1. Instructor's Introduction
2. Student Opener: Caroline Brehm
3. A hypertext of materials that may be useful for class discussion

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works That May Be Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  • Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991)
  • Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960)
  • Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989)
  • Some Bots:
    • Eliza
    • Brian
    • Jabberwacky

Excerpt from the presentation:

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Question or challenge posed during the presentation:

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1. Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality (1999) (from chapter on "Virtuality and Ambiguity")
2. Steven Johnson, Interface Culture (1997) (from "Bitmapping: An Introduction")
3. Jonathan Steur, "Defining Virtual Reality" (1992)
4. Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (1992)
5. Kim H. Veltman, "Electronic Media: The Rebirth of Perspective and the Fragmentation of Illusion" (1995)
6. Slavoj Zizek, "From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of Reality" (1996)
7. William Gibson, "Academy Leader" (1991)

Instructor's Preliminary Questions

(1) We have been here before in this class: what does virtual reality (VR) add to the question about the "actual reality" of reality? Is it virtual realities (like turtles with heads withdrawn into their shells, or goggles) all the way down? If so, what is different about the virtual? What could be other about it?

(2) When critics of VR say that VR cannot finally escape reality (or the body), is their argument realistic or ethical? Similarly, is Zizek's essay about VR and the Other, the Woman, realistic or ethical?

(3) I am struck to the bone by the intimate knowledge of illness and death in this passage in Borgmann. This, it seems to me, is as real as it ever gets. Whether or not VR can deal with reality, could it ever be a place to which one goes to mourn?

(4) Who among the authors we have read for today on VR, interfaces, or information in general is least heavy-handed or ignorant about the experience of "fiction," or is virtual reality the death of good fiction (in the way that "mechanical reproduction" for Benjamin was the "withering" of "aura")? See the following candidates: Borgmann, Johnson, Laurel, Zizek, Gibson. By the way, what are the differences between virtual reality, fiction, and fantasy?

(5) Information technology is usually associated with knowledge and knowledge work. What, however, is its relation to the Unknown? (See the following: Johnson, Zizek) In Brenda Laurel's world of the stage, is the backstage the unknown, the other? (Cf., Heidegger on the "incalculable.")

(6) In the transmission model of communication, it seems clear, the emphasis is on the linear movement of information from the sender to the receiver—with the result that the nature of the channel drops out of the equation as a neutral fact (any intervention made by the channel is quarantined as "noise"). In the VR model of information, by contrast, the zone of the channel or medium thickens and complexifies until it is a whole space or environment. Is there any other in this environment at all, or is that just a fantasy? Is it sufficient to say that the information environment is the other?

(7) Is Steven Johnson right about the death of narrative in the age of the interface?

(8) In Jonathan Steur's definition of VR as (tele)presence created through some coefficient of "vividness" and "interactivity," how does "languageness" figure? How, for example, does a very vivid and interactive—but mute—VR simulation stack up against a MUD world in which interactivity is paired with language but no vividness?

"A Kind of Equivalence"

Though the nature of information fails to warrant a rigorous intrinsic linkage of signs and things, the technology of information can produce a kind of equivalence between signs and what they are about, that is, between the containers and the content of information. (p. 179)

The compact disc, finally, can be information about and for reality. But the technological information it contains is distinctively information as reality. Information gets more and more detached from reality and in the end is offered as something that rivals and replaces reality. (p. 182)

At the limit, virtual reality takes up with the contingency of the world by avoiding it altogether. The computer, when it harbors virtual reality, is no longer a machine that helps us to cope with the world by making a beneficial difference in reality; it makes all the difference and liberates us from actual reality. Of the five terms of information where, INTELLIGENCE provided, a PERSON is informed by a SIGN about some THING in a certain CONTEXT, intelligence, things, and context evaporate and leave a person with self-sufficient and peculiarly ambiguous signs. (p. 183)

A distinctive term for real reality needs to be found now that reality can be virtual. Actual reality is the obvious choice. (p. 236, n. 10)

The Difference Between Virtual Reality and Actual Reality

Helpful as Steuer's distinctions are, they need to be complemented by terms that divide virtual from actual reality. Taking vividness and interactivity to their extremes does not lead us to the heart of virtual but rather back to actual reality. Nothing has as much breadth and depth and nothing invites as much engagement as the actual world. (p. 184)

