Addictive Bodies and Hypnopompic Dynamics
The prevalence of computer-mediated environments in our society has shown that their controversies are just as salient as their possibilities. These environments, largely constituted by digital objects, are able to simulate the physical world and provide the space for users to communicate with and through the platforms that embed them. Incorporating the aesthetics and functions of information technology, it is evident that these environments are able to enhance the quality of user experience in what Kwan Min Lee would refer to as ‘telepresence’, or the transposition to a technological space (‘Presence’, 29). This transformation of presence is not only immersive, but also intrusive, considering how it may result in permanent or deleterious physical effects. In South Korea, where online gaming is a popular form of entertainment, a young couple starved their own infant daughter to death because of their addiction to a virtual character in the MMORPG Prius Online (Tran, ‘Girl’). While it is possible that the couple might have used the game to evade their ‘real-life’ troubles, this account suggests their attachment was also an experience that inevitably emerged from the repeated interaction between the user and the interface.
On this basis, the use and significance of ‘addiction’ warrants further inquiry. If one adheres to a strict dichotomy between virtual and physical—or in a more reductive sense ‘real’—perceptions, then the assumption is that an excess attachment or suspension of disbelief would inevitably result in a gross misrecognition.1 In other words, it is less about the immersion of the user than it is about the object of immersion, upon which it is necessary to question the basic difference between the nature of the virtual and the physical. Shifting the focus to perception also proves to be equally, if not more ambiguous, for as Lee explains, ‘the attempt to strictly differentiate mediated perception from natural perception might be futile because natural perception can, in a sense be regarded as mediated’ (‘Presence’, 30). Hence, to assess addiction based on the differences in perception is problematic for two primary reasons. First, perception alone is not able to determine unequivocally the virtual-physical divide and second, it fails to do so precisely because perception is the subjective and perhaps ‘virtual’ interpretation of sensory stimuli. We can certainly use the guidelines stipulated by medical institutions to claim that the addict is attached to a false object, but the underlying notion of perception does not provide ample justification to falsify the reality of the experience. We are thus left with an abstract diagnosis, but have gleaned little from the particularity of the addict who claims that the experience, or ‘feeling’ of immersion was real and tangible.
As such, it will be more useful to side-step the entanglements between the virtual and the physical to examine the phenomenology of addiction, given that the latter is a persistence of immersion that emerges from the repeated use or play of the interface. Through repetition, the user does not merely develop a psychological detachment from reality, but also forms an affective connection with the object. In video games, for example, it is not just the fingers on the console which affect their narratives, but the ‘environment’ (i.e. the collective of visuals, sound and the tactility of the console) which communicates with, and likewise affects the users. The contents of these media might be ‘artificial’, but they are addictive because they can deliver an immersive or ‘real’ experience for the users. This experience, in addition, is not simply the result of a difference in visual recognition, but an emergent quality involving the repeated participation of all bodily senses. By observing the way users display an embodied interaction with the virtual, we are not only able to critique the simplistic notion that addiction involves a mental attachment to a false image, but also demonstrate that it is an affective preference. In effect, the experience of the addict would provoke a revision of the efficacy of visual-centric attachments, by looking at how cognizance is premised on the recession and what this paper calls the ‘hypnopompic dynamics’ of embodiment.2
Recession
In his research on presence, Lee argues that the virtual experience, which refers to ‘sensory or non-sensory experience of para-authentic or artificial objects’ should be differentiated both from real experience and from hallucination. Real experience, he claims, involves sensory experience, and is non-virtual to the extent that it does not entail non-sensory, or mental perceptions such as reading. Hallucinations, on the other hand, are purely mental experiences and thus do not require ‘human sensory systems’ (‘Presence’, 37). Although Lee’s formulation provides much empirical clarity, it runs into significant categorical difficulties with those addicted to virtual environments, as all three experiences could be said to occur simultaneously in such cases. Apart from the interaction with a virtual object, there is also the sensory experience of the medium, or device to consider. In addition, the addict can also be said to be in a hallucinatory state that proceeds from the engagement. What then, is the addict experiencing exactly during such an immersion? Such a problem emerges from the dualistic objectification of the self postulated by René Descartes, who writes in Meditations on First Philosophy:
But what then am I? A thing that thinks…The fact that it is I who am doubting and understanding and willing is so evident that I see no way of making it any clearer. But it is also the case that ‘I’ who imagines the same is the same ‘I’. For even if, as I have supposed, none of the objects of imagination are real, the power of imagination is something which really exists and is part of my thinking. Lastly, it is also the same ‘I’ who has sensory perceptions, or is aware of bodily things as it were through the senses. (11-12)
