Thorsten Botz-Bornstein. Critical Posthumanism

7/29/2019 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein. Critical Posthumanism

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Pensamiento y Cultura Vol. 15-1 l Junio de 201220

Recibido: 2012-05-16Aprobado: 2012-06-09

20-30pensam.cult. l ISSN 0123-0999

* Associate Professor of Philosophy, Gulf University of Science and Technology. Kwait. [email protected]

Critical Posthumanism

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein*

Abstract: Uncritical Posthumanism celebrates the continuation of the human by non-humanmeans (for example, a new techno-bio body) as well as the creation of a reality by unreal means.Posthumanists attempt to make the body more self-contained and energy-efficient, developing theinteraction of body-technology and consciousness-digitality, biotechnology or bioinformatics. Themutual interference of body, consciousness and reality creates a new space of Virtual Reality.Critical Posthumanism attempts to disentangle the common characteristics of human reality andposthuman Virtual Reality and establishes communicative links between both by sticking to theconviction that simulation should never win over reality. Critical Posthumanism attempts to locatethe human in the posthuman. This article analyzes the common points of Virtual Reality, biotechnol-

ogy, and globalization by reflecting on the notion of the narrative. The existence of Virtual Reality,the gene-code, and globalization is due to the desire to elude any narrative and to express realitydirectly. Gene technology tries to grasp not a certain temporally definable stage of the en-tire process ofgeneration, but thegene itself, as the essential quantity of generation that has no realplace in generation itself. Globalization globalizes the globe and represents it as something thatis neither the real world nor its narration but rather a new sphere that we have to accept as such.Critical Posthumanism defines the subtle differences between a Virtual Reality in the sense of atechnological narrative and an existential Virtual Irreality that interprets the virtual in a more hu-man fashion.

Keywords: Critical posthumanism, virtual reality, narrative, human, posthuman.

El Posthumanismo Crtico

Resumen: el Posthumanismo Acrtico celebra la continuacin de lo humano por mediosno humanos (por ejemplo, un nuevo tecno-bio cuerpo), as como la creacin de una realidad pormedios irreales. Los posthumanistas intentan lograr un cuerpo ms autnomo y con eficienciaenergtica, desarrollando la interaccin del cuerpo-tecnologa y la conciencia- digitalidad, la bio-tecnologa o la bioinformtica. A travs de la interferencia mutua del cuerpo, la conciencia y la reali-dad, se crea un nuevo espacio de Realidad Virtual. El posthumanismo crtico intenta desenredarlas caractersticas comunes de la realidad humana y la Realidad Virtual posthumana y establecevnculos comunicativos entre ambos, adhieriendose a la conviccin de que la simulacin nunca

debe ganarse a la realidad. El posthumanismo crtico intenta ubicar al ser humano en el posthumano.Este artculo analiza los puntos comunes de la Realidad Virtual, la biotecnologa y la globalizacinmediante una reflexin sobre la nocin de la narracin. La existencia de la Realidad Virtual, el c-digo gentico, y la globalizacin se debe al deseo de eludir cualquier narrativa y expresar la realidaddirectamente. La tecnologa de los genes no trata de entender alguna estapa - temporalmentedefinible - de todo el proceso de generacin, sino elgen en s mismo, como la cantidad esencial de


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Pensamiento y Cultura l ISSN 0123-0999 Vol. 15-1 l Junio de 201221


generacin que no tiene lugar real en la generacin en s. La globalizacin globaliza el mundo y lorepresenta como algo que no es ni el mundo real ni su narracin, sino ms bien una esfera nuevaque tenemos que aceptar como tal. El posthumanismo crtico define las diferencias sutiles entreuna Realidad Virtual, en el sentido de una narrativa tecnolgica, y una Irrealidad Virtual existencialque interpreta lo virtual en una forma ms humana.

Palabras clave: posthumanismo crtico, la realidad virtual, la narrativa, humano, posthumano.