Supernatural brilliance, limitless variety, and unreal availability constitute the normative identity and charm of virtual reality. The actual world seems drab, poor, and hard in comparison. But such glamour could not coexist with the gravity and duress of actual reality if the former were not discontinuous with the latter. In its pure form, virtual reality is separated from the ordinary world by a threshold that can be crossed easily and at any time and yet marks the entry into a separate reality. You have to climb into a simulator or don helmet, suit, and gloves to have a vivid and interactive experience of Superman's kind of travel. (p. 185)

In virtual reality too, resolution is high and engagement intense. Vividness and interactivity are the terms of art that define these features. But it is characteristic of virtual reality that as resolution and engagement grow, so does ambiguity. [ . . . ] virtual reality provides no information about the world out there and is in this regard totally ambiguous. At the same time it is or aspires to be richly and engagingly informative within. The characteristic ambiguity of virtual reality reflects the amalgamation of the sense of wealth that results from the resolution of symbolic and real ambiguity with the sense of unencumbered freedom that registers the disburdenment from reality. We can call it virtual ambiguity. (pp. 185-86)

Is VR a Fantasy or Fiction, and What is the Difference?

The virtual elation that is the companion of virtual ambiguity obviously contrasts with our experience of reality. Unfettered freedom has always been accessible to human beings in imagination. But flights of fancy have low resolution and little bodily engagement compared with virtual reality. Discontinuous regions of reality too have been created long ago. The builders of baroque and rococo churches had ceilings open up onto celestial spaces and sculptures suffused with supernatural light. Yet churches and theaters had unequivocal and even prominent moorings in actual space, and they would command attention rather than invite manipulation." Thus both fantasy and spectacle used to defer to the authority of the real world. (pp. 186-87)

Thus a man of conventional cast in real life can explore in a MUD his feminine or homosexual side, his amorous dreams, his desire for power or acclaim and so enlarge and enrich the scope of his experience. And more than exploration is possible. A woman can shift her very center of gravity from reality to virtuality and feel most fully alive when she moves in virtual space. Virtual ambiguity seems to be a burst of fluorescence that dispels the darkness of ordinary life and reveals another more luminous reality. (p. 188)

The veil virtual ambiguity casts around cyberspace can be more or less dense. The more permeable the veil, the more intrusive the burdens and barriers of ordinary life. To secure the charm of virtual reality at its most glamorous, the veil of virtual ambiguity must be dense and thick. Inevitably, however, such an enclosure excludes the commanding presence of reality. Hence the price of sustaining virtual ambiguity is triviality. To be sure, hermetically sealed-off regions of cyberspace can be entertaining and captivating much as games, novels, and television have been in the past. They may well be more seductive and addictive than their predecessors and so intensify the familiar moral concerns about distraction, isolation, debilitation, and indoctrination. Yet they fail to be the radically novel territory of experience that would allow people to lead newly multiple, flexible, polymorphous lives. (p. 189)

Like pornography and cheap novels, an entire artificial intelligence can engage one who surrenders to a surge of unrealizable desire. Conversely MUD personae can continue to be engaging if their real identity is known to fellow players. In either case, however, we have nothing more than technologically heightened versions of traditional cases-some Pygmalion failing in love with his Galatea, a bunch of people sitting around a table, or calling one another on the phone, or e-mailing each other. (p. 189)

In detaching facets of reality from their actual context and setting them afloat in cyberspace, information technology not only allows for trivialization and glamorization but also for the blurring of the line between fact and fiction. The looseness of a tie to reality is hard to distinguish from the lack of a tie. (p. 192)

The Unglamourous Body at Last

Such games are feasible as long as they are walled off from actual life and kept barren of real consequences. But if the student were to lead a really polymorphous life, he would be taken to court for practicing without a license and polygamy. The human body with all its heaviness and frailty marks the origin of the coordinate space we inhabit. Just as in taking the measure of the universe this original point of our existence is unsurpassable, so in venturing beyond reality the standpoint of our body remains the inescapable pivot. (p. 190)

