Pain and Subjectivity in VR

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# Pain and Subjectivity in Virtual Reality

**Diana Gromala**

In Lynn Hershman Leeson, ed., *Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture* (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), pp. 222–237.

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Virtual reality (VR) exists as a mythopoeic cultural phenomenon and as an experience through which notions of subjectivity flow and collide. Subjectivity—constituted and reconfigured through experiential aspects of VR and the larger cultural domain within which it resides and operates—is befuddled: the experience is irreducible to subject/object, inside/outside, mind/body, and VR/“real” world oppositions. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of VR is the consciousness-altering bodily experience, generally and problematically termed disembodiment. The term itself reveals the difficulty of linguistic or textual description and can be related to conditions of *jouissance*,' Avital Ronell’s notion of drugs, and Julia Kristeva’s exploration of the abject (I/not I). Just where are the self and the body in relation to this disconcerting and simultaneous experience of being in and not in the virtual world, and how do they constitute each other? Elaine Scarry’s conceptualization of pain and imagining provides productive strategies to employ in exploring how the body and self extend agency and how they constitute each other through the prostheses of VR.

## SITUATED BODIES, SITUATED SELVES

Deeply implicated in the cultural production? of so-called VR technologies, I often witness and swallow the many paradoxes it creates. Highly regarded scientists, for example, legitimize research directions in scholarly symposia, while at dinner they speak in hushed tones, comparing VR experiences to transcendent spiritual states, drug trips, 222 | and “d.t.’s” or residual effects of extensive exposure. Respectable professors dream of “downloading ‘pure’ consciousness.” Others thrill in the sensation of “disembodiment” and the ecstasy of “leaving the meat behind.” Subjective states, such as a sense of “immersion” or “presence,” are often measured by purportedly objective, empirical means. The user's body stands woefully constricted and tethered, straining to clumsily adapt to the alleged limitlessness of VR—one can experience the ability to fly, as long as the three foot sensor range is not exceeded. Such presuppositions also rely on a socioeconomic status of relative privilege, as well as the culturally determined ability to comprehend the symbolic languages or orders of VR. One of the most significant paradoxes is that VR is more widely discussed than actually experienced, yet the experiential component is what is found to be most compelling.

VR is frequently conflated with the larger existent or projected cultural processes referred to as cyberspace. In addition, future possibilities of VR technologies are often confused with actual current capabilities. This may help explain why VR, in a brief but frenzied moment during the last several years, enjoyed widespread attention in literature, film, the arts, the media, and other cultural forms, and why it has assumed mythopoeic dimensions in our cultural imagination. Though the technology is still in its infancy and has often not lived up to the urgent expectations created around it, much like artificial intelligence in previous decades, it nonetheless persists as both a troubling and potentially redemptive phenomenon.

Although VR is often depicted as if it lacked a history or a cultural context, its historical precedents can be traced through intertwining threads of mechanical developments, computational evolution, and the fantastical worlds elicited through mimetic simulations of ritual, dioramas, art, literature, and theater, and some may claim, medieval cathedrals. What these examples hold in common is the evocation and perception of a shareable but otherworldly place in which humans extend and project their agency—the ability to act upon, within, and through the world—and where subjectivity is problematized. The history of VR is in many ways the history of the conditions and construction of selfhood through projecting one’s self and one’s agency into the “real” or object world and attendant virtual and fictional worlds.

