TECHNOPHOBIA: EXPLORING FEARFUL VIRTUALITY

Kathryne Metcalf

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

August 2019

Committee:

Clayton Rosati, Advisor

Edgar Landgraf ii ABSTRACT

Clayton Rosati, Advisor

With 171 million active users and a market value expected to climb to almost $17 billion

in the next three years, Virtual Reality (VR) would appear to be a technology on the rise. Yet

despite the public fervor for VR, our media landscape has long been marked by phobic depictions

of the same—from William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), to The Matrix (1999), to Black

Mirror (2011-present), VR fictions always seem to dread its presence even as their audiences

anticipate these feared technologies. How, then, can we explain the durability of fiction fearing

VR, and what use might we find for that phobic response? While ample previous scholarship has

explored how horror and other forms of genre fiction reflect specific cultural anxieties, to this

point little work has been devoted to technophobic fiction as it represents and serves to manage

cultural responses to new and emerging technologies. As VR grows increasingly common, such

fiction might offer a powerful tool toward anticipating its uses—good and bad—as well as to

influence the ends for which these technologies are taken up. Through textual analysis of Ready

Player One (2018) and “San Junipero” (2017), I explore how fears of capitalist subjugation, disembodiment, and the limitations of the humanist self come to be displaced in VR’s technological systems. This work clarifies the technosocial politics of VR as they penetrate what

it means to be human, and how technophobia itself might be mobilized toward the creation of a

better technological future. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my partner Jeremy Kemball and my friend Tabby Violet for their help and support. They each read innumerable drafts, troubleshot confused arguments, and talked through countless instances of late-night frustration. I could not have managed the writing process without them.

Thank you also to Dr. Edgar Landgraf for his patience discussing the complexities of

(inevitably German) theory, and for his perpetual cheer and unflagging interest in my work. His passion and generosity with his time have been both inspiring and enormously helpful in completing this thesis.

Finally, thank you to Dr. Clayton Rosati. He pushed me to answer more difficult questions than I would have set for myself, and to pursue more ambitious goals both in this project and in my professional future. My life is very different for having met him, and I am exceptionally grateful for his mentorship and support. iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION: ENTERING VIRTUALITY ...... 1

Historicizing and Contextualizing VR’s Fearful New Worlds ...... 5

On VR Itself: Theoretical and Definitional Challenges ...... 8

Methodology: Reading Cultural Anxiety Through Genre Fiction ...... 13

CHAPTER I. READING PHOBIA IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOSOCIAL

SYSTEMS...... 17

Virtual Revolutions: Marcuse and Technological Liberation ...... 19

Technophobia as Counter-Revolution ...... 24

Critiques of Technophobia in Literature and Film ...... 29

Early Studies ...... 30

Contemporary Scholarship ...... 32

Social Ordering and Technology: Marcuse and Heidegger ...... 37

Against Technophobia: Heidegger on Technology’s Essence ...... 40

Revitalizing a Political Techne ...... 43

From Technophobia to Techno-utopia ...... 48

CHAPTER II. VIRTUAL PLEASURES AND VIRTUAL PAUPERS: VR FICTION AS A

CRITIQUE OF UTOPIAN CAPITAL ...... 51

Online Abundance and Offline Scarcity: Poverty and VR Economies ...... 56

Utopian Architecture and Impossible Ideals: VR as Capital’s Seduction ...... 60

Authentic but Anonymous Avatars: Fearing Sociality Online ...... 63 v

Virtual Paupers in Virtual Reality...... 69

Failed Revolutions and Alternative Mediations ...... 73

CHAPTER III. POSTHUMANISM AND THE VIRTUALIZED BODY ...... 77

Biomedical VR...... 79

The Virtual Abject ...... 82

Death and Dis/embodiment...... 85

Purifying the Abject ...... 88

Returning to the Body: Posthuman Articulation ...... 91

Social Articulation and Multiplicity ...... 94

Hybrid Embodiment...... 96

CONCLUSION: THE LIBERATORY AND FEARFUL TECHNOLOGICAL

IMAGINATION ...... 99

REFERENCES ...... 105 1

INTRODUCTION: ENTERING VIRTUALITY

“Oh, uh—”

It is May 2017, and I am standing in the crowded main hall of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, fiddling with an Oculus Rift headset as the colossal skeleton of Sue the T-

Rex looks on. Under the headset, an older man extends his arms suddenly, straight out, lurches in his seat. “Uh—” he repeats, this time with significantly more urgency.

“That must be working again,” quips the technician next to me, and behind us dozens of museum visitors laugh, waiting for their own chance to be startled into their first look through virtual reality (VR). The man takes off the headset after less than a minute, apologizes, and quickly walks away shaking his head—a somewhat common reaction in our time at the Field, as

several thousand visitors tried out our demonstration.

These types of “demos” pop up everywhere in the literature of VR—as do their

invariably fearful participants. Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford researcher and pioneer of emotive

VR, begins his recent book Infinite Reality with an account of a frightened Mark Zuckerberg

placed into a simulation straddling the edge of a giant pit (2). Howard Rheingold, an American

media scholar who travelled around the world documenting VR research laboratories in the

1980s, offers several such accounts: Timothy Leary blanching at the NASA Ames research

facility, one of the earliest VR labs in the country, as well as himself suddenly nauseated within

an Autodesk demonstration in Japan (156, 30). Somewhat similarly, Jaron Lanier, the founder of

VPL Research (formerly “Virtual Programming Languages,” bought by Sun Microsystems in

1999) and the father of contemporary virtual reality technologies, describes his working group’s

standard demo as a collection of large falling blocks that terrified participants. During one such

demo, a participant was so frightened as to vigorously dive under a nearby table, badly injuring 2

their arm in the process (Lanier 120). It’s clear that these VR demos seem to represent a real

danger, at least to some.

My own first experience in virtual reality, sometime in the spring of 2000, was in such a demo: through a friend of a friend, we had secured a private visit to the CAVE (Cave Automated

Virtual Environment) at the University of Illinois Simulation Laboratory (ISL). I found that

setup—a small room surrounded by walls lit up with rear-projection, creating an immersive and

interactive simulation of an aquarium of tropical fish—to be riotously amusing. My companion,

however, found it uncomfortable and disquieting. We didn’t stay long. Close to two decades

later, in 2017, I was invited back to ISL as part of a media tour in my then-role as a University of

Illinois science writer. Though the technology had dramatically evolved (and the fish had been

replaced by an interactive map of Baghdad), several of the other participants again begged for

the demonstration to be cut short, claiming that it was “hard to breath” in the simulation. I didn’t

much mind the technology, but the déjà vu was unsettling.

It is easy to understand why so many would willingly go into a simulation without

anticipating their own fearful reaction. Until very recently, VR interfaces of all types were

prohibitively expensive, meaning that (unlike most other technological demonstrations) many

visitors to a simulation lab would have never experienced anything even remotely similar—as

such, and as I experienced in my own demo at the Field, expectation of what it might be like has

been shaped by decades of VR fictions with little to no idea of the realities of VR fact. This is

likely also why descriptions of such demos are rampant the work of VR technologists: demos

represent (or at least until recently, represented) the primary mode in which a member of the

public would have been likely to be able to interact with virtual reality—in a way, it’s their

method of inviting the reader to see themselves within the text. As Lanier describes of such 3

demonstrations, they have become “a canonical cultural event of our times: coming up with a

twist on our causal connection to reality and demoing it with digital devices. VR demos are like humor, opening up one’s thinking a little bit” (178).

It is interesting to imagine how virtuality might open up one’s thinking, but expansion of mind does not seem to be the story actually told by these technologists—nor does it seem to be

the one experienced by those in the ISL demos, or in my own demonstration program at the

Field. Rather, they all instead describe a pervasive sense of fear and malaise in those offering

witness to VR in a way that noticeably echoes within the genre: though it is hardly quantitative

evidence of commonality, it certainly suggests these fearful indications were (or are) common

enough so as to be rote, or even humorous, to those managing such technologies. What does this

say, then, about the deployment of virtual realities? What does it say about how the public

experiences them?

This type of unease is often chalked up to “simulator sickness,” a neurophysiological

response akin to other forms of motion sickness created by a disconnect between the expectation

and perception of motion (Duzmanska et al.). Though this type of straightforwardly biological

explanation must hold true in some circumstances, the ways in which these instances are

described seems to go beyond mere (virtual) seasickness: this cranial short-circuit is not just perceptive, but emotional, fearful. In his study of vertigo—a type of neurophysiologically- induced dizziness linked to simulator sickness, among other causative states—historian of science Jeffery Kirkwood suggests that such a condition draws our attention to “a complexity of soberer discourses on the connection between material systems and metaphysical unities” in a way that offers to shed light on the fearful problematic at play (1). Rather than a direct product of biological reality, vertigo is an “interface disorder” linked to the interruption of “the processes by 4

which the physical body produced a meta-level recognition of the subject as distinct from but related to objects” (2-3). Such an interruption reveals to us that our perception is, and has always been, inherently manufactured rather than externally-representative—it offers to startle us out of a belief in “the” reality in which we have trained ourselves to exist.

This is a quite profound realization in itself: virtual reality, through simulator sickness

(among other means), seems to threaten our relationship to reality itself—or at least, our

relationship to what we understand to be reality. Even Lanier, a man who has spent more hours

in virtual reality than any of us are ever likely to, seems to fall victim to such a fear at

moments—as he writes, “claustrophobia quickly sets in: a bit is a bit. As you watch the tree

change into a waterfall, you realize there was nothing essential about the bits being a tree or a

waterfall, or you being you, for that matter” (141). This hints at the very root of phobic responses

to VR demonstrations, that there is “nothing essential”—but Lanier seems lost in the deals of

what, exactly, lacks an essence: is it the VR environment or the self? And what is claustrophobic,

fearful, in that realization? Though several of the demos I’ve described presented overtly fearful

scenarios—falling blocks, a bottomless pit—others seem quite benign: Lanier describes a tree

and a waterfall; my Field demonstration placed the viewer in a bare, sunlit room. Why should

any of these have prompted so many fearful rejections? Why are these phobias so wide-spread,

seemingly able to infect anyone from Mark Zuckerberg,1 to media scholars, to the father of virtual reality himself?

1 Zuckerberg is now the owner of Oculus, the best-selling brand of VR headsets—clearly his fears didn’t preclude his economic sensibilities. 5

Historicizing and Contextualizing VR’s Fearful New Worlds

But despite these seemingly widespread fears, virtual reality’s star is clearly on the rise.

What was a somewhat cryptic technology available only to the wealthy and well-connected still a decade ago is now one of the fastest-growing market categories in consumer technologies: even though only roughly 1/3 of a survey group representative of American consumers had ever tried a virtual reality headset, augmented and virtual reality technologies are expected to reach a market size of nearly $17bn by 2021 (Nielsen SuperData). More interestingly, another market study queried participants about “the single most interesting aspect about virtual reality” [sic]; outcompeting “intense gaming experience,” “possibility to be ‘part of the movie,’” and “new possibilities for communication,” nearly 50% of respondents answered that they were most interested in “the feeling of entering a new world” (Perkins Coie). Not only is virtual reality highly anticipated, but it represents to a popular audience a vast possibility—or at least, the

“feeling” of one.

Beyond consumer sales of recognizable products such as Facebook’s Oculus Rift or

Samsung Gear, virtual reality has penetrated media and popular thought for an even longer time period. Unlike the thrilled and thrilling ecosystem that has arisen around these entertainment products, however, these depictions seem universally grim. Lanier suggests this darkness is in large part due to the emergence of cyberpunk as a genre following the publication of William

Gibson’s influential Neuromancer (1984)—as many scholars have disputed, though, our fears of

VR long predate that novel and even the genre of science fiction as we commonly understand it.

Victorianists and Romanticists tend to link VR to shadow-play phantasmagorias—popular amusements that used so-called magic lanterns to cast images of ghosts, ghouls and skeletons— as well as to panoramas, which critics such as Bernard Comment have argued were an early form 6 of “absolute dominance” over the real that allowed audiences to “experience the…illusion that they were masters of the world” as they in turn created it (qtd. Otto 45).

Such scholarship, which also tends to include depictions of ghosts and dream-states in period literature alongside real-world diversions such as phantasmagorias and panoramas, lacks a sense of technicality—the machined, “inhuman” nature of enabling systems which produce virtual experiences—common to more modern conceptions of the virtual. However, it is helpful in grounding cultural notions and artistic motifs of virtuality: as Peter Otto has concluded, “the contemporary cultural force of virtual reality is to a surprising degree shaped by assumptions about the virtual, and the relation between real and illusory/fictional worlds, that first emerge during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (7). These assumptions seem to include a deep discomfort with simulation that remains evident today—phantasmagorias were used to paint visions of Hell for popular enjoyment, a funhouse-mirror transformation of many more modern fictional accounts of VR wherein popular entertainments become a hell for their participants. Otto quotes a particularly vivid 18th century account of a German writer experiencing a panorama that reads uncannily familiar to the descriptions of VR demos that began this essay. As that man wrote:

I feel shackled with iron bands… I feel as if I am in a net spread by an irrational dream-

world, and neither the advice that I am distant from the location [presented by the

panorama], nor the daylight, nor the contrast with my own immediate surroundings can

rouse me from this fearful dream, from which I have to tear myself against my

will. (27-8) 7

Clearly, these techne-less forms share more with modern VR than we might immediately

assume, and perhaps, as Otto has argued, lay the foundation of our contemporary technophobia

as well.

Even if we are to limit our study to mechanical/computational VR, we find similar fears

not only in the experience of users—as the demos above suggest—but in the very design process

itself, coded into the history of this technological form. The first theorization of what a popular

audience would identify as the ancestor of today’s VR comes from Ivan Sutherland, who

described what he termed the “ultimate display” in a publication in 1965. Such a display would

be able to simulate an interactive image so realistic, aided by audio and tactile feedback, that it

would be indistinguishable from reality. “With appropriate programming,” he wrote, “such a

display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked” (Sutherland 506). Even in its

earliest conceptions, VR has always seemed to leave us poised on the brink of a new world—but

always with a fearful caveat.

In an early attempt to create such an “ultimate display,” Sutherland built the first head-

mounted display (HMD, a class which includes the “goggles” that dominate today’s VR

marketplace) in 1968; the device was fully functional by 1970. That system allowed the user to experience them self within a wire-frame “room” displayed by small screens positioned over their eyes. Lacking the space-saving capabilities of more modern LED screens, gaze tracking devices, microprocessors and other contributing technologies, it was a massive contraption, too heavy to be properly borne by the human frame. To make up for its weight, as well as to enable a rudimentary form of gaze-tracking through measuring the user’s head movements, Sutherland’s

HMD was suspended from the ceiling, inspiring its ironic (and perhaps phobic) name: the Sword of Damocles (Rheingold 150). 8

The name comes to us through Cicero, who relays the tale of Damocles in Tusculanae

Disputations. A courtier of Dionysius, Damocles exclaimed to his king that there must never have been anyone more fortunate than he to rule from a palace of seemingly infinite wealth and luxury. When Dionysius offered that Damocles might take his place for a day, the courtier leapt at the opportunity only to find that Dionysius arranged for an unexpected addition: a massive sword suspended over the throne, point down, held aloft by a single horse hair. Damocles blanched, and begged to be released from the seat of power. As Cicero concludes, "does not

Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms?" (Cicero 5.62).

As Otto’s “shackled” panorama viewer and Sutherland’s Sword seem to suggest, accounts of VR often seem to combine a sense of “absolute dominance,” per Comment’s gloss, and a simultaneous fearful rejection of the enabling technology. That power over “reality” and fear of the same have become enclosed within the discourses of VR itself—and so durably, spanning centuries and emerging at historic points in the design of VR technologies—suggests that the idea of virtuality itself might lay some special claim to the construction of reality that evokes a vertiginous reaction by the coin of that very construction. If reality can be manipulated in VR and so denatured, we might find ourselves on the cusp of a similar interface disorder that challenges the border between subjects and objects, human and not, self and other.

On VR Itself: Theoretical and Definitional Challenges

Defining “virtual reality” is a critical entry into such study, but a surprisingly difficult point to resolve. What we know today as virtual reality was not always called such; what was once called virtual reality is a far sight from what we know it as today. Contemporary virtual reality technologies generally share three features: they place the user in a simulated 9 environment, they are interactive, and they create a sense of “presence.” These technologies range from the “gloves and goggles” type that constitute the bulk of consumer VR products—the

Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear, Google Cardboard—to more immersive setups that include omni treadmills (the Virtuix), telepresence through robots and drones, full room displays

(CAVEs) and on.

This is hardly a static list, and indeed, no one seems to agree upon definitional boundaries of what VR actually is. Does it include mixed and augmented reality, such as so-called “window on world” displays including Google Glass (discussed in Ch. I) or Pokémon Go’s camera-based simulations? Does it include web-based applications like Second Life or MMORPGs that aren’t necessarily immersive? Might it even stretch to graphics-devoid chatrooms and online communities, which many 1990s cyberscholars would be quick to identify as “virtual spaces”?

Certainly, a popular audience of today would not consider World of Warcraft to be VR…but a mid-1990s audience, what else could they possibly think of it? A 1992 article in the New York

Times grappling with this same definitional vagueity quotes cyberneticist Peggy Weil, who suggests that “the entire field is in its infancy and badly needs a linguistic referee. We don’t know what to call this stuff” (Safire). That same article offers that “the real page you hold in your real hand at this very moment [constitutes] reality,” a troubling assertion when read on my laptop screen 27 years later (Safire). When the medium is rapidly evolving, is it possible to hold a meaningful definition?

Lanier, who is typically credited with coining the term “virtual reality,” offers twenty-six definitions in his most recent book, ranging from “the substitution of the interface between a person and the physical environment with an interface to a simulated environment” to “shared lucid dreaming” (47, 3). His term caught on quickly, replacing clunkier, less specific, and 10 baggage-laden descriptions including William Gibson’s “cyberspace,” NASA researcher

William Robbinett’s “interactive graphical simulations”2 (“every one of those three words is important,” he is oft quoted as clarifying), and early VR artist Myron Kruger’s Hobbes-inspired

“artificial reality” (Gibson; Robbinett; Kruger). Though “VR” has clearly come to be the universally preferred term today, used in industry publications, scientific journals and by the popular press, what technologies that term actually includes and where its boundaries might lie remains an unsteady category.

Before dealing with the technologies of VR, however, it would be useful to more fully interrogate the term itself—or at least, the half of it I question here. “Virtual” descends from the

Latin virtus meaning “valor, courage,” and likely comes from an even more ancient root: the

Proto-Indo-European vir, meaning “man” or “hero,” relating it to the Latin virga, meaning “rod,” colloquially used to refer to a phallus. Once used to reference a man’s power, the term underwent an odd (and somewhat Nietzschean) reversal by the 18th century, refiguring it from the reproductive prowess of man to the chastity of women (Barrett 198). The word also picked up a second definition, perhaps linked to its relationship with the Latin virus: “to be possessed of the power to influence, to have the potential to affect,” which the OED attests to the 12th century. As literary critic David Porush argues, this too stems from the phallus, metonymically linking the essence of man with man’s “essence” (Porush). This affective capacity carries over into the affective capability of VR—much like essence, it possesses the “power to influence” without claim to materiality.

2 Per Robbinett’s unpublished manuscript detailing the development of the computer games Adventure and Rocky’s Boots, “simulation offers a phenomenon from the world faithfully mimicked (but safely contained) in the computer. Graphical simulation brings the eye's great powers of analysis to bear in aiding the understanding, and in grasping the relations of cause and effect which govern the phenomenon under study. Interactivity lets the user test his tentative understanding by tweaking parts of the simulation and seeing if it behaves as expected.” 11

From there, “virtual” has come to more directly mean “essentially” or “so close to as to

be indistinguishable.” And yet, frustratingly, “virtual” also seems to signify the opposite of

“essential”—it is explicitly not the thing it claims to (virtually) be. As Porush writes of virtuality

and VR, it signals something “almost but not quite really real and so maybe somehow better and

sexier than reality itself,” something essential yet simultaneously absent. But Porush, too,

describes his experience in a 1995 VR demo as a seemingly phobic eroticism, similar to those

that began this essay: as he bluntly writes, “I thought I’d get a hard on. It made me throw up”

(Porush). What, then, are we to do with something that both is and isn’t? Why does it seem to

make us physically and, perhaps, spiritually ill?

