Where does this leave us in terms of thinking through ‘virtual’ bodies?
In situating Deleuze in relation to debates in cyber theory and posthu-manism, I have traced a line of thought that resists the techno-fantasy of escaping the body. This line of thought resists the fantasy of a ‘fl eshless ontology’, not by returning to or shoring up the material body, but by revealing how the ‘virtual’ realm of cyberspace is always already formed by and implicated with material forces. In both the critical shift towards a cyber theory of embodiment and the materialist posthumanism that follows it, there is a recognition that what constitutes ‘the body’ spans both the ‘virtual’ and ‘material’ realms. In both ‘materialist’ posthu-manism and Deleuze’s work, this ‘mixed-reality’ view of embodiment is revealed to be part of a larger ontological critique that links the irre-ducibility of ‘the body’ to the biological body to a ‘fundamental shift in assumptions about subjectivity’. In a ‘mixed-reality’ paradigm it no longer makes sense to talk about a ‘virtual’ body and a ‘material’ body.
Instead, we turn our attention to a critical analysis of the relationships
between our bodies, our brains, our environment, our identities, and the multitude of material forces that shape them. In conclusion, I would like to turn to the example of social networking sites to illustrate what this shift might look like in practice.
Social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace are a prime example of a ‘mixed-reality’ situation where ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ bodies mingle to produce identities that do not fully correspond to either. Through online profi les that consist of pictures, lists of preferences, lists of friends, and mini-blogs, users create online personas. The profi le picture and other images that the user posts play a major role in establishing that persona.
Users generally have the option of not posting a picture, or of posting a picture of something other than oneself, but in the online environments of Facebook and MySpace to do so would be considered odd – an indi-cation that one is either unattractive or socially dysfunctional, or both.
It would be very easy to take these images as acting as a more or less accurate representation of the ‘real’ body, and thus involved in an all too common and vicious form of representation. We might be tempted to launch a Deleuzian critique of representation, and there would indeed be plenty to say here. Certainly, the unoffi cial requirement to post a photo involves a good deal of ‘facializing’ and reterritorialization. (The images serve to categorize one as male or female, black or white, queer or straight, attractive or unattractive.)
This is all true and in a way too obvious. I would like to follow a dif-ferent, perhaps counterintuitive, line of thought and argue that the work the images of bodies on social networking sites are doing is not merely representative, but also constitutive. I would argue that the nature of the sites and the way profi le images are used complicates and undermines the representational schema (even as they participate in it). The nature of social networking sites is that they necessarily cross over the bound-ary between the online ‘virtual’ world and the ‘real’ or ‘material’ world.
Theoretically, at least, most users know and will interact with most of their ‘friends’ in the real world at some time. Unlike early fantasies of cyber space, on social networking sites there is a mutual feedback between users’ real-life experiences and activities and their online perso-nas and interactions. Constant status updates and comments can shape how a person or event is perceived offl ine. Online discussions can lead to the organization of offl ine events, meetings, protests, or dates. Real-world events can in turn prompt a fl urry of online comments and inter-actions. The nature and functions of social networking sites also mean that images are more than merely representational. In addition to the main profi le picture, users have the option to upload additional pictures
or picture albums. They are then able to ‘tag’ themselves and other users in each picture, creating a hyperlink between the image of each user and his/her profi le. Other users are able to do the same, which means that a user is not necessarily the source of all of the images of herself that are linked to her profi le. The representational schema is essentially reductive: x represents y. In contrast, the images that help form a user’s persona on social networking sites are prolifi c, multiplying. The point of this proliferation of linked and tagged images is not to create a ‘correct correspondence’ with a given biological body in order to verify or solidify an identity. Instead, the proliferation of interconnected images actively supports the ongoing recreation or ‘becoming’ of all the online personas involved.
