Elisabeth List
Department of Philosophy
University of Graz

Floating identities, terminal bodies
The virtualization of existence in Cyberspace

Cyberspace was born in science fiction. Since then, much of what fiction has anticipated has become real. Nevertheless, much of public and even academic discourse on cyberspace to a great extent is still embedded in phantasies. Using the term "cyberplatonism", I have ironically adressed such mythologies and fiction in the discourse of bodies and disembodied selves in cyberspace (List 1996).

In this paper I try to come to term with this issues in a more systematic way. To do so, it would be necessary to start with an elaboration of the most crucial features of a theory of selfhood and embodiment. And, as the syndrom of "cyberplatonism" is in important respects the result of the dominance of the often-quoted cartesian dualism, this should be an account of subjectivity, self and body that avoids the errors the cartesian paradigm is flawed with.

The framework I propose is a phenomenological one, referring to some of the crucial concepts of Franz Brentano, the founder of Phenomenology, by Henri Bergson, as Alfred Schütz, a later phenomenologist has read him, the seminal thoughts of Merleau-Ponty who has made emodiment the crucial point in his phenomenology of perception, and of the late works of Francisco Varela, who has taken a critical turn with regard to the debates between cognitivst defenders of the computational model of the mind and its connectivist critiques by drawing on Merleau-Ponty and non-western traditions in the philosophy of mind.
In such a framework, a theory of selfhood and embodiment will adress as their main features the following issues:

1) An account of subjectivity as reflexivity in terms of selfwareness and self-consciousness.
The capacity to conscouisly conceive of oneself as a subject, a person, and the ascribe to oneself properties or to imagine of oneself as being an individual with clear boundaries against a context that is nonsubjective, a context of objects, has been since Descartes' famous statement of the ego cogito, ego sum the defining criterion of subjecitivity. Today the representational structure and function of the mind is explained in terms of a neuroscientific model of the brain as a representational mashine. It should be mentioned that cybertechnology as presented in the texts of Gibson, Rucker and Sterling are pressuposing exactly such a model of the mind, the model of strong AI that maintains that human intelligence and consciousness is explainable algorithmically, with some large number of rules and procedures (MacFadden 1994, 336).

2) Phenomenology introduced the crucial term to account for the structure of the mind responsible for its capacity to represent the world, its objects, and finallly itself: the term "intentionality", a term that relates this capacity to the experiential sphere of subjects. By distinguishing between intentional states and intentional objects of various kinds Brentano takes what he calls "intentional inexistence" as the ontological state of such objects. "Intentional inexistence" now is just the term Brentano uses for what we today call "virtuality" - namely "not really existing in an ordinary sense" but existing in the sense of being able to be thought of, as thinkable, as possible, in short, as virtually existing. This idea has farreaching consequences for our topic, because taken sereiously it means that all objects we can conceive of are in fact of this kind, including our bodies and our selves. The thought experiments and science fiction scenarios are about converting all experiential space into informational space, in which sensual bodies are no longer of concern. The place held by an embodied subject would then be shrink to a zero point of pure awareness - this woud endeed be a completely new form of existence.
For the time being, however, we are still bound to our sensual and biophysiological mode of existence where intentionality is our way of relating to reality.
Let me give a simple example: There are in priniciple two possible kinds of relations we can have to objects, physical or intentional. If I have a book in my hands, this is, it seems, a physical relation: Here are my hands, objects themselves, and between them a book. But if we are not just library workers carrying around books, we usually have a completely different relation to a book: Maybe we find in an antiquariate a rare and early edition of the work of our most apprechiated philosopher, or, say, the bible, the relation between "us" and the book is of a completely different kind. It is an intentional relationship, because it makes us think of many things not visible for somebody not able to read, to "decode" the signs in the book. It is a relation in our conciousness, that has the structure of intentionality, and it is ontologically speaking a relationship relating us (as embodied beings) the the virtual informationals space we associate with the title of the book.
This example makes clear that intentionality is a semiotic structure, and that it, folowing Peirce or Cassirer, has to be analyzed as a sign relationship. With such a qualification of the concept of intentionality, we can immediatly understand the role of the use of signs and media to enrich and to change the informational space that is accessible to us and our culture.
From that it is also evident that the first serious challenge for the cartesian subjectivis t and rationalist model of the mind came from the linguistic and pragmatic turn in philosophy, through George Herbert Mead and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