There is a glimpse of something Derridean in this, evoking his writings on duality in

containment: the dangerous supplement, the pharmakon, a socially constructed artifact created to

complement “nature” that instead both adds to and erases its original—as writing is to speech or

masturbation to sex, so perhaps is VR to “real-reality.” Its simultaneous presence and absence suggest that virtuality in essence must always already have accompanied and structured reality, even before its technological embodiment—virtuality is a space of “full presence” in contrast to an always bracketed reality, such that virtuality exposes the absence within reality rather than the other way around. We can see this more directly play out through Kirkwood’s understanding of dizziness, or Lanier’s confusion between the mutability of virtual bits and self within virtual environment, or Otto’s recount of fearful responses to panoramas—the virtual is, and always has been, a fundamental denaturing force to our conceptions of reality through its re-presentation; its technological embodiment merely makes this public and plain. Such logic certainly seems apparent within the phobic specter evinced through media depictions of VR: as Derrida describes, we seem to understand that “this charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of 12

fascination, can be—alternately or simultaneously—beneficent or maleficent” in the ways in

which it exposes the limits of reality (429). As Porush experienced, this implicit doubling of

reality and virtuality is, as such, both erotic and philosophically nauseating.

Virtuality has long occupied a special place in both critical theory and philosophical

fiction as it comes to symbolize the ever-presence of mediation in a variety of forms—indeed,

Baudrillard’s own phrase “desert of the real” is quoted forebodingly to characterize The Matrix, and has become something of a trope within both academic and fictional representations of virtuality (Baudrillard 2). In his analysis of the breakdown of the sign order in contemporary hyper/reality, Baudrillard attempts to deal with the dizzying revelation of absence which virtuality (for him, hyperreality) demands. He offers Disneyland in concrete example: it offers “a play of illusions and phantasms” in a way which recalls the full potentiality of virtuality, and creates a space for the childish imaginary and “the warmth of the crowd” which are absent adult society (10). What Baudrillard here offers, beyond this shared play of presence and absence, is a curious mechanism absent Derrida’s formulations: the supplement does not only demonstrate absence, but is produced to “recycle” such an awareness back into a productive schema, to paper over the very hole that proves its existence (11). Disneyland exists only to conceal “the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus [save] the reality principle”; our expectations of perceptual reality “need this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system,” a functional redirect away from the short circuit (dizziness) such absence provokes (10). As Baudrillard suggests in much the same way as does Kirkwood, the discovery of this impossible incompatibility can only provoke “a mental catastrophe, a mental implosion and involution without precedent”—the intervention of a supplement reproducing the “Real” is at once dangerous and protective, both demonstrating and shielding us from its own ontology (11). Vertigo intercedes. 13

Of course, I am far from the first to suggest that VR is hyperreality embodied in

technology, or that reproduction changes the relation between art and reality; however, such

critique tends to be surface deep, escaping its important politics. Baudrillard explores actual

harms created through or by hyperreal processes, including the alienation inherent in

urbanization and multinational capitalism—both violent phenomena, a topic I will expand in

Chapter II where I will argue that VR itself contains a critique of capital. My point in outlining

this theoretical heritage is to demonstrate that virtuality itself, beyond its technological

embodiment, has long been discussed as a multiple, seductive, and potentially dangerous state.

Though this may appear innocent, or perhaps coincidental, the scale of this imagining is so

reaching as to be inescapable. That these fearful visions are presented not only through our

popular media and VR technologists’ experiences with its material form but are further located

within our very understanding of virtuality as a concept suggests that the magnitude of our

phobia extends nearly to the horizon. However, such theory also offers a window through which

we might better understand—or at least, correctly locate the origins of—our VR technophobia

onscreen.

Methodology: Reading Cultural Anxiety Through Genre Fiction

This study offers a textual analysis of technophobic films to elucidate how their shared

fears illustrate the mechanisms and specific anxieties represented by contemporary virtual reality

technologies. While Chapter II focuses on genre conventions of popular fictions fearing VR in

order to establish a broad set of general fears associated with phobic virtuality through the film

Ready Player One (2018), Chapter III offers an analysis of the 2017 Black Mirror episode “San

Junipero” which renegotiates these fears toward a radical, utopian potentiality. These readings work to establish a symbolic relationship between the conventions of fictional virtual reality and 14 modes of technosocial ordering in the production of daily life. This relationship springboards a theoretical critique of the possibilities for human existence within technological systems, both as they play out through the funhouse-mirror reflections of science fiction futures as well as how those fictions might serve to imagine and produce a new reality.

Because the circulation of technophobic fears abstracts and displaces cultural anxiety from its true objects (discussed further in Ch. I)—a process difficult to decode at the level of individual experience—the investigation of popular culture texts offers a useful medium through which to reidentify the fears supplanted into phobic VR. Critics of genre fiction, particularly horror and gothic literature, have long held that the conventions of such texts offer visions of cultural anxieties birthed into other forms—Paul Wells, charting the evolution of horror narratives through social and cultural shifts, comments that “the history of horror film is essentially the history of anxiety in the 20th century…[illustrating] the phobias of a ‘new’ world characterized by a rationale of industrial, technological, and economic determinism” (3). Such media serve as a historical record of broad, shifting concerns linked to changes in social conditions; they come to represent the most concrete vocalizations of nebulous, popular fears. As

Joseph Grixti similarly argues in the seminal Terrors of Uncertainty, horror fictions “form part of a complex discursive process which is an integral component of the models deployed by contemporary society (often tacitly and uncritically) to understand itself” (xiii). Such work holds a mirror to popular phobias and anxieties while holding space for them to be understood, negotiated, and critiqued—it offers an imaginative landscape in which we can experiment with different forms of management through associative play.

Though technophobia as a subgenre would appear to be positioned at the juncture of horror and science fiction, the texts I examine here are far from horrific, and their interest in 15 technoscience might be read as secondary to their predominant genre-coding. However, as they participate in genre conventions common to phobic and sci-fi cinema, they yet bear study through these methods: each offers a particularly valuable exploration into specific fears (and promises) of virtual reality that shed light on the non-fictional phobic eruptions offered in this introduction. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018), the object of Ch. II, serves as a useful model to observe the genre of VR fiction as a whole through its replication of popular culture tropes, plots, and characters. Through an analysis of that film as read against a body of other popular movies prominently featuring VR, I establish a set of genre conventions illustrative of the fears of VR fiction in order to offer a Marxian critique of virtualization as a social process, as well as to analyze the durable pairing of scarcity and abundance in such texts. In contrast to

Ready Player One’s blunt, unnuanced fears, Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” (2017) offers a critical foil which tempers its phobic construction of VR with an assessment of its utopian possibilities, grappling with the creation of lifeways through fear in a variety of embodiments.

That episode, read in Ch. III, serves to ground a revolutionary imaginary enabled through VR, offering a possible mobilization of our technophobic impulses toward the creation of a more equitable society.

Through this research, I hope to clarify what cultural anxieties have been displaced into fictional virtual realities as a genre, as well as to explore how those fears have been managed, mediated, and mobilized in ways that propose radical political imaginaries for our technological future. Such work is important not only within our understanding of how technological anxiety stems from and shapes social existence, but for the future construction of democratic technologies that serve to further equitable social processes. From self-driving tractors, to 16 deepfake videos, to geosynchronous satellites,3 science fiction has long prefigured technoscientific development—by taking the fears of such fiction seriously, we might hope to identify the dangers and directions of future technosocial development.

3 All three of these inventions first appeared in speculative fiction, described respectively in Otfrid von Hanstein’s “The Hidden Colony” (1935), JG Ballard’s “Studio Five: The Stars” (1971), and Arthur C. Clarke’s V2 for Ionospheric Research (1945). See Technovelgy for more examples. 17

CHAPTER I. READING PHOBIA IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOSOCIAL

SYSTEMS

Google Glass was supposed to be “revolutionary,” according to early press coverage. It

was supposed to be a technology that would refigure our ways of life by bringing the virtual into

the actual, the quotidian, the mundane, by attaching it to our bodies—refiguring our

phenomenological experience of technologized embodiment in the process. The company’s

promises were so radical that the beta wasn’t simply sold, they made people ask for it. Interested

parties were invited to write Google an essay detailing what they would do with the AR system,

the first of its kind, for which they might receive the privilege of becoming one of the device’s

earliest users (Lee).

Those early adopters, called “Explorers” in subsequent Google marketing material, were promised “an amazing journey” through a new technological world by Google co-founder and

Glass spokesman Sergey Brin (Glass Almanac). The rest of the world seemed to agree. Even before its popular release, Time declared it one of the best inventions of 2012; Vice used Glass to cover the Istanbul protests of that year, positioning it as a powerful new tool for immersive journalism; and Vogue even included a 12-page spread featuring models in Glass-es in their annual best-selling September edition dedicated to “the future of fashion” (Time Editors;

Dredge; Klein). The idea that virtual reality would come to penetrate social existence by literally mediating our views of the world, interlaid over the top right corner of your right eye, appeared to be a radical new frontier. Technologists, journalists, and celebrities all but tripped over each other to be among the first virtual pioneers in Brin’s new world.

And then: nothing. Google Glass was, for all intents and purposes, dead within three years. So much for a revolution. 18

It wasn’t that the technology wasn’t viable, or wasn’t salable—far from it, as the success of other wearables and AR systems has since demonstrated. People were simply afraid of what it represented. As a journalist for Gawker’s technology gossip offshoot Valleywag described, “of

[Google Glass’] two best uses one is wildly dangerous and the other makes one's fellow human beings paranoid and angry… [instead of using Glass,] I recommend inhabiting your body and being aware of your environment while you walk, which is genuinely good and borderline joyful and nothing to be so afraid of” (Schoech). Though Schoech’s work is obviously meant to be humorous, it seems important that the malefic dangers of technology are positioned against the beneficence of “inhabiting your own body” and simply existing in the world. Glass—and VR as a whole—always seem poised to take us away from our bodies, to divide experience from reality, to nauseate. And yet VR still attracts the language of revolution, of new worlds: the “next big thing in VR,” Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset, is now poised to “revolutionize” the ways we use technology (Rubin).

If not Google Glass, we might ask: what would a revolutionary technology be, and what, exactly, would it revolutionize? From techno-utopianists (e.g., Ray Kurzweil) to technophobic reactionaries (e.g. Jacques Ellul, Theodore Roszak), advances in technology have long been understood as vehicles for a variety of social transformations—good and bad. In the worst case, these approaches assume a unilinear development of technological progress that advances under its own volition, or a “natural” human essence at risk of corruption by technological infiltration.

But several intellectual projects have tried to understand technology in less problematic ways.

Herbert Marcuse’s 1960s work on liberation stands out for its unification of politics and technology under the banner of contemporary aesthetics, which makes plain our instinctual impulses in both art and technology. Marcuse calls this process “desublimation,” and suggests it 19 has the potential to be either repressive or liberating—though as with Glass, we might see that either can offer dramatic social change.

This chapter will read Marcuse’s technological theory as a critique of technophobia which offers to render it a productive social force. To do this, it will outline the history and theoretical trajectory of technophobia to which Marcuse responds and also prefigures, look at how the analysis of technophobia in literature misses many of the insights he develops, and attempts to construct a framework through which fearful art can itself be read as a utopian force even as it represents and is representative of a dystopian world.

Virtual Revolutions: Marcuse and Technological Liberation

It is no accident that Herbert Marcuse similarly saw technology and revolution as interconnected projects. In his “Essay on Liberation” (1969), Marcuse offers a radical vision of what he terms the New Reality Principle: a future in which advanced industrialization has not only changed the nature of man’s needs to abate his subservience to consumerism, but has further opened the door to a utopian liberatory potential within our grasp. Such a liberation would entail freedom from false needs4 and an expansion of life-affirming activities in a world beyond scarcity, as such scarcity is itself artificial and generated only in the maintenance of hegemonic control. This would create “a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself” (Marcuse 1969 23). Technology and science are the “vehicles of freedom” toward this new world order even as they are

4 False needs are those created and maintained toward the maintenance of consumerist capitalism. They are “those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp his chances of curing the disease. The result, then, is euphoria in unhappiness” (Marcuse 1964 7). 20

implicated in the creation of industrial capitalism that necessitates such intervention (Marcuse

1969 19).5

This freedom, however, is reliant on the (co)evolution of desublimating art—the mode of

artistic creation that Marcuse suggests characterizes contemporary society. As he develops in

One-Dimensional Man, art has come to be fully enclosed within the commodity form6 as it

directly re-presents to us our aggressive and libidinal drives—drives that would otherwise be

productively and artistically sublimated toward the kind of beauty and other life-affirming

activities he identifies as utopian impulses (Marcuse 1964 60). In this way, desublimating art is

repressive: it currently serves to release what energies we might instead collect toward social

critique, passively maintaining the hegemonic status quo and removing sublimating art’s ability

to introduce artistic alienation that might spur social action (the Estrangement principle).

Technology, Marcuse suggests, might offer the intervention that would redirect our drives—and

in doing so, our art—toward a liberatory future despite both art and technology’s roles in our

current unfreedom.

In this way, Marcuse’s work suggests an inherent pairing of fear and hope within the

potentialities of technology as a whole, as it is both the tool of repressive industrialism and the

key to its undoing. This pairing offers a fertile landscape in which to theorize the utility and

limitations of technophobic imaginations, particularly as they in turn shape our understandings of

society and of humanity itself. As he argues, technocapitalism and the market economy have

driven changes in our very “biology,” rendering humanity covetous consumers whose

5 This develops an earlier point made passingly in One-Dimensional Man—“that this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development” (3). 6 “The liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values,’ but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale” (Marcuse 1964 60). 21 fundamental need for self-identification through purchase cannot be undone by simply socializing the means of production. Despite the connotative problems of the term “biological,”

Marcuse’s construction of a mutable and non-essential human (social) nature is important. In his own words:

to the degree to which this foundation is itself historical and the malleability of ‘human

nature’ reaches into the depth of man’s instinctual structure, changes in morality may

‘sink down’ into the ‘biological’ dimension and modify organic behavior. Once a specific

morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected – it

also operates as a norm of ‘organic’ behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain

stimuli and ‘ignores’ and repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is

thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective

society (Marcuse 1969 13-4).

That “human nature” and “instinctual structure” are historically and culturally formed has implications for desublimating art, and in turn, technology. If desublimation reveals our deepest instincts and those instincts themselves are dictated via culture under capitalism, we seem to find ourselves in an inescapable cycle—as he similarly has it, “the music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship” (Marcuse 1964 61). Desublimation then can only be repressive, an assumption that characterizes his earlier work. This presents a difficult dilemma: culture itself must be changed—liberated—before our instinctual drives desire it if we are to find a new societal structuring or a new morality.

Indeed, these “biological” changes are so deeply held that only radical shifts in the maintenance of life itself will be able to reshape humanity toward a truly democratic existence beyond the pull of capital—shifts that technology might enable. As Marcuse continues, 22

Is such a change in the ‘nature of man’ conceivable? I believe so, because technical

progress has reached a stage in which reality no longer need be defined by the

debilitating competition for social survival and advancement. The more these technical

capacities outgrow the framework of exploitation within which they continue to be

confined and abused, the more they propel the drives and aspirations of men to a point at

which the necessities of life cease to demand the aggressive performances of ‘earning a

living,’ and the ‘non-necessary’ becomes a vital need (Marcuse 1969 5).

Following Marx,7 technology is for Marcuse a tool of domination rather than its driving force.

However, (and also like Marx), Marcuse’s suggestion that it might “outgrow” the “abusive”

constraints of that use refigures both technology itself and our relationship to it. Rather than

existing only as a passive conduit through which human influence and desire might be

channeled, technology seems almost possessed of a life of its own, with the ability to act, to perform labor in concert with human actors, and to together redefine the structuring capacities of reality itself—to, for instance, “propel … drives and aspirations.” If those drives and aspirations change, so too would the art that desublimates them, brings them into the public sphere—that art would be liberating, rather than repressive. Art and technology together would then seem to form a radical and potentially revolutionary mode of “human nature”—but this necessitates a particular construction of technology to enable such change.

As he argues of human “biology” that “instinctual revolt turns into political rebellion… which now appears as a precondition for liberation,” we might too imagine a technology whose

“biological introjection,” whose materialized morality, is itself cause for revolt (Marcuse 1969

7 As Marx makes this argument in Capital: “it took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used” (Marx 1976 551). 23

9). To this end, Marcuse suggests that “science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals” before they might be able to “project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil” (Marcuse 1969 19). This demands a more careful attention to the creation of technology, as well as how technology in turn creates the “human universe” (Marcuse 1969 19). Otherwise, as with Google Glass, our technology will continue to reinforce repressive norms. The question is not simply “what new worlds does Google Glass (or

VR more broadly) allow us to enter” then, but rather, what biologizations of morality will new visualization technologies introject? In this sense, technology is both product and actor, not simply one or the other.

This is a provocative and forward-thinking theorization of the twinned and co-constituted natures of science and society—one that predates Latour and Law’s similar formulations within

Actor Network Theory (ANT) by well over a decade. Marcuse suggests that such a new sensibility might allow us to reclaim access to concepts such as equality and freedom beyond their narrow facsimiles offered through capital. This language might then allow us to revitalize art and the aesthetic form—a form we can extend to include technology through a revitalized scientific imagination. Through this process, society itself becomes a “work of art […which] depends on a revolution,” a revolution which demonstrates that “society’s capacity to produce may be akin to the creative capacity of art, and the construction of the world of art akin to the reconstruction of the real world – union of liberating art and liberating technology” (Marcuse

1969 37). This is to say, the ability of art and technology to “propel … drives and aspirations” is not a call to defend the consciousness of sovereign individuals but a call to struggle over the ends of that propulsion system. Technological art, artistic technology, techne, remains undefined in 24

Marcuse’s work—and yet, within the imagination of fiction, we might begin to see the contours of a “reconstruction” of technology toward the creation of a liberatory future.

This radical potential was and remains unrealized. As Marcuse argues of the failures of contemporary art, “the pacifying conquest of matter, the transfiguration of the object remain unreal – just as the revolution in perception remains unreal” leading to the conclusion that “the

translation of the potential into the actual is the work of political practice” (Marcuse 1969 35).

Revolution must then be the product of intentional actualization that attempts to articulate the as-

yet imperceptible. In his own words, “reality has to be discovered and projected. The senses must

learn not to see things anymore in the medium of that law and order which has formed them”

(Marcuse 1969 31). To realize a liberated future, we must first find a way of envisioning it in art.

But when it comes to VR, art is often more reactionary than revelatory—or worse.

Technophobia as Counter-Revolution

From the cyberheaven of Nicole Stenger’s VR film Angels (1989) to Ray Bradbury’s

philosophical speculation in “The Happiness Machine” (1954), virtual reality in fiction has long

been a vehicle for imagining such utopias—as well as their failures. Bradbury’s short story

describes a device (somewhat like Heilig’s early VR Sensorama) which creates immersive

experiences for its users. Though rapturously happy within the machine, the story’s characters

find their lives thereafter profoundly dissatisfying, even ruined, unable to again reach the

emotions and experiences provided by the technology. Similarly Stenger’s film, for instance,

showcases what appears to be a heavenly space in which participants found themselves to be

angels. Despite the uncomplicated utopia suggested by the film, it was accompanied shortly after

by an odd essay in a cyberspace studies anthology in which Stengers describes the sensation of

developing art in VR quite ominously, writing, “I felt that this hallucination behind a screen was 25 just the first stage in a development, a rehearsal for a D-day when this substance would finally escape and invade what we call reality” (Stengers). These works offer paired aesthetic beauty and fear in VR, always seeming to attribute each to the specific abilities of the technology itself without ever quite landing on the mechanism of their twinned nature.

Like Stengers and Bradbury, similarly failed utopic projects are routinely the site of technophobic imagination, fearing that what seem to be promising social and technical developments might carry with them unexpected consequences. These texts are counter- revolutionary in this sense, rejecting technology wholesale for its failures—and yet, by the coin of this duality, we might still identify in them a sense of revolutionary “drives and aspirations.”

If Marcuse is correct, there is something inherently catastrophic about the current hegemonic order; attempts to avoid those catastrophes, to find a “shortcut” to a utopian future, are thus always destined to fail as we see repeatedly in such texts. And yet such an attention to aesthetics, what Stengers, Bradbury, and others afford VR, are necessary components of a liberatory VR per the role of desublimating art toward engendering a revolutionary “biology”. How does the concept of virtuality itself—and how do its technological embodiments, or their representations in other aesthetic works—then allow us to ask revolutionary questions? How might VR itself herald a radical political consciousness, and what use might we find for its fears?

