VR is a literal enactment of Cartesian ontology, cocooning a person as an isolated subject within a field of sensations and claiming that everything is there, presented to the subject. (Richard Coyne)

The possession of a body in space, itself part of the space to be apprehended, and that body capable of self-motion in counterplay with other bodies, is the precondition for a vision of the world. (Hans Jonas)

You are floating inside an abstract lattice not unlike the skeletal wireframe models familiar from 3-D graphics. You have no visible body at all in the space in front of you, but hear a soundscape of human voices swirling around you as you navigate forward and backward by leaning your body accordingly. Soon the Cartesian gridlines melt away as a forest clearing centering around a great old oak tree appears. Everything in your visual field seems to be constructed of light: branches, trunks, leaves shimmer with a strange luminescence, while in the distance there appears a river of dancing lights. Leaning your body forward, you move toward the boundary of the clearing and pass into another forest zone. You are now enfolded in a play of light and shadow, as leaves phase imperceptibly into darkened blotches and then phase back again, in what seems like a rhythmic perpetuity. Exhaling deeply causes you to sink down through the soil as you follow a stream of tiny lights illuminating the roots of the oak tree. Soon you sink into an underworld of glowing red rocks that form a deep luminous cavern beneath the earth. Exhaling again, you sink still further, encountering scrolling walls of green alphanumeric characters that (you will later learn) reproduce the 20,000 some lines of code upon which the world you are in is built. Longing for the vivid images above, you take in a deep breath and hold it, waiting to ascend. After passing once again through the clearing, you enter another world of text, encountering quotations from philosophical and literary sources that seem to bear directly on your experience. "By changing space, by leaving the space of one's usual sensibilities," one passage informs you, "one enters into communications with a space that is psychically innovating. … For we do not change place, we change our nature." [1] The attention you have been lending to your breathing makes you feel both angelic and fleshy: while you float dreamlike, unencumbered by the drag of gravity, your actions are syncopated with your breathing in away that makes your bodily presence palpable, insistent. Meanwhile you find yourself floating back down to the clearing, no longer driven to explore, but meditative, content simply to float wherever your bodily leaning and breathing patterns will take you. Now acclimated to the new sensorimotor demands of this interactional domain, you can effortlessly explore the different spaces contained in this world, choosing to follow the river of lights as if swept along by a swarm of fireflies or, alternately, to step into the big oak tree and see its bloodred sap coursing around you, or again, to dive into a pool of shimmering water and let yourself sink into its engulfing embrace. Yet just at that point when you begin to see the fuzzy pixelated organic I forms around you morph into a field of resonant luminosity, you are suddenly thrust outside the world, looking upon what now appears as a gray bean-shaped blob floating against an empty background. When you realize that you cannot return, you are flooded with a combination of resignation and melancholy which soon gives way to a sense of awe-a feeling that one visitor likened to the experience of facing death.

If your experience is anything like that of the many thousands of other "immersants," you will feel that you have undergone something vastly different from what normal life brings and also quite different from what other forms of "virtual reality" afford or, at least, what you imagined them to afford. Here you have lived in harmony with a virtuallifeworld and have felt the dissolution of the hard boundary of the skin that in ordinary experience, and most certainly in most forms of virtual experience, so insistently prevents fluid interchange with the surrounding space. You have let your visual faculty become subordinate as you became more confident in maneuvering with body movement and breathing. And perhaps most strikingly, you have let the experience of spatial navigation penetrate into your body via the immediately felt physiological modifications produced by the inhalation and exhalation that triggered your vertical movement (and the bodily leaning that triggered your horizontal movement). [2]

As several commentators have pointed out, the work just described Char Davies's "Osmose" (1995) is highly atypical for what currently goes under the rubric "virtual reality art." Davies's work eschews many of the familiar trappings of computer-based worlds, virtual reality, and game environments, including the primacy normally accorded to detached vision, the use of a joystick or other manipulable navigational tool, the orientation toward a goal, and the hard-edged simulation of a perspectival space. What results is, as Jennifer Fisher puts it, a "haptic aesthetics" that strives to "deepen the sense of subjective embodiment" by foregrounding the function of bodily modes of experience. " At a time when much VR technology effects a visual dominance and corporeal abstraction," Fisher continues, Davies's "use of the haptic sense both implicates and creates an 'embodied' spectator." [3] Davies's "Osmose" is, in the words of another commentator, "the first major immersive VR environment to 'resist' simulation of perspectival space and to attempt to heal the rift between vision and body inherent in conventional virtual reality ." [4] And Davies herself is credited, by no less an authority than (VMRL inventor) Mark Pesce, with "redefin[ing] our place in cyberspace and mak[ing] the virtual world seem more human than our own." [5] Speaking in her own name, Davies likens her work's difference from more traditional VR environments to the difference between illustration and evocation: "When art evokes," she says, "it's drawing on the experiences of the user. It becomes interactive on a much more subtle level. To me, Osmose looks at immersive space as a place where we can explore what it means to be embodied conscious beings." [6]

My aim in this paper is to draw out further what makes Davies's work atypical, if not in fact unique. To do so, I shall undertake two relatively autonomous explorations, each of which will make a claim for the centrality of touch in perception generally and for its specific function within the virtual reality interface. In a first section, I shall build up to an examination of how Davies's work deploys the role of touch and haptic perception in away that effectively counters the overemphasis on vision on the part of both scientists and artists (not to mention scientist-artists) interested in virtual reality. Of particular interest will be the resonance between this deployment and philosophical and scientific work that has shown how vision is grounded upon touch. This resonance will serve to underwrite a neo-Bergsonist claim that virtual reality realizes an aesthetic function insofar as it couples new perceptual domains with the "reality" -conferring experience of touch (or what Bergson calls "affection"). [7]  In this respect, moreover, Davies's work is simply making explicit something that forms a crucial dimension in every successful VR simulation: the role played by proprioception and the haptic system in generating what seems to be an exclusively visual simulation. In a second section, I shall widen the divide separating a haptic aesthetic from a visual one by focusing on the topic of the body image. Specifically, and again with the help of Davies's work, I shall argue against a position that subordinates our experience of the body, including the body's fluid interface with space, to a "body image" or "body phantom." Insofar as it opens a non-representational and non-visual affective and proprioceptive experience of the body, Davies's work once again brings to material fruition research in science and philosophy—in this case, by illustrating concretely how the living body exceeds the boundaries of the skin and encompasses parts of the environment. In this respect, I shall argue, Davies's work engages the problematic of "psychasthenia" (made famous by Roger Caillois's research on insect mimicry) to markedly different effect than that informing its contemporary cultural currency as a simulational or image-based "disorder." [8] In Davies's work, the confusion of self and space constitutive of psychaesthenia becomes the catalyst for a reworking of the correlation between bodily and environmental space — a reworking that literally teaches us how to orient ourselves without needing to see ourselves (or to let the gaze of the other see us) as a point in space. Far from illustrating a confusion of the organism with the representations that surround it, the process triggered by Davies's work spurs a fluid, ongoing, and active interchange with the environment that has the effect of "transcending" the limited (representational) function of the "body schema" in an experience that phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has suggestively called "the flesh."

Davies's work deploys the role of touch and haptic perception in a way that effectively counters the overemphasis on vision on the part of both scientists and artists (not to mention scientist -artists) interested in virtual reality.

The Primacy of Touch

The rhetoric associated with virtual reality clearly conveys its privileging of the visual register of perception. More than a mere bias of a popular culture that constantly barrages us with the promise of perfect simulation and the lure of disembodied existence, this privileging informs the very research aims of scientists interested in virtual reality technology.

Conjure up your own mental image of virtual reality. What does it present if not some version of this visually optimized, sanitized space?

"The screen is the window through which one sees a virtual world," says VR pioneer Ivan Sutherland; "The challenge is to make that world look real." [9] Researcher Frank Biocca concurs, noting that "the long-term developmental goal of the technology is nothing short of an attempt … to fool eye and mind into seeing … worlds that are not and never can be." Our aim, Biocca continues, is to transform "[a]n array of light on a visual display [into] a lush landscape in the mind of the viewer." [10] This privileging accorded the visual has so thoroughly seeped into the practical design of virtual environments (VEs) by scientists, artists, and game designers that it might be said to dictate a kind of de facto standard: hard-edged objects and shapes, distinct spatial demarcations (e.g., into rooms or sub-worlds), vivid, surreal image quality, and perhaps most centrally, the deployment of a familiar infrastructural Cartesian grid. Conjure up your own mental image of virtual reality. What does it present if not some version of this visually-optimized, sanitized space? Having by now been streamed and re-streamed through all available cultural channels (movies being, perhaps, the most effective), this standard picture has become so ubiquitous that most of us would not even think to question it.

