The Making of…Desire, Digital

Marie-Luise Angerer
http://www.mediaartnet.org/themes/cyborg_bodies/postsexual_bodies/

Paul Virilio introduced the term «tele-action» to describe the digitalization of our
lives, thus defining the substitution of direct action through «acting from a distance»
as a new phenomenon. In his view, however, in the long term this acting,
communicating and feeling from a distance will lead to the complete disorientation of
humans: «To be used to mean to be somewhere, to be situated, in the here and
now, but the situation of the essence of being is undermined by the instantaneity, the
immediacy, and the ubiquity which are characteristic of our epoch. […] From now on,
humankind will have to act in two worlds at once. This opens up extraordinary
possibilities, but at the same time we face the test of a tearing-up of the being, with
awkward consequences. We can rejoice in these new opportunities if and only if we
also are conscious of their dangers.» [1]
In the meantime, however, without any great effort this model of two worlds, which
can also be referred to as ‹tele-presence,› has gained acceptance in everyday life
and culture and has not provoked general disorientation. Instead—at least in the first
half of the nineties (of the twentieth century)—a prevailing (uralkodó) mood of
euphoria has set in. Artists and Net users have taken possession(birtoklás) of
cyberspace as a new space for action and experience. It is being celebrated as a
free, unrestricted space onto which no limits have been set. The body and its gender
modalities are being discovered as central parameters of identification. For the
female gender, even a new epoch is being proclaimed: Sadie Plant, one of the
representatives of English Cultural Studies, has declared the Net to be an
omnipotent space specifically for women. «If the male human is the only human, the
female cyborg is the only cyborg.» [2] Against the background of the cyborg concept
as developed by Donna Haraway, the Australian culture theorist Zoë Sofoulis made
the following remark: «The future is unmanned, that is, neither dead or collapsed, but
animated by other dynamic agents, including women and machines. From the
perspective of cyberfeminism […] the question is not one of dominance and control
of or submission and surrender to machines, but of exploring alliances and affinities,
co-evolutionary possibilities, especially between women and technology.» [3]
The taking possession of cyberspace by female cyborgs was inspired in particular by
Donna Haraway's «Manifesto for Cyborgs», which was published in 1984. [4] In
her manifesto, the American natural scientist, who teaches at the University of
California at Santa Cruz, introduces a being that is neither female nor male,
neither machine nor animal, but a cyborg. It is a girl who refuses to become a
woman (in a classical, traditional sense), who rejects any specification
whatsoever: Rather she produces her identity temporarily in permanently new
alliances, in constantly varying interactions. With her cyborg figure, Haraway
parts with models of society that are built on repression and discipline: Neither
Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis nor Michel Foucault's «Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison» are suitable for comprehending post-modern realities (and virtual
spaces). Rather, this postmodern state establishes itself according to the principle of
control, a principle developed in particular by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For
Haraway, the fact that Deleuze and Guattari no longer define the subject as one of
‹truth› but as one that finds itself in a permanent state of ‹becoming› makes up the
particular attraction of this philosophy.

Life on and off the screen

Numerous films have been produced which show how media—the old as well as the
new digital media—change our lives [5] : «Strange Days» (1995) by Kathryn Bigelow
portrays humans who are linked via their brains. I can retrieve the thoughts and
feelings of someone else via a «squid» in my brain. Stored on a chip, the wishes and
desires, fears and moments of happiness of others enable me to experience
someone else's emotional images as my own. In his films «Scanner» (1984),
«Videodrome» (1986) and «EXistenZ» (1999), David Cronenberg also thematicized
something similar: Humans linked up via communication wires (telephone lines and
natural telepathic abilities), their assimilation by the media, as well as their inability to
distinguish realities. What is real, and what is virtual? Who is a machine, and who is
human? It is not by chance that Chris Cunningham's videoclip for Björks song «All is
full of love » (1999) focuses on a cyborg whose loneliness and need for love causes
it to turn to its clone. Artificial beings apparently also love/live better as a couple. The
media artists Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford produced the variant «human hooked
up to (love) machine»: In »CyberSM« (1993/94), two people—one in Paris and one
in Cologne—have sex with each other. Squeezed into bodysuits and hooked up to
computers, their movements, emotional stirrings, skin and heart frequencies are
calculated and transmitted, resulting in a ‹real simulation› of arousal and orgasm.