3) But there is another very important aspect in which the models of a (purely) representationalist view of mind and self are wrong:
To be a subject, it is not enough to be able to conceive of oneself, to have an idea, an image, or knowledge of oneself. It means essentially agency, the capacity to act spontaneously, to take a position, to do something about it, to guide ones course of action in our environment. I prefer to call this capacity performativity, because it does not imply problematic assumptions associated to the concepts of agency and spontaneity. What is important here is that we never can "discover" what we "really are" by meditation or introspection, because we ourselves in the course of acting as embodied individuals in our environment bring about, "what we are". We are, in other words, "selves in progress" and we are, as such, both the makers of ourselves and the witnesses of what is happening with us, partly constructers, partly constructs of causes beyond our control.
The "self in progress" is a project for future actions, and therefore is inherently temporal. It is in flux, never being able to be captured, understood, analyzed completely, and it is through symbols, that we give it a kind of unity, closedness, a fixed shape. This unity is always fantasmatic, and a virtual unity. For this reason Varela maintains that all images of selfhood are virtual images (Varela 1993).

4) We now are to ask the most crucial question. Consciousness and the capacity to use symbols cannot be presupposed simply as givens. We shoud be able to understand what can account for them.
Recent debates on the nature of subjectivity in analytic philosophy have made I-statements, or statements in the first person, i. e. statements with the form "I-here-now" as strongholds for the irreduscibility of subjectivity as epistemological core-concept. Only very recently it has become clear, that statements of this form not only witness the peculiar character of subjective experience, but also, the essential situatedness of the subject. And situatedness also means that embodiment is as well essential to the experience of self and subjectivity.
This is the cornerstone of the necesssary revision of the cartesian, rationalist, individualist idea of the Ego as a disembodied self. And it also demarkates the limits for projects of virtualization, if such projects do not clearly relate themselves to the genre of fiction.
It is not possible here to give an satisfactory account of embodiment as the basis for the emergences of language, consciousness, and symbolica lly mediated forms and experiences of selfhood. It would require to give the outlines of Merleau-Pontys argument about embodiment as fundamental for experience and perception. It would be necessary to give due attention of both Cassirer and Wittgenstein to the same issue, of recent developments in cognitive psychology, like the work of Israel Rosenfield who has found out from many case studies that images of embodiment are basic for the evolution of a safe sense of selfhood. And, finally, it could be argued from an even more basic level, that of a theory of the organism, that something like an "organic intentionality" is the core feature of what we call life, as for instance the theoretical Biologist F. Buytendijk has argued.

Let me sum up: The main issues for my topic - the relation of selfhood and embodiment as it appears in the theoretical and practical context of what I for the moment vaguely call "cyberspace", are virtuality and embodiment. It should be clear from the statements so far that intentionality as the underlying structure of the conscious mind are both naturally embodied and "virtual", and symbolically and technically mediated. It should also be clear that this holds not only on the background of recent developments in information technology, but for any form of human consciousness, knowledge, and agency. And instead of reproducing myth about total disembodied it would be more revealing to find out in which way both the cultures of selfhood and embodiment are transformed by the technologies of virtualization. But one should also be aware of the fact, that experiences of virtuality is part and parcel of our mode ov living, even without "technologies of virtuality", as the following personal notes should illustrate.