Rather than stemming from some necessity inherent in the technological interface or even in the makeup of our perceptual apparatus, however, this visual bias can be seen as a complex artifact related to the motivating desires and scientific backgrounds of VR developers and, more generally, to the pervasive ocularcentrism of Western culture. In a recent study of space, identity and embodiment in virtual reality, Ken Hillis has criticized the ocularcentrism characteristic of VR research by exposing the false promise of a multisensory interface with informational worlds. As he sees it, this rhetoric masks an underlying investment in the function of vision: "Suggestions that VR's real promise is a corroboration among the senses fail to consider the disjuncture between subordination and corroboration. Subordination to the visual really points to the coordination (and domination) by the visual of our other bodily faculties and senses. VR privileges sight, and other senses play a subordinate role to it." [11] Borne out by the fact that all branches of VR research currently employ some kind of HMD (head-mounted display), this privilege effectively insures that all interfaces with other sensory registers remain subsidiary to the fundamental task of visual orientation.

Hillis traces this overvaluation of the visual on the part of VR researchers to the seminal influence of the work of perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson. [12] Throughout his career, Gibson sought to theorize the way we directly perceive aspects of the world by picking up information from what he calls the ambient light. [13] This fraught notion, the complexities of which are beyond the purposes of the current inquiry, is perhaps most clearly glossed by Jeremy Campbell in his book Grammatical Man:

Gibson held that all the information needed for perception … is present in the structure of the light as it is reflected from objects and events in space. The objects and events give the light its specific organization as it reaches the eye. An observer is immersed, drenched in this information, and the perceptual system of the brain is attuned to pick up certain aspects of it, either by means of innate neural circuits or by the fine discrimination which comes with experience. [14]

As Hillis sees it, this notion of direct perception, together with the correlative notion that there are perceptual invariants immediately observable in the visual field, explains Gibson's impact among the VR research community. Schematically put, researchers saw in Gibson's work a mechanism for transferring perceptual experience characteristic of "real-world" perception to new, artificial environments: if realworld perceptual experience was grounded in biologically-innate capacities to see perceptual invariants in the ambient light, all that would be necessary to carry perception into artificial environments would be to reproduce such perceptual invariants in the virtual domain.

One important facet of the complex influence of Gibson's work on VR research concerns Gibson's early theory of "texture-gradient mapping" which, Hillis suggests, furnished a model for the mapping of "perceptual invariance" onto virtual environments. [15] According to Gibson, we directly perceive distance insofar as we detect the differences in texture gradient of objects located at different distances from us. Thus we recognize the distance of an object from its texture relative to other objects within our visual field: the finer the texture, the closer it is to us; the denser the texture, the more distant it is. The important point here is that texture gradient does not define a cue that our brains employ in processing what we have seen, but is a spatial property of the environment itself. Once again, Campbell's gloss helps mediate the significance of this fundamental claim: "For Gibson, invariants in the structure of light reaching the eye correspond to the stable features of the real world: the surfaces and edges of objects, … the texture of the ground that grows more dense with distance. In spite of the fact that the image of an object on the retina may shrink in size as it recedes, the image is invariant with respect to the texture of its surroundings" (205). No less than the privileging of hard-edged surfaces and objects, the liberal deployment of textural surfaces in VEs testifies to the effort to capitalize on Gibson's theory; indeed, both cases betray the same underlying logic: to wit, that building such visual invariants into artificial environments will function to attract the attention of our evolutionarily attuned brains.

In his own criticism of this strategy, Hillis accuses VR researchers of, in effect, misapplying Gibson's theory. While innate perceptual invariants like texture gradients function, within Gibson's theory, as enabling constraints on how we perceive the environment, carried over into VEs they become the mechanism for an unhindered and limitless potential for visual interface with any environment imaginable (and, no doubt, many not yet imaginable). It is as if the simple presence of icons or representations of perceptual invariants (hard edges, texture gradients) within an environment were enough to transform it into a world not simply visually apprehensible to us, but one in which we can feel at home. What such a logic seems to ignore is the deep correlation of our visual system with other, nonvisual perceptual systems-a correlation that is, incidentally, foregrounded at each stage of Gibson's career. [16] If perceptual invariants do in fact exist and if they serve to inform us about the world, they do so only in conjunction with the panoply of perceptual processes that are constitutive of the kinds of beings we are. On this point, Hillis is, I think, absolutely right to object to the extension of Gibson's theory in the development of VEs. As Hillis sees it, the appropriation of Gibson does not pay sufficient heed to the evolutionary basis of Gibson's theory. Thus, while VR technology might well "permit users to see like birds" (or like anything whatsoever), a VE constructed on the basis of perceptual invariants "may confuse users precisely because they have not been 'hardwired' by evolution to fly like birds" (130). More succinctly put, whereas Gibson's theory of perception (including the role played by perceptual invariants) is a holist one that encompasses the entire range of perceptual processes constitutive of our evolutionarily-robust embodied being, its deployment in VE design is piecemeal and premised on an unthematized, and, I think, wholly implausible hope that vision can by itself reconstitute the richness of human perceptual function.

Another way to make this same objection is to focus somewhat differently on the concrete material difficulties involved in creating successful, that is, compelling virtual environments. As Wann and Rushton point out, the limitless potential of the imagination to construct rich virtual environments is contravened by the reality of storage and computational limitations. The Gibson-inspired researchers believe they can "solve" these difficulties through texture gradient mapping: by building in "objective" elements that simply transcribe perceptually invariant elements of the "real" world into VEs, they think they can mobilize, through visual stimulation alone, the perceptual modalities for which we have been evolutionarily hardwired. [17] In their interpretation of the storage and computational limitations necessarily encountered in designing VEs, Wann and Rushton outline a very different position. For them, the existence of such limitations immediately introduces a wedge or gap between "real-world" perception and perception in virtual environments that bears directly on the misapplication of Gibson just discussed. For these researchers, the presupposition that perception (including visual perception) involves the full panoply of perceptual systems — the very presupposition informing Gibson's theory —simply cannot be carried over to perception in VEs. As a consequence, whereas perception in "natural settings" can be said to be "veridical" (i.e., indicative of properties of the environment), the principle informing the creation of v'irtual environments is, of necessity, "deception." Wann and Rushton explain: "it is technically impossible to present an observer with a VE that has coherence across the perceptual domains (e.g., for vision and vestibular stimulation) … [Consequently,] the emphasis has to be on presenting visual displays that are salient enough to induce the required percept and to establish what other sensory conditions may be necessary to maintain that illusion." [18] What Wann and Rushton foreground here is the necessity, in creating compelling VEs, to rely on the embodied subject's response to the stimuli presented as what generates the effect of "reality." While some degree of corroboration among different sensory registers is always involved in perception, within VEs this corroboration plays an especially important function insofar as it constitutes the primary vehicle for overcoming effects of storage and computational limitations-effects that threaten to compromise the desired sense of immersion.

Wann and Rushton's position thus defines an approach to virtual reality at odds with the Gibson-inspired position just discussed. For them, what is crucial is not simulating a visually "realistic" environment in purely visual terms, but rather designing an environment capable of inducing a compelling sensorimotor correlation in the participant. As Held and Durlach point out in their discussion of telepresence, such a position stems from a conviction that the "best general-purpose system known to us (as engineers) is us (as operators)." [19] Such a view finds corroboration in no less an authority on artificial reality than artist and engineer Myron Krueger, who has long held that "the ultimate interface would be the human body and human senses." [20] These views point toward what we might call a functional understanding of what makes VEs compelling. According to such an understanding, their purpose is "to augment the sensorimotor system of the human operator."21 Thus, rather than being defined strictly or even primarily by their "incorporation" of objectively "realistic" elements like perceptual invariants, VEs should be valued for their capacity to stimulate sensorimotor processes responsible for producing effects of "realism" or of presence. [22] Held and Durlach make this point explicitly and in terms immediately relevant to design implementation: "The most crucial factor in creating high telepresence is, perhaps, high correlation between (1) the movements of the operator sensed directly via the internal proprioceptive/kinesthetic senses of the operator and (2) the actions of the slave robot sensed via the sensors on the slave robot and the displays in the teleoperator station" (237). Beyond simply specifying the means to mobilize the human body as the interface, such functional correlation emphasizes the active contribution made by proprioception and internal kinesthetic sense in creating the effect of presence.

