1.
INTRODUCTION 3
1.1 An Anecdote 3
1.2 Outline of the research project 4
2. ON THE STUTTERING PERSPECTIVE 5
2.1 Elusive diagnosis 5
2.2 Whence to speak? 6
2.3 Stumble 8
2.4 “On the Marionette Theatre” as a play of three acts 11
3.ORIGINS OF STUTTER: THE NARCISSISTIC RAGE 12
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND VIRTUAL EMBODIMENTIN HEINRICH VON KLEIST
15.07.2016
Martin Poduska 11106832
MA Literary Studies: Comparative Literature University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr Timothy F. Yaczo
Second reader: prof. dr. Mireille. D. Rosello
3.1 The Mirror Phase 12
3.2 The Boy Without Thorn 14
3.3 Embodying The Virtual: Psychasthenia 17
4. SPEAKING DUMMIES: RECOVERING THE PRIVILEGE OF THE
OPERATIONAL 20
4.1 The Marionette and a Human Dancer 20
4.2 The Marionette as a Gaming Characters 22
4.3 Types of Gameplay 24 5.1 Recollection 26 5.2 False Dichotomies 28 6. CONCLUSION 29 WORKS CITED 29
1. I
NTRODUCTION1.1 A
NA
NECDOTEIt seems only fitting that I begin to write this essay on speaking block while suffering from a terrible writing block. As I am sitting here waiting for words to appear on my computer screen, I recall words of a fellow stutterer, Harvard professor Marc Shell: “Writer’s block may involve a ‘heightened sense of perfection’ or terror of ‘having nothing to say,’ but it is better understood as a sign of trying to articulate what one cannot express.” And indeed, as I am re-reading Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre” for what seems like a hundredth time; as I am struggling to articulate ideas I have never had before; I try to
forcefully prod myself to follow Nietzsche’s advice: “if you must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.” And so I cast away the self-awareness of my “heightened sense of perfection” which prevents me from writing, only to write about the paralyzing
self-awareness of “On the Marionette Theatre”; hoping that in the process of writing I will be able to depend on what Kleist himself identifies as “The Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking”.
In Summer 2014, when YouTube began rolling out support for 60fps video playback, computer magazines announced this feature with unconcealed enthusiasm. For years,
YouTube uploads were limited to thirty frames per second, which, although being perfectly acceptable for most types of content, often proved quite insufficient for the YouTube’s newest obsession – video game commentary. In spite of being a long time e-sports fan, I found myself among those who were quite unhappy with this upgrade. Being unable to adhere to the relentless upgrade principle of the world of technology, I was still using the same laptop I bought many years before. This poor old machine became outdated long time before YouTube announced its 60fps playback feature, although it was still perfectly capable of performing most everyday tasks. In 2014, however, Google threw at it something new— something it was not designed to do in the first place—and my trusty laptop began to overheat, as it could only make 60fps high-definition videos glitch and “stutter”.
This “stuttering” began to appear seemingly at random. Every so often, the computer managed to process the influx of data properly and play the video ever so smoothly, enabling my full immersion. At other times, it would come to a halt unpredictably, or slow down and speed up randomly, preventing immersion and making me aware of the computer’s hardware limitations. This often resulted in ‘user panic’ on my part, as I was trying to re-establish fluidity of the playback, feeding the unresponsive machine with random inputs. Being a long time stutterer myself, I could not but find this rather ironic. Somehow, in my particular case, the feature that was intended to enhance and emphasize fluidity of playback brought about the exact opposite. All of a sudden, even my virtual existence came to be frustrated with my real-world affliction. This moment of broken immersion occurring on the intersection between the computer interface, the body, and the self—the moment of the stuttering computer and user panic—is to be the main object of analysis for this dissertation.
1.2 OUTLINE OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT
This master thesis aims to offer a phenomenological analysis of stuttering and self-consciousness within virtual spaces. This theoretical project will be grounded in Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre” as its primary object of analysis and
phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. First, we will present an exhaustive description of diagnosis-induced stuttering and present an overview of possible coping strategies (particularly that of ventriloquial substitution). In the following chapters, we will continue to trace shifting forms of self-consciousness in three of the essay’s protagonists: the young Narcissus, the puppeteer, and the self-conscious God. Firstly, we will take a look at Kleist’s Narcissus, the young man who loses his natural charms by becoming overly obsessed with his own specular image. We will argue that the mirror represents the original virtual space and finally we will discuss psychasthenia as a side-effect of pathological self-consciousness. Secondly, we will posit the stutterer against the figure of the Kleist’s
puppeteer and consider the possibility of technologically enabled intentionality (as opposed to self-consciousness). We will envision the marionette as a gaming character and discuss phenomenological implications of broken immersion. Finally, we will take a look at the fully self-conscious god-figure in relation to the Paul Virilio’s understanding of virtual reality and the god’s-eye perspective.
To follow Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre” in a fashion similar to ours, is to follow a trajectory of changes in how one embodies physical as well as virtual spaces. Most of all, however, it is to trace changes in the perspectives represented by the respective objects of analysis. First, we have observed the young man’s fall into self-consciousness, that is, into the proto-virtual space of a mirror. For the young man, the world is invisible, since his is the third-person perspective of the always reflective psychasthenia, which cannot but be always fixed onto his own body. Then, we observed a shift towards the first-person operational
perspective of the puppeteer, whose single-minded dancing is enabled by an extension of his own body. The puppeteer’s perspective is that of a gamer who embodies the virtual reality. Lastly, we engage with Kleist’s self-conscious god-figure and god’s eye perspective, which sees through all and makes everything transparent, including himself.
2. O
N THE STUTTERING PERSPECTIVE2.1 ELUSIVEDIAGNOSIS
Over the years, much has been written on human-computer interaction and even more about stuttering. However, whereas interest in the former can be easily justified by recent proliferation of new technologies and their impact on our everyday lives, the latter remains a relatively obscure medical condition that seems to enjoy an unusually high level of popularity among philosophers. Stuttering is a rather elusive phenomenon and in spite of the countless texts on stuttering written over the years, it seems that we are getting nowhere near
understanding it. Margaret Drabble calls stuttering “the most complex disorganization of functioning in the field of medicine and psychiatry.” Oliver Bloodstein, whose influential
Handbook on Stuttering aspires “to guide the reader to the edge of our knowledge on
stuttering”, has to admit at the end of one of the book’s chapters:
the stuttering moment remains an obscure phenomenon and […] there are as yet no conclusive answers to such basic questions as whether it is ‘voluntary’ or ‘involuntary’ in nature, autonomically or centrally controlled, respondent or operant, learned in itself or an unlearned resultant of learned behaviours. The same may be said about the etiology of stuttering. Although we have ventured some inferences about it, we must conclude that there are few grounds for zeal in support of any single theory. (Bloodstein, 74)
Marc Shell, in agreement with the above authors, writes that stuttering
is an especially mysterious condition, since it straddles the hypothetical line between physiology and psychology and between voluntariness and
involuntariness. Ask ten doctors about it and you’ll get ten answers; ask ten rhetoricians and you’ll get then more.
