Selfhood and the Senses
Merleau-Ponty describes the emergence of the self as such: “There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place—when the spark is lit between sensing and sensible” (284). In the “sensed bodily envelope,” consciousness is “essentially a lived involvement in a series of concrete situations” (Archer 131). From the phenomenological perspective of Merleau-Ponty and Archer, the subject enters into selfhood by means of the senses, and consciousness is neither an a priori condition of transcendental synthesis, nor a linguistic result. Rather, departing from Cartesian conceptions and rejecting Lacanian influence, practical consciousness is pre-linguistic, representing “that inarticulate but fundamental attunement to things, which is our being-in-the-world” (132). Hence the emergence of a “habitual body” that is the result of sedimented acts, a notion that intuitively binds to Gallace and Spence’s concept of the “tactile present” and “tactile memory.” Memory is indeed essential to Archer’s conception of self (in accord with a Lockean relation between body and a “continuity of consciousness”), but it too is not bound to language.
For Jacques Lacan, of course, not only is self tied inextricably to other people by way of relationality, it is also unavoidably linguistic. The child first recognizes itself in the other of its own mirror image, but it only truly enters into selfhood through declaration (the “I” of individual subjectivity) (see Écrits for a fuller explanation). Haptic visuality for Lacan, as Laura Marks describes, would also be near to what Mary Ann Doane refers to as the “over-closeness of the image,” and the Lacanian psychoanalytic model “castigates the ‘over-close’ viewer for being stuck in an illusion” (188).
The fundamental slippage in much of the thinking here relates to the classic problem between (and I’ll refer only to touch here) the existence of the object apart from the subject or its constitution through sense-perception. Virtual reality exacerbates this problem most clearly for vision, but perhaps increasingly for touch as well. Touch, as S.H. Rosen translates and interprets, is for Aristotle defined in De Anima in relation to thought:
By conceiving of though as analogous to perception, Aristotle is led to define thinking by analogy from touch, the most fundamental of our senses, the sense which defines life itself…We grasp the forms of things which are, and thereby know them: touch is the differentiation of forms which is the necessary condition for knowing. Knowing is touching. (132)
If touching is knowing, then how to reconcile the relative absence of touch in virtual reality at the moment, as well as the “false” knowing that virtual reality necessarily engenders? How does the self resolve itself when it is split and defined by an obvious illusion? What does it mean to sense, think, and define the boundaries thereof in a virtual space?