In this respect, Held and Durlach introduce a fundamentally different understanding of telepresence than that proposed by the Gibson-inspired position. For the latter, as Hillis explains, the simulation of the hand's presence in the VE via the data glove "allows users to manipulate virtual objects" in away that draws upon "Gibson's belief that we grab on to our world and make it part of our' direct' experience" (15). It is this virtual extension of our hand that stimulates the mapping of the virtual world onto internal human perception-structuring processes. The resulting experience of presence (or telepresence)—"experience of presence in an environment by means of a communications medium"—is, not surprisingly, informational at its core. [23] Like the "information pickup" involved in the visual experience of perceptual invariants, [24] the virtual extension of perceptual mapping facilitated by the data glove simply opens the body to the reception of information emanating from a new, virtual environment. [25] For Held and Durlach, by contrast, the telepresent hand would be less a hinge for mapping the information from a visually disclosed environment onto internal perceptionstructuring processes than one element in a necessarily broader sensorimotor coupling of the operator's body with the VE.

Beyond its consequences for concrete issues of VE design, what the contrast of these two fundamentally divergent approaches illustrates is the deep connection linking the privileged role of vision with the desire to explain "reality" in terms of information (or more precisely, informational exchange between system and environment). In both cases, what is left out is precisely the grounding role played by the body and by experiential modalities—touch, proprioception, internal kinesthesis—proper to it. No less a visionary than Jaron Lanier (who coined the term "virtual reality") has diagnosed this doublebarreled reduction as a form of "information disease." Encouraged by technology, "people think of themselves as information entities that aren't real experiencers, and … gradually lose a sense of validity for everyday experiences … Technology has been so overwhelmingly successful that it serves for many people as the most creative metaphor for what they are. And so, they lose the internal perspective, and tend to substitute an external perspective. With that goes the essentiality of life." [26] Though such an informational self-image need not necessarily follow from Gibson's theory of visual perception, it does find strong reinforcement in Gibson's focus on the perceiver's "informational pickup" from what he calls the ambient light (roughly, the light cast by the environment or world), especially when it is carried over to the problem of perception in VEs. [27]

Both of these postulates—the priority of vision and the informational perspective—are contested in another domain of inquiry that will return us to our original question concerning the uniqueness of Char Davies's virtual environments. In his brilliant exploration of the phenomenology of the different senses, philosopher Hans Jonas underscores the necessary correlation among the sensesand particularly between vision and touch—in the generation of perception. Ostensibly intended as a discussion of the "nobility of sight, Jonas's essay (entitled "The Nobility of Sight") actually seeks to dethrone sight, or at least to delimit its specific privilege: "Sight, in addition to furnishing the analogues for the intellectual upperstructure, has tended to serve as the model of perception in general and thus as the measure of the other senses. But it is in fact a very special sense. It is incomplete by itself; it requires the complement of other senses and functions for its cognitive office; its highest virtues are also its essential insufficiencies." [28] In accord with this basic position, Jonas's demonstration pursues two main tasks: 1) to explain how, and at what cost, sight acquires its "nobility"; and 2) to embed sight within a larger sense ecology in which the role of other sensory modalities, and especially touch, is shown to be fundamental.

Schematically put, the privilege of sight stems from its role as the sense, par excellence, of "the simultaneous or the coordinated, and thereby of the extensive" (136). Unlike hearing and touch, which are both proximate senses that build up their manifolds in time, sight presents us with an "instantaneous survey of the whole field of possible encounters" (145). What is more, because of this unique capacity, sight is characterized by two additional factors that inform its alleged "nobility": the "neutralization of the causality of senseaffection" and "distance in the spatial and mental senses" (136). In sum then, Jonas argues that sight achieves its "nobility" precisely because of its detachment from the domain of affective causality and sensory proximity. [29]

This detachment accounts for a certain gain—namely the concept of objectivity, "of the thing as it is in itself as distinct from the thing as it affects me," and with it, the "whole idea of theoria and theoretical truth." Yet it also involves a necessary loss: "the elimination of the causal connection from the visual account" (147). Despite the pretensions of sight to autonomy, this elimination introduces a certain insufficiency that requires supplementation from other sensory registers. In away that effectively suppresses the "very feature which makes these higher developments (i.e., the concept of objectivity and theory) possible," this elimination fundamentally saps visual objects of any "force-experience" that could account for their interconnection with one another and with the observer:

The pure form-presentation which vision affords does not betray its own causal genesis, and it suppresses with it every causal aspect in its objects, since their self-containedness vis-à-vis the observer becomes at the same time a mutual self-containedness among themselves. No force-experience, no character of impulse and transitive causality, enters into the nature of image, and thus any edifice of concepts built on that evidence must show the gap in the interconnection of objects which Hume noted. (147, emphasis added)

Indeed, when he criticizes Hume and Kant for, effectively, "forgetting the body" (28), Jonas underscores the fact that this limitation of sight is not some voluntary whim, but a constitutive dimension of sight as a sensory modality: "The character generally suppressed [in accounts of perception] is force which, being not a 'datum' but an 'actum,' cannot be 'seen,' i.e., objectified, but only experienced from within when exerted or suffered" (31). The mistake of Hume and Kant (and the many, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike, who follow their lead) is to maintain belief in an objective autonomy of sight unsupported by the "lowlier" sensory modalities.

In this respect, Jonas's analysis helps clarify why the position of Gibson-inspired VR researchers is philosophically untenable: simply put, any purely visual account of perception must necessarily fail. Beyond that, moreover, Jonas's account explains the underlying logic informing the alternate approach deployed by researchers like Wann, Rushton, Held and Durlach, and also, incidentally, by artists like Char Davies. Specifically, Jonas's work specifies the force-experience involved in touch and proprioception as the "reality-generating" element! Calling sight the "least 'realistic' of the senses,' Jonas contrasts it with touch:

Reality is primarily evidenced in resistance which is an ingredient in touch-experience. For physical contact is more than geometrical contiguity: it involves impact. In other words, touch is the sense, and the only sense, in which the perception of quality is normally blended with the experience of force, which being reciprocal does not let the subject be passive; thus touch is the sense in which the original encounter with reality as reality takes place. Touch brings the reality of its object within the experience of sense in virtue of that by which it exceeds mere sense, viz., the force-component in its original make-up. The percipient on his part can magnify this component by his voluntary counteraction against the affecting object. For this reason touch is the true test of reality. (147-48)

What this account strongly suggests is that success in generating compelling virtual experience comes not by simulating visual images but by stimulating tactile, proprioceptive and kinesthetic sense modalities. Perception of a VE (like perception of a "real" environment, at least for Jonas) is less an affair of informational pickup than one of channeling external through internal reality: " external reality is disclosed in the same act and as one with the disclosure of my own reality-which occurs in self-action: in feeling my own reality by some sort of effort I make, I feel the reality of the world" (148, emphasis added).

The stress on "effort" in this last line is significant insofar as it introduces the fundamental role played by voluntary movement, indeed self-movement, in the ecology of perception. For while Jonas does lend a certain privilege to touch over sight (though certainly not to the point of suggesting a simple elimination of sight in favor of touch), this privilege stems not so much from touch as a specific sense as it does from its implicit conjunction with movement. [30] Put another way, Jonas's sense ecology involves a certain elevation of touch from a mere sense modality into a cross-modal synthesizing function. The commonplace account of perception as a conjunction of sight and touch is incomplete, Jonas remarks, "so long as 'touch' in this combination is taken as just another sense, only qualitatively different from sight, hearing, and smell." He furthermore stresses that no "mere superimposition" of one set of sense qualities over another could yield "the new property of space-in-depth." But if we include in our understanding of touch the "fact of its being an activity involving motion," we add the complement of action to its "receptivity," thus elevating it, as it were, into a "spatial organizer" of the different sense species, "the synthesizer of the several senses toward one common objectivity" (153). The "reality-conferring" effect of touch stems from this elevated function and more specifically from the "toucher's" newfound capacity to give form to perceptual experience: in yet another gloss on the elevation of touch, Jonas explains how

the tactile situation moves to a higher level when the sentient body itself becomes the voluntary agent of that movement which is required for the acquisition of this serial sequence of impression. Then touch passes over from suffering to acting: its progress comes under the control of the percipient, and it may be continued and varied with a view to fuller information. Thus mere touch-impression changes into the act of feeling. There is a basic difference between simply having a tactile encounter and feeling another body … The motor element introduces an essentially new quality into the picture: its active employment discloses spatial characteristics in the touch-object which were no inherent part of the elementary tactile qualities. Through the kinesthetic accompaniment of voluntary motion the whole perception is raised to a higher order: the touch qualities becomes arranged in a spatial scheme, they fall into the pattern of surface, and become elements of form. (139-41)

