Chapter 18

Virtual mobility

The sign/body of pure information

Ken Hillis

To speak about mobility of necessity means speaking about space – whether the material spaces of the actual world through which we move and negotiate daily life, or, increasingly, those Web-based virtual spaces through which we feel we navigate, visit, or flow when online. It is also the case that any form of mobility or materiality that is not understood as an extension in space is very difficult to imagine or write about. In order to live, human beings need to interpret the world through and in relationship to a series of fixed and moving objects. We see the material before we see the cultural. This is reflected in the reliance on spatial metaphors to situate Web practices – “sites,” “under construction,” “browsing,” “visit,” Active Worlds, MySpace, Netscape, and so on. These spatial metaphors and the sense of affective materiality to which they point also speak to a new discursive positioning of active digital subjectivity, one connected to a 3-D spatialized sense of doing resonant with, while also repositioning, Hannah Arendt’s concept of homo faber. To speak about online mobility is to implicitly suggest that one buys into the idea that virtual space is sufficiently extensive and equivalent to material space so that one might achieve something akin to geographic and social mobility within it.

The naturalized assumption that the Web constitutes a form of space coupled to the increasing ubiquity of online virtual environments reflects the rise of a Neoplatonic techno-metaphysics. It is driven, in part, by telepresence, the experience, and simulation of presence achieved through the use of a communications technology. The sense of online telepresence has increased with bandwidth and the development of a range of techniques, practices and sites that involve the transmission of moving images and representations of self and others. Telepresence is part of a wider resurgence of a techno-metaphysics that attempts to realize, through digital settings and the virtual spaces they establish, a synthesis of appearance and presence, of the ideal and the materially real – a synthesis of, on the one hand, online settings for the performance of the ideal of a disembodied, cosmopolitan, and mobile self that many networked neoliberal individuals intuit that they should be or become, and, on the other hand, the reality of their fleshy bodies sitting in front of screens. From a material standpoint, they are not going anywhere at all, yet this dynamic allows essentially stationary individuals to experience certain qualities of mobility, the sense of making a journey, without requiring them to leave the room, or become ambulatory. At a moment of great support for the idea of mobility as a major resource of contemporary life, the online moving image pulls us along in its tow, catching us in a tension between material fixity and digital flow.

My discussion of mobility as it applies to the virtual spaces of Web-based communication media draws from my recent enquiry (Hillis 2009) into forms of online signification and their relationship to digital practices of ritual and fetishism. In that interdisciplinary work I explored the relationships between individual users’ perceptual experience of a digital materiality and specific forms of indexical, signifying practices manifested in online settings. Drawing from different schools of thought, I examined two networked communication technologies that induce the experience of telepresence: avatar-driven graphical chat environments (also known as MUVEs or multiuser virtual environments)¹ and the sites of personal webcamera operators.² Both digital avatars and the moving images of webcam operators are what I term sign/bodies, in brief, a synthesis for online settings of specific aspects of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, particularly his theorization of the index as a sign that remains in direct connection with its object;³ Jacques Derrida’s (1976) reformulation of Peirce’s early semiotics in his notion of the trace; and Gilles Deleuze’s discussion (1986), developed with particular reference to the cinema, of the movement-image. For Deleuze, the image’s ability to move confers on it a quality of immanence that allows viewers to perceive that the movement-image and matter are identical (ibid.: 56). The movement-image, therefore, allows us to understand how cinema bridges the gap between ideology (and therefore meaning) and a viewer’s embodied (and therefore material) perception. The online digital sign/body operates in a related fashion.⁴

I understand the online moving image of a body or object as a special kind of sign. It is a hybrid form that points directly, in Peircian fashion, to those online forms of signification mounted by Web participants whose practices and techniques reveal the broader project of using the Web to collapse the binary that Deleuze identifies; that is, to render the Web as both the realm of the image and consciousness as well as that of space and movement, and thereby to reconnect consciousness to the thing or object itself. For the purposes of this essay, then, the sign/body operates as a vehicle by which a trace or some remaining fragment of the original body seems to be present, through technologies of transmission, to distant others. Like the Peircian index, the online sign/body points directly to the individual remaining on this side of the screen. The sign/body’s force in so doing, therefore, crucially depends not only on the increasing centrality of digital settings as sites for the production of meaning but also on its increasing ability to move on the screen, to appear lively within meaningful virtual spaces that reference, through different aesthetic forms, aspects of material space this side of the screen.

