Conclusions

I have now reached the last and most difficult part of this thesis: the conclusions. The reason of its difficulty is not in gathering, or summarizing the information and the conclusions that were, here and there, implicit in my writing, but in ‘actualizing the virtuality’ of this thesis. I have claimed the existence of our bodies in Cyberspace. I have outlined how they come alive, how they actualize themselves. Now, since every theoretical discourse would presuppose a feedback within the reality of its environment, the theory should ‘hit’ reality and become one. As I have claimed in my first chapter redundancy is not the objective of life but philosophy is.

Does the theory agree with reality, does the reality of Cyberspace accept the theory? Cyberspace surrounds every-body and even if this wider world seems independent of human beings cherished aims and interests, it remains around us as a presence waiting to be acknowledged.

Our bodies have always brought us into place, whether it was a ‘place of conflict’ (Streitraum) or a ‘place of openness’ (Spielraum.)[1] As itself a proto-place, the body constituted our corporeal here and in this action of proto-placement, our bodies took us up against counter-places, including conflictual places like Cyberspace itself, that brings us to doubt of ourselves, of our bodies, of our identities, at every moment. In this countering (and being encountered) our bodies constitute the crossroads between architecture and landscape, the built and the given, the artificial and the natural. If it were not for the body as a proto-place, existing in opposition to counter-places, the earth-world confrontation could not occur; there would be no ‘common ground’ for this confrontation and no basis for the mediation effected.

I turned inside outside while writing this thesis, and I found myself caught up in a veritable labyrinth of modes of ‘betweenness’. At the same time however, I found myself in front of an amazing world, as I approached to enter it, or circunambulate it. As I come to know it, this world became a com-presence in my experience, and I became com-present to it. To be with this world was not just a matter of being in its literal presence, as though one object or a site, but I was to be juxtaposed with it. In this world a juxtaposition meant being-with, part of becoming intimately acquainted with a particular place, sensing it as with me at all times, not only physically in the matter of something present-at-hand or instrumentally like a ready-to-hand entity, but as something I remembered staying with me over time and in different places. In my memory the things ‘I am with’ helped constitute the ongoing ‘aura’, the enveloping atmosphere which surrounded me. The things of memory remain with me, within me. They occupy now my interior psychical (and doubtless also neurological) places and are the determinative loci of my life.

Of one thing I can be certain: both the continuing accessibility and the familiarity of a dwelling place presuppose the presence and the activity of the inhabitant’s lived body. This body has everything to do with the transformation of a mere site into a dwelling place.

«Technology will never allow itself to be overcome by man. That would mean, after all, that man was the master of Being.»[2] In his philosophy of technology the later Heidegger was careful to differentiate between technology as ‘enframing’ (Gestell)[3] and technology as ‘event’ (Eireignis). Their secret correlation he compared with a print and a negative print (negative) in photography.[4] The dominant instrumental technology of ‘enframing’, Heidegger blamed for a ‘forgetfulness’ of Being which threatens thinking itself, the only hope for overcoming fixed world views. By following Wolfgang Schirmacher’s reading of ‘the event of technology’[5] I consider digital technology to be the magnifying glass humanity has always looked for, to see itself in depth recognizing the splendor of certain qualities of human communication and certain acknowledgments of ourselves. From the moment in which the technology of Cyberspace and the body are united, a mutual training occurred, they are one with and for the other. It is no longer an issue of supremacy, of being separated from our primordial field, technology as been implemented within us and technology has implemented us in its process of growth.

Digital technology, as stated in Chapter 1 of this thesis, is a language, and precisely through language we have a way of experiencing our relationship with our existence. It was Heidegger who understood language as the universal medium of thinking which is ‘thanking’ for the event of humanity. Language is an extended memory which recordes the history of Being but never ceases to interrogate itself: «For questioning is the piety of thought.»[6]

The computer is no longer a simple extension it is an implementation. Digital reality is not an alternative reality, it is a parallel one, it is the location that allows human beings to become information. Man is re-established as a whole, the embodiment of feedback, the ‘land in Between.’ We achieve activity, the body in Cyberspace is active, it is present. «...from the facts and confirmed by reasoning is that our body is an instrument of action, and of action only» as Henri Bergson states in Matter and Memory.[7] Willian Gibson in all his novels describes Cyberspace as a data world of the international community represented as a 3-D videogame. Gibson’s user is involved in this world thanks to a ‘console’ of a computer directly connected to the brain, he perceives, thus, his body as ‘meat’, meat of the world[8], as a material component of Cyberspace in perfect relation with that world.[9]

Humanity’s task has always been and will always be, the task of the mutant, mutating, adapting, cataloguing the body, breaking apart the body, taking it into parts. I propose here a deconstrution of the body, of the bodily, the elements that constitute the experience/phenomenon of the Body. Questioning all that we take for granted about language, experience and ‘natural’ systems of human communication brings us to the deconstruction of the experience - the body experience. As Judith Butler proposes in Bodies that Matter[10], we must show that deconstruction of matter/body/bodily necessities is not a negation of usefulness of the term on the contrary the objective is to emphasize the ‘utility’ of each one of our bodily functions/necessities and re-name them in the digital environment.

At last, in order to prove my theory of the Body in Cyberspace, and its correspondence to the reality of the environment, I propose a list of bodily functions, sensations, feelings that I have felt and analyzed while interacting with the digital environment:

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[1] For the contrast between Streitraum and Speilraum, see Martin Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. 61.

[2] Heidegger, Martin. «The Question Concerning Technology», in Basic Writings. 332.

[3] Heidegger, Martin. «The Question Concerning Technology». Basic Writings. 302-317. See also Richard J. Bernstein : «The New Constellation.» The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity. 101-118.

[4] Heidegger, Martin. Vier Seminare.

[5] Schirmacher, Wolfgang. «From the Phenomenon to the Event of Technology.» Philosophy and Technology.

[6] Heidegger, Martin. «The Question Concerning Technology.» Basic Writings. 317.

[7] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 225.

[8] On the notion of ‘meat of the world’ as ‘télos’ see: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible.

[9] Stone, Sandy. «Entering the screen involves a state of change ... to the symbolic, metaphorical 'consensual hallucination' of cyberspace... [it] both disembodies ... but also reembodies in the polychrome hypersurface of the console.» The War Between Desire and Technology. 21.

[10] Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter.

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