With this presupposition of mental activity, all perception and hence thought, becomes grounded in this representational space, or ‘theatre’ of the mind, which leads to an idealised distinction between the mind and the body, to the extent that the former is regarded as the sole determinant of the self. Of course, further consideration of this distinction reveals at least two complications. Firstly, the body and the mind, as parts of the unified self, have become discrete entities with separate and atomised functions. Secondly, the mind in presiding over the body, assumes an image of the body within its own discourse. Hence the metaphor of the body is always present in every expression, as witnessed in how the phrases, ‘I think’, ‘I see’ or ‘I touch’ are—like playable avatars in a video game—virtualised performances of the body. As Frank Biocca states in The Cyborg’s Dilemma, the body is a ‘representational medium for the mind’ (13). The notion of representation, in this sense, refers to a schema of the body which resonates with Benedict Spinoza’s earlier proposition in Ethics, whereby ‘the object of the idea constituting the human mind is a body’ (Ethics, 56). In his elaboration of that claim, Spinoza posits that since the mind is able to apprehend the affections of a body, it follows that the object making up the mind is an actual, existing body. This metaphor is arguably not confined to a scene which unfolds within the mind per se, but is also extended, even objectified within the context of virtual environments, because avatars, though digitally synthesised, also function as this image of the body, albeit in a more visual way.
Thus while the conceptualisation of addiction according to Cartesian terms denotes a cognitive aberration as opposed to an embodied sensation, an account drawn from Spinoza (and, following him, Biocca) would see an overwhelming implication of the body in its interactions with virtual entities. Spinoza, in particular, discusses this intimate connection between mind and body in further detail, by claiming that the mind can only contemplate an external body, if the latter affects the body of the mind itself (Ethics, 65). Although at this juncture it is not possible to conclude that there is an interdependent relationship between addiction and embodiment, it nonetheless appears that the sensation of presence—virtual or otherwise—is an embodied experience.
This is a point which forms the theme of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, whose Phenomenology of Perception makes an indirect reference to Spinoza, with the point that ‘every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of my body is made explicit in the language of external perception’ (239). Applying this to the immersion of users in virtual environments, it can be argued that immersion is never only a mental response to an external object, nor a moment produced from an isolated mind directing the body. Rather, it is an emergent quality of the body that is repeatedly synchronised and connected to the environment. In thinking of this synchronisation, Merleau-Ponty reduces the emphasis on a visual-centric engagement, as the metaphor of sight would correspond to cognizance and hence seek recourse to the Cartesian problem. Instead, he frames sensation as an impression of ‘texture’ (245) and mode of proprioception that leads to the synthesis of conscious awareness. For Merleau-Ponty, this proprioceptive body is marginal and incomplete, as it comes before the awareness of a coherent self and thus marks our connection to or co-existence with the world:
Every sensation is spatial; we have adopted this thesis, not because the quality as an object cannot be thought otherwise than in space, but because, as the primordial contact with being, as the assumption by the sentient subject of a form of existence to which the sensible points, and as the co-existence of sentient and sensible, it is itself constitutive of a setting for co-existence, in other words of a space. (256-7)
Attention must be paid to Merleau-Ponty’s use of the words ‘primordial’ and ‘space’ if we want to examine how the embodied sensation of virtual presence translates into immersion. To begin, sensation is primordial, because it involves the intervention of the tactile body before conscious awareness. Sensation is also spontaneous, since it is not established on any external necessity. That is, it is not a physiological expression directed by the mind, but a hypnopompic transition into conscious perception. To say that the body undergoes this hypnopompic movement is to show that the ‘body parts recede from perception so that we can exist as a whole body rather than a culmination of disparate sensory pieces’ (Farman, Mobile, 28). In sleep, the body does not cease to be affected by its surroundings. To awake or become conscious does not cause these affections to cease, but to persist and repeat in the background. On this basis, it can be argued that in the case of immersion in the virtual, both the body and the hardware are sensory objects that recede into the background of the interface in order to achieve a transparency, or awareness that one has indeed escaped into another space. Hence, this rather visual recognition of a virtual space is one that is fundamentally predicated on the notion of the body as a sensorium commune. The body’s relationship with the world is not simply tied to presence, but also its capacity to affect and be affected by it. As Merleau-Ponty would explain, certain words—though they are merely representational symbols—are able to invoke feelings which can consume the body:
The word ‘hard’ produces a sort of stiffening of the back and neck, and only in a secondary way does it project itself into the visual or auditory field and assume the appearance of a sign or a word. Before becoming the indication of a concept it is first of all an event which grips my body, and this grip circumscribes the area of significance to which it has reference. (Phenomenology, 273-4)