Precisely the mysterious quality of stuttering—as it renders inadequate many of traditional divisions of physiology and psychology—is one of the reasons why it remains interesting to so many as concept and trope. Shell claims that stuttering may prove to be a useful point of entry to many of the central problems of the humanities: “The pan-global and pan-cultural phenomenon of stuttering ‘literalizes’ in the human body and spirit many of the key notions that humanists deal with—imitation, representation, doubling, synonymy,
that stuttering will prove to be a useful entry point into the problem of human-computer interaction.
2.2 WHENCE TOSPEAK?
Under a closer inspection, this fascination with stuttering becomes even less surprising. When stuttering, the speaker knows what to say but cannot say it. In a similar fashion, it would be almost impossible to find a philosopher who has never been frustrated with language and its insufficiencies, or a writer who never had to fight against a writer’s block. Indeed, over the centuries, stuttering has proven to be a fitting metaphor for the frustrations of linguistic expression and active participation in the world. Marc Shell, Harvard professor and a fellow stutterer, in Stutter traces the literary and cultural history of stuttering from Moses through Hamlet to Porky Pig and Marilyn Monroe. The central proposition of Shell’s work is that “speech impediment becomes literary art, or vice versa” (49). Shell’s argument is that if one has to employ a diverse set of verbal strategies in order to maintain fluidity of one’s speech, she naturally develops a distinctly poetic way of using language. The stutterer can feel the approaching bodily spasm and in this anticipation she can substitute the problematic word or phrase for another one. Thus she rarely says what she wants to say, since the original meaning has to always conform to whims of the randomly “malfunctioning” body. Gilles Deleuze, in the famous essay “He Stuttered”, defines writing excellence as an ability to make language itself stutter and similarly, in What is Philosophy?, he argues that philosophy is “that which stutters” as it stretches language towards the inexpressible. Marshall McLuhan once said that “Language is a form of organized stutter” and there are many others, such as Walter Benjamin or Paul de Man, who claim that “every great writer creates a foreign language inside her own language” (Shell, 40). Indeed, even Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writing is to figure prominently in this paper, equates philosophy with limping, which older glossaries list as “stammering in going” (33). In this fashion, stuttering reveals speech as a potent site of negotiation of meaning located somewhere between body and mind—or even more so, it reveals that the Cartesian duality of body and mind can often prove to be misleading.
For many years, one of the most widely accepted theories about the origins of stuttering was that it is “diagnosis-induced, or identification-induced” (Shell, 10). According to this “iatrogenic” theory, nobody is born a stutterer. Instead, stutterers lose their “grace” of speech the moment they are made excessively aware of it. In the words of John Updike, another famous stutterer, “this defect is caused by self-consciousness, you could think—a failure to let the complicated muscular processes of speaking take place unconsciously” (Updike, 117). This would explain why on a good day, many stutterers could pass for non-stutterers with relative ease, especially if they fail to remember their affliction. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, who is according to Shell also a stutterer, becomes fluent the moment she is “overcome with ecstasy – a term that, according to the OED, suggests removal of the soul from the body” (Shell, 190). In Hamlet’s case, and in popular culture in general, stuttering is often used as synonymous with self-consciousness; a symbolic device through which the character’s hesitation, “nervousness, weakness, or unheroic/villainous” (Johnson, 246) characteristics are communicated. Yet, original definition of the word indicates the “feeling of undue awareness of oneself, one’s appearance, or one’s actions” (OED). Therefore we face the obvious philosophical problem: if I am being excessively aware of my presence and actions—if I am always observing myself as I am doing things—who remains to be the observing subject when I become the object of my own observation?
It is no wonder, then, that stuttering became synonymous with hesitation. To hesitate is “to pause in indecision before saying or doing something” (OED) as much as to be torn
between two (or several) conflicting options. Yet, probably the greatest conflict arises from the fact that the stutterer is also torn between occupying two mutually exclusive positions at once; as one has to watch oneself in order to successfully employ a wide range of verbal strategies to maintain fluidity of one’s speech. In other words, stuttering does not arise as an uncertainty about what to say; rather, it reveals hesitation as to where should one speak from. Is the stutterer supposed to speak from the position of the self-spectator or from the position of the embodied speaker? This aporia cannot be resolved. By a similar token, Shell mentions ventriloquism as a technique which allows many stutterers speak fluently: “many stutterers cease to stutter when they take up a dummy or a persona; just so, many people cease to stutter when they play-act at being a ‘dummy persona’” (Shell, 196). In the words of John Updike, “the captive tongue is released into Maskenfreiheit, freedom conferred by masks” (Updike, 87). In this manner, the persona liberates the stutterer from seeing himself as the object, as it removes the self-reflective aspect of one’s engagement with the world, while integrating the two conflicting perspectives into one externally orientated and thus fixed point of view. In other words, instead of directing one’s gaze against one’s own body, the stuttering
ventriloquist turns this formerly third-person look towards the dummy, turning speaking into a first-person experience.
On the first glance, it may seem that ventriloquism is something of an anomaly rather than a relatively common strategy to cope with stuttering. Under a closer inspection,
however, it becomes clear that ventriloquism naturally accompanies stuttering as a pan-global and pan-cultural phenomenon that enables expression of those who cannot otherwise speak. For instance, great poets of the antiquity—probably in hope of overcoming the writer’s block —traditionally called on the muses, inviting them into a ventriloquial relationship: “Sing in me Muse, and through me tell the story”. Aesop, the fabled author of the classical animal fables, was born “most deformed” and “could not speke” (Lenaghan). Aesop, being both a stutterer and a slave who was not allowed to speak his mind, was able to escape the confines of his position by speaking “through” animals. Moses, the stuttering prophet who led Israel out of Egypt, appoints his brother Aaron as his spokesperson and thus they enter a
ventriloquist-dummy relationship. By extension, God chooses Moses as a dummy through which he can speak, since he is unable to speak to the Hebrews directly. Here we should note that although Shell mentions several of the above examples as cases of ventriloquism, there is, of course, an important distinction to be made between having somebody else to speak in one’s stead and one speaking through a puppet. (We should make it clear that our main point of interest lies in ventriloquism in the more narrow sense of the word. Moses and Aaron— albeit useful for demonstrating cultural embeddedness of ventriloquism—are not such occurrence. In any case, the ventriloquial strategy offers nothing but a mediated relief to a stutterer.) The stammering ventriloquist does not speak for herself, instead, allows a dummy or a persona to speak in his stead. In this mechanically-enabled fashion, the stutterer is able to temporarily escape the self-reflective perspective, yet suspecting that the cure for his
affliction can only be found in integral embodiment—being in the world. 2.3 STUMBLE
As we have already outlined, stuttering is a phenomenon that involves the body as well as the mind. In this regard, stumbling is no different and indeed the two are often paired
together, even though the connection between them is still poorly understood. Shell notes: That stumbling and stuttering are somehow the same is, of course, already suggested by most Indo-European languages. For example, the English term stutter is cognate with
stumble; and oral stammering often goes together with pedal stumbling. Older glossaries
discuss both “stammering in speech” and “stammering in going” (33)
In spite of not being as mysterious and fascinating as stuttering, stumbling has received theoretical attention on its own account. “Stumbling,” James Rasmussen writes, “became one privileged site for negotiating the demarcations by which human life could be distinguished, though sometimes it was a mark of the non-human and other times that of the human” (9). Depending on the respective school of thought and its view of the body—whether it privileges rational automatism or Romantic organicism as the essential human quality— stumbling is seen either as uncannily machine-like or as a mark of being human. Faithful to the Platonic/Christian/Cartesian tradition, the notion of body as an automaton or a puppet remains a persistent trope even today, as many prefer to see it as a mere instrument of the mind. Among many examples, Rasmussen lists Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship, where Mignon moves in a strangely mechanical, puppet-like fashion; her
stumbling and stuttering make us question her humanity. On the other hand, in Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre”, the mechanical is put up on a pedestal, presented as the ideal of graceful movement—a goal unattainable to humans plagued by self-consciousness. One way or another, stumbling becomes the site of recognition in which the human and the mechanical can be set apart. According to Bergson’s essay Laughter (1914), we laugh when a person stumbles or falls because we infer a lack of flexibility or elasticity on their part. We tacitly presuppose absent-mindedness, since it has to be the case that one does not trip or fall voluntarily. Therefore to stumble is to lack adaptability and awareness—to act mechanically instead of acting accordingly to what the particularity of a given situation requires. Bergson claims that laughter requires absence of feeling; it suspends compassion and possibly
dehumanises the object (Bergson). Since the mind is absent, we have no compassion for what we assume is an inflexible automaton, incapable of adjusting its step to the random surface of an uneven road—hence the laughter. In this regard, the stumbler’s absent-mindedness relates (but is not identical) to the stutterer’s self-consciousness. It is up for debate to what extent “stumbling in walking” and “stumbling in speech” are the same, or what exactly is the cause for the stumbler’s absent-mindedness. However, what the two certainly have in common is a sense of disconnectedness from the outside world, as both seem to pay more attention to something else than the road.