The idea that online moving images transmit to human sensation an experiential trace of the actual individuals they represent strongly articulates to the dynamic of telepresence. There is, in the perception that the Webbased index or trace carries something essential about the individual, the implicit understanding that the Web also carries us, gives us greater mobility, that we are more present on the Web through the form of our own animated sign/bodies than instrumental understandings of telepresence as merely an efficient form of electronic communication would suggest. The idea of telepresence, at least, retains the prefix tele – “at a distance” – as part of its explanatory power. I note here the connection to magic, which, like telepresence, can be broadly defined as “action at a distance,” thus underscoring the techno-metaphysical desires that are inherent to these technologies. Nevertheless, under acknowledged perceptual dynamics strongly inflected by capitalized desires increasingly dispense with the idea of the tele to move directly to implicit assumptions grounded in indexicality about actual spaces peopled by “something” resembling actual human bodies.

As Deleuze notes, cinema as a technology renders image equal to movement, and it erases the psychological distinctions between the image as an experiential reality and movement as a physical reality. In Web settings, enter the moving image in the form of an index/digital trace/movementimage – a sign/body – and its ability to suggest to human sensory faculties some remaining fragment of the individual it represents or contiguity with this individual. Deleuze’s theorization of the ways that moving images hail perception autonomically is confirmed by recent brain science research. H. Henrik Ehrsson reports that it is possible to determine the experience of embodiment through “visual perspective in conjunction with correlated multi-sensory information from the body” (2007: 1048). To induce the sensation of out-of-body experience in subjects, Ehrsson had them wear Virtual Reality head-mounted displays that transmitted images of the subjects recorded from behind. The display prevented the individuals from seeing any other spatial representation or image of themselves in virtual space. Ehrsson then pressed the tip of a rod against the subjects’ chests while also holding a different rod in front of the camera behind them. These combined actions had the effect of making it seem to the subjects as if the virtual individual viewed from behind was also being poked in the chest. Subjects reported perceiving their chests being probed, yet they also sensed that it was the virtual individual lodged within the display (in other words, a moving image, or sign) that was also being touched by the rod. In a second experiment Bigna Lenggenhager et al. (2007) demonstrated that the sight of a humanlike figure, such as an avatar in virtual space, combined with actually stroking the subject’s body, was able to induce an experience of relocating the subject’s sense of self away from his or her body’s location in actual space.

While Deleuze’s philosophy and the brain science research just noted rely on very different approaches and methods, they complement one another through their parallel conclusions that the viewing of a moving image of an object, thing, or event located in virtual space has the potential to authorize the perception of experiential access to a trace of the referent. The dynamics of signification further suggest to human perception that the moving sign/body articulates metonymically to the thing it stands for and points toward: that is to say, toward the human body of its operator or referent. This point about the indexical trace, with its implication of cause and effect, is crucial. While the indexical sign/body is clearly a representation, I am arguing that it is not sensed, autonomically, or psychically, as such by those who consume it in graphical chat/MUVE environments such as Second Life or through accessing personal webcam sites. The autonomic reception of the moving image, which operates as if it were a trace of an actual human being located elsewhere, parallels and supports the psychic desire to receive this image in the same way – that is, as if it were a transmogrification that could render actually present the distant individual it represents. In such a way do individuals located in one place in front of the screen achieve, through a combination of digitally induced sensation and culturally induced desire, both an experience of spatial mobility so prized by contemporary capitalized cultural formations and the sense that these individuals may all gather, as in traditional group ritual formations, in one collective virtual space without ever needing to move from their individual discrete locations.

A concrete example may serve to further explain the rise of this development. In 2007, I attended a workshop on research issues and Second Life. Several teachers gave presentations on their experiences using Second Life as an educational platform, one of whom recounted how she had resolved a disciplinary issue in her online classroom populated by avatars of students and herself. During the first week of class, a student, in the form of his avatar, produced a pop gun and fired it at the teacher in the “presence” of the other students. According to the teacher, the gun was only a “play” gun that fired a flag-like projectile with a virtual dart at its end. The projectile, however, hit the teacher’s avatar. Realizing the importance of quickly reestablishing her authority, the teacher, a code-savvy individual versed in the arts of authoring MUVE-based virtual objects, launched a program during the next class period that caused the offending student’s avatar to burst into flames and disappear. Students, including the one made to disappear, were impressed, the teacher gained considerable credibility, and discipline was restored.