While I’ve devoted some time to exploring the etymology of “virtual” (see introduction), probing its embodiment of complications between perceptual experience and reality,

“technophobia” as a term seems equally of note to the questions I’ve posed here. Merriam-

Webster8 dates the term to 1947, as “a fear or dislike of advanced technology or complex devices and especially computers.” It has remained unchanged since. However, this accordance is

8 Merriam-Webster is the only dictionary with attestation for this word. 26 lacking definitionally, etymologically, and historically. While popular common-sense links the phenomena to personal computing, many technology scholars trace it much farther back— techne, from the Greek for “art, skill, craft,” encompasses far more than simply “advanced technology.” Between the Calton Weavers’ 1787 destruction of power looms (see the first volume of Capital) to Neil Postman’s (1985) broad, McLuhanian concern about the power of visual media over education and democratic society, there are endless iterations of fears of technologies far beyond those of “advanced” machines or computation. As technological historian Coye Cheshire summarizes, “you can go back to the printing press and find all this rhetoric about the fear that people would no longer need to remember things. Now, you hear people talking about that with regard to the Internet. What’s old is new again” (qtd. Oatman-

Stanford). Certainly, if 17th century panoramas evoke the same fear as 21st century VR demos, we can hardly limit ourselves to virtualities and technologies made up of silicone, plastic, and neodymium.

So techne itself is more reaching than we might assume—broader modern computing, broader even than mechanical technology we consider it. But what about the other half—phobos, fear? One of the earliest medical descriptions of phobia comes from Dr. Benjamin Rush, who in

1786 defines it as a condition entailing “a fear of an imaginary evil, or an undue fear of a real one” which results alternately in repulsion and/or aversion (qtd. Trotter 2). This is more or less in keeping with contemporary clinical descriptions. As the American Psychiatric Association’s

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) concludes, phobia describes a

“marked and persistent fear that is excessive or unreasonable, cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation” (DSM 318). Technophobia, though not specifically described within the DSM, claims a large body of research within contemporary psychology. 27

Mark Brosnan, the author of several such studies, accounts that “up to one third” of the population struggles with such fears, and that they are not simply limited to the older generation

(11). He concludes that such anxieties limit the ability of vast segments of the population in all demographics to access needed services, find employment, and participate in other processes of social functioning. Clearly, if Brosnan’s findings are to be taken seriously, the transmission and specific character of such fears (fear of virtual reality among them) must certainly demand further study.

It is definitional that these studies rely on categorization of the feared object (technology) as irrational (an “imaginary evil”), invoking taxonomies of appropriate and inappropriate fears that are neither static nor necessarily predictable—such cultural construction indicates the mutability of such phobias while yet underscoring the broad and transformative power of fear.

Take, for example, miasma theory and its contained fear of “bad air.” What was for centuries considered a rational response based on understandings of the transmission of disease is now a named ailment (mysophobia) associated with several psychiatric disorders. Miasma is also an excellent example of the large-scale social outcomes produced through constructions of phobia: as many historians have noted, fears of miasma drove the massive early-century urban sanitation projects in England and America—even after the popularization of the germ theory of disease should have “disproven” such anxiety (Johnson). Our mass-scale phobic responses to an invisible and misunderstood threat reshaped our cities and refigured many of the processes of daily life in the process. Though experienced at the individual level, phobia is certainly a transformative social force. If fear of such a “passive” object as air has the power to remake our lifeways on an international scale, what cultural forces might technophobia, a product of capital 28

and companion of dominative politics, then mobilize? And, further, what revolutions might they

preclude?

Such fears are transformative even as they remain mobile and unfixed: they are

constituted by the same landscapes and subjects that they in turn produce. As literary critic David

Trotter has assessed, phobia might be understood in this way as “an ontological disease. It might

even be ontology’s dis-ease with itself. It provokes us to ask whether ontology, underwhelming

as it overwhelms, might not after all have its uses, as a moral, political, and aesthetic resource”

(Trotter 3). Our categorization of fearful objects and the ways in which we depict them is, as

Trotter suggests, a powerful resource—one that offers to redefine political and aesthetic

production in much the same way as Marcuse talked about the necessary liberations of the same.

But this connection highlights the tension between phobia and revolution: though fear of the

technologies which serve to uphold the status quo might be rendered productive, fear of

technology as such would instead seem to contribute to a counterrevolutionary impulse,

precluding changes in the maintenance of human life that would penetrate our biologized

moralities.

This isn’t to imply that fears of technology are inherently “irrational,” as phobia’s

definition would seem to suggest. As with Google Glass, fears of specific technologies and the

social reorderings they appear to promote are well-justified—certainly, the surveillance culture

Glass enabled within its very design poses an obvious social harm (see Kudina & Verbeek 2018 for this discussion). Here we can identify the displacement: changes to privacy (and other) norms, not Glass itself or VR as a category, are the feared catastrophe. But this displacement is not obviously marked in every technophobic rejection of that device—like Schoech’s editorial quoted at the beginning of this chapter or Stenger’s and Bradbury’s fictions, fearful responses in 29

media warp toward other, less obvious or more complex fears ensconced within VR. In analyzing these fears—particularly as they become reinscribed in art, which should make plain

the human “drives” desublimated within—we must ask: how do phobias of VR technologies

serve to produce our social order, and how are they, in turn, produced? What alternatives do they

imagine and fear? What other fears are displaced within them?

Critiques of Technophobia in Literature and Film

Science fiction and speculative fiction have long been forms through which we attempt to

take seriously the ramifications of these lines of questioning. As Donna Haraway, herself a

thoughtful and studious reader of what she jointly terms “sf”, comments, “it matters what stories

make worlds and what worlds make stories” because we are always engaged in the “relentless

contingency” of worldmaking (Haraway). Like Marcuse she identifies the value of technological

imagination, here situated in the form of fictions. Through these fictions, we can play-act

alternative forms of social ordering, “enter into” different worlds. VR, as it creates inhabitable

worlds within the worlds of fiction, offers a self-awareness of fiction’s potential to theorize the

technological construction of the social within the social construction of the technical,

recursively binding human to machine while forging new futures for both.

Despite the overwhelming preponderance of texts fearing all the manner of technologies

and scientific advances, startlingly little scholarship has invested in reading the technologically- specific cultural anxiety evidenced through them, favoring instead narrow readings of specific works without regard to their shared tensions. This is in part linked to a longstanding academic reticence toward serious consideration of science fiction as a whole, the genre and publishing niche in which most of such technophobic speculative fiction has found itself within. As Susan

Sontag indicatively commented in the 1980s, “there is absolutely no social criticism, of even the 30

most implicit kind, in science fiction films. No criticism, for example, of the conditions of our

society which create the impersonality and dehumanization which science fiction fantasies

displace onto the influence of an alien It" (Sontag 223). This, of course, is a ludicrous

assertion—technological fantasy offers some of our most poignant and pointed critique of our

technological society, and as theorist well versed in psychoanalysis, Sontag should have known

that aliens often represent our best and most critical Others.

Early Studies

Nonetheless, such sentiment limited the scope of inquiry into technophobic media until well into new historicism’s9 grasp on textual fields. Gorman Beauchamp, a literary critic better

known for his work on utopian fiction, offers perhaps the earliest reading of technophobic

literature in his 1986 essay “Technology and the Dystopian Novel.” Grounded against a variety

of theoretical interests including Marx/ism and the lay theologian Jacques Ellul,10 his study is

one of the few works from this era that recognizes phobic manifestations of technology as an

anxious displacement—but rather than displacement in technology, as I described of medicalized

phobia, Beauchamp instead argues that technology itself has become displaced within humanity,

echoing Ellul’s concerns that “technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human

being… [modifying] man's very essence” (Ellul 325). As he follows through a collection of

dystopic novels, such work channels “the fear that man himself will be transformed into

machine. The machine, that is, will become the measure of all things, the model for man to

9 New historicism is a movement of literary criticism interested in exploring intellectual and cultural histories through literature, including through the study of popular fiction and non-canonical texts that were previously considered “sub-literary.” Genre fictions (including science fiction) were rarely studied before this turning point beyond their few intrusions into the canon (such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and other “literary” authors). 10 Jacques Ellul is a notable critic of technological society, which he saw as a form of totalitarian rationality in which efficiency comes to eclipse all other values at the expense of all virtue. His work is perhaps the most technophobic in mainstream philosophy, and has inspired later works including Theodore Roszak’s useful and more moderate The Cult of Information as well as the Unabomber manifesto. 31

emulate” (Beauchamp 59). This is similar to Marcuse’s formulation of the interrelation between

human “biology” and technology, identifying a phobic response to the same within science

fiction. However, Beauchamp’s work introduces further issues: rather than understanding

technology as influential within a limited sphere, he constructs a totalizing techne that appears to

consume what it touches. Though his work offers the beginning of a Marcusian critical project

toward technologically-inclined art (and represents perhaps the first textual study in this regard),

he misses the ever-present co-construction of human and machine that denies either the ability to so totally dominate the other’s “essence.”

Paul Alkon offers another early analysis of technophobic fiction, locating its popular and historical origins in early 20th-century American literature. Though Alkon resists drawing broad

conclusions or establishing more specific conventions from his case studies about phobic media

as a genre, his work offers a useful historicization of such texts by documenting technophobia as

a through line in the American fiction of technology, contrasted against French technophilia and

English interest in technology’s ability to reflect human nature. Identifying technophobic rhetoric

in the work of Poe, Bellamy and Twain, Alkon’s work demonstrates not only that fearful fiction

has been a hallmark of the American imagination since the early 1900s, but that such fiction has

long captured a particular public interest. All three authors were commonly republished in

popular audience periodicals on speculative science and science fiction, and Bellamy’s work11 in

particular became so widely discussed that “Bellamy clubs” were formed to consider his ideas,

eventually leading to the formation of a socialist political party to push for their implementation

(107).

11 Bellamy’s 1887 novel Looking Backward imagines the America of 2000 as a socialist utopia in which technology is afforded an important—but carefully limited—scope. 32

Alkon’s study demonstrates that science fiction and its technological imagination have

had a direct impact on political formations, particularly as they have imagined fearful futures that

might be avoided through social action in the present. Though such phobic rhetoric has long

transcended national borders (if it was every truly an American project to begin with, which I

doubt), it is interesting too that Alkon fixes different approaches to technology to the state in this

way. Though he does not consider how governing social orders inform the development of

technology, he yet offers a concrete example of the real-life impacts of fiction’s phobic technopolitical imagination. This can be read in keeping with Marcuse’s conception of an interlinked liberatory technology and liberatory art—brought at least partially, temporarily, into practice. As Bellamy clubs briefly defined popular leftism in America, we can see how such art might inspire radical change. But though Alkon charts political action alongside this fiction’s technophobic rhetoric, he fails to theorize the importance or mechanism of this relationship. This remains a thorny problem, returned to in the conclusion of this chapter.

Contemporary Scholarship

In contrast to these early studies, later work on technophobic media has come to focus on its form as much as its content, bridging narrative studies and political rhetoric in analyses of technosocial constructions. Matteo Bittani has explored what he terms the “technoludic film” as a dynamic dialectic between the narrative conventions of electronic game, virtual reality and film.12 Tracing his term through lud, to play, he investigates the anxious abstractions through

which media forms reflect each other—the remediative role of the internet in film, or radio used

as a symbol on TV. These anxieties come to stand in for broader myths of cultural formations

12 While Bittani locates this genre’s distinctive quality as drawn from the narratives of video games, he notes its resemblance to older forms of interactive media including Heilig’s Sensorama. He also discusses the impact of remediative representation in several fictions of VR, including Tron (1982), Lawnmower Man (1991) and eXistenZ (1999) among its defining iterations (309). 33

around specific technologies. As he defines, technoludic films are “a screen or a mirror upon

which society projects and re-enacts through myth-narratives its deepest anxieties, forbidden desires, escapism from the self, the body, and ultimately, from reality tout court” (309). As VR appears to offer a heightened escapism through its immersivity, we might understand remediative texts dealing with representations of VR as themselves a way of processing—or at least, making plain—these same anxieties (many of which are discussed at length in Chapters

Two and Three).

Rather than investigate the social and cultural dimensions of these fears, however,

Bittani instead suggests they evince “cinema's own fear of being displaced by other technologies of leisure such as video games, Internet, cable, and satellite television,” offering an unconvincing reading of such narrative conventions out of touch with the vast cross-investment between these industries (311). Further, “cinema” as a form cannot act or actualize without human investment—and though perhaps individuals in the cinema industry fear the obsolescence of their chosen art, it seems absurd to flatten the sum of individual desires, actions, and economic and cultural pressures to a mere fear of “what comes next.” Bittani’s methodological consideration of technologically-influenced narrative structuring offers a provocative lens through which to read all fictions of technology, and raises interesting questions of how technological forms can both fear and reproduce themselves. That elements of technological design (perhaps their biologized morality, per Marcuse) come to infect the narratological elements of the fictions that represent them is useful for the study set out here: it allows for plot structure and other textual elements beyond the direct discussion of VR to be read as a critique of such. However, by further anthropomorphizing these texts in their phobic impulses, Bitanni loses 34 the perspective to himself criticize the broader social contexts that create fear as well as the mechanisms through which certain technologies come to stand in as their agents.

Other approaches, best exemplified by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner’s

“Technophobia,” resist such specificity in their technological interest while yet retaining its investment in reading a structural politic. They offer that such fictions pose “the machine” as the binarily opposed couple to “nature” writ large—as they describe, “the rhetorical strategy of many technophobic films…is to establish a strong opposition between terms that does not permit any intermediation” (59). They delineate “conservative” versions of technophobia in film from radical ones, limiting their interest to the former in a problematic and unstated high/low art divide. In this genre, Ryan and Kellner link technological anxiety to conservative political discourses of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As conservative economic development gave way to a hypermodernization that appeared to threaten traditionalist social values, they argue that mainstream technophobic fictions offered a mirror through which to grapple with technologically-bound liberal desires within valorized returns to nature. By displacing such moral panic onto technology, Ryan and Kellner suggest that technophobic fictions represent a classic Luddite fallacy (though they do not use that term) embodying conservative political ideology.

Political critique is necessarily tied to any critique of technology, as Ryan and Kellner persuasively demonstrate. This seems to echo Marcuse’s concern with the construction of our technologized industrial society. However, lacking technological specificity, their essay fails to consider future potentialities for either technological or political discourse through its imaginative futures. Though their political contextualization of these films is interesting and clearly marked within the texts they examine, it remains unclear how we are meant to mobilize 35

these technopolitical discourses within political action. Are we to understand that technological

anxiety is the domain of conservativism, restricting critical conversations around the social roles

of technologies to their “modernizing” practices without regard for the vast socioeconomic

harms created through technological intervention? Should we forget that technology is both

produced by and producing dominant social ordering, particularly as it relates to labor and

consumption? Are we to take at face value that these films—popular and simplistic as they may

be—are unable to communicate subversive or alternative readings of the same issues? By

bringing technophobic media into the political sphere, Ryan and Kellner mark a critical

conversation without actually entering into it; for their line of argumentation to be continued, it

would need to engage in the type of play they consign to “radical” film—and I would further argue those impulses are hardly removed from the mass-market films they critique. Their failures demonstrate both the continued necessity of acknowledging the interpenetration of art, consumption, and “human nature,” per Marcuse; to forget this produces such a one-dimensional critique.

The most recent addition to this line of scholarship, Daniel Dinello’s Technophobia offers the most developed and technologically-specific reading of technophobia in fiction; his book-length investigation dedicates chapters to specific fears of genetic modification, artificial intelligence, and robotics among other scientific advances. Though he affords VR fiction its own specific critique beyond “technology” as a category (discussed further in Chapter Two), it seems useful here to discuss his conception of technophobia more broadly. Dinello offers a summative effort that traces a number of theoretical investments in the fearful construction of technology, including as it intersects with the themes I’ve here discussed—particularly in regard to narrative

representations of technologies (Bittani), historical and cultural contextualization (Alkon), 36 political import of technological discourse (Ryan and Kellner), and how all of these contribute to the formation of the human/ist subject. He finds all technophobic science fiction to be negotiating futures within a dialectic between phobia and utopia, simultaneously fearing and anticipating technological advance through a quasi-religious fervor. “By dramatizing concerns about technology’s outcomes,” he comments, such fiction “sounds an alarm that contrasts sharply with the divine prophecies of the cyber-utopians and reveals their techno-religion as a propagandistic ploy and insidious menace” (274). Importantly, Dinello demonstrates the utility of science fiction in creating and representing popular fears of technology, as well as the function those discourses hold within a radical political imaginary—technophobic media does not simply critique aspects of technological society but demonstrates alternative ways of being in the process.

Following technology theorists including Langdon Winner and T.J. Matheson, Dinello positions technophobic fiction at the juncture of scientism—an excessive and religiously-intoned belief in the power of science—and a Weberian instrumentalist critique; as he quotes Winner, “in the end, literally everything within human reach…will be incorporated into the system of technical instrumentality…here one locates the political essence of technology in its total formative impact on all nature and culture” (qtd. Dinello 273). Dinello offers instrumentality as the driving force shaping both human and machine into vehicles of production, systemically maintained through the scientistic worship of emerging technologies. This marks an important version of phobic displacement: the feared object is not ultimately technology itself, but the social ordering enabled through it that devalues all in favor of the efficient ordering of production. Though this totalizing instrumentalism raises many of the same problems as does

Beauchamp, it yet offers a critique of the social maintenance (through scientism) of a repressive 37

social order as it is evinced and sustained in art and technology—this seems very much in line

with a Marcusian critique, albeit one less careful about its consideration of “human.” Though his

instrumentalism should be further deconstructed to expose the historically specific fears relating

capitalist ordering to conceptions of humanity and society, Dinello’s book is the most

comprehensive study of technophobic media to date, and lays the groundwork for this study,

both in its theoretical investments and careful technological specificity.

These previous studies mark a diverse set of investments in fictionalized technophobias;

however, each lack, in different ways, a strong theoretical understanding of the relationship

between technology, art, and society. Though useful in their analyses of specific fictional texts,

these close readings have largely failed to engage critical theorizations of science in their social

critique. This has come at the cost of failing to recognize the two-way exchange between social structure and technoscientific development: technology neither simply drives nor simply mirrors

social ordering and is produced through social settings and norms rather than emerging, fully

formed and free of influence, from the ether. Toward correcting this trend, Marcuse’s

theorization of a human “biology” produced through the intervention of art and technology—

even as those categories are themselves produced by humans—offers a necessary framework that

acknowledges the recursive and contingent construction of society by all these actors. His work

links fictional and artistic products to real political investments without falling back on an

essentialized human nature or unilinear and dominative technology, connecting textual criticism

to our ongoing struggle for a democratized technological future.

Social Ordering and Technology: Marcuse and Heidegger

Marcuse’s interest in the scientific imagination offers the starting point for locating such a political project in technophobic fictions. By inviting us to “project” a new reality, he 38

encourages a merging of aesthetic and reason toward a reclamation of the full expanse of experience as denied us through the strictures of late industrialism’s hold on both artistic and technological forms (see Marcuse, “Art as a Form of Reality”). Experience and subjective perception are not simply overlays or mediations of an external reality, for Marcuse—rather, they constitute further (virtual) dimensions that do not “exist” in nature, such as beauty. These aesthetic dimensions have the potential to reveal what critic Andrew Feenberg (himself a student of Marcuse) describes as “a kind of simplification and idealization that reveals sensuously the true essences of things, things as they would be redeemed in a better world… but also to a critical repulsion toward all that is life-destroying and ugly” (Feenberg 2008 3). This revitalized sensorium would thus be a tool for a liberatory discernment.

VR, like art, is represented as such an aesthetic form in the works discussed in the following chapters: its particular mediations offer to imagine both “redeemed” societies and

“ugly” ones seemingly in total, as its users can enter these new worlds and make reasonable decisions about their structures—decisions which then might carry back into the “real” world.

VR offers potential models, “projections,” of what a revitalized scientific society might look like; or, alternately, how an uninterrupted hegemonic catastrophe might progress. Indeed, it should seem to offer the beginnings of a liberated technology—as Marcuse describes,

The liberated consciousness would promote the development of a science and technology

free to discover and realize the possibilities of things and men in the protection and

gratification of life, playing with the potentialities of form and matter for the attainment

of this goal. Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality:

the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and

scientific thought, would be invalidated (Marcuse 1969 22). 39

By combining art and poetics with a technological rationality, VR might be read as a

representative symbol of such a revolutionized form. However, VR offers a particular and unique

set of relationships between the social sphere, the body, and the machine that are not necessarily

demarcated in Marcuse’s work here. Beyond the unique neurophysiological sensations Kirkwood

draws to our attention (e.g. “vertigo,” see p.4, Introduction), VR’s interactivity and sense of

“presence” create additional modes of engagement absent Marcuse’s already broad use of the

term “art.” These gaps call for synthesis between a variety of constructions to address the

specificities of that form.