Le Post-humanisme Critique

Rsum: Le Post-humanisme acritique clbre la continuation de lhumain par des moyensnon-humains (par exemple, un nouveau techno-bio-corps), ainsi que la cration dune ralit pardes moyens irrels. Les posthumanistes essaient dobtenir un corps plus autonome avec une

effcacit nergtique, dveloppant lintraction du corps-technologie et la conscience-digitalit, labio-technologie ou la bio-informatique. A travers linterfrence mutuelle du corps, la conscienceet la ralit, se cre un nouvel espace de Ralit Virtuelle. Le posthumanisme critique essaie dedemler les caractristiques communes de la ralit humaine et de la Ralit Virtuelle post-humai-ne, et tablit des liens communicatifs entre eux; sadhrant ainsi la conviction que la simulationne doit jamais vaincre la ralit. Le posthumanisme critique essaie de situer ltre humain dans leposthumain. Cet article analyse les points communs de la Ralit virtuelle, la bio-technologie et laglobalisation travers une reflexion sur la notion de narration. Lexistence de la Ralit Virtuelle, lecode gntique, et la globalisation est due au dsir dluder toute narrative et dexprimer la ralitdirectement. La technologies des gnes nessaie pas de comprendre une tape temporairementdfinissable de tout le processus de gnration, mais le gne en soi, comme la quantit essentiellede gnration qui na pas de place relle dans la gnration en soi. La globalisation globalise le

monde et le reprsente comme une chose qui nest ni le monde rel ni sa narration, mais pluttune sphre nouvelle que nous devons accepter en tant que telle. Le posthumanisme critique dfinitles diffrences subtiles entre une Ralit Virtuelle,dans le sens dune narrative technologique et uneIrralit Virtuelle existentielle qui interprte le virtuel dune faon plus humaine.

Mots-cls: Posthumanisme critique, la ralit virtuelle, la narrative, humain, posthumain.


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Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

1. Critical

Posthumanism

Even if one is tempted to ridicule an elasticconcept such as postmodernism because of itslargely unspecified character one has to admitthat during the last thirty years or so, togetherwith the rejection of totalilizing concepts such as

progress, race, rigor, etc., also the idea of

the human has suffered and will most prob-ably continue to do so.1 In the present article Iattempt neither to embrace the posthuman asan exciting adventure nor to reinstall human-ism but rather to steer a middle course able tolocate the human in the posthuman. This is what Isee as the task of Critical Posthumanism.

Critical Posthumanism exists already invarious forms, reaching from straightforwardanti-cloning campaigns to sophisticated studies

informed by disciplines such as structuralism,feminism, and postcolonial studies. My CriticalPosthumanist agenda consists in characterizingthe posthuman world as the latest grand narra-tive that humanity has produced, the narrativeof Virtual Reality. Most generally, narrativeis defined as the representation of an event ora series of events (Abbot 2002: 12). Lyotardsstatement that the grand narrative [progress,Marxism, etc.] has lost its credibility (Lyotard1984: 37) has generally been accepted but I be-

lieve that it is still possible to describe the wholeprocess of civilization as a process that trans-forms reality into a mediated, narrated reality.And Virtual Reality (including its posthumanextensions) represents the last stage of a con-tinuous development.

2. Uncritical

Posthumanism

Uncritical Posthumanism (I avoid call-ing it Popular Posthumanism or Transhu-manism though some people do, see Simon2003) celebrates the continuation of the human

by non-human means (for example, a new tech-no-bio body) as well as the creation of a reality

by unreal means. Both celebrations are inter-linked but let us start with the body. Originally,uncritical Posthumanism developed around anoutspoken appeal for the cyborg in the 1980s and1990s and fostered an intellectual attitude thatsees the body as a commodity malleable in thehands of modern technology predicting a pros-thetic biocultural future. This attitude is oftensparked off by a weariness with the humancondition itself (Baillie and Casey 2005: 31).In 1991 the artist Stelarc announced that it is

time to question whether a bipedal, breathingbody with binocular vision and a 1,400cc brainis an adequate biological form (Stelarc 1991:591). Equally in the early nineties, the WorldTranshumanist Association declared that hu-manity will be radically changed by technol-ogy in the future. We foresee the feasibility ofredesigning the human condition (quotedfrom Winner 2005: 392). Closely linked to thisadventure are ambitions to make life eternal, asthey were pronounced by Human Genome Sci-ence CEO William Haseltine who said that aswe understand the bodys repair process at thegenetic level [] we will be able to advancethe goal of maintaining our bodies in normalfunction perhaps perpetually (quoted fromFukuyama 2002: 18).

