Still taken from here.
In the same way that Frankenstein belied anxiety about mechanization and our power to create machines, these stories reveal our current anxiety about digital technology and our power to make a virtual world. Is it possible to recreate the world using digital technology? If so, how will we be able to tell the recreated world from the original? This sort of anxiety reminds me of René Descartes who, in his Meditations on First Philosophy [1642], was worried that an evil genius, “supremely powerful and clever,”[1] was intercepting his perception of the world and confusing him as to its true nature. How, he wondered, would he ever be able to tell the difference?
The influence of Descartes’s line of reasoning, which implied a clear split between the mind and the body, is well documented and thus he is often blamed for inserting this schism into the history of Western thought. Many contemporary thinkers have found this split to be extremely detrimental to our well-being.[2]
The mind simply does not exist apart from the body. Memory and cognition are contained and expressed within the body and through the body, but somehow we continually forget this and think of them as being different. As the late American philosopher Richard Rorty has put it, “if the body were easier to understand, no one would have thought that we had a mind.”[3] However, despite constant philosophical criticism of this schism over the last half-century, new technologies seem to reinforce it, supporting the dominance of the mind over the body. New technology mimics the behavior of the mind, attempting to interface directly with it and to bypass the body. In addition our networked technology emphasizes a particular form of communication – an intellectual and verbal communication, heavily imprinted by the logic of written language. Not only does this forget the body, but it also forgets the emotions. In such an environment, structured by the logic of clear intellectual communication, where does our emotional self take refuge?
In the priority of the mind over the body, and in the parallel priority of the intellectual over the emotional, there is an implication of the dominance of the male over the female. This is a bit of a slippery claim to justify, but for the moment I’m just going to make it without contestation, hopefully to back it up at a later date. Such dualities as ‘mind / body’ are, in Donna Haraway’s words, “systemic to the logics and practices of domination.”[4] However, the way to escape these patterns of domination is not, as people have sometimes thought, to compensate through reactionary privileging of the body over the mind, but rather it is to broker a merger between the two, a solution that depicts neither body nor mind as being better or more essential than the other.
This is certainly the dream of the 'new orality' hoped for by Juhani Pallasmaa. In his book The Eyes of the Skin [2003] he links the domination of the body by the mind to the ocular-centricism that was born in the Enlightenment. In an ocular-centric culture, he says, “instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina.”[5] Thus our visual bias prevents us from being fully present in the world, so stuck in our heads are we.
Although Pallasmaa’s argument that the overwhelming tide of images is causing us to retreat from our visual bias is a fair one, the primary means of interfacing with most technology remains through our eyes. But perhaps this is changing with the advent of haptic feedbacks and more tactile input mechanisms (tablets come to mind). Maybe technology, so long structurally biasing the visual and the intellectual, will soon return some of its emphasis to bodily experience, engaging the body and mind in an integrated manner.
And there is further hope for the merger of body and mind in what is being called ‘mixed-reality’, the marriage of the virtual and real. As the real becomes increasingly mediated by our mental prosthetics [our sense of place being determined as much by our GPS co-ordinates as the scent of the air], perhaps a new territory is being forged in which our minds and bodies can comfortably co-exist. Maybe there’s hope that we won’t end up like those poor saps in the Matrix. Maybe we are not fated to remain as “frighteningly inert”, as Haraway has described us.[6]
Here’s to hoping the cyborg ‘body’ will be as active as its mind.
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