While Merleau-Ponty exemplifies the above with the written language, a similar form of hypnopompic response is also observed in the immersion of any other virtual environment. What is usually a visual form of engagement always involves an initial recession of the body at the interface, a body that is not only at home in the world but is already being in-touch with it via the participation of its senses. To reiterate, it is only through the participatory recession of sensation that a visual-centric awareness is brought to light, much like how the same physiological mechanisms of sleep can continue in the background of consciousness when one awakens. And just as how writing remediates the oral with the visual, the multi-sensory engagements of virtual environments denote what Jacques Derrida would refer to as a ‘fundamental synaesthesia’ that allows bodies to communicate with and feel for one another (Grammatology, 89). If we follow the assumption that immersion is antecedent to addiction, then it should be noted that the ‘primordial contact’ mentioned by Merleau-Ponty is in reference to immersion as it occurs within embodied, sensory space.
Opening
However, it is also apparent that Merleau-Ponty’s theorisation of embodiment eventually brings the visual back to the fore, with the recession of the sensory, and arguably tactile body. As much as this present inquiry would refrain from framing the reversion to an economy of the visual as a conceptual problem, it is not exactly clear from Merleau-Ponty’s arguments if addiction can actually be brought to consciousness, given that addicted users have a tangible and even persistently immersive experience with the interface. And since the label of addiction is something determined by a third party, such as a psychiatrist, it would instead be more appropriate to think of addiction as a mode of inscription, rather than the actual mark (or label) inscribed on the body, which would mean that for immersion to be addictive, it would have to be an act repeatedly performed and played, rather than a state of awareness.
This repeated act, moreover, questions the recession of the addicted body and is a point Luce Irigaray raises in her critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, for it displays a ‘preoccupation with an agent for whom perceptions is a holding to things as objectives and thus a means of maintaining oneself in the world’, as Cathryn Vasseleu interprets it (Textures, 66). For Merleau-Ponty the tactile is always tied to vision, as if the latter is capable of completely objectifying and ascertaining the indeterminacy of the tactile. This reflexivity between the visual and the tactile, Irigaray argues, has less to do with the perception of coherent objects than it is the parting or—in a Derridean sense—the deference from things. If the sensory body has to recede and give away to visual awareness, it is not possible for vision to encompass the entirety of the experience since it is grounded on the primordial contact of embodiment. In Irigaray’s terms the movement of sensation not only begins, but also persists in its opening by means of the tactile. As she writes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference:
We can agree that there is a situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the visible. But the two maps are incomplete and do not overlap: the tangible is, and remains, primary in its opening. (162)
Such a formulation implies there is never, in the strictest sense a complete grasp of the object in the visual field, even when a subject-object relationship can be mapped out, as in the case of addiction. As Irigaray contends, the boundaries that define the emergence of the visual from the tactile are never clearly demarcated. Similarly, the lack of distinct boundaries shows that the hypnopompic phase traversing the domains of sleep and consciousness never completely recedes, but is immanent to the tactile field. Relative to Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray is less concerned with ontological certainty (e.g. what is seen or touched) than with sensation as a movement that takes place ‘only in the intervals between, through difference, succession’ (Ethics, 158). Even in seeing, the tactile remains a ‘non reflexive indetermination of flesh in/between flesh’ (Vasseleu, Textures, 72). By continuously affecting and being affected, the consciousness of the addicted body is never emptied of its own sensory dynamics, but is in ‘constant process of reading the world’ (Farman, Mobile, 30). Similarly, the virtual is never read nor fully comprehended in the visual sense, but is experienced as it is open to one’s touch, as Vivian Sobchack notes:
Thrown into a meaningful life world, the lived body is always already engaged in a commutation and transubstantiation of the co-operative meaning-making capacity of its senses (which are never lived as completely ‘discrete’ or ‘raw’) to the more particular and reflective discriminations of ‘higher order’ semiotics. Put another way, we could say that the lived body both provides and enacts a commutative reversibility between subjective feeling and objective knowledge, between the senses and their sense. (Shobchak, ‘My Fingers’)
Sobchack’s contribution can be read as a summary of the ideas raised by Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray concerning the body as it is immersed in a particular world. With respect to the relationship between the body and the virtual, this constant process of ‘reading’—or meaning making—resonates with Derrida’s différance, which at once refers to both a distinction (difference) and an ‘interposition of delay’ or deference of a final comprehensibility. The synthesis of meaning for Derrida flows in the same vein as writing and reading; to re-read, is also to re-write. Along with the body constrained and temporalized in space, writing as difference entails temporalizing, ‘resort[ing], consciously or unconsciously, to the temporal and temporalizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfilment of “desire” or “will”, or carries desire or will out in a way that annuls or tempers their effect’ (Derrida, Speech, 136).
