The Womb of Virtuality: From Plato to Posthumanism

A peril of writing about new technology: when I started working on this essay, Mark Zuckerberg had just announced the rebranding of Facebook into Meta, signaling his desire to engineer, monetize, and control the vast networked virtual something called "the metaverse"; when I completed a draft of it, the multinational conglomerate Siemens had teamed up with the technology titan NVIDIA to pioneer a form of the metaverse geared to industrial applications; and by the time I had submitted it for consideration, thousands of Meta employees were in the process of being laid off following another massive quarterly loss from Reality Labs (Meta's metaverse-creation division). It was a familiar cycle to anyone who follows virtual reality, which has long obeyed laws of hype and humiliation. But fixation on such booms and busts should not occlude recognition of the real progress being made. The metaverse, which under one name or another (cyberspace, the matrix, OASIS, etc.) has been a recurring dream at least since William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984), was edging closer to realization even as it was disappearing from headlines. It was edging closer because the development of a necessary component, artificial intelligence, was accelerating at staggering speed. If the great leap forward in AI that began in 2022 temporarily eclipsed the construction of the metaverse, it also provided a key to its viability.You, dear reader, will have a better idea of where all this is headed than I do as I type these words. But one thing at least is clear: VR has developed far enough circa 2023 that one can begin to survey not just the trees but the forest. This essay identifies a basic term—"presence"—as central to the medium of VR. And it identifies a basic distinction between humanist and posthumanist approaches as critical to understanding the medium's shape and direction. To understand all this, it will help to return to N. Katherine Hayles's 1999 monograph How We Became Posthuman and then to turn yet further back, all the way to Plato's cave. This journey will then set the stage for the examination of humanist and posthumanist approaches to aesthetics, which will be chiefly exemplified by two artworks: Chris Milk's Evolution of Verse (2015) and Jacolby Satterwhite's Domestika (2017).In retrospect, Hayles's groundbreaking study How We Became Posthuman seems to have been right about almost everything. But it was wrong about this: it underestimated the persistence of presence in our virtual age.Hayles's book describes a world in which presence and absence, the shadow play that had come to define Western thought at least since Plato, was rapidly giving way to a dynamic dance of pattern and randomness. (The former dialectic Hayles dubs "materiality," the latter "information.") VR in particular, for Hayles, illuminates this broader epistemic shift "toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence," and thus might be considered a technology of information par excellence.1 "The technologies of virtual reality," she writes, "with their potential for full-body mediation, further illustrate the kind of phenomena that foreground pattern and randomness and make presence and absence seem irrelevant." Why "irrelevant"? Because in situations where "the relevant boundaries for interaction are defined less by the skin than by the feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a technobio-integrated circuit . . . questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage." Most centrally, VR is a medium of information, of code, of noise and signal, with materiality a remnant of an older, pre-digital discourse—not quite eradicable from the medium, perhaps, but also not significantly constitutive. According to this logic, VR materiality should be viewed as a kind of red herring, one that threatens to mislead those too bound up with pre-posthuman ways of thinking to learn to read the code behind the screens.Is talk about VR "presence," then, just a mask or a misdirection for processes of information? Is VR presence like the headlights and tailfins on a 1950s Cadillac—alluring, but not what's going on beneath the hood?No. Presence persists, now in a dance with information. And nowhere is this persistence and this dance more clearly exemplified than in VR.It may help to recall some history. What is now called "presence" in virtual technology was once dubbed "telepresence," a word with roots back in an article written for Omni magazine back in 1980. In that piece, the MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky coined the term to speculate about a future in which technologies would allow people to use bodies remotely. "The biggest challenge to developing telepresence," he cautioned, "is achieving that sense of 'being there.' Can telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing?"2 Minsky's answer to his own question was an emphatic "yes." In the ensuing decade or so, the "tele-" prefix largely dropped away, and presence came to be widely regarded as a central element—perhaps the central aspect—of the emergent medium. In 1992, one of the premiere journals of virtual technology began publication out of MIT; its title is Presence.Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton, two leading researchers into virtual presence, argue for six basic aspects of the term when applied to VR: social richness (does the medium feel personal?), realism (do the representations seem accurate?), transportation (do you feel like you are really "there," or that it is "here," or that "we are together"?), immersion (are you engrossed?), social action with the medium (can you interact with the medium?), and the medium as social actor (can the medium interact with you?). Abstracting from these, Lombard and Ditton further identify the common thread that tied all these aspects together and derived from it a general definition. Presence, they conclude, is "the perceptual illusion of nonmediation."3It is hard not to be struck by the irony of the fact that the term "presence," with its longstanding connotations of authenticity and truth, has come, in VR discourse, to be associated with precisely the opposite: with illusion. But there is also a deeper idea at play here, driven at once by a business model and a romance. It is a dream that through the "perceptual illusion of nonmediation," genuine connection, actual experience, some feeling of truly being there might be engineered into existence. Zuckerberg would make such ideas company policy in 2021 when he announced the rebranding of Facebook into Meta. "The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence—like you are right there with another person or in another place," he wrote in the Founder's Letter of that year.4 "Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology." And as Meta began seriously engineering its version of the metaverse (aided by an in-house project, launched in 2021, called the Presence Platform), "presence" continued to be the keystone of the edifice. According to Nick Clegg, who went from being Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications at Meta, the metaverse's "defining quality will be a feeling of presence, like you are right there with another person or in another place."5 This feeling of presence, writes Clegg, will be about much more than merely being "right there"; it will also be about "enriching our experience" and digitally reproducing and thereby strengthening the social relations of analogue life.This romance of VR's power to deepen human connection is shared even by some who lament the uses to which it is being put. VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, for instance, urges his audiences to delete their social-media accounts, calling social-media companies "behavior-modification empires."6 At the same time, he celebrates VR's capacity for interpersonal connection in terms similar to those of Zuckerberg and Clegg. He hopes that, properly deployed, VR will teleport its participants to a "shared, waking state," an "intentional, communicative, collaborative dream," which will "hopefully" provide "a path to increased empathy" for individuals and society as a whole—on a global scale. "Virtual reality was and remains a revelation," he concludes. "There's a moment that comes when you notice that even when everything changes, you are still there, at the center, experiencing whatever is present."Presence, then, is more than a just technical term for VR. It gestures toward an unquantifiable object of deeper desire: a gesture toward the actual, the true, the connected, the shared, the deeply experienced and felt—all mediated by a machine that erases all traces of its own mediation. This is why the old complaint that VR is escapist misses the deeper longing of the medium, a longing not so much for escape as for return.Plato's Allegory of the Cave, predictably enough, played an important role in the programming, theorizing, and fantasizing of early VR. Like others of my generation, my own first experience of VR took place inside a CAVE, or "Cave Automatic Virtual Environment," an early form of VR that relied on surround-screen projection technology that immersed the user in an interactive audio-visual cube. The technology, invented in 1992 and still in wide use, was described by its inventors as "a reference to 'The Simile of the Cave' found in Plato's Republic, in which the philosopher discusses inferring reality (ideal forms) from projections (shadows) on the cave wall."7In the wake of Luce Irigaray's reading of the Allegory in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), one can no longer ignore the gendered connotations of Plato's Allegory: the Cave is, in her words, "a metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the womb or hystera uterus."8 It is a female space inhabited strictly by humans whose implicit gender is masculine; humans with their "heads forward, eyes