Martin Heidegger’s technological criticism, in conversation with Marcuse’s, is useful

toward identifying a theoretical construction of technoculture that allows for both utopic and

dystopic potentialities in a way that begins to deal with VR’s specificities beyond the broad

category of “art.” Though Marcuse’s philosophical writing is often discussed in the context of a

“Heideggarian Marxism,” his alignment with and divergence from his former teacher on the

topic of technology—a framing interest in both thinkers’ later works—has only recently come

into popular scholarship through the prolific interventions of Andrew Feenberg (see particularly

Feenberg 1999, 2005, 2010).13 Heidegger’s interest in technologically-informed ontology and

Marcuse’s in aesthetic critique within technosocial systems each mark novel shifts in the

philosophy of technology (see Feenberg 2005 for disciplinary historical context). These

theorizations each work to open up the technological form, exposing its recursions,

13 Feenberg’s work has sparked a new wave of criticism reconsidering Marcuse’s contributions in both critical theory and the philosophy of science, rejecting Jurgen Habermas’ misreading of Marcuse in “Technology and Science as Ideology”—a misreading so profound and influential that it led to decades of scholarly neglect on this topic. That essay frames his response to Marcuse in the context of Weberian rationality, linking the development of technology to a seemingly unidirectional development of “work” as removed from “interaction.” Marcuse’s argument, which does not make this distinction, is thus dragged into a hostile context which allows Habermas to do away with the multiplicities of technological action while he reckons with the place of communication within social society. 40

contradictions, and intersections with human subjectivity and social consciousness. Borrowing

from Marcuse’s utopian optimism and tempered by Heidegger’s fearful techno-skepticism, these

works in conversation offer a way of reading fear as a form of critical consciousness—one which

offers to find a use for the persistence of technophobic rhetoric toward the creation of a society

in which the reduction of toil might create space for the production of technique as art.

Against Technophobia: Heidegger on Technology’s Essence

Heidegger’s 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology” has remained one of the

most discussed continental approaches to technological philosophy, exploring the “essence” of

technology as it relates to human perception. Though this work has been read as an attempt to

formulate an essential, deterministic technology (and Heidegger’s language certainly invites such

misreadings), Heidegger is here quite uninterested in the thrust of technological development.

While he appears to fear technology, contributing to his reputation as a “technophobe” (see

Bailey 2014; Fuchs 2015; Dreyfus in general for examples of this characterization), his real

concerns lie within the contested and malleable nature of humanity itself—a nature that “fear,”

properly mobilized, might have the ability to improve.14 Heidegger’s formulation of such a

connection here, interested in perception through technological intervention, is a particularly

useful version of such an argument, tying together the divorce between perceptual experience

and “reality” (e.g., “vertigo”). These concerns are immediately evocative of technophobic

responses to VR and yet make the case for the utility of such fear, helping to position such

phobia at the (re)making of humanity and society—a remaking that might be figured toward

Marcuse’s political project.

14 As discussed in the following chapters, and as Marcuse’s conception of human “biology” understands, fears of what it means to be human are always at play in considerations of what it means to be technical. 41

Heidegger distinguishes between art and technology, offering a recent and dangerous

divide within techne. Rather than “bringing-forth” truth from object, as does art, Heidegger

argues that technology instead attempts to evince truth through a process of “challenging-forth”

(4,6). In this sense, technology penetrates reality in a manner distinct from art and other forms of technique by altering what it encounters, as how a hydroelectric dam changes the flow of a river

(7). Though both art and technology shape the ways in which we think about nature, Heidegger describes technology’s “enframing” of the potentiality of the world as fundamentally

“dangerous,” threatening to obscure our ability to see beyond the possibilities particular technologies specifically enable (such as damming the river to generate power, or removing mountaintops to access coal) (14). We might even understand VR to offer a particularly literalized version of such enframing as it mediates perception—in this way, Google Glass’ visual overlay would seem to shape the way we see the world, perhaps toward increased productivity with calendar and communications integration, or toward other reductions of our

“free” time. Such a process “endanger[s] man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is,” raising questions of the relationship between technology and nature, and humanity’s role within its creation and use—questions clearly at play within our fictions and fears of VR.

This essay is oft-cited to skewer Heidegger as the original philosophical technophobe.

Take for instance the recent example of philosopher of technology Don Ihde (2002) who offers

Heidegger (alongside Marcuse, similarly incorrectly, and Ellul) as the progenitor of a widespread

“rhetoric of alarm” at the boundary between technological and environmental philosophy. He suggests Heidegger figures technology as a “threat toward culture” which has “created alienation, and even threatened a presumed essence of the human” (28).15 While Idhe’s

15 Somewhat interestingly, this same argument made through Marcuse would figure not as a threat toward culture, but as itself necessary within a liberated world. 42 discussion of what he terms the “ethics of fear” should have implications for any study of technophobic rhetoric, his flatly dystopic construction fails to engage either with ontological fears or possibilities for alternative considerations of being, ignoring the formative mechanisms

Heidegger illuminates. As Hubert Dreyfus half-jokingly comments, “Heidegger has not always been clear about what distinguishes his approach from a romantic reaction to the domination of nature, and when he does finally arrive at a clear formulation of his own original view, it is so radical that everyone is tempted to translate it in conventional platitudes about the evils of technology” (ed. Kaplan 25). Such a default to convention marks Idhe and others’ approaches, which ignore the quite radical (and hardly essentializing) interest in perception as a form of action. Needless to say, such a phobic approach is of little value in considering the social and political implications of technocultural exchange.

A more constructive reading is that Heidegger’s fear doesn’t stem from technology as such, but our perception through it, or our failures of perception displaced within it. Neither the existence of a hydroelectric dam nor the development of its contributing technologies are

“dangerous” for Heidegger, or else it contributes very little beyond the pleasure of critique.

Rather, a less dead-ended reading is that he fears that we will come to see the river only as a source of power to be unlocked, and that this distortion of our perception of nature will in turn threaten our ability to see other potentialities in the landscape and in ourselves, as even humanity becomes subject to the demands of productive ordering. To apply this same reading of Heidegger to VR, his critique draws our attention to the contested nature of perception and landscape, of particular use when considering VR as a technology of perception that creates immersive experiences, landscapes within technology. This allows us to understand perception and representation as the phobically contested site rather than human or machine, as they are 43 implicated in the formation of and relation between (human) subject and (machinic) object. If we can undo the divide in techne, to perceive technology as art rather than instrument, we might claim access to a “saving power” that can grant access to the highest “constellation of truth”

(Heidegger 19).

Heidegger’s construction here allows him to theorize a dual mechanism of technophobia and techno-utopianism—the same structuring principles that relegate nature to “standing reserve” might be refigured to emphasize its value and beauty; the process of enframing could instead allow man “to enter into his highest essence” rather than diminish him (16-7). Though he does not frame it quite in this way, his argument suggests—like Marcuse—that a fear of such instrumental ordering is what might drive humanity toward its “highest essence,” that such a state is unreachable except through the critical intervention of enframing and the poetic horror it evokes. This broad potentiality he offers, ignored in simplistic readings of Heidegger-as- technophobe, is unique within technocritical theory through its pairing of fear and possibility by the same token. Because “virtual” reality invokes the possibility of alternative ontologies and ways of perceiving, a techno-ontological interest as Heidegger takes here opens the door to reading the revolutionary imaginary always already contained within cultural anxieties. Such an imaginary is mobilized through popular technophobia and its dystopian ravaging of technosocial ordering; fear, through its evaluation of such potentialities, can as such be weaponized as a practical-critical activity.

Revitalizing a Political Techne

Heidegger’s theory engages art toward new constructions of humanity and a poetic technology. What he calls an “obscured” nature we might understand as a way of marking a normative “essence” that is externally ascribed through mediated perception. This creates an 44

opening through which we can consider both the particular damages created through

instrumentalist iterations of technological systems as well as their alternatives. However,

Heidegger stops short before envisioning what such a technologized future might entail, instead

landing on an aesthetic modernism that seems to revalorize the sovereignty of untouched nature

witnessed by a poetic, pastoral human. In this sense we return the river to itself but fail to liberate

the society on its banks, in the process averting a future crisis while ignoring the urgent need to

address the one already at hand.

Marcuse’s theory of technology is then particularly useful to engage that opening toward

revolutionary political applications. His approach resembles Heidegger’s (and was quite likely

influenced by it, though unstatedly—see Feenburg 2012), yet locating it within the construction

of the subject rather than a more broadly ontological metaphysic. Marcuse long argued for a new

form of radical (and eventually revolutionary) subjectivity: a form of consciousness16 that

recognizes and rejects the intolerability of prevailing economic traditions as obscured by false

needs—those created toward the maintenance of a repressive social order (Marcuse 1964 4). By

replacing these needs, Marcuse suggests we might regain our free time, individual autonomy,

and a heretofore unprecedented “freedom beyond necessity” (Marcuse 1964 4-5). In search of

this, he expands Marx’s formulation of alienation to find humans displaced into the technological

products of our labor: through the use of technology, humans come to “recognize themselves in

their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen

equipment” (Marcuse 64). Though this language fearing the displacement of the “soul” may

appear simplistically technophobic, Marcuse’s work is not positioned in relation to a naturalized

16 This consciousness is linked to an awareness of the role of capital in the formation of social conditions and false needs—as Marcuse describes, “it is the consciousness of the discrepancy between the real and the possible, between the apparent and the authentic truth, and the effort to comprehend and to master this discrepancy” (Marcuse 1964 233). 45

(foundationalist) human essence—as his technologically- and artistically-informed understanding of human “biology” demonstrates—but rather to a political and constructivist standpoint. This argument helps to bind Heidegger’s ontological technique to a more concrete understanding of the technological mediation of lived experience in subject formation.

Marcuse persuasively demonstrates that technology is underdetermined, and that because a multiplicity of technologies might exist to solve any problem each with their own influence on the distribution of power, any choice between them is inherently a political act as well as a technical one—an observation rederived in much later cultural and STS theory, including

Raymond Williams’ description of “symptomatic technology”17 and Bijker and Pinch’s Social

Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory. As he argues, technological devices are not

themselves “the engines of repression, but [rather] the presence, in them, of the masters who

determine their number, their life span, their power, their place in life, and the need for them”

(12). But who is displaced in technology, then?—for a moment ago it was “us” found in our

automobiles, hi-fis, kitchen equipment. We return to the recursive construction from the

beginning of this essay: society as a whole creates and upholds particular iterations of

technology, which in turn penetrate our own “biology.” Though Marcuse’s use of the word

“masters” certainly acknowledges the overemphasized role of certain actors—capitalists,

inevitably—in the development and deployment of these technologies, control is yet somewhat

distributed. Again, a change in the “biology” of humans as a whole is necessary to access a

liberated future.

But Marcuse follows the reversal of this line of argumentation—a technology with new

masters—far further than either Marx or Heidegger as he imagines a revolutionary, utopian

17 Williams argues that all technologies are “at once an intention and an effect of a particular social order” (128). 46 technological society. Marcuse concludes in the same vein as Heidegger that a “new science” or

“new technology” might be formulated outside of the instrumental reason generated by the maintenance of class society: simply reallocating control of contemporary, undemocratic technologies to the workers cannot sufficiently refigure their needs beyond its “exploitative apparatuses”—it must be remade (Marcuse 1969 4). As he describes of the extent of that remaking, “such a new direction of technical progress would be the catastrophe of the established direction, not merely the quantitative evolution of the prevailing (scientific and technological) rationality but rather its catastrophic transformation, the emergence of a new idea of Reason, theoretical and practical” (Marcuse 1964 232). That “catastrophe” is necessary toward utopian formation.

It may seem counterintuitive to engage with such a techno-utopian theorization in an investigation of its phobic opposite; however, Marcuse also engages a psychoanalytic exploration of the paired nature of fear and hope within techne and its “katharsis,” through which “terror and the pleasure of reality [appear to be] purified” while yet remaining mired in

“fear and frustration...the self-defeat built into art” (Marcuse 1969 44). As he writes, seemingly invoking similar such fearful and dystopic works as those discussed here,

in its negativity, the desublimating art and anti-art of today ‘anticipate’ a stage where

society’s capacity to produce may be akin to the creative capacity of art, and the

construction of the world of art akin to the reconstruction of the real world – a union of

liberating art and liberating technology. By virtue of this anticipation, the disorderly,

uncivil, farcical, artistic desublimation of culture constitutes an essential element of

radical politics: of the subverting forces in transition (Marcuse 1969 48). 47

Such “subverting” art might then be read as a necessary part of a political project, its fears

working to structure a radical consciousness that might be mobilized toward a techno-utopian,

rather than technophobic, future. Sublimation is a useful comparison to phobia as it offers a

“mature”18 defense mechanism to the same stimuli that provoke phobia’s “neurosis.” If we are to

understand phobia and sublimation as defense mechanisms which function in similar ways

toward coding similar impulses, a desublimated technophobia would leave bare the social

critique displaced within it. Desublimated technophobic art then deals with the same instinctive

fears. These fictions can easily be read as forms of “social control,” as a younger Marcuse would

have it—in different ways, they enact fears only to pretend toward catharsis by purifying or

defeating it while yet sustaining the symbolic order that necessitates it. This response to fear

motivates a false sense of freedom, precluding us from considering liberatory alternatives to

dominative technologies by rejecting the category of technology as a whole.

However, such desublimation might also open up technophobic impulses and allows us

access to them in more productive ways. Though Marcuse suggests that “the absorbent power of

society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents,” a fear of

specific technosocial ordering is always already a fear of specific political formations and

constructions of the human it contains, which are themselves required for the maintenance of

advanced industrial society (Marcuse 1964 62). As he similarly argues of Black music’s

desublimated “affinity…[with] political rebellion,”19 so too might we read technophobic fiction

18 Defense mechanisms are psychological tools for managing situations in which the ego cannot cope with the demands of reality. These are classed into “psychotic” (pathological) defenses, such as delusion and denial; “immature” and “neurotic” (socially undesirable) defenses, such as phobic displacement and repression; and “mature” (socially acceptable) defenses, such as sublimation, altruism, and humor. See Freud 1930 for further description. 19 “Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus knows it: ‘I want to revoke the Ninth Symphony.’ In the subversive, dissonant, crying and shouting rhythm, born in the ‘dark continent’ and in the ‘deep South’ of slavery and deprivation, the oppressed revoke the Ninth Symphony and give art a desublimated, sensuous form of frightening immediacy, moving, electrifying the body, and the soul materialized in the body. Black music is originally music of the 48

as a desublimated cry against the repressive and dominative tendencies of contemporary

technology—a cry for political action and the creation of a new technology (Marcuse 1969 36).

Such direct, “negative” art is necessary even as it is far from the “beautiful” art that must

eventually characterize Marcuse’s utopia: it forces civil society to “assimilate its antagonistic

contents” not as the depletion of some aesthetic dimension or artistic alienation, but rather as an

unsublimated bitter pill that predates (as does Black oppression) the “flattening” of sublimating

art into the commodity form. It illuminates the fact that technology has always penetrated our

“biology” toward specific moralizations which have never been democratic, and forces society to

“assimilate” that catastrophe. It is art against technology, which is inherently also anti-art, art

against itself.

From Technophobia to Techno-utopia

As Feenberg argues, Marcuse’s borrowing of Heidegger offers the possibility of

“democratic interventions” that would allow for an affirming technosocial system—one that

would allow for “the structure of human existence [to] be altered; the individual would be

liberated from the work world’s imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The

individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own” (Marcuse 1964 5).

This is the liberatory potential of all technology: we return our own lives to ourselves and restore

our free time by reconciling the technological and aesthetic forms. Virtual reality is not the only

inheritor of this project, but marks a particularly literalized version of technology’s ability to

allow us to enter into “new worlds,” for better or for worse. That VR has inspired such

revolutionary rhetoric while dogged—for centuries, if Otto is to be believed!—by a phobic

oppressed, illuminating the extent to which the higher culture and its sublime sublimations, its beauty, have been class-based. The affinity between black music (and its avantgardistic white development) and the political rebellion against the "affluent society" bears witness to the increasing desublimation of culture” (Marcuse 1969 36). 49

revulsion toward what forms those “new worlds” might take demonstrates both the fear and

promise of this potential, the catastrophe always imminent in its realization.

It is critical to be mindful that not all technological developments in this direction are

inherently liberatory. Though Marcuse did not have the language common to technology studies

today, his demand for a “new technology” suggests an awareness of technology’s ideological

black box—our devices cannot simply be better used but must instead be better made. The

implications of this for the study of technophobia are twofold: fears of other social processes

become displaced and cemented within technology through the process of closure, such that a

recognition and re-placing of those fears has the potential not only to inform more democratic

design, but further to reconsider what “the good life” entails and how technology should function

within it. Marcuse offers us a political image of “the good life”: one in which labor is reduced

and redirected toward the maintenance of our “vital needs,” and our free time is restored that we

may pursue the “art of life.” But though Marcuse is clear that technology and automation are

required to advance to such a state, he does not provide a concrete image of what its technology

might look like. Heidegger’s interest in appearance, then, offers something more substantial as

we imagine a liberated perceptual technology: such VR wouldn’t enable pure, untethered

fantasy, but would continually restore to us images of the landscape and ourselves that

emphasize their beauty rather than their productive capacity.

This aestheticized technology is yet out of reach—and yet, Marcuse’s desublimation and its ugly, technophobic (anti-)art is what allows us to perform this critical reversal, to open the black box of VR and consider the social ills it encloses through the intervention of fiction and art. The literature to this point on phobic fictions has already located a variety of displacements in the history of that genre: conservative political formations (Ryan and Kellner), the interests of 50

media production industries (Bittani), the worship of technology (Dinello, Noble), and even the

“essence” of humanity (as fraught and disputed a term as that may be) are at stake within the art

and reality of VR. Though there is merit in each of these arguments, this body of work as a

whole largely fails to link to theoretical and philosophical constructions of technosocial societies

and social processes toward actual solutions for these ills, despite the promises of its popular

rhetoric. Mass phobia has always been mobilized toward mass social change, as the history of

miasma and other like fears demonstrate; technophobia, to this point durable within art and

history, could certainly be mobilized toward a “new world,” toward revolution, if its

desublimating tendencies are taken seriously.

Such technologically enclosed processes are in part what we feared in the initial release of Google Glass: as Marcuse might have it, the systems in which it was produced threatened our

“biology” by coordinating its production of needs with our perception and phenomenological

embodiment quite directly—and toward particularly repressive ends. By refiguring the body as

itself an outpost of surveillance culture, Google (almost) actualized a broken and policed

sociality through its particular technological engagement. Like Columbus, Glass “Explorers”

discovered a world already inhabited and with little regard for those it surveilled there. Only

mass fear—and anger, its frequent companion—prevented that particular conquest from

materializing.

But! This is not the only future we might imagine. As both Google and Apple prepare to

(re-)release new AR headsets, as we prepare again to become “explorers” of new worlds through

them, as Facebook and Microsoft and Samsung and the rest all prepare their own forays into the

virtual unknown, it is high time we consider what we want those worlds to be, and how we want

to get there. 51

CHAPTER II. VIRTUAL PLEASURES AND VIRTUAL PAUPERS: VR FICTION AS

A CRITIQUE OF UTOPIAN CAPITAL

Ready Player One’s (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2018) climactic moment centers on an old

Atari 2600 hooked up to a dusty 1980s television set—a humorous reversal of form for a film predominantly set in a hyper-futuristic VR gaming environment. We watch as protagonist Wade

Watts (Tye Sheridan) plays through Adventure20 with the fate of the world at stake, standing

alone on the fracturing ice of a frozen ocean. As he exposits of the game while he plays,

Warren Robinett21 was proud of Adventure—he wanted people to know who was behind

it. That’s why he created the first digital easter egg.22 And to find it, you didn’t even have

to win. You just had to blindly play, searching around in rooms for an invisible dot. You

took the dot back to the main screen, and that’s when you found the first easter egg ever

put in a video game: the creator’s name.

Though Wade stands alone on the ice, Robinett’s easter egg reminds us that the technologies of

work and play at stake in the film aren’t sprung from the head of Zeus. Rather, they are products

of human labor that can be themselves understood as attempts to form social connections.