        This impossible union of unencumbered glamour and profound engagement must sooner or later fall apart and settle for triviality or gravity. Yet the illusory escape into cyberspace does not leave reality unharmed. At least for a time, virtuality can spread a fog of virtual confusion and blur the shape of things and events with glamour and triviality. Two of the great forces of the human condition, eros and thanatos, the erotic life and the solemnity of death, have particularly suffered glamorization and trivialization. Virtuality has extricated sex from the depths of real life and made it available as a diversion that would be harmless if it were not for the disabilities and displacements it abets in real life.
        As for death, Tom Mandel, the New York Times tells us, was "one of the first (if not the first) to share on-line, with a wide audience, his own experience of dying." Actually to share a person's mortal illness is to feed, clean, and change that person, to suffer the person's bursts of anger and flights of hallucination. It is to see a person suffer deeply and decay. It is to sleep irregularly and poorly and to feel confined and at times resentful. With all that it can be an occasion of grace and gratitude. In any event it is quite different from checking your e-mail when you are good and ready, to catch up on the progress of the disease, to take in the sentiments of others, to contribute one that reads, "Oh, Tom . . . Damn, damn, damn, damn . . . (Do I get TOS [terms of service violation] for that?) Sweetie . . . I am so sorry and I am so amazed that you can just get on here and blurt it out," and then to log off and go about your daily life. (pp. 191-92)

2. Steven Johnson, Interface Culture (1997) (excerpts selected and titled by instructor of this course)

Computing = Representing

        What exactly is an interface anyway? in its simplest sense, the word refers to software that shapes the interaction between user and computer. The interface serves as a kind of translator, mediating between the two parties, making one sensible to the other. In other words, the relationship governed by the interface is a semantic one, characterized by meaning and expression rather than physical force. Digital computers are "literary machines," as hypertext guru Ted Nelson calls them. They work with signs and symbols, although this language, in its most elemental form, is almost impossible to understand. A computer thinks—if thinking is the right word for it—in tiny pulses of electricity representing either an "on" or an "off" state, a zero or a one. Humans think in words, concepts, images, sounds, associations. A computer that does nothing but manipulate sequences of zeros and ones is nothing but an exceptionally inefficient adding machine. For the magic of the digital revolution to take place, a computer must also represent itself to the user, in a language that the user understands.
        In this sense, the term computer is something of a misnomer, since the real innovation here is not simply the capacity for numerical calculation (mechanical calculators, all, predate the digital era by many years). The crucial technological breakthrough lies instead with this idea of the computer as a symbolic system, a machine that traffics in representations or signs rather than in the mechanical cause-and-effect of the cotton gin or the automobile. [ . . . ] A computer, on the other hand, is a symbolic system from the ground up. Those pulses of electricity are symbols that stand in for zeros and ones, which in turn represent simple mathematical instruction sets, which in turn represent words or images, spreadsheets or e-rnail messages. The enormous power of the modern digital computer depends on this capacity for self-representation.
        More often than not, this representation takes the form of a metaphor. A string of zeros and ones—itself a kind of language, though unintelligible to most humans—is replaced by a metaphor of a virtual folder residing on a virtual desktop. These metaphors are the core idiom of the contemporary graphic interface. (pp. 14-15)

As our machines are increasingly jacked into global networks of information, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine the dataspace at our fingertips, to picture all that complexity in our mind's eye—the way city dwellers, in the sociologist Kevin Lynch's phrase, "cognitively map" their real-world environs.
        Representing all that information is going to require a new visual language, as complex and meaningful as the great metropolitan narratives of the nineteenth-century novel. We can already see the first stirrings of this new form in recent interface designs that have moved beyond the two-dimensional desktop metaphor into more immersive digital environments: town squares, shopping malls, personal assistants, living rooms. As the infosphere continues its exponential growth, the metaphors used to describe it will also grow in both scale and complexity The agora of the twenty-first century may very well relocate to cyberspace, but it won't get very far without interface architects to draw up the blueprints. (p. 18)

How should we understand the cultural import of interface design in today's world? Put simply, the importance of interface design revolves around this apparent paradox: we live in a society that is increasingly shaped by events in cyberspace, and yet cyberspace remains, for all practical purposes, invisible, outside our perceptual grasp. Our only access to this parallel universe of zeros and ones runs through the conduit of the computer interface, which means that the most dynamic and innovative region of the modern world reveals itself to us only through the anonymous middlemen of interface design. (p. 19)

