Introduction
When I was young, my father would trick me into scratching his back by having me spell out words on his back with my finger. He would then try to guess the spelled out words. This game, wherein I would practice spelling and he would jump through the hoop of consciously processing tactile stimuli in order to experience the benefits of the exercise, relied upon a few crucial factors, each of which is instructive to the aims of this project.
First, manipulating the back presents particular issues for both the unimodal perceptual regime (the strictly haptic modality) as well as the multi sensory convergence of Gestalt groupings (the confluence and emergence of perceptual maps across the senses). This is, however, a false binary (or, rather, a false, non-opposing dualism). Surely, I need not recount the entire history of Western philosophy from Aristotle in De Anima, say, on the relationship between sense and the sensible, to Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel on the relationship of primacy between vision, thought, and the transcendental ego, and finally to Derrida's critique of the intuitionist, phenomenological approach Merleau-Ponty and his ilk espoused, nor need I recount the associated history of debates between empiricists and metaphysicians in order to underline the false dualism at work, the way in which touch in fact is always already multisensory. Touch is unavoidably a play between surface and depth; container and contained; the skin as vast sensory plane, the body hidden and working toward homeostasis, and the outside environment that acts upon the body and is acted upon by the body; the subject and the object; and, finally, the neglected senses, proprioception, thermal awareness, etc.
The back, out of sight, detaches vision from touch, introducing unreliability. This blind touch mirrors the sensory problems (the split between the senses) enforced by virtual reality as it is presently constituted. Virtual reality forces critical disjunctures that result in a simultaneously unimodal sensory experience; that is, the senses are isolated and combined through prostheses, an act of sensory suturing that is anything but seamless. The lack of sensory coherence in the virtual reality experience, limited as it is by technical and financial limitations, gives lie to the trick virtual reality plays on the mind.
Second, there are simple means of obstructing the relay from back to mind such that the message—the symbolic order—is jumbled or indecipherable amidst, if I may mix metaphors, a cacophony of touch. The back is an area without dense sensory receptors, a fact that makes identification easier in one sense (because of the lack of refinement, it is easy to identify broad acts of manipulation without sensory clutter) and more difficult in another (because of that very same lack of tactile refinement). Thus, by using more than the single finger to spell out the word, by scratching in other places or drumming one’s fingers on the upper back while spelling on the lower, one can disrupt the signal being transmitted. Virtual reality, again as it is presently constituted, lacks the total sensory immersion that would guarantee investment; its fundamental trick is undermined by its propensity to touch the wrong places and its inability to touch the right ones or, moreover, simulate the comparatively more complicated nuances of touch.
Third, these critical obstructions—the obstruction of sensorial coherence and the obstruction of tactile coherence—are furthered by the apparatus itself, which mediates unavoidably in all its plastic artificiality between the simulation and the user subject to that simulation. If I were to spell instead with, say, a pencil, it would lack the warmth of human touch, but it would nonetheless approximate near enough the dexterity and pinpointed accuracy of a finger. If I were to spell with a pestle, the distance between human finger and tool is increased. Tangentially, the VR apparatus quite literally obstructs the experience of affect by preventing the full contraction of facial musculature (tied as the movement of the face is to emotion through the sensitive web of facial nerves) and by reminding through its very presence of a stifling gap between simulation, reality, and subject.
I will provide a necessarily truncated version of these arguments, introducing in turn the neurocognitive approach, the theoretical approach, and then spanning the bridge between these poles of inquiry. I will then suggest room for analytic growth in this area of study, areas of growth that I intend to actualize with greater access to the recently released tools of the trade, the VR machines released for popular and home use. Navigate via the table of contents tab on the left side of the page, the visualization maps to the right of that tab, or by way of the links below.