This process of ‘becoming’ parallels in many ways that described in Difference and Repetition. First, what these online identities can become is limited to a certain degree by the environment and forces in play: in this case, the categories each site offers (male or female, for example);
social conventions and technological limitations (2-D, so many pixels, etc.); even the moods and inclinations of other users. Second, though the identities produced online are not reducible to biological bodies, they are formed in relation to them. This relationship, however, is not one of one-to-one correspondence, but a network of ever-shifting and increas-ing complexity. Third, the non-coincidence of the biological body, the signifi ed bodily images, and the user’s online identity means that it is dif-fi cult to ‘locate’ the self or the body. Finally, given this non-coincidence and the role that other users, social codings, and technological aspects play, we could say that the user is ‘dispossessed’ of her online self. She participates in its creation, but she does not, in the end, determine or possess it. I cannot elaborate on all of these parallels, or the questions they raise, here. But this brief sketch serves as just one small example of how a Deleuzian ‘mixed-reality’ ontology might help us to understand what is going on in contemporary cyber practices.
Ultimately, the implications of the mixed-reality paradigm extend far beyond cyber or internet technologies and practices. This is because the
‘fl eshless ontology’ of cyberspace was never just about cyberspace. It refl ected a dualistic worldview that has its roots in a long philosophi-cal and religious tradition. As Haraway and others have insisted, it is this worldview that has dominated science and scientifi c inquiry. This is the Cartesian view, with its famous mind–body dualism. The shift in cyber theory to a mixed-reality paradigm and the articulation of a
‘materialist’ posthumanism are symptomatic of a larger shift in both our scientifi c models of inquiry and our cultural understanding of ourselves.
Developments in microbiology, genetics, and neurobiology increasingly reveal the Cartesian model to be insuffi cient to explain the complexity of relations, the mutual feedback loops and differential processes of indi-viduation in a bacterium, a gene, or a neural network. In neurobiology, for instance, we fi nd that the mind is not free of the fl esh, but the result of a sublimely complex series of material processes, electrical impulses, chemical reactions, and the ongoing formation of neural networks, which both are infl uenced by behavior and infl uence it in turn. The brain is in the body, the body is in its environment, and the bounda-ries between are porous and engaged in a continual process of mutual informing. We note the same complexity in our online practices, in the creation of online identities and the proliferation and interconnection of social networks, as well as in the movement of political action from the
‘virtual’ into the ‘real’ and vice versa. Increasingly, in a range of techno-scientifi c and cultural fi elds, we are searching for an image of thought that is capable of explaining complex forms of relationality that span the old divide between ‘mind and matter’ or ‘virtual and material’ – one that can talk about determining factors, without falling into determinism;
one that acknowledges the immanent materiality of the world without falling into a reductive materialism that is just one more offshoot of Cartesian mechanism; one that is suffi cient to our dynamic, relational world.
Deleuze’s philosophy offers this image of thought. His work is important for thinking embodiment and technology, precisely because his ontological account gives us a framework complex enough to get beyond the virtual–material divide. He reminds us that our bodies and our identities are never merely given, but must be constituted out of a range of incommensurable, heterogeneous forces. His work gives us a framework for talking about both the biological, physical processes and social and cultural codings that shape and produce our bodies and our identities. At the same time, he offers tools for creatively and critically intervening and challenging in these processes. This, indeed, is the force of his work with Guattari, and the source of its continuing appeal. The concepts they create together are an attempt to talk about how resistance, creation, and novelty can exist in this welter of partially determining, inter-related forces.
If Deleuze has anything to teach us about ‘virtual’ bodies, it is that they have never been virtual, if by virtual we mean non-material. This is why the techno-fantasy of escaping the body in a ‘bodiless’ cyberspace, or of a ‘human’ consciousness without a body, fails. What we are, to borrow a phrase from Douglas Hofstadter, is constituted in the ‘strange
loop’ between our biological bodies, their virtual representations and signifi cations, our physical and social environments, and the myriad processes that produce them. The idea that we could simply excise the body from this network and dispose of it like so much dead weight is an idea whose time has passed. Deleuze’s work points us towards an understanding of the body – and by extension its social codings and implications for our subjectivity – that is suffi ciently complex for our times. The fl esh shows a strange persistence. Perhaps we are fi nally coming to understand it.