front, genitals aligned, fixed in a straight direction and always straining forward, in a straight line. A phallic direction, a phallic line, a phallic time, backs turned on origin." This line—this straight line—points directly from Plato to VR. If one needed a demonstration, in cartoonish form, of the application of Irigaray's reading for VR circa 2016, one could do no better than to search up that notorious photo posted by Zuckerberg on Facebook of a conference auditorium of seated, suited men hooked up to Oculus headsets ("heads forward, eyes front, genitals aligned") while the chairman strides down the aisle.9VR reminds us that love and loathing of the womb is Plato's poisoned gift to modern technology. The debt is particularly obvious in the Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999), in which humans float like grown fetuses in uterine pods, immersed in a collective simulation given a name drawn from the Latin for "womb." (Neo's violent self-extraction from one of these pods further recalls, perhaps unintentionally, the famous parasite birthing scene in Alien 1979, with roles now reversed: the host as monster, the parasite as savior.) Turning from Hollywood representations to VR experiences themselves, it is worth noting that cave/womb imagery and affect are common from the earliest days of VR. Consider, for example, one of the most influential first-generation cyber-artworks, Roy Ascott's Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth (1989).Aspects of Gaia, which premiered at the Ars Electronica Festival, was a work that immersed its audience/participants in a landscape at once digital and analogue. "Immersants" (Char Davies's apt term for VR spectator/participants) were placed on their backs on individual railcars; each car then traveled into a dark tunnel on which could be seen "thoughts, comments, and ideas about the earth on LED signs, which have been submitted by networkers from around the world."10 Presented during the early years of the internet, these flickering comments, which were updated "as networkers continue to input new ideas," pointed toward an imminent future of instantaneous global connectivity. And the journey also pointed toward the past, for this cave-like terrain was also in Ascott's words, "Gaia's womb, a kind of telematic, Neolithic passageway." Thus the immersant returns, by means of what Ascott calls a "Gesamtdatenwerk" (total data work), to primordial origins of the person and the species.11 (The Germanic term harkens back to Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, his attempt to realize the dream of aesthetic totalization through the creation of a theatre space in which music wells up from a "mystic gulf" beneath the floorboards, as if from what Wagner called "the holy womb of Gaia.")12 Published a year after the exhibition of Aspects of Gaia, Ascott's influential essay "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?" opens with an acknowledgment that technologies of computation and telecommunication "seem increasingly to be calling into question the very nature of what it is to be human." This questioning reflects "deep-seated fears of the machine coming to dominate the human will and of a technological formalism erasing human content and values." In answer to these concerns, Ascott argues that telematics could embody not cold calculation but all-embracing and deeply humane love. If technology threatens to estrange people—from one another, from nature, from ourselves—then immersive digital technology might also be the tunnel of return.With less theoretical sophistication, this desire carries over into more recent VR experiences. Consider The Womb 360 (2017), a "Virtual Reality Experience connecting calming white noise, heart beating and a pinch of motherhood," or In the Womb: From Head to Toe (2018), which "takes the viewer into the final weeks of a baby's development in the womb," or Wombsong (2019), in which "a pregnant dancer leads the audience to an imaginary world inside the womb."13 Higher-end productions include Wonderful You (2018) and Alien: Covenant—In Utero (2017). The former is a VR experience in which "Academy Award nominee Samantha Morton presents an interactive virtual reality experience, immersed inside a womb." Produced by the VR/AR film company BDH, it offers a seventeen-minute uterine journey from conception through birth, accompanied by original music (vocal and synth, with occasional baby sounds), so that you may "Meet Your Unborn Self." The latter, by sharp contrast, is "a 360-degree virtual reality journey into a living nightmare and offers a terrifyingly close and personal encounter as an alien neomorph at the time of its birth."14 Produced by FoxNext VR Studio to coincide with the fifth installment of the Alien franchise, In Utero places the immersant in the subject-position of a parasitic fetus about to be born. If VR has, as some argue, a unique capacity to elicit a sense of intimate identification from its users, here empathic connection