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<?Water bodies>: A narrative exploration of divergent digital intimacies
Water, stories, the body, all the things we do, are mediums that hide and show what’s hidden. (Rumi, 1995 translation)
꙳for you
All intimacy is about bodies. Is this true? Does it matter? I doubt it. Do you know? Let’s find out, maybe.
Once, I thought that everything in the world was either one or zero and that there was a harsh straight line between them. Then I found out you could step or hop across the line, back and forth, if others showed you how. Today, I am no less binary, no less interested in dichotomies, but I am willing to dance through them if you are too. Can we dance these dichotomies together, embracing the contradictions of the virtual and physical, the comfortable and uncomfortable, intimate and non-intimate? I can’t do it alone, the subject is too heavy and the binary is too 1011000. I won’t ask you to resolve these contradictions, I have no desire to. Instead, I hope we can cultivate the tension and tenderness inherent in holding together incompatible truths because both prove necessary.
To dance through these dichotomies I will start in a specific position, growing from Donna Haraway’s in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto”. In her essay, Haraway explores the concept of a cyborg as a rejection of boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. A symbol for a feminist posthuman theory that embraces the plasticity of identity. Before she does all this dancing, however, she takes a strong stance of blasphemy. She engages seriously with traditional notions of feminism and identity but with irony, not apostasy, which is to say without full rejection—without unbelief. My position as I jump will be the same as hers, ironic faith. My mocking is grave but caring and my primary aim is for us only to spin fast enough not to see the line anymore, while still being able to see the binaries. It won’t be an easy dance for us but I will do my best to keep softening for you, I promise.
I will show you a digital body, make it comfortable and then uncomfortable, lightly intimate, and richly intimate. I have my own story, my own digital body, of course. This is where I take my second stance, however. This time, the position is Lauren Berlant’s, from ‘The Female Complaint’. The book places individual stories as inescapable autobiographies of a collective experience and uses the personal to explain an intimate general experience. In our story, the difference between my body and the collective digital body is unimportant, I hope you see that. I will tell you my story if you know how to look, but I will tell you through the stories of many others who shared them with me. I have no other choice, every time I have tried to tell this story a chorus of voices has come out.
Some of the stories I will tell you will carry memories of pain; physical and emotional. I will keep holding you while you hear this, but your limbs may still feel too heavy to dance. In that case, I give you my full permission to skip, jump, or lay down completely. This is not choreographed and I care deeply for you.
I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.
Safe dreams now, I will talk to you soon.
0. DIGITAL BODIES
I think the worst must be finished. Whether I am right, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. No ringlet of bruise, no animal face, the waters salt me and I leave it barefoot. I leave you, season of still tongues, of roses on nightstands beside crushed beer cans. I leave you white sand and scraped knees. I leave this myth in which I am pig, whose death is empty allegory. I leave, I leave— At the end of this story, I walk into the sea and it chooses not to drown me. (Yun, 2020)
a. what is a digital body?
A digital body is a body on the Internet. A body outside the internet is simply a body. On the internet, discussions about corporeality transcend the limitations of physicality, shaping and reshaping narratives surrounding the self. This text explores the intricate dynamics within these conversations, dancing at the interplay between tangible bodies and their digital counterparts. The construction of a digital body is intricately intertwined with these online dialogues, necessitating engaged reconstructions of the narratives surrounding physical existence. Yet, the resulting digital body is a complex and contradictory entity, embodying the nuances of both its virtual and tangible origins.
There is a specific metaphor that would allow us to better carry these contradictions as we further explore digital bodies. Do you remember that dream you had about deep ocean pie? Allow me to remind you.
You were walking on the shore, slowly, during a summer that happened a long time ago. Your skin was warm and you could feel the wet cool sand sticking to your feet. The gentle lapping of the waves washed the sand away as you walked towards the ocean. You stepped, stepped. Then dove. Underwater, the sea unfolded deeper than you remembered. It was a vibrant display of life: bright schools of small fish, and tall colorful, waving corals. It looked like that aquarium you saw once as a kid. Your arms moved confusingly through the water as if you were wading through a soup or were terribly tired. On the sandy ocean floor, you saw a dining table. It had a floating white tablecloth, one plate, a fork, and a pie in the center of it, on a serving dish. You sat on a chair but could not feel it underneath you. You ate a heaping slice of pie. It had a buttery-cooked carrots filling. You woke up. In the world, the sun was still timid and your bedroom thick with sleep. What a weird dream. You rubbed your face, sat up on your bed, and drank the glass of water next to you. You felt full, as if you just ate a plateful of carrot pie.
There were two bodies in this story. An awake one and a dream one, an ocean one. In dreams, bodies have their own set of rules, often blurring the boundaries between waking and sleeping, wanting and fearing. Digital bodies are very similar to dream bodies. They exhibit a similar fluidity and abstraction, a defiance of traditional notions of physicality. They share the blurring and inherent potential nature of dream bodies. They are slower, stronger, and different. They switch and change and melt into each other, they lose and regrow limbs, they run sluggishly and fly smoothly. If we scream in our dreams, we sometimes wake up still screaming. Our waking bodies react to our dream bodies, they have the same tears, the same orgasms, the same drives.
