Life as Screen? Or how to grasp the virtuality of the body?

Abstract

In her book Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle assumes that the new computer technologies materialize “postmodern theory and bring it down to earth”. Turkle is not the only “cyber-theorist” defining the new technologies as a kind of materialization or visualization of something previously invisible. But in doing so, such theorists erase important differences: that of a topological and a descriptive notion of the unconscious, between the Other and the other, between the body and its unconscious image, and between gender and sexual difference. Various examples of cybertheories and (art) practice (media art, net-projects) demonstrate this impulse to erase these differences. But when an equation is made between the unconsciousness and the cyberspace, a crucial difference is lost, namely that which constitutes the space of the subject.