In its contemporary manifestations, VR can be understood in a multiplicity of ways in relation to the experience and perceptions of | see the subject, as well as the informing context within which subjectivity and VR are situated. One is a deterministic view of VR which places its development as increasingly removed from human control, somehow taking on a “nature” of its own, an essentialized apostasy. Here it is rendered in cautionary tales that stir our mythopoeic imagination in an animistic or fetishistic sense, as a phenomenon that takes on a monstrous life of its own, often turning against us in a threat to ultimately destroy us. These cautionary tales remind us that the extension and projection of human agency can be dangerous, whether the projection is indirect, through a robot or the automata described by the early Greeks and Chinese’ for example, or direct, through prostheses in contact with the body, as in VR. When human agency is externalized, projected through indirect means and expressed as embodied, an essentialized Other emerges. It becomes progressively further removed from direct human contact and can no longer be controlled by its human creator. This can be seen in a thread connecting golem in sixteenth-century Prague to Frankenstein, the feminine robot in *Metropolis*, the replicant Roy in *Blade Runner*, the T-1000 in *Terminator 2* and the biologic cells in *Blood Music*. The results are just as disastrous, however, when the projection is more intimately tied to a direct prosthetic interface with the body, such as current VR apparatuses of head-mounted displays, data gloves, and body suits. In these instances, the technology, though not externalized as an entity, nonetheless reveals its ability to create a fertile framework or condition for human self-destruction. In *Lawnmower Man* and *Until the End of the World*, users are “taken over” by something inherent in their own consciousness, whether it is an escalating greed for power or a profound addiction to their dreams and desires. In either case of externalized entities or direct bodily experience, the technology grows disconnected from human agency.

However, these totalizing myths of a demonized technological Other, as well as the converse utopian rhetoric, reify cultural hegemony in the construction of subjectivity. By relying upon a totalizing view of technology, especially as a seemingly autonomous Other, most of reality is omitted.* Further, by not questioning or considering the instrumental forces, conditions, processes, and power relations of a technology implicit in the cultural realm, we can unproblemati224 | cally distance ourselves from our own implicit role and responsibility in these processes. This unquestioning acceptance works at the level of ideology or “common sense”; thus, unequal power relations remain invisible.

Subjectivity in relation to VR can also be understood in terms of a problematic relation to the symbolic realm, implicated in the much wider, everyday cultural experience of hyperreality described by Jean Baudrillard’ and Paul Virilio.° In a hyperreal cultural context, symbols no longer maintain a referent or are preferred over the thing they originally represented. In this view, the phenomenon of VR can be seen as a simple distraction to or instance of the much wider everyday cultural experience of hyperreality, an experience that in turn problematizes subjectivity in the schizophrenic terms of Fredric Jameson,’ Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.* The schizophrenic subject, constituted through this realm, is no longer a unified entity, but a free-floating, fragmented being. Deleuze and Guattari celebrated this construction or reconstitution of a schizophrenic subject as a strategy for survival in a Western world of late capitalism, characterized by processes of the hyperreal brought about in part by technology.

The experiential dimensions of VR provoke further confusion in the relationship between bodily experience and subjectivity in the symbolic realm. An indeterminate subjectivity embedded in this context of hyperreality not only experiences disconcerting shifts in the time/space continuum and free-floating signifiers on the level of the everyday, but in some way can seem to bodily inhabit or occupy the symbolic realm of VR. Because the technologically enhanced body, or human sensorium, is “joined in a sensory feedback loop with the simulacrum that lives in RAM, it is impossible to locate an originary source for experience and sensation.”’ Thus, the body is experienced as more viscerally “present” than it is in other fictive realms and is therefore seen to somehow circumvent our subjective relation to the symbolic. According to Jaron Lanier, for example, VR abrogates the process of entry into the symbolic realm, what he terms “postsymbolic communication.” Resulting attempts to describe this VR experience as disembodiment, however, only serve to reify a mind/body split. A schizophrenic subjectivity might provide an alternative to the Cartesian dualism by nomadically embracing shifting and contin- | gent experiences.

In the view of Jean-Francois Lyotard," the experience of VR | 225 can be seen as an instantiation of the instrumentality of technology in a postmodernist context. Lyotard describes technology as a language game, extending while reconfiguring the modernist myths or metanarratives of mastery and progress, while the state maintains domination by escalating the rate of technological change to an everincreasing frequency. Implicit in this technological landscape, the phenomenon and experience of VR reflect and are co-opted by instrumental forces of domination. Here, the self dissolves into a host of networks and relations of contradictory codes and interfering messages, which he, like Deleuze and Guattari, valorizes. Likewise, as Donna Haraway would have it, the phenomenon and experience of VR are related to larger sites or processes of domination. VR reinforces but could also simultaneously disrupt those very structures through emerging contingent and hybrid subjectivities. Rather than adhering to a demonization of technology or reacting to it by developing another, oppositional and totalizing theory, Haraway enjoins us to embrace “the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection to others, in communication with all of our parts.”