All these statements concern the bodywhich posthumanists attempt to make moreself-contained [and] energy-efficient (Stelarc

1 On the definition of Critical Posthumanism see Callus and Herbrech-ter 2008.


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1991: 592). It goes without saying that the brainrepresents a similar challenge. Strictly speaking,it is not the brain as a self-contained machinethat fascinates Posthumanism; such an entityis rather an object of interest for more technical

branches of cognitive science. The item that hasreceived a good deal of interest in posthumantheory is the consciousness as a mixture of intel-lectual, bodily, and spatial awareness. Whilebioengineering and nanotechnology (whichdevelops molecular-scale self-replicating ma-chines) establish a posthuman body, digitalityestablishes a consciousness able to functionposthumanly. Katherine Hayles thinks that thecoupling of human cognition to digital machin-ery makes the construction of posthuman be-

ings possible (Hayles 1999: 3). Things becomecompelling and much more dynamic at the mo-ment the cognitive-digital domain and the pros-thetic-bodily domain overlap. Merging withcomputerized entities requires an extension ofour humanity, writes Michael Heim (Heim1998: 62). While a first phase of Posthuman-ism came of age simply through the couplingof the natural and the technological, a secondphase announced itself through the interactionof body-technology and consciousness-digitali-

ty, biotechnology or bioinformatics, as merg-ers of biology and information technology, letcomputers interpret and build models provid-ed by biological sciences, especially genomics.Biological and digital domains are no longerrendered ontologically distinct, writes EugeneThacker (2004: 7), which means that the post-human reality is no longer a reality out there

but a realm established in relationship withboth consciousness and the body. The biologi-cal informs the digital just as the digital cor-porealizes the biological, continues Thacker

(7). It becomes clear that the body is no longer,as Hans Moravec still postulated, a containerof consciousness that can one day be cast away

because consciousness can be unloaded intosome sort of brain vat (cf. Moravec 1992).2 Onthe contrary, the body itself is both biomolecu-lar and compiled through modes of visual-

ization, modeling, data extraction, and in siclosimulation (Thacker 2004: 13). To this must beadded the fact that biotechnology is more andmore web-based and takes place in a web-lab.

The Copernican revolution led humanityto recognize that it did not stand at the centerof the universe; the genomic revolution showedus that we are the most undistinguished spotat the periphery of evolution (Sagoff 2005: 68);finally, the digital revolution shows us that re-ality itself is not a stable platform on which wecan stand but that it is manipulable, prone toall sorts of combinations and hybridizations de-pendent on consciousness and the body.

3. A World of Paradoxes

From the preceding explanations followsthat Critical Posthumanism must be concernedwith paradoxes. The first paradox is that, onthe one hand, Virtual Reality is de-centered,playful, godless, and disenchanted because alltruths it contains have been made and notfound;3and that on the other hand, for reasons of thisrealitys synthetic power of identification andexpansion or simply because of its all-inclusive-

ness, it can also be seen as transcendental. WhenRobert Pepperell writes that recent theories ofquantum physics have suggested that the tra-ditional division between mind and reality isin doubt (Pepperell 2003: 6), what he meansis not so much that reality will be submittedto a Humeian sort of Matrix-like subjectiv-ism in which embodiment has become irrel-evant (Wolmark 2002: 83). His point is ratherthat in posthuman reality the relation betweenconsciousness (traditionally defined as feel-ings, emotions, memories, and other mentalstates) and the world is no longer limited tosubjectivism or objectivism but that from nowon consciousness is not in the brain alone butdistributed throughout the whole body (Pep-perell 2003: 4). This means that the posthumancondition is not limited to the replacement of

body parts with technological items but con-

2 See also Simulation, Consciousness, Existence available fromMoravecs website.

3 The distinction between made and found truth comes from Rorty1989: 53.


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cerns a change of consciousness. It concernsall mental states including that of eroticism,which becomes a sort of techno-eroticism (cf.Springer 1996) directed, for example, towardsthe JapaneseMecha Shjo (Mecha Musume in theWest) who is a combination of a beautiful girland a (weapon like) machine.

