THE BODY IS BACK:
COMMUNICATION IN CYBERSPACE
Introduction
We are living in a world that is loosing each day its consistency, a world which appears to play with our senses and our judgments, hiding its real nature. A world in which we can determine ‘what it looks like’, but not ‘what it is.’ We know that everything, starting from sensorial stimuli, which transforms into mental models and produces the ‘idea of reality,’ is of our invention, creation, artifice; what presents itself to our eyes as reality, is constructed owing to the interaction between external stimuli, previous cultural sedimentation, science, technology, and society. Our reality is a generated reality that shares the characteristics of the ‘artificial’.
The idea of ‘truth’ comes from the relative stability and the perseverance of the idea itself, in time. The image that is proposed to us corresponds to our expectations. Confronting the stability in our relationship with things, the problem is not in the accusation of the ‘non-reality’ or ‘non-truth’ of the experience, but it is in adapting our criteria to the novelties of the material substratum with which we form a tight relationship, and to develop a culture able to give these novelties a socially recognizable value. It is on the stability of this relationship between the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ that our culture builds its own sense of reality and truth.
Today we are experiencing the end of the coming world, a world that is ‘over’ and ‘unknown’ at the same time, we are no longer able to define things with language: language, words, symbols have abandoned us, they are no longer in charge of the ‘definition’, of the ‘explanation’, of the function of support. Chaos is the new word for harmony, for unity, for order, for ‘whole-ness’... Chaos is our status, chaos is the Rhizome, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called it: the ‘location’ constituted by a million invisible parts where the position we occupy within is not relevant per se, where according to the «Principle of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a Rhizome can be connected to anything other» where «...not every trait of a Rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature... bring[ing] into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status.»[1]
Here multiplicity has only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions, where we all come together. This creates (or is attempting to do so...) our Postmodern order/construction, where we re-gain the pleasure and the desire, where the open-ness: open-system, open-gender, open-personality, open-subjectivity, open-body, is its substance.
We have reached what we could call the virtual stone age[2] characterized by a microscopic materiality that escapes our control, but that does not stop us from constructing images. This new era puts us into contact with new worlds: real but
immaterial, where the imaginary can be shown without the support of concrete matter. There is a call for a new world view where the criteria of experiential truth is to be set on new basis: a world where everything seems fluid, smooth, but where it is still necessary to learn new ways of making things talk.
In the twentieth century, many thinkers made of the body a central philosophical issue. This is particularly true among French philosophers. Gabriel Marcel, for example, at the end of his Metaphysical Journal concludes that «I am my body.»[3] Henri Bergson begins Matter and Memory with a discussion of the importance of the body image.[4] Jean-Paul Sartre devoted lengthy sections of Part II of Being and Nothingness to an analysis of the body as a fundamental modality of being-in-the-world.[5] Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered the body the element itself of perception in his Phenomenology of Perception.[6] And many more.
The focus of this thesis: The Body is Back: Communication in Cyberspace, is once again the body, the body in interaction with the digital environment. The digital environment is considered to be the location where, according to the majority of the literature of the past years, the body vanishes in ‘fluid simulations’, where the body as matter and the bodily functions are reduced to ‘soft programming’, where, quoting Sherry Turkle’s most recent book Life on the Screen,[7] life has ‘left our body’ and has been transposed onto the screen. I would like to prove the contrary. I would like to support the theory that a body, the body still exists and has not yet abandoned us, on the contrary it is an active participant of the location we now commonly call Cyberspace.
As of present, discussions and analysis of digital technologies in relation with the human sphere concerned the notion of ‘self’, the notion of ‘identity’, of ‘gender’, of ‘psychological life’. Everybody searches in digital technology for answers to long time asked questions. I would like to make a step backward and try to approach digital technologies in relation to human beings under a more basic and primary sense, going back to the roots of physicality, of perception, of instinct, of body as material as a body of matter, and let all these concepts lead us and create us in the digital environment. Along the lines of self, identity, gender I would like to propose body, matter, location.
The thesis is dived into four Chapters. I start by establishing Cyberspace as a location, as a place, a living space, a social space. Cyberspace is location that certainly has a life of its own, with specific details, folds, peculiarities, representing a particular reality of feedback.
From the location of Cyberspace I pass to the location of the body where, in Chapter 2, I analyze Leibniz’s the concept of Monad. As a Monad, a body is the ‘location’ of all basic perceptions, the zone or vehicle of expression and perception of the world, it is the mirror of the universe according to its body, according to the organs of the body, and according to its activity, energy, and forces. The body realizes the world of Cyberspace and Cyberspace realizes the body.
From the body as a Monad in Cyberspace I shift to another ‘kind’ of body, or another quality of presence of the body in Cyberspace, such as a body of memory. The knowledge and the revelation of the body in Cyberspace occurs so that the attempt to know ourselves comes after the event, thus with memory. The memory of our body supports and makes ‘the being happen’. The multiplicity of layers of memory constitute the atmosphere which surrounds us, since memory is considered to be an organ of selection, a mass of recollections never destroyed, that manipulates the resources of the past according to the practical needs of the body.
Memory leads the user’s perception of its body while interacting with the digital environment, contributing to the creation of what I defined in Chapter 4 as open topology, as the ground of ‘collected efforts’, of sharing experiences, of openness between two existential features of humanity.
Thanks to a phenomenological approach, I try, then, to focus on the act of the experience of the body, rather than on the ‘thing of being’ experienced. The body becomes the location of physical awareness, its components come alive, it appears to our senses and our cognition. In Cyberspace the body experiences the freedom of the independent visual language of Cyberspace that speaks directly to our senses.
The body in Cyberspace, considered as an open topology, as an alter-ego, or as a phenomenon, is then taken under consideration as a moment of happening of Dasein,[8] as a body being-in-the-world-of-cyberspace with the consequences that it entails.
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[1] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari Felix. A Thousand Plateau - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 7.
[2] Longoni, Samantha. Realtá Virtuale nuova tecnologia della comunicazione e/o finzione comunicativa. 93.
[3] Marcel, Gabriel. Metaphysical Journal. Chicago: Henry Rennery Co., 332-9.
[4] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 1-6.
[5] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 401-460.
[6] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception.
[7] Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
[8] Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein translated as ‘Being - there’, as existence in which where we conceive ourselves, where we acknowledge our lives, our ‘average - everydayness’. ‘Being-Happening’ for Heidegger meant the primordial condition or ground which allows everything else to come into existence.