This is a story of two bodies, same but different, influenced but not driven. A tangible body, full of fluids and organs, emotions and feelings. Cartilage, bacteria, bones, and nerve endings. A digital body, cable-veined and loud-vented, shiny and loading.
The digital body is ethereal and abstracted, embarrassing, graphic, and real but not physical.
This is the beginning.
b. body vs. computer
Framing the discourse around bodies on the internet as a clear-cut dichotomy feels clunky in today’s internet landscape. The web is today available by body, cyborg dimensions of the internet of bodies, or virtual and augmented realities, creating a complex interplay between having a body and existing online.
As intricate as this dance is now, it certainly did not begin that way. It started with what felt like a very serious and tangible line drawn by very serious tangible people; this is real life and this is virtual life. Even people like Howard Rheingold, pioneers who approached early virtual life with enthusiasm and care, couldn’t escape characterizing it as a “bloodless technological ritual” (1993). Rheingold was an early member of The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (Well), a seminal virtual community built in the 1980s that was renowned for its impact on digital culture and played a pivotal role in shaping what would become the landscape of the Internet. Rheingold’s reflections on his experience on this primordial soup of the Internet offer insight into the initial conceptualizations of online life by those joyfully participating.
In “The Virtual Community”, Rheingold offers a heartfelt tribute to intimacy and affection through web- based interactions which, at the time, were unheard of. He struggles in his efforts to highlight the legitimacy of his connections, finding no way to do so except by emphasizing their tangible bodily experiences. The community’s claim to authenticity thus had to lie in the physical experiences of its members— the visible bodies and hearable voices, the weddings, births, and funerals (1993). (1).
Even then, and even by people with no interest in undermining the value of the virtual, the distinction between physical and virtual was confusing. Rheingold himself reinforces the boundary of body relations and computer relations by referring to his family as a “flesh-and-blood family’ and his close online friends as “unfamiliar faces” (1993). Constantly interplaying digital connections with the physical characteristics of the kind of connections people valued before the internet. (2)
In any case, his primary interest seemed to be to emphasize computer relations as valid forms of connection between bodies, not to talk of any distinction quite yet. It’s the eighties, the internet is still fresh and new and the possibility to form close relations with strangers online seems fragile and concerning yet exciting. This is the clearest the distinction between in-real-life and online has ever been and it’s still fuzzy and unclear.
At the same time and in the same digital space as Rheingold, there was another man, a digital body being formed. This is our second story, the ocean body we dreamt of earlier is now in a digital primordial soup, questioning itself and stuck between staying and leaving. In this story, its name is Tom Mandel and when he died, he did so on the Well.
Mandel was a controversial and popular figure in this pioneering virtual community. According to many other members, Tom Mandel embodied the essence of the Well—its history, its voice, its attitude. Mandel's snarky and verbose provocations started heated discussions, earning him warnings such as "Don't Feed The Mandel!” (Leonard, 1995). His sharp comments often stirred emotions that reminded people of family arguments, fuelling an intimacy that was characteristic of the Well: both public and solitary (Hafner, 1997).
Until 1995, Mandel had done a quite rigorous job of keeping his body separate from The Well and had never attended any of the physical in-person meetings from the community. His only references to being a body had been on the “health” online conference, where he often talked about his illnesses. One day, after nearly a decade of daily interaction, he posted he had got the flu and that he felt quite ill. When people wished for him to get well soon, he replied he had gone to get tested and was waiting for a diagnosis. This way, when cancer was found in his lungs, the community was first to know. In the following six months, as his illness progressed, the community followed closely (Hafner, 1997). They were first to know when Nana, a community member with whom he had had a publicly turbulent relationship, flew to California to marry him. The community was a witness and is now an archive of his declining wit as cancer spread to his brain and his famously articulate and scathing comments got shorter, fearful, and more tender. (3)
Before he posted his final goodbye, he chose to do one last thing. Together with another member, they programmed a bot that posted randomly characteristic comments from Mandel on The Well—the Mandelbot. In the topic he had opened to say goodbye, he posted this message about the bot:
I had another motive in opening this topic to tell the truth, one that winds its way through almost everything I've done online in the five months since my cancer was diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my physical self wasn't going to survive forever and I guess I was going to have less time than actuarials allocateus [actually allocated]. But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew on-line... I could toss out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn't really have to leave... Large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space. (Hafner, 1997)
With the Mandelbot, Mandel found a way to deal with what he later called his grieving for the community, with which he could not play anymore once his own body died. By doing so, he was starting to blend the boundaries of intimacy through computers and bodies, driven by his love and grief. (4)