These different combinations of human and machine are referred to as «cyborgs.» In
this connection, the male/female figure of the cyborg stands for omnipotent
feasibility, both material and mental. Not only are parts of the body exchangeable
and replaceable, the psychical dimension also undergoes a remodeling. The concept
of the cyborg was originally developed within the context of space travel in order to
denote a being in new environments—weightlessness in space—a being whose
body no longer functions self-sufficiently, but rather in combination with technology:
«The concept of the cyborg was to allow man to optimize his internal regulation to
suit the environment he may seek.» [6]
Haraway's cyborg, however, now appears in a completely different intellectual
environment. As a hybrid being that is a match for the new postmodern standards for
survival: as a superficial being, conceived without emotional depth, it denies itself the
old psychoanalytical story of mama and papa. Its identity bears neither the nicks of
family tragedies nor the scars of suppressed yearnings. Its essential posits of identity
are neither traditions nor standards, neither gender identities nor class-specific
boundaries, nor are they different skin colors. Rather these are markings on a path
of open options. In this context, Haraway speaks of a «postgender world.» However,
‹postgender› does not mean that gender as a category has become superfluous, but
that this can be charged with new meanings. This means that gender identities no
longer constitute fundamental bases, but instead political, sexual markings that can
be charged with meaning according to the prevailing context.
«Dandy Dust» (1998) by Hans Scheirl is an impressive cinematic example of this.
This film is not concerned either with cyberspace or the male/female figure of the
cyborg. Nevertheless, it deals exclusively with ‹other existences in other spaces,›
monstrous cross-creations, mechanically extended bodies, with desire without
gender orientation or perverse cravings. [7] As Rachel Armstrong writes in «Cyborg
Film Making in Great Britain»: «[c]yborg identities have much to offer. They
physically demonstrate that it is possible to defeat (legyőzés) obliteration,
annihilation, or replacement by the encroachment (túlkapás) of the dominant
patriarchal, social, technological or medical pressures on the body, and interpret
them as survival technologies.» [8] If one allows one's eyes to wander over the
identities of the nineties, there dominates a kind of ‹polyidentity,› a queer lifestyle, a
«metrosexuality,» as Marjorie Garbner [9] described it. Ambiguities, changing sexual
orientations are being played with; male and female combine, in fashion as well as in
the music and pop industry. Judith Butler's «Gender Trouble» [10] and Haraway's
«Manifesto for Cyborgs» have to be read together in order to make out the
dimensions of the socio-political shifts.

