Connecting to the Body: Transcendence is Confinement

The writings of the French school of ecriture feminine purport that writing vis-à-vis speech affords a certain liberty that allows one to express a femininity that is repressed in the general phallogocentric order of speech. That it is “never her turn to speak” and that “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought” (Cixous, 1986, p. 94) and consequently also to create a way of speaking the feminine. Most importantly, this means that through writing, women can liberate themselves from their false relations to their body and re-discover it. It has been almost 40 years since and I believe currently we would do good to ask similar questions about the medium by which we enact most of our social exchanges – the internet. This means we must ask: Does cyberspace allow a turn to speak the yet undefined. How does it relate to the body, and what does it do to subjectivity? To do so, I will explore the relationship between cyberspace and the body. This entails first, explicating the very dualist promise of transcendence through cyberspace that my account seeks to confront. This I intend to accomplish by adhering to Haraway’s myth of the cyborg as a theoretical lens applied to James Triptree’s novelette “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”

The (double) promise of Transcendence

“One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity[…] We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world.” (Gates et al., 1995)

The internet, as a commodity and as access to cyberspace was advertised and sold as the tool of ultimate emancipation and freedom. Its promise was to liberate users from the limitations of their bodies, in particular those, deriving from their position in hierarchies of race, class, and sex. It was supposedly a network that allowed anonymous communication and as such was considered to be by design subversive of patriarchical structures. With the fundamental premise of the elimination or occlusion of gender, age, and infirmities it was supposed to be a medium that leveled the playing field (Gunkel, 1998, p. 111). This, in essence, was a double promise. First, in the spirit of millennia of dualist western metaphysics it promised the liberation from one’s body. Meaning, a sort of transcendence through disembodiment, by finally getting rid of the “meat” that doomed one to immanence. But even more importantly, as Chun shows through an analysis of early internet provider commercials, it was mostly a promise made to all marked bodies. Advertisements, purported that individuals could trade-in their ineffaceable otherness of which oppression was merely an effect and enter a space wherein everyone was bodyless, mere streams of information (Chun, 2008, pp. 132). Therein contained was the second promise of undisturbed communication. The body was casted as the very thing which inhibited pure minds from connecting with each other. Against this embodied self, the advertised cyberself was individual, disengaged from earthly tethers, nature, sexuality, and passions. It was presented as the “real” self, that was lying in wait to come out. The body was portrayed as the obstacle to rather than the device for communication.

Introducing the cyborg

Feminist theory has in great part elaborated on the oppressive functions of such dualist thought. Instead of the mind, it impels us, we must theorize the body in relation to cyberspace. Hence, to arrive at the possibilities that the internet forecloses and generates in adjunct with the body, I want to take the hand of Haraway who asks for a turn away from the individual and towards the cyborg. By which she means to embrace certain “possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine” (Haraway, 2006 , p. 140) as well as other distinctions that have been formative in the construction of the western self so far. Moreover, Haraway’s cyborg in opposition to other feminist theory does not consider itself as an oppressed class, or any class for that matter, in fact it does not require a shared coherent identity. For this reason, it does not need to play into certain readings or histories of salvation, rather it conceives of itself as fully implicated in the world in all its being without pretensions of original unity, innocence, or superiority (p. 142). Precisely, because it sees itself that way, it can acknowledge the body not as a pre-given unity, but as constituting its own field wherein various different powers play out against each other. Power’s that can be contradictory. Additionally, for the cyborg, machines are not apart from the body but form part of the body’s processes and allow for the experience of differing boundaries. Insofar nothing about the body, and especially the female body is given or preconstituted (p. 146). This lens informs my analysis and thus, in the following pages, we are at a liberty for notions and boundaries of what constitutes the self. Not only do I align myself conceptually with Haraways formulation but also methodologically, for I want to engage with the question of this essay through the novelette “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” by author James Triptree Jr, the pen name of Alice Sheldon, which features a cyborg protagonist. I will seek to examine this narrative and expound on and make visible the affinities it holds to our bodies in cyberspace.

Disciplining the body.

In the near-future world of the novelette, advertisements have been banned. Therefore, the communication corporation GTX has responded by creating television shows of beautiful people that travel the world, whose actual purpose is product placement. However, due to the unreliability of the beautiful and famous, instead GTX decide to genetically engineer a body without a functioning brain which can be remotely controlled by a cybernetically modified person. This latter person becomes P. Burke a hideous and deformed woman plucked from the streets. The corporation has performed countless operations on her that connect her nervous and sensory system to wires, which enables her to use the genetically engineered but brainless body of “Delphi” from a distance. To do so she must take place in a “waldo”, a device placed in an underground laboratory wherein she must take place to connect to the brainless Delphi. The latter is a beautiful sight to behold and planned to be the star of one of GTX’s shows and thus gets to indulge in the related luxurious life of the rich and famous. First, however, P. Burke must learn for months to use the body of Delphi properly, and she realizes that many of Delphi’s senses are reduced in comparison to those of her actual body – the one of P. Burke. In fact, many of the senses connected to pleasure – those of taste, touch, and smell – are starkly diminished. This, the engineers explain, is because they needed to conserve bandwidth and preserved most of it for the kinesthesia of the body to work correctly.