This emphasis on the voluntary activity of the sentient body resonates with the position of Held and Durlach discussed above and indeed might be said to find empirical verification in Held's earlier experimentation with active and passive perception in kittens. [31] Once again, Jonas's theory furnishes a philosophical explanation for the crucial role of voluntary action in the development of normal sensorimotor coordination: such action, his analysis suggests, gives a spatial form to otherwise disparate perceptual data, thus making them consonant with a body's feeling of the reality of the world. And although Jonas's account here lends primacy to the activity of the perceiving body over the information in the environment, it does resonate to a degree (and somewhat surprisingly, it must be admitted) with Gibson's own distinction between "obtained" and "imposed" proprioception, roughly a form of active proprioception in which the body is the source and a form of passive proprioception imposed on the body by the environment. [32] At the very least, Gibson's distinction, which centers on the role of self-movement in proprioception (present in the former, absent in the latter), requires some recognition of the role of bodily motility in visual perception. [33]

It is what differentiates Jonas's perspective from Gibson's, however, that makes his work especially significant for understanding how VEs function: for Jonas, movement qua bodily performance transforms what looks like a purely theoretical perceptual situation into a felt experience. To make his point, Jonas contrasts embodied perception with an imaginary case of a "winged seed sailing on the wind" that would perceive "a kaleidoscopic change with a definite but meaningless pattern" (155). [34] What differentiates this imaginary case from embodied perception is the recursive correlation between selfmoving animal and environment that is central to the latter: insofar as the animal "changes its place by an exchange of mechanical action with the resisting medium," the two evolve in tandem; moreover, the "muscular effort required means that the relative motion is more than a shift of mutual geometrical position: through an interplay of force the geometrical becomes a dynamical situation" (155). The priority of self-movement (and hence of touch) over the visual apprehension of the environment is expressed in the crucial role accorded to active (or "obtained") proprioception, which "becomes a guide for the organism in the successive construction of spatial distance and direction out of the phases of the motion it actually performs" (155).

Jonas's work thereby specifies how VEs generate an effect of presence or "reality" by correlating a "virtual" perceptual stimulus with a "real" motor response. In this way, Jonas lends apriority to proprioceptively guided self-movement that manages to connect Bergson's insightful account of affection with the distinction between vision and touch. As Bergson explains:

The necessity of affection follows from the very existence of perception. Perception, understood as we understand it, measures our possible action upon things, and thereby, inversely, the possible action of things upon us … . our perception of an object distinct from our body, separated from our body by an interval, never expresses anything but a virtual action. But the more distance decreases between this object and our body … , the more does virtual action tend to pass into real action. Suppose the distance reduced to zero, that is to say that the object to be perceived coincides with our body, that is to say again, that our body is the object to be perceived. Then it is no longer virtual action, but real action, that this specialized perception will express, and this is exactly what affection is. Our sensations are, then, to our perceptions that which the real action of our body is to its possible, or virtual, action. [35]

In the terms of Jonas's analysis, Bergson's distinction between perception and affection approximates the distinction between vision and touch. Insofar as it involves "virtual action," perception is, like vision, defined by its detachment from its objects. Likewise, as "real action," affection approximates touch, since in both cases what it at stake is some kind of "force-experience." What Jonas adds to the Bergsonist picture is a clarification of how touch-affection functions as the "understructure" of vision-perception and, with this clarification, an account of how its potential for generating "reality" can be "lent" to the most schematic artificial environments. In sum, Jonas's work shows how affection necessarily enters into even the most abstract perceptual environments, and thus how some crucial dimension of bodily self-movement and proprioception is always at issue in felicitous virtual experiences. [36]

We can now specify precisely what constitutes the uniqueness of Char Davies's work. Both "Osmose" and her more recent "Ephémère" are designed expressly to catalyze a shift—and to compel self-reflexive recognition of the shift—from a predominately visual sensory interface to a predominately bodily or affective interface. [37] The characteristics we earlier singled out in differentiating her work from most other engagements with VR technology, artistic and scientific alike, can now be seen to reflect a deeper, properly philosophical dimension of her project. Thus the diaphanous surfaces, the solicitation of bodily motion and breathing, and the non-goal-oriented nature of the environments form the elements not just of an alternative approach to 3-D design but more fundamentally of a shift in perceptual sensibility away from the entire Cartesian worldview so central to the development of 3-D computer graphics. Davies characterizes this philosophical dimension as an experience of "being" rather than of "doing," [38] and correlates it with her well-documented immersion in scuba diving, the proximate inspiration for the breathing and motion interface as well as the diaphanous, shimmering surfaces. Yet despite the Heideggerian rhetoric of withdrawal, the origin of Davies's quest to escape Cartesianism can be found, not insignificantly, in a more mundane, if not exactly everyday, personal experience: her early experimentation with her own extreme myopic vision as a source or catalyst for artistic creativity. "In this unmediated, unfocused mode of perception," she recounts, "I discovered an alternative (non-Cartesian) spatiality whereby 'objects' had disappeared; where all semblance of solidity, surface, edges and distinctions between things-i.e., the usual perceptual cues by which we visually objectify the worldhad dissolved. These were replaced by a sense of enveloping space in which there were no sharply defined objects in empty space, but rather an ambiguous intermingling of varying luminosities and hues, a totally enveloping and sensuous spatiality." [39]

Davies's virtual environments might be understood as efforts to bring this private experience—and most centrally its creative or catalytic dimension—into the public domain. In this respect, both "Osmose" and "Ephémère" constitute environments that do not so much aim to simulate "real-world" perception (as Gibson-inspired VEs do), as to utilize the virtual domain as a medium for sharing what must be considered a liminal form of experience. The statement Davies furnishes to accompany the exhibition of both works at the recent SFMOMA show, 01010101, makes this difference altogether patent: "I imagine virtual space as a philosophical yet participatory medium, a visual/ aural spatio-temporal arena wherein mental models or abstract constructs can be given virtual embodiment in three dimensions and then be kinesthetically explored by others through full body immersion and interaction, even while such constructs retain their immateriality." [40] Moreover, since the environments involve the direct placing of the "immersant" within an atypical, indeed anti-"realistic" environment, the role of touch as the "reality"-generating sense becomes especially pronounced. Here, the primacy Jonas lends touch as a sense-synthesizer helps explain why manoeuvring through "Osmose" using bodily movements and breathing seems, in the words of one immersant, "so uncannily 'real."' [41] Indeed, whatever effect of presence the installations facilitate must stem not from a withdrawal from the activity of movement and the contact with " force-experience," as Davies's occasional Heideggerian rhetoric might suggest, but from a heightening of self-movement and of the proprioceptive and internal kinesthetic senses of the "immersant." Again, Davies's statement serves to clarify her intentions: "My interest lies in going beyond VR's conventions of photo-realism and joystick interfaces which situate the user as a probing hand (with gun) and disembodied eye among passive hard-edged objects in empty space. By working with the participant's breath as primary interface (enabling them to 'float'), and using semi-transparency as a means of evoking cognitive ambiguity, I have sought to reaffirm the role of the subjectively lived body within the virtual realm and deeply engage the participant's sensory imagination." [42] In sum, rather than being about the realist simulation of an external environment, Davies's works are about experiential possibilities that explicitly foreground the kinesthetic and proprioceptive dimensions of bodily self-movement. "It is my hope that the paradoxical qualities of bodily immersion in virtual space might lead to an experience of being-in-the-world freshly," says Davies (2001). Or, in the more succinct phrasing of Mark Pesce: "What you encounter in 'Osmose' is yourself." [43]

Beyond the Body-Image: Embodying Psychasthenia

In her 1992 book Megalopolis, Celeste Olalquiaga correlates our contemporary experience of technology with the psychological and ethological condition of psychasthenia:

Defined as a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding territory, psychasthenia is a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the organism's own body is confused with represented space. Incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense area that circumscribes it, the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond. It does so by camoflaging itself into the milieu … Psychasthenia helps describe contemporary experience and account for its uneasiness. Urban culture resembles this mimetic condition when it enables a ubiquitous feeling of being in all places while not really being anywhere. Architectural transparency, for example, transforms shopping malls into a continuous window display where the homogeneity of store windows, stairs, elevators, and water fountains causes a perceptual loss, and shoppers are left wandering around in a maze … . Dislocated by this ongoing trompe l'oeil, the body seeks concreteness in the consumption of food and goods, saturating its senses to the maximum. [44]

I cite this passage at length not simply because of its evident interest in relation to our exploration of Davies's virtual environments, but more specifically because of its strange mélange of representational and functional assumptions. In short, while the passage posits a recursive, systemic correlation between organism and environment, it narrows the register of this correlation to the domain of representation. In this respect, it seems to me that Olalquiaga's account betrays the markings of the privileging of the visual we have just analyzed: like virtual perception in the hands of the Gibson-inspired VR researchers, Olalquiaga reduces the entire spatial problematic of psychasthenia to a narrowly representational framework. For Olalquiaga, psychasthenia is a disorder that takes place exclusively in the visual register, through an inability to preserve a distinct body representation (or body-image) in the face of the proliferation of representations in the environment. In this respect, psychasthenia functions much like the "information disease" diagnosed by Jaron Lanier: it too collapses all difference between information (or representation) and experience, which means that it jettisons the "internal perspective" essential to embodied human experience.