The imperative of jouissance

The disciplinary society once analyzed by Foucault has developed into a society of
control. Other laws, other performance parameters, other imperatives apply
here.One of these new imperatives is that of enjoyment. Enjoy! You have to have fun
and find pleasure in doing everything you do, and you only do what is fun and gives
you pleasure. There are a whole variety of opportunities to fulfill this urge for
enjoyment: from recreational and sports activities to the various media (television,
cinema) with their erotic and pornographic programs and films, to submersion in
cyberspace. Whereas in the case of the old media such as television and cinema
«substitute enjoyment» has priority, in the case of cyberdiving something else is
possibly at work, at least that is what the various cybertheory gurus suggest. Slavoj
Zizek in particular made the term «substitute enjoyment» well-known. «Substitute
enjoyment» is at work in the choruses of ancient Greek theater, in various burial
ceremonies with wailers standing in for mourners at funerals, in situation comedies
with their «canned laughter.» In all of these cases we let someone stand in for us,
and we get our pleasure in this way. With reference to television, at the beginning of
the nineties Zizek made the point that this consists in doing nothing, but still being
involved. [11] A few years later, in «Lacan with quantum physics» [12] and in «The
Plague of Fantasies» [13] he described the arrangement made available by the
Internet and its link-up possibilities. According to Zizek, in the case of the Internet we
have to reckon with more far-reaching changes. It could come to a fusion with the
computer, and a state might again set in which prevailed before the sexualization of
the subject, i.e. a state prior to sexual differentiation and thus a state characteristic of
pure pleasure—pure autoeroticism. In «The Plague of Fantasies» Zizek describes
counterforces that attempt to contain this boundless state of pleasure, above all the
subject her/himself, who would react to the profusion of choices presented by the
Internet with anorexia-like behavior: «Is not one of the possible reactions to the
excessive filling-in of the voids in cyberspace therefore informational anorexia, the
desperate refusal to accept information, in so far as it occludes the presence of the
Real?» [14] This is a line of argumentation that comes very close to that of Paul
Verhaege. In his book «Love in a time of loneliness» [15] he makes the point that
there is a comparable paradox in our society. Because in a time which professes to
allow everything,which almost forces the individual to be everything and to have
everything and, as already mentioned, also to get pleasure from everything, instead
of happiness, boredom and tiredness spread. Less and less people would be able to
get involved with other people or other things. Instead, we would make out a
hysterical quest for new proscriptions, new leaders, new rules and rituals. This
means that immense liberty, unrestrained pleasure, communication and sexual
contacts with everyone and at any time would lead to a draining. Boundaries,
restraints, rules and laws are apparently necessary in order to keep that force alive
which psychoanalysis termed libido at the beginning of the twentieth century, and
which since Jacques Lacan has been known as the desire that drives the subject
forward.

Being part of an image

How can one now understand all of the different television events in which people
expose, degrade and make themselves appear ridiculous in public? What can the
longing to (vágyakozás) come on to someone in the Internet or invent a false
autobiography be traced back to? Is not every biography false? False because the
narrator does not even know that she/he is ‹inventing,› that she/he ‹invents›
her/himself, paints a picture of her/himself in which she/he has found/occupied a
wonderful place?
In the case of television or the Internet, this ‹being part of the image› can be
understood literally: In the studio, in front of the studio audience, in the spotlight and
in the lens of the camera the feeling can actually arise (keletkezik) of being involved,
of being the center of everyone's attention, of being admired and desired by a
symbolic community. A similar experience can be made in the Net in the different
chatgroups: an experience of belonging. The daily ritual of logging in, parting with
reality in front of the computer, and submersing oneself in an image that does not
contain less degrees of reality than ‹real› worlds of metaphors. It is not by chance
that the vastness of cyberspace is charged with all of those metaphors that are
associated with roaming about, surfing, lightness and carefreeness.
Two interpretations can be offered here: Firstly, ‹being in the picture› as a psychical
modality of ‹being in the world› as defined by Jacques Lacan. And secondly, several
aspects of the Deleuzian philosophy that precede ‹the nomadic subject.›
Lacan defined ‹being part of the image› as a fundamental requisite for perceiving
one's self. In doing so he fell back on the theory developed by Roger Callois after
investigating the camouflage behavior of insects. These insects do not adapt their
color to their surroundings in order to protect themselves from the enemy, but rather
in order to be a patch in their surroundings. [16] Lacan transfers this to the child who
mimics her/his surroundings, rehearses being in a picture in order to preserve
(megőrizni) ‹her/his› image. The boundaries of this (self-)image though are always
fragile, emotionally vulnerable, because the subject loves, seeks and desires an
other self in the picture—an image behind the image. Transferred to media images
this means that the images provide the viewers with the framework for becoming part
of an image and thus for vanishing into the image.
In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy provides another perspective.