From the get-go multiple affinities with our connection to cyberspace emerge. Equally to how P. Burke needs to change her body and learn new behaviors to control Delphi, we must do the same. For us, it is necessary to be in constant connection with our cybernetic adjuncts; the mouse, touchpad, the keyboard, which in turn enforce certain positions on our body. We must not only learn the sensitivity and pressure required for the use of our touchpad, but we must also learn to consider the on-screen pointer as our electronic self. We must constrain the motions of our “organic” bodies in our seats to allow our mouse-pointer-bodies to traverse cyberspace. Moreover, like, P. Burke, the senses of smell, touch, and taste are left behind unstimulated in our “organic” bodies. Insofar, what the internet gives is only a traded transcendence, that is no transcendence at all. Traveling cyberspace requires a sort of anesthesia in our bodies, a numbing of that which is left behind. Indeed, just as only Delphi’s body can take part in the life of luxury, freedom, and autonomy when P. Burke is constrained- cyberspace allows us to enter a similar informational realm only at the cost of a spartan existence of the organic parts of our selves. In short, the cyberspace of abundance and possibilities is created by the imposition of constraints in the “organic” realm.

Alternating subjectivities.

In the story P. Burke is eager to use Delphi’s body and neglects the care of her own. The laboratory scientists therefore need to intervene and make Burke understand that she is threatening not only her own existence, but that of Delphi and the television programme as well. Yet, to tell her, the scientists must extend the sleep time of Delphi during the television programme, so that they can make enough time to schedule a talk with Burke in her own body. The problematique that they are thus dealing with here is that there is a single consciousness, that is now tasked with taking care of two bodies. As such, sleep is also re-signified, because between the two bodies the one that momentarily contains the consciousness is active whereas the other one must be put to rest, to “sleep”.  Agency, consciousness, and subjectivity are only ever attributes of one of the two bodies, the other one must be in a state of rest. If Burke controls her body, Delphi’s body is motionless, and if Burke controls Delphi’s body her own body is a non-responsive part of a machine.

For, travelers of cyberspace, this too is barely different. The term user, resonating with “drug user”, already contains the dream of programmers: to create an addictive product (Chun, 21). One which we would rather use than another. A virtual window that not only competes with all other ones available but also those of a homes rooms. As such cyberspace offers us to inhabit a multiplicity of attachments to our bodies, each of which entails a different subjectivity enacted by the platform’s constraints and possibilities. If we are dissatisfied with one, we may change to another. That means that cyberspace is the choice of a grand variety of cyberplaces, wherein we can be different sorts of agents and experience different subjectivities during our traversal.

Control over Cyberbodies.

At last, the story of P. Burke reflects on the ownership and control of a cyberbody. There is three moments I will identify here. First, the unique advantage that made GTX create their new TV-show around the cybernetic host Delphi was that it also allowed them to access the connection between Burke and Delphi to both observe but also change behavior as the it traveled from the formers brain to the latter’s body. This allowed them to observe, control, and remedy their stars behavior if necessary.

In cyberspace the relation is similar. That is as Galloway states, that in cyberspace power works through standardized protocols – that is universally agreed formats for how data needs to be constructed to be legible to other devices – these determine the distinction between signal/noise, what can circulate and what cannot (Galloway, 2004, p. 6-11). In essence, the powers that institute these data conventions, which constitute the building blocks of cyberspace, consequentially determine the possibilities and impossibilities therein. But, also, it is precisely because our data is homogenized into the same format – the fact that cyberspace seeks to render unimportant the differences of our technical and organic “hardware” – that the purported transcendence from bodies is made possible.

Secondly, when Delphi’s body once needs to travel to Barcelona, the story reflects on the fact that the communication circuit between Burke and Delphi must be replaced. This, however, happens seamlessly while Burke is eating, and she never realizes that it happened. Despite Delphi being part of her nervous system, she never notices anything. Burke knows nothing about the relation by which she controls Delphi.

In terms of cyberspace, the same holds true for us, we know little about how our devices work. At its base, digital technologies are merely changing voltage differences, where we use the binary digit 0 to represent 0 volt, and the digit 1 to represent 5 volt (Kittler, 1995). When a representation on screen tells us that a file is saved to a folder named “my documents”, that is a mere ideological relation to what is happening. In reality, there is nothing as such, computers do not know anything of folders. The representation on screen can be completely unrelated to the machinic process. So, already we have no way to engage with the process by which our cybernetic parts work, what they do. This is exacerbated, by the fact that code is part of the body that only allows what is explicitly permitted. Whereas, we can overstretch, and transgress the rules that our organic body seems to posit on us. Code precisely executes what it was built to execute. In essence, then engaging with code means acquiring a body part whose uses are completely pre-determined. Code cannot walk differently. The coupling of the two properties of unexplorable relations to our coded parts and their non-negotiable use, means that they have no possibility for generative difference, cybernetic bodies are not possible to experience differently. Your cyber self cannot click a link gently.

Conclusion

Both parts of the promise of transcendence remain unfulfilled. The body is merely reconfigured through relations created by the influx of other institutional powers. Furthermore, communication is not pure instead it is homogenized on the tiniest level through protocols, and as such the communicable is severely constrained. Instead, entering cyberspace constitutes a disciplining of the body, the elimination of generative differences, and affords the true owners of the cybernetic parts control. It does, however, entail the possibilities to experience a certain breadth of subjectivities which do, however, only engage with few senses of experience.

References

Chun, W. H. K. (2008). Control and freedom: Power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. mit Press.

Cixous, H. (1986). Sorties. The newly born woman. University of Minnesota Press.

Galloway, A. R. (2004). Introduction. Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT press.

Gates, B., Myhrvold, N., Rinearson, P., & Domonkos, D. (1995). The road ahead.

Gunkel, D. J. (1998). Virtually transcendent: Cyberculture and the body. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 13(2), 111-123.

Haraway, D. (2006). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. In The international handbook of virtual learning environments (pp. 117-158). Springer, Dordrecht.

Kittler, Friedrich. “There is no software.” ctheory (1995): 10-18.

Tiptree, J. (1989). The Girl who was Plugged in. Tom Doherty Associates.