The Experience of Virtual Reality
Lev Manovich works more concretely. He recalls Jaron Lanier’s (naïve) assertions of an isomorphic linkage between mental process and technologically generated environment in virtual reality, where “the fantasy of augmenting consciousness, extending the powers of reason, goes hand in hand with the desire to see in technology a return to the primitive happy age of prelanguage, premisunderstanding” (210). As a prosthetic, virtual reality projects the internal into the external. And, as a means of conceiving of a plane of consciousness mediated by technology, it points toward the ways in which consciousness is always already mediated by technology in a saturated society. Virtual reality is neither wholly post-language (gestural, mimetic) nor is it wholly linguistic; rather, it manages to intensify both modalities. Surface and depth play on the sensorium; language is expanded, visualized; the virtual subject emerges in and through language even as it emerges against language.