Human Virtuality and Digital Life

Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations

Richard Frankel, Victor J. Krebs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781138505148
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351379717
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the Gradiva® Best Book Award 2022, and the Courage to Dream Book Prize 2023 from the Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association!

This book is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves.

Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth, and popular culture, this book argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being. It illuminates what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives. The authors claim that technology is a pharmakon - at the same time both a remedy and a poison - and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life. The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change. The book's postscript considers the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic.

Accessible and wide-reaching, this book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives.

Part I
Virtual media

Introduction to Part I

Before we begin our investigations on human virtuality and digital life, we need to provide a genealogy of the technology that has led us to this era. We begin with a short story of the evolution of the media, starting in the emergence of language, and consider the relation between these evolving technologies and what we are calling the human virtual. And we finish with virtuality’s different transformations, especially apropos the digital.

1 History of the virtual

[In] a technological world […] the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.

Rebecca Solnit (2003)

Prelude

Human beings, unlike any other species on the planet, have a sense of history, of living through a sequence of past, present, and future. Animals, on the contrary, do not have our sense of time; they live always in an unstoppable now. They forget as soon as they’re done, and then they do it again as if for the first time. Animals immediately forget: not their bodies, that remember in another way, but their temporal consciousness. For them, each moment “sink[s] back into deep night extinguished forever,” as Nietzsche (1980, pp. 8–9) poetically says. Their life is condemned to (or blessed with) an eternal present. But humans are freed from this sentence. They suspend the world from the actual present and virtualize it into a representation, a concept, an image, an idea. Images and words are our awakening to consciousness.

According to the Greek myth, we received the gift of thought in the fire that the titan Prometheus stole from the gods as compensation for the precariousness of our natural existence. This titanic transgression curses us but also brings us closer to the gods. In technology, we are given the power to extend reality, to usher the world into the realm of possibilities. It constitutes our “leap into the virtual,” which begins the evolution of Homo sapiens. Technology generates a history of the virtual, of the many different transformations it undergoes with each new advance. That history has led us – through images painted on cave walls, and words first uttered and then written, through photographic and then moving images – to our latest leap into the digital modulation of the virtual, which we call “Virtual Reality.”

The awakening of the intellect, says Wittgenstein (1993), is always accompanied by a rupture from the original ground. Human consciousness involves the loss of the instinctive connection to the world that characterizes the life of animals and human infancy. Every time a new technology arises, it conditions the virtual differently, so that the same dynamic of loss is repeated again. Armed with a new medium, we lose the immediacy of the world we had attained under the spell of the previous one. Our smartphones, for example, capable of carrying an immense memory supplement, begin to displace and obliterate our natural memories, which often no longer remember even the simplest of things. Suddenly, what had been natural for us before, is forgotten with the next technology, which opens a new evolutionary path in its place.

Plato (1980) was the first to warn us about that technological dynamic, especially its particular loss and danger, when he pointed out that the new invention of writing would separate knowledge from experience, doing away with the work of memory that transforms information into understanding, and so leads us to mistake information for wisdom. As King Thamus tells Theuth, the inventor of writing, in the Phaedrus:

If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. [Writing] is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing. (p. 275a)

Writing allows us to handle information without having to assimilate it immediately, as we did before, when we received it orally and had to process it right there and then in our bodies, through our emotions. But with writing, we can learn to repeat the discourse of another and “understand” its meaning, at a distance, intellectually, without really grasping it. (Apollo, the myth says, shoots his precise arrows always from a distance.) In making memory dispensable, scribal consciousness disconnects the oral medium from experience and words lose the depth and power of their grounding in the body.

There is a new loss every time we leap again into the virtual. This has been true with speech and written or printed words, photographs, and moving pictures; it is no different with digital images, hypertexts, and the like. But, faithful to its pharmacological nature, that loss always comes with its gain as well. All technology opens new doors, making new experiences possible, at the same time that it closes others. Writing may disconnect us from the immediacy of oral language and its automatic work of memory, but it also sharpens the reasoning and logical skills without which modern scientific advance, for example, would not have been possible.

1 A short story of the media

a Words: From speech to writing

Technology is the expression of a drive to extend ourselves into the virtual. It reflects our capacity to abstract reality, to remove ourselves from the immediacy of experience in the world, to lift it up “into thought.” Its consequences mark the path technology has forged in human history, and the world-changing transformations it has occasioned. In order to explore how this manifests in the digital era, we intend to provide a basic framework from which to understand them, outlining, in broad strokes, a short history of the technology of communication and tracing the primary ways in which each subsequent technology has transformed human experience.

The story we want to tell begins with the appearance of what some might consider our first technology: language. With words, human being was extended into the abstract and ethereal realm of concepts that freed us from the passage of time and the tyranny of becoming. Speech articulates the mental world, extends our experience with virtual possibilities, and re-configures it with ideas and constructed narratives. Articulated in the air of spoken words, behavioral patterns, acquired tastes and tendencies, etc., they are passed on from generation to generation, in “memes” (to use Dawkins’ now-trending term), which function at the cultural level as genes do biologically. Thanks to language, human evolution speeds up beyond the biological. As Yuval Harari (2011) observes, since the emergence of language, humans don’t live in only one mode of natural life, as animals seem to do, they live in many cultural alternatives.

The virtual was first forged by spoken words and images, constituting together a mythical worldview.¹ With alphabetical writing – a particularly Western form of inscription that articulates meaning around arbitrary signs – the mythical thought of words and images was replaced by logical, rational thought. By massifying that technology in the 15th century, the printing press helped intensify this shift away from orality which has prevailed in our culture ever since.