Absent-mindedness and self-consciousness alike (in terms of seeing oneself as the object) evoke the notion of a wandering mind or a wandering spirit. In the words of Rasmussen’s brief reflection on Kierkegaard, “once the soul awakens to itself it finds itself within a body and begins to wander around, leaving the body’s center of gravity which is its proper place and reflectively moving this part of the body or that in various ungraceful ways” (210). This separation is something that certainly weighed heavily on Merleau-Ponty’s mind, noting “that my body is always perceived by me” (Phenomenology, 107). Yet, this state of explicit
awareness, similar to the Cartesian or Kantian cogito, is hardly what Merleau-Ponty advocated for. Instead, he devised a conception of the cogito inseparable from the body, insisting that the body is not only the essential nexus of all our perception and action, but also “the core of our expressive capability and thus the ground of all language and meaning” (Shusterman, 151). The body naturally knows how to approach the world gracefully; provided that we do not stand in its way. In other words, “our body guides us among things only on condition that we stop analyzing it and make use of it.” (Signs, 78). In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body resonates strongly with the notion of the
Heidegger’s (whose influence on Merleau-Ponty is undeniable) ready-to-hand hammer which “disappears” in hand while being used—as long as it remains effortlessly functional. As soon as something goes wrong with it, the hammer acquires a present-at-hand (or unready-to-hand)
status and makes us reconsider not only the condition of the tool itself, but also the state of our being in the world. Along the same lines, the body can be rendered stumbling or “dysfunctional” merely by considering it in a present-at-hand (self-conscious) fashion. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty advocates for a “primordial” (non-)approach to one’s own body (Signs, 67). What ready-at-hand is to Heidegger, the tacit cogito is to Merleau-Ponty: “the tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself” (Phenomenology, 404); that is, in “direct perception and spontaneous action through one’s body” (Shusterman, 153). The cogito is our “primary subjectivity,” it is “the consciousness which conditions language,” but itself remains a “silent consciousness” with an “inarticulate grasp of the world”
(Phenomenology, 404). Reflection is always articulate and secondary.
The above comparison may sounds somewhat perplexing, considering that the main goal of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was to do away with the Cartesian mind/body dualism; including the notion of the body as a mere instrument. However, if we distance ourselves from the hammer and consider ready-to-handedness as a perspective, connection between the two may become somewhat clearer. Here I want to propose that the tacit cogito should be understood in terms of being a perspective as well—the operational perspective—for the reasons outlined above and because it disappears when observed: “ultimate subjectivity cannot think of itself the moment it exists” (Phenomenology, 402-4). In the identical fashion the ready-to-hand tool disappears when it is being used, which purportedly entails another connection to the body as Merleau-Ponty understands it. Phenomenology of Perception offers several examples of how tools in particular become seamless extensions of one’s own body:
The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: [...] To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. (143)
This being said, it is no wonder that writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty can provide a useful platform for understanding ventriloquial fluency of the stutterer. If we can incorporate tools into our own being, through them we enter a different experience of the world. It is not at all that our being in the world turns into an experience mediated by the tool; rather our body schema changes by incorporating the tool and thus we are transported into the world organised around thusly extended body. In this fashion, the stutterer can cease to stutter by incorporating the ventriloquist dummy whose sole perceived purpose is to speak.
Similarly, Kleist’s stumbling dancer fantasizes about being able to dance gracefully by incorporating the mechanical marionette: “the puppeteer placed himself in the centre of gravity of the marionette, [...] the puppeteer danced” (23). This phenomenon, I would argue, does not arise from mere incorporation of the puppet/tool, but mainly from the puppet/tool’s inherent power to channel intentionality—every tool demands being used. Surely none of us is a complete stranger to the feeling of an unexplainable urge to hit or nail something down when randomly picking up a hammer. In a similar fashion, one finds oneself unable to stop changing television channels when holding the remote, or to prevent oneself from randomly clicking and browsing while seated behind a computer. A tool unready-to-hand always wants to return to the ready-to-hand state and takes the body with it. A tool, while being used, forces onto one “the operational perspective” (Companion, 300). Yet, all of the above can only be the case if the tool directs one’s perception towards the world and not merely back to itself, as it will become more clear in the following chapter.
2.4 “ON THE MARIONETTE THEATRE” ASA PLAYOFTHREEACTS
According to James Rasmussen, Kleist’s oeuvre (with “On the Marionette Theatre” at its core) includes an insistent proto-phenomenological dimension and thus in many ways predates and anticipates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Rasmussen claims that it is particularly stuttering and stumbling, which Merleau-Ponty sees as mostly deficient modes of embodiment, that in Kleist’s works receive a much more nuanced enactment. For this reason, it should come as no surprise that “On the Marionette Theatre”, with its stumbling figures of flesh as well as graceful mechanical dancers, is to be at the core of our project as well.