A statement by the British writer J.G. Bal-lard illustrates in a particularly graphic waythe consequences that this will have for the lifeof humans: I believe that organic sex, bodyagainst body, skin area against skin area, is

becoming no longer possible []. The wholeoverlay of new technologies are beginning []to reach into our lives and change the interior

design of our sexual fantasies (Ballard 1984:157; quoted from Shigematsu 1999: 127). A. Ne-witz has even an original explanation for thenaturalness of the Mecha Shjo: female bod-ies are [] best suited to mecha [] precisely

because it is related to reproduction and givingbirth (Newitz 1995: 9).

All this shows that Virtual Reality as wellas the posthuman world of bioengineered be-ings is not a utopian, second world that can

be enthusiastically embraced or refused. On thecontrary, in this new world reality as muchas the body with all its traditional quests con-tinue to exist. It is rather through the mutualinterference of body, consciousness and realitythat a new space of Virtual Reality is created.And since consciousness is located in the bodyas much as in the space within which this bodyacts, space requires an entirely new dimensionas we can guess by simply reading the title ofGregory Stocks book Metaman: The Mergingof Humans and Machines into a Global Superor-ganism. In this book the author claims that theprogressively deepening union between hu-mans and machines is symbiotic (Stock 1993:60) and will eventually develop into a plan-etary creature (53).

The role of Virtual Reality in a posthu-man world can only be understood withinthe network of these links that exist between

consciousness, reality, and the body. VirtualReality is not just a new kind of space but hasreplaced a certain spontaneity of direct percep-tion that could traditionally be defined as astraightforward relationship between the sub-

ject and the object with a sort of commodifiedsecond world that it constantly reproduces.

Francis Fukuyama discusses in his OurPosthuman Future Aldous Huxleys Brave NewWorld and common reactions to his world asa realm in which people may be healthy andhappy, but [] have ceased to be human be-cause Huxleys system is against human na-ture (Fukuyama 2002: 6). Fukuyama ridiculesthese reactions because neither being human

nor its importance can be defined in an absolutemanner (Fukuyama largely follows Leon Kasssinterpretation of Huxley, [Kass 2001]). Any ar-guments reproaching the Brave New World andits intrinsic inhumanism (or Posthumanism)establish, so Fukuyama finds, the human in acircular fashion as an ethical ground and at thesame time as a value dependent on this ground.

Fukuyamas discussion of Huxley doesnot lead towards a defense of Brave New World

schemes but rather towards the recommenda-tion of tough government checks in order toprevent the breeding of people with saddleson their backs (9). This is Fukuyamas versionof Critical Posthumanism. However, his al-most hysterical focus on inhumanbioengineer-ing but simultaneous lax dismissal of anythingintrinsically inhuman in the Brave New World isalarming. In my opinion, what the people inThe Brave New World loose is not an objectifiedversion of human characteristics but simplyreality. At the moment they no longer strug-gle, aspire, love, [and] feel pain (Fukuyama)they live in a dreamworld in which nothingever signals that things do really exist. Thisconcept of reality as resistance helps to un-derstand what is at stake in discussion on Vir-tual Reality and bioengineering. Huxley is notat all recommending to continue to feel pain,

be depressed or lonely, as Fukuyama tries tomake us believe, but points to the importance


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of clinging to reality as the true, yet ephemeralfruit of human life which is the surprise [and]the beauty [] (Baillie 2005: 231) and whichsome kind of Virtual Reality attempts to under-mine but which remains the only world that itis worth living in.

Critical Posthumanism, far from diaboliz-ing Virtual Reality and bioengineering, settlessomewhere between extreme idealism and naverealism. It attempts to disentangle the commoncharacteristics of human reality and posthumanVirtual Reality and to establish communicativelinks between both by firmly sticking to the Bau-drillardian conviction that simulation shouldnever win over reality. This is how it will be able

to locate the human in the posthuman.

