Technosense and Sensibilia: Haptic Interfaces, Selfhood, and Obstruction in Virtual Reality

The Experience of Virtual Reality

On the realness of virtual reality: Does virtual reality negate the real? Slavoj Žižek remarks: "Our point is thus a very elementary one: true, the computer-generated “virtual reality” is a semblance, it does foreclose the Real; but what we experience as the “true, hard, external reality” is based upon exactly the same exclusion. The ultimate lesson of “virtual reality” is the virtualization of the very “true” reality: by the mirage of “virtual reality,” the “true” reality itself is posited as a semblance of itself, as a pure symbolic edifice" (44). Žižek is ultimately treading well-worn ground here. The fantasy transposed as virtual reality out of which the real emerges or in which it is couched is an extension of Lacan’s thinking, and the indistinguishable divide between the real and the virtual echoes Baudrillard’s hyperreal, where simulation exceeds the boundaries of body and space.
 
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. 
 

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