In spite of its relative shortness, “On the Marionette Theatre” is one of the best known works of Heinrich von Kleist and is considered by many to be the key to unlocking his oeuvre as a whole. Even though the degree of its relative importance is up for debate, there is no doubt that “On the Marionette Theatre” deals explicitly with the motif of overt bodily awareness which in his other works only appears in a much subtler, albeit equally prominent. Helmut Schneider wrote on the emphasis Kleist puts on the body that “in his dramas and novellas alike, Kleist complements his characters’ action and speech with succinct accounts of their bodily involvement, typically a facial expression, gesture, position or movement in space” (502). Most of all, however, “On the Marionette Theatre” represents a dialogue on the body happening between a first-person “I” and a third-person “he”; the perspective of action and the perspective of reflection.
Yet, the title of “On the Marionette Theatre” might initially seem somewhat misleading, considering that the essay consists of several multi-layered and interconnected narratives of which the marionette is merely a single component. It is only after each of the individual stories is told, that Herr C. admits: “now […] you are in possession of everything that is necessary to comprehend what I am saying” (26). Indeed, as the closing paragraph unfolds, we see clearly that the true purpose of the conversation between Herr C. and the author was in fact to examine several different levels of self-consciousness as well as to envision a solution to it. Therefore, if I were to arrange these anecdotes on a spectrum ranging from the puppet to God—and this is a testament to Kleist’s literary mastery—they would naturally organize into a very symmetrical image with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden at its centre. Firstly, as Herr C. claims, the mechanical puppet alone stands on the outermost edge of this spectrum. The fantastical fencing bear follows as a fitting example of what Merleau-Ponty calls the tacit cogito. Herr C.—whose self-awareness is quite extraordinary, though not yet paralyzing—functions both as the point of reference and framework for other stories. The unfortunate young man, quite paralyzed by his pathological self-consciousness, serves as the direct reversal of Herr C.: inverting the self-aware and unaware portions of their
personalities. The puppeteer, being presumably as self-conscious as the young man, is able to dance gracefully only through the mechanical extension of his own body—the puppet. Finally, there is God, in whom self-reflection coincides with action.
On the following pages, we will examine each of these anecdotes in relation to some other theoretical texts and works of art. We will attempt to consider Kleist’s essay as a play of three acts, in which he foresaw technics standing both at the origins of essential human awareness, as well as being a possible means of escaping the paralyzing
self-consciousness. Firstly, we will take a closer look at the graceful young man and the mirror, putting it in relation to the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty. Secondly, we will attempt to reconsider the marionette and the puppeteer within the bounds of human-computer interaction and gaming in particular. Finally, we will examine “On the Marionette Theatre” in the context of God-fantasy, which figures prominently in theoretical takes on
3.O
RIGINS OFS
TUTTER: T
HEN
ARCISSISTICR
AGE3.1 THE MIRROR PHASE
Mirrors are fascinating objects that are frequently associated with all kinds of uncanny experiences. If we take a look at their various representations in culture, we may notice that myths and stories revolving around mirrors are usually quite unsettling. It is perhaps because mirrors rarely do what you would expect them to do. Break a mirror and you may as well start readying yourself for quite miserable seven years of unhappiness. Stare too long long into a mirror and you may find yourself quite troubled by increasingly frequent visits of a certain Mr Hyde. Some mirrors may turn you into a narcissist, whereas others will crush your high hopes by telling you that Snow White is indeed prettier than you are. All mirrors expose vampires and there is also a mirror which can help you escape the Matrix. Yet, although mirrors are capable of all of this and much more—and perhaps precisely for this reason— they seem to never produce an undistorted reflection. Therefore, one should be aware that mirrors are deceitful, almost spiteful, and should never be entrusted power over one’s reflection.
Inflated as these lines might seem, there is no doubt that seeing one’s own reflection in a mirror can prove to be a fairly anxiety-inducing experience. After all, it brings back rather traumatic memories. According to Lacan, as is well known, the moment of self-reflection marks the crucial point in the child’s transition from a “fragmented body image” into an “orthopaedic” totality. The mirror stage is critical for the formation of the imaginary ego, but it also comes at the price “paranoic alienation”, a radically split in subjectivity. It is through the mirror that one subscribes to an endless struggle for recognition in the eyes of others as well as her own; that is to say, perpetual frustration stemming from misrecognition and fundamental incompleteness. Merleau-Ponty recognises many of the points made by Lacan, acknowledging the mirror as the source of self-alienation, however, in his view this alienation can prove to be an immensely productive dimension of the phenomenal body. The mirror brings into existence two truths fundamental to Merleau-Pontian analysis—”the nonidentity between the interoceptive and the specular and the primacy of the former as the source of their relation” (Hansen, 55)—which emerge as the result of the child’s coping with the discord presented to her by the seeming completeness of the mirror image:
It is a problem first of understanding that the visual image of his body which he sees over there in the mirror is not himself, since he is not in the mirror but here, where he feels himself; and second, he must understand that, not being located there, in the mirror, but rather where he feels himself interoceptively, he can nonetheless be seen by an external witness at the very place at which he feels himself to be and with the same visual appearance that he has from the mirror. In short, he must displace the mirror image, bringing it from the apparent or virtual place it occupies in the depth of the mirror back to himself, whom he identifies at a distance with his interoceptive body. (Phenomenology, 129)
The shift from experiencing the body as a sum of confused, interoceptively felt impulses, towards the unified body image is channeled through the mirror-space and as such marks the child’s first experience of virtuality. The child has to make the leap of understanding her mirror reflection as an essential extension of herself within virtual space, yet not see it as being identical to herself. Experience of embodiment is therefore an inherently spatial practice; the mirror-reflection demands that the child identifies with it by extending her body-schema to this essentially distant mirror-avatar. Thus the mirror phase is most
fundamentally a leap into exteriority, laying foundations for the inherent presence of technics within embodied life. Here, following Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code, I also want to argue that embodied experience is always fundamentally technical, since it always already incorporates relation to exteriority as being an inherent part one’s body-schema. This requires understanding of technics in its broadest sense as “a relation to exteriority, as exteriorization [which] cannot be something merely added on to some ‘natural’ core of embodied life” (Hansen, ix). Although Hansen traces this relation all the way to the Didier Anzieu’s conception of the skin ego—a fissure which predates the split brought about by the mirror reflection—scope of our project does not require that we dwell deeper into this conception. The skin ego mostly prepares “the sensible–transcendental ground for
exteriorization as such” (Hansen, 61), which eventually becomes fully unlocked during the mirror phase. Let us emphasise, then, that the main function of the mirror stage is indeed to launch us into the technical exteriority and it is only secondary that it also launches us into social exteriority. Lacan sees the body-image as a prerequisite for entering the social space of the symbolic, while Merleau-Ponty, along the same lines, understands it as something that
allows the child to unlock a space of social intercorporeality: “What is true of his own body,
for the child, is also true of the other’s body. The child himself feels that he is in the other’s body, just as he feels himself to be in his visual image” (Phenomenology, 134). The mirror stage, therefore, comprises a basic, ontological form of intercorporeality, which predates the distinction of self and other and “thereby correlates with an account of primary narcissism” (Hansen, 58).