As a cultural artifact, VR can be seen as a diagnostic tool or an expression of our millennialist angst. Like artificial intelligence and a broad range of new technologies, from the printing press to the telephone and television before it, VR functions as a screen or mirror upon which we can project our deepest fears, hopes for utopia, cures for what ails us, or an escape from our current condition, expressed in relation to our notions of subjectivity and the body. However, VR differs from the evocation of imaginary spaces, such as the suspension of disbelief that happens in the theater, in part because of the seemingly more direct and visceral implication of our bodily responses in the feedback loop with VR technologies. The Lacanian mirror of misrecognition seemingly becomes a mirror we can literally walk into, or, in N. Katherine Hayles’s terms, becomes a second mirror stage—the Mirror of the Cyborg, one which accounts for a subjectivity not reliant upon physical boundaries."

Most frequently, VR is understood in terms of the experiential, inevitably referred to as the sensation of so-called disembodiment. By implication, traditional notions of subjectivity are disturbed by the 226 | inexplicable quality and effects of VR-induced sensations. The fascination with the sensation of disembodiment belies the most outstanding characteristic of VR: the profound experiential dimension that seems to resist linguistic or textual description and that confounds binary oppositions of mind/body and self/other. “Boundary states” of subjectivity that cannot be reduced to binary oppositions provide useful models for the examination of the sensation of so-called disembodiment and its effect on subjectivity. These are Avital Ronell’s no- — tions of narcotics, and Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject (I/not I) —the problematic projection of the self into the object world. However, Elaine Scarry’s conceptualization of pain provides perhaps the most useful strategy for examining sensation and subjectivity, since it necessarily implicates the body and self as inextricably bound.

As an experience of embodied imaginary space, VR is often compared to altered states of consciousness, such as those provoked by narcotics or hallucinogenic drugs. Rather than considering a drugenhanced state of consciousness as a search for an exterior, transcendental dimension in a dualism of interior/exterior, or mind/body, Avital Ronell views the desire for a “chemical prosthesis” of drugs, or a technological prosthesis of virtual reality, as a desire to explore “fractal interiorities.” Again, subjectivity is decentered. The chemical prostheses provide an experience in which the “distinction between interiority and exteriority is radically suspended, and where this phantasmic opposition is opened up.” Kristeva’s concept of the abject can be seen as another type of boundary state in relation to the body and its social construction. “The abject is what of the body falls away from it while remaining irreducible to the subject/object and inside/outside oppositions. The abject necessarily partakes of both polarized terms but cannot be clearly identified with either.” We are repulsed by but at some level desire and claim these abject products of bodily fluids and “wastes” as a part of the self. Perhaps this is akin to the sensations provoked by VR: desire and anxiety (or unrecognized revulsion) simultaneously emerge as our body responds to the feedback loop and disrupt traditionally sacrosanct notions of body and self. Such boundary states assume that a certain degree of self has already been constructed, whether it is understood to be whole and intact, or contingent and partial. However, other boundary states that occur prior to an infant's construction of self or separation from its mother, such as Lacan’s “imaginary” and Kristeva’s view of *jouissance*, | ee also serve to elide and disrupt oppositions of self and Other, inside and outside. An unconscious desire to return to this intensely pleasurable state of *jouissance* may be proffered to explain one of the reasons for VR’s popularity.

