Embodied virtuality is a topic that Katherine Hayles explored most thoroughly in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Such a concept is quite difficult to grasp even with Hayles’ explanations, but thankfully there are examples in media that can accurately represent the concept. In the show Black Mirror, the character of Ash in the episode “Be Right Back” can have the concept of embodied virtuality applied to him given his circumstances. Another example of this embodied virtuality can be found in the 1975 film based on the novel of the same name, The Stepford Wives, by observing the “wives” of the town of Stepford. Ash and the wives from Stepford represent embodied virtuality in that they are artificially created humans made for the purpose of “serving,” if you will, other humans; more specifically, both are made to fulfill the needs of a significant other, a universal need that applies to both genders.
In the episode “Be Right Back” from the show Black Mirror, one of the two main characters introduced, Ash, dies from an accident, leaving his girlfriend Martha alone to mourn him. Due to an acquaintance’s recommendation, Martha discovers a program that uses the information found online about Ash from his social media accounts to reconstruct his consciousness by recreating his personality. Eventually, it escalates to “Ash” getting a body and living with Martha, but she soon realizes that it will never truly be Ash and basically banishes him to the attic from then on. This version of Ash provides a strong example of what embodied virtuality is and could possibly become. Hayles herself gave a more relatable and simplistic example of the concept of virtuality, describing it as like playing a virtual game of ping-pong: “[T]he game takes place partly in real life (RL) and partly in virtual reality (VR)” (14). Just like this half-real/half-online game of ping-pong, Ash exists partly in real life and partly in virtual reality. While the simulation of Ash was able to return as a tangible entity that reacts to real-life people and stimuli, he still exists as a product of the internet and virtual reality, as his personality is just a simulation of what the program was able to gather about him from what he put out on the internet. Since he is literally embodied but still quite virtual, existing both in real life and in virtual reality, Ash is a prime example of the concept of embodied virtuality that Hayles proposed.
Looking at it from another perspective, Hayles’ concept of embodied virtuality can also be seen in examples in The Stepford Wives. In the movie, the town of Stepford seems to be an old fashioned town full of bland women who take on the roles of being the perfect housewives with little interest outside of that. The protagonist Joanna eventually discovers that the men of Stepford have recreated their wives as perfect robots and have killed their old wives in favor of these so-called improved and ideal versions. The situation of the wives from Stepford is quite similar to Ash’s: they are not real humans, but they are made to look and act like them (although an argument can be made the the Stepford robot wives acted less than human). The wives are the embodiment of a simulation of subjectively “perfect” wives, but they are embodied in real life and can react to the whims of their husbands. Hayles commented on embodied virtuality in a way applicable to this situation, saying, “[O]ne way to construct virtuality is . . . as a metanarrative about the transformation of the human into a disembodied posthuman” (22). In a way, the wives have come close to being “disembodied posthumans,” as they are not quite humans but machines that resemble them. Granted, the wives lacked a remote sense of consciousness and individual wills not directly imposed onto them, so the posthuman Hayles imagined likely would have more of a balance. Overall, though, the Stepford wives are a grim portrayal of embodied virtuality, one that hopefully will not ever come to be in the real world
Something interesting found when comparing Ash’s situation in Black Mirror to the wives’ situation in The Stepford Wives is that both situations occurred as a result of their significant others’ desires. For Ash, his lover Martha missed him and desperately wanted to see him and be with him again, so she resorted to having the virtual embodiment of Ash created for the purpose of fulfilling her needs for him and his company. In contrast to Martha’s more genuine desires, the men in Stepford created the robot “improvements” of their wives in order to have what they believed were the perfect women to fulfill their needs sexually, emotionally, socially, and domestically. These similarities in the motives for creating the virtual embodiments of their significant others lay in their romantic and sexual desires, and this offers an interesting commentary on what humanity values. These two examples place an emphasis on recreating a significant other that is gone—or will be gone in the case of The Stepford Wives—in an effort to have them near, whether for a genuine reason or a selfish reason. One could make a comparison of genders by relating the men’s selfish and twisted use of embodied virtuality in The Stepford Wives to a masculine desire to control females, but this would be a severe generalization that would be virtually impossible to prove and is quite likely untrue. So the only conclusion that can be accepted is that, in the realm of romantic and sexual relations to humans, people from both genders may be willing to dabble in the virtual in order to attain an embodiment of what once was or what could be.
Comparing Ash in “Be Right Back” from Black Mirrors and the wives from The Stepford Wives would probably take a novel itself to cover, but there certainly are similarities between the two in regards to embodied virtuality. Using the unique situations of Ash and the Stepford wives provides an accurate and interesting understanding of Katherine Hayles’ concept of embodied virtuality; the concept can more easily be grasped by studying these situations, and hopefully humans can take the lessons learned in the cases of Ash and the Stepford wives as a warning to make clear the distinction between man and machine—it’s becoming quite a hard distinction to make, after all.
Works Cited
Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. The University of Chicago Press. 1999.