On the spot

So, with no ill will for being put there in the first place, I feel like I essentially floundered when presented with the opportunity to soapbox on embodiment in the last five minutes of class today. Really, embodiment and Katharine Hayles' essay are interesting to me, just difficult. Here are my thoughts, late and still partially-formed.

As KF mentioned early in the discussion, Hayles seems to be working with something similar to what Michael Joyce brings up in "Walking Mornings." Hayles seems to take the intellectual route when Joyce opts for personal and autobiographical, but it seems that the impetus for writing is the same. Joyce's walks seem deeply personal and somewhat troubled by "the invented I, the invented I who brought me here to give this talk, the hypertextualist and fiction writer" (87), much no amount of absence unsettles Hayles as the threat that absence be replaced by randomness (78). Her closing words caution us that "as we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us also remember the fragility of material world that cannot be replaced."

On the surface, Hayle's warning sounds preposterous - how could the "real world" cease to exist based on changes in media culture? Of course, if we take McLuhan at his word, every technological change becomes an extension of our world experience, a psychological prosthesis. Hayles explains our interaction with these prostheses in terms of "functionality," the inputs that a virtual world is equipped to deal with. As we become accustomed to these inputs (as many of us have become familiar, if not satisfied, with the function of hypertexts), we change the way we interact both with these texts and with the world.

The key relationship that Hayles seems concerned with is the continuum between a world of presence/absence and one of pattern/randomness, which she sees as opposing one another (90-91). As technology advances and we become more facile with information than with material (consider how much Christmas shopping will be done online this year), we must deal with the embodied world in a different way. Virtual reality has co-opted the point of view which was once associated with a physical body (82), and we can have read, write, converse, buy, sell, etc online with the kind of agency that used to require hands and feet.

The real kicker is that information seems to do reality better than the real world does. Hayles points out that pattern is immortal and immune to the liabilities of physical damage and deformity that haunt the body (81). Also, recalling our discussions of games, the disembodied world gives us a powerful omniscience. Particularly as we watched The Onyx Project, our concerted frustration with the inability to navigate a film spoke to our expectations for a hyperlinked world. Seeing the ability to interact with the video, we put aside our expectations to be lead along a pre-authored plot and set out in search of the mystery that we had been primed to examine. We expected to be very powerful, and our failure to exercise that agency was categorized as a failure in the form of the hypertext. Alternatively, we could take our impotence as evidence of a feral hypertext actively resisting our attempts at omniscience. I enjoyed pieces like Jackson's Skin because they resisted intellectual enclosure. As I said earlier, the text rehumanizes itself by becoming as infinite as the lives that it interacts with. Importantly, this occurs at the same moment that the text becomes "embodied," inscribed and intertwined with a human life.

Maybe this is me being old-fashioned. I admit that paper still has a real hold on me (nobody tell the EQC folks on me, ok?). But I also think that there is something really creepy about ideas that are completely detached from the physical world. Faced with a Descartes or a Lacan who suggests that our experience of the world is necessarily detached from reality itself, everyone has to look around a little differently. Now, without entering into an infinite regression, let's think about a flickering world that is twice removed, and separated by a language that we neither create nor understand. There is a question as to whether this is progress or collapse, but I think that we must respect it as a journey to somewhere new and categorically different.