These considerations open out onto
a vastfield of recent critical theory concerning the body and its relationship
with gender, technology, and the mind. My own focus has been on the way
the cartesian mind/body duality has been articulated in computer technology
and particulary in VR...
In 1990, when VR had just burst out of the labs into popular culture, I
began to examine some of the rhetorical claims concerning "the body"
in VR. It has been claimed that VR is a liberation from the Cartesian mind-body
duality. This would be a marvelous thing if it were true, as neurological
and physiological research over the last fifty years seems to indicate that
such a distinction cannot be substantiated. The mind-body split is, at best,
a philosophical convenience and, at worst, completely wrong. The notion
of a body (virtual or real) "driven" by mind like some kind of
teleoperated robot, an obedient servant, is a basic tenant of nineteenth-century
industrialism: the bosses and the workers. To me, VR seems to blithely reconstitute
a mind/body split that is essentially patriarchal and industrialist.
-Simon Penny, from Consumer Culture and the Technological
Imperative
