Celebrating The Breakdown Of The Cartesian Ego
Celebrating the Breakdown of the Cartesian Ego
Every funeral needs a jazz band to parade the streets with joyful
noise, as is the custom in New Orleans. The breakdown of the
Cartesian ego erodes the solitary power of meditation but at the
same time we would be remiss not to celebrate the lively
dissipation of contemporary life. From the confines of the
Cogito, Descartes could launch his Meditations about the
impregnable substrate of certainty, the fundamentum absolutum
et inconcussum of the solitary self. That Ego has, centuries later,
melted under the revelations of Freud’s Unconscious, Jung’s
Collective Unconscious, the revolutions of Marx’s social subject,
and the temporal ecstasies of Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein.
Today we rejoice in rich varieties of dissolution while at the same
time we acknowledge the need for a self-centering practice that
balances the swing toward boogie-woogie dissipation. The
pulsation of life as practical self-gathering and disintegration is
worth considering apart from the abstract skeleton of purely
rational “dialectic.”
A post-Cartesian meditation might well begin where we already
are – immersed in digital culture. Contemporary life transpires in
a computer culture where Cartesian solitude was first installed as
an interface and then became networked in such a way as to
undermine absolute ego isolation. Other contemporary
phenomena erode the ego substance but do not undermine
solitary meditation as we see in contemporary trends like Yoga
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and Tai Chi bodywork, both of which seek body-mind harmony.
Furthermore, a glace at the aesthetics of jazz improvisation can
illuminate the way in which the contemporary self maintains its
independence while at the same time it submits to group
vibrations in the moment. All three contemporary phenomena –
the digital avatar, Tai Chi bodywork, and jazz improvisation –
bear witness to a dynamic process that pulsates with self-
integration and dissipation, meditative gathering and self-
dispersal. Such pulsation should not be burdened with the heavy
baggage of Hegelian “dialectic.” Rather, as we shall see in the
case of Tai Chi bodywork, the oscillatory process in which we
are involved is more an immediate, practical yin-yang movement
than a metaphysical absolute. The references to pulsation and
dialectic simply point to the heartbeat of life, its systole and
diastole, its yin and yang, not to the all-encompassing self
(capitalized) that Hegel inherited from Descartes. To invoke the
complex and powerful lens of Absolute Spirit is too strong a
description of our primal pulsation, which in fact rejects the
privileged position of the Cartesian ego as a starting point or
axiomatic principle.
The Digital Occasion
The first prompt for this essay arose from the virtual realm where
avatars extend our telepresence. Avatars are representations of
our identities insofar as we are perceived in and through the
virtual world. An editor of Rue Descartes, Paul Mathias,
contacted me by email where an exchange of links began. One of
the links we shared was “L’Internet entre la subjectivité et son
monde,” which already implies a network that penetrates the
solitude of multiple Cartesian subjects. An MP3 audio file on the
website (pmat.ciph.free.fr) gives a full lecture by Professor
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Mathias about “l’écriture assistée par ordinateur” (aka “WP”)
in which he discusses the text of my book Electric Language: A
Philosophical Study of Word Processing (Yale University Press,
1987 & 1999). Our meetings began as a virtual encounter – “in
avatar,” as it were. Our digital selves exchanged audio, print, and
electronic texts. These avatar selves (digital self-presentations)
associated across oceans and cultures in a virtual landscape
which exists quite apart from our geographically grounded
selves. This phenomenon Electric Language describes as
“linkage.” Linkage belongs essentially to digital text and to
whatever becomes present – not permanently but more than
ephemerally – in the realm of virtual reality. Our avatars enjoy
more durable telepresence than any phone connection. The traces
of avatars remain indelibly caught in the Net, abiding witnesses to
living exchanges.
The 1999 author’s preface to Electric Language describes this
connectivity as “the intrinsic linkage of digital text embedded in
the very operating systems of the personal computer” (page xiv).
The personal computer once functioned as a standalone
workstation, as a solitary personal tool, but now the personal
computer has become a networked extension of ourselves.