"Wired".
A meditation on "being online"

Sometimes, when I am very absorbed by my reading and writing projects, it happens that I wake up in the morning earlier as usual. Usually, this first awakening followed by the desire to fall asleep again, and usually I do so very easily. But when I am, as I will call it, "wired", then I switch, without wanting it, from the state of sleepfullness to a kind of bright wide-awakenness, that involves me immediately in the virtual word of the book or texts I have been reading the day before, of the paper I am just writing, say, the paper on the virtualization of selfhood in cyberspace.
I would like to stay in bed, relax some more minutes, but the program, switchend on in my head, does not allow it. The arguments I have left behind in the evening are vividly befor my mental eye, and very often I discover with exitement, that a new solution, a new anser to the problems "on-line" in my project, is before me. The thougths are circulating in my mind with such an insistence, that they finally urge me to get up, to sit down at my writing table and write down a number of pages.

From my practices of chinese technicques to create bodily awareness I have learned, that one of the best ways to escape is to return to seme form of embodied dooings, meditation, dancing, or just looking wich relaxed awareness at some point. But when I wake up in the morning in the way described, I have the strange experience of suddenly being "switched on", of "being wired" aganinst my will, and I feel that lying here in my body I am powerless vis vis this mental urge. My well trained techiques to return to bodily awareness fail, and suddenly I see it, this my body, "there" in the bed, somehow weightless, feable, unable to resist.
This experience gave me the image of a "terminal body". A body that is in such moments no more and no less than a "terminal" a locus to fix mnemotechnic or other kinds of technical devices of interface - a body, just as it is described more drastically in cyberpunk texts as a piece of meat to insert plugs for electronic cables.
But no - in the case of my story there are no brain-chips in my head, and I have not taken psychedelic drugs, and still, I feel "wired", "on line", and even, I would say, somehow "beyound myself".
I find myself kept by the virtual reality of my field of thinking and research. The same can happen with other types of virtual reality, say, being concerned with severe economic problems, or, not much easier, with an unhappy love affair. In any of these cases one feels decentered, disseminated in the flux of intellecutal or imaginary inputs, informations, media events, just as the postmodernist theorists would have or like it. We feel decentered because we feel endangered to loose anchorage in the real situation of our lifes, bodies, the persons around us. In short: We feel uneasy about being absorbed by the informational space, offering itself by all symbolic means, offering especially images of self.

To be "in" cyberspace. What does it mean?

Much of cyberpunk fiction and even theory is about the question what it means to "be in cyberspace". Sherry Turkles recent book is about "Life on the Screen" (1995), in its german tradition even about "Life in the Net" (Leben im Netz, 1998). Let us first ask what virtual spaces do consist of: Images, texts, programs. Since the use of so-called "technologies of viruality" is no longer restricted to a small number of experts, but available to whowever can afford to by a personal computer, programm providers are offering images and ideas the everage user looking for entertainment and games is after: images of phantacy worlds, of heroes, monsters, programs for virtual environment for the construction of virtual personae for the interactive games like MUDs. Virtual self-presentation and interaction are presented as adequate means to create, transform and communicate one's identity as a form of selfhood an life in cyberspace.
The thus constructed identities are, as in the Muds, mainly textbased, appearing in their sensually graspable form on a two-dimensional computer-display. Therefore, I talk about "flat identities", which are, seen in their temporal dimension, at the same time "floating identities". What form of existence is such a form of "virtual identity" or selfhood? To answer this question, I would like to ask first what it really means or can mean to be "cyberspace".
This is a crucial question, and a very elementary one. One, that should no longer be an issue for those who are "in". Because it has been longly discussed in the first fine anthologies on the theories and technologies of cyberspace, such as the one editet in 1991 by Michael Benedict. (Benedict 1991)
I give a short survey of the definitions proposed in this volume.

1) The first point of reference ist of course the defition given by Gibson who has created the term "cyberspace":
"A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being tought mathematical concepts ... A graphic representation of data abstractd from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable Complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clustered and constellation of data. Like city lights, receding..." (Gibson 1984)
Doubtlessly, the experiences I described as being "wired" is exactly an experience of cyberspace in this sense.