Elizabeth Grosz considers the body-image to be “the condition of the subject’s capacity not only to adapt to but also to become integrated with various objects, instruments, tools, and machines. It is the condition of the body’s inherent openness and pliability to and in its social context” (187). Thus the body-image becomes the mediator between the self and the world, as well as basic requirement for prosthetic modification, which we have discussed in previous chapter. In this regard, the body-image is the original prosthesis, the nexus for all consequent extensions of the body. It functions as a link between our biological and cultural selves. In this fashion, the body-image perceived in the mirror becomes the primary site of contact for interaction with virtuality as well. In other words, the mirror stage introduces the child into the écart between the body-image and the body-schema. Whereas in the case of the former, it clearly delineates outer limits of the body proper, in the case of the latter it opens up the body-schema to incorporation of the reflected body as well as other abstract/virtual bodies. From this moment onwards, the human will always remain split, “inhabiting the two separate, incompossible yet superposed worlds of the tactile and the visual” (Hansen, 79). Thus the very same moment which predicates self-consciousness also enables embodiment of virtual spaces.
3.2 THE BOY WITHOUT THORN
Since self-consciousness and embodiment of virtual space arise at the same crucial moment, we may begin to read “On the Marionette Theatre” as an allegory on both, rather than limiting ourselves to a single aspect of the essay as most authors do. We have already presented an outline of the text with each of the individual anecdotes organised on a scale from entirely unconscious to fully self-conscious. If we follow the same outline in our discussion of virtual, we may discover that it would not change even if we re-organised the outline according to the degree of virtuality as opposed to actuality. We have also noted that this entire text revolves around the scene of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden; or “fall from grace,” as Herr C. puts it. It is only fitting, then, that we engage “On the Marionette Theatre” at the moment of the fall, so we can build from the bottom up.
In the previous section we have recounted some points that Lacan and Merleau-Ponty make about the mirror stage. Under ideal circumstances, the child would be able to go through each of the developmental stages unscathed, maturing into a relatively healthy individual with a sound relation to one’s own image. Unfortunately, as we are well aware, this is often not the case, which results in all kinds of psychological pathologies and breakdowns. Yet, perhaps there is a wisdom to be found in these regrettable occurrences— such as stuttering and stumbling—since a breakdown can often reveal something about the underlying structure of otherwise invisible processes. Thus, if the child is fortunate enough, she will recognise herself in the mirror and embody the reflection. However, we have said that mirrors can often be deceitful. What happens, then, if one fails to recognise one’s own image in the mirror?
Such misrecognition is what happens to the young man in “On the Marionette Theatre”. After discussing at length the construction of the ideal marionette (to which we will return in the following chapter), Kleist begins to tell a story of a very graceful young man who, growing aware of his fortunate disposition, comes to be in danger of becoming vain. One day, while drying his foot after taking a bath, he sees his own reflection in a mirror and notices that his posture resembles the famous Hellenistic statue “Lo Spinario” he saw earlier that day. He asks his friend to confirm this. His friend, in spite of having noticed the very same thing, rejects the resemblance in attempt to counter the young man’s growing vanity and ridicules him. The young man finds himself incapable of reproducing the gesture and in the process of trying he makes his friend chuckle even more. This was the beginning of his “fall from grace”:
From that day on, practically from the very moment, the young man was changed. Day after day he stood before a mirror, and one by one his charms fell away from him. An invisible and inconceivable pressure (like an iron net) seemed to confine the free flow of his gestures, and after a year had passed there remained not a trace of that loveliness that had so delighted everyone. (25)
Facing the mirror, the young man begins to stumble. Although Kleist only uses a wide range of euphemisms to name his affliction, hints implicating the young man’s stumbling are scattered throughout the entire anecdote—indeed, the story seems to revolve around the foot. The young man is drying his foot after taking a swim, when he notices the he looks
extraordinarily like “the statue of the youth pulling a splinter from his foot” (Marionette, 25). The sculpture in question is, of course, “Lo Spinario”, one of the most famous bronze
sculptures of the antiquity, usually praised for being one of the best classical portrayals of concentration and single-minded action. However, whereas the original Spinario returns to grace in the very act of removing the splinter which impeded his step, Kleist’s young man forgets about the thorn or drying his foot altogether. While the Spinario gives the impression of being completely unaware of any potential spectators, the young man has to call upon witnesses. After being ridiculed, he lifts his foot again and again in order to replicate the pose —all in vain, as he only manages to stumble.
The young man’s stumbling is somewhat peculiar in regards to what exactly motivates it. We have already briefly discussed stumbling in the previous chapter, concluding that it originates in absent-mindedness as opposed to self-consciousness of the stutterer. However, in this particular case, it seems, the young man’s stumbling is also brought about by overt self-consciousness. At the beginning of the anecdote, Kleist implies that prior to the unhappy afternoon, the young man’s awareness of his natural charms was inspired mostly by his first-person interactions with others. This changes when he sees himself reflected in a mirror,
presumably for the first time in his life. Suddenly, we see him going through a process akin to that of the Lacanian mirror stage. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s , the young man thinks to himself something like:
I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately, to be; I am that image of myself that is offered by the mirror. To use Dr. Lacan’s terms, I am ‘‘captured, caught up” by my spatial image. Thereupon I leave the reality of my lived me in order to refer myself constantly to the ideal, fictitious, or imaginary me, of which the specular image is the first outline. In this sense I am torn from myself (Phenomenology, 136)
This narcissistic state of jubilation does not last for long. At first, the young man becomes self-aware and self-conscious only after he had already assumed the graceful pose. The second glance, however, marks the moment in which the order of things is reversed. In other words, the second glance—in the reflection of which he attempts to reconstruct the
previously involuntary pose—marks the moment in the young man’s life, from which onwards self-reflection begins to predate action. Whereas the original pose arose involuntarily from the “inside” of the young man’s body, all his consequent attempts to replicate it originate within the mirror—the “outside” space of reflection. This scene echoes yet another work of Kleist—“On Thinking Things Over: A Paradox”—in which the author writes a letter to his son, warning him about dangers of reflection. In this essay, Kleist proposes a model of engagement with the world very similar to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being in the world. Kleist argues that one should aim to act spontaneously and decisively at all times, giving oneself to the situation fully and keeping all reflection at bay until the deed is done:
Reflection, or thinking something over, finds its proper moment after rather than
before an act. If it comes into play prior to it, or in the very moment of decision, it
seems only to confuse, to obstruct and to repress the power to act, which flows from the glorious wellspring of our feelings; contrariwise, it is afterwards, when the action is already performed, that the end for which reflection was intended is best attained (“On Thinking Things Over”)
Similarly, Merleau-Ponty in his criticism “double sensations” insists that “if our body is the observing object of experience, then it cannot at the same time be the object of
observation” (Companion, 173). The young man is paralyzed by self-reflection in the same manner the stutterer is paralyzed by having to watch herself at all times in order to escape an approaching spasm. In this sense, the young man’s stumble and one’s stuttering are both caused as if by carrying the mirror with themselves at all times. Rather than being able to act or speak, they are unable to “un-see” themselves as objects of their own observation. Rob Shields, briefly reflecting on alienation echoes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account, notes:
Alienation is always created anew, and living is the process of engagement with the conditions of existence; living is the practice of overcoming alienation to reach a deeper level of understanding, of engagement and of reconciliation. (Shields, 43) Self-alienation, Shields argues, is a normal part of lived experience, since “living is a complex mixture of wholehearted engagement, reconciliation and alienation.” What
distinguishes both the young man and the stutterer from a normally functioning person is that for them, it is not alienation that “is always created anew”. Instead, the two find themselves
in a desperate struggle to always create anew the aforementioned “wholehearted engagement” as an escape from self-alienation. If we read his introduction into
phenomenology carefully, we may notice that Taylor Carman also seems to consider engaged intentionality to be the prevalent mode of lived experience, as he describes the immediate sense of bodily agency as something “we all take for granted” as opposed to “a free-floating eye entertaining while gazing at itself in a mirror” (1999, 211). Thus the Kleistian expulsion from the Garden of Eden is also an expulsion from the operational perspective.