Connected to the Internet, the linked computer shatters the
illusion of an isolated ego viewing the world through a solitary
screen or set of overlapping windows looking onto a data world
under the control of the private self. The ego may first have the
illusion of being a private self using a personal tool for writing
and communicating, but behind the apparently solitary interface,
the ego discovers a network of parallel and serially connected
desktops used by untold millions of similar egos who also peer
into the asynchronously shared world. The World-Wide Web
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highlights what Electric Language calls “linkage in the psychic
framework of word processing.” Every hot spot on a Web page
connects digital text to texts written by other contributors and
each page links to images and photographs selected by other
users. The implications for reading and writing are significant:
My computer interface is no longer an isolated “desk” in the
metaphor taken from physical furniture. My desktop can host
international seminars conducted completely online as well as
book chapters that connect to other books existing
simultaneously on the Internet. Chapter 5, for instance, of
Electric Language exists digitally on the World-Wide Web with
the blessings of its publisher, along with comments and reviews
by readers. Electronic text has everywhere become a hypertext
with references in all directions. (“Hyper” refers to more than
the traditional four dimensions of space-time.) The linkage made
possible by current hardware and software precipitates a
transformation that theorists have called a digital revolution.
The same linkage that spins digital text spatially like a web across
cultures also brings an emphasis on interactivity. Whereas the
traditional book provides a mirror for the passively contemplative
mind, linkage creates synchronous and asynchronous
interactivity. Every link is a point of personal decision and
action. What this means for literacy is a greater sense of non-
linear temporal jumps and leaps into multiple layers of sensory
media. What Electric Language saw as the meditative and
contemplative character of traditional reading has mutated into an
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active sampling of multiple media.1 The multimedia reader
chooses a hyperlink to follow, clicks on video animation,
graphics file, or audio clip, and then clicks again to find more
text. The interactive text can flash messages or brief narratives or
it can become a gateway to photo images; it can attach narrative
passages to audio or video scenes. Interactive linkage means that
file folders contain pieces of graphic art, photo illustrations, and
videos clipped from online conferences. Articles now incorporate
chunks of audio, voice, and email communication. Animation
files support written words. Processes can be explained by films
and by structures of text highlighted by color-coded icons. The
multimedia reader discusses ideas or stories via newsgroups or
mail servers. Multi-sensory participation beckons around every
corner. The contemplative self-centering of the book explodes in
all directions.
Dance of the Avatars
The Web provides not only a novel interplay with dynamic
graphics and video, but the Web also provides a home for avatars
that simulate human physical presence in 3-dimensional places.
Early experiments in 3D environments (VRML, Virtual Reality
Modeling Language) pushed the edge of the horizon and
suggested how future generations may someday share their
1 The wide range of telepresence through different media was
explored in my two later books The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality
(Oxford UP, 1993) and Virtual Realism (Oxford UP, 1998).
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information in a way that resembles computer games with their
shared avatars.
One of these 3D experiments (2001) included the author’s
“Avatar Dance” and “Tai Chi Avatars” using the Visualization
Portal at the University of California at Los Angeles. Researchers
from UCLA, Art Center, and the Southern California Institute of
Architecture (SCI-Arc) gathered physically in front of a 8-meter
immersion screen where international avatars were projected so
that interactions could transpire between the on-screen remotely-
animated avatars and the physical bodies of the researchers.
[See images online: http://ciph.org/publications.php?idRue=55]
The remote avatar users – some of whom were in Sweden,
England, Brazil, and Denmark – viewed the physical spaces at
UCLA through QuickTime video while another window allowed
them to manipulate their avatars. The physical bodies engaged the
avatar bodies by dancing, shaking hands, and exercising playful
Tai Chi kicks. Sometimes during dances, a limb would fly off
from one of the avatars and attach itself to another avatar body,
making dismemberment the non-programmed sharing of cyber-
arms or legs.
[See images online: http://ciph.org/publications.php?idRue=55]
The physical body interacts with virtual bodies not only by using
language and symbols but also by using body proxies. The
extension of the self into the network becomes more than a
mental act of identification. The deliberate creation of a world, its
poématiser, can be fresh, innocent, and playful. The avatars
play in a wire-like web that invites gestures from the physical
bodies. Such physicality has led to the notion of “avatecture,”
which is the embedding of avatar projections into physical
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structures like the “avatar alcove,” a space in which a group of
physical humans interact with screen projections of real-time
avatars on the Internet.2
Note that the multiple shapes of avatars, including non-human
shapes, are constructs chosen by the self and in many cases
designed by the self, not merely projections of inner self-doubt.
