Tag: Virtuality

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.

Embodied virtuality is the idea that the mind and body are separated. Katherine Hayles went into further detail discussing this topic in her essay titled “Toward Embodied Virtuality”.  The author described how there are many factors, that can separate the mind and the body. Individuals should put this concept into consideration, so that they can avoid the negative effects. One of the negative results are; becoming a Posthuman. There are two examples in which the media represents this concept. One being an episode from a television series Black Mirror. The second example is a film titled Stepford Wives. These two films represent how the mind and body can be separated, and be used for harm rather than good.

The first example is the Black Mirror series. Here is a clear description of the episode. A couple has decided to move into a home together. The character Ash, has died (it is not told to the audience how he has died). The woman names Martha becomes depressed. In the episode she later realizes that she is pregnant. Unable to cope with the loss of her lover Martha decides to sign up for a program that create a virtual embodiment of Ash. How this works is every text message, email, social media that Ash has used has been saved. The computer program then uses the recent words that Ash has used to talk to Martha.  Martha then becomes obsessed with this technology. With her baby on the way Martha wants her boyfriend to be there, so she takes the next step, and orders a robot version of Ash. The robot not only looks like Ash, but has studied every word/phrase Ash has ever said/written.  Ash best represents the concept of what it means to be Posthuman. From Katherine Hayles essay she described what a Posthuman is “It is important to recognize that the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg. Whether or not interventions have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman.”  This concept applies to Ash, since before he died, he was always glued to his technology. Examples include: In the car, when Martha was getting coffee. Or on the couch when he was on twitter. In a way his phone was a part of him, he could not go a day without out it. This makes him posthuman, how he needs access to technology at all times. Since he was always on his phone, this allowed an opportunity for humans to create a computer version of Ash. This is also what the author Katherine Hayles worries, that technology will be used for the wrong purposes. Now-a-days everyone can be considered a posthuman. Children, teens, adults always have their phones on them at all times, and this is considered “normal”. In a way we all are cyborgs because we need this technology to survive. The argument to this is, could be: Are these programs that create a robot version of an individual be all bad? Some individuals, are unable to move on with their lives when someone has died. Some go to extreme measures such as suicide, because they are unable to cope with their loss. Would it be a bad thing if an individual who had just lost a family member, wanted to have one last conversation with them?

The second example is the film Stepford Wives. This film is about a group of men who have total control of a small town. In result, the wives plan to start their own clubs, and businesses. Suddenly one-by-one all of them decided its best that they do the housework instead. The wives even look, and sound different. The main character Joanna Eberhart  tries to find a reason to why all these women have suddenly change. The more Joanna investigates the more she realized that the women have not only changed their appearances, but also their hobbies. An example could be; one of the women who was excellent in tennis, had suddenly given up. Claiming that her priority is to make sure, her husband is pleased. Towards the end of the film Joanna finds out that, the husbands have killed all of the wives, and replace them with robots. These robots look, and sound just like the wives. However, there is a clear distinguishing between the wives, and cyborgs personality. Katherine Hayles mentioned in her essay,“Human essence is freedom from the wills of others, the posthuman is ‘post’ not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will.”  My interpretation of this is that, we as humans have our own-will, but there could be other people, or elements such as faith that destroy that freedom. This applies to Stepford wives, because the husband’s took their wives freedom. The wives can no longer play tennis, paint, bake, or take photographs, because the husbands to that away from.

In conclusion, both films show how embodied virtuality could be applied, in reality. In my opinion, both films do display wonderful examples, of dualism. I however would never agree on the fact that we should record everyone’s social media in order to “recreate” them. Even though this could help someone cope with the loss of a loved one, I believe that things that are natural should stay natural. This phrase also refers to Stepford Wives, how robots who look exactly like humans should never be created. The mind and body are separate, and shouldn’t be tainted by science.

In Katherine Hayles article “Towards Embodies Virtuality”, Hayles discusses the topic of dualism, or the separation of the body and mind. She believes that this shift in perspective comes from the creation of intelligent machines and the possibility of a population of cyborgs. In the episode of Black Mirror and in the film Stepford Wives, the idea of embodied virtuality is portrayed through the cyborg wives and through Ash, showing the disconnect of the mind and the body through the idea of disembodiment.

The definition of embodiment is “a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling.” In Hayles article, she describes information “as a (disembodied) entity that can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components to make protein and silicon operate as a Single system” (Hayles 2). This concept of embodiment, or rather disembodiment can be found in the episode of Black Mirror titles “Be Right Back.” When the main character Ash dies, his girlfriend Martha uses an online chatroom that uses the information found on Ash’s social media and emails to type like he would. This information about Ash helps to display the separation of mind and body, by showing how a majority of a man’s thoughts can still exist without a body for them to reside in. Things like his opinions, his voice, strange terms that Ash has used are analyzed and used by this program to recreate a person’s mind. And he can be carried everywhere with Martha. He is on her phone for when she is hiking, at the doctor, and driving. And when she is at home, he is on her computer. The information found online is a disembodied object, after his body has died, parts of his mind can be recreated and formed into a new machine. This information becomes a “single system” when Martha decides to buy a cyborg version of Ash to put this information into. The cyborg looks exactly like Ash, talks like Ash, and can evolve to act like him using the information from the internet and Martha. This cyborg is the perfect representation of dualism, showing that how the information put into the machine is a separate entity from the machine itself.

This concept of disembodied information can also be seen in the film Stepford Wives. The film is based around a town whose men replace their wives with cyborgs that looks and acts as a stereotypical house wife would. This idea of disembodied information can be seen through the wives and their behavior. Once a wife has been replaced with a cyborg, they act the same as the rest of the other women. For example, they only talk about cleaning, spend all their time in the kitchen, dress the same, and only try to please their husbands. The cyborgs have all been programmed to act like a housewife, and nothing like themselves. The mind and body are separated in this process. While the body may look the same as the original house wife, the mind is completely altered, wiped clean of any of their previous personality and replaced with one that the men find suitable.

The idea that the mind and body are separate is a concept that can be found throughout fiction. Dualism helps to show how cyborgs and human are different, and the future for humans if cyborgs become part of the population.