As mentioned, the de-centered, playful nar-rative of Virtual Reality that is at the same timeuniversal or even transcendental asks for an ap-proach able to take into consideration paradox-es. As a matter of fact, in terms of methodology,Critical Posthumanism enters a ground that isnot well trodden because such curious concep-tual combinations of subjectivity and preten-sions towards something absolute remain rare

in the history of Western thought. Kants sen-sus communis comes to mind because, just likeKants construct,the narrative of Virtual Realityis simultaneously intimate and universal. Kantintroduced the term sensus communis as a theo-retical tool able to grasp the intrinsic characterof aesthetic expressions. To Kant it was obviousthat aesthetic judgments are subjective, that theyare made and notfound by reason in the form ofrational rules. However, at the same time hesaw that these subjective judgments need tobe also universal: what one person judges to bebeautiful must also be found beautiful at leastby many others, otherwise the idea of the beau-tiful does not make sense. Therefore Kant intro-duces, in Section 20 of the Critique of Judgment,the sensus communis (Gemeinsinn) as the humanability to judge according to the same feeling(sensus, Gefhl), which is subjective though atthe same time universal and transcendental.Aesthetic judgments are declared to be tran-

scendentally valid through a paradoxical sensuscommunis.4 As shown above, Virtual Reality is

based on a similarly paradoxical constellationand Critical Posthumanism must take this intoconsideration. The playful and subjective nar-

rative of Virtual Reality is at the same time anAll-Unity.

Virtual Reality represents the idea of a non-physical space enabling man to grasp the worldas a whole. Originally, in the history of philoso-phy, the religious idea of All-Unity contained atragic and existential moment. However, thistragic moment was stifled in the Renaissancethrough the invention of perspective. In Re-naissance, according to the Russian philoso-

pher Berdiaev, the inner drama and dynamicstirring related to religious experience were re-placed by a single, static, idolizing gaze depen-dent only on one single perspective (Berdiaev1930: 51). Virtual Reality now offers a new con-sciousness of the whole.

Critical Posthumanism approaches Virtu-al Reality through still two other paradoxes. Afurther paradox is represented by the fact that,in principle, there is no reason to call the post-human reality posthuman because, after all,

it is a project led by humans.

Still another paradox has to do with thepeculiar status of immediacy in Virtual Reality.On the one hand, our postmodern civilizationis dominated by the desire to elude narrativesand to experience reality immediately, that isin an unmediated way and in life time. On

4 The sensus communis has nothing to do with common sense. Asan aesthetic notion it maintains a very indirect relationship with thesocial phenomenon of the community. Cf. 20 of Kants Critique of

Judgment (entitled: The Condition for the Alleged Necessity by aJudgment of Taste is the Idea of a Common Sense): If judgments oftaste had (as cognitive judgments [Erkenntnisurteile] do) a determinateobjective principle, then anyone making them in accordance with thatprinciple would claim that his judgment is unconditionally necessary.If they had no priciple at all, like judgments of the mere taste of sense[des bloen Sinnengeschmacks], then the thought that they have a ne-cessity would not occur to us at all. So they must have a subjectiveprinciple, which determines only by feeling rather than by concepts,though nonetheless with universal validity [allgemeingltig], what isliked or disliked. Such a principle, however, could only be regardedas common sense [Gemeinsinn]; for the latter judges not by feeling [Ge-

fhl] but always by concepts [Begriffe], even though these concepts areusually only principles conceived obscurely. (English translation byWerner Pluhar 1987. Original: 237-38). See also Kimmerle 2000.


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the other hand, the methods that are pursued inorder to enable this experience are technologicaland create a second hand reality that, in return,closely resembles a narrative.

4. Psychoanalysis,

Gene-Technology,

Globalization, Virtual Reality

Four cultural paradigms are determined

by a shift from an original event to a virtual

narrative: psychoanalysis, gene-technology,

Virtual Reality, and globalization. Psychoanaly-

sis transformed the dream into a narrative, and,

consequently, was able to spell out the dreams

symbols. Similarly, gene-technology narrates dy-

namic, self-evolving evolution as a gene code.

This means that what has first been nothing

but an undeterminableprocess of generation is

now spelled out in the form of a code containing

genes as elements constituting generation.