The avatar projection is not self-alienation but it embraces both
given elements and customizable, fungible, self-designed
elements. This is not the Selbstentfremdung resulting from
subconscious self-doubt (Entzweiung or Verzweiflung) of an
absolute ego, as described by the Hegelian dialectic. Instead, the
avatar feeds a chosen self-projection into a feedback loop which
becomes a sequence of recorded moments which can become a
process of increased self-reflection and self-understanding,
especially as avatars connect through social constructs. The
avatar identity is built to be perceived by others while the primary
ego also perceives the avatar as a customizable object that already
moves among other avatars.3 The virtual world is more
fundamental than any of the selves that move within it, much as
2 Another avatecture project was created in collaboration with
architect Christophe Cornubert of PUSH (Los Angeles,
California). The project became a finalist in the Hotel Pro Forma
architectural competition (2001) for a 40,000 square-meter
performance center and international hotel planned for the
Ørestad suburb of central Copenhagen, Denmark. The design was
exhibited at the Gammel Dok Danish Center for Architecture in
2002.
3 See the excellent Virtual Worlds and Social Interaction Design
by Mikael Jakobsson published by the Department of Informatics
at Umea University, Sweden.
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Heidegger’s being-in-the-world precedes any single ego identity
that becomes present in the world.
The Tai Chi Body
The accompanying photos from experiments with avatars
demonstrate the use of Tai Chi body movements. The precise
stances, leg lifts (kicks), and balanced postures of Tai Chi
complement the use of avatars in a more than superficial way.
Digital culture often seems to devalue the body (novelist William
Gibson’s “the meat”) because Turing’s “universal machine”
can simulate any and every physical process. As a result, humans
feel less “grounded” in a computerized culture where most
operations – from automobile carburetors to wrist watches -
remain opaque to direct observation and where micro-circuitry
replaces traditional locomotion. Computer “digits” emulate and
assimilate human handiwork. By contrast, the human body as
described by Tai Chi (pinyin: taijiquan, “the martial art of yin &
yang polarities”) provides a counter-image of a felt internal
energy field that resides “underneath” the external body as
typically visualized by Cartesian mechanics and Western
scientific medicine.
Tai Chi theory maps the human energy field as a pulsating
system that can be accessed and modified through self-awarness,
postural alignments, and internal processes like breathing. The
flows (feng shui) of the energy body move on a deeper level of
awareness than the conscious ego. Hence Tai Chi values
meditation because breathing and awareness can provide access
to the energy flows (warm currents) that constitute the internal
energy system. Some external manipulations, such as
acupuncture and acupressure, can affect changes in the internal
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system of pathways (meridians), but internal attention can
influence the flows more effectively. The postures of Tai Chi
movement are, in effect, positions of meditation or awareness that
directly affect internal flows of the body. For this reason, the
classic styles of Tai Chi are often called “meditation in motion.”
The mind that meditates in Tai Chi is not the Cartesian ego.
Rather, “mind” here refers to awareness or attention directed to
the warm currents that are self-perceived (proprioception) but not
observable from the standpoint of a separate substance. In
Cartesian terms, we might speak of the “interplay” between the
mind and body, but these terms presuppose the primacy of
separate substances. It is the very fixed presence or substantiality
of the ego that Tai Chi undermines. The energy body can be
mapped more accurately by field theory than by the Greek
metaphysics of presence and substantial entities.4 The partner
games of Tai Chi, such as Pushing-Hands (“sensing hands” or
Chinese tuishou) revolve around the mutual perception and
interference of two interlocking energy fields. A similar
observation could be made about Japanese Aikido where the
practitioners see not the clash of two separate egos but the
interplay of intersecting energy fields (ki in Japanese or chi in
Chinese).
An appropriately post-Cartesian meditation follows the model of
Tai Chi where stopping to meditate is not seeking isolation in
4 George Katchmer contrasts East and West in his The Tao of
Bioenergetics (published by YMAA Publication Center, 1993).