Yet just as the information position found an "antidote" in functionalist VR research (and in Davies's art), so too does this informational interpretation of psychasthenia find a corrective in the corpus of phenomenological research on lived spatiality (and also, not insignificantly, in the spatial effects of Davies's environments). To lead up to an analysis of lived spatiality in the late work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and in Davies's virtual environments, I shall explore the linkage between Olalquiaga's representationalist interpretation of psychasthenia and the notion of the body image that recent feminist critics have (following Jacques Lacan) retooled as the basis for a material theory of the body. Specifically, I shall argue that the root error in the representationalist understanding—an error that also informs Caillois's original conceptualization of psychasthenia in relation to insect mimicry—stems from a reliance on what I see as an inadequate notion of the body as body image. Correcting this "error" will yield a very different, indeed affirmative, understanding of psychasthenia as a tactile experience of connection or interpenetration with the environment.

In her own take on "lived spatiality," feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has drawn a link between the three threads of our current interest: virtual reality, the body image and psychasthenia. According to Grosz, the body image or "body phantom" comprises a kind of mediator between the subject and its social and biological environment: it is, she specifies, "the condition of the subject's capacity not only to adapt to but also to become integrated with various objects, instruments, tools, and machines. It is the condition of the body's' inherent openness and pliability to and in its social context … . It is the condition that enables us to acquire and use prosthetic devices (glasses, contact lenses, artificial limbs, surgical implants) in place of our sense organs." [45] In short, the body image forms a necessary link connecting the internal and the external and thus enjoys a kind of priority in relation to the biological and physiological body as well as any prosthetic extensions it may undergo: "If it exists at all," Grosz notes, "the biological body exists for the subject only through the mediation of a series of images or representations of the body and its capacities for movement and action" (186). As the "link between our biological and cultural existences, between our 'inner' psyche and our 'external' body," the body image forms the very condition not only for the self-representation of an integrated body but for the very "capacity for undertaking voluntary action" (187).

When she goes on to apply this perspective to the question of psychasthenia, Grosz follows Olalquiaga in hypostatizing the domain of vision and the problematic of representation. Indeed, she too sees in psychasthenia a perfect figure for the contemporary technologized lifeworld (or in her terms, for the "deceptive simulations" of cyberspace): insofar as it names a disturbance in the subject's capacity to differentiate itself representationally from its environment, psychasthenia marks a danger of contemporary culture -and one that, for Grosz at least, has profound implications for the way gender haas been written out of considerations of contemporary technological culture and specifically, of virtual reality. Leaving the important topic of gender aside here, what we must not fail to grasp is how Grosz's reading (like Olalquiaga's) is premised on an understanding of psychasthenia as a fundamentally visual problematic: mimicry, she says, "is not a consequence of space but rather of the representation of space Psychasthenia is a response to the lure posed by space for subjectivity. The subject can take up a position only by being able to situate its body in a position in space, . . a point from which vision emanates" (190-92). [46] In psychasthenia, she continues, "the primacy of the subject's own perspective is replaced by the gaze of another for whom the subject is merely a point in space, not the focal point organizing space" (193). Psychasthenia, that is, marks a breakdown in the function of the body image as a mediator between subject and space. Unable to represent one's position in space and thus one's own being, the psychasthenic subject suffers a kind of visual objectification; she becomes a mere point in a space projected by another. To be fair to Grosz (and Olalguiaga), we must note that the precedent for the representationalist reading is set by Caillois himself, who, in his original article of 1933, lays stress on the visual or representational dimensions of the "drama" of psychasthenia. After suggesting that mimicry involves a "double dihedral" of action and representation, Caillois focuses on the latter as a hinge articulating insect mimicry with the human symbolic domain:

There can be no doubt that the perception of space is a complex phenomenon: space is indissolubly perceived and represented. It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself. One can already recognize the characteristic scientific attitude and, indeed, it is remarkable that represented spaces are just what is multiplied by contemporary science. Finsler's spaces, Fermat's spaces, Riemann-Christoffel's hyper-space, abstract, generalized, open, and closed spaces, spaces dense in themselves, thinned out, and so on. The feeling of personality, considered as the organism's feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined; one then enters into the psychology of psychasthenia. (28)

Like Grosz (and Olalquiaga), Caillois thematizes this disorder as a problematic of the visual register: "the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space" (30).

Despite this tendency to privilege the visual, there are enough references in Caillois to action, feeling, and the like, to counterbalance this thematization and to make his theory "available: as it were, for a vastly different reading that places stress on the affective dimension of the psychasthenic indifferentiation. It is clear that Caillois, unlike both Grosz and Olalquiaga, sees psychasthenia as a multisensory existential problematic, one that affects the organism not solely or primarily through its visually apprehended symbolic significance, but in more primitive, embodied ways as well. In this respect, it is hardly insignificant that Caillois concludes his analysis by characterizing insect mimicry as a "sort of instinct of renunciation," an "inertia of the élan vital" (32). [47] Without contradicting his own polarization of the "luxury" of mimicry against earlier attempts to subordinate it to evolutionary mechanisms, such a conclusion reveals this "drama" to be part of a larger existential drama: the continually evolving, systemic correlation of the organism with its environment. In this respect, what we must criticize in Caillois is not so much the representational basis of mimicry, as the inadequacy of his understanding of this larger drama, and specifically, his polarization of the individual and space. Rather than allowing for a co-becoming of the individual and space, as contemporary ethology most certainly would, Caillois sees the activity or "generalization" of space as a necessary threat to the autonomy of the individual: in psychasthenia, as he puts it, space "seems to be a devouring force" (30). As we shall see shortly, reversing this reductive understanding is the key to an alternative, and empowering, deployment of psychasthenia.

First, though, we must return to Grosz and the problematic of the body-image. Despite the precedent it finds in certain aspects of Caillois's original account, Grosz's reading ends by inverting Caillois's understanding in a way that bears directly on what I would designate as the imperalizing function of the body-image. For, whereas Caillois sees mimicry-psychasthenia as a result of bodily activity on the part of the organism, for Grosz psychasthenia marks a failure of the "meshing" of subject and body that is itself the condition for bodily activity. In Caillois, that is, the body necessarily preexists—insofar as it it agent of -- the psychasthenic disturbance. In Grosz, by contrast, the body (and bodily activity) is a consequence or effect of a non-pathogenic body-image. Incidentally, I should mention that recent neuroscientific research would seem to side with Caillois in understanding the dissolution of the body-image (like the production of the nonpathogenic body-image) to be the result of bodily activity. To name just one example, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has argued that the body is the theater of the mind and has introduced the notion of an "on-line" body image that represents not so much a representation of the body (insofar as representation necessarily implies distance) as a real-time rendering of its continuously changing states. [48] While it is undeniable (as Damasio admits) that we in fact live some aspects of our bodies through the static body images that congeal from time to time out of this online flow, the very distinction suggests just how much richer the (misnamed) body-image is than a mere representation of the body.