Virtuality is, in no small way, a party to such a detour, for, in its adverbal sense of ‘almost’ or ‘nearly’, it is a dynamic state that carries the capacity to transform and the tendency to regress. Hence, the lived body of which Sobchack writes is a body that is repeatedly written, deferred and in a state of flux. With this notion of flux, we not only subvert the Cartesian grid of objective content and subjective intensity, but continue to probe into the immanence of this hypnopompic dynamics consuming the body in addiction.
Affect
Intrinsic to Irigaray’s indeterminate interiority of a body in flux is also the mechanics, or more specifically exchange of affects, making up the surface of interaction in embodied experience. If two different entities in touch with one another do not maintain their essential or interior differences, it is because there is a transformation or emergence that is instantiated with these entities affecting one another. In other words, transformation moves not in a hierarchical mind-to-organs, but more in the fashion of Brownian motion, where the dynamics of surface effects correspond to the sensory body. And similar to particle movements, affects are not neutral, but denote—as Spinoza recognises—corporeal affections in which the body’s potential to act is ‘increased, diminished, helped or hindered’ as well as ‘the ideas of these affections’ (Ethics, 98). In fact, the ‘reality’ of the virtual emerges only if and only when the body is affected by it, thus showing that affects are transformative.
Later theorists, like Brian Massumi, have drawn on the philosophy of Spinoza (and more significantly, Gilles Deleuze) to articulate the relationship between affect and embodiment. While Irigaray directs her critique towards the elision of the flesh in the visual, Massumi draws attention to the movements constituting this primordial contact, or transformative space, by conceptualising affects as ‘virtual synesthetic perspectives’ within bodies that allow images to arrest the senses and alter potentials moving from one body to another (Parables, 35). For Massumi, affects are dynamic because they are movements that exceed stasis, and hence cannot be determined by it, by virtue of the fact that ‘between two points in Euclidean space, no matter how close, lies another definable point’ (185). In other words, the infinity of potentials embedded in affective states (i.e. the space between two points) is a direct consequence of movement between bodies, like atoms or molecules in motion. Alternatively, affecting is synonymous with interfacing, which is perhaps a more apt description in the context of digital interactions, where objects exchanging data with one another, are engaged in a form of interfacing that has ‘at its core, materiality encoded into the transfer’ (Farman, Mobile, 63). This interface is a continuously transitory state, which means that the distinction between self and interface—much like the addict’s own awareness of addiction—is but a fiction that is deferred in the immersive experience. Accordingly, as the virtual becomes increasingly transparent (as in the case of Augmented Reality), the boundaries between the biological and the artificial become increasingly blurred. Nonetheless, to affect and to be affected remains immanent to embodiment; a sojourn from determinate being. As Irigaray poetically imagines it:
Don’t fret about the ‘right’ word. There is none. No truth between our lips…Between us, there are no owners and no purchasers, no determinable objects and no prices. Our bodies are enriched by our mutual pleasure. Our abundance is inexhaustible: it knows neither want nor plenty. When we give ourselves ‘all’ without holding back or hoarding, our exchanges have no terms. (‘Our Lips’, 76)
If exchange for Irigaray refers to an excess that cannot be determined, it is only due to the affect that bodies impress upon one another. The structures emerging from such Brownian interactions are not bonds characterised by fixity, immutability or permanence, but rather assemblages possessing unique or arguably ‘singular’ capacities and tendencies. In Philosophy and Simulation, Manuel DeLanda differentiates capacities from the object’s actual properties. Sharpness for example, is a property of knives, but the capacity to cut can only be actualised the moment it comes into contact with, or cuts another object. Tendency, on the other hand, refers to transformations produced from non-material interactions. To again use the example of the knife, it has the property of solidity within a wide range of temperatures, but at extremely high temperatures it will display the tendency to liquefy. The key difference between capacities and tendencies, DeLanda explains, is that the former are typically more infinite, insofar as the ‘capacity to affect’ is always dependant on the other object’s capacity to be affected (Philosophy, 4-5). Apart from this difference of degree, capacities and tendencies both can be considered as possibilities of excess which exert a corporeal influence on consciousness.