The Space of the Interface

Perhaps as an implicit homage to his long-distance mentor, Doug Engelbart used the language of "augmentation" throughout his career, but the bitmapped datasphere he unleashed on the world in 1968 was the first major break from the machine-as-prosthesis worldview. For the first time, a machine was imagined not as an attachment to our bodies, but as an environment, a space to be explored. You could project yourself into this world, lose your bearings, stumble across things. It was more like a landscape than a machine, a "city of bits," as MIT's William Mitchell called it in his 1995 book. Not since the Renaissance artisans hit upon the mathematics of painted perspective has technology so dramatically transformed the spatial imagination. (p. 24)

Metaforms: Fictions Sans Narrative

The Victorians had writers like Dickens to ease them through the technological revolutions of the industrial age, writers who built novelistic maps of the threatening new territory and the social relations it produced. Our guides to the virtual cities of the twenty-first century will perform a comparable service, only this time the interface—and not the novel—will be their medium. (pp. 19-20)

Just as twentieth-century labor movements grounded themselves in the authenticity of industrial work, the new parasite forms take the images of contemporary television at face value—as a real, vital, unavoidable component of everyday life. It just happens that this particular region of everyday life is not well represented by stories. The reality of nineteenth-century society—the "manifold awakenings of men to endurance and labor," as George Eliot famously described it in Middlemarch—required the steady, deep-focus narratives of the triple-decker novel. Eliot's "involutary, palpitating life" is alive and well in the mediated universe of late-twentieth-century culture. Only the palpitations of modern life don't readily map onto the sprawling plotlines of the Victorian novel, or even the "high-concept," cookie-cutter narratives of Hollywood films. Instead of stories, we have riffs, annotations, asides. We are a nation of commentators, either heckling the mass-media magnates from the cheap seats of our living rooms or cheering on the hecklers that are delivered to us there: Beavis and Butthead, the political pundits and media watchers, the robots of Mystery Science Theater. (pp. 30-31)

What unites the diverse strains of this emergent species [of metaforms] is shared belief in the need for information filters—data making sense of other data. The parasite forms thrive in situation where the available information greatly exceeds our capacity to process it. Metaforms prosper at those threshold points where the signals degenerate into noise, where the datasphere becomes too wild and overwrought to navigate alone. In these climates, all manner of metaforms appear: condensers, satirists, interpreters, samplers, translators. They feed on surplus information, on the bewildering sensory overload of the contemporary mediasphere. And this is where the connection to the modern interface comes into focus.
        Where the novel ushered its readers through the crowds and assembly lines of industrial life, the metaforms process and contextualize the byzantine new reality of information overload. They serve as buffers, translators, tour guides. Unlike the novel, they prefer evaluation and interpretation to storytelling and character development. The old-style narratives acculturated their audience to the industrial age by building elaborate structures of cause and effect, connecting the increasingly atomized public spaces of the new cities, linking working-class orphans to withered aristocrats to idle speculators to colonial scavengers. These narrative webs—dense and meticulously interwoven—were a way of restoring a sense of connection, of unity, to a culture that had transformed itself utterly in the space of fifty years. The novel was the answer to the question: "What connects all these bewildering new social realities?" And that answer was phrased in the form of a story. The parasite forms, on the other hand, are a response to the question: "What does all this information mean? Which sources are the most reliable ones? How does this information relate to my own particular worldview?" That response arrives as a kind of hybrid, a mix of metaphor, footnote, translation, and parody. It is a measure of the newness of the form that we lack a single word to describe it. (pp. 32-33)

In the digital world, they are a fact of life. There is no such thing as digital information without filters, for reasons that will become increasingly clear. As more and more of the culture translates itself into the digital language of zeros and ones, these filters will become enormously important, even as their cultural roles become increasingly diverse, embracing entertainment, politics, journalism, education, and more. What follows is an attempt to see all these various developments as instances of a larger idea, a new cultural form hovering somewhere between medium and message, a metaform that lives in the nether land between information producer and consumer. The interface is a way of mapping that strange new territory, a way for us to get our bearings in a bewildering environment. (p. 38)

The Interface as Tragic Chorus (or, Information is Fate)