Given my focus in this examination, the distinction between Caillois and Grosz could not be more fundamental, since it opens a divide between two very different engagements with the interface of virtual reality, and more generally, two antithetical "philosophies" of prosthetics. By insisting on the primacy of the body-image in mediating the interchange between subject and environment, Grosz ends up advancing a very conservative view of prosthetics: effectively, technological enhancements like virtual reality goggles (not to mention those she enumerates in the passage cited above) can only impact experience insofar as they are mediated by the body image. However much they may assert a recursive impact on the body-image, such an impact must necessarily remain subordinate to some phantom figure of a "natural" or non-technological body image, or more pointedly, to the capacities of the body to represent itself to itself. There is, for Grosz, no question that technological prosthetics might actually modify the way the senses work, and subsequently, the way the body experiences sensation: rather, as she puts it, prosthetic devices function "in place of our sense organs," as the vehicle of a substitute set of data for the body-image to compute. For this reason, Grosz would be unable to account for any but the most straightforward deployments of VR technology (i.e., those in which the "coordinates" of the bodyimage are in no way disturbed). ln fact, if we follow her in likening the "deceptive simulation" of cyberspace to the "dysfunctional breakdown" of psychosis, psychasthenia as a figure for the spatial problematic of VR can only demarcate the limit of bodily experience. By narrowing the impact of VR experience to the way it confounds the body-image, Grosz effectively insures its reduction to the status of disembodied simulation.

ln characterizing psychasthenia as an organism's active "assimilation to the surroundings," Caillois opens up a very different line of investigation, one that would see in contemporary technological prosthetics like VR the potential for embracing new experiential modalities and, I would suggest, the possibility of displacing the priority of the visual that seems to haunt the analysis of psychasthenia. On this point, Caillois's attention to the positive dimensions of psychasthenia, via (for example) his interpretation of Eugene Minkowski's phenomenological analyses of pathological temporality, is most significant. Caillois introduces Minkowski's work to support his understanding of psychasthenia as a" depersonalization by assimilation to space" that would, importantly, be the equivalent in human beings of "what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species" (30). What is crucial about the reference to Minkowski, at least for my purposes, is the way it advances the problematic of psychasthenia beyond the visual register:

The magical hold … of night and obscurity, the fear of the dark, probably also has its roots in the peril in which it puts the opposition between the organism and the milieu. Minkowski's analyses are invaluable here: darkness is not the mere absence of light; there is something positive about it. While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is "filled," it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence 'the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light' … Minkowski likewise comes to speak of dark space and almost of a lack of distinction between the milieu and the organism: "Dark space envelops me on all sides and penetrates me much deeper than light space; the distinction between inside and outside and consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are designed for external perception, here play only a totally modest role. (30) [49]

In endorsing the description of what is, after all, a shift from perception to affection, from vision to tactility, Caillois effectively opens the way for a deployment of psychasthenia beyond the bodyimage. [50] In this respect, the lineage of technological prosthetics opened by Caillois's analysis can affirm that VR technology functions by disturbing the body-image without finding this to be problematic in the least. For what is important is what takes the place of the bodyimage, i.e., what can happen once the body-image is displaced as the enabling frame of bodily experience.

Before returning to a final discussion of Char Davies's environments, I want to suggest how this distinction between Grosz and Caillois effectively repeats a fundamental divide between the two ways of reading the conception of the "body ego" that Freud introduces in The Ego and the Id. As others before me have suggested, the problem begins with Freud's ambiguous characterization, which I shall simply cite at length:

A person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology has fully discussed the manner in which a person's own body attains its special position among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too, seems to playa part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our body. The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the "cortical homunculus" of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and, as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side. [51]

Here is not the place to show how Judith Butler's model of the body or Lacan's notion of the mirror-stage derive from a misreading of this passage, a misreading that effectively assimilates "body" to "body-ego," making it the result of the projective mechanism described by Freud, rather than its source. [52] Suffice it to say that these analyses, like Grosz's, focus exclusively on the second half of the passage (the italicized portion), ignoring the explicitly phenomenological description of the first half as well as the important footnote glossing the first italicized sentence: "I.e., the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body." It seems clear from the full passage that Freud saw the body as the source of the body-ego and not the reverse.

Leaving aside the complex hermeneutical concerns presented by this passage, I would like very briefly to suggest Merleau-Ponty's work as a fruitful site for engaging the phenomenological dimensions of the body, including those specific to what he (following the conventions of psychology and physiology) called the "body-schema." In his remarkable and underappreciated career, Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenology of the body premised on the particular doubleness of experience mentioned by Freud in the first half of the passage cited above. Merleau-Ponty's work began with an investment of the body, and specifically, of bodily activity, as the source of space itself. Later, he focused his attention on understanding the ontological immanence of the body in the world that he characterized with the abstract and ambiguous term, "the flesh."

Juxtaposed against Grosz (and Butler), Merleau-Ponty furnishes a very different understanding of the body schema, one that insists as much on its nonrepresentational dimensions as its representational function. And even more significantly for my purposes here, the evolution of his work from The Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible introduces a certain displacement of the "body schema" that resonates both with the potential for thinking psychasthenia beyond the body-image and with the concrete effects (especially the shift from a visually dominant to a tactile mode of sensation) catalyzed by Char Davies's environments.

Central in both of these cases is the fundamental role MerleauPonty accords spatiality as a constitutive modality of bodily experience, and not simply an effect of representations, even bodily representations. Accordingly, from the very beginning his notion of the "body schema" is vastly different from the projective image derived by LaCan, Butler, and Grosz from the Freudian source. Indeed, the first few pages of his important analysis of the spatiality of the body in The Phenomenology of Perception are concerned with articulating the specificity of his conception of the body-schema against other reductive understandings. The body-schema, specifies Merleau-Ponty, is more than simply a "continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic and articular impressions of the moment." [53] And it is more than a de facto synthesis of a particular set of bodily components, "a superimposed sketch of the body" (99). It is a "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world, a 'form' in the sense used by Gestalt psychology" (100); or, still more precisely, it is "a way of stating that my body is in-the-world," a "third term, always tacitly understood, in the figure-background structure" (101). Far from being a mediator between the subject and the environment that would condition bodily activity (as it is for Grosz), the body schema is cosubstantial with the activity of the body and is dynamically constitutive of the spatiality of the world. We might say that the body schema, like touch in the higher office accorded it by Jonas, forms an infraempirical form: one that is immanent to bodily life without being reducible to its empirical contents; moreover, like Jonas's conception, the body schema involves vision and touch (along with the other senses) in an irreducible co-functioning that, in and of itself, indicts the more abstract, visual conception of the body-image.

This initial introduction of the body schema already makes clear the vast divide between Merleau-Ponty's motor-centered understanding of the body and the representationalist conception. Correlative with this divide is a vast difference in the role of space: whereas Grosz's (and Olalquiaga's) understanding of psychasthenia portrayed space as a geometrical, visual domain in which the subject fails to locate itself, for Merleau-Ponty, such a space is itself abstracted from a more fundamental space: the space constituted by the motor-intentionality' of the body. If, in one sense, this can be taken to mean that the body holds a certain priority over space, it also means that the body does not stand opposed to space, as Caillois's analysis (for the most part) suggested. Rather, from the beginning in Merleau-Ponty, the body and space are dynamically coupled, such that changes in bodily motility (e.g., the blind man's stick) necessarily correlate with changes in lived spatiality, the sum of which is expressed in the body schema. With reference to the problematic of psychasthenia and its important correlation with technological prosthetics, what Merleau-Ponty's analysis affords is an account capable of explaining how the dissolution of the (representational) boundaries between body and space nonetheless accords with a certain bodily activity that functions to ground the recursive correlation.

Ultimately, this understanding of the dynamic coupling of body and space undermines the function of the body schema as such, in the sense that it can no longer function to demarcate the body from the environment. Put another way, insofar as the body schema is generative of space as well as the body, it characterizes their systemic correlation, rather than one or the other of them. This is one of (no doubt) many implications of Merleau-Ponty's project that, I think, led to the substantial revision involved in his final work. In The Visible and the Invisible (and also in Merleau-Ponty's final lecture courses published in 1995 as La Nature), the problematic of the body schema more or less falls away, as Merleau-Ponty's interest shifts from the phenomenological-existential problematic of the body as source of space (and world) to the ontological problematic of the flesh and the body's immanent belonging to the world. Without engaging the difficult itinerary of Merleau-Ponty's thought, I shall simply note here that Merleau-Ponty's final work seems to embrace a conception of the body's spatiality that can explain psychasthenia as an affirmative modality in which the in-differentiation between the body and the environment, the oneness of the flesh, is opened to experience. Not insignificantly, given our above discussion of Jonas, this interpenetration of body and world correlates with an interpenetration of vision and touch:

The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two lips: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born and upon which, as seer, it remains open. It is the body and it alone, because it is a two-dimensional being, that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that … would coexist with them in the same world … . What we call a visible is … a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle borne by a wave of Being. [54]

As immanent to the world, the body is penetrated by the world in a fluid interchange that, just as Jonas argued, necessarily involves the correlation of vision and touch. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty's final problematic becomes that of thinking the in-differentiation between body and world. Or, put differently, the situation he seeks to describe is precisely the condition of psychasthenia, a fact that finds perfect expression in the (no doubt) rhetorical question orienting Merleau-Ponty's entire investigation: "Where: he asks, "are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?" (138).