Finally reality itself (with all its dreamlike and

perhaps virtual components) also has come to

be narrated in the form of a second reality that

is called virtual. One might say that the only

phenomenon that has not yet been fully nar-ratized is the world, though the discourse

on globalization (in French mondialisation,

which means worldization) does its best to

let theglobe appear as once moreglobalizedbe-

cause reproduced through narrative.

In spite of its consistency, a decisive aspect

needs to be considered within this version of a

history of civilization, an aspect which flows

out of the very nature of the new element called

the virtual. The model of the the world asa narrative makes most sense in regards to

Freud when he tried to transform dreams into

narratives in order evaluate them scientifically.

It still makes sense in regards to television or

the media in general. The particular point about

the above-mentioned, more recent, phenomena

succeeding psychoanalysis is, however, that

these phenomena attempt to reach back to an

originality that is not simply an event. Inother words, what is at stake in Virtual Real-ity, gene-technology, and globalization is muchmore than the desire to narrate the world.The striking point about Virtual Reality, the

gene-code, and globalization is that even ifthese phenomena end up as nothing more thanas a narrative of something that exists outthere, their existence itself is due to the desireto elude any narrative and to express realitydirectly. Gene technology tries to grasp not acertain temporally definable stage of the en-tire process of generation, but the gene itself, asthe essential quantity of generation that has noreal place in generation itself. This means that inpopular bio-genetics genes have a virtual char-

acter. Though Baillie and Casey believe thatgenetic mapping and sequencing have [not]yielded the meaning of life (Baillie and Casey2005: 10), it is clear that the map of genes is acertain kind of narrative. However, genes nevertell a story about reality but they generate a Vir-tual Reality of their own. It seems that large partof the popular fascination with genes is derivedfrom this virtual character of genes. Realitytells us that the logic underlying historical pro-cesses as well as biological formation (a logic bywhich philosophers have often been fascinated)

cannot be grasped because, in reality, thislogic is nothing. Through genetics however, apart of this logic can suddenly be crystallizedwithin a kind of narrative presented in theform of the genetic map. Along these lines,genes are telling a posthuman narrative which,as Halberstam and Livingston have said, hasreplaced previous masternarratives about hu-manity (Halberstam and Livingston 1995: 4).

The Matrix is such a posthuman narrative

because it effectuates a shift from human realreality to a posthuman Virtual Reality. However,this shift is relatively simplistic and represents atypical vision of uncritical posthumanism. Thecognitive manipulations thesis of The Matrixproduces a one-dimensional model of reality aswell as of humanity. A narrative exemplify-ing Critical Posthumanism would be AndreiTarkovskys Solaris and Stalkerbecause in thesefilms it remains entirely undefined what it ac-


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tually means to be human. As a consequence,in Solaris and in Stalker the establishment of aposthuman reality is also more ambiguous.

Narrated reality functions as a substitute

reality. Such a narrated reality is represented byVirtual Reality, by eternal life obtained throughcloning, as well as by a globalized world (as itdesigns itself as a repository of the end of his-tory, or as a state of world civilization hardenedthrough opposing core civilizations). Global-ization globalizes the globe and representsit as something that is neither the real worldnor its narration but rather a new sphere thatwe have to accept as such.

5. Critical Posthumanismand Interculturality

It must be pointed out that Posthumanismhas a different face in Far Eastern traditions.It has often been remarked that the distinction

between humans that have a soul and animalsthat have no soul does not exist in non-Chris-tian cultures. As a consequence, Posthumanismis received in these cultures with less concern.This attitude can partly be traced to Buddhismand Shintoism, which holds that all objects pos-sess a spirit (see Bartneck et al. 2007). The Japa-nese, for example, distinguish less strictly theartificial from the natural, and Frdric Kaplanfinds that for the Japanese building machinesis a positive activity in search of the naturallaws that govern [the world] (Kaplan 2004: 9;and Gilson 1998). In Japan, which is, accordingto Ian Buruma, at once one of the most naturaland the most artificial of places (Buruma 1984:110), the distance between humans and ma-

chines is less large and robots are judged froma more aesthetic point of view. Japanese robotscan even contain a considerable amount of cute-ness. This does not mean that Japanese would

be uncritical towards artificial life; especiallyhybridizations of humans and machines (cy-

borgs) are not met with much enthusiasm (Ka-plan 2004: 3). Polls have shown that Japaneseare most worried about the emotional impact

of robots, a concern less frequently expressedby Americans (Bartneck et al. 2007). Curiously,real human beings can adopt in Japan a robotlike existence as is often the case with doll-liketelevision talantos, teen stars artificially created

through choreographed movements and me-chanical smiles who seem to be appreciated bythe public because of their flagrant lack of hu-manity (cf. Buruma 1984: 68).