In responding to this account, another workshop participant stated that at her university such an incident would have led to the teacher’s dismissal from her job as well as the student’s suspension. I interjected to ask her why that would be the case. My question, posed after the April 2007 Virginia Tech mass shootings, had less to do with the inappropriate actions of the student and the possibly rash response of the teacher. Rather, I hoped to provoke discussion about the nature of representation in MUVE settings. I continued by asking if a university normally would discipline a representation. To contextualize my question, I noted that many researchers in attendance had already discussed the difficulties of gaining Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for research conducted in Second Life. This research, mostly online ethnography, entailed interviews conducted “in world” with individuals and groups in the form of their avatars. Why, again, I asked, noting the parallel with the university that would suspend the student and fire the teacher for engaging in virtual classroom warfare, would such research require IRB approval if what was under investigation (and therefore possibly in need of protection) was understood to involve only a set of representations? I answered my own question by suggesting that a plausible explanation lay in understanding that IRBs already implicitly buy into the understanding that sites such as Second Life are no longer only media forms per se; rather, because they allow for indexical experiences of traces of human beings, such sites are increasingly positioned as seemingly actual spaces in which aspects of actual humans have come to reside. Such a development far exceeds the powers generally accorded by modernity to forms of representation. Instead, it reveals the evolution of the machine world of images as an abstract, sovereign, and ultimately desirable postrepresentational force into which aspects of human beings can somehow relocate. IRB officials, I argued, are already treating the avatar as a bodily appendage-cum-psychic extension and therefore as an actual (if not quite material) part of the person needing protection. Such a development was anticipated by Guy Debord when he argued that “for one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings” (1994: 17). Within this machine-dependent virtual world, appearance – the images themselves and the meanings they carry – takes command; the mobile, telepresent sign/body stands in for actual/material presence. The forms of public discourse this world supports lend credence to workshop members’ concern to obtain IRB approval. In such combinatory ways the contemporary moving image has become a post-Debordian form of social relation with which we must all increasingly reckon.

I have offered a few ideas about the relationships among mobility, animated sign/bodies, and individuals’ experience of copresence in virtual space based on the indexicality of these sign/bodies. I now want to discuss the sign/body as a form of visual allegory. As Victoria Nelson has observed, “the Web is above all a medium uniquely suited to the ancient mode of allegory, a capability dramatically evident in the ubiquitous fantasy role-playing narratives” (2001: 201). Erik Davis could be discussing Second Life when he identifies computer gaming’s “first person allegory” structure within which gamers “wander through a rigorously structured dreamlike landscape patched together from phantasms” (1998: 212–13). I use allegory in the sense of it being the “description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance … in which properties and substances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest” [Oxford English Dictionary (OED)]. Allegory, moreover, is also “the aesthetic device of Personification” (Nelson 2001: 202). In literary terms, then, allegory is a form of extended metaphor through which materiality, in the form of objects, actions, and individuals, is rendered equivalent with meanings lying beyond the narrative itself (Holman and Harmon 1992: 11). One of the most famous literary allegories is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a tale of Christian salvation; Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) operates as a visual allegory for the evil of fascism and the horrors of war. Whether deployed this side of the interface, as an avatar in a virtual world, or the visible image of a gay/queer webcam operator living aspects of his daily life in front of the camera, allegory is a figural device serving as a means of simulating the possible – a means by which what remains potential is given imaginative yet figural embodiment so that this figure then may seem to be probable or to actualize. Experientially, this state of potential may then seem to have a chance of transforming, of becoming actual. An allegory, then, is a structure or figure of seeming. When coupled with the powers of online telepresence, it is an ideal vehicle for imaginative relocation to the middle ground of virtual environments with their sensational indexicality and thereby seemingly empirical abilities to render equivalence between the imaginary and the actual.

In online MUVEs like Second Life, the avatar is an allegorical figure that indicates a widespread, implicit desire for a form of virtual embodiment that nevertheless could somehow still retain and transmit qualities of the material referent. Avatars allegorize material human bodies as flexible forms of awareness fully capable of becoming information itself. As forms of visual allegory reliant on the dynamics of telepresence discussed above, digital avatars constitute a set of playful, graphically accessible, emotionally believable instructions; they are, drawing from the OED, an “aptly suggestive resemblance” and “figures of some other thing mystically signified by them.” Digital avatars, then, can also be thought of as indexical automata through which networked participants perform both the metaphysically inflected expectation to personify themselves through telepresence and the associated real world demand that they take on the incorporeal qualities of indirectness and spatial exchangeability increasingly required for satisfying the capitalized expectation for mobility and being in more than one place at a time.