By way of conclusion, let me suggest in more concrete terms than I already have how Char Davies's "Osmose" and "Ephémère" function to catalyze an experience of psychasthenia and the oneness of the "flesh." By shifting the interface away from an exclusive focus on vision and engaging the body in an affective, proprioceptive manner, Davies's environments gradually produce a dissolution of the discrete boundaries characteristic of the body as a visually-dominant agent, opening an experience of the indifferentiation between bodily interiority and spatial exteriority. Answering an objection that her work employs the very same military technologies which in other contexts serve to bolster the fantasy of the autonomous self, Davies makes explicit her aim to effect precisely such a dissolution: " As an artist, I … have two choices: I can either unplug and never go near a computer again or I can choose to remain engaged, seeking to subvert the technology from within, using it to communicate an alternative worldview … My strategy has been to explore how the medium/ technology can be used to 'deautomatize' perception (via use of semitransparency, seemingly floating through things, etc.) in order that participants may begin to question their own habitual perceptions and assumptions about being in the world, thus facilitating a mental state whereby Cartesian boundaries between mind and body, self and world begin to slip." [55] In accord with this aim, as Mark Pesce suggests, Davies manages to design a space "that contained no distinct boundaries between self and world" a space that functions by engaging vision and touch as irreducibly interlinked sensory modalities: in what he describes as a "direct assault on two fronts," Pesce contends that Davies's work simultaneously changes "what the eye would see" and "how the participant would move through the world." [56] The result is a use of the virtual reality interface to catalyze a profoundly affirmative and empowering experience of psychasthenia. At some point in the immersion, to cite the experience of Karl O'Donaghue, "the border between the interface as a symbolized surface and the surface of the physiological body begins to blur." [57] As the visual (representational) boundaries between body and world dissolve in favor of an affective contact that foregrounds what Jonas called the " force-experience" characteristic of tactility, what is brought to the fore is an energetic connection of the body with the world that many "immersants" experience as profoundly spiritual. Pesce recounts the story of Montreal artist Henry See, among the first to immerse himself in "Osmose" at its premiere. When he emerged from his journey, Pesce tells us, See was "silently crying. 'It's just … very beautiful,' he said and then went silent again" (3-4). "I always knew," wrote another visitor, "but now I have proof—I am an angel!" (4). The words of yet another former immersant perfectly sum up the embodied dimension of this experience: "If the body emerges from Osmose and … Ephémère as a reintegrated site of being, it is because the perspectival cone of vision is undermined, while the physicality of the body is delicately reaffirmed, albeit with a subtle energetic and not a gross corporeal ontology." [58] As a figure for the active interpenetration of body and world, this notion of an energetic ontology aptly expresses the mechanism by which Davies's works allow people, as she puts it, to step outside their normal mind frames and experience "the paradoxical sensations of simply being, with all the wonder that implies." [59]

Notes

1. The passage is from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).


2. My description of this work borrows liberally from descriptions by Davis and Wertheim. See Eric Davis, "Osmose," Wired, 4.08, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/Osmose.html (August 1996); and Margaret Wertheim, "Out of this World," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999-MWertheim.html (1999).


3. See Jennifer Fisher, "Char Davies," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999-JFisher.html.


4. See Niranjan Rajah, excerpt from "The Representation of a New Cosmology," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999-NRajah.html, 1.


5 . See Mark Pesce, "Cathedrals of Light," excerpt from The Playful World, http://www.immersence.com/publications/2000-MPesce.html (2000), 2.


6. This comment is cited in Davis, "Osmose," http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/Osmose.html


7. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991).


8. Psychaesthenia can be schematically defined as a disturbance in the relation between the self and the surrounding environment. See Roger Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," trans. J. Shepley, October 31 (Winter 1992): 17-32. Page numbers will be cited in the text of this essay.


9. Sutherland, cited in Hillis, xxi.


10. Frank Biocca, "Virtual Reality Technology: A Tutorial," Journal of Communication 42.4 (Autumn 1992), 27. In this passage, Biocca cites VR researcher Fred Brooks.


11. See Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), xxii (emphasis added).


12. Rheingold mentions the influence of Gibson on two central pioneers of VR: Scott Fisher and Michael McGreevy. See Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1991), 143-4.


13. See James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950); The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966); and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). As far as is possible, I try in what follows to refrain from evaluating Gibson's substantive claim regarding perceptual invariants, restricting my commentary to how Gibson's work has been appropriated by VR researchers.


14. See Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1982), 203-4. Page numbers will be cited in the text of this essay.


15. Hillis, Digital Sensations, 15. See also 125.


16. Though this correlation is especially explicit in Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), where it forms the very topic of investigation, both his early work, The Perception of the Visual World (1950) and his final work, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) include extensive discussions of locomotion and haptic processes. See especially Chapter 13 of the latter work.


17. See Hillis, Digital Sensations, 125: "Texture gradients are seen as away to overcome the vast storage and computational difficulties in modeling geometric form in VEs." Hillis mentions, in this regard, the ongoing research project of the Department of Computer Science as UNC Chapel Hill, aptly entitied "Virtual Backdrops: Replacing Geometry with Textures."


18. See John Wann and Simon Rushton, "The Illusion of Self-Motion in Virtual Reality Environments," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17.2 (1994): 338.


19. See Richard Held and Nathaniel Durlach, "Telepresence, Time Delay, and Adaptation," in Pictorial Communication in Virtual and Real Envirouments, ed. S. Ellis (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1991), 235. Page numbers will be cited in the text of this essay.


20. See Myron Krueger, "Artificial Reality: Past and Future," in Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice, and Promise, ed. S. Helsel and J. Paris Roth (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991), 19.


21. Held and Durlach, "Telepresence," 234.


22. In a related body of research, work on telepresence has linked the richness of tele-embodiment to success at getting technology "to support the body's role in face-to-face interaction." Thus tele-embodiment functions neither via visual simulation nor through illusion, but by the functional duplication of the body's capacities in a variant environment. As Canny and Paulos note, "We can best interact with others at a distance by recreating the affordances of our physical body with telepresence." See John Canny and Eric Paulos, "Tele-Embodiment and Shattered Presence: Reconstructing the Body for Online Interaction," in The Robot in the Garden, ed. K. Goldberg (Cambridge: MIT P, 1999), 292.


23. Steuer, cited in Hillis, Digital Sensations, 15. This remains the case despite Steuer's own understanding of virtual reality—"defined as a real or simulated environment in which a perceiver experiences telepresence "—as introducing "an alternative view of mediated communication in general," one that breaks with the notion that media are only important as a "conduit." While Steuer's redefinition of virtual reality effectively breaks with a reductive understanding of it in terms of specific hardware and shifts the focus to the interaction between the mediated environment and the participant, it does not break with the standard notion that what is communicated in the telepresence circuit is information. If it is the case, as Steuer claims, that "[i]nformation is not transmitted from sender to receiver," this does not mean that the informational position is rejected. Indeed what is experienced in mediated environments as Steuer describes them if not information? See Jonathan Steuer, "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence," Journal of Communication 42.4 (Autumn 1992): 73-93.


24. For a discussion of Gibson's theory of information pickup, see Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, chap. 13.


25. Despite Gibson's embrace of an informational understanding of perception, his theory includes elements that could, potentially, serve to complicate such a view. By mentioning Gibson's differentiation of perceptual systems in relation to the variable of "breadth" (which "refers to the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously presented"), Steuer suggests as much: "Breadth is a function of the ability of a communication medium to present information across the senses. J. J. Gibson (1966) defines five distinct perceptual systems: the basic orienting system, which is responsible for maintaining body equilibrium; the auditory system; the haptic, or touch, system; the taste-smell system; and the visual system. Inputs to several of these systems from a single source can be considered informationally equivalent (Gibson 1966). However, the redundancy resulting from simultaneous activation of a number of perceptual systems reduces the number of alterative situations that could induce such a combination of perceptions, and therefore strengthens the perception of a particular environment." See Steuer, "Defining Virtual Reality, 81. Though Steuer here accepts the informational basis of Gibson's theory, we shall have occasion below not simply to question this, but to rescue Gibson's intriguing understanding of proprioception from the informational reduction it undergoes in his theory.


26. Lanier makes this point in Frank Biocca and Jaron Lanier, "An Insider's View of the Future of Virtual Reality," Journal of Communication 42.4 (Autumn 1992), 164.


27 See Gibson 1966, Chapter 13, for a statement of his theory of informational pickup from the ambient light.


28. See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 135-6. Page numbers will be cited in the text of this essay.


29. He furthermore argues that the privilege placed by Western philosophy on theory is simply a higher order extrapolation of this privileged detachment of sight.