## PAIN’S REMAINS
Though I was only 13, I mourned the loss of my kidney the night before they cut it from my body, “removed” the dysfunctional organ. What seemed curious to me was that I wasn’t allowed to keep it, vitiating the traditions of my family. My people are “of the earth” types from isolated areas of the Carpathian Mountains, people whose traditions are rarely mentioned by anthropologists. They collect and save their body parts in yellowed glass jars sealed with wax which reside in medicine cabinets, hope chests, and potato cellars worthy of Dr. Caligari. They save their protein excrement, their hair, and bury their body parts along with the soil of their birthplace in some sort of shamanistic hangover. Only after unseemly insistence was I allowed to see what my ambitious surgeon said would make me famous in the *New England Journal of Medicine*: a calculus the size of Montana, attended by a complete lack of evidence of the horrendous pain physicians associate with this disease. He felt that the kidney itself, the meat, would be too upsetting for me to see, but somehow the stone would not. *Medusa from the inside* I thought as I snatched it and held its smooth, fetal shape. But holding it was strictly forbidden because I might have somehow damaged what rightfully belonged to science, to pathology—I had violated the protocols of medical science. Never would I be buried with all of my bodily creations. In contrast, a few years later, the reverse was true: now I experienced inexplicable pain, which could not be readily substantiated by physical evidence. My subjective experience of pain seemed to defy verification by the objective, scientific measures insisted upon by Western medicine. Thus I came to my first virtual reality experience in a research hospital, subversively catching glimpses of the interior of my body. There, in an attempt to substantiate and objectify my emerging pain, physicians used microvideography to explore my viscera, projecting it on televisions and larger screens to other physicians 228 | and interns. Drugged but conscious, I was nonetheless consistently and vehemently discouraged from viewing my own body, though | thrilled in the abject pleasure it produced when I caught glimpses of its enormous and animate projections.

In her book, *The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World*, Scarry defines pain by the manner in which it implies a split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of others. An essentially subjective state, pain cannot be denied or confirmed. Scarry outlines the exceptional character of pain when compared to all other interior states: “We do not simply have feelings, but have feelings for somebody or something: love is love of x, fear is fear of y, ambivalence is ambivalence about z. Pain has no referential content, it takes no object, and more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.”’’ She discusses pain through the metaphor of three concentric but permeable circles: the innermost, the difficulty of expressing pain; next, the political and perceptual complications that result because of that difficulty; and finally, the nature of both material and verbal expressibility, that is, the nature of human creation.

Scarry’s analysis of pain provides useful methods for understanding the experiential aspects of VR. This experience—what I term the transformative state of consciousness provoked by sensorial experiences of the body and inexorably bound to them in simultaneity—is a projection of the self into the object world; in this case the object world is VR. Though Scarry’s analysis appears to be somewhat problematic in her distinction of physical pain, implying a mind/body split, her framework does allow for a semipermeability that both partakes of and denies strict binary oppositions. It is thus valuable in the examination of the experience of VR in two ways. First, by focusing on the projection of a sentient being into the object world, what Scarry refers to as “imagining,” the mind/body duality becomes permeable and allows for the consideration of simultaneous experiences. Second, Scarry outlines this projection and ultimate reformation as transformative. Again, this condition allows for semipermeability, or a continuous feedback loop between the sentient being and the object world. - The loop 2ins with _ | en Leone | projected out into the object world through labor sentience 7 | 7s | A resulting in | eee preset fF fire betty Wao nl 9 oe e ten Be ote) Il Ee orea tion 1 the force of creation moves back onto the human site to remake of an object,