The central trope of allegory is the figure of the traveler who “on [her or] his journey … is plausibly let into numerous fresh situations where it seems likely that new aspects of him or herself may be turned up” (Fletcher 1964: 34–37; emphasis added). The customized gestures of the avatar – who may be shorter, taller, thinner, more buxom or less tanned than one’s own material body – allegorize “new aspects” of contemporary and more mobile individual formations. Digital avatars indicate an aestheticized revitalization of the belief that signs, especially moving images such as the online sign/body of the avatar or webcam operator, are already alive with the energy to which they point as simulations. To apply Neoplatonic logic, all that remains is for humans to accord such sign/bodies the agency that they already seem to possess. While these sign/bodies point to the living bodies of participants as the “true” or “real” residents of the Web, they equally point to digital networks not just as “efficient” forms of communication technologies but as meaningful settings for “new aspects” of the social and life itself.

For Second Life participants seated before their screens, who are at least incipiently aware of the unequal distribution of material mobility, the avatar as allegory meaningfully expresses desire for greater mobility. This desire is seemingly satisfied, if only temporarily (for the virtual never becomes actualized), though inherently metaphysical forms of identification with online sign/bodies also coupled to a dialectal disaffection with a material sense of remaining immobile. Thus MUVEs in general can be viewed as a depiction of the discourse and simulation of mobility, and participation in these virtual worlds (a participation demanding considerable time) works to ritualize the increasingly monetized fetishization of mobility. Such participation, however, is also deeply ironic. For it also points to how the sense of remaining immobile – home alone, insufficiently monetized – articulates to a regressive discourse emphasizing the purported limits of embodiment. In such a way do sign/bodies on the Web also point to the absence of what they unwittingly point directly toward – the absence of, or at least unequal access to, sufficient embodied mobility and acceptable offline forms of transcendence rooted in immanence on the part of many MUVE participants and webcam fans. The avatar, then, further allegorizes capital’s interests in encouraging producers and consumers to believe that their real interests always lie formally elsewhere – within the screen-deep space of flows that subjects may only enter as telepresent, mobile sign/bodies.

The avatar participates in a long history of belief that the inanimate can be animated – a history that runs from the statues of Ancient Greek theater that were believed to have the power to move, to The Sandman (1816), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s account of Olympia, a daughter as mechanical being, to the Talking Turk figures of yesteryear’s carnivals, midways, and funhouses. These are all vehicles by which individuals have sought and continue to seek to animate the inanimate and thereby retain a place for spirit in mechanism in an otherwise disenchanted and numb world of dead objects, organized religion and, for many, its exhausted rituals. To dismiss such practices as naïve per se fails to adequately consider how the implicit, even ineffable, beliefs they reflect continue to manifest in new forms of digital affectivity and that for such believers the Web increasingly constitutes a transcendental signifier in itself, a post-representational ur-automaton come to life as the psychic appendage for all who use it as a means to seek a unity between meaning and materiality. Fabricating virtual places and objects, sign/bodies included, allegorizes a broader cultural resurfacing of the implicit, as of yet largely unspoken, belief that certain sign forms are alive. In many ways, moreover, the avatar conforms to the ancient logic of puppetry as a practice. Let the puppet tell you what it wants to do. The avatar, in ritual fashion, is the new educator; and although it is designed, and therefore, by a certain logic inferior to its designer, it nevertheless shows and tells MUVE participants, as members of social networks, what they need to do to stay current in the virtual world. The tables may be turning, with the sign/body seemingly the new referent, the new bio-graph, from which Web participants increasingly take their cues. To paraphrase Karl Marx, graphical chat, replete with virtual objects and sign/bodies serving as “social hieroglyphics” (1952: 32) is part of an intensification of allegorical experience in the world that today works to ritualize capital’s inherently metaphysical interest in having relationships between persons programed as an experience of the relationships between things. Relationships between automata are relationships between things though they may appear otherwise to human sensation. The magical practices and the political economy of metaphysics continue to display right in front of our eyes, though many critics continue to see only signs of exchange.

Notes

References

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Ehrsson, H.H. (2007) “The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences.” Science 317(5841): 1048.

Fletcher, A. (1964) Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Model. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hillis, K. (2009) Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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