Whereas with Lacan the possibility of ‹toppling out› of the picture is filled with fears,
with Deleuze and Guattari the crossing over of marked out territories—moving along
«lines of flight»—is something that is part of the subject. This is its most foreign part
though, an uncanny and unresolved part. Besides the lines of flight, it is in particular
the body without organs that illustrates this conflict of antagonistic forces, which
define and at the same time overflow the subject. Brian Massumi makes the
following suggestion in his «User's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia»: «Think of
the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any
action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential, or
virtuality.» [17] If we now translate this ‹organless body› with ‹organization-less
body,› we come closer to what Deleuze and Guattari understand by this. We are
dealing you see with a body that simultaneously exists beside the organized
(defined, divided up, sub-divided) body, that threatens to infiltrate or actually
subverts—in the case of insanity, drugs and illness—the organization of the one
body.
The French performance artist Orlan, who has become known for her spectacular
operations, acts on a completely different level. In «La Réincarnation de Sainte
Orlan»and in the seventh operation, «Ceci est mon corps…ceci est mon logiciel:
Omniprésence,» she had her face remolded according to classical models in art
history. Entire parts of her face were cut open and numerous implants inserted,
allowing a new face to emerge. During this procedure she quoted passages from
works by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in order to make her ‹senseless›
conduct comprehensible in its existential dimension. The ego is nothing more than
an image, and a deceiving one at that, which we always fail to recognize; we never
perceive it as it really is, but rather as we would like to be seen. [18] Or formulated in
another way: Skin is all that I have; there is nothing under it: no ego, no soul, no
truth. However even this skin is not unique, but malleable and changeable. Orlan
cites the French psychoanalyst Eugénie Lémoine-Luccioni: «Skin is deceiving—in
life, one only has one skin—there is a bad exchange in human relations because
one never is what one has. I have the skin of an angel but I am a jackal, the skin of a
crocodile but I am a poodle, the skin of a black person, but I am white, the skin of a
woman, but I am a man, I never have the skin of what I am. There is no exception to
this rule because I am never what I have.» [19]
However, in his theory of the ‹ego as a sack of skin,› Sigmund Freud had already
formulated this in a somewhat less spectacular way. Here he followed the
development of the linguistic, symbolic ego out of the folds of skin of the body. [20]
The English culture theorist Parveen Adams had the Freudian topology in mind when
she called the ‹Operation Orlan› an «anamorphosis of space which bears upon
sexual difference.» [21] Freud's attempt to explain the structural components of ‹ego,
super-ego and id› in a dynamic as well as a topological way makes possible this
connection between spatial arrangement and force relations. Because spatial
arrangements are founded on basal assumptions. If one of them is not fulfilled, the
subject can ‹topple out› of its perceptive framework. Thus interior and exterior must
fit, i.e. they have to both exclude and complete each other. The second assumption
refers to the ‹how› of this fit; it must you see be isomorphic, i.e. match in a simple
way. However, this isomorphism does not make reference to the pair
interior/exterior, but rather it also definesthe whole list of opposing arrangements
which characterize occidental thought: body–mind, essence–appearance, subject–
object, male–female, and finally phallic–castrated. If these pairs are subjected to an
‹anamorphotic› [22] procedure it becomes immediately clear that «each term of the
pair is not in contradiction to the other term and the extent to which the relations
between them, far from conforming a clean-cut isomorphism, are strewn with strange
thresholds and hybrid forms.» [23] With Orlan's opening of the skin the ‹interior and
exterior› boundary of the body/face is drastically violated, the pretence of depth—
therefore a truth under the skin—is destroyed, and thus perceptive balance is
disrupted.
