MmeBovary2.0
In 2007, a technique was invented that made it possible to experience feeling in an artificial limb (Nature: 29-1-2007). ‘Feeling’ is not to be understood as some passive experience, like a simulation. It works both ways: the artificial limb is in all its movements directed by thought, while the mind responds to what it senses.
Rather conventionally, the artificial limb was still installed in its proper place.
However, the conventionality of such a ‘proper place’ came soon to be questioned by artists, philosophers, and the sexually confused. For one can think of a great many ways to install an arm, in no way less functional than on the right side of the chest. It could just as well have an interesting roll to play at the other side of the room, and probably even more so, in someone else’s.
So now, in 2017, I can feel it, when you touch your mouse.
But we must admit, it has been far from easy to accept our distant-body-parts as our own. Embarrassingly, it still seemed more natural to accept the experience of distant-touch as some Dionysian intoxication, as a religious experience, rather than as something we could control.
So in the beginning, we could only undergo the stimulations passively.
That is, if we found someone to touch our distant-body-parts at all. Because that was the second problem: in order to get touched, we had to make ourselves desirable.
So we now had two problems to solve:
1. How to understand ourselves as a unity
2. How to make others want us
Looking back, we see that the 2007 bionic girl, learned to operate her arm very quickly. How did she do that? It was not so difficult for her, because her arm was placed where an arm conventionally would be found.
How exactly does one remember the proper place of a dismembered arm? What is this convention of where what should be? In other words, what is the Operating System that made it possible for her to understand the new arm as her own?
It was her sense-of-self.
This sense-of-self was given to her by the others around her: they gave her words, images, and expectations. By looking right back at her, they offered her a mirror.
And so we discovered what was needed in order to unite our distant-body-parts, and do so in such a way that it would be a presentable unity for others to desire. This operating system is known as: identity.
Identity is the software that can do for the distant-body-parts technique, what Microsoft/Apple, did for the computer in the 1980’s: to give the hardware a language.
However, this time we did not need to write a new language, for we had unknowingly created it all along. We had been developing it ever since we called ourselves human. Only, we thought we were doing something else.
What we now see as the construction of an Operating System, we had always misunderstood as a philosophical, or spiritual search for the self. We had confused the need to see ourselves as a whole, and the need for others to perceive us so, with presuming the actual identities we happened to think ourselves whole with, as being necessarily those.
While looking all around, we have found nothing necessarily so. But in doing just that, we have developed numerous forms of life. So while we might not have found ourselves some true source, we have created a rich system of contingent forms instead.
A rich system of contingent forms is known as: language.
So, in place of searching sense of self, we developed sense of language. We are not human anymore, nor anything else: we are forever trans-human. We are the language we create.