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The closer something comes to imitating reality, the greater its power to transform reality. Virtual Reality isn't reality but a reductive, imitative and illusory reality. As such, it excludes itself from normative, nominal, everyday reality as fast as it appropriates and transforms it. There is no greater site for appropriation and transformation than that of the psychological and social "Self." The central definition for the "Self" is the notion that the "Self" represents core reality for the individual, whether that core is holistic or pluralistic, whether diseased or dissociated. Each of our technologies has changed our essential personal and social behaviour, but none threaten individual being more than the convergence of computer and telecommunications into VR.
Marshall McLuhan's Apocalyptic VR
Marshall McLuhan's entire lifework stands as a prophecy about the nature of what has become "Virtual Reality." His biographer, Philip Marchand, tells us that as early as the mid-1950s, McLuhan was hopeful that technology would enable us to electronically engineer a delightful, global Disneyland. He thought that because electronic media created "a total field of instant awareness," it could possibly free us from our old habits of reacting automatically and involuntarily to our human inventions. By the early sixties, he was to enunciate that while earlier technologies had extended only one sense or one part of the body -- the wheel extending the foot, for example -- the new electronic technologies extended the entire nervous system and the movements of the human mind. Moreover, because these new technologies impinged upon the human self or psyche, he was able to assure the Humanities Association of Canada that the arts and sciences would experience an era of unprecedented accomplishment.
In 1963, at the time of the inauguration of his Centre for Culture and Technology, McLuhan proposed a test to measure the sensory balances and preferences of entire cultures. He turned to a psychiatrist, Dan Cappon, to devise tests to determine individual and cultural "sensory typololgies." Such would include the sense modalities of excitation and inhibition, pleasure and pain, aptitude and deficiency, as well as of old and new technologies. Once these measures were ascertained, it would be possible to stimulate attention and intelligence toward new levels of individual and social standards, with appropriate new standardization for economical, political, scientific and artistic development. Although what was to be called the "IBM Sensory Profile Study" eventually emerged, it was considered too ambiguous and was finally abandoned without much ado. Similarly, McLuhan's concurrent scheme to design an "encapsulating chamber" which would simulate the exact sensory environment of another culture was discarded due to lack of interest and financial resources. Funny, isn't it, that today the IBM Sensory Profile Study represents a precursor for what was to become the major enterprise of Cognitive Engineering in the seventies and eighties, and the "encapsulating chamber" a conceptual prototype for VR.
At that time, Marshall McLuhan contemplated the possibility of post-symbolic VR. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), he wrote:
Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to bypass languages in favour of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of weightlessness," that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be parallelled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace. (p.80).
By 1973, McLuhan had fully recognized this grave mistake and became fully apocalyptic regarding its implications. He felt that the "weightlessness" of what he now termed "discarnate man" was the precursor of psychic, self-destruction. In electronic media, in a "typically hypnotic state," in "a world between fantasy and dream," between the internal and the external, both consciousness and unconsciousness break down. Such is the final apocalyptic nature of any "sensory retraining centre", or VR, which seeks to by-pass language and its society.
The New Science: Virtuality
In order to avoid some of the pitfalls of the imminent VR revolution, it would be wise to meditate upon what Marshall and Eric McLuhan have called Laws of Media: The New Science (1988). Simply put, they state that each new medium: Enhances; Obsolesces; Retrieves; and Reverses aspects of the environment. For example, they cite that the computer enhances speeds of calculation and retrieval; retrieves perfect memory; obsceleces sequence, approximation, perception, the present and hardware; and reverses [general systems] into anarchy via the overlay of bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, the McLuhans did not include a "Tetrad" regarding Virtual Reality. Unfortunately too, Marshall McLuhan's Analogical Theory of Communication is much more complex and much more scientific than may be suggested by these playful tetrads, although inventive play is McLuhan's and their first principle.