This is different in the case of «Strange Days» by Kathryn Bigelow. When Lenny
inserts his chip and immediately becomes a girl and the victim of a rape that ends
fatally, the spasms and writhing of his body and his stammering are not an
expression of his surprise to have landed in ‹another film,› but rather an indication of
his being overpowered in the image. Or when one of Lenny's customers suddenly
finds himself as an 18-year-old girl under the shower, his surprise can be attributed
to the fact that boundaries—between one reality and another—are momentarily no
longer recognizable or controllable: One's own body has become another one whose
movements obey different laws, which feels foreign, whose desire is new and, in a
Freudian sense, ‹uncanny.› [24] Here, shock and disgust, repulsion and horror take
place in «another scene» [25] than is the case with Orlan. Visitors to «Erotogod» are
also meant to experience this kind of sensual confusion. After «CyberSM» SStahl
Stenslie developed further interfaces in order to extend the tactility of the visitor's
body. In «Erotogod» the visitor sits on a kind of ‹saddle,› wrapped up in a suit that
marks the respective places on the body where tactility is to dock. In a description of
the project, Stahl Stenslie wrote: «Erotogod prints new words as sensations on the
body.» All of the examples cited here deal with the inscription (felirat)(of words,
images, feelings) onto one's own body, onto its sensations, emotional images and
emotional states. A kind of self-alienation(elidegenedés) occurs, a self-estrangement
—in a literal sense (and thus strict sense-lessness). This is where the link to the
‹sexual reality› of humans and its structure of desire are located. Because who it is
that acts and gets pleasure in offline life? In the end, the sexual dimension, which is
regarded as the most intimate human dimension, only constitutes the boundary of
rationality, consciousness and control. [26] It represents a reservoir of
inconsistencies, foreignness and inexplicability. It comprises all of what Freud
attributed to the effect of drive, Lacan to desire, and finally Slavoj Zizek to «the
plague of fantasies.» [27] In addition, Zizek also made the point that computer users
develop a relationship with their machines that is a «perverse» one. Because the
world generated by the computer makes explicit a mechanism whose course would
otherwise be implicit: «The virtualization, which was previously ‹in itself,› a
mechanism which operated implicitly, as the hidden foundations of our lives, now
becomes explicit, is posited as such, with crucial consequences for ‹reality› itself.»
[28] This relation is in so far «perverse» as with it the fundamental difference
«phallic–castrated» is denied. [29] The (at least for the layperson) incomprehensible
movements and courses of the data flows; the ‹wonderful› emergence of the others,
who however are completely distant in their concrete physicality; the child-like joy
over the simultaneity of being at different geographic poles; a directly experienced
intimacy; the feeling of an omnipotent and ubiquitous access and response: all of this
makes experiences in the Net so seductive and provokes the fantasies mentioned
here.

Desire, insatiable, potential

Besides the representatives of psychoanalysis, in particular Jacques Lacan and his
situating desire in the symbolic order, it is above all Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
who have conferred great meaning to desire. In their case one can even speak of a
kind of ‹ontological constant.› Because while psychoanalysis starts out from a
‹transgression of being,› through which desire is installed into human existence as a
fundamental constant, in Deleuze and Guattari's ‹Philosophy of Becoming› it has its
basis in the overabundance of being itself. Desire is one of the abundance (of being)
and not of the deficiency (of the subject or language). But both theoretical versions of
the subject omit its actual place: In Lacan's psychoanalytical theory the subject
«shows» itself between the signifiers and is defined as an effect of the signification
process. In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari it is the preliminary result of
different power relations, which permanently distort and deform it. They call these
two different states «molar» and «molecular»: «molar» means rigid, fixed and sealed
off sedimentations, whereas «molecular» refers to flexibility and being fluid, agile and
open. The individual however is always somewhere in between: between being and
becoming different or something else. «Molar» describes the state in which humans
became simulacra, «derived from a social aggregate […] Since no particular body
can entirely coincide with the code enveloped in its assigned category and in the
various images recapitulating it, a molar person is always a bad copy of its model.»
[30] Both states are produced by two different modalities of subjection:
«subjectivation» and «subjectification.» While «subjectification» means that one is a
subject only with respect to something, «either the State or Capitalism, and its aim is
to produce more surplus value,» the other modality, «subjectivation,» describes
«lines of flight within the subject.» However, these have little to do with a subject—
rather it is a question of an «individuation operating by intensities, within individual
fields not within persons or identities.» [31]
The attempts to define the ‹agents› in the Net in theory and in practice as ‹a-
persons› can also be read against this background. Cells, bacteria, viruses and other
morphologically indefinite figurations therefore often share the digital planet. After
Sadie Plant first defined women as the best inhabitants of the Net, in a second step
she came to the conclusion that a digital culture cannot, however, presume a familiar
form. Rather the active authorities must be thought of as something that causes
«complex interactions of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems, thought
patterns, cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance nights and
bacterial exchanges [to] emerge. […] You live in cultures, and cultures live in you.