3.3 EMBODYING THE VIRTUAL: PSYCHASTHENIA
We have argued that stumbling of Kleist’s aspiring Spinario is related to the fact that he initiates his bodily movements as if from within of the represented space of the mirror. The specular image, while being an extension of the young man’s body schema, obviously cannot be embodied in the same way a blind man’s stick or a prosthetic limb is embodied. Whereas the latter two merely extend one’s intentional grasp on the world by means of technology, seeing ourselves in a mirror is akin to a technologically enabled transportation into a qualitatively different space. Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project, while often being exceptionally eloquent in defining ideal embodiment, leaves much to be desired in its analysis of pathologies in relation to space. Perhaps help can be found elsewhere.
Celeste Olalquiaga, in her 1992 book Megalopolis, associates experiences similar to that of the young man with the psychological condition of psychasthenia:
Defined as a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding territory, psychasthenia is a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the
organism’s own body is confused with represented space. Incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense area that circumscribes it, the
psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond. It does so by camouflaging into the milieu. (2)
With certain adjustments, Mark Hansen argues, this account of psychasthenia could perfectly well describe the experience of virtual reality (126) and, we should add, by default also the experience of seeing oneself in a mirror as the original virtual space. The notion of psychasthenia allows us a deeper understanding of Kleist’s mirror scene. We can infer, that the young man’s misrecognition of his own reflection in the mirror and the subsequent ridicule, prevent him from identifying with his body-image. The ridicule instead of affirmation is particularly damaging in this scenario, since it also prevents his later re-integration with the body image. According to Merleau-Ponty, “the mirror image prepares me for another still more serious alienation, which will be the alienation by others”
(Phenomenology, 136). In our particular case, the problem arises from the fact that to
recognise oneself in the mirror usually involves the realisation that the felt me has an exterior image which can be seen by others. Unfortunately for the young man, the self-recognised image was never affirmed in recognition by others and thus he is left without a link between inside and outside. How can he identify with a body-image which no one else can see? In the end he spends days in front of the mirror, trying to mold his body proper into the image he saw that first time and thus recover lost bodily coordinates. Touching upon some of the concerns outlined above, Marshall McLuhan introduces the idea of Narcissus as “The Gadget Lover” (Understanding Media, 41). McLuhan claims that the word Narcissus comes from the Greek word for narcosis, or numbness. The youth mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. The reflection, being merely an extension of himself by mirror, “numbed
his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended repeated image.” Narcissus thus becomes a “closed system” in imprisoning himself inside an infinite feedback loop of reflective images. Somewhat paradoxically, McLuhan understands every extension of the body as self-amputation. In the case of the stumbling young man, what is amputated is his body-image. By extension, having already argued that the young man’s stumble and one’s stuttering are essentially produced by the same traumatic experience, we may also deduce that a stuttering child goes through a similar process. Indeed, nobody is born a stutterer although many children do briefly stutter while learning to speak. A stuttering child is not aware of her condition and thus identifies with the body-image of a fluent speaker. However, the parents notice and attempt to correct her speech, which produces the same traumatic effect and makes the stutterer watch herself at all times in attempt to mold her body as if to match original fluency of her lost body-image.
Roger Caillois’ original definition of psychasthenia clearly echoes points made above and in section one, as it emphasises that psychasthenia is primarily a disturbance in
embodiment, which marks one’s inability to engage with the world from one’s operational perspective:
There can be no doubt that the perception of space is a complex phenomenon: space is indissolubly perceived and represented [...] It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself. [...] The feeling of personality, considered as the organism’s feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined; one enters into the psychology of psychasthenia. (28).
If we go back now, to the Merleau-Ponty’s account of the mirror stage, we may conclude that the stutterer’s and the young man’s experience are inherently psychasthenic, as they abandon the operational perspective in their inability to situate themselves in relation to the world. In psychasthenia, “the primacy of the subject’s own perspective is replaced by the gaze of another for whom the subject is merely a point in space, not the focal point
organizing space” (Grosz, 193). Although we should not forget that stuttering and stumbling are somewhat pathological forms of embodiment, their theorized experience can guide us towards better understanding of one’s experience within virtual world. Let us keep in mind, then, that psychasthenia is primarily a reversal of the basic tenets of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Although the nonidentity between the interoceptive and the specular remains, psychasthenic psychology privileges the specular as the source of their relation. That is why the young man wastes his life away in front of the mirror and why the stutterer at all times adjusts her vocabulary in order to maintain fluency. If one cannot accept the
specular image as one’s own, the only coping strategy is to adjust the body in order to fit the representation. In the actual world, this can be quite stressful, well-nigh psychotic, since the body-image is then always derived from the sum of others’ outside impressions of the psychastheniac. One intuits that the body-image that one would like to call one’s own (i.e. Spinario/fluent speaker) is not identical to that which others see from the outside. In cyberspace, the psychastheniac is liberated in a way that echoes Updike’s “Maskenfreiheit, freedom conferred by masks.” In this freedom to finally choose one’s own body-image (not body-schema), to finally see in the “mirror” what others see too, the stutterer retrieves the desired operational perspective. In the words of Grosz quoting Rheingold:
As you conduct more of your life and affairs in cyberspace your conditioned notion of a unique and immutable body will give way to a far more liberated notion of “body” as something quite disposable and, generally, limiting. You will find that some bodies work best in some situations while others work best in others. The ability to radically and compellingly change one’s body-image is bound to have a deep psychological effect, calling into question just what you consider yourself to be. [...] Who, then, are you? It may seem, from your present view in physical reality, that you will be
centered as you are right now, in your physical body. It always comes back to that, right? But does it, even when you spend nearly all your waking life in cyberspace, with any body or personality you care to adopt? (42)
4. S
PEAKINGD
UMMIES: R
ECOVERING THEP
RIVILEGE OF THEO
PERATIONAL4.1 THE MARIONETTEANDA HUMAN DANCER
In his attempt to do away with the Cartesian dualism, Merleau-Ponty construes a dualism of his own—primordial state of unified experience on the one hand as opposed to state of somatic reflection on the other. Indeed, it seems that the stutterer stands on the wrong side of this conceptual hierarchy, but if we look carefully, we may notice that the philosopher is there with him. In spite of his inherently negative view of reflection, Merleau-Ponty claims that “the limping of philosophy is its virtue,” suggesting that he himself yearns for being able to engage with the world fully. “The philosopher of action is perhaps the farthest removed from action, for to speak of action with depth and rigor is to say that one does not desire to act” (Essays, 59-61). Unlike the philosopher, the stutterer desires to act, she desires to speak, and thus finds herself on a way towards the operational perspective. And let us make no mistake, for Merleau-Ponty to speak fluently is no different from moving gracefully; both can only happen from within the operational perspective: “as our body guides us among things only on condition that we stop analyzing it and make use of it, language is literary (that is productive) only on condition that we stop asking justifications of it at each instant and follow it where it goes” (Signs, 78). Still, it seems that there is a middle ground to be covered between the two—if one can be furthest removed from unified experience, one can also try to get a bit closer.