The great drama of the next few decades will unfold under the crossed stars of the analog and the digital. Like the chorus of Greek tragedy, information filters will guide us through this transition, translating the zeros and ones of digital language into the more familiar, analog images of everyday life. These metaforms, these bitmappings will come to occupy nearly every facet of modern society: work, play, romance, family, high art, pop culture, politics. But the form itself will be the same, despite its many guises, laboring away in that strange new zone between medium and message. That zone is what we call the interface. (p. 41)

Presence

The key to defining virtual reality in terms of human experience rather than technological hardware is the concept of presence. Presence can be thought of as the experience of one's physical environment; it refers not to one's surroundings as they exist in the physical world, but to the perception of those surroundings as mediated by both automatic and controlled mental processes (Gibson, 1979): Presence is defined as the sense of being in an environment. Many perceptual factors help to generate this sense, including input from some or all sensory channels, as well as more mindful attentional, perceptual, and other mental processes that assimilate incoming sensory data with current concerns and past experiences (Gibson, 1966). Presence is closely related to the phenomenon of distal attribution or externalization, which refer to the referencing of our perceptions to an external space beyond the limits of the sensory organs themselves (Loomis, 1992). (p. 75)

Telepresence

In unmediated perception, presence is taken for granted: What could one experience other than one's immediate physical surroundings? However, when perception is mediated by a communication technology, one is forced to perceive two separate environments simultaneously: the physical environment in which one is actually present and the environment presented via the medium. The term telepresence can be used to describe the precedence of the latter experience in favor of the former; that is, telepresence is the extent to which one feels present in the mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment. Telepresence is defined as the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication medium. (pp. 75-76)

Virtual Reality

By employing the concept of telepresence, virtual reality can now be defined without reference to a particular hardware system: A virtual reality is defined as a real or simulated environment in which a perceiver experiences telepresence. (pp. 76-77)

Traditionally, the process of communication is described in terms of the transmission of information, as a process of linking sender and receiver. Media are therefore important only as a conduit, as a means of connecting sender and receiver, and are only interesting to the extent that they contribute to or otherwise interfere with the transmission of messages from sender to receiver. In contrast, the telepresence view focuses attention on the relationship between an individual who is both a sender and a receiver, and on the mediated environment with which he or she interacts. Information is not transmitted from sender to receiver; rather, mediated environments are created and then experienced. (pp. 77-78)

A similar sense [of telepresence] can be experienced via virtually any technology used in mediated communication. Newspapers, letters, and magazines place the reader in a space in which the writer is telling a story; television places the viewer in a virtual space in which both viewer and on-screen objects are present; and video games create virtual spaces in which the game-player is an actor. (p. 79)

Vividness and Interactivity

Two major dimensions across which communication technologies vary are discussed here as determinants of telepresence. The first, vividness, refers to the ability of a technology to produce a sensorially rich mediated environment. The second, interactivity, refers to the degree to which users of a medium can influence the form or content of the mediated environment. (p. 80)

Vividness means the representational richness of a mediated environment as defined by its formal features; that is, the way in which an environment presents information to the senses. [ . . . ] A highly vivid medium can be considered "hot" in the McLuhanesque sense, as it "extends one [or many] sense[s] in 'high definition'" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 36). Many factors contribute to vividness. Two generalized but important variables are discussed here: sensory breadth, which refers to the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously presented, and sensory depth, which refers to the resolution within each of these perceptual channels. (p. 81)

Interactivity is the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real time. Interactivity in this sense is distinct from engagement or involvement as these terms are frequently used by communication researchers [ . . . ]. (p. 84)

Three factors that contribute to interactivity will be examined here (although many others are also important): speed, which refers to the rate at which input can be assimilated into the mediated environment; range, which refers to the number of possibilities for action at any given time; and mapping, which refers to the ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment in a natural and predictable manner. (pp. 85-86)

Computing = Unified (Aristotelian) Action

Why was Spacewar the "natural" thing to build with this new technology? Why not a pie chart or an automated kaleidoscope or a desktop? Its designers identified action as the key ingredient and conceived Spacewar as a game that could provide a good balance between thinking and doing for its players. They regarded the computer as a machine naturally suited for representing things that you could see, control, and play with. Its interesting potential lay not in its ability to perform calculations but in its capacity to represent action in which humans could participate. (p. 1)