Wade’s victory—not winning the game, but finding Robinett’s name in blocky pixelation—

allows him to take control of a bigger game, to fill it again with players beyond himself, to forge

a romantic connection with the Player Two to his Player One. It serves as a reminder, perhaps,

that even in the seemingly singular occupation of digital gameplay we are always interacting

with and through the work of another—that in this way, we aren’t really alone.

20 Adventure is widely considered to be the first action-adventure and fantasy video game, released in 1979 for the Atari 2600. 21 Robinett is the real-life creator of Adventure as well as a pioneering VR technologist. Following his time at Atari, he worked at both the NASA Ames Research Lab and the University of North Carolina Graphics and Virtual Reality Group—two of the most important players in the development of contemporary VR. 22 An “easter egg” is a hidden element in a game or film that players/viewers have to “hunt” to find. Easter eggs typically offer an inside joke, reference, or secret message. 52

This is an observation absent most genre studies of science fiction featuring VR, which

make the mistake of aligning technological virtuality with other forms of unreality—dreams,

intoxication, hallucinations.23 Though such works certainly share a common DNA, they lack a

critical element common to all works set in VR: they are typically interior, singular, and focused

on individual states. While there are certainly single-user applications for VR—in terms of

present-day technologies, these far outnumber multi-user platforms—within its fictional

representations virtuality is essentially always a social space, what VR technologist Jaron Lanier

so insightfully identified as a “shared hallucination” (5). Unlike a dream, the virtual is a place we

go together, build together. This in mind, VR on screen demands its own technologically tuned-

in genre analysis, one which deals with its specific fears and the cultural tensions they embody

beyond the scope of a single disembodied mind.

Daniel Dinello (discussed briefly in Chapter One) is one of the few scholars to examine

technophobia as a genre and the role of virtuality within it without reducing it to a shallow

Baudrillian concern over unreal realities. He identifies scientism—the worship of

technoscientific progress, scientists as its prophets—as the common strain within the fictions of

VR, echoing computer scientists Michael Benedickt and Nicole Stenger’s24 notable commentary about the seeming-holiness of cyberspace. With its ability to infinitely remold and perfect its own vision of reality, Dinello argues that VR has come to stand in for total domination of humanity over the real—both for cyberutopianists, who understand virtual space as a digital heaven, and their dystopian counterparts who fear the hellish implications such unchecked power might unleash. Charting such themes through a variety of works including Brainstorm (1983),

23 Peter Otto’s work in Multiplying Worlds (discussed in Introduction) is a representative example of this construction. 24 See Ch. I for a brief discussion of Stenger’s VR work in this regard, particularly her film Angels (1982). 53

Synthajoy (1968), Videodrome (1983), Strange Days (1995), and eXistenZ (1999), Dinello makes

the case that such “science fiction helps liberate us from those mythic and deceptive dreams” of

techno-utopianism by “warning that our technology is not easily controlled” (274). A technological heaven-on-earth is only reachable by sacrificing—not worshipping—our machinic gods.

As we watch Wade play through Adventure, we might identify a different religious subtext: he is searching desperately to find the hand of the creator within the game—even as he himself inhabits a larger game within the VR world of the film. His partial perspective, playing a game within a game, is striking, raising questions of who is in control of technosocial systems: their users and inhabitants, their creators, the technology itself, or a knotted web spanning between all three. Dinello would perhaps take a limited and directional stance, as he argues that

VR fictions inevitably orient themselves toward the use of technology as a “religious opiate

[which becomes] a repressive technology of social control” (152). This, of course, recalls the common misreading of Marx’s “opium of the people” as unilinear mechanism of oppression. If we orient ourselves through his original text, however, we see the fallacy of this construction. As he has it,

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a

protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a

heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The

abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real

happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on

them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore,

in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo (Marx 1844 1). 54

Clearly, the “opium of the people” is more complicated than a simplistic mechanism of social

control—it is both an “expression of” and “protest against” the same. Utopian cyberspace and

the overabundance of VR do represent such a “religious opiate,” perhaps, but not as a singular

form of control. Rather, the phobic, contaminated construction of such otherwise holy spaces

represents not only the need for an escape from inequitable and undemocratic societies, but an

awareness of the inherently illusory nature of the utopian imagination in desublimating art (see

Chapter I). Such phobia is then a demand for “real happiness”—what must include, as Wade and

Robinett’s parallel quests suggest, some form of “real” interpersonal recognition or connection.

This “real happiness” is something we might begin to locate in art or film, per Marcuse—

and yet even here it seems challenged, incomplete, always falling back toward a half-measure

that denies what it promises in a “happy ending.” Ready Player One (RP1), based on Ernest

Cline’s 2011 debut novel of the same name, offers a particularly interesting complication in its revolutionary conclusion. It follows previous films featuring VR including Strange Days, The

Matrix (1999), and Avatar (2008) in a long line of showy, expensive blockbusters whose endings promise such a revolution to free their worlds from corporate or machinic domination. These revolutions—all religiously intoned (see Dinello on the former two, Klassen 2012 on the latter)—always seem to fall short in their liberatory promise. Though Dinello attributes this to the dominative reach of technology itself, we might instead try to see past that “halo” to locate these films’ dominative impulses and revolutionary potentials (or failures thereof).

RP1 is a useful object of study for an additional reason: as it relies heavily on reference to various popular culture artifacts of the 1980s, its metatextual interests directly and uncritically reinscribe many of this genre’s motifs, allowing it to neatly stand in for the larger body of work it comes to represent. Set in the post-industrial rubble of 2045 (“after the corn syrup droughts, 55 after the bandwidth riots”), the film largely takes place in the virtual world OASIS: a 1980s popular culture paradise in which the movie’s protagonists—and seemingly all of its world’s inhabitants—are educated, work, play, and functionally live. Labor is performed through gaming, among other means, generating currency (“coin”) through recognizable simulacra of contemporary media properties; as antagonist and Innovative Online Industries (IOI) CEO Nolan

Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) assesses, the OASIS is “the world’s most important economic resource” both as a platform for production and consumption. Following the death of its eccentric genius creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), control of the OASIS was left in trust: the first person to complete three quests and gain three keys would inherit the company, its virtual world, and the massive wealth it represents.

These quests are the main plot conceit, setting up a race between Sorrento—interested in controlling the OASIS to introduce ad sales and uphold the system of debt collection via virtual slavery his corporation profits from—and the so-called “gunters” (easter egg-hunters) including protagonists Wade Watts/Parzival and Samantha/Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who are driven by a devotion to Halliday as a near-mythic figure and a fervent love of the OASIS rather than economic self-interest. The challenges themselves are borrowed from 1980s gaming and popular culture—an unnamed racing game recalling Tron, a brief trip through The Shining, and

Adventure’s easter egg allow Wade to win the keys and save the OASIS from Sorrento’s machinations. These elements neatly replicate many of the major themes of popular fictions of

VR: the scientistic worship of an eccentric creator, working class or otherwise impoverished protagonists able to escape their station in virtuality, the seeming-impossibility of romance within VR, and an uprising of the underclass toward a reclamation of the technologies of control. 56

In a chiasmic refiguring of Dinello’s phobic scientism, RP1 locates its opposition

between the forces of fearfully evil corporatism and technological worshippers: it fears that

technology might become a system of control in the wrong hands, but yet upholds an uncritical

worship of the OASIS as a space of techno-democratic opportunity. That the film reifies VR only

to ultimately pull the plug suggests that there must be something more at stake beyond IOI’s

malice, even as it fails to advance an alternative reading in its “happy ending”—this, too, seems

to orbit Marx’s halo without puncturing through to its heart to identify the cause of its unhappy

condition. As we watch Wade alone on the ice, we might recognize how the contingent and

interrelated play of technology and religion offers to open up such a condition toward

understanding its contained criticism, offering to illuminate the utility and embedded social

critique of VR’s construction in science fiction more broadly.

Online Abundance and Offline Scarcity: Poverty and VR Economies

RP1 spends exceptionally little time in its “real” world: well over 70% of its runtime takes place in the OASIS, much of it in fawning broad shots of its dizzying CGI virtual unreality.

In the few scenes that take place outside of VR, we see that Wade lives in the so-called “Stacks.”

Though the name appears to intentionally echo the computer science term for abstract data sets,

its usage here appears quite literal: the Stacks are made up of hundreds of dirty, ramshackle

mobile homes stacked into precarious towers, claustrophobic and rusted, resembling a futuristic

reinterpretation of Jacob Riis’ turn-of-the-century photodocumentary of New York tenements.

Save for a few shots of Sorrento’s well-appointed office and the modernist corporate interior of

IOI, the entirety of RP1’s “real” world, as we see it, is similarly impoverished. The very first words of the film come from one of IOI’s ominous digital billboards announcing its own tagline:

“get ready for the feel—the feel of real—no pain, no gain.” The “real” itself, though, seems 57 thoroughly neglected—perhaps abandoned in anticipation of its eminent simulacra, its escapist

“feel.” There certainly seems no “gain” to be had for most in the film’s rusted-out reimagining of

Columbus.

Aside from futuristic VR equipment and high-tech advertisements for the same, all of the technology seen in the film (kitchen appliances, household furnishings, even cars) appears to be our own, recalling other dystopian films like Planet of the Apes (1968) which make strange the familiar to evoke horrific recognition. Unlike the lush, neon adoration of 1980s popular culture in the OASIS, this material repurposing of 2018’s technological lifeworld is dusty and beaten twenty years later, serving to highlight the stark differences between the two landscapes. We might twist Marcuse’s condemnation that we identify ourselves within our automobiles and appliances to instead find ourselves displaced, through their presence, into a dystopian near- future enabled by the shape of our actions in the present. As Keith Booker famously declared, such fiction is always itself a form of social and political commentary—one here that seems to offer a fearful indictment of the technologies of our own present and their evolutions (Booker 3).

This dystopian offline impoverishment is not unique to RP1—by and large, all VR fictions present their “real” worlds as similarly sparse: The Matrix’s protagonists eat gruel and wear rags; Avatar’s Jake Sully is driven to virtuality because he lacks the funds to ‘regrow’ his damaged legs—a troublingly ableist understanding of resource scarcity (as ample previous scholarship has discussed—see Flynn 2016, Palmer 2011); Lawnmower Man’s VR test subject is, well, a lawn-mower; the list goes on. In contradistinction to their impoverished settings, however, these films each also offer their virtual space as the site of pleasures impossibly more pleasurable than those available in materiality—experience, through VR, seems always to become experience+. This is typically coded within the aesthetic of their virtual spaces: like the 58

OASIS, virtual realities in film are inevitably brighter and more colorful than their offline worlds, shown glittering and in motion. Consider Avatar’s technicolor planet Pandora contrasted against the rusted military apparatus moving its plot, or Lawnmower Man’s neon and geometric cyberspace entered only through basement computers and perpetually-dim research laboratories.

Even The Matrix plays with this motif, inverting it to represent our own “real” world as a place of virtual pleasure offset by the grim, permanently clouded-over blue-filtered materiality behind it (see Elie During’s essay in The Matrix in Theory for this reading).

Though this dichotomy would seem to mark VR as a superior space of existence in RP1 and elsewhere, this aesthetic difference is instead weaponized to demonstrate virtuality’s seductive danger—its pleasures draw us into escapist fantasies in much the same way as drugs or dream-worlds, anaesthetizing us from the important business of existence. These movies all figure, in various ways, attempts to rescue the “real” from the tyranny of the virtual—often through a valorized return to offline materiality, a destruction of the virtual world, or a renegotiation of boundary through some type of physical reversal (see Dinello for other examples; “San Junipero,” discussed in Chapter 3, plays with and complicates this version of the trope). This should seem to be a straightforward symbolic operation within a hierarchical binary, in which liminality and mixed-states are explored before being dismissed in reapproval of dominant ordering—a particularly common structuring within a variety of fiction (Klapcsik 2012 offers this history, which he complicates through poststructuralist intervention into science fiction). However, if these works are attempting to perform this operation (hierarchizing

Real/virtual), it seems counterintuitive that the virtual is always shown to offer an impossible overabundance. Why is this aesthetic so conserved within this genre even as it seems to run 59

counter to its preferred symbolic ordering? Why does the play of scarcity and abundance in RP1

seem to favor the OASIS even as the film valorizes offline existence in its conclusion?

The beauty of virtuality is often justified within the plots of these texts through a direct

critique of capital and its manifestations—multinational corporations (Avatar, RP1, Strange

Days), environmental fallout (Avatar, The Matrix), and the military industrial complex (Avatar,

Lawnmower Man, The Matrix) are common culprits for the impoverishment of the offline/”real”

worlds highlighted by such contrast. In this way, virtuality often comes to stand in both for a

threat to the real and a utopian vision of what it might be—only by choosing to retake an offline

existence rather than abandon it for the daydream of VR might we be able to access a “real”

version of such virtual pleasures. RP1 similarly participates in such narrative structure: its

visions of “corn syrup droughts” and “bandwidth riots” invoke contemporary fears of climate

change and social unrest driven by the interests of multinational capital. Sorrento’s further

assessment that the key quests represent “a war for control of the future” echoes this rhetoric,

underscoring the OASIS’ position as itself both a utopian future and as an economic force that

might be weaponized against democratic interest.

RP1’s particular manifestation of this trope reveals an interesting contamination: despite its aesthetic beauty and seemingly unnoticed even by our protagonist, social inequality haunts

even the “egalitarian” structuring of Halliday’s quest within the OASIS as well as the offline

world beyond it. Wade describes the virtual world (and the battle for its control) as

fundamentally meritocratic—as he explains, “Halliday… made sure the OASIS was littered with

enough randomly powered stuff that anyone could win if they had the skills… everyone starts the same, but the more coin you make, the more you level up.” Despite this, we see Wade unable to functionally compete in the first key quest in a scene shortly thereafter: lacking coin for virtual 60 fuel to power his virtual car, he is forced to trail the other players—hamstrung not by skill but poverty. Though he insists that Halliday “showed us that we could go somewhere without going anywhere at all” in the utopian promise of his game, his comment seems instead a grim reminder of the ever-presence of inequality under late capitalism on- and offline.

Because the offline and online economies of RP1’s universe are clearly and indistinguishably intertwined—IOI’s chief villainous act is the operation of “loyalty centers,” real-world debtor’s prisons for those with virtual debts, extracting value from their inmates by forcing them to perform manual labor within the OASIS—it would seem inevitable that such economic imperatives would also color the lifeworld online as much as they do offline. Yet even faced with obvious indications of this stark inequality, Wade and his friends repeatedly insist on the “fairness” of the game as it offers an escape from material inequality, rejecting Sorrento’s rhetoric of “war” to insist that VR “isn’t about winning, it’s about playing.” Because Wade functions as our guide to the OASIS and because he is firmly positioned as a reliable narrator, this confusion between his earnest dialogue and the structure of the film’s world carries additional weight as it papers over one of the film’s core tensions—the in/ability to access democratic spaces within an undemocratic economy. When, as Wade informs us, “losing your

[virtual] shit means losing your shit”—fiscally and emotionally—how can players participate simply for the love of the game? How can technological worshippers like Wade maintain an uncritical love for their machines even as those same machines clearly embody an inequitable system?

Utopian Architecture and Impossible Ideals: VR as Capital’s Seduction

IOI’s uncomplicated malice represents a fairly direct economic critique located in RP1’s offline world—as Sorrento comments, the corporation “believe[s they] can sell up to 80% of an 61

individual’s visual field before inducing seizures.” However, that does little to explain the

persistence of VR’s online aesthetic overabundance or Wade’s blind worship. We might then

turn to Fredric Jameson, who, discussing cyberpunk’s similar overabundance, can offer a useful intervention into the literary aesthetic of cyberspace—a category he takes to be roughly

synonymous with virtual reality. Though Jameson is specifically uninterested in VR, and directly

denies its claim to a unique rhetorical space—like Otto and others, he relegates it to the same category of (internalized) dreams and fantasies—his work helps to connect aesthetic and political

discourses as they intersect within films of this genre.

Offering Neuromancer as a type specimen, Jameson reads the “the peculiar nature of

abstraction to the second degree” as symbolically contained within the literary geography of

cyberspace. These “abstractions” evolve the nature of value from use to pure exchange under the

banner of finance capital, parasitically demanding more from each transaction. We might see

such finance as cause for the dated technology of RP1’s offline world: save for VR equipment, it

appears production has largely ceased. Despite being set in Columbus, evocative of rust belt

industry and middle American blue collar labor, there appear to be no factories, smoke stacks, or

signs of non-financial employment in the film’s rusted cityscape; the only “industry” seems to be

IOI’s speculative gearing toward advertising futures, and the debt-prisons and hardware that enable it. This, like IOI’s obvious antagonism, offers a fairly direct critique of capital—here, as it has marred the offline urban spaces of the film, we can see an echo of Jameson’s broader

theorization of finance capital over the spaces it comes to control.

Though finance capital seems to have decimated RP1’s offline world, Jameson suggests

its influence is equally visible in the online overabundance of cyberpunk—that cyberspace in

fiction is itself symbolic of capital’s overreach. He argues that fictional virtual realities literalize 62

and spatialize the “unrepresentable totality… of finance capital,” recalling the impossible ideal

of paper architecture (229).25 The fantastical spaces of VR “symptomatizes our impossible efforts to connect incommensurables and to reduce the unrepresentable to the confines of a single unified thought”—their massive and impossible aesthetic beauty comes to stand in for the very impossibility of marking capital’s endless and debased exchange (230). These fictions serve a critical purpose, then, in making plain the otherwise “unrepresentable” and thus unchallenged extensions of postmodern capital—as Jameson argues, cyberpunk is itself “an instrument which registers current realities normally beyond the capacity of the realistic eye to see, which projects dimensions of daily life we cannot consciously experience” (237). Like paper architecture, cyberspace appears utopic and is yet impossible to real-ize, to bring into offline reality—its very impossibility demonstrates the seductive danger of capital itself.

Jameson’s argument is useful, to a point. His formulation of VR’s fictional landscapes as critiques of finance capital is well-taken, and offers an architectural embodiment of what I’ve marked within the overabundant aesthetics of VR against an impoverished offline reality. In both cases, VR technology is foregrounded as a cultural process enabling the full presence of exchange value disembodied from both production and use value: capital-as-cyberspace becomes the setting for these stories, both literally and figuratively. This allows their characters to interact directly with capital’s ineffable social ordering, illuminating the otherwise invisible “individual relationships to realities that transcend our phenomenological mapping systems and our cognitive abilities to think about them” (234). However, in his dismissal of Marx within his reading of finance capital, Jameson misses something critical about the nature of this substitution and value itself. He pins our discomfort with cyberspace to a dialectic between the creeping

25 Paper architecture, also called visionary architecture, describes an architectural imagination of impossible or implausible spaces that remain unbuilt. 63

abstraction of late capitalism and, bewilderingly, the mind-body problem,26 internalizing the

“dialectic of globalization” by locating it within a discomfort with organic embodiment, with

“meat” (237). There are some serious problems with this reading: though the totality of exchange value certainly introduces a particular abstracting/mediating force27 that highlights the inherent

tension encoded in the gap between signified and signifier, material and pure information, the

fundamental symbolic logic of exchange isn’t and cannot be internal—it’s social. Capital

(finance and otherwise) is definitionally reliant on this. To ignore the social nature of capital by reducing its phobic shadow in VR to Cartesian mind-body panic misunderstands the problematic of virtuality at its core, and ignores its social manifestations in the genre-conventions of its fictions.

Authentic but Anonymous Avatars: Fearing Sociality Online

One of the ways this tension manifests is through a persistent suspicion of sociality in online settings: relationships in virtuality are always suspect, always clouded over by the fog of neon overabundance distancing each from the other. As Dinello similarly notes, works in this genre “express a vision of the fears that this digital world generates, including the diminution of love, physical intimacy, social interaction, and even our self-awareness as more and more of our activities are mediated by computer networks” (149). This demonstrates that VR fictions do not simply collapse into an internalized panic through their flight from capital’s vampiric abstraction. Rather, they are always deeply invested in retaining an externalized and social exchange as it fears its “diminution.”