30. Indeed, one might understand Jonas's move here as an effort to merge the generalized function of vision (which must be distinguished from the specific sense modality of sight) with the generalized function of touch. Hints in this direction can be found in his discussion of the "mental side" of touch which is closely bound up with the generalized function of vision: "There is more than mere coincidence in the fact that in his hand man possesses a tactile organ which can take over some of the distinctive achievements of his eye. There is a mental side to the highest performance of the tactile sense, or rather to the use which is made of its information, that transcends all mere sentience, and it is this mental use which brings touch within the dimension of the achievements of sight. Briefly, it is the image-faculty, in classical terms: imaginatio, phantasia, which makes that use of the data of touch. Only a creature that has a visual faculty characteristic of man can also vicariously 'see' by touch. The level of form-perception at the command of a creature will be essentially the same for both senses, incommensurable as they are in terms of their proper sensible qualities. Blind men can 'see' by means of their hands, not because they are devoid of eyes but because they are beings endowed with the general faculty of 'vision' and only happen to be deprived of the primary organ of sight" (141-42). We shall return to this deep correlation of vision and touch below, in relation to the work of Merleau-Ponty. Incidentally, the differentiation of vision from sight bears on the misapplication of Gibson's theory by VR researchers. As Hillis suggests, the latter seek to extend to the, in his terms, necessarily interpretative faculty of vision what Gibson says about sight. See Hillis, Digital Sensations, 126-7; 132. If we restrict Gibson's theoretical claims to the domain of sight (as he himself suggests we should), what he says about perceptual invariants begins to make more sense and indeed to resonate with Jonas's similarly biologically-inflected claim that "only the simultaneity of sight, with its extended 'present' of enduring objects, allows the distinction between change and the unchanging and therefore between becoming and being" (144-5). Restricted in this way, Gibson's claims also, at least potentially, leave room for processes of reception that would involve the "self-movement" of the observer and thus other the role of other sensory modalities.


31. Using an apparatus that allowed an active kitten to move about freely while carrying a gondola containing another, passive kitten, Held and Hein demonstrated that active or voluntary movement was central to the development of sensorimotor skills: thus the active kittens developed normal sensorimotor coordination, while the passive kittens failed to do so. See Richard Held, "Plasticity in Sensory-Motor Systems,' in Perception: Mechanisms and Models, ed. R. Held and W. Richards (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972).


32. This resonance is, perhaps, deceptive, since Gibson specifies "obtained perception" as his primary focus and explicitly denies any correlation between perception and proprioception along the lines of Jonas's argument for the correlation of perception and self-action (or affection): "Proprioceptive systems overlap with the perceptual systems but do not correspond with them." See Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 45. The reason, of course, is that Gibson focuses on the way sense organs actively adjust to and explore their environments in order to obtain information. Whatever properly bodily experience might accompany such perceptual experience, even were it admitted to exist, would be superfluous.


33. Hillis makes a similar argument, accusing Gibson-inspired VR theorists of "conflat[ing] Gibson's distinctions into a retheorized 'imposed proprioception' that conceptualizes vision, and an image of movement in representational space, as capable of standing in entirely for the whole of bodily motility." See Hillis, Digital Sensations, 129.


34. Incidentally, Jonas's imaginary case very nearly approximates the situation of what Bergson, in the first chapter of Matter and Memory calls "pure perception." Like the winged seed endowed with eyes, pure perception simply registers the flow of images without correlating this flow with any organizational principle (for Bergson, bodily affection and personal memory) that could give it meaning. In Bergson, the notion of pure perception was only a heuristic device to illustrate how the body as a "center of indetermination" is simply one image among others in a universe of images and thus can be deduced from this universe (rather than being posited as something standing over against it, as in both idealism and realism). When Deleuze generalizes Bergson's notion as the basis of his understanding of cinema (both in the movement-image and the time-image), he makes the very error that Jonas is accusing the philosophical tradition of making: lending vision an illegitimate autonomy from the lower sensory modalities of the body. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-lmage, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986). A critical account of Deleuze's move forms the basis for my current study of interactive digital art, Cinema 3: the Digital Image.


35. See Bergson, Matter and Memory, 57.


36. Elsewhere, Jonas speaks of the "force-experience of the body in action" as an "analogy" capable of supplying "the dynamical links in the sequence of observed events." See The Phenomenon of Life, 31.


37. Like Osmose, Ephémère utilizes semitransparency and spatial ambiguity and an interface based on breath and balance. However, it went beyond Osmose by foregrounding the temporality of the experience, rather than its spatiality and simplifying the spatial elements to three principal levels. Here is Davies's description of Ephémère: "In seeking to deal with the ephemerality of life, this work expands the spatiality of Osmose to encompass temporality. While Osmose was based on spatial organization of various worlds, and stasis of most elements within (except flowing particles), Ephémère relies on the emergence and transformation of form, and the ebb and flow of visibility and audibility. Ephémère contains three horizontal levels: landscape, subterranean earth, and interior body. The landscape is constantly transforming through time. The relationships between the various elements and the participant are more interactive or inter-responsive. In Osmose, interaction was limited to navigation and the resulting ambiguous perceptual readings of gestalt-like compositions were dependent on the changing participant location (with the exception of the fully-interactive sound). In Ephémère, gaze has been introduced as a means of interaction: rocks 'open' when gazed upon, revealing landscapes which quickly fade, and in the earth, seeds sprout if approached slowly with a steady gaze, blooming, then fading back into the earth. I introduced the interior flesh body as the substratum in Ephémère (quite a change from the software code that formed the base of the Osmose world) as a means of reaffirming the poetic correspondence or co-equivalence between earth and body.
… anecdotal responses from some of the three thousand people who have experienced Ephémère … suggest that this second work feels much more interactive, and evokes a sensation of being swept up and away, without a secure unchanging place to return to (i.e., the clearing in Osmose), i.e., one has to surrender to the experience." See Karl O'Donaghue and Char Davies, "Interview with Char Davies." http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999/1999-KOdonoghue.html (1999), 3-4.


38. Davies comments, "I think that by using a fully enveloping virtual environment, one can get closer to re-creating the sensation of being … I release people from these physical constraints and allow them to experience 'being' in a slightly different way. It almost refreshes their perception, so they can rediscover what it feels like to be here when they come back out into the world." This passage is cited in Wertheim, "Out of this World," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999-MWertheim.html, 1.


39. Davies and O'Donaghue, "The Real and the Virtual: Karl O'Donoghue Interviews Char Davies," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999/1999-KOdonoghue.html, 1.


40. See Char Davies, Artist's Statement, 010101, [SFMOMA]† 2001, [http://www.sfmoma.org].


41. Wertheim, "Out of this World," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999-MWertheim.html, 2.


42. Davies, Artist's Statement.


43. Pesce, cited in Davis, "Osmose," 4.


44. See Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992), 2.


45. See Elizabeth Grosz, "Lived Spatiality: Spaces of Corporeal Desire: in Culture Lab, ed. B. Boigon (Princeton: Princeton Architectural P, 1993), 187. Page numbers will be cited in the text of this essay.


46. Though it is beyond the aim of the present purpose, the issue of gender in relation to psychasthenia and the lived spatiality of the body would concern the adequacy of representation as a means to account for it. On this score, let me simply note that I have certain reservations concerning Grosz's account of the "constitution of the subject's sexed body through various forces of signification and representation—the meaning the body has for others and for itself, its socioeconomic constitution as a subject, and, above all, the psychical, economic, and libidinal constitution of bodies as sexually differentiated, as sexually specific" (193). As I see it, this account too narrowly circumscribes the domain where sex matters. One would, instead, have to ask how sex enters into the phenomenal experience of lived spatiality as I shall now reconstruct it.


47. See also Caillois's footnote where he likens this instinct to the Freudian death drive, in "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," 32, note 44.


48. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes's Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Hearst, 1995).


49. Caillois is here citing Minkowski, "Le temps vécu," Etudes phénomologiques et psychopathologiques (Paris, 1933), 382-98.


50. To be sure, this "endorsement" runs directly counter to his polarization of the individual and the environment that I criticized above. As I see it, such a tension within Caillois's analysis simply testifies to the complexity of the topic he is examining.


51. See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey (Oxford: Hogarth P, 1923), 25-6 (emphasis added).


52. I examine Butler's model at length in my forthcoming book, Becoming-Human. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), chap. 3.


53. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962),99. Page numbers will be cited in the text of this essay.


54. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 136 (translation modified).


55. Davies and O'Donaghue, "The Real and the Virtual: Karl O'Donoghue Interviews Char Davies", http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999/1999-KOdonoghue.html, 3.


56. Pesce, "Cathedrals of Light," 2.


57. See Karl O'Donaghue, "Virtual Ecology." http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999-KOdonoghue.html, 4.


58. Rajah, "The Representation of a New Cosmology," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999-NRajah.html, 1


59. Davies and O'Donaghue, "The Real and the Virtual: Karl O'Donoghue Interviews Char Davies," http://www.immersence.com/publications/1999/1999-KOdonoghue.html, 2.