is perplexed, and the myth of originary presence disordered. The difference between Wonderful You and In Utero gives a hint of a fundamental divide in VR aesthetics and politics, a divide between humanism and posthumanism.This divide can be brought into sharper focus by turning to two pioneering virtual artists: Chris Milk and Jacolby Satterwhite.Whether or not you recognize the name Chris Milk is a fairly good sign of how deeply into VR you are. Milk is the Founder and CEO of Within, perhaps the best-known media company specializing in narrative VR, and co-founder of the VR production company Here Be Dragons. His VR fitness company, Supernatural, was acquired by Meta in 2021. He is arguably the most prominent figure in the landscape of VR storytelling.He is also a vocal enthusiast for what he considers VR's unique and unprecedented capacity for "stimulating our senses in a manner so closely approximating lived experience that our lizard brain interprets it as real."15 Oral stories, epic poems, novels, films: all of these "require what we call a suspension of disbelief, because there's a translation gap between the reality of the story and our consciousness interpreting the story into our reality."16 But virtual reality "bridges that gap." "In all other mediums," in other words, "your consciousness interprets the medium. In VR, your consciousness IS the medium." For Milk, VR is actually no medium at all, for in VR, "we have a unique, direct path into your senses, your emotions, even your body." Whereas the immersive effects are currently limited to just three senses—sight, sound, perhaps touch—soon enough it will "have all our human senses employed, and we can have agency to move in any path we choose." The ultimate realization of this ultimate medium, or non-medium, might well be the elimination of the need for language entirely, such that people may eventually "communicate with one another not using words but using our raw thoughts." There is, moreover, a distinctly moral dimension to this capacity for presence, and the moral dimension is this: the production of genuine encounter translates into the production of genuine caring. "I believe we are still hard-wired to care the most about the things that are local to us, and VR makes anywhere and anyone feel local, and that's why it works as an empathy machine," says Milk in a TED talk. Another such talk, entitled "How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine," concludes with claim that "through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, we become more connected, and ultimately, we become more human." As Milk utters these words, the sentence "VR is a machine that makes us more human" appears on a screen behind him.17Arguably Milk's best-known VR experience, which also features in his TED talks, is a four-minute journey called Evolution of Verse (2015). At the work's opening, you find yourself floating over the middle of a mountain lake at sunrise. A dragonfly zooms before your eyes. The sun is now high in the sky, and you hear, in the distance, the sound of a low whistle. You swivel your head to discover the source of the sound and find a plume of black smoke moving rapidly around the perimeter of the lake. It is a train, circling the lake—which suddenly turns and starts driving into the lake, straight toward you. The train is about to hit you—and, just before it does, bursts into a cloud of birds. And suddenly the birds are joined in the sky by streamers. You are now levitating above the lake, at an accelerating pace. As you look above you to find the streamers wrapping themselves together and forming a tunnel, a tunnel you are now flying up into. Until you are through, and into another space, with what appears to be another sunrise over, perhaps, a planet. But it is not a planet, it is skin, a forehead. You make out eyes, a nose, until it becomes clear that this is a fetus, curled up in its womb. The fetus turns toward you, reaches out its hand, and smiles slightly. The experience ends.The title Evolution of Verse already hints at the meta-textual element here, since VRSE (pronounced "verse") was the original name of Milk's VR production company (which has since become Within). What this work offers is not only a cutting-edge (for the time) VR experience, but also a meditation on the "evolution" of the medium itself. The quick visit by the dragonfly, which hovers before you for a moment, gives a foretaste of the presence effects to follow. The train's whistle, which possibly comes from "behind" your head, exhibits the medium's use of directional sound to reinforce the sense of being within a world, just as the circling smoke guides the immersant into finding and tracking an object in 360 degrees. The clearest reference to media history comes in the next instant, as the train heads straight for the viewer—an updated recreation of the legendary moment in cinema history when, in 1895, the Lumière Brothers showed a crowd a film of a train running toward