26 The mind-body problem considers the relationship between a physical brain and a metaphysical conception of consciousness. This problematization assumes that they are inherently separate to begin with and that one might exist without the other (as in a “soul”). 27 This isn’t to suggest that this supplants a previously unmediated state—rather, it offers a different and unique mediation in addition to the ever-presence of other perceptual and social mediations. As Marx comments of capital’s mediation, “it is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself” (Marx 1844). 64

RP1 is not subtle about its engagement of this escapist trope and its fears of inauthentic interpersonal connections online. In the very first scene of the film, we see Wade leave his family to enter VR in a hollowed-out automobile, alone, as he informs us that “these days, reality is a bummer—everyone is looking for a way to escape.” In the final shot he is no longer alone, sitting entangled with Samantha, as he announces that they’ve decided to shutter the OASIS twice a week because “people need to spend time in the real world—'cause, like Halliday said, reality is the only thing that’s real.” The subtext is clear—offline reality is the only place of authentic sociality; relationships formed online are compromised through the ever-present mediation of (literal and symbolic) abstraction. This tension scaffolds RP1’s romance plot throughout: Samantha repeatedly refuses Wade’s advances in the OASIS because he doesn’t

“live in the real world… [he lives] inside this illusion,” but immediately embraces him upon their first encounter offline. It seems inevitable that they should be together as Wade describes the closure of OASIS—by genre convention, their relationship is only made possible outside of it.

Wade’s language in that final scene echoes an earlier moment in the OASIS between himself and the hologram/ghost of Halliday—here again, we can identify a tension between online and offline sociality and subject formation, but presented in a different way. After Wade finds the Adventure easter egg, completing the final quest, Halliday appears first as his CGI- enabled avatar “Anorak” before transforming into himself as a young man. He whisks Wade

(still as his CGI avatar Parzival) into a simulacrum of Halliday’s own childhood bedroom, bedecked with the 1980s pop cultural ephemera that inspired the design of the OASIS. The replication of the real world within the virtual, the virtual-real-ghost, and the real-virtual intrusion of CGI Wade/Parzival within it collapse layers of representation into a confused 65 jumble. Halliday, quiet and nostalgic, describes the original creation of his virtual world as a sort of thinly-veiled morality tale; as he says to Wade,

I created the OASIS because I didn’t know how to live in the real world. I just didn’t

know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid for all my life, right up until the

day I knew my life was ending. That was when I realized that, as terrifying and painful as

reality can be, it’s also the only place that [sic] you can get a decent meal. Because reality

is real. You understand what I’m saying?

Here again we encounter this hollow conclusion: “reality is real,” with its implied second half— virtual reality is not. And why? Because offline the food is hot and there are people there. How, then, are we to understand the creator’s quest for connection—Robinett’s in Adventure, offered up just moments before, or Halliday’s own through the creation of the OASIS and its key quests?

The tensions here pull in both directions—toward online sociality and away from it.

This anti-escapist imperative is challenged as Wade returns to the offline world following his encounter with Halliday’s moralizing ghost: Halliday’s once-friend Ogden Morrow (Simon

Pegg) emerges from the crowd to congratulate Wade on his decision to share ownership of the company, winkingly commenting that “[Halliday] used to say the OASIS was never supposed to be a one-player game.” If the OASIS is a two-player game—or a several-billion-player game, more accurately—it would seem intentionally designed to allow users to “connect,” in Halliday’s words. This raises the same kinds of questions: What about that connection is inauthentic? Why are terror and pain in online less frightening than those same experiences offline? How did friendships formed online come to triumph over the vast resources and manpower of IOI if those friendships weren’t “real”? What does the mediation of the VR interface actually change about the experience of existence, other than our ability to get a hot meal? 66

Though RP1 attempts to maintain a firm line between the OASIS and the offline world,

this collapse of on- and offline existence in Halliday’s bedroom—closet doors whooshing open

to reveal the digital universe inside as faded posters flutter against the wall, Parzival’s digital-

mesh skin next to Halliday’s worry-worn, wrinkled face—underscore the fact that this divide has

been illusory and poorly policed from the start as each seem to parasitize the other. While reality might be “terrifying and painful,” the very first words of the film demonstrate that VR is no less frightening: a billboard advertisement for haptic bodysuits overlooking Wade’s home exhorts customers to “get ready for the feel—the feel of real—no pain, no gain.” The same advertisement reappears later, slightly changed to read “every push, punch, gunshot: you feel it all.” Because we are followed by the repetition of this particular advertisement and its ironic distancing of virtuality within the painful “feel” of real (another abstraction), it seems important that it circulates around these sensations rather than pleasurable ones, as we might expect given the employment of genre conventions and aesthetic markers of VR’s overabundance. If pain designates reality, as both Halliday and this advertisement suggest, then it seems impossible that

VR might be both a place of escapist pleasure sold and a transcended manifestation of capitalist social order, a place of pain. There would be no point in escaping something simply to find it again.

RP1’s use of these conventions here sets up an irresolvable conflict between pleasure and pain: its cyberspace literalizes capital’s “impossible totality,” per Jameson, creating a seemingly- pleasurable overabundance that is yet marked and sold by its ability to enable suffering. This setting is mobilized in part to limit the directions of social recognition within virtual space: its creators, Halliday and Robinett, can be “seen” and encountered through their works—they can be named. Notably, Halliday is the only character shown as a human actor rather than a CGI 67

avatar in the OASIS, offering him a singular sense of full personhood within VR. Common users

like Wade and Samantha are barred entry into this affective landscape except as mute witnesses,

hailed into VR as if by a version of Dinello’s “repressive technology of social control” favoring

interests not their own (152). To escape its grasp, it seems, they must resist the siren song of

virtual escapism and reassert normative social politics in the offline, “unmediated” world.

But this is an unsatisfying conclusion—not only does it ignore the ever-present mediation

of capital as its harms necessitate the salve of such religious recognition, to return to the Marxist

corrective to Dinello’s argument, but it ignores conflicting constructions of sociality in the film

itself. RP1 offers two formative relationships through which to figure Wade: Samantha, as love

interest, and Aech (Lena Waithe), as confidant and lieutenant. Like Halliday, Samantha figures

VR as a place of inauthentic sociality, at one point chiding Wade for attempting to share his real

name with her in the OASIS and repeatedly spurning his online romantic advances. As if to clue

its audience more directly into this sense of distance, Samantha offers a bit of telling exposition

about Wade’s screenname during their first meeting—“Parzival,” she reminds us, “as in the

knight who found the holy grail by himself” (it’s unclear if we are supposed to be in on the irony

of Samantha as grail maiden and love interest at once).28

Yet Wade’s friendship with Aech—though it shares the same markers of online anonymity—functions quite differently. Early in the film, Wade introduces us to Aech as his

“best friend in the OASIS. He’s my best friend, period—even though I’ve never actually met him in the real world.” This sets up the humor of the third act gender reveal: Aech is secretly H,

Helen, a queer black woman whose avatar and voice modulator allowed her to be read as a man

(apparently for years). When they meet offline for the first time, she identifies herself to Wade

28 See Maureen Fries’ influential “Gender and the Grail” for a version of this discussion. 68 by repeating an earlier quip—that anyone in the OASIS is as likely to be “a 300lb dude who lives in his mama’s basement in suburban Detroit” as who they claim to be. The irony of her authenticity marked through the invocation of this trope only serves to underscore that their relationship—their friendship—is real in the ways we are supposed to take to matter, regardless of its mediated origins online. Unlike Wade’s first offline meeting with Samantha, his dynamic with Aech claims an immediate, comfortable familiarity. That such a connection could be formed online between Aech and Wade would seem to negate Samantha and Halliday’s fears, and yet by the film’s conclusion they seem to be affirmed through Wade’s choice to spend more time offline.

This confusion and concern over the possibility of “authentic” sociality in VR repeatedly doubles back on itself in these ways: the OASIS is seemingly both a place in which friendships can be formed and a place in which technological mediation prohibits them for most. Even the virtual landscape itself seems to represent this confusion: as the establishing shots of the OASIS pan over a neon-lit hotel with an hourly rate, Wade’s voiceover announces that in VR “you can get married, you can get divorced, you can… go in there…” Not only is the OASIS a place of intimate relations, it is a space in which official relationships can be formed, dissolved, made anew. And yet marriage is immediately undermined by its proximity to divorce, and even the less-officialized sexual relations represented by the hotel are offered with audible discomfort— an unexpectedly puritanical aside from a teenage boy looking for love, or something more profound? As the shot swerves away from the hotel toward a bustling thoroughfare, Wade more thoughtfully intones that the OASIS is simply “where we go to see each other.” “Seeing,” though, still suggests an unsurmounted sense of distance. 69

Virtual Paupers in Virtual Reality

To this point we can see that VR (both by genre convention and within RP1 specifically)

serves as an escapist respite from capitalist subjection while also reiterating capital’s abstracting

principles within its landscapes. The overabundance of VR is a result of the “vampiric”

tendencies of capital toward its own enrichment at the expense of dystopically impoverished

offline worlds, creating the need for such an escape and providing it at once. Further, VR appears

to both promise social relationships and deny them by the same token. How can these conflicting

and somewhat disjointed tendencies be squared? That many fictions of VR deal with the same

broad unease in their constructions of capital and sociality suggests that the two are paired—both

Dinello and Jameson seem to recognize this, but their arguments fail to fully explain it. If our fear of virtuality is innately a fear of capital literalized in its construction of cyberspace, as

Jameson suggests, we might then consider how capital itself works to create the unresolved fears of impossible and preempted sociality Dinello describes. This pairing itself must then be essential to the specific logic of sociality under capitalism in such a way that resolves (or at least explains) the social contradictions I’ve outlined to this point.

Often overlooked in his economic critique is the fact that Marx’s deconstruction of capital is intimately bound to the nature of social relations—a pairing that echoes the tensions embodied in these genre conventions. As he explores in his comments on James Mill, the nature of currency (and other mediating systems, perhaps VR among them) is not that it embodies property, as we might assume, but that it instead absorbs and alienates the social nature of exchange itself (Marx 1844). Unlike Robinett and Halliday, who appear able to meaningfully represent themselves in their creations (and to be socially “seen” in them), the OASIS’ denizens are unable to productively externalize their “selves” and are instead forced to exchange their 70 labor power,29 furthering a process wherein capital’s self-enrichment comes to rule over those that made and continually remake it. As Marx continues that “it is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me”, so too might we see that the OASIS itself comes to rule over its inhabitants as it mediates and monetizes all exchange between them (Marx 1844). Though Halliday seems to recognize himself and be recognized in the product of his unalienated labor, he is yet distanced through the power of this mediation as he is the only actor outside it. In this way he and Wade are left unable to encounter each other through Halliday’s own creation even as Wade strives to locate him in it— like Adam reaching for God, they strain toward each other but do not quite touch.

This is not, however, to project some pure or fixed essence of the human that can be externalized as such. Because “the human essence… is the ensemble of social relations,” processes of virtualization—intrusions of a mediating force within an organizing system that rely on the externalization of life-activity—are not simply a threat to our economic order or conception of reality, as has been often argued (Marx 1845 VI). Instead, virtualization threatens our understanding of the very nature of social humanity (rather than Jameson’s hand-wringing over a singular and threatened relationship between mind and body). As RP1 seems to fear, in

VR we are only permitted to play-act social exchange rather than conduct it authentically. Real exchange, we seem to find, can only follow an awareness of the offline existence behind online mediated presence, as in the second act reveal of Samantha’s birthmark: it is only inscribed onto

29 Wage labor is the form of production in which the worker sells their own labor power as itself a commodity. For Marx, “the putting of labor-power into action--i.e., the work--is the active expression of the laborer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. ... The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity… What he produces for himself is wages … Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours' work… [only have meaning] as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed” (Marx 1891). 71 her avatar after it is observed by Wade offline, “real-izing” her virtual presence thereafter.

Though this reading obviously ignores critical parts of Marx’s formulation by limiting such mediation to the online world, it offers some sense of the disrupted sociality of VR fictions. To extend Jameson’s understanding of cyberspace as literalized capital, the technological recreation of self in VR comes to further stand in for capital as a mediating force governing particularly social exchange: a force that prevents its subjects from forming “real” connections, estranging social action in the technology.

But this is confusing and contradictory within its partial perspective—why should offline existence authorize and revitalize sociality in VR? Marx himself uses the word “virtual”30 repeatedly while describing the paired nature of capital and social relations, including seven times within the Grundrisse (excluding its appearance in quotations of work by other authors). In each instance, it is used to mark a disconnect or layer of abstraction between material conditions and the production of value. In one of the most notable of these passages, he develops the idea of a “virtual pauper”—what he saw as the essential status of any “free laborer.” Because workers are reliant on capital’s demand for surplus labor to acquire the “necessaries of life,” they are always already dependent on the “charity” of capitalist intervention to sustain themselves (Marx

1993 607). This, finally, is our vertiginous disconnect between perception and “reality”: though the laborer does not seem to experience his own pauperism, standing in alms lines or seeking government aid, that is nevertheless is the unrealized foundation of his condition.

As Marx describes, a laborer “can live as a worker only insofar as he exchanges his labour capacity for that part of capital which forms the labour fund. This exchange is tied to conditions which are accidental for him, and indifferent to his organic presence. He is thus a

30 This term (virtual/virtuell) and its etymological heritage are roughly the same in both German and English. This extends to its technological embodiment, virtuelle Realität. 72

virtual pauper” (Marx 1993 604). It strikes me that Marx is focused on an “indifference” to

“organic presence,” what seems to describe individual, material embodiment. This “indifference”

to the body (or rather, to its needs) can be seen as a core component of capital’s virtualization in

all its forms. As “capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour,

and lives the more, the more labour it sucks,” we might understand it to consume the body as it

consumes life itself, abstracting and de-individuating power into money. Jameson, it appears,

was half right: the body is threatened, but not by a confused relationship to the mind. Rather, the

body itself disappears into mediation—and when it is gone, there is nothing left.

Marx contends that “society in its fractional parts undertakes for Mr. Capitalist the

business of keeping his virtual instrument of labour – its wear and tear – intact as reserve for

later use” (Marx 1993 609). Our dependence on the charity of capital thus drives social

organization, at least insofar as we inhabit fallible, material forms. This is to say that though we

maintain each other materially, we do so only through the mediation of capital and in its service,

severing any sense of an “authentic” interpersonal connection. While this is a broken sociality

beyond the “species activity” of social exchange, it yet creates an image of the social even as it

denatures it. If we are to become fully indifferent to the body, however, if we are to ignore its

material needs entirely, we lose even this image. As Samantha and Halliday seem to fear,

virtualization severs the final thin threads left between us.

The OASIS literalizes this problem by offering technology as a fully mediating world- system: its inhabitants only touch, feel, and speak through digital abstraction. As Halliday bemoans the fact that you can’t get a hot meal in the OASIS, we might instead see that its disembodied players don’t (seem to) need one. By eliding the appearance of the body and its needs, VR renders even that most basic form of social organization undertaken for “Mr. 73

Capitalist” redundant, unnecessary. With no socially cohering force and without any internal or singular human essence, fictional VR’s symbolic promise of “complete” virtualization denies us any humanity, any sense of life. An insistence on offline relationships in VR fictions thus might be read as a half-measuring reclamation of social exchange and humanity within it: by demanding the ability to maintain each other’s bodies and the need for their own maintenance,

RP1’s players-cum-laborers can again claim access to the specter of sociality, to its image.

Though this is hardly the liberatory conclusion the film seems to promise, the alternative would be unimaginable, apocalyptic.

This is a somewhat dizzying claim, but one immediately reigned in by the remembrance that there is an offline behind the online, that there are yet bodies to be maintained. Hot meals are still required. Curiously, this very awareness should then real-ize the pauper. The virtual pauper only remains virtual as he remains unaware of the underlying foundation of his condition—this illusion relies on social organization toward the maintenance of life, enshrined within the structure of wage labor itself. This in mind, the impossible elision of the body’s needs in VR should make it evident that the terms of contemporary labor are themselves structured around such an empty maintenance of life, to provide the spark of revolutionary consciousness. Instead, though, RP1 offers a much more disappointing conclusion: “bad” capitalists are replaced by

“good” ones, but the system as a whole remains the same.

Failed Revolutions and Alternative Mediations

Spurred by this realization, why do not Samantha and Wade instead revolt—not just against IOI, but the OASIS itself? Why do they turn it off only twice a week, having discovered finally the foundation of their confused fears—why not turn it off for good? 74

Jameson argues that cyberpunk, as it literalizes capital and allows its characters to engage

with material stand-ins for its symbolic processes, offers a way through which we might envision

such revolutions. However, the realization of capital-made-literal in RP1 is instead disabling and precludes such reflection. The phobic revulsion it provokes demands an immediate return to the

“real,” the offline, the partially-abled and brokenly-social as capital yet orders us to maintain each other. Nothing can be resolved within virtuality because, denied social access to each other, we are no longer ourselves human. Within the critique of capital in fictions of VR, the virtual is in this way both necessary and inherently untenable. Phobia returns to its original psychoanalytic role; the problems of dehumanizing and alienated labor processes are too massive and their logical extension too dehumanizing; they are displaced onto VR, and finally, rejected.

Dinello locates the fundamental underpinning of this phobic response in a more palatable version of the mind-body problem, quoting Tim Jordan’s concern that “the connection between mind and body [might be] given up for a connection between mind and machine…the body’s dominance over the mind is the stranglehold broken by complex computer systems…cyberspace allows a transcendental community of mind” (179). But this, of course, offers a similarly confused critique as does RP1. One wonders how a “transcendental community” might exist in the virtual worlds of misshapen social networks and “diversionary escapes” (152) into individualized religious spaces—how can a community be individuated in this way while yet remaining social? We return again to Wade alone on the ice, attempting to locate Robinett in his own creation. As he plays to play, “not to win,” we might wonder if this doesn’t ultimately mark a social failure despite its appearance otherwise.

This analysis is an important beginning, but functionally inadequate. As Marx’s fourth thesis on Feuerbach famously provokes, 75

that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent

realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within

this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its

contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is

discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in

theory and in practice.

Here is both Dinello’s success, and his failure: by identifying religious impulses within the

fictions of VR, he marks a critical mechanism within their modes of movement around human

subjectivity, particularly within the brokenly-social individuating impulses of these texts.

However, in neglecting the origin of these religious structures, he misses the opportunity for a much more radical social critique than a simple concern for the dangers of scientistic techno-

utopianism. The earthly family is the secret of the holy family; earthly technosocial relations are

the secret of techno-religion. While acknowledging the critical importance of such a religious

recognition—particularly given our contemporary impulse toward the same (Kurzweil’s Church

of Singularity, David Nobel, etc.)—we must find a way to identify and manage the underlying,

material conditions that give rise to such structures and desires. As Marx similarly concludes that

“all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and

in the comprehension of this practice,” so too must we insist upon an interest in “human

practice” in the way it shapes and is shaped by technology and technosocial relations, rather than

confine our study to “the human” as it orbits “the machine” in discrete spheres. As we see in

RP1, structural inequality and poverty as created by finance capital have created a society in

which impoverished subjects—Wade among them—are blinded to their condition by the illusory

overabundance of VR. Like the “euphoria in unhappiness” of Marcuse’s false needs, VR’s 76 artificial pleasures serves to maintain their dependence on the technologies of capital while yet providing a further challenge to an already-fraught sociality both online and offline (Marcuse

1964 7).

Despite these inclusions, RP1 does not ultimately offer a definitive critique of capital, technology, or VR—at least, not directly. By attempting to police an impossible border between the always-conjoined real and virtual, online and offline, it finds itself locked into contradictory impulses and symbolic structures. Like Dinello, the film attempts to offer a landscape where we are alone together, or together alone, impossibly individuated and yet promised the ability to finally connect to each other and to our gods. The process of capital’s mediation itself, symbolically occupied by VR, appears to offer an overabundant utopia while yet fueling that abundance at the cost of its players very humanity, blinded to the contradictions of their conditions like Marx’s virtual paupers. Despite the film’s happy ending, we are left with unresolved hopes and fears. But these tensions are themselves productive, as they offer a mechanism through which we can see the impossible oppositions of utopian capital. This, then, is the film’s revolutionary spark: not Wade’s victory over IOI, but our reminder of a humanity beyond capital’s particular mediation thereof. 77

CHAPTER III. POSTHUMANISM AND THE VIRTUALIZED BODY

Virtual reality seems to provoke a horror both psychological and physiological: a fear of the disconnect between mind and body, experience and expectation. As Kirkwood reminds us, such a jolt is indicative of an interruption of “the processes by which the physical body produces a meta-level recognition of the subject as distinct from but related to objects” (2-3). This assumes something important—that the body’s own presence is itself a perceptually mediating circuit that cannot be superseded. Within the medical-metaphysical problematic Kirkwood opens here, one can identify a particularly destabilizing dialectic between material and informational forms. We might ask: is it possible to even consider a reality outside such “biological” mediation, or to do so without threatening the line which retains human subjects as an ontologically separate category from nonhuman objects? Alternatively, can we retain perception without specifically biological mediation, and if so, what openings might we encounter through a different

“interface?”