Even if Merleau-Ponty explicitly recognises only two contrasting modes of engagement with the world, we have already suggested that in Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre” we may find a more nuanced approach. Indeed, according to Kleist it is impossible to escape the curse of self-consciousness once it awakens, which renders even the best human dancers incapable of fully graceful movement. Similarly to the stumbling young man, they too are affected by self-consciousness to some extent, and thus true gracefulness can only be found in “that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god” (26). At least, that is what Herr C. claims in “On the Marionette Theatre.” According to the story, Herr C. is himself an accomplished dancer and thus someone whose relation to the body can be considered as close to ideal even by Merleau-Ponty’s standards. Yet, he is aware that even he cannot dance without occasionally
stumbling, since he is subjected to gravity. A human dancer has to use the ground as a point of departure before propelling herself in the air and thus always lands too heavily after a leap. Whereas in the case of the puppet, it is the puppeteer who pulls the string and thus the
puppet’s natural position is that of always being light in the air, a human dancer is presumably propelled in the air by his own will to act.
Furthermore, there is always a certain element of affectation in the way a human dancer moves. According to Herr C., “affectation appears [...] when the soul locates itself at any point other than the center of gravity of the movement” (“Marionette”, 24). In the light of our previous observations, we may assume that in that moment the soul “experiences the body as an object which it can animate but which is subject to other forces and constraints [...], an object upon which it can also reflect and which it thus perceives as other than itself” (Rasmussen, 210). The soul can even be removed from the body and placed at different places in it, depending on where one directs his attention, which often happens when the dancer seeks to emphasise the narrative the role: “When he dances Paris [...] and hands the apple to Venus, his soul is located precisely in his elbow” (24). Hence a human dancer finds himself in an impossible situation, battling laws of physics as well as natural inclinations of his soul. On the one hand gravity presses him to interrupt the dancing in need of momentary relaxation; on the other hand momentary self-consciousness prevents him from not resisting gravity when the dance requires it.
The ideal marionette dancer presents a solution to each of these problems caused by the imperfections of human embodiment. First of all, the puppet is completely devoid of consciousness and therefore its movements possess “composure, lightness, and grace” (23) unattainable to human dancer. Instead of having to, at times self-consciously, control the complicated muscular movements mentioned by Updike, each marionette has “a center of gravity, and when the center is moved, the limbs follow without any additional handling. [...]the limbs are pendula, echoing automatically the movement of the center” (22). Since the puppeteer merely controls the center of gravity, which is his only means of starting an
intended movement, the marionette can never slip into affectation: its “center of intention of a movement is [never] separated from the center of gravity of the movement.” Although Kleist laughs at the idea that “the spirit cannot err where it does not exist,” (24) the true solution to the problem obviously does not lie in the erasure of the spirit, but in the erasure of the separation within the self.
The ventriloquist puppet, as opposed to the marionette, does not have to adhere to the numerous (although still vague) technical specifications provided by Herr C.; yet, in spite of its relative simplicity, it still enables the stutterer to speak. There can be numerous reasons for this, however, I believe that the main reason for such difference is that the complexity of the puppet is not really important in the first place. What the puppet provides is an exteriorised anchoring in the world, since—returning to the phenomenological argument—the subject can take up position only in being able to situate itself in relation to a given space. Normally, it is the body-image which becomes the anchoring of subjectivity, however, the stutterer and the stumbler alike have a rather troubled relation to their body-image (i.e. psychasthenia). For this reason, the puppet has to become the anchoring in which the stutterer can have a perspective on the world. However, it is up for debate to what extent does the stutterer’s psychasthenic perspective change, or whether the only thing that the puppet provides is a realisation of the psychasthenic dream of identification with the perspective of the other. In any case, the prosthetic body-image provided by the puppet forces the operational perspective and allows the stutterer to speak fluently. Such is the stutterer’s backdoor into the realm of speech fluency.
4.2 THE MARIONETTEASA GAMING CHARACTERS
When dealing with “On the Marionette Theatre”, most scholarly accounts tend to leave the puppeteer out of the spotlight. While Kleist’s interest seems to be less in the marionette’s dancing than the young man’s stumbling, our interest is in the puppeteer. Although often
overlooked, the puppeteer occupies a clearly privileged position in the essay: after all, he is the only human in the story, who does indeed dance gracefully, since he dances through the puppet, enacting a power fantasy. Herr C. explains:
The line that the centre of gravity must describe [...] was something very mysterious. For it is nothing other than the path to the soul of the dancer, and Herr C. doubted that it could be proven otherwise that through this line the puppeteer places himself in the centre of gravity of the marionette; that is to say, in other words, that the puppeteer danced. (23)
Reflecting on the above passage, Bianca Theisen claims that “the German term Kleist uses, “sich versetzen in,” carries both denotations of a movement of empathy or imagination and of a more physical sense of displacing oneself [...] Operating the puppet’s dance, the puppeteer must dance himself, the operator is drawn into his own operation” (525). In this regard, there is no essential difference between the puppeteer and the English amputee who dances with a prosthetic limb. According to Rasmussen’s account, “the marionettes have an empty space where their soul should be, and the puppeteer accordingly fills it; it is the puppeteer who is actually dancing” (209). Thus we can assume that the puppet indeed
produces some sort of interface which invites almost sadistic form interaction; how else could we call a possession so absolute. Now, if the mirror already foreshadows the virtual, then the theatre is its first true iteration. Matthew Causey writes: “There is nothing in cyberspace and the screened technologies of the virtual that has not been already performed on the stage. The theatre has always been virtual, a space of illusory immediacy” (1). By extension then, in the same way the theatre foreshadows virtual reality, the marionette puppet can be seen as a precursor to embodied gaming characters.
The same mechanism which makes the puppeteer become prosthetically present on stage, also allows one “to be ‘informatically’ present in the world.” In The Interface Effect, arguably one of the best critical texts on the topic written to date, Alexander Galloway claims that “to experience the pleasure of the computer, one must be a sadist” (13). This astonishing
assertion is not a Galloway’s attempt to be offensive, it merely states a logical necessity. Galloway puts human-computer interface interaction in contrast to Lev Manovich’s well known claim that cinema was the first new media. He explains that to be “cinematically” present to the world, “to experience the pleasure of movies, one must be a masochist” (11) as opposed to the sadistic pleasure of the computer. The contrast between the two echoes Merleau-Ponty’s crucial distinction between the operational and the reflective perspectives. Similar to the marionette, the computer interface is only activated through user interaction with it. This analogy is quite potent. Just as the active and involved body is what ultimately infers perceived reality (in this case it is activity accessed through the prosthesis of the marionette), it is the active and involved interaction with the computer that reveals virtual world.