Publicly, all of McLuhan's figurative analyses were exclusively of media and media environments as old and new communication systems. Although McLuhan never published moral or ethical teaching, privately he practised the traditional religious techniques for interpreting sacred text, the four-part technique of Grammarian Exegesis: literal interpretation (Boy chastens dog); allegorical interpretation (Boy is Christ, dog is Satan); moral interpretation (Boy is good, dog is bad); and, anagogical (ultimate spiritual or mystical) interpretation (Boy is Universal Light, dog is Universal Dark). Tacitly, Grammarian Exegesis is implicit in the formulation of the Laws of Media: language is metaphorical; all metaphors are analogical; all metaphors are composed of two figures and two grounds; all such figures are open to empirical inquiry and spiritual interpretation. Hence, for McLuhan, all media form and content was the subject for profound verbal meditation, for he believed all human knowledge can be found in language.
Given the greater context of McLuhan's Analogical Theory of Communication and Grammarian Exegesis, it is indeed unfortunate that he was unable to provide a Laws of Media tetrad for Virtual Reality, especially since it may have enabled us to navigate through pan-synesthesia towards what we hope will be a happier ending.
|A. ENHANCEMENT||consists in intensifying some aspect of a situation, of extending a sense or configuration of senses, of turning an element of ground into figure or of further intensifying something already figurative; i.e., TV enhances the multisensuous, using the eye as hand and ear.|
|B. OBSOLESCENCE||refers to rendering a former situation impotent by displacement: figure returns to ground -- TV obsolesces radio, movie and point-of-view.|
|C. RETRIEVAL||is the process by which something long obsolete is pressed back into service, revivified; ground becomes figure through the new situation -- TV retrieves the occult.|
|D. REVERSAL||involves dual action simultaneously, as figure and ground reverse position and take complementary configuration -- TV reverses the intensities of the external specialism (objectification) of the senses into the inner trip (subjectification): the inner becomes outer, and the outer, inner (what was considered subjective is now considered objective and vice-versa).|
|A. ENHANCES||Computer (Hardware, Software) / Cable Infrastructure / Consumption of Electricity / Electronics / Pan-Television / Prosthesis or Extension Culture/Cognitive Science / Technological Control / Social Control / Old and New Psychiatric States of Being / Pan-Synesthetic Sensibility / Anarchy (into a unique, highly-controlled and controllable neo- or post-anarchy anarchy) / Leisure /Entertainment Industry / Gesticular Theatre / Physical and Mental Pain (Torture)/Physical and Mental Pleasure (Orgasm) / Imitative "Transcendence" / Gnosticism (Secret Magical Mystery Tours) / Fundamentalism / Illusion-Delusion / Subjectivity (and, paradoxically, the "Other") / "SOCIAL AUTISM"|
|B. OBSOLESCES||Radio / Telephone / Traditional TV-Networks / Traditional Reality / Traditional Education / Traditional Social Orientation / Traditional Philosophy / Sense of Place / Sense of Boundaries (Limits) / Holism / Dualism / Gender / Objectivity /Precepts / Traditional Concepts / All Existing Languages / Traditional Experiential Memory / Trust in One's Self and Others / Symbolic Representation /Traditional Travel / Traditional Physical Contact / Traditional Architecture / Traditional Art / Traditional Religion / the "Self"|
|C. RETRIES||Cave-dwelling / Previous Developmental Stages of Physical and Mental Development (Regression) (including some aspects of Genetic Evolution -- many particulars of the body and brain are vestigial; such may be reactivated) / Pre-Ethical, Pre-Ritual, Pre-Verbal Primitive Group Activities (called "theatre" by Brenda Laurel and Robert LePage, among others) / Privacy / "AUTISM"|
|D. REVERSES||All sense of CONTEXT from the Specific to the General: Inside-becomes-Outside-becomes-Inside-becomes-Exterior-becomes-Interior and so on through all Precepts and Concepts, all Subjects and Objects, until all is as a Physical and Mental "Simulator Sickness" / all Technological Extensions reverse their actions and begin to colonize Being from within -- VR programs for physical and mental states of being, so that both states are manufactured from without and experienced within VR / there is a general attempt to completely reconfigure DNA and Neurology.|