them, prompting the crowd (so the story goes) to flee in terror. The message is clear enough: what the Lumière Brothers' The Arrival of a Train once did for film, Evolution will now do for VR. Following this nod, the levitation effect once again exhibits a core potency of the medium, its ability to provide intense sensations of movement and acceleration. And finally, the culmination of the work returns you, unsubtly, to the originary romance of the medium.The work as a whole, in other words, offers a journey into an ever more immersive sense of presence. It begins when the immersant puts on the headset, blacking out the everyday world and placing them in a pristine landscape of the forest lake, and proceeds to an even more unavoidable demonstration of VR's presence effects through the train hurtling directly toward the spectator. Its culmination brings this trajectory of presence effects to its apex and origin, as the immersant floats in an all-enveloping womb. In all these respects it recalls Derrida's reflections on Rousseau in Of Grammatology, where, as Elissa Marder puts it,birth appears ineluctably tied to ontology, presence, essence, and nature, and the mother is reduced to the universal singular: "the mother." . . . Then depicted as a universal singular, "the mother" instantiates empirical certainty and guarantees that birth is a knowable and circumscribed event that requires no witnesses and that precludes any need for reading.18This mother is the one who, through her absence, guarantees our presence in the world and who certifies its truth—its direct, unmediated truth, "precluding any need for reading." To return to this matrix is to return to paradise and to hell, a return that is all that is yearned for or else, and yet, is all horrifically too much. It is full immersion, total presence, and second nature, a drowning and a birth.Evolution of Verse offers such a (re-)encounter, and as such is a telling example of a certain form of the medium. This form, unquestionably the dominant one in narrative VR, suggests a humanistic VR. Its basic strategy may be defined as the occultation of informational processes in order to produce presence effects, and the substitution of the virtual body for the physical body, with a primary goal being the cultivation of interpersonal connection. In other words, humanistic VR buries computation and subordinates it to the end of showcasing the dialectics of presence and absence (a process I have referred to elsewhere as "iconic," with a nod to both religious iconography and graphical interface).19 And it does this in avowed service of bridging divides between individuals, of cultivating empathic bonds, of helping people experience one another's experience.Other recent examples of the form include just about everything produced by Milk's company Within, including Waves of Grace (in which the immersant is invited to "step into the virtual shoes of Decontee Davis, who recovered from Ebola and now helps other victims of the disease in a township in Monrovia, Liberia"), My Mother's Wing (which "follows a mother attempting to cope with the loss of her two children, victims of a shelling attack on her children's school in Gaza"), and the Look But with Love series created by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy ("a VR documentary series about the extraordinary people of Pakistan").20 It would also include such high-budget animated VR experiences as Patrick Osborne's Academy-Award-nominated Pearl (2016) and Sascha Unseld's Dear Angelica (2017), starring Geena Davis and Mae Whitman—both bittersweet stories about the relationship between a parent and a child. Or take, as a last example, Shadows over Sidra (2015), a particularly celebrated piece co-created by Milk and Gabo Arora set in Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. The documentary, narrated by a twelve-year-old Syrian girl named Sidra, interleaves multiple strategies of immersion (music, image, narrative) in order to heighten the presence-effects of the medium—all to the end of cultivating interpersonal connection. Sidra premiered, in fact, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where it was shown to over a hundred diplomats in the hopes of using the "ultimate empathy machine" to help shape public policy.An understanding of humanistic VR may help clarify its counterpart as well. For an example of this counterpart, consider Jacolby Satterwhite's Domestika, released in 2017 as part of a New Museum exhibition entitled "First Look: Artists' VR." (Like Evolution of Verse, Domestika can be watched on a smartphone viewed through a Google Cardboard or compatible viewer; it is also in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art.) Satterwhite describes himself as an "extended-frame video-installation performance diva" and his work combines live performance, video art, 3D animation, and virtual reality.21 He first gained broad attention with the presentation of his six-part video series Reifying Desire