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Notes
1. See http://www.rhizome.org.
2. There is evidence that this characterization of the body as ‘just meat’, which has been taken as a defi ning aspect of a Gibsonian cyberspace, is meant to be the pro-tagonist’s ‘naïve’ view. After regaining his ability to interface with cyberspace and going through various reversals of fortune, Case, the protagonist, later recognizes a ‘strength’ in a former lover and realizes that, ‘It belonged to the meat, the fl esh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infi nite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read’ (Gibson 1984: 239). It is striking that this passage occurs after Case has begun to interact with highly complex AI and security structures in cyberspace. The implicit comparison is between the body’s ‘vast sea’
of information and the information of cyberspace. Here, the body, ‘the meat’, is revealed to be signifi cantly more complex than cyberspace. This second revelation puts a different twist on the Gibsonian vision of cyberspace as something that is able to supersede, and eventually replace, the fl esh. Perhaps we, like Case, are only now coming out of a long technological adolescence and becoming mature enough to recognize the complexity of ‘the meat’.
3. The Matrix references science fi ction pioneers like Gibson and Philip K. Dick, while also providing a vivid example of the classic Cartesian ‘evil demon’ or ‘brain in a vat’ problem. And yet, The Matrix complicates the traditional mind–body divide. It is worth noting that after waking up to realize he is effectively a ‘brain in vat’ Neo must fi rst reclaim his physical body and come to terms with reality before he can enter, and conquer, the Matrix. While Neo is not bound by normal material limitations while inside the Matrix (he can fl y and make death-defying leaps across urban rooftops), one scene makes it clear that what happens to his
‘body’ in the Matrix can have a direct effect on his material body. This increased sensitivity to the issue of material embodiment vis-à-vis cyberspace suggests that the intervening debates about cyber-corporeality in the 1990s had an effect on the techno-fantasy of cyberspace in the popular imagination.
4. It is not a coincident that this image of mindless, but physically powerful, automata emerged in the Cold War. It is a well-established fact that the robots, bugs, or aliens of science fi ction were often barely disguised stand-ins for Soviet or Communist forces.
5. The technologies for the internet, as well as smaller academic or urban networks, existed as early as the 1970s, but a large-scale, commercial network did not emerge until the late 1980s and only gained widespread adoption in the 1990s.
It is, therefore, impossible to pinpoint a single date or even year for the ‘birth’ of the internet.
6. For an overview of the relation of Fleischmann’s ‘mixed-reality’ to the shift in cyber theory, see Hansen 2006: 1–22. Hansen claims that, with the shift to the mixed-reality paradigm, ‘the “fi rst generation” model of VR as disembodied hyperspace free of all material constraints simply no longer has any purchase in our world’ (4). Given the trajectory that I trace from cyber theory to posthuman-ism, I would claim that Hansen’s conclusion is overly optimistic. Unfortunately, the dream of being ‘free from all material constraints’ persists.
7. For those interested, Hayles gives an excellent summary of the history of cyber-netics and the development of cyber discourses vis-à-vis materiality and the cri-tique of Enlightenment humanism. See Katherine N. Hayles, ‘Toward Embodied Virtuality’, in Hayles 1999: 1–24.
8. Though Difference and Repetition (1968/1994) was written and published in French before Anti-Oedipus (1972/1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987),
it was not published in English until well after the volumes co-authored with Guattari appeared. This delay may account for some of the trends in the Anglo-American reception of Deleuze and Guattari that overlook the ontological critique in favor of a ‘radical’ political or cultural critique, or at least see it as tangential, rather than essential, to the political-cultural project.
9. See, especially, Book IV, 436b–e, and Book X. This is the interpretation of Plato as a classic dualist, committed to a ‘Two Worlds’ theory, in which there is one world of material fl ux and another of ideal, non-material Forms. Though this is traditionally how Plato has been read, there is a range of other interpretations that attempt to fi nesse or even deny Plato’s purported dualism. It is clear in Difference and Repetition that it is the classic interpretation of Plato, which has so deeply
9. See, especially, Book IV, 436b–e, and Book X. This is the interpretation of Plato as a classic dualist, committed to a ‘Two Worlds’ theory, in which there is one world of material fl ux and another of ideal, non-material Forms. Though this is traditionally how Plato has been read, there is a range of other interpretations that attempt to fi nesse or even deny Plato’s purported dualism. It is clear in Difference and Repetition that it is the classic interpretation of Plato, which has so deeply