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lever, Scarry’s use of the term “sentient” is crucial here, in that it refers to consciousness inextricably bound to sensation; hence, the conscious “mind” is one with perception through the bodily senses. Further, in her definition of the effect of pain as a splitting of one’s own sense of reality from others’, which resides within the larger frame of the processes of pain and imagining, Scarry accounts for both the irreducible material fact of the body as well as subjective experience without falling into a solipsistic subjectivity. By extension, this frame of self-objectification, termed imagining, allows for the consideration of the simultaneous experiences offered in VR. This represents a significant opportunity in discourses surrounding VR, ” which otherwise tend to deny the body as somehow separate from the mind and expendable. In these discourses, the sensation of disembodiment is generally proffered as adhering to the well-worn Cartesian split. It is possible and liberatory, as some would have it, to escape from the body, or at least from the aversive aspects of the body, that is, pain. The dream here is to download pure consciousness (mind) and leave the problematic meat (body) behind. The assumptions underlying this stance reify the position that the mind and body are separable, that experience can be unproblematically compartmentalized, and further serve to limit the conscious experience of VR to, again, an either/or experience. This reasoning assumes that one experiences VR, say, in the ability to “fly” in the simulation, without simultaneously experiencing the irreducible physical limitations of the material body and its dissonant inputs. A reluctant acknowledgment of simultaneity of experience gets a nod, albeit one in terms of disease, from the observation of “sim-sickness.” Simsickness (or simulation sickness) refers to the proprioceptive determinations of the body receiving two sets of signals at odds with each other, one originating from the “real” world, say, gravity, the other from visual cues in the simulation that can produce the sensation of flying. The result is nausea, though the body usually adapts through habituation. Describing this in terms of a ce | disease reveals the tendency to desire an escape from the problematic meat, rather than reincorporating it in simultaneous experiences, which phenomena of adaptability like habituation serve to accomplish.

However, rather than considering the sensation experienced in VR as a denial or escape from the material body, I would instead argue that this experiential component of VR can be viewed more productively when focused on Scarry’s description of imagining—the projection of the sentient being into the object world—in this case through technological prosthesis, a move associated with pleasure. By focusing on the projection, the fiduciary subject'*—that is, the body as the privileged site of geopolitical instrumental forces within systems of domination and the irreducible material fact of the body—is not disavowed. The meat remains, and remains connected to a multiplicity of simultaneous experience.

Scarry posits the following: “‘Pain and imagining’ constitute extreme conditions of, on the one hand, intentionality as a state and, on the other, intentionality as self-objectification; and between these two boundary conditions all the other more familiar binary acts-andobjects are located. That is, pain and imagining are the ‘framing events within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.””

According to Scarry, pain serves to split one’s own sense of reality from others’, while imagining allows the subject—unified in subjectivity, or decentered and schizophrenic—to project, to participate in a shared reality. The experience of VR seems to manage both. The user of VR, partially cut off from participation in the real world by a head-mounted display, can be observed to be thrashing about, simultaneously and partially functioning in another world. Semi-immersed in the VR world, this user can communicate with other users who are “telepresent” through similar technological prostheses and representations. However, if a user spills virtual coffee on another user in VR, the person may react as if liquid burned their flesh; but, simultaneously, in the material world, her pants are not wet—the liquid does not fully translate. Yet if one user scares another user in VR and that person is heavily invested in the simulation, he could perhaps suffer a very real heart attack. The realities are multiple and simultaneous, only partially shared, not reducible to the VR world or the real world, yet necessarily implicated in both. Mythopoeic examples often em- ploy the trope of a shock to the body, a visible instance of a sign of pain, before the subject experientially “enters” VR. This is not unlike shamanistic practices of inducing pain as a signal that many anthropologists interpret as “a little death” of the body necessary to signal a rebirth of a reconstituted self.*” These can both be read as a denial of the flesh, but read another way, they can signal the disconcerting experience of simultaneous presence—the irreducible material aspect of the body is in the VR world and in the real world, just as the reconfigured shaman, even renamed, returns to the same body through which the transcendental state was induced.

The nature and the process of imagining and creation described by Scarry provides useful insights in examining subjectivity in VR. The sentient being projects into the object world and is in turn transformed in the process:

Imagining works this way. We begin with a perception about

human sentience. It is projected out into the object world

through labor and results in the creation of an object (in this

case, a VR object/experience). This object in turn acts as a ful-

crum or lever, which the force of creation moves back onto the

human site to remake the makers. To repeat, there is a recipro-

cal consequence at the human site.” © Scarry goes on to say that imagining works either directly, by “extending its powers and acuity (poem, telescope),” or indirectly, “by eliminating aversiveness (chair, vaccine).” Like imagining, VR seems to work in both ways. Indirectly, the user, the sentient being in VR, projects and extends agency in a multiplicity of ways. The users, or sentient beings, can extend their ability to interact and effect change simultaneously in the simulation and in the “material” world by remote manipulations of robotic arms in space, or by remote surgery. They can interact with other users who, though physically remote, are nonetheless “telepresent,” and can share and communicate in a common simulation. Certain qualities of a VR simulation do not strictly reproduce what is possible outside of the simulation, such as the six degrees of freedom which produce the illusion that users can fly. Indirectly the experience of VR can simultaneously eliminate aversiveness, for example, in providing surgeons, pilots, and astronauts 232 | an opportunity to refine skills and habituate themselves to unfamiliar experiences. The temporary “escape” into a fictive world eliminates the aversiveness of the real world. In some instances, VR works directly and indirectly, simultaneously. In using robotic arms to manipulate dangerous materials, users directly extend their agency to remote sites and simultaneously eliminate aversiveness by remaining at a safe distance.

In the feedback loop of Scarry’s process of imagining, subjectivity can be seen to be continuously and dynamically influenced. This feedback loop begins with a perception about human sentience and an intentionality, as stated earlier, as self-objectification. What drives this intentionality in relation to VR? Perhaps it is alluded to in Ronell’s discussion of drugs: “Much like the paradigms installed by the discovery of endorphins, being-on-drugs indicates that a structure is already in place, prior to the production of that materiality we call drugs, including virtual reality or cyberprojections.”” We do not reproduce that which is ultimately outside of our perceptions, that which influences our subjectivity, including experiences of so-called disembodiment. In situating VR as the object/experience, subjectivity is dynamically influenced by the partial shareability of a VR experience, and by a simultaneous experience of being within and outside of VR.

In terms of the theorists mentioned in the introduction, Scarry can be considered to be adhering to binary oppositions and a tendency toward a totalizing discourse. What is at issue is the shareability of a reality on an ontological level, technologically mediated or not. A decentered and contingent subjectivity, by definition, must share, or partially share, a reality. Scarry’s positing of permeability allows for the attenuation of strict splits between binary oppositions.

## VIRTUAL BODIES

Some time ago, I was in a semicontorted position, trying to watch the interior of my stomach lining, in real time. Swallowing, incorporating the video camera elicited pain, as did the torturous nerve conduction studies that were required, again, in an effort to substantiate my subjective experience of chronic pain through “objective” tests. Although the suggestion would be anathema to Western physicians, it seemed not unlike the homeopathic magic practiced by my herbalist grandfather: provoke pain to cure one of it. My grandfather taught me what | 233 Western medicine could not: how to cope with ever-present pain. In essence, I deal with chronic physical pain in part by reexperiencing it, simultaneously, as pleasurable. In many non-Western methods of meditation, this involves not an escape from the body, but rather, a reinhabitation of its inward enormity, or an erasure of the distinction between interior and exterior, a certain sense of an expansion and simultaneous loss of self, perhaps not unrelated to *jouissance*.

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FIG. 1. *Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies*, created by Diana Gromala and Yacov Sharir. The virtual body is comprised of medical visualizations of Diana Gromala, artistically manipulated and animated to symbolically represent continual decay and reformation. The virtual body Is overwritten with texts, meditations on pain, Eros, and Thanatos. Each organ contains another, surreal virtual world.

I had long since insisted on my place in both the subject and object position of this medicinal discourse. A voyeur of the wonders of medical imaging, I collect and personally finance, with the help of my insurance companies, all sorts of “objective” and “scientific” visualizations of my body. What fascinates me is the spectral and sensuous quality of these representations, images of bone and viscera, fluid and sound, movement and depth (fig. 1). Here my body, through their tools and devices, is enhanced as a site through which social, political, economic, and technological forces flow and collide, often 234 with very real and tangible effect. Here I become a cyborg, both theoretically and as a result of the way technology alters my material being. The idea of a cyborg tweaked my throbbing interest, not only in the liberatory possibilities outlined by Haraway,” but also because, quite literally, I have devices, or what belongs to the object world within my interior being.

