existing, the term being-in-the-world. The use of the hyphens emphasizes that there is no distance between ourselves and the world. We are as much a part of that world as it is part of us. The ‘in’ is precisely an indicator of involvement, Heidegger thought that no distance, either physical or mental, should exists between ourselves and the world. Dasein’s interest and involvement with its world is intrinsic to Dasein. There is no existing, no ‘being-there’, with out a world in which to exist. A person without a world makes no sense. The world and Dasein are one and the same.
It is following the basics of Heidegger’s philosophy that Cyberspace could represent all the possibilities for Dasein’s world as a collective whole. Cyberspace constitutes the environment in which an individual can and must act. It could be what gives meaning and intelligibility to each Dasein’s existence. Through Cyberspace we make a new sense of ourselves and of the world around us, by learning how ‘one lives’ in it. The user should make the world of Cyberspace intelligible through its participation in its context, it should produce a world in which new customs would come alive, embodied by and expressed through Cyberspace.
What does Dasein mean in Cyberspace? Dasein [body] characterizes the reality of Cyberspace as opposed to its mere possibility or potency. For this reason reality or actuality in Cyberspace is appropriate exclusively to the body, to its essence that lies in its existence. But what does existence mean in the digital environment? The existence of the body lies in what makes it be just what it is. Its presence, its endurance, its active participation, its movements and its perceptions shows what the body in Cyberspace is. The body in Cyberspace exists as a phenomenon of the body, its essence is that it is ‘bodily’. As Heidegger pointed out, existence is a definition of the Being which alone belongs to man, and it is precisely in these terms that the existence of the body, or bodily, in Cyberspace defines itself with that realm and therefore defines the body itself.
The open topology, the body/mind, Dasein all represent reliable indicator of an ongoing cultural process: the creation of Cyberspace, where the components of the ‘natural world’ [body/mind] unite with a ‘generated world’ [Cyberspace] creating a new culture, a ‘shared culture’, where the meanings of both worlds are placed in each other creating a new recognition and a new regulation of each other, giving thus our open topology a new responsibility. Human nature in Cyberspace is reflected in the characteristics of the culture of Cyberspace. It is the different social practices of this culture that shape the world of Cyberspace and constitute the standard by which Dasein of a culture acts.
Cyberspace renders transparent processes that biological evolution buried under automation; in Cyberspace we also charge our system of bodily recognition and regulation with recognition and regulations of the external world and thus we augment our bodily responsibility. The acknowledgment of the changed external world guarantees the border line of the body. When this border line breaks, it is to underline the limit and to establish that the present state of being-in-the-world, of happening, of momentum, derives from a pretended ‘state of affair’, of ‘every-day-like’ bias, derives from: «...a world that solidly appears as the location for its own appearance,... and on spectators [such as us, the body/mind] to acknowledge and recognize its existence.»[12]
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[1] Bloch, Ernst. A Philosophy of the Future. 9.
[2] «This new cybernetic construct consisting of body - plus -equipment - plus - computer - plus simulation that displaces the ‘natural’ body also generates a profound compatibility, a ‘confusion of boundaries,’ about this encounter of inert matter and the living self. This new hybrid entity aptly embodies our sense of being in the late twentieth century. From this moment of encounter not only are we under surveillance but, most important perhaps, we automatically pass into a mode of ‘self - surveillance.’» Transcription from Sandy Stone’s performance during the Chance Conference. Las Vegas, Nov. 1996.
[3] As Martin Heidegger stated in Being and Time: «Dimensionality consists in reaching out that opens up.»
[4] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. 103.
[5] Edmund Husserl in the the Médiations cartésiennes - Introduction a la phénoménologie distinguished five modes of ‘here-being’: 1. Here in part referring to the different locations of the body, 2. Here of my body proper the body itself as a unitary entity that constitutes a second kind of here, 3.Here of my by-body referring to a movement with and by the body, 4. Regional here indicating all the places that a body can move to, and 5. Interpersonal here intended as a monadic sphere.
[6] I interpret here the concept of ‘Alter-ego’ as Edmund Husserl does in paragraph 42 of the Médiations cartésiennes - Introduction a la phénoménologie, it is a problem of ‘Ego’ and of everything else that is not ‘Ego’ or foreign to it is ‘Alter-ego’.
[7] As Maurice Merleau-Ponty expresses in the Phénoménologie de la perception : «The synthesis of the object [location] is done through the synthesis of the body proper.» 237. (Translation from the French version by Samantha Longoni.)
[8] Spurling, Laurie. Phenomenology and the Social World. The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and its relation to the social sciences. 110.
[9] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 87.
[10] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception: «...we are in the world through our body, and we perceive the world with our body... But in regaining, thus, the contact with the body and with the world it is also ourselves that we find since, if we perceive with our body, the body is a natural me, and therefore the subject of perception.» 239. (Translation from the French version by Samantha Longoni.)
[11] Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 41-87.
[12] Arendt, Hannah The Life of the Mind - Thinking. 21-22.