[…] Without the centrality of agency, culture is neither high, nor ordinary, but
complex.» [32] The Australian media artist Melinda Rackham develops these kinds
of living things, by means of which she attempts to convert them into movements,
migrations, transferences, affections, states of love, viral symbioses and
transformations of all kinds: pulsating, glowing, starfish-like creations, a glittering and
flickering as in a fluorescent aquarium. To cite only a couple of her works: The multi-
user project «empyrean» depicts a parallel universe, an arena beyond space and
time, the hungry emptiness following potentialities, a world of breaks and intervals in
which we operate as avatars. In contrast, the work «carrier» visualizes a symbiotic
ecology that is produced through the love affair between the user and the hepatitis C
virus. [33]
This digital configuration does not, however, only receive support from the
cyberfeminist side. Representatives of a ‹posthuman› direction of thought also favor
the amorphic state as the expression of a posthuman stage of development. This
differs in many respects from the modern version of humans, in particular with regard
to language and sexual difference and its associated desire. While the
psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, a classic representative of modernity, speaks of
«floating signifiers,» according to the American literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles
the world has long since been conquered by «flickering signifiers.» The «floating
signifiers» obtain their value and thus their semantic meaning from their different
positions within the whole system of language (in the sense of the structural
linguistics advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure, who wrote the first «Introduction to
Structural Linguistics» in 1914). They function in much the same way as the now
famous «peek-a-boo game» [34] that Sigmund Freud played with his grandson,
using a set of signs to practice presence and absence (of the boy's mother). Hayle's
«flickering signifiers,» in contrast, no longer play with presence and absence, rather
they posit «pattern and randomness,» which are subject to permanent mutation. This
mutation is for the posthuman age what castration was for modernity, for the era of
possessive individualism. So in the posthuman age, in order to be able to recognize
the radical difference between yesterday and today one must set Freud's «peek-a-
boo game» beside David Cronenberg's film «The Fly» (1986): When during the
process of his metamorphosis into a fly the protagonist's penis falls off, he no longer
experiences this as castrated, but rather as«posthuman.» [35]
In their list of the possibilities of becoming someone/something else, Deleuze and
Guattari conferred a prominent position to «becoming an animal.» However, this
does not suggest the actual metamorphosis into an animal, but rather—in the sense
of Franz Kafka's «The Metamorphosis»—understanding the traumatic shock one
experiences when one realizes that one is no longer standing on two legs, but lying
wriggling on one's armored back. It can presumably be attributed to a Freudian slip
that Hayles reads the falling off of the penis as the first indication of a posthuman
state, a state of ‹beyond human.› Because both psychoanalysis and the Deleuzian
philosophy of immanence agree in one point: that being human and the sexualization
of the body are deeply connected. In 1986 the French psychoanalyst J. Laplanche
and the philosopher J.-B. Pontalis wrote the following about this:
«The whole point is to show that human beings have lost their instincts, especially
their sexual instinct and, more specifically still, their instinct to reproduce. […]
[D]rives and forms of behavior are plastic, mobile and interchangeable. Above all, it
foregrounds their […] vicariousness, the ability of one drive to take place of another.»
[36] This means that sexuality is never resolved in the satisfaction of needs, but
rather that it always includes the dimensions of desire and demand at the same time.
[37] Conversely, psychoanalysis and the Deleuzian approach agree that on the way
to becoming human—on the way to becoming a woman or a man—something is
lost, but that something is also gained. While the prelinguistic, presymbolic union
(this hallucinated symbiosis with the mother's body) is lost, a force—desire—is
gained. If sexual difference, which is not resolved in the differentiation of male and
female but which primarily means that a body must be sexually marked in order to be
read as a human body, is erased, this being loses its human status and is no longer
distinguishable from an animal or a machine: Because sexual difference is «the
enigmatic domain which lies in between, no longer biology and not yet the space of
socio-symbolic construction. […] this in-between is the very ‹cut› which sustains the
gap between the Real and the contingent multitude of the modes of its
symbolization.»[38]
Deleuze and Guattari have also defined the relation between the female and male
bodies on the one hand as loss, and on the other hand as implementation of power.