[ . . . ] interface design should concern itself with representing whole actions with multiple agents. This is, by the way, precisely the definition of theatre. (p. 7)

The Theatre of the Interface

        For purposes of comparison, let's take a look at the theatre. We have observed that the theatre bears some similarities to interface design in that both deal with the representation of action. Drama, unlike novels or other forms of literature, incorporates the notion of performance; that is, plays are meant to be acted out. A parallel can be seen in interface design. In his book The Elements of Friendly Software Design [1982], Paul Heckel remarked, "When I design a product, I think of my program as giving a performance for its user." In the theatre, enactment typically occurs in a performance area called a stage (Figure 1.5). The stage is populated by one or more actors who portray characters. They perform actions in the physical context provided by the scene and light designers. The performance is typically viewed by a group of observers called an audience.
        Part of the technical "magic" that supports the performance is embodied in the scenery and objects on the stage (windows that open and close; teacups that break); the rest happens in the backstage and "wing"' areas (where scenery is supported, curtains are opened and closed, and sound effects are produced), the "loft" area above the stage, which accommodates lighting instruments and backdrops or set pieces that can be raised and lowered, and the lighting booth, which is usually above the audience at the back of the auditorium. The magic is created by both people and machines, but who, what, and where they are do not matter to the audience. It's not just that the technical underpinnings of theatrical performance are unimportant to audience members; when a play is "working," audience members are simply not aware of the technical aspects at all. For the audience member who is engaged by and involved in the play, the action on the stage is all there is (Figure 1.6). In this sense, plays are like movies: When you are engrossed in one, you forget about the projector, and you may even lose awareness of your own body. For the actor on stage, the experience is similar in that everything extraneous to the ongoing action is tuned out, with the exception of the audience's audible and visible responses, which are often used by the actors to tweak their performance in real time (this, by the way, reminds us that theatrical audiences are not strictly "passive" and may be said to influence the action). For actor and audience alike, the ultimate "reality" is what is happening in the imaginary world on the stage—the representation. (pp. 14-16)

In a theatrical view of human-computer activity, the stage is a virtual world. It is populated by agents, both human and computer-generated, and other elements of the representational context (windows, teacups, desktops, or what-have-you). The technical magic that supports the representation, as in the theatre, is behind the scenes. Whether the magic is created by hardware, software, or wetware is of no consequence; its only value is in what it produces on the "stage." In other words, the representation is all there is (Figure 1.8). Think of it as existential WYSIWYG. (p. 17)

The idea of human-computer activity suggests a number of interesting corollaries. Since all action is confined to the world of the representation, all agents are situated in the same context, have access to the same objects, and speak the same language. Participants learn what language to speak by noticing what is understood; they learn what objects are and what they do by playing around with them. (p. 18)

The no-frills view that permeates thinking about the interfaces of "serious" applications is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of seriousness in representations. The idea that theatre is "really not real" and is therefore unsuited as an approach to serious human-computer activities is misguided, because those activities are "really not real" in precisely the same ways. Without the representation, there is nothing at alland theatre gives good representation. (p. 22)

"New Veracity Tests Are Proposed"

CONCLUSIONS:
        Following a temporary decline during the period 1914-1945, the second half of the twentieth century has witnessed a dramatic rebirth in the uses of perspective. A number of reasons for this rebirth are: a radical increase in population which has led to new concern with recording and reconstructing the built environment in particular and the physical world generally; and new developments in aerial photography, cinema, computer graphics, and virtual reality.
        The second part of the paper compares and contrasts Renaissance and modern perspective. Whereas Renaissance artists favored static, one-point, linear perspective, modern perspective has focused ever more attention to dynamic transformations. Whereas Renaissance perspective assumed a strict one-to-one correspondence between original object and image, modern perspective entails a whole range of alternatives including theoretical, assumed, possible, transposed, and deliberate noncorrespondence. These new kinds of correspondence have greatly expanded the scope of perspective, as have recent developments in virtual reality. Among the more complex ancillary effects of modern perspective has been a new fragmentation of illusion. To counter these developments new veracity tests are proposed. (p. 227)