Given their synesthetic character, affects again invoke the notion of immersion as an embodied experience, for it is not merely what one sees that brings pleasure, but that in being affected by and eventually addicted to the virtual, pleasure moves in between and out of fixed sensory perceptions. An example of how affects are comprised of such dynamics can be found in the video game Rez, developed and released by Sega in 2001. Combining trance-like visuals with electronic music, players have to rescue an advanced A.I. from psychosis. One interesting feature is the feedback system of the soundtrack, which subjects the music to the onscreen activity and in turn provides a mutually affective space. Players are able to feel immersed, or ‘caught up’ in a rave as the music creates and enhances the game environment, which is rather similar to the loss of senses during a trance (Shinkle, ‘Corporealis’, 28). The game developers, in this case, were indeed astute in enhancing the bodily experience, for seeing alone is never sufficient for believing.
The engagement of other senses in addition to sight (if not all of them) sees the containment of an intensity from players that is not restricted to their respective sense-organs, just as the phrase ‘to stay in touch’ implies an intimacy in a relationship that involves more than the simple act of holding hands. And if those ‘in touch’ with the virtual are fully tactile bodies, it follows they are bodies without organs, without territorial distinctions.3 Extending this argument, a body is without organs when it is in a state of sleep and de-territorialised synchronicity, whereas in wakefulness, consciousness inhabits the organs; differentiates and positions them, with some behind the Cartesian theatre. These poles of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation should not be treated as discrete absolutes, but should be understood as the boundaries of a hypnopompic space, a space that is always transitioning from sleep to consciousness. Under these terms, could it be said that the addicted body is a hypnopompic body, since it is always in between unconscious repetition and a conscious sensibility of difference?
Repetition
The conduct foregrounding addiction, even as it materialises and moves in between difference, is repetition. Deleuze in particular reads repetition as a manner of behaviour ‘in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent’ (Difference, 1). It is ostensibly a contradiction that no two actions or two addicts are exactly the same in a repeatable series, for as the scientific method would demonstrate, it is only through similarities that we are able to determine if repetition has occurred. For Deleuze, however, the extraction of repetition based on common, or identical points of reference is not repetition but generality, a crude representation and resemblance of the movement constituting the phenomena. Repetition is primarily concerned with singularities that exploit ‘the artificial passage from one order of generality to another’ (2). To say that repetition is involved with the singular is to avoid the concept of addiction that labels habituation as a symptom of the condition. Instead, it would be constructive in this case to look at a ubiquitous repetition that, according to Deleuze, ‘escapes indefinitely continued conceptual difference’ (13). The singularity of repetition thus refers to a repetition devoid of a concept, a repetition that cannot be labelled, because it is at work in the indeterminate body.