Our bodies were taken away from us in order to use them to form units in which we
get ourselves back again—now oppose each other as woman and man, as child and
adult. Because it is not or not exclusively a question of the organism, history, or the
subject of enunciation phrase, as they put it, «that oppose masculine to feminine in
the great dualism machines. through which female and male are set against one
another in great dual machines. It is first of all a The question is fundamentally that of
the body—the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms.»
[39] Whether defined as a «distorted relation» (Zizek) or as an «opposing duality»
(Deleuze), something always remains ‹outside.› This can be called the ‹gap between
the Real and reality,› a trail that shall be erased from the posthuman discourse as
well as from numerous Net utopias. Sherry Turkle's description of «Life on the
Screen» provides us with an example for this: «Thus, more than twenty years after
meeting the ideas of Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, I am meeting them
again in my new life on the screen. But this time, the Gallic abstractions are more
concrete. In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted
in interaction with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language;
sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from
navigation and tinkering rather than analysis. And in the machine-generated world of
MUDs, I meet characters who put me in a new relationship with my own identity.»
[40]
It is precisely that ‹getting light› pointed out by Lacan with reference to speech that is
invalidated by the dedifferentiation or conforming of signifier and signified, of sign
and referent. Applied to Deleuze and Guitarri's definition of desire as an effect of
overflowing being, [41] this means an existence under the control of the adding
machine, which is forced to obey the law of algorithmic operations. Both of the
positions cited here—Lacan's and Deleuze's—have followed the motions of desire,
have described it with the aid of mathematic formulae (Lacan) and plastic metaphors
(Deleuze), have tracked it down in various terrains and awarded the media machines
differentpotentialities. But when today certain media theories describe the digital as
«the Real» (Lacan), they are as wrong as those who celebrate computer users as
«nomadic subjects» (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari).

Translation by Rebecca van Dyck

[1] Carlos Oliveira, «The Silence of the Lambs: Paul Virilio in Conversation,» in
CTheory, Global Algorithm 1.7, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds.), June 1996.
[2] Sadie Plant, «Women and New Technologies,» in 21 C Scanning the Future, The
Magazine of Culture, Technology and Science, 1995, 7, 1, p. 12.
[3] Zoë Sofoulis, «Futurity and Technological Art,» in Leonardo, Cambridge/M, MA,
19, 29, 1, p. 63.
[4] Donna J. Haraway, «A Manifesto for Cyborgs, Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s,» in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New
York, London, 1990 (1984), pp. 190–233.
[5] A play on the title of Sherry Turkle's bestseller Life on the Screen. Identity in the
Age of the Internet, New York, 1995.
[6] Manfred Clynes, «CYBORG II. Sentic Space Travel,» in Chris Hables Gray et al.
(eds.), The CYBORGHandbook, New York, London, 1995, p. 35.
[7] [Cyborgs.Nets/z], catalogue accompanying the Dandy Dust exhibition, Andrea B.
Braidt (ed.), Vienna, 1999.
[8] Rachel Armstrong, «Cyborg Film Making in Great Britain,» in [Cyborgs.Nets/z], p.
29.
[9] Marjorie Garbner, «Some like it haute,» in conversation with Hannah J. L.
Feldman, World/Art 1995, 1, pp. 30–33.
[10] Judith Butler, Gender trouble—Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New
York, London, 1990.
[11] Slavoj Zizek, Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! Jacques Lacans
Psychoanalyse und die Medien, Berlin, 1991.
[12] Slavoj Zizek, «Lacan with quantum physics,» in George Robertson et al. (eds.),
FutureNatural. nature/science/culture, New York, London, 1996, pp. 270–292.