2) Isabell Stengers takes turn with a statement of radical constructivism: It has always been like that, i.e. realities have always been constructed. So what is the difference? Let's step in and see all the wonders of the new cyber-universe of realities to celebrate the telenoia of cyberception, as Roy Ascott calls it. The only difference, Stenger tells us - we loose our weight when we are "in". And this simply means, that cyberspace is a "nonspace" in the ordinary sence, a paraspace, informational space.

3) Michael Benedikt himself, editor of the volume, is more "down to earth". He proposes to conceive of cyberspace in Popperian terms as "world 3", where world 1 is the name for the physical, spacia-temporal world, and "world 2" for the realm of subjective consciousness. And "world 3" then is the world of objectivized, real and public structures of knowledge and ideas, such as scientific theories, religion, philosophy, art, inculding all the material and institutional arrangements of informations storage like libraries, etc.: "A cyberspace, we now might see, is nothing more, nor less the latest stage in the evolution of world 3" (Benedikt 1994,4). Furthermore, Benedikt argues, and many of the authors in the volume do, cyberspace in that sence will not "replace `real reality'", say the air, our bodies, books, streets". It also it will not replace all the elements of former world 3, but ruther displace them, and others would add: enrich and transform them.
Conceptions and definitions of "cyberspace" rest on different and contesting ontological frameworks, which can be contrasted as "realist" versus "constructivist". While it seems reasonable to argue for the Popperian world 3 - ontology, there seem to be good arguments also in favour of constructivism. So one could say that as soon as one talks about things in words, using symbols, that there very structere involves a certain amount of virtuality. For that reason the much used term "virtual reality" as a synonym for cyberspace is in need of specification. What it means are perceptual, sensual and informational spaces created with the help of special informational technologies.
On the other side, the universality of virtual features in any use of symbols and images does not render useless the Popperian distincitons for defining cyberspace: It seems to be indispensable to distinguish between
1) the very materiality of the technological features involved, chips, cables, computers, keyboards, screens etc.,
2) the mental and psychic dimensions of the persons involved, and
3) the informational space of symbols, codes, imgages making up the universe of cybernetic systems.
To be "in" cyberspace, then usually means to dispose of a technological equipment enabling to communicate in the datanet.

Cybernetic Selfhood?

This seems especially important if one talks about subjects, selves and bodies in the world of cyberspace technologies.
Experiences and images of subjectivity and selfhood are evolving together with media of their articulation. Historically the idea of the subject vis a vis an outer reality and a group is the achievement of a culture of writing, and it has found its strongest articulat i on in the age of books and a culture of reading. Theories of the subject from Descartes to Kant (at least) are resting on a stable dichotomy between subject and object, of internal and external reality, world 1 and 2 in Popperian terms. The linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy has drawn the attention to the social and symbolic foundations of the creation of selfhood, in terms of social interaction and shared language games (Mead, Wittgenstein), making visible the transsubjective and socially constructed realm of world 3.

Those who are on-line know about the force with which especially the new interactive and multi-media technices of information are able to pervade and attract us - offering images, or "identity options", digitalized, in most cases a two-dimensional image on a computer-display, all of them usable to form, as I would like to call them, flat and floating identities.
Flat identities - a call them flat because they are not related to the spacio-temporal coordinates of my lived body, to the sensual channels of my awareness of what is going on here and now. And I would ask: what are they good for, except for getting lost in a space where I am not alife. Or, am I?

Floating identities, terminal bodies.