Counterintuitively, VR is often depicted in fiction as a technology that might offer such an experience, even as VR itself is a system of perceptual mediation. Technologist Jaron Lanier has described VR’s “ideal form” as “unbounded experience… a way out of the dull persistence of physicality…a way of being that isn’t just tied to our given circumstances in this world” (2-3).

This “unbounding” might seem to offer us a wider—or, at least, different—circumscription of phenomenological experience. Interestingly, Lanier offers this definition against other

“troubling” conceptualizations of VR, including that of a political commentator who wields

“living in virtual reality” as an insult which implies “the failing of the mind” (240). If we are to take a failing of the mind as itself a failing of the body—as Lanier’s commentator also seems to, suggesting “[honest] delusion rather than manipulation”—we are left with an “ideal” of VR that 78

doesn’t simply trouble the body but exists beyond it. How might VR encounter a “disembodied”

and yet still perceptive mind, and what, finally might that “ideal form” enable us to consider

differently?

The Netflix original series Black Mirror (originally produced for Channel 4, 2013-

present) is known for its speculative considerations of technologies that challenge, distort, and

delude human perception—technologies that seem to enable such a disembodiment. Named for

“the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone” and inspired by the phobic anthology

The Twilight Zone, the series takes the form of standalone episodes set in an alternate present or near future, inviting us to critique societies and sciences not far removed from our own

(Brooker). In contrast to the series’ typical phobic fare, 2016’s Emmy award-winning episode

“San Junipero” has been widely regarded as an optimistic episode—one which offers a vision of

a liberatory VR, freeing its users not only from the social inequality but the constraints of their

very bodies. Within a computational system that allows humans to upload their “selves” after

death, “San Junipero” explores a seemingly utopic VR space that, like Lanier’s “ideal form,”

exists beyond a biological interface.

By reconsidering the industrial and social contexts in which VR is used and produced,

“San Junipero” offers a particularly interesting case study of the relationship between

technological and medical discourses as they construct the body, the human, and the social.

While characters within the episode demonstrate similar fears of virtual reality as discussed in

the previous chapter—particularly fears of social relations in VR—the cultural anxieties

displaced within them are made dramatically different by the shift in context. Protagonists Kelly

(Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) then demonstrate a turn away from those

fears—a turn that does not end in disaster, per many of Black Mirror’s too-trusting leads, but 79

appears to allow them access to paradise and personal fulfillment. Through Julia Kristeva’s

theory of the abject and Bruno Latour’s construction of embodiment, I will explore in this

chapter how “the self” functions within the VR space of “San Junipero” both within and beyond

biologically mediated perception toward illuminating the episode’s posthumanist imagination—

and the limits thereof.

Biomedical VR

The episode opens on a neon-lit downtown street, a long shot dwelling for a moment on

Max Headroom’s (Matt Frewer) plasticine bust glitching in multiple on a storefront television window display. Though it serves as one of several signals to draw our attention to the time period of the scene (“one of the biggest hits of 1987” declares a car stereo over the final bars of

Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” immediately preceding that shot), Headroom’s appearance adds a strange meta-irony upon replay as it gestures toward the interpenetration of human and machine. Somewhat similar to the digitized consciousnesses of San Junipero, Max

Headroom, from the eponymous 1980s television series, is as an artificial intelligence built on the memories of a real man following his unexpected death—a way of preserving (and yet, critically, altering in the process) his spirit. Yet in contrast to the seeming paradise of San

Junipero, Headroom is trapped in a dystopian mediascape ruled by network television, and was

“uploaded” only by the intervention of his colleagues rather than by his own choice. In this way,

Max Headroom seems a specter of the social commentary we might expect from such a Black

Mirror episode, fearfully satirizing a technological afterlife within virtual reality. And yet for all

its symbolic weight, invoking one of the most well-known technological resurrections, the shot

quickly moves on. This seems a direct dismissal of such a critique—a way of pointedly 80 exorcizing the expectations of malefic capital that sustain Headroom and have invigorated the genre since.

It is particularly notable that “San Junipero” does not seem to question the development or capitalistic deployment of its technology of interest, as do many Black Mirror episodes and indeed most other technophobic science fictions. Instead, the episode interrogates the possibilities of transhumanist VR itself rather than the faults of a specific iteration thereof (as does RP1’s critique of IOI in Chapter Two). Its VR system seems to simply exist, fully formed, freed of economic impetus, computational errors, or other external influence. Even the corporate backstory is fully obscured: the name of the company that operates San Junipero, TCKR

Systems, is shown only briefly in a cut-away during the end credits. In those moments, TCKR appears entirely devoid of societal influence or human politics, inhabited only by robotic arms maintaining its seemingly infinite racks of servers. Through this unusual positioning we might read the phobic reactions to VR within the episode as responses to the idea simulated reality itself, rather than as indicative of some broader societal condition enabling it.

In keeping with its occulted corporatism, the episode gives no sense of San Junipero’s purchase or use fees, and characters who interact with it are shown being handed VR devices by health aides (not salespeople, inventors, or those with other obviously motivated interests) in several scenes. When Kelly bargains with a nurse for access to San Junipero in Yorkie’s hospital facility, she insists to him that “the system is there for therapeutic purposes.” These purposes are clearly controlled by a medical infrastructure favoring a very conservative definition of medical responsibility, as she has to beg to use the hospital’s VR equipment to even communicate with the paralyzed and speechless Yorkie. In a later scene Kelly again enters VR with the help of a 81

scrubs-clad assistant—this time within an assisted living community, a sunset31 visible through

the window. By limiting VR to medical contexts and managing access through health care

workers while—like a hospital—obscuring a sense of cost or purchase, the episode seems to

refigure VR from an entertainment technology, as it is popularly understood (and portrayed as in

several previous Black Mirror episodes as well as RP1) to a specifically medical technology.

By changing the industry context of VR while yet downplaying the socioeconomic factors of its development and deployment, we are invited to understand its use in a wholly different context than most other VR fiction.32 Though this might appear a subtle shift, it

dramatically refigures our expectations for how we read the relationship between human and

machine. While entertainment technology is often considered to be superfluous to life processes,

medical technologies are seen to offer needed and life-sustaining interventions—they sustain life.

Further, they often penetrate, inhabit, or otherwise comingle with the body more intimately than

entertainment devices, whose use is temporary and optional. This refixes our interest in the

relationship between VR and the individual while materializing its effects quite literally, even as

“San Junipero” seems to vanish the organic body in death. Unlike Headroom’s vampiric

subsumption of the human by the mechanical, the episode continues to grapple with embodiment

as it creates and is created by the “self,” demanding careful attention to the borders of life and

humanity as it seems to challenge common conceptions of both.

31 It seems worth noting that most of the episode appears to take place at sunset or in the early evening both in and out of VR, an obvious nod to death and what comes after. Only immediately before Junie’s death do we see daylight on the island, adding to the positive valorization of VR. 32 Interestingly, through several other films feature a more mechanistically medical approach to VR, Black Mirror is the only to position it as a specifically medical technology. Lawnmower Man’s VR required chemical injections, while eXistenZ’s messy organic interface, with its Freudian quasi-phallic umbilical cord connection, was clearly more “biological” than the sterile, delicate technology of “San Junipero.” 82

The Virtual Abject

Max Headroom blurs the boundary between man and machine; his presence in this episode forces us to consider hybridity as the potential state offered through VR. But even as

“San Junipero” appears to further this categorization by blurring the boundary between life and death itself—allowing the avatars of the living to interact with those of the deceased, granting the yet-mortal limited access to the digital island as “tourists”—it seeks to maintain a much more

conservative delineation between computational and biological consciousness. This, critically, is

what evokes the first moments of what we might identify as phobic revulsion within the episode.

When our protagonists first meet as tourists on the island, Kelly asks Yorkie if she “lives here [as

a deceased resident of San Junipero].” “No! No!” Yorkie replies, almost shouting. Her

vehemence is surprising and out of character for her otherwise soft-spoken, nervous woman.

This revulsion is then triggered a second time as scorned lover Wes (Gavin Stenhouse) attempts

to recapture Kelly’s attention. Turning him down, she begs Wes to chase after one of the

thousands of other women in San Junipero instead, to which he replies, yelling with apparent

shock: “the locals? They’re like dead people!” In both these instances, the confusion of living

(Yorkie and Wes) for dead (the “locals”) prompts a loud, horrified reaction—the threatened

intermingling of binarily opposed states here creates a classical phobic response.

The emotion both Yorkie and Wes demonstrate in these moments recalls Kristeva’s

description of the “abject,” a phobic horror-response to a threatened breakdown in meaning

originating at the boundary between self and Other. Such a reaction “crops up suddenly and

condenses into a flash of lightning, an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve

bringing together the two opposite terms, but, on account of that flash, is discharged like

thunder” (Kristeva 8-9). The suddenness, the vehemence of Yorkie and Wes’ rejections of erotic 83 interaction with or being mistaken for the dead are that thunderclap, discharging the possibility of reconciling the subject and object, living and dead, “real” persons and “virtual” ones. And though Kelly initiates both of these moments, raising the possibility of authentic interaction with the digital dead, she too indicates an abject phobia in her own understanding of San Junipero elsewhere in the episode. Though willing to visit the island while she remains living, Kelly initially scoffs at the potential of uploading her consciousness after her death, repeating flatly,

“when I’m done, I’m done.” Her refusal to consider a technological existence beyond the human form is yet another instance of phobic rejection, moved from a public sphere of sociality into a private one of physical embodiment and choice.

It is clear that what is at stake is not, then, online vs offline existence—at least not as such. Instead, Kelly, Yorkie and Wes’ responses all suggest a much more traditional phobic rejection in line with Kristeva’s original theorization—a fear of mortality. “San Junipero” offers a specific version of VR that makes this fear plain: as posthuman theorist Rosi Braidotti assesses in her work on computational consciousness, the transgressed border that allows the living and non-living (here, dead) to interact forces the human subject to “become schizoid, or internally disjointed…spectral: the body doubles up as the potential corpse it has always been” (Braidotti

119). We might understand all bodies in San Junipero as evidence of such “doubling up” as there is no visible difference between the dead and the living, and yet that awareness seems curiously and repeatedly denied. As she tries to get rid of Wes in an early scene, Kelly intimates that she needs to have a private conversation with her friend because Yorkie is “sick, like, six months to live sick”; “sure,” Wes responds earnestly, “I’m really sorry.” As Wes continues to remind Kelly that their time in San Junipero is limited, suggesting that to live on the island “full time” would be a desirable fate, Yorkie’s impending death should seem a promise rather than a tragedy. That 84

Wes instead seems genuinely moved by her “condition”—and that Kelly anticipated such a

response—suggests a certain blindness toward their coexistence with the deceased.

Though the living tourists in San Junipero are able to avoid conscious acknowledgement

of such “doubling up” by forgoing interaction with the dead, any breach in that containment

threatens to rupture the border between the sign order and the Real—this threat is what demands an abject reaction, a “defense fantasy.” This extends to obscuring the weaknesses of the offline bodies behind the youth and vigor of San Junipero’s avatars, as any such illness conjures the specter of death’s inevitability. Throughout, we see remarkably little reference to biological embodiment in San Junipero, and what little there is prompts disgust and disdain. One of Kelly’s suitors describes his knee replacements in one breath only to continue that he “doesn’t get” music in the next, signaling his social ineptitude and seeming unfitness both materially and as a romantic partner. “You want to dance?,” Kelly asks as if to stop him from speaking, only to quickly excuse herself to the restroom when he resumes their conversation. Her look of distaste is mirrored by Yorkie—a rare moment of social disapproval from her, as she herself feels out of place for most of the episode. This marks a particular authorization of the disembodied discourse of the island that seems to forbid reference to offline existence—or at least, the parts of it tied to biological limitation. This is a particularly important inversion, as it marks the organic body as not only not an important indication of life, but an actually devalued and devaluing handicap. If not the body, what, then, separates San Junipero’s living from its dead?

As their relationship progresses in San Junipero, Yorkie initially attempts to stop Kelly from visiting her offline, presumably to conceal her quadriplegia for a similar purpose. “You wouldn’t get me at all,” she insists, her voice quavering, “you wouldn’t like me… wouldn’t want to spend time with me.” Kelly doesn’t respond with the reassurance we might expect: rather than 85 affirming their friendship, she instead cuts her off firmly, interjecting that “I’m dying, nothing scares me.” Her tone and her forcefulness seem to suggest any form of life remains ordered over—less terrifying than—death, such that no infirmity on Yorkie’s part might present a fate worse than her own imminent mortality. For Kelly, as for Wes and the other tourists, to be human and alive always entails a border maintained through fear and revulsion at the potential for becoming categorized with ghostly, nonhuman Others—even as technology offers a way through which that boundary might be transgressed and the organic body itself does not seem to be the factor at stake. Though “San Junipero” seems to offer such a utopian technology, a

“heaven on earth” per its soundtrack, the episode’s characters’ phobic rejections initially mark this as a fate no better than the mortality it appears to circumvent. As Kelly sarcastically quips to a nurse, “uploaded to the cloud, sounds like heaven.” This echoes an earlier comment about the needlessly poetic and passive language around death—“let’s just call it dying.”

Death and Dis/embodiment

What does it mean to die when your consciousness continues? If we are to take the premise of “San Junipero” at face value, the fallible organic body is replaced with a digital replica, as is the material world in which it exists refigured toward a computationally generated one—leaving us with what seems to be the consciousness of Theseus. However, the episode offers a variety of characters and plot elements that seem to reject this seamless transition, valuing certain forms of “life” and embodiment over others that forms a value system at odds with its utopic conclusion. These impulses structure conflicting conceptions of death as it particularly relates to the role of the (organic) body.

Oddly, “San Junipero’s” deaths seem biologized even as they enable a move away from such forms of embodiment. The scenes of Kelly’s and Yorkie’s deaths each focus on two similar 86

shots: an egglike diode affixed to the temple, and an IV filled with a translucent, milky fluid—

semen-like, the meeting of sperm and egg, an anti-conception that ends in bodily death. In credit-

sequence cutaways we see that the diodes containing their “selves,” the sums of their personalities and experiences, are placed within the glittering TCKR mainframe by a robotic

hand. Like a woman who carries with her all the eggs she will ever have from birth, we might

see the mainframe as a digital womb reclaiming those diodes with their nigh-infinite consciousnesses, potentialities—the anti-Oedipal mother, who gifts not death but immortality.

Kristeva’s construction of the abject recognizes such a maternal feminine at play in phobic

sublimation: as she explains, the self/(m)Other divorce at birth is the original mortal horror because “the mother gives us life but without infinity”: she births us only so that we will die

(Kristeva 59-60). What are we to do with the mother who grants immortality beyond biology—

how does that shift reframe what it means to be human after such a re/birth?

The maternal computer should seem to offer a feminist refiguring of death—and life—

itself. As Kelly and Yorkie are happily together in a queered and sunlit afterlife in the episode’s

conclusion, we might try to read “San Junipero” as a morality play which questions the

human/ist sovereignty of biological life over computational existence. Is phobia so easy to

overcome—are we to see the island’s inhabitants as Headroom-like hybrids who have

transcended petty concerns about the nature of the interface to embrace other forms of

experience? Such a heterogeneous relationship—one alive, one deceased—might offer the beginning of such a reconsideration. And yet even their happy ending is threatened by the same

phobias that mark the rest of the episode: after Yorkie’s death but before her own, Kelly visits

the island expecting to celebrate only to be drawn into a vicious fight that ends in an emotional

car accident. Though they attempt to reconcile, the very structuring of the world itself intercedes 87

to prohibit it: as Yorkie reaches for Kelly’s hand to help her off the pavement where she was

thrown from the car, Kelly’s allotted visitation time expires. She blinks out of existence, leaving

Yorkie alone in the blowing rain, hand outstretched but denied the chance to touch, to “double

up” body and ghost. Even though their cross-border relationship seems to conjure the abject, it

does not represent a true breakdown or indefinite permeability: life cannot seem to give itself up.

This construction is itself embedded in the legal system of the offline world, which

tightly controls island “residency.” Resembling euthanasia restrictions already legislated in states and countries that allow for such an act, San Junipero residency is under “triple lock-down,” requiring signatures from the patient, a physician, and a family member. However, while similar

American laws are meant to prevent coercion or choices made in haste, Black Mirror’s “triple lock-down…[is] to stop euthanasia just because folks prefer San Junipero,” underscoring a fear of virtual pleasures so enticing they end in untimely death. Even visitation to the island is limited toward this end. As we learn through Yorkie’s care aide, only those near death (the elderly and the terminally ill) are allowed access to San Junipero, and their access is strictly limited to five hours per week. “They say you go crazy if you have too much,” he describes of the reasoning behind such a policy, that “you don’t leave your seat, disassociate body from mind.” This suggests that to enter into VR is in some way an inherent threat to vitality and is thus limited to those without it; it represents senility, another feared loss of meaning, a geriatric exit from the sign order. In this way, it seems the border zone itself—San Junipero, as it allows the living and dead to coexist—is opened only to those who are already within life’s liminal edges. Though the seemingly corruptive pleasures are appropriate for the dead, and seep outward to those at its threshold, such rules fear digital possibility while yet reinscribing a Life/death hierarchy through those it deigns to “protect” from the consequences of what appears to be a free choice. 88

Purifying the Abject

Though “San Junipero” appears to radically refigure life and death, in this way we can

see that that reconstruction remains limited—both legally, in the political figurations around the

technology, and psychosocially, in the variety of abject responses the living evince toward the

dead. That even Kelly and Yorkie are unable to effectively communicate while straddling that

border (before Kelly’s death, after Yorkie’s) marks the durability of such phobic categorization.

Despite its utopic appearance, the episode in fact seems to offer little movement toward a future

in which death operates in a meaningfully different cultural context. Like Kelly’s initial derision

at the language of being “uploaded to the cloud,” we might ask: why not just call it dying?

The episode’s failure to truly revolutionize this categorization through its assertions of reinforced binaries and policed borders while yet promising queered hybridity then comes to resemble Latour’s fundamental critique of modernity. As he argues, the schema of modernity attempts to construct purification and translation as separate, coexisting projects, ignoring their conflicting and contradictory mechanisms (Latour 1991). San Junipero’s separation of body from mind at death allows for an infinitely extended form of purification by separating nonhuman nature (here, the conscious-less body and the material world) from human culture (pure consciousness and simulacra of an urban built environment). Separately and simultaneously, translation is allowed to occur as Kelly and Yorkie become subsumed into digital networks— networks which themselves are always under threat or attempt of purification, as the living and dead consistently reassert boundaries even within their own translational, community-building efforts.

These conflicting impulses are part of what creates the episode’s tension: it orbits what seem to be post-humans, digitalized hybrids, while yet circumscribing them to an untenable 89 space beyond the sign order—as Kelly describes after Yorkie’s death, San Junipero is a “fucking graveyard,” a place where “nothing matters” because “who could even make sense of forever.”

Her sense that “nothing matters” against the vast expanse of eternity underscores the fact that such a reintegration of death into life and absence into presence should be impossible, unhuman.

This construction then marks the episode as an ultimately modernist project: its contradictions are what stop it from forming a more robust posthumanist imagination. As Latour describes, in such a technosocial setting “there are no more naked truths, but there are no more naked citizens, either. The mediators have the whole space to themselves” (Latour 1991 144). The contradictions seem unreconcilable and demand sustained categorization of life from death, purging what might otherwise be considered an entertainment technology into a legislated and walled-off biomedical VR.

That these mediators are delimited to their own arena is no accident. As Latour further describes, “by rendering mixtures unthinkable… the moderns allowed the practice of mediation to recombine all possible monsters without letting them have any effect on the social fabric, or even any contact with it. Bizarre as these monsters may be, they posed no problem because they did not exist publicly and because their monstrous consequences remained untraceable” (Latour

1991 13). Here, hopefully, the fundamental contradictions become apparent: Kelly and Yorkie pose no threat to the social order because they have become immaterial, nonhuman, reorganized into a computational system rather than a biological one. However, they simultaneously become purely human in their relations to each other beyond the material society they (seem to) exit through their deaths—this is the “romance” that we are invited to celebrate at the episode’s conclusion, the reclamation of queer love allowing each fuller access to the human experience. 90

This contradiction is irresolvable, and yet necessary for the heavenly “happily ever after”

Carlisle’s soundtrack promises. The phobic specter of technophobic abjection is the only

intervention that allows this balance to be maintained, existing within Black Mirror’s extra-

episodic promise that simulacra virtualized through technological and technosocial systems

might not be as they appear—that Kelly and Yorkie might be “computer ghosts,” recreations of

individuals rather than their “authentic” continuation of consciousness. Though “San Junipero”

itself does not seem to offer this possibility as a threat—rather, the episode simultaneously

acknowledges and defuses this phobic manifestation through Yorkie’s insistence that “it looks so

real, it feels so real”—viewers are yet invited (or perhaps mandated) to consider this possibility

as it reconciles an otherwise impossible contradiction. This offers symbolic resolution, perhaps,

but is a profoundly troubling erasure of a queer relationship within a nonhuman system: it is

dehumanizing in perhaps the most literal way.