For this reason also the aforementionedposthuman indistinction between the subjectand reality obtains a new status in the con-text of East-Asian cultures. David Peat writesabout the East-Asian concept of reality:

This holistic notion of the atomic world wasthe key to Bohrs Copenhagen interpretation.It was something totally new in physics, al-though similar ideas had long been taughtin the East. For more than 2000 years Easternphilosophers has talked about the unity be-tween the observer and that which is observed.They had pointed to the illusion of breakingapart a thought from the mind that thinks thethought.5

Most evidently, out of these constellationswill also flow peculiar concepts of Virtual Re-

ality and they are most visible in the domain ofaesthetics. Specialists of Far Eastern art explainthat in the East, art is always necessarily virtual.For Rysuke Ohashi, for example, Japanese cul-ture attempts to attain a vision of the real worldas something virtual by means of an aesthetics ofthe virtual. According to him, in Japanese culturethe paradox which makes the imagined non-real more existential than the virtual real dis-appears. Art is a Virtual Reality as it exists notonly for itself but also permits us to recognize

the virtual character of all reality.6

In the West the virtual has a differentstatus. When, quite unexpectedly, the termVirtual Reality was introduced to the publicin the late 1980s and consequently examined byWestern thought, it appeared, curiously, not as

5 David Peat, Einsteins Moon,quoted from Pepperell 2003: 6.

6 Ohashi 1999: 91ff. For further developments of this topic see the chap-ter on Noh-plays and icons in Botz-Bornstein 2008.


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a component of art but in the form of a qualitysticking to a kind of non-existent space created

by computers and through electronic commu-nication. For reasons that would never really beexamined, it seemed to be predestined to func-

tion as an integral element of a posthuman typeof new reality. Philosophy tried to disentanglesome of these concepts, which was, of course,no easy task. There was almost nowhere tolook for philosophical approaches that wouldsystematically explain the nature of the virtual.The only thing that was clear from the begin-ning was that Virtual Reality was not simply amatter of illusion (similar to postmodern sim-ulation) created by sophisticated technology.Though formally, Virtual Reality appeared to

be very much like television, it also includeda psychologically and ontologically disquiet-ing quantity. Terms like transcendentality orAbsolute Spirit quickly occurred and couldnot be eradicated since. To many, virtual spacespontaneously appeared as something spiritu-al though a human or aesthetic quality of thevirtual would never gain over the posthuman,technological one.

Conclusion

My claim is that the phenomenon com-monly known as Virtual Reality should beopposed to a more intimate type of VirtualReality that does not aspire to create, as doesthe latter, a second reality, but that creates anirreality.7 Virtual Reality lacks the existentialcomponent that Virtual Irreality considers asits main purpose of existence. The shift fromPosthumanism to Critical Posthumanism iseffectuated through this distinction. What dis-tinguishes the Virtual Irreality from common,

technological Virtual Reality is that the latterfollows the principal lines of Western aesthet-ics and attempts to establish an alternative kindof virtual realism by means of logic and rea-son. Zolas approach of capturing life itselfis based on the reasonable approach of at-tempting to reproduce reality. It is opposed to

Romantic ways of grasping the world basedon personal feelings and other subjective com-ponents. However, even when reality is perfect-ly represented to the point that it appears asabsolutely real, the fact to re-present something

cannot escape subjectivism. What Zola can bereproached with represents also the weakestpoint of computerized Virtual Reality. CriticalPosthumanism has to define the subtle differ-ences between a Virtual Reality in the senseof a technological narrative and an existentialVirtual Irreality that interprets the virtual in amore human fashion.

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7 The term Virtual Irreality is in agreement with Michael Heims defini-tion of Irrealism (Heim 1998: 216).


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