A sound theory of body and self will reflect the tree-dimensional ontology proposed by Popper: As embodied selves we are part of the material World I, the realm of psychic experience, World 2, and the realm of images, symbols, ideas, World 3.
Experiences and images of subjectivity and selfhood are evolving together with media of their articulation. So it was the context of a culture of wirting the invention of writing that led to the birth of the idea of a subject vis a vis an outer reality including social reality, and it has found its strongest articulation in the age of books and a culture of reading. Theories of the subject from Descartes to Kant (at least) are resting on a stable dichotomy between subject and object, of internal and external reality, world 1 and 2 in Popperian terms. The linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy has drawn the attention to the social and symbolic foundations of the creation of selfhood, in terms of social interaction and shared language games (Mead, Wittgenstein), making visible the transsubjective realm of world 3, the world of ideas.
The recently developed telematic technologies have, as it seems, displaced both social face-to-face interaction and language games as the primary fabric of selfhood, at least for special strata of the population and for certain purposes. How and in what d irections do technologies like the international data-networks and technologies for computing artificial perceptual environments transform ideas of selfhood, or, to use a more problematic term, of "personal identity"? Given the diversity of sites, technological possibilities, purposes, it is not possible to give a simple answer.
Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, has done extensive interviews with MUD users, and provides us with evidences of the effect of such technologies for the process of identity formation.
MUDs, she suggests, are " social laboratories for experimenting with the construction and the reconstruction of self that characterizes postmodern life" (Turkle 1995, 180). To be precise: What are muds- social spaces or mere virtual spaces? Do people joint the MUDs just for fun or are the split into real persons out there and virtual personae in the net? Turkle takes the view point of the conventional distincton between constructed personae and real self (Turkle 1995, 187). But at the same time she seems to take slippages between personae and real self as a standard case. She starts by describing a girl playing real world- role games. Such games, says Turkle, may be escapist, but also pschologically constructive - a kind of therapy. MUDs are social games, too, but with fuzzy boundaries to real life, because there is no socially approved dividing line between the virtual an the real. Turkle does not explain why this is so but I assume it is because Muds are always are there and it is a solitary decision of the individual when and how long to join it, maybe during worktime while doing other works with their computer.
The main idea of the MUD is the virtual reshaping of ones self-image: "You are what you pretend to be ... you are what you play" (Turkle 1995, 200).When joining a Mud one has first to invent his or her persona. Being perceived and reacted to by the other members of the MUDs evidently gives you a very strong sense of being really that and beeing really there, especially of you stay in the Mud for eight hours a day as many of the people do whom Turkle has interviewed.
The recently developed telematic technologies have, as it seems, displaced both social face-to-face interaction and language games as the primary fabric of selfhood, at least for special strata of the population and for certain purposes. How and in what directions do technologies like the international data-networks and technologies for computing artificial perceptual environments transform ideas of selfhood, or, to use a more problematic term, of "personal identity"? Given the diversity of sites, technological possibilities, purposes, it is not possible to give a simple answer. But the following can be assumed: As the general feature of telecommuication is nonlocality, it will be socially desituated, highly optional, and more and more "virtual", and that means: dislocated from immediate sensual and embodied experience ideas of what one is. It will be patterns of "selves in progress" by virtue of the use of technologies, which themselves are not neutral, but impose predefinded possibilities according to the consensual agreement of companies of software engineering or "virtual communities" of different kinds who now take the authority as informational decision makers who have the power to "define the situation on line". So such selfhood in progress is dependend to a great extent of what is already "possible", availble for choice in the net.
All that shatters inherited ideas of authenticity as criterion for "real selfhood". Local communities or life contexts cease to be the source for "relevant others" operating in the intersubjective formation and consolidation of a sense of selfhood, of being really this or that, such and such a person, as individual. Thus, the data-realm of cyberspace creates nomadic subjects (Braidotti 1994) with multiple identities, enforcing at the same time global tendencies of individualization and isolation. The young cybernauts, hackers, are something as a new typ of youth culture, and the texts of cyberpunk give illustration of a new way of life - and maybe death - in cyberspace.
One of its features seem to be exactly that kind of almost schizophrenic split between virtual selves, arranged by and arranging themselves in the "net", and "terminal bodies", embodied bexistences hardly aware of them selves. "Terminal" bodies are to some extent the absent body of this virtual self; they are absent from the cybermind who definess himselves exclusively through the intellectual and technical devices on the desktops of computer centers, which according to a more precise definition are - happily - "pre-cyberspace" in the best case. In her paper on The Embodied Computer/User Deborah Lupton observes this split araisng from the utopian discourse about "escaping the body" in cyberpunk literature and the resulting disparity between the images of the masculine heroes of Blade Runner, Terminator or Robocop and the soft, bloodless and pale appearance of the comupter nerds, whose apperance is presented as out of cpntrol as a consequence of their computer obsession. As an example photographs of the legendary hacker Kevin Mitnik present him as the archetypical "computer nerd"- "complete with spectacles, pale skin, pudgy body and double chin". And Lupton goes on: "This physical characteristic contrast with the abstract images of his disembodied on-line hacker persona - Time Australia Magazine shows in an article on the Mitnick case a surreal photograph of two computers side by side, the only sign of embodied presence an arm extending from one to clutch the keyboard of the other, thus symbolizing the "pleasure of hacking". Mitnick was sentenced to participate a six-month addiction programme wehn he was last arrested for hacking, but `soon reverted to his old habits'. And Lupton concludes:
"The bodies of the computer `hackers' and `nerds', thus, are not transcendended through their owners pursuits, On the contrary, their bodies are inscribed upon and constructed through the computers they use. Their physical characteristics betray their obsession to others. What is more, such individuals are described as `addicted' to computing as if it were a drug. They thus lack control over their bodies and desires, in sharp contrast to the rationalized, contained body of the masculine cyborg." (Lupton 1996, 103).
Images of selfhood in "cyberception" (Ascott 1994) are so far not images of bodiless selves. Such images may be the imaginary of a ruthless desire for adventures of virtualitiy, of "teleneoia" as a new form of conscious life. And they will be more often imaginary compensation of human fears - fears of alienation or of loneliness. In anys case, as long we are not able and/or not willing to download all of us, our bodies and our brains, to the net (Moravec 1993), these virtual imaginations of ourselves will depend on this our body, not just as a terminal body, but as the very condition of possibility of life as we have come to know and appreciate it and still do.