at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.At the heart of much of Satterwhite's work, including Reifying Desire and Domestika, is the figure and memory of his mother, who spent much of his childhood unemployed at home, where she made countless drawings, diagrams, and notes; she was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. For many of his video installations, Satterwhite has reproduced these sketches and texts as dynamic, three-dimensional objects, which dance alongside other objects organic and mechanical, mundane and surreal, some entirely computer-generated, some filmed before a green screen, some filmed in real environments, some viewed on video screens, some unframed within the work. Alongside the leitmotif of the mother (never seen except through her remains) is the equally prominent leitmotif of Satterwhite's own dancing body, multiplied and refracted throughout the space. Satterwhite's explicit, though of course virtual, body operates as a metonymy for the outrageous explicitness of the (virtual) body throughout these works. Reifying Desire 3, for example, programmatically queers processes of impregnation, pregnancy, and birth, with "every chapter" of the six-part series marking "a specific type of gestation cycle," in Satterwhite's words. As he puts it, "The egg I lay hatches a new human language that metastasizes until it's out of control."22Like Reifying Desire, Domestika places the spectator within a rough-cut digital world blending elements of Afrofuturism, surrealist art, videogame graphics, queer S/M nightclub culture, and choreography drawn from vogueing, hip-hop, martial arts, and the dances of William Forsythe. Here too, if somewhat less prominently, the mother's sketches and annotations help to construct the environment, such as an enormous sign in his mother's handwriting that reads, backwards, Home Cookin'. But if the mother is less visually present here than in some of Satterwhite's previous work, she is far more present auditorily. The soundtrack, which plays throughout, uses an audio recording of Satterwhite's mother made of herself singing of "the healing in my house." Remixed to a techno beat and synth (subsequently also to strings), the mother's song accompanies the remainder of Domestika.The figure of the mother grounds, one might say, the materiality of the piece, its ongoing play with presence and absence refracted through the variously recorded (sometimes in front of green screens, sometimes not; sometimes multiplied, sometimes singular) and computer-generated dancers and environments that continually stream before the immersant. She is its dominant (though not domineering) absent presence, glimpsed (as in Reifying Desire) only through her ghostly remains—principally her voice—that construct this house of healing in which the immersant finds themself. And it is above all because of the mother's materiality that Domestika cries out for psychoanalytic interpretation just as much as for informatics.In short, the piece produces strange rhythms that at once invite and frustrate attempts at holistic interpretation while continually inviting a reexamination of the relationship between materiality and information. To borrow Hayles's description of the posthuman subject, it is "an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction."23 But perhaps the most provocative aspect of Domestika's posthumanism is the way it refigures the mother from a singular and universal figure ("The Mother") to something split, replicable, and uncanny. In this queer multiplicity, the mother of Domestika recalls Derrida's reconsideration of the idea of birth toward the end of his life. After noting that the figures of birth, family, and motherhood can hardly be erased from discourse, Derrida wonders whether these terms could be reoriented toward an open future rather than (as they more typically are) toward some foundational past. He asks, "But what is it 'to be born'?"24 "If we distinguish it rigorously from the origin, the beginning, provenance, etc., 'birth' is perhaps a question of the future and of arrival, a newly arrived question."More interestingly still, Derrida notes that the possibilities opened up by this reorientation—birth not as primal origin but as new arrival, not as answer but as question—are themselves made possible by new technologies: specifically, by new technologies of reproduction. "Today less than ever," Derrida continues:can we be sure that the mother herself is the woman we believe we saw giving birth. The mother is not only the genetrix since, as psychoanalysis (and not only psychoanalysis) has always taught us, another person can become or can have been "the" mother, one of the mothers. Now the most difficult thing to think, and first of all to desire, then to accept otherwise than as a monstrosity, is precisely this: more than one mother. Supplements of mothers, in an irreducible plurality.This irreducibly plural mother, who bears within her "perhaps a question of the future," if n