The Virtual Embodied

Practice, Presence, Technology

John Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134720965
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Virtual Embodied is intended to inform, provoke and delight. It explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge, space, virtue and virtuality to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence. It juxtaposes cutting-edge theories, polemics, and creative practices to uncover ethical, aesthetic and ecological implications of why, how and in particular where, human actions, observations and insights take place.
In The Virtual Embodied, many of the authors, artists, performers and designers apply their interdisciplinary passions to questions of embodied knowledge and virtual space. In doing so it chooses to acknowledge the limitations of the conventional linear book and uses them creatively to challenge existing genres of multi-media and networked consumerism.

part one
embodied knowledge and virtual space

chapter 1
embodied knowledge and virtual space
gender, nature and history

victor jeleniewski seidler

modernity, knowledge and nature

Within an Enlightenment vision of modernity there is an assumption that knowledge is independent, objective and impartial, for the Enlightenment was largely cast within the terms of the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century. This marked a profound shift¹ from an organic towards a mechanistic conception of nature. With the ‘death of nature’ we witness the reduction of nature to matter which is largely to be explained through the discovery of scientific laws. Progress is identified with the control and domination of an external nature just as it is in relation to inner natures. Just as outer nature is there to be controlled, since it is governed through external laws, so our inner natures also have to be controlled if we are to exist as rational selves. This was crucial to Descartes, who prepared the secular terms for the mind–body dualism which has also characterised modernity.

As mind is to be radically separated from body, so reason is to be separated from nature. The mind is conceived as existing separately from the world that it is endeavouring to explain. For Descartes it is as rational selves that we face an ‘external world’. It is mind which is identified with reason, and consciousness which defines the new Cartesian vision of what it means to be ‘human’. We still find echoes of the idea that to be human is to be a rational animal, that it is an independent and autonomous faculty of mind/reason which is categorically separated from an ‘animal nature’. So it is that knowledge is deemed to be crucially disembodied and universal. This prepares the ground for a radical structuralist distinction between culture and nature, and the assumption that identities as rational selves are crucially articulated within the terms of culture alone. Where traditionally it was an independent faculty of reason which defined an existence as a rational self, it is language which is deemed to be independent and autonomous, and which supposedly provides us with experience.

This may help us to recognise just how unsettling is the question of whose knowledge is to be embodied. The notion that knowledge has to be ‘situated’ and ‘embodied’ is part of a crucial feminist challenge to the terms of an Enlightenment vision of modernity. It is also part of the challenge of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which sought to question the autonomy and independence of language. He recognises, as does Freud, a crucial tension between language and experience. It is part of the attraction of Freud’s work for Wittgenstein and it is what places each of them in a critical relationship to modernity. Wittgenstein articulates this in the introduction to the Philosophical Investigations² as a way of explaining how his writings are likely to be misunderstood. In this he anticipates misreadings of a philosophy of language; misreadings which too often enshrine the very autonomy of language which his work seeks to question.

There is a resonance between Wittgenstein’s questioning of a Cartesian inheritance with crucial aspects of feminism and ecology. In different ways they help to question the disdain for nature, the body and sexuality that has been deeply rooted within the dominant Christian traditions in the West. They help to unsettle too firm a distinction between nature and culture, and in different ways they open up questions about the ways we can be part of both nature and culture. As I have tried to think this in Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory,³ it helps to name a particular relationship between a dominant white, heterosexual masculinity and a vision of modernity that insists upon a categorical split/dislocation between reason and nature.

A dominant white heterosexual masculinity can alone take its reason for granted. This becomes a way of affirming male superiority, for it is women, Jews, people of colour who are deemed in diverse ways to be closer to nature. For Kant it is men alone who can establish a secure inner relationship with reason and so who can be independent and self-sufficient. This means that women supposedly need men in a way that men do not need women, for it is only through accepting the subordination of marriage that women can secure the guidance of reason. So women are trapped traditionally into accepting subordination as a means to their freedom and autonomy. This is because women are more closely identified with their bodies and sexualities. It falls as a responsibility for men that they need to control their partners within heterosexual relationships, for women’s sexuality is deemed to be a threat to male reason.

It is crucial here that a dominant, white, heterosexual masculinity is framed within a Cartesian tradition and its separation between mind and body. This means that within modernity the self is already gendered and racialised as a rational self. It is the dominant white, heterosexual male self that is identified with mind/consciousness and so with a reason that is disembodied. This independent faculty of reason is taken to be the source of impartial and universal knowledge. Men are encouraged to ‘rise above’ their ‘animal natures’ and so, implicitly, to disdain their bodies and sexualities. As Susan Griffin has it in Pornography and Silence,⁴ adominant masculinity learns to project a relationship to the body, sexuality and nature that it is obliged to deny. It is women who are made to carry those aspects of the self that are denied. Men learn to identify with culture alone, for to acknowledge emotions and feelings is a sign of weakness and so a threat to male identities. So it is that men remain estranged from themselves in crucial respects.