Furthermore, as repetition moves between the conscious and unconscious, one may observe that difference is gradually concealed; a point which is attributed to the particularity of addiction, insofar as the pathology of the habit is predicated on its naturalisation. Regarding this movement, Deleuze challenges the representational limits of repetition along three lines. In the first it is the finite concept which inhabits repetition, whereas in the second the concepts inhabiting repetition are ‘devoid of memory, alienated and outside themselves’ (16). In the first two instances, one is conscious of repetition and its significance is assumed to be understood either partially or not at all. The third mode of repetition is of greater interest because it repeats unconsciously and it does so ‘only by dint of not “comprehending”, not remembering, not knowing or not being conscious’ (ibid.). In this case, the addict is left to repeat without being aware, just as a player stays immersed in the artificial world of a computer game by unconsciously repeating the motions on the console, or as the body regulates itself in sleep. This is the repetition that marks the Brownian movement of particles, and—in reference to Irigaray—the indeterminate interiority or primary opening of affective bodies. In other words, the repetition of affect between bodies is synonymous with their dynamic movements, a characteristic DeLanda observes with the example of molecular interactions:
But in addition to new gradients exploring the primordial medium in which living creatures first emerged involves considering interactions in which different molecules can bond or form a new compound or, on the contrary, in which compounds can be broken down into their component parts. This leads not only to much larger combinatorial spaces with atoms and molecules of different species entering into innumerable possible combinations, but more importantly, forces us to invent new means to explore possibility spaces that are intrinsically open-ended…. (Philosophy, 37)
Hence, the open-endedness DeLanda refers to is a disavowal of any finality in transformation. Even as the therapist claims addiction is a condition the individual contracts, or attains from repetition, it merely implies that the repetition of ‘addictive’ behaviour, as with other disorders, is not compatible with other modes of repetition that have been legitimised. In addition, the conccurrence of difference with repetition indicates that a perception of form (such as addiction) is not only always a memory abstracted from the changing space of experience, but that bodies are defined and expressed by the co-subsistence between ‘the swarm of potential forms/configurations’ and ‘an infinity of qualitative relational differences’ (Massumi, Parables, 197).
Underlying the paradox of addiction is, therefore, the inhabitation of difference in repetition, for if the transparency between the technology and user was absolute or final, then there would be no need for repetition and no material difference or interfacing to speak of. Bodies in repetition are as much a deference of plenitude as they make up a movement of difference that opens up the spaces of possibility. From the unconscious rhythms and intuitive hand-eye movements to the consciousness of immersion, these phases are arbitrary precisely because of the condition of repetition. To cite Deleuze again, repetition is ‘a condition of action before it is first a concept of reflection’ and the ‘emergence of something new’ can only occur on the condition of repetition (Difference, 90). As such, these transformations are neither permanent nor novel assemblages. Rather, they are repetitions—or, in the corporeal sense, bodies that will continue to change. To affirm the particularity of the addicted body is to acknowledge that the addict has never awakened to an altered state of consciousness, but is in a process of that alteration. To attempt to capture the addicted body in a freeze-frame, to define addiction according to psychiatric criteria is to fail to understand the indeterminate interiority of an affective body. As Massumi explains:
A body present is in a dissolve: out of what it is just ceasing to be, into what it will already have become by the time it registers that something has happened. The present smudges the past and the future. It is more like a doppler effect than a point: a movement that registers its arrival as an echo of its having just past. (Parables, 200)
To take this notion of movement further: would it not be possible to claim that an addicted body—or, in this case, a body in repetition—is one that is unaware of itself? In his essay Elliptical Bodies, Jeremy Fernando contends that it is the processes and not the language of biology that makes these processes biological. Like menstruation, one does not need to know of addiction in order to be addicted. It is on this basis, on this ‘part of experience which escapes cognition’ (Elliptical, 82) that Fernando insists ‘biology has to be re-inscribed’ into any social construction of the body precisely because biology is the counter-gesture to ‘totalising knowledge’ (84). This counter-gesture, according to Fernando, would be the ‘ellipsis’ of biology that haunts the hermeneutics of social construction and more significantly, repetition, even as it is ellipsis that sets repetition in motion.
Confronted with such unknowns, each repetition then becomes a singularity, where the actions of the body are marked out by a space of possibility. To be marked out, in this sense, is also to be displaced, which again means an experience of the virtual is one that is always prevented from becoming a totalising actual. As noted by Deleuze, moreoever, ‘repetition depends upon the virtual object as an immanent instance which operates above all by displacement’ (Difference, 105). It is such a displacement that permits the virtual to be re-presented, to be repeated—not because representation is derived from or will eventually arrive at an original, but because each repetition is singular, elliptical, and therefore only virtually known.
To return to the question of addiction, it would arguably be problematic to argue along with the psychiatrist that it is a mind led astray, for it is not just the mind, but the body that immerses itself repeatedly in the experience. And even so, the experience or affection of the body is always tangible and personal, which is to say quite simply that two can be addicted to the same thing, yet no singular actualisation of circumstances or possibilities will ever be the same. It is in this difference within repetition that the singularity of bodies is an elliptical one, for one repeats because one has yet to arrive or become. Therefore, to be immersed in the virtual is to be confronted with what cannot be known; a perpetual deference of plenitude that again sets repetition into motion.