[13] Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London, New York, 1997.
[14] Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies. London, New York, 1997, p. 155.
[15] Paul Verhaege, Love in a time of loneliness, New York, 1999 (1998).
[16] Roger Callois, «Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,» in Annette Michelson
et al. (eds.), OCTOBER. The First Decade 1976-1986. Cambridge, MA, 1987, pp.
59–73.
[17] Brian Massumi, A User´s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deviations
from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 70.
[18] Jacques Lacan, «Das Spiegelstadium als Bildner der Ich-Funktion,» in Schriften
I. Frankfurt/Main, 1975 (1966), pp. 61–70.
[19] Sigmund Freud, «Das Ich und Das Es,» in Psychologie des Unbewußten,
Studienausgabe, vol. III., Frankfurt/Main, 1982 (1923), pp. 273–330.
[20] Sigmund Freud, «Das Ich und Das Es,» in Psychologie des Unbewußten,
Studienausgabe, vol. III., Frankfurt/Main, 1982 (1923), pp. 273–330.
[21] Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image, London, New York, 1996, p. 141.
[22] In art «anamorphosis» refers to a technique of perspective which makes objects
viewed from a normal angle appear to be distorted. If the observer changes his or
her position in front of the picture, the distorted object is corrected. The painting
«The French Ambassadors» (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger is often cited as
an example for this.
[23] Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image, London, New York, 1996, p. 142.
[24] Sigmund Freud wrote that the phenomenon ‹uncanny› is much closer than it
appears to be at first. It is something deeply familiar which, however, must remain
secret or hidden. Unconscious desires that push through to the surface become
threatening—uncanny. Sigmund Freud, «Das Unheimliche,» in Psychologische
Schriften, Studienausgabe, vol. IV, Frankfurt/Main, 1982 (1919), pp. 241–274.
[25] Freud's other term for the unconscious.
[26] Refer to Michel Foucault's three-volume work The History of Sexuality.
[27] Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London, New York, 1997.
[28] Slavoj Zizek, «Über virtuellen Sex und den Verlust des Begehrens,» in Mythos
Information. Welcome to the Wired World, Ars Electronica, Karl Gerbel/Peter Weibel
(eds.), Vienna, New York, 1995, p. 128.
[29] Cf. Slavoj Zizek, «Lacan with quantum physics,» in George Robertson et al.
(eds.), FutureNatural. nature/science/culture, New York, London, 1996, pp. 270–292,
here pp. 291f.
[30] Brian Massumi, A User´s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deviations
from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 181.
[31] Gilles Deleuze cited in Andrew Murphy, «Computers are not Theatre: The
Machine in the Ghost in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatari´s Thought,» Convergence,
1996, 2, 2, p. 98.
[32] Sadie Plant, «The virtual complexity of culture,» in George Robertson et al.
(eds.), FutureNatural. nature/science/culture. London, New York, 1996, S. 214.
[33] Cf. the chapter «Utopian/Dystopian Bodies.»
[34] Using this game, Freud attempted to explain how the small child ‹symbolically›
counterbalances the absence of her/his mother and learns to work this experience
into her/his world (of linguistic differences). (Freud had observed his grandchild, who
as his mother went away threw a spool of string over the side of his cot and—
accompanied by different sounds—retrieved it again.)
[35] Cf. N. Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman, Chicago, London, 1999,
pp. 30–34.
[36] Jean Laplanche/Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, «Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,»
in Victor Burgin/James Donald/Cora Kaplan (eds.), Formations of Fantasy, London,
New York, 1986, pp. 29f.
[37] Using anorexia as an example, Charles Shepherdson provides a good
explanation of the difference between ‹desire,› ‹demand› and ‹need› in «The Gift of
Love and the Debt of Desire,» in differences, 10, 1998, pp. 30–74.
[38]
[39] Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism &
Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, London, 1987, p. 276.
[40] Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York,
1995, p. 15
[41] Alain Badiou, Deleuze. Das Geschrei des Seins, Zurich, Berlin, 2003.
© Media Art Net 2004