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9 Welcome to the Pharmacy Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual Reality Ann Weinstone 161 It has become a truism to say that virtual reality (VR) is addictive. Case, the protagonist of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, dreams of connection to the net like a junkie jonesing for a Wx. In Jeff Noon’s novel Vurt, you get to cyberspace by tickling the back of your throat with addictive, governmentproduced feathers. Verity of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz sports nanotechnology implants that compel her to enter virtual worlds into which she sinks with feelings of deep bliss. As in Vurt, in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, everything’s an addiction: cyberspace, people, rock and roll. But let’s move away from Wction. Graphic cyberartist Nicole Stenger, a selfprofessed Neoplatonist, writes: “What if the passage to a new level of humanity actually meant abolishing indeed the natural one, or at least some part of it? . . . Will it not require immense effort to recover from this enhancement of the senses, from this habit of perfection?”1 Michael Benedikt, editor of Cyberspace: First Steps, deems VR “a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology.”2 Ad copy in a May 1995 issue of Wired for “Origin,” a VR game, reads, “You must die to learn how to live. . . . Death is not an option. It’s an addiction.” And an article in The New York Times titled “The Lure and Addiction of Life on Line” displays a graphic of a bespectacled male, tapping away at a computer located inside of a panopticon-sized rendering of a globe to which the avid user is happily chained.3 From advertisements to scholarly texts, it is difWcult to Wnd any writing about VR that does not engage in and rely on the rhetorics of addiction . William Gibson dubbed cyberspace a “consensual hallucination.” That was 1984. In 1996, critic Robert Markley rechristened VR “a consensual cliché.”4 Surely, the “addictiveness” of cyberspace contributes to the sense of tired familiarity. My questions are these: Why does cyberspace have to be addictive? What work is addiction doing in discourses of virtual reality? I’m concerned here with the production of what might be called “hyperreal transcendence.” Jean Baudrillard, in his influential schema “three orders of simulacra,” identiWes a Wrst, “natural” order in which “a transcendent world, a radically different universe, is portrayed . . . in contrast to the continent of the real.” Second-order simulacra are additive and productive; they enhance the real. Science Wction belongs to this order. Third-order simulated simulacra collapse the distance between the model and the original , the space across which transcendence has traditionally been produced. Baudrillard writes that the aim of simulation simulacra is “maximum operationality , hyperreality, total control. . . . Models no longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real; they are, themselves, an apprehension of the real, and thus leave no room for any Wctional extrapolation —they are immanent, and therefore leave no room for any kind of transcendentalism .”5 I propose that a third-order, hyper-real, transcendence has survived the collapse of the distance between the model and the original. This transcendence relies on rhetorics of disembodiment, immortality, and extrahuman reproductive and generative powers within virtual spaces. Such spaces include scholarly and technical essays about VR or cyberspace, science Wction, advertisements for VR games, VR game narratives, and other advertising copy that borrows from current discourses of virtuality. Although “virtual reality” is clearly a locus for fantasies about transcendence of the body, it is my purpose here to show exactly how these fantasies rely on rhetorics of addiction, and how, within the context of a general “transcendentalizing” of the concept of code, they attest to the advent of an expanded notion of writing that no longer does the antiauthoritarian work of deconstruction but constitutes a reWgured zone of uninterrupted presence. In Of Grammatology, Derrida wrote that “scientiWc language challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing and all its implicit metaphysics.”6 Derrida published this inaugural section of his landmark work in 1965 during a time when cybernetic concepts and rhetoric were disseminating through diverse Welds such as psychology, anthropology, literary studies, and molecular biology. The cybernetic urge, he wrote, is to “oust all metaphysical concepts,” those such as soul, life, and memory. “[Cybernetics] must conserve the notion of writing . . . until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.” Even at this early date, Derrida intuits that the yet-to-be...

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