The Bliss of Reality, the Exclusion of the Other, and Bad Infinity

How are we to approach "virtual reality" from the psychoanalytical perspective? Let us take as our starting point Freud's most famous dream, that of Irma's injection; the first part of the dream, Freud's dialogue with Irma, this exemplary case of a dual, specular relationship, culminates in a look into her open mouth:

There's a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this—You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness (1)

        Suddenly, this horror changes miraculously into "a sort of ataraxia" defined by Lacan precisely as "the coming into operation of the symbolic function" exemplified by the production of the formula of trimethylamin, the subject floats freely in symbolic bliss. The trap to be avoided here, of course, is to contrast this symbolic bliss with "hard reality." The fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis is, on the contrary, that what we call "reality" constitutes itself against the background of such a "bliss"; i.e., of such an exclusion of some traumatic Real (epitomized here by a woman's throat). This is precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says that fantasy is the ultimate support of reality: "reality" stabilizes itself when some fantasy-frame of a "symbolic bliss" forecloses the view into the abyss of the Real. Far from being a kind of figment of our dreams that prevents us from "seeing reality as it effectively is," fantasy is constitutive of what we call reality: the most common bodily "reality" is constituted via a detour through the maze of imagination. In other words, the price we pay for our access to "reality" is that something—the reality of the trauma—must be "repressed." (p. 290)

What has this to do with the computer? As early as 1954 Lacan pointed out that in today's world, the world of the machine proper, the paradigmatic case for "symbolic bliss" is the computer, as one can ascertain when one enacts a kind of phenomenological investigation, leaving aside (technological) questions of how the computer works, and confining oneself to its symbolic impact, to how the computer inscribes itself into our symbolic universe. (p. 291)

The computer works most effectively of course as an "evocatory object" in the question of "artificial intelligence"—here, an inversion has already taken place which is the fate of every successful metaphor: one first tries to simulate human thought as far as possible with the computer, bringing the model as close as possible to the human "original," until at a certain point matters reverse and it raises the questions: what if this "model" is already a model of the "original" itself, what if human intelligence itself operates like a computer, is "programmed,'' etc.? The computer raises in pure form the question of semblance, a discourse which would not be a simulacrum: it is clear that the computer in some sense only "simulates" thought; yet how does the total simulation of thought differ from "real" thought? (p. 293)

        Yet in contrast to this search for the point of inconsistency of the system, the hacker's aesthetic is the aesthetic of a "regulated universe." It is a universe that excludes intersubjectivity, a relation to the other qua subject: notwithstanding all the danger, tension, amazement which we experience when immersed in a video game, there is a basic difference between that tension and the tension in our relation to the "real world"—a difference which is not that the computer-generated video world is "just a game," a simulation; the point is rather that in such games, even if the computer cheats, it cheats consistently—the problem is only a matter of cracking the rules which govern its activities. So, for the hackers, the struggle with the computer is "straightforward": the attack is clean, the rules are laid down, although it is necessary to discover them, nothing inconsistent can interfere with them as in "real life."
        Therein consists the link of the computer world with the universe of science fiction: we conceive of a world in which all is possible, we can arrange the rules arbitrarily, the only predetermined thing is that these rules must then apply; i.e., that world must be consistent in itself. Or, as Sherry Turkle puts it: all is possible, yet nothing is contingent—what is thereby excluded, is precisely the real. Impossible qua contingent encounter. . . . This reality, the reality of the other which is excluded here, is, of course, woman: the inconsistent other par excellence. The computer as partner is the means by which we evade the impossibility of the sexual relationship: a relationship with the computer is possible. Das Unheimliche (the eeriness) of the computer is exactly in that it is a machine, a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner, the computer is an "inhuman partner" (as Lacan says of the lady in courtly love). One can also explain from this the feeling of something unnatural, obscene, almost terrible when we see children talking with a computer and obsessed with the game, oblivious of everything around them: with the computer, childhood loses the last appearance of innocence. (pp. 293-94)

This is Hegel's "proper infinity": the land itself is its own map, its own other—the flight into bad infinity does not come to an end when we reach the unattainable final link in the chain but when we recognize instead that the first link is its own other. From there we could also derive the position of the subject (in the sense of the subject of the signifier): if the land is its own map, if the original is its own model, if the thing is its own sign, then there is no positive, actual difference between them, though there must be some blank space which distinguishes the thing from itself as its own sign, some nonentity, which produces from the thing its sign—that "nonentity," that "pure" difference, is the subject. . . . (p. 294)