Support this thesis also appears in many other books, including
those by Moshe Feldenkrais, Alexander Lowen, and Thomas
Hannah.
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abstraction from the body. Instead, the awareness is brought to
the body internally as a needed adjustment to the body amnesia
which has been induced by increased computer usage and by the
extension of presence (telepresence) through digital culture. Tai
Chi postures are not attempts to release the mind from physical
embodiment; similarly, contemporary meditation does not attempt
to establish a foundational anchor apart from the flow of
experience. As Tai Chi resides in the yin and yang of pulsating
flow, in the opening and closing of the physical joints, so too
does contemporary self-integration seek balance rather than the
extinction of the polarities of stillness and action, quietude and
engagement. While today there may be no total escape from
dissipation, there is a balancing that can be more or less achieved.
There is no absolute balance; there is only balancing. The
“absolute” value is a precise harmony rather than a conquest of
otherness, whether the other is a physically embodied condition
or an outside incoming force.
Harmony and Improvisation
The open quality of the balancing process appears in jazz
improvisation. A jazz group will typically establish among
themselves a “groove” or subdivision of rhythm. No single
player controls the groove but all share it. Players may assign
more responsibility for the groove to a drummer, percussionist,
or keyboardist; the groove floats in time through the shared
music and must be felt by the body even when a soloist plays
slightly behind or ahead of the groove. The group mind may have
an awareness of the groove, but the groove exists in the nervous
system’s reactions to a missing (syncopated) beat or absent
subdivision that the body supplies by a jerk of the hip, a nod of
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the head, or a tap of the toe. The ego mind is submerged in the
physical groove of the group. Only then can individual players
create improvisations over the steady groove.
The typical form of a jazz standard illustrates the relation of
individual solo improvisation to the group vibration. After
playing the “head” or main melody together in unison, the
players typically “trade eights” or “trade sixteens” where eight
or sixteen measures of the solo improvisation is performed by
each of the soloists in turn while the others accompany the solos
in the background. A soloist might be cheered on to do another
eight or sixteen measures, depending on the circumstances, until
all have taken their turns. The group then concludes by playing
the head in unison and by adding an ending. This typical jazz
format fosters the interplay of the soloists with one another as
each improvisation provides a call or response to the other
soloists. The group music is the reciprocal creation of a shared
context.
The submersion of the individual ego in a shared groove and the
harmony implied by the call-and-response of improvisation does
not eliminate freedom. Improvisation as a solo activity elicits the
uniqueness of each person’s response to the group harmony.
The greatest improvisers are those whose sound is unmistakably
their own.5 While much of the language of improvisation draws
on a specific history learned through recorded sound, the value
5 Two major resources on this topic are: Free Play: Improvisation
in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch (Tarcher/Putnam,
1990), and Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation by
Paul F. Berliner (University of Chicago, 1994).
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sought in performance is the uniqueness of personal response to
the harmonic situation in real time. The improvisation “works”
when deliberate plans give way to reliance on spontaneous
responses, much as impromptu speakers rely on a learned
spoken language rather than on the readings of scripts although
reading what previous speakers have said may provide phrases
and ideas for the impromptu speaker.
Conclusion
All three phenomena – avatars, Tai Chi, and jazz improvisation –
are treasures now embedded in global culture. They each point to
a contemporary relationship between the self and others, between
the self and the world(s), between the mind (awareness) and its
grounding in the body. These are pulsating relationships, full of
lively oscillation, requiring not an absolute fixed foundation but
an ongoing process of deliberate balance. Each of these three
forms of praxis shows the self as a rhythmic flow, a periodic
wave, an open permeable field of gathering-and-dispersal, rather
than an atomic, isolated concretion where refuge may reside.
Aesthetically, today’s self-integration resembles more the
makeshift, jerry-rigged “Combines” of Robert Rauschenberg
than the geometric symmetry of classic art. What this paper
suggests is that the breakdown of the Cartesian ego is not simply
a cause for superbia vitae, for celebrating the distance gaping
between those who are alive and those who are dead. Rather, the
breakdown of the Cartesian self frees us to appreciate given
cultural assets for what they are and to see how we can
understand, support, and cultivate them.
Michael R. HEIM
Irvine, CA (U.S.A.)