I was interested in bringing my experience of chronic pain into the object realm, as Scarry suggests, in order to make it sharable. In =~ order to produce art, that is, to hopefully invite or induce an insight, revelation, or state of altered consciousness, I was interested in exploring the experiential aspect, the sensation of disembodiment of VR, to reflect that double move of conflating pain with pleasure. Further, | was looking at these visualizations of my body as sites of contestation and negotiation among social, political, and economic forces that had a direct result on my subjectivity and material body. In doing so, I wanted to reappropriate these visualizations, digital data obtained from technologies that are able to extend our perception to apprehend previously inaccessible properties of bodies, from x-rays, MRIs, and sonograms to electron microscopy, invasive microvideography, and algorithmic interpretations, which transform data from bodily sounds, heat, and “measurable” pain sensitivities into malleable visual and aural forms.

Thus, a cyborg materially as well as theoretically, I explored these issues in the creation of *Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies*, a work in virtual environments (figs. 1, 2). Through the beneficence of the Canadian government's Department of Communications and the Banff Centre for the Arts, I engaged in a three-year process of creating an immersive virtual environment which has since been performed at various venues. With a choreographer and computer scientists, this immersive, interactive virtual environment was constructed from the database of visualizations of my body. This virtual body is of enormous scale and exists in a state of constant decay and reformation. The virtual body becomes a “book” as it is overwritten with texts of desire, Battaille-inspired reembodiments of Eros and Thanatos swirling about splintered and reconfigured forms, textual encryptions of a body in pain, a body in confluence with materiality, the immaterial, and dematerialized notions of corporeal transcendence, of corporeal reinhabitation.

## CONCLUSION

My firsthand experience with pain illustrates Scarry’s description of its ability to destroy the language of the sufferer: one who experiences physical pain can neither have it confirmed or denied. The effect of pain is that it prevents the projection of self into the object world (imagining) to make pain sharable. Yet, my artistic goal of *Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies* was not to replicate the experience of pain but to create a virtual environment which elicits a

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FIG. 2. *Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies*. By wearing a head-mounted, stereoscopic video display, users can feel “immersed” within the moving body and interact with it. Such interactions include “touching” the text, which then changes, or “flying” into an organ—say, a heart—to find another, surreal world. Three-dimensional sound helps users locate themselves in surreal virtual spaces. reinhabitation of the body, one which conflates pain with pleasure and unknowable states of death. To quote Scarry, “That pain is so frequently used as a symbolic substitute for death in the initiation rites of many tribes is surely attributable to an intuitive human recognition that pain is the equivalent in felt-experience of what is unfeelable in death.”” I linked this strategy of reinhabitation to the consciousnessinfluencing bodily experience of disembodiment of VR. Both states strongly decenter our culturally specific emphasis on certain senses (the visual, sonic) above others (haptic, kinesthetic, visceral, emotional) and provoke profound visceral responses which seem to defy textual description. The experience of VR, understood in its mythopoeic cultural forms as a problematic experience of the self and body, has an ability to throw assumptions of subjectivity into disarray.

Underlying discourses that strive to redefine relationships between technology and subjectivity assume that a stable subjectivity exists intact, prior to experiences of fluid and mutable disembodiment, an assumption that poststructuralist theorists call into question. The disembodied experience, combined with qualities of VR that seemingly do not replicate “reality,” serves to upset notions in our relationship to the symbolic realm, as well as binary mind/body, subject/object, and material/immaterial distinctions. Other boundary states which do not allow for strict binary oppositions include *jouissance*, drugs, and the abject. While they provide useful analogies in the exploration of subjectivity in VR, Elaine Scarry’s conceptualization of pain provides productive strategies to employ in exploring how the body and self extend agency and how they constitute each other through the prostheses of VR precisely because what is at stake is our human ability to make our world sharable with others.