Insect Assemblages
If bodies in repetition present a challenge to the primacy of the visual, what then could be said of addiction? As discussed, addiction is not an altered state of consciousness, insofar as the subject in question has acquired a different condition, but remains hypnopompic because of what it unconsciously repeats. The dynamics of affect are more tangible at the level of individual relations, but the assemblage taking shape from all these interactions is no less a body that is visually apprehended. This is perhaps more evident with the pervasiveness of information technology and high-speed communications in urbanised locales. Like William Gibson’s inhabitants of the Sprawl (see Neuromancer), we are moving, even as we are wired within the vast array of media networks. And although the sum of all these parts seems to suggest digital environments are a sudden intrusion that has detached us from our physicality, a closer examination of the assemblage would reveal that there is no ‘simple binary opposition between a material, sensual reality and the virtual, as the virtual is an inherent potentiality discovered by way of a sensual immersion in the material world’ (Meek, ‘Walter’). What is often ignored is not a technological determinist position on the possibilities of future innovation, but the naturalisation of these ‘molecular’ relations of embodiment. Perhaps, the pathology of addiction could be understood as an amplification of these relations: the addict, by being immersed, is unaware of the addiction, just as the interactions between the body and the machine are oblivious to their own repetitions.
As such, it could be said that the visual is not made from sight alone, for what constitutes the phenomenon of sight is clearly the affections of bodies. To derive an example from insect behaviour, it is not cognition that directs their action, but the repetition of their embodied action that determines cognition, as observed in the way their rudimentary mechanics are collectively deployed to build complex hive and social structures, which when assessed externally do exhibit an intricacy that can be deemed to be ‘intelligent’. In contrast to pre-determined capacities, we can conceive of such instincts as ‘pre-linguistic modes of intertwining the body with its surroundings (other bodies), the resonance of bodies in continuity and movement’ (Parikka, Insect, 24). On that note, it is less about the visible transparency of a virtual environment than the actualisation of the virtual via sensual or affective immersion, which again looks to the virtual as a product of a technical activity, a ‘bringing forth’ of the object from a variable context that is not determined a priori. As opposed to claiming that addiction commences with sight, the consideration here should be on this context, or the unconscious tactile or the coming ‘in-touch’ that make up the dynamics of the affective body. An insect does not think about what it sees, it acts with the environment—which means to say that the focus is on what it does with its body, as opposed to whether it possesses any independent intelligence.
Massumi aptly reminds us that, ‘a thing is when it isn’t doing’ (Parables, 6). The ontology of addiction can only be determined by the transformative possibilities of emergence, because the reality of the thing only presents itself after it is abstracted or taken out from the dynamics of the assemblage. Our contact with the interface is transformative, like how the wasp meets the flower and touches it; both are one yet not and in parting each is changed by the other. In the context of the assemblage, however, the partings are but openings to other meetings, for there is no finality, only repetition. Likewise, in this interfacing, or affecting between bodies, we see that the virtual is ‘a function of the bodily impulses that produce and are transformed by technological impulses’ (Grosz, ‘Naked’, 188). If indeed our hypnopompic state has foreclosed a complete awakening in the virtual, then it remains to be seen if the lenses of pathology could be further calibrated to accommodate and naturalise the addict’s behaviour. From the current ubiquity of interfaces in the developed world, it seems the wait would not be long; in fact, we might have already moved on.
Notes
1. From a materialist perspective, the virtual as described by Allen Meek usually refers to any ‘experience of the screen, the terminal and the network’, which quite evidently denotes any experience with media technologies. In broader terms, however, the virtual could also mean ‘simulated’ which in this case serves to include the experience of all forms of technology, including language.
2. This paper will not discuss the physiological mechanisms of the hypnopompic state, in relation to hypnagogia, which denotes the bi-directional transitions between wakefulness and sleep. A hypnopompic body, however, is a partial state of consciousness leading to complete awakening which in phenomenological terms, is recognised as an affection of the body with the environment and is an appropriate figure of reference in resolving the issues between consciousness and embodiment.
3. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘the body without organs’ is the site of undifferentiated excess in resistance to the differentiation and connection of organ-machines. Unlike other bodies, the body without organs is affective, pre-linguistic and de-territorialised. It counters the use of ‘words composed of articulated phonetic units’ with ‘gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound’ (Anti-Oedipus, 10).
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Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy
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