Our point is thus a very elementary one: true, the computer-generated "virtual reality" is a semblance; it does foreclose the Real in precisely the same way that, in the dream of Irma's injection, the Real is excluded by the dreamer's entry into the symbolic bliss—yet what we experience as the "true, hard, external reality" is based upon exactly the same exclusion. The ultimate lesson of virtual reality is the virtualization of the very true reality. By the mirage of "virtual reality," the "true" reality itself is posited as a semblance of itself, as a pure symbolic construct. The fact that "the computer doesn't think" means that the price for our access to "reality" is also that something must remain unthought. (p. 295)

[Note 1: Quote from "The Seminar of Jacques Lacan," Book 11: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 154-55]

Cyberspace: "Slick and hollow—awaiting received meaning" or "accretion of dreams"?

Just a chance operator in the gasoline crack of history, officer . . .
         Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceded any concept whatever. Slick and hollow—awaiting received meaning.
        All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices.
        "Gentlemen, that is not now nor will it ever be my concern . . ."
        Not what I do.
        I work the angle of transit. Vectors of neon Plaza, licensed consumers, acts primal and undreamed of . . .
        The architecture of virtual reality imagined as an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, shooting galleries, pinball arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with damp-stained years of men's magazines, chili joints, premises of unlicensed denturists, of fireworks and cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, purveyors of sexual appliances, pawnbrokers, wonton counters, love hotels, hotdog stands, tortilla factories, Chinese greengrocers, liquor stores, herbalists, chiropractors, barbers, bars.
        These are dreams of commerce. Above them rise intricate barrios, zones of more private fantasy . . . (pp. 27-28)

        Kelsey's second week in Australia and her brother is keeping stubbornly in-condo, doing television, looping Gladiator Skull and a new Japanese game called Torture Garden. She walks miles of mall that could as easily be Santa Barbara again or Singapore, buying British fashion magazines, shoplifting Italian eyeshadow; only the stars at night are different, Southern Cross, and the Chinese boys skim the plazas on carbon-fiber skateboards trimmed with neon.
        She pauses in front of the unlicensed vendor, his face notched with pale scars of sun-cancer. He has a dozen cassettes laid out for sale, their plastic cases scratched and dusty. "Whole city in there," he says, "Kyoto, yours for a twenty." She sees the security man, tall and broad, Kevlar-vested, blue-eyed, homing in to throw the old man out, as she tosses the coin on impulse and snatches the thing up, whatever it is, and turns, smiling blankly, to swan past the guard. She's a licensed consumer, untouchable, and looking back she sees the vendor squinting, grinning his defiance, no sign of the $20 coin . . .
        No sign of her brother when she returns to the condo. She puts on the glasses and the gloves and slots virtual Kyoto . . . (p. 28)

        Her mother removes the glasses. Her mother looks at the timer. Three hours. "But you don't like games, Kelsey . . ."
        "It's not a game," tears in her eyes. "It's a city." Her mother puts on the glasses, moves her head from side to side, removes the glasses.
        "I want to go there," Kelsey says. (p. 29)

"The Street finds its own uses for things"

       Once perfected, communication technologies rarely die out entirely, rather, they shrink to fit particular niches in the global info-structure. Crystal radios have been proposed as a means of conveying optimal seed-planting times to isolated agrarian tribes. The mimeograph, one of many recent dinosaurs of the urban office-place, still shines with undiminished samisdat potential in the century's backwaters, the Late Victorian answer to desktop publishing. Banks in uncounted Third World villages still crank the day's totals on black Burroughs adding machines, spooling out yards of faint indigo figures on long, oddly festive curls of paper, while the Soviet Union, not yet sold on throwaway new-tech fun, has become the last reliable source of vacuum tubes. The eight-track tape format survives in the truckstops of the Deep South, as a medium for country music and spoken-word pornography.
        The Street finds its own uses for things—uses the manufacturers never imagined. The micro-tape recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnetisdat, allowing the covert spread of banned political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular phone become economic tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication . . .
        The aerosol can gives birth to the urban graffitti-matrix. Soviet rockers press homemade flexidisks out of used chest x-rays . . . (pp. 28-29)