In transforming spoken words and images into logical concepts, writing subordinates our synchronistic, moment-to-moment experience of time to the diachronic progression of history. As Vilém Flusser (2011a) says, “the unidirectional flow of writing” (p. xiv) results in a new experience of time as linear, a stream of unstoppable progress, of dramatic unrepeatability, of framing, in short, history. Past, present, and future, and our conception of time as progressive, are made possible by this virtual extension of experience.

The invention of writing made it possible for stories to reach farther across time and space than their tellers and stay more stable than memory; and new communications, reproduction, and transportation technologies only continue the process. (Solnit, 2003, p. 11)

But as we know, every gain brings a loss with it. As McLuhan (1998) pointed out in his seminal book, Understanding Media, the advent of any technology involves not just an extension but also an amputation of experience. When our calculating capacity is extended by an electronic calculator, for example, we stop adding or multiplying in our head. The mental activity of calculating is amputated. When we extend our motility with the car, we amputate our legs so that we hardly consider it a possibility to walk even short distances. When we extend our memory with the Internet, we begin to depend so much on the technological extension that we stop committing to memory the information that is stored there now.

In their battle against spoken language, Flusser (2011b) writes, “the characters of the alphabet suck the life of the language up into themselves: letters are vampires” (p. 37). And, as Havelock (1986) points out, with writing, “the acoustic flow of language contrived by echo to hold the attention of the ear has been reshuffled into visual patterns created by the thoughtful attention of the eye” (p. 13). Writing displaces bodily interaction: the sonority of the voice that the ear receives gives way to the intellectual sharpness of the seeing eye and the spontaneity of speech yields to the deliberateness of reason. The analytic, sequential way of thinking and perceiving fostered by the linear logic of the alphabet pointedly contrasts with the thought and perception that characterized oral culture. The richness of the image and the associative thought it promotes is replaced by the exactness of the concept and rational way of thinking. We thus begin to live as we read, logically and sequentially, as if in a fixed line towards a goal. But, of course, this transformation did not take place immediately.

The printed page, in placing the object before us in inert signs, extends our capacity for concentration, objective analysis, and representational memory. That shift transforms language and modifies the way in which we had traditionally modulated the virtual. Whereas in the oral tradition, the expression with which words were delivered was inseparable from its content, so that they were literally an extension of our tongues, in the new scribal tradition content becomes more important than expression, and so language is transformed into a tool. The industrial revolution’s emphasis on production and efficiency, and the pragmatic expeditiousness of that era that is occasioned by writing, turns language into a mere “vehicle of information,” what Benjamin (1978) called a “bourgeois language” (p. 318).² Its clear concepts, sedimented on the page, simplify the complexity of oral language and its aesthetic dimension. We begin to experience reality through the objective concepts of reason, and gradually become more insensitive to the pregnant opacities of actual experience, unable to see the meanings that opened up through the spoken word and its images.

So, although bourgeois language achieves an aesthetic detachment from sensible experience that is, of course, responsible for many scientific achievements in these past centuries, it involves also the kind of sensible impoverishment that Plato warned us about, when he pointed out that writing would affect the capacity to interiorize what we learn and end up confusing information for wisdom. Once we begin to read the world through the thinking head rather than the resonating body, concepts are divorced from their live, performative contexts. They abstract us from time and disconnect us from its flow. Spontaneity yields to regularity, contingency and the unknown are systematically disavowed, and our vital circle narrows. While written language provides a precise, technical tool and expedites communication, it also takes away its existential depth.

If technology is, as McLuhan (1998) observed, an extension of human being, then images and drawings, concepts and words, each constitute a different extension of experience with its own particular modulation of virtuality. With the spoken word we leave the mute privacy of wordless experience and enter into verbal interaction with actual others that help forge a public world of shared meanings. By suspending temporal movement and casting events into abstract signs (i.e., writing), we substitute the immediacy and fleetingness of experience with a permanent, objective, atemporal, visual trace. No longer subject to the transience of passing voices in a conversation or fleeting thoughts, with writing the world is sedimented into objective, atemporal meanings.

The illusion of an orderly world and of a world with a rational telos, at the service of humans, is only possible with a language turned into a tool of reason, understood as pure or as instrumental. The excesses that this will incur are anticipated, for instance, by the image of Goya’s famous etching – of a man crumpled on his desk asleep upon an open book – “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

b Images: From photography to digital image

i Photography

But let us not forget that the word originates in the image. Concepts anchor our world, as Nietzsche (2017) so poignantly puts it, “by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid” (p. 22). Despite the prevalence of scribality, words and images both are inscribed in our psyche; both are different openings to the human virtual and stand always in a dialectical relationship. Each marks a different psychic domain and holds a perennial tension within ourselves.

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, printed reproduction spread slowly but steadily, and with the invention of the daily newspaper, it placed itself at the center of culture. The prevalence of the word continued, however, despite the introduction, in the 20th century, of the electronic media. The telegraph, the telephone, and the radio, since they are linked to the voice and articulated language, were still compatible with writing. But with the invention of photography in the mid-19th century, the rupture with scribality begins with its re-introduction of the image. Its extensions in television and film are then powerfully potentiated with the advent of digital technology, which massifies the image in the same way that the printing press did with writing.

Like the written or spoken medium, the trace on the photographic plate continues the technological modulation of virtuality, freezing time and abstracting from experience, but now through the image. Before photo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Permission
• Introduction
• Part I: Virtual media
• Part II: Evolving conceptions of the virtual and the real
• Part III: Depth psychology in the digital age
• Part IV: Philosophical issues of the virtual
• Postscript: Digital life in the time of the pandemic
• Index