In the light of this disenchantment, nature can no longer serve as a source of meanings and values, and human beings no longer reflect upon what would be an appropriate relationship with nature. Rather, these issues are suppressed as nature is presented as something that needs to be dominated and controlled. This means that there can be no communication between people and nature, for nature supposedly has no voice of its own. Animals and trees are no longer the bearers of intrinsic value. Rather, within an Enlightenment vision of modernity it is human beings who are, alone, the source of meanings and values which they impose upon a disenchanted nature. This is part of the arrogance of modernity which defines values in terms of exchange values on the market. The trees supposedly only have ‘value’ as timber that can be sold as a commodity on the international market. It is crucial that human beings do not regard themselves as ‘part of’ nature but that they exist categorically separate from it. At some level nature is the enemy against which we prove ourselves as human beings. This is crucially a masculinist vision, though often it is not named as such.

embodying knowledge

For Descartes it is crucial that as rational selves we have an inner relationship to reason, mind and consciousness and an external relationship with our bodies. Put crudely, bodies are not part of ‘who we are’ as rational selves, but are part of a disenchanted nature. So it is that the body exists as an ‘object’ of medical knowledge and our experience of our bodies is automatically discounted as subjective and anecdotal. As children we learn to be silent in front of the doctor and so we learn to devalue the knowledge that we have of ourselves. If we learn to value the knowledge of our minds, we learn to disdain whatever knowledge emerges from our bodies. If this is set within the terms of dominant masculinity, it also sets the terms in which women are obliged to evaluate their experience. For women can never take their rationality for granted and it remains something they have continually to prove. Within modernity this means that their status as human beings is always in question. As feminism learnt to recognise it, women exist as second-class citizens.

As Kant develops an ethical tradition, there is a radical split between on the one hand thoughts that are linked to the mind, consciousness and reason and, on the other, emotions and feelings that are placed in the body. So it is that Kant’s inclinations are deemed to be forms of determination and a lack of freedom. They are constructed as externally determining our behaviour, so taking us away from the path of pure reason. Within the West we inherit the Christian identification of purity with spirituality. The idea is that pure love is a love that is not tainted with sexuality, which is linked to the body and identified with the sins of the flesh. This shows more clearly how knowledge comes to be ‘disembodied’ within an Enlightenment vision of modernity. Within Kant’s terms we have to learn to ‘rise above’ our animal natures so that we can learn to live in the light of reason alone. With Kant’s identification of reason with morality, it is only if we act against our inclinations that we can be sure that we act in relation to the moral law.

So it is that the body and emotional life are silenced as we learn to aspire to live as rational selves. We learn to control our emotions and suppress our impulses, especially as men who have learnt to identify a dominant masculinity with independence and self-sufficiency. Rather we can feel threatened by the revelations of our natures for they can bring into question the idealised images we have of ourselves. We learn to discount experience as a source of knowledge within structuralist traditions that assume that it is through language alone that experiences are articulated and subjectivities defined. This is part of a deeply rooted disdain for the body and sexuality, as Freud investigates it in Civilisation and Its Discontents.⁵ He insists that the repression of sexuality is not a personal and individual issue, but is structured within the historical experience of modernity. Often we learn to relate to bodies instrumentally, treating them as possessions that are at our disposal. This is particularly relevant for men who learn to train their bodies and who can feel trapped into constantly testing their male identities against the limits of the body. If they get sick or their body lets them down in some way, they feel entitled to punish it.

Learning to listen to our bodies involves beginning to develop quite a different relationship with self. It involves recognising the body as a source of knowledge and recognising ways that memories are carried, not only in the mind but also in the cells of our bodies. Rather than treating the body as separated off, as part of a disdained nature, we learn to bring the mind and body into relation with each other. This was a process which Reich begun in his early relationship with Freud. He recognises ways that we tighten the body against feeling, and the ways that muscles hold emotions in particular ways. He began to explore how, for instance, ‘being uptight’ not only reflects an attitude of mind, but also reveals a certain way of holding the body. But this involves going beyond post-structuralist theories which can help to recognise the body as a space upon which cultural meanings are drawn. As Freud recognised, it also involves redefining liberal conceptions of freedom which suggest that we can split from our emotional histories to find freedom and autonomy in the present. Rather, we have to learn to face the emotional realities of the past, if we are to find more freedom in the present.

Embodying knowledge involves more than recognising the body as a means of expression, or thinking that we can shape or pierce our bodies in ways that can express our freedom and autonomy. Postmodern theories tempt us into thinking that we can constantly remake identities in the present, and that we can leave the past behind. Sometimes they suggest that there has been such a radical disjunction with the past that we are forced to create identities out of whatever is culturally available in the present. To suggest otherwise is to slip back into visions of authenticity that imply that traditions exist in some protected spaces of their own. Freud, however, makes us think otherwise, for we can only escape the influences of the past if we are ready to acknowledge them in the present. We might wish to split from painful emotional histories as well as from cultural histories full of pain and suffering, but the repressed will return to haunt us. A time will come when we will have to face what we have chosen to split from. At some level this involves coming to terms with ourselves in a way that postmodern theories suggest we can evade.

If we are to establish a deeper contact with ourselves, then we have to recognise what we have chosen to suppress. Freud has a particular grasp of how this is to be carried through as a process of transference. Alternative forms of psychotherapy offer different paths suggesting diverse ways in which the present is tied in with the past. Often they put less stress upon a process of regression and are more concerned with the ways in which conflicts in the present return us to unresolved issues in the past. But there is a shared sense that we cannot split from the past but have to be r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Virtual Embodied
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface Curvatures in Space–Time–Truth
• Part One: Embodied Knowledge and Virtual Space
• Part Two: Nature and Virtue
• Part Three: Embodying Truth
• Part Four: When Becoming Meets Becoming
• Part Five: Between Saying and Showing