The emphasis on bodily engagement is crucial for every honest attempt to develop something akin to serious game studies and indeed, in recent years, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has become key to our understanding of gaming experience. One’s
experience of engagement in games is not tied to passive perception of visual stimuli, but to enactive process. A video game, after all, is not a film and it cannot be approached in the same self-reflective manner. The crucial component of a game is its gameplay; i.e. the game only becomes what it is when it is interacted with, otherwise we are left with a static image. In other words, the aesthetic of computer games is necessarily “an aesthetic of control” (Kücklich, 9). Most authors, when trying to untangle the question of phenomenological
embodiment in computer games, begin with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of prosthetics. The first emphasis is always on the controller as the point of entrance into the virtual. The controller is originally an obstacle and it remains an obstacle as long as it remains present-at-hand.
Similarly to the blind man’s stick in Merleau-Ponty’s writing (Phenomenology, 143), force of habit plays the central role in the controller’s withdrawal into the ready-to-hand state. This process involves assuming the controller as an integral extension of the one’s body-schema as well as getting used to the responses which individual keys provoke within each individual game on the screen.
The above process happens concurrently with one’s adaptation to the perspective imposed by the screen and thus with the virtual body-image. Most games adopt either a first-person or a third-person perspective, however, in praxis the distinction between the two is minimal, as the main purpose of either of them is to fix the player’s perspective and thus situate him in relation to the virtual world. Representation of the player inside the virtual world can differ from game to game and often even as little as cursor is sufficient to enable an immersive experience. Moreover, even when the game avatar has established a powerful cultural
presence for itself, such as Lara Croft or Gordon Freeman, as soon as I pick up the controller to play Half-Life, I do not become Gordon Freeman, instead, Gordon Freeman becomes me. The identity of the game avatar is not important to me, since a different polygonal body would not change my experience of the game whatsoever. This marks the difference between a game avatar and a game character.
4.3 TYPES OF GAMEPLAY
Therefore, if the player’s virtual embodiment depends on gameplay, rather than identification with the main protagonist, as is often the case with other media, we should make a distinction between various types of gameplay. The crucial criteria here is the room for error which they allow for, since failure often momentarily breaks the immersion and induces self-conscious reflection. We are a long way from the early days of gaming, when failure was an integral part of gaming experience. After all, the amusement arcades’ main source of profit used to be its players’ inability to beat the game in one run. Every subsequent attempt, every virtual life, came at the price of yet another coin. At the same time, hardware limitations of arcade machines prevented them from storing and running big games.
Therefore players considered the increased difficulty a perfectly acceptable way of getting more from the game. These were the now famous games such as Donkey Kong (1981),
Galaga (1981), Street Fighter (1987), and many others. Nowadays, the dominant business
model is vastly different and games are made easier to consume. Games following the business model of Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed have become quite ubiquitous over the past couple of years. These games focus on rather linear cinematic experience, which often results in gameplay that does not really reward player’s skill nor punish his mistakes.
Such consumerist approach to game design leads to games that resemble experience that one may have while interacting with his operating system or while browsing the internet. Peter Krapp explains that “the fact that games afford users significant room for error is an important deviation from the common assumptions about the strictures of human-computer interfaces (HCIs).” Some people from the industry, he says, have even joked that if HCI designers were to transition to game design, this would result in a game consisting only of a big button labeled “Press here to win!” (Krapp, 76). Somewhat paradoxically, although such game would probably only succeed in forever staying in a present-at-hand state for the confusion it produces, such “press win button” is essentially what Herr C. wishes for in his
sophisticated marionette. Nevertheless, what we should acknowledge and keep in mind, is that these two types of gameplay enable different kinds embodiment. This, of course, is no easy matter to resolve. On the one hand we have the gameplay akin to that of old school arcade games which works with the oscillation between the operational perspective and reflection. On the other hand there is the easily consumable gameplay which, in presenting no challenge for the player, can oftentimes be so dull that it makes one’s mind wander towards reflective state of consciousness. It is worth asking whether even the perfect marionette can still retain its graceful movements if the puppeteer’s mind begins to wander?
Yet, I would advocate for the former alternative. In certain ways, such oscillation between reflection and operational engagement reveals some of the inconsistencies inherent to
Merleau-Ponty’s project. For one, it uncovers an entire dimension of engaged reflection stemming from the fact that one cannot beat an arcade-style game without occasionally stepping back and reflecting on his previous failure. On the other hand, one can neither expect to beat an arcade game being constantly self-consciously aware while playing. What the game of this type encourages is learning and gradual acquisition of mastery. Thus the state of engaged reflection can be perhaps best explained in terms of Hubert Dreyfus’ model of skill acquisition. In Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in
the Era of the Computer, Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus developed a phenomenological model
adult learning, aiming to answer the question of whether mastery arises from reflection or from motor faculties of the individual. Their account to some extent follows Kleist’s “On Thinking Things Over: A Paradox”, which we have discussed earlier. According to the Dreyfus’ model, skill acquisition occurs gradually across five stages ranging from beginner to expert. While the beginner has to act slowly, as he is remembering how to apply arbitrarily learned processes, more advanced learners begin to notice “meaningful additional aspects” beyond the set rules (Dreyfus, 23). Finally, the expert acts not thinking about the rules at all, possessing expert knowledge which eludes articulation (16). Thus we can infer that beating an arcade game involves going through the same five stages, which means as much as to engage with the game from the single-minded operational perspective, yet let one’s action be informed by reflection to various extent. In this regard, the Dreyfus’ account occupies the realistical position between the overly optimistic yearning of Merleau-Ponty and well-nigh resignation to self-consciousness of Kleist.
Let us now finally return to the very thing that stood at the beginning of this paper. As much as the previous chapters had to be about immersion in Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre”, they also attempted to deal with the breakdown of this immersion, which is self-consciousness. Needless to say, Kleist’s text dates back to the 18th century, yet, as we have attempted to argue earlier, immersing oneself in puppeteering corresponds to one’s
immersion while gaming. However, even though the puppet theatre and video games bear many similarities in regards of how they enable embodiment of virtual spaces, they belong to two technologically very different worlds. The puppet theatre is, of course, completely analogue, which does not allows for a whole lot of breakdowns. The video game is brought into being and supported by a vast array of digital devices. This on the one hand allows for a much more sophisticated spectacle, on the other hand it always already contains an
unpredictable sum of even more spectacular hardware and software breakdowns. The most obvious cases of these would probably be “hard” errors: such as the game freezing completely, the computer shutting down, the controller running out of batteries, electrical blackout, or even a Windows 10 update pop-up window. Each of these would cancel one’s immersion completely and reveal the computer in a present-at-hand state. In such scenario, the player would at least momentarily abandon the operational perspective of engagement with the game and began to reflect on what caused the breakdown. On the other side of the spectrum, however, we can find something like “soft” failures: such as lagging,