It is difficult but necessary, in this way, to bring together a psychoanalytic concern for the im/material feminine with a socially networked critique through Latour. “San Junipero” is a love story at its heart, with the requisite attention to character development through romantic interpersonal exchange that genre entails—though we may be tempted to limit our scope to Kelly or Yorkie as singular subjects with a happy ending, to do so ignores the formations of the social world they inhabit as it directs the actions of other actors, other people. This step of remove

again highlights the episode’s contradictory, troubling insistence on humanistic binaries as they

structure its universe, limiting the queered, posthumanist and deathless future its resolution

appears to offer. Instead, we find ourselves again in a familiar world driven by old (and sexist!)

dichotomies; the only way out afforded to its inhabitants is to find another world completely. As

Kelly’s body is buried beside her husband while her “mind,” freed of its organic shackles, 91 pursues a new romance with Yorkie in San Junipero, we might be inclined to read the parallel structure as indicative of Kelly’s ability to honor her old life while entering a new one. However, that divorce might also indicate a more substantive split—one which leaves behind something important.

Returning to the Body: Posthuman Articulation

This is a disappointing conclusion to reach, and underscores the episode’s failure to conceptualize the radical posthumanist future it promises. By its reliance on a purification of the abject—both psychoanalytically, banishing it to an unfavored binary category, and sociologically, by attempting to create a demarcation between nature and culture through the death of the body—“San Junipero” falls back into humanist patterns despite its utopic promise.

Interestingly, though, these tensions appear to be localized to the body in both constructions— the monstrously material feminine form, for Kristeva, and the contradictions realized when these competing constructs are made to inhabit the same space, for Latour. Realizing this, we must return to investigate the body within virtual systems—no longer remediated into symbolic oblivion through technological intervention, but allowed life of its own.

The body is important not because it houses some ineffable human essence, but because it always already mediates—and thus dictates—the nature of perceptual experience. In this way,

Bruno Latour proposes that the body, alongside other material interfaces from which it cannot be categorized beyond, is best defined as “an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements”—that the body is inherently relational and exists meaningfully only in its interaction with other actors/elements as it is shaped by them

(Latour 2004 206). He refines this definition through the process of “articulation,” the body’s ability to render increasingly fine phenomenological distinctions. Importantly, these 92 differentiations are uninterested in reaching a faithful representation or even a consensus reality or representing such in language—this is beyond the point. Rather, additional articulations allow one to behave differently, to feel and act differently in response to one’s environment.

Articulation is a particularly useful way of thinking about the virtualized body because of its need for careful consideration of setting, of “environment,” and of the inherent integration of actor and (technologized) world that doesn’t allow for a simple collapse into mind-body panic.

The body—or rather, the interface—can be changed, but never done away with: even in death, continued perception entails continued mediation from which “the mind” can never be divorced.

“San Junipero” draws our attention to the individuated and embodied nature of perception immediately: in their first meeting, Kelly comments that Yorkie’s glasses are not “a fashion statement,” but “authentically [her].” This is reemphasized in a later montage, wherein

Yorkie enacts a rom-com trope trying on several outfits before her date. After modelling a variety of 1980s fashion trends, wincing in discomfort at each, she again lands on an ensemble featuring glasses—the shot lingers for a moment on a close up as she reaches for them on the table, fingers curling around their arm, to emphasize their importance. As Yorkie later chases

Kelly through a variety of eras in the shifting time periods of the island, her glasses remain the one sartorial constant as her hair and clothes change. Her “interface”—not her biological body— is strongly coded as key to her very character. It is critical that her glasses—not other aspects of her physical appearance, such as her eye color or voice—are discussed and displayed as her

“authentic” self: they seem to have become part of her very person. As Latour similarly argues, such an articulating object becomes the body, or becomes “coextensive with the body”; he suggests that to become embodied always entails an expansion of the self beyond the barrier of skin (Latour 2004 207). This openly denaturalizes the organic body before its death by 93

expanding embodiment to include technological articulations—even before the obvious hybridity

of computational consciousness, humans in San Junipero are already not “purely” human.

Alongside other assistive devices such as hearing aids and prosthetic limbs, glasses-as- interface is a such a common theme in posthumanist speculative fiction so as to have become a trope. Black Mirror’s version of this is particularly interesting, though, in that Yorkie’s eyes are digitally perfected—she has no need for corrective lenses in San Junipero, her glasses carry no prescription. This would seem to make them a style choice (as Kelly originally assumes) rather than a necessary mediator, and yet the episode’s structure indicates they are “authentically” part of her. That the glasses aren’t required to address some kind of material failure pushes the boundary of articulation beyond the biomedicalization of VR toward a reimagining of what it means to be human, or where the borders of that category might be found. That her glasses aren’t used to correct a material failing but are yet still “authentic” seems to authorize a construction of the body that isn’t concerned with achieving normative dimensions (as medical technologies are often employed to do). Rather, such alternative articulations open up the body rather than attempting to return it to some socially appropriate baseline of phenomenological existence.

If we are willing to read San Junipero’s denizens as embodied in this way—no longer

biochemically sustained but yet able to register difference and be put into motion by it—we can

begin to resolve some of the contradictions raised by the episode’s purifying impulses. Latour is

quite clear that one way through which articulations are acquired is through technological

mediation: he offers chemical “odor kits” and biomedical imaging as examples. VR is an

extreme extension of such mediation by appearing to produce a world that human actors inhabit,

wherein the sum total of experience is formed and arbitrated through its mediative influence.

Though such mediation is often positioned and feared as a falsification of reality, Latour’s theory 94 acknowledges that our experience is always already mediated beyond meaningful engagement with “the real.” Instead, alternative mediations such as VR allow for expansive sensory potential that might allow users access to new forms of difference and novel articulations produced through them. VR is an extension of reality rather than its opposite; it opens up the field of play without reliance on binary oppositions.

Troubling this, though, Black Mirror might be read to offer its VR afterlife as less mediated form of experience. As Yorkie emerges onto the island following her euthanasia, we are again drawn to follow her glasses. The scene seems to be from her perspective: as we watch

Kelly and a nurse pull a sheet over her face/the lens, the shot fades in to the beach, swinging disorientingly in and out of focus before landing on a close up of her face. As she sits at the water’s edge, she removes her glasses and places them in the sand—recalling her earlier dressing montage, the camera follows them down and stays with them a moment before moving to her inscrutable expression. Yorkie is not shown in glasses again—her digital afterlife seems unbespectacled. If we are to understand her glasses as representative of the ever-presence of embodied mediation per above, this should seem to offer the impossible, to strip away that abstracting layer. However, if we squint, this too might demonstrate the openness of articulation enabled through San Junipero: unlike the often-compulsory employment of medicalized technologies, Yorkie is fully free to decide how she would like to extend (or not) her own body.

She is no less herself for opting for a differently-embodied future.

Social Articulation and Multiplicity

One of the episode’s most puzzling instances orbits Kelly and Yorkie’s marriage: is it purely utilitarian, indicative of “true love,” or some middle ground in between? Kelly offers to marry Yorkie ostensibly to provide the needed third signature for her euthanasia; and yet, as she 95 replaces a male nurse who had offered to do the same, their marriage is clearly suggestive of something more affirming—a chance for Yorkie to marry a woman despite her homophobic family, a symbolic gesture that yet allows her access to some more “authentic” version of herself. Though Yorkie’s inability to decide her own fate without the authorization of others is a distressing and ableist limitation of her free choice, it yet demonstrates something interesting about mediative embodiment—the posthuman subject does not simply exist; it becomes through sociality. Latour describes an “articulate subject” as “someone who learns to be affected by

[human and nonhuman] others—not by itself. There is nothing especially interesting, deep, profound, worthwhile in a subject ‘by itself’ … a subject only becomes interesting … when it resonates with others, is effected, moved, put into motion by new entities whose differences are registered in new and unexpected ways” (Latour 2004 210). That these “others” include but extend beyond obvious mediative objects—VR, glasses—is critical to understanding the development of embodiment over the course of the episode.

As Yorkie’s marriage to Kelly allows her access to her own body, we might understand her to have “taken Kelly on board.” That the male nurse offered to provide the same strictly legal service to different effect demonstrates that the specific character of such an articulation is dependent on and dictated by the other by whom the articulated subject is affected. Through this process, Yorkie’s inarticulate—figuratively and literally—organic body is shed for alternative virtual articulations, which allow her to become sensate and to produce difference, albeit in the somewhat limited sphere of San Junipero. She is put into motion by Kelly, who we can see as an articulating actor through the unification of sex, and of marriage, and their subsequent effects on

Yorkie’s ability to know and access her own body. Importantly, Yorkie becomes embodied and becomes herself through their romance as it is enabled by the TCKR computer, which comprises 96

her body as much (if not more) than Kelly’s interjections. The love triangle between Kelly,

Yorkie, and the maternal mainframe is what produces the “heaven on Earth” of the episode’s

conclusion—not Kelly and Yorkie alone and impossibly purified.

Interestingly, the episode’s first scene sets up this same problematic—the invisible

influence of the computer—while yet highlighting its incoherence on closer examination. As

Yorkie hovers, uncertain, near an arcade cabinet in a quiet corner of San Junipero’s lively bar, a

bystander remarks to her that there are “different endings depending if you play in one- or two-

player.” His comment, clearly an awkward attempt at engaging her through gameplay, has an

element of obvious truth (and resembles the trope of phobic virtual sociality discussed in Chapter

Two). However, we might see beyond the misdirection of one- and two-player games to

acknowledge that even one-player playing is never truly singular. Players yet engage the

algorithms, the materiality of the cabinet, and the production of difference coauthored by

machine in the process of mutual embodiment and articulation. As Latour comments of the

reductive humanist impulse to limit the human to the boundaries of its skin, such work is “a

dream precisely as unreachable as being alive and having no body.” Even—or especially—in

VR, we are always becoming embodied with—with human and machine.

Hybrid Embodiment

Through all of this, we might read “San Junipero” as a halting, half-measuring, and yet still somewhat radical theorization of what it might mean to be posthuman and yet remain embodied. As Latour suggests, for too long we have allowed science and science only to articulate our “body talk,” reducing the body to primary qualities and relegating the complications and contradictions of lived experience to spirituality and phenomenology. This opposition of physiological and phenomenological—of “real” and virtual—is a profoundly 97 limiting and unproductive way of considering the body, the human, or the social. These limitations are in part what “San Junipero” enacts for us, even as it professes to transcend such categorizations in its transhuman heaven. By medicalizing VR and situating body discourse within such biological confines, the episode allows us to assess the failures of the scientific constructions of the human and their political import even in obvious hybrids (e.g., euthanasia restrictions and elder care). Through its phobic interjections, Black Mirror demonstrates the problematics of a utopia that does not reckon more carefully with its political and scientific productions of difference, particularly as they relate to gender and sexuality, to life and death, and to the nature of personal choice. Fears of VR and the futures it enables are, in this way, provocative political imaginations that reckon with the co-construction of science and social life, and how poor articulations in either inevitably come to infect both.

These imaginations are badly needed, and soon. As the technologist and transhumanist public figure Ray Kurzweil has assessed, “by 2030, we’ll have the means to scan the human brain and re-create its design electronically” (Kurzweil). Further, we are already developing technologies that blur the boundary between life and death, illustrating the inherent instability of those categories: headstone QR codes that conjure videos of the deceased, medical “miracles” allowing the body to survive after the death of the brain, even fully conversant artificial intelligences developed from the chat logs of those passed—as the sister of the deceased commented of that AI, “it’s not virtual reality. This is a new reality, and we need to learn to build it and live in it” (Newton). Clearly, there is an urgent need for updated theorizations between the relationship between humanity, technology, and mortality; as of now, the algorithms are moving faster than the field itself. 98

What, then, do we take away from “San Junipero’s” phobic and flawed constructions of

such virtual realities—such new realities? Embodiment cannot be escaped within VR or through bodily death, if consciousness is to continue. While perception is always mediated and subject to the specific character of the “interface,” the progression of embodiment is yet dependent on the environment—including human and nonhuman actors. This is in part why Black Mirror’s impossible attempts to purify the living from dead and technological from human badly limit the episode’s posthumanist imagination: by forever splitting and categorizing in this way, the episode stifles motion, builds walls between actors, and circumscribes the possibilities for interesting and novel articulations. It further reinforces humanist binary oppositions, which limit the interpenetration of technology and humanity, troublingly relegating queer love and femininity to devalued and dehumanized spaces. However, “San Junipero’s” celebration of computer/human hybridity in its conclusion might yet offer the beginning of a posthumanist articulation: one which moves such penetrative technology beyond biomedical maintenance of the human body toward alternative embodiments and values. 99

CONCLUSION: THE LIBERATORY AND FEARFUL TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

Writing in the early days of VR, philosopher Michael Heim asked: “what perils lurk in the metaphysical origins of cyberspace?” (60). He worried that VR and other forms of cyberspace would cause “the spirit [to] migrate from the body to a world of total representation” as even the “meaning” of reality itself, what exists in the “keen existential edge of experience,” would “weaken as it stretches over many virtual worlds” (73, 59). He fearfully envisioned a humanity divorced from its bodies and stranded behind the screen, on the far side of the interface. In that world, Heim wrote, “we are the moths attracted to flames, and frightened by them too, for there may be no home behind the lights, no secure abode behind the vast glowing structures. There are only the fiery objects of dream and longing” (61). He concludes to suggest that in the “God’s-eye” of VR we stand a very real chance of losing ourselves (78).

Heim is certainly not alone: as both Ready Player One and “San Junipero” evidence, our phobic fictions of VR always seem to fear the divorce of mind from flesh, and the variety of consequences—broken sociality, senility, etc.—that must follow such an impossible disembodiment. But Heim’s work here gives the lie, though he doesn’t seem to recognize it himself—“experience” and “reality” are not mutually constituted in the way he assumes.

Experience is always mediated by the perceptual systems that create it; it is never “truthful” about some external reality even as it appears to represent it. This realization threatens other modes of cognition, including (as Kirkwood argues) the distinction between subject and object, prompting a vertiginous and phobic response. In the resulting fear, defense mechanisms run wild and all the manner of associations are displaced: VR comes to stand in for a “denatured” reality as the technology that enables such a realization, then offers to do away with the body to reclaim

“total representation” beyond biological mediation. Hopefully it is apparent by now that these are 100 not simply contradictory impulses, but further individually impossible, irrational. And still, we remain embodied.

So what use are we to make of embodiment? Latour acknowledges that his epistemology of embodied articulation extends beyond ways of knowing to offer “a principle for mapping a divide between science and politics” (Latour 2004 221). Against other modes of ordering that divide the world into inarguable true science against “disputable false sciences mingled with disreputable politics” (this is to say, social sciences, Marxism, and other such dirty words), he borrows from Stengers and Despret to demonstrate that “political epistemology always deals with the composition of the common world, and thus should be able to distinguish between good and bad articulations of science and politics” particularly as they are constituted by and come to function within the body itself (Latour 2004 223). For too long we have allowed science and science only to articulate our “body talk,” reducing the body to primary qualities and relegating the complications and contradictions of lived experience to spirituality and phenomenology. This opposition of physiological and phenomenological is a profoundly limiting and unproductive way of considering the body, the human, or the social. VR exposes their inherent interconnection, and asks us to consider how we might manage their contradictions—phobically or productively.

These oppositional limitations are in part what “San Junipero” enacts for us, even as it professes to transcend such categorizations in its transhuman heaven. By medicalizing VR and situating body discourse within such biological confines, the episode allows us to assess the failures of particular scientific constructions of the human and their political import even in obvious hybrids (e.g., euthanasia restrictions and elder care). Through its phobic interjections,

Black Mirror demonstrates the problematics of a utopia that does not reckon more carefully with 101 its political and scientific productions of difference, particularly as they relate to gender and sexuality, to life and death, and to the nature of personal choice. Similarly, Ready Player One deals with the co-construction of embodiment and labor, demonstrating both the need for physical embodiment toward the maintenance of capital as well as for providing the basis for social exchange under capital’s domination. Its technophobic apparatuses are instead fearful of disembodiment, illuminating the obscured and contingent natures of capital, labor, and the body.

Fears of VR and the futures it enables are, in this way, provocative political imaginations that reckon with the co-construction of politics, science and social life, and how poor articulations in any inevitably come to infect all.

With this, I’d like to end where I began. A rereading of Marcuse’s “Essay on Liberation” finally engages alternative articulations of the virtualized body and VR society as it relates to a political project—one that deals with psychoanalytic and social constructions of the human in a technological society. As he describes of a liberated humanity:

The construction of a free society would create new incentives for work. In the

exploitative societies, the so-called work instinct is mainly the (more or less effectively)

introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a living. But the life

instincts themselves strive for the unification and enhancement of life; in non-repressive

sublimation they would provide the libidinal energy for work on the development of a

reality which no longer demands the exploitative repression of the Pleasure Principle.

The ‘incentives’ would then he built into the instinctual structure of men. Their

sensibility would register, as biological reactions, the difference between the ugly and the

beautiful, between calm and noise, tenderness and brutality, intelligence and stupidity, 102

joy and fun, and it would correlate this distinction with that between freedom and

servitude (Marcuse 1969 63).

We might ask what Marcuse here intends by labor, or by “new incentives” for work, as these categories are part of what plays out in RP1. However, perhaps a more interesting question is how technology might play a role in bringing those incentives into the “instinctual structure” of humanity—as his essay (and mine) begins, “these technical capacities… propel the drives and aspirations of men” as they each evolve toward liberation (Marcuse 1969 5). As we seek to create a “new technology,” we will simultaneously discover a “new humanity” with “new instincts” created by and creating it. Marcuse’s language here describing the “registering of difference” is ideologically oriented, and yet clearly resembles Latour’s apolitical interest in the articulation of the body. This pairing offers a sense of political import to Latour’s construction of embodiment, while grounding Marcuse’s utopian vision more clearly in subject formation at the

“biological” level through it. New forms of embodiment offer new mediating systems of perception, which in turn shape the realities we live in and produce. Through its elision and revisions of the body, VR fiction conversely prompts us to reassess, and to rearticulate, our relationships with each other and ourselves to and through technology.

Though Latour has little to say about the form such “good” articulations might take,

Marcuse describes how such liberated instincts—liberated embodiments—might function. As he concludes,

Freud’s last theoretical conception recognizes the erotic instincts as work instincts – work

for the creation of a sensuous environment. The social expression of the liberated work

instinct is cooperation, which, grounded in solidarity, directs the organization of the

realm of necessity and the development of the realm of freedom. And there is an answer 103

to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the

people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of

the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall

be free to think about what we are going to do (Marcuse 1969 63).

As Marcuse illuminates the gap between action and thought, we might find in it the utility of fear. These technophobic fictions aren’t valuable for their apparent utopian imagination, for their

“happy endings”—as Marcuse has it of repressively desublimated art, these offer only hollow pleasures rather than concrete formulations of a utopic society. In contrast, these films’ fears are what motivate philosophical reflection and what offer to fuel political rebellion, even as those fears are themselves misplaced. In their confused mistrust of the body, its absence, and the threat of mediation in general, these texts expose embodiment itself as a malleable category, one which might be reclaimed for other purposes.

As Marcuse’s young friend demonstrates, this is an opening, not an answer—it is the catastrophe prefiguring liberation rather than liberation or utopia itself. VR, by its technologically-enabled realization of “imaginary” conditions, might be our most provocative tool for assessing alternative forms of embodiment under other principles. Our fears “of” VR, misplaced as they may be, are what allow us to expose the failures, misplaced utterances, and improper articulations of other forms of mediation—to begin to decide what alternative modes of perception would be better. If we are to take these works seriously, our technological imaginations need to be made robust in order to begin to realize the radical potentialities they might enable—how technological mediations might allow us access to a life free from toil, in which our free time is restored to us beyond the repressive demands of production under capital, and in which cooperation and solidarity guide social organization. Our ability to enter such a 104 future depends on our artistic vision to realize virtual conditions, and in doing so, open up embodied mediation as a field of play. Through that art, for the first time in our lives, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do. 105

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