The Womb of Virtuality: From Plato to Posthumanism
Matthew Wilson Smith · PAJ A Journal of Performance and Art · 2024
A peril of writing about new technology: when I started working on this essay, Mark Zuckerberg had just announced the rebranding of Facebook into Meta, signaling his desire to engineer, monetize, and control the vast networked virtual something called “the metaverse”; when I completed a draft of it, the multinational conglomerate Siemens had teamed up with the technology titan NVIDIA to pioneer a form of the metaverse geared to industrial applications; and by the time I had submitted it for consideration, thousands of Meta employees were in the process of being laid off following another massive quarterly loss from Reality Labs (Meta’s metaverse-creation division). It was a familiar cycle to anyone who follows virtual reality, which has long obeyed laws of hype and humiliation. But fixation on such booms and busts should not occlude recognition of the real progress being made. The metaverse, which under one name or another (cyberspace, the matrix, OASIS, etc.) has been a recurring dream at least since William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), was edging closer to realization even as it was disappearing from headlines. It was edging closer because the development of a necessary component, artificial intelligence, was accelerating at staggering speed. If the great leap forward in AI that began in 2022 temporarily eclipsed the construction of the metaverse, it also provided a key to its viability.You, dear reader, will have a better idea of where all this is headed than I do as I type these words. But one thing at least is clear: VR has developed far enough circa 2023 that one can begin to survey not just the trees but the forest. This essay identifies a basic term—“presence”—as central to the medium of VR. And it identifies a basic distinction between humanist and posthumanist approaches as critical to understanding the medium’s shape and direction. To understand all this, it will help to return to N. Katherine Hayles’s 1999 monograph How We Became Posthuman and then to turn yet further back, all the way to Plato’s cave. This journey will then set the stage for the examination of humanist and posthumanist approaches to aesthetics, which will be chiefly exemplified by two artworks: Chris Milk’s Evolution of Verse (2015) and Jacolby Satterwhite’s Domestika (2017).In retrospect, Hayles’s groundbreaking study How We Became Posthuman seems to have been right about almost everything. But it was wrong about this: it underestimated the persistence of presence in our virtual age.Hayles’s book describes a world in which presence and absence, the shadow play that had come to define Western thought at least since Plato, was rapidly giving way to a dynamic dance of pattern and randomness. (The former dialectic Hayles dubs “materiality,” the latter “information.”) VR in particular, for Hayles, illuminates this broader epistemic shift “toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence,” and thus might be considered a technology of information par excellence.1 “The technologies of virtual reality,” she writes, “with their potential for full-body mediation, further illustrate the kind of phenomena that foreground pattern and randomness and make presence and absence seem irrelevant.” Why “irrelevant”? Because in situations where “the relevant boundaries for interaction are defined less by the skin than by the feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a technobio-integrated circuit . . . questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage.” Most centrally, VR is a medium of information, of code, of noise and signal, with materiality a remnant of an older, pre-digital discourse—not quite eradicable from the medium, perhaps, but also not significantly constitutive. According to this logic, VR materiality should be viewed as a kind of red herring, one that threatens to mislead those too bound up with pre-posthuman ways of thinking to learn to read the code behind the screens.Is talk about VR “presence,” then, just a mask or a misdirection for processes of information? Is VR presence like the headlights and tailfins on a 1950s Cadillac—alluring, but not what’s going on beneath the hood?No. Presence persists, now in a dance with information. And nowhere is this persistence and this dance more clearly exemplified than in VR.It may help to recall some history. What is now called “presence” in virtual technology was once dubbed “telepresence,” a word with roots back in an article written for Omni magazine back in 1980. In that piece, the MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky coined the term to speculate about a future in which technologies would allow people to use bodies remotely. “The biggest challenge to developing telepresence,” he cautioned, “is achieving that sense of ‘being there.’ Can telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing?”2 Minsky’s answer to his own question was an emphatic “yes.” In the ensuing decade or so, the “tele-” prefix largely dropped away, and presence came to be widely regarded as a central element—perhaps the central aspect—of the emergent medium. In 1992, one of the premiere journals of virtual technology began publication out of MIT; its title is Presence.Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton, two leading researchers into virtual presence, argue for six basic aspects of the term when applied to VR: social richness (does the medium feel personal?), realism (do the representations seem accurate?), transportation (do you feel like you are really “there,” or that it is “here,” or that “we are together”?), immersion (are you engrossed?), social action with the medium (can you interact with the medium?), and the medium as social actor (can the medium interact with you?). Abstracting from these, Lombard and Ditton further identify the common thread that tied all these aspects together and derived from it a general definition. Presence, they conclude, is “the perceptual illusion of nonmediation.”3It is hard not to be struck by the irony of the fact that the term “presence,” with its longstanding connotations of authenticity and truth, has come, in VR discourse, to be associated with precisely the opposite: with illusion. But there is also a deeper idea at play here, driven at once by a business model and a romance. It is a dream that through the “perceptual illusion of nonmediation,” genuine connection, actual experience, some feeling of truly being there might be engineered into existence. Zuckerberg would make such ideas company policy in 2021 when he announced the rebranding of Facebook into Meta. “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence—like you are right there with another person or in another place,” he wrote in the Founder’s Letter of that year.4 “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.” And as Meta began seriously engineering its version of the metaverse (aided by an in-house project, launched in 2021, called the Presence Platform), “presence” continued to be the keystone of the edifice. According to Nick Clegg, who went from being Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications at Meta, the metaverse’s “defining quality will be a feeling of presence, like you are right there with another person or in another place.”5 This feeling of presence, writes Clegg, will be about much more than merely being “right there”; it will also be about “enriching our experience” and digitally reproducing and thereby strengthening the social relations of analogue life.This romance of VR’s power to deepen human connection is shared even by some who lament the uses to which it is being put. VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, for instance, urges his audiences to delete their social-media accounts, calling social-media companies “behavior-modification empires.”6 At the same time, he celebrates VR’s capacity for interpersonal connection in terms similar to those of Zuckerberg and Clegg. He hopes that, properly deployed, VR will teleport its participants to a “shared, waking state,” an “intentional, communicative, collaborative dream,” which will “hopefully” provide “a path to increased empathy” for individuals and society as a whole—on a global scale. “Virtual reality was and remains a revelation,” he concludes. “There’s a moment that comes when you notice that even when everything changes, you are still there, at the center, experiencing whatever is present.”Presence, then, is more than a just technical term for VR. It gestures toward an unquantifiable object of deeper desire: a gesture toward the actual, the true, the connected, the shared, the deeply experienced and felt—all mediated by a machine that erases all traces of its own mediation. This is why the old complaint that VR is escapist misses the deeper longing of the medium, a longing not so much for escape as for return.Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, predictably enough, played an important role in the programming, theorizing, and fantasizing of early VR. Like others of my generation, my own first experience of VR took place inside a CAVE, or “Cave Automatic Virtual Environment,” an early form of VR that relied on surround-screen projection technology that immersed the user in an interactive audio-visual cube. The technology, invented in 1992 and still in wide use, was described by its inventors as “a reference to ‘The Simile of the Cave’ found in Plato’s Republic, in which the philosopher discusses inferring reality (ideal forms) from projections (shadows) on the cave wall.”7In the wake of Luce Irigaray’s reading of the Allegory in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), one can no longer ignore the gendered connotations of Plato’s Allegory: the Cave is, in her words, “a metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the womb or hystera [uterus].”8 It is a female space inhabited strictly by humans whose implicit gender is masculine; humans with their “heads forward, eyes front, genitals aligned, fixed in a straight direction and always straining forward, in a straight line. A phallic direction, a phallic line, a phallic time, backs turned on origin.” This line—this straight line—points directly from Plato to VR. If one needed a demonstration, in cartoonish form, of the application of Irigaray’s reading for VR circa 2016, one could do no better than to search up that notorious photo posted by Zuckerberg on Facebook of a conference auditorium of seated, suited men hooked up to Oculus headsets (“heads forward, eyes front, genitals aligned”) while the chairman strides down the aisle.9VR reminds us that love and loathing of the womb is Plato’s poisoned gift to modern technology. 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