Bibliography:

Ascott, Roy, The Architecture of Cyberception, in: Leonardo Electronic Almanac, September, 1994
Benedict, Michael (ed.), Cyberspace. First Steps, MIT 1991
Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects. Columbia University Press 1994
Brentano, Franz, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1. Bd., Hamburg (Meiner) 1955
Gibson, William, Meuromancer, 1984, dt. München 1987
List, Elisabeth, Platon im Cyberspace. Technologien der Entkörperlichung und Visionen vom körperlosen Selbst. In: Ilse Modelmog/Edit Kirsch-Auwärter (Hg.), Kultur in Bewegung. Beharrliche Ermächtigungen, Freiburg i. B. 1996, 83 - 109
Lupton, Deborah, The Embodied Computer/User, in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, Body & Society Vol 1 (3-4) 1995,
97 -112
Moravec, Hans, Geist ohne Körper - Visionen von der reinen Intelligenz, in: Gert Kaiser, Dirk Matejkovski, Jutta Fedrowitz (Hg.), Kultur und Technik im 21. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt 1993, 81 - 90
MacFadden, Tim, Notes on the Structure of Cyberspace and the Ballistic Actor Modell, in Michael Benedikt 1994, 335 - 362
Rosenfield, Israel, Das Fremde, Das Vertraute und das Vergessene. Anatomie des Bewußtseins, Frankfurt 1992
Turkle, Sherry, Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of Internet, New York 1995, dt. Leben im Netz. Identität in Zeiten des Internet, Hamburg 1998
Varela, Francisco J., Ethisches Können, Frankfurt 1994

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