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Life as Screen ? Or how to grasp the virtuality of the body 
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 1995, 18) And she continues: »Thus, more than twenty years after 
meeting the ideas of Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, I am meeting 
them again in my new life on the screen. But this time, the Gallic abstractions 
are more concrete. In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, 
fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is made 
and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; 
and unders tand ing follows f rom navigation and tinkering rather than 
analysis.« (Turkle 1995, 15) 
Turkle is not the only »cyber-theorist« defining the new technologies 
as a kind of materialization or visualization of something previously invisible. 
Kathryn Hayles and Slavoj Žižek, to name but two, develop a similiar position 
from within a Lacanian framework. But in doing so, they erase important 
differences. The difference, for instance, between a topological and a 
descripive notion of the unconscious, the difference between the Other and 
the other, the difference between the body and its unconscious image. 
Various examples of psychoanalytic cybertheories and (art) practice 
(media art, net-projects) demonstrate this impulse to erase these differences. 
But when an equat ion is made between an (artistic) netpractice and 
psychoanalytical theory, a crucial difference is lost, namely that which 
constitute the space of the subject. 
New Technology (NT), it is claimed, reconstitutes the subject in a 
fundamental way, not only effecting his mental state but also and foremost 
his body. The new modes of perception introduced through NT claim to 
bring to an end the modern way of vision and the corresponding subject of 
central perspectivity. But the discourse on NT does not clearly define the 
subject nor is the notion of vision placed under rigorous scrutiny. With 
Lacan's question »What is a picture« both vision and the seeing subject are 
d e f i n e d in a radically d i f f e r en t way. In my paper I will work with a 
psychoanalytical definition of the subject in order to theorize the otherness 
or the novelty of the subject of NT. 
Discourse about endings is at this moment very much to the point. The 
Filozofski vestnih, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 153-164. 153 
Marie-Luise A ngerer 
spectre of the end of media, esp. mass media has been raised. The end of 
art has also been prophesized; not to mention the implosion of the public 
realm and the undermining of its apparent opposition the private. The end 
of the subject has been invoked again, on this occasion including the end of 
gender. In addition a lament for the passing of the human being has been 
intoned. 
Such talk of endings leads naturally to a consideration of beginnings. 
It presupposes a beginning which is either ontogenedcally or phylogenetically 
defined, or an inaugauration of a conjuncture between specific historical 
epochs and psychical stages. 
I have suggested the title »Life as Screen?« in o rder to evoke the 
question of those endings and their corresponding beginnings, as well as to 
pose the question of what and who comes to an end. Lacan's question »What 
is a picture«, which he posed in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
Analysis, was from the beginning essentially implicated with the question what 
is a subject. My question here will be which subject Lacan has in view and 
how it relates to the discourse of NT. 
I shall begin with a short extract from Marge Piercy's novel Body of Glass 
(1992). In the following scene Shira, a programmer, encounters Jod , a 
cyborg: 
»She wondered exactly what one did with a cyborg. She had waded 
through gigabytes of material on his hardware, but she was still confused. 
Could one kiss a cyborg? Would not his mouth be dry as an can opener? It 
was not. His lips were soft on hers. His tongue was a little smoother than a 
human tongue but moist. Everything was smoother, more regular, more 
nearly perfect. The skin of his back was not like the skin of other men she 
had been with, for always there were abrasions, pimples, scars, irregularities. 
His skin was sleek as a woman's but drier to the touch, without the pillow of 
subcutaneous fat.« (Piercy 1992, 227) 
After initially hesitating to begin a sexual relation with Jod, Shira comes 
to be overwhelmed with his perfection to the point that she could no longe 
ignore her own human defects. Jod continually pursues her with questions 
about what it is like to be a human woman. Shira became ever more 
uncertain about the advantage of being human and the essential difference 
between human and non human. 
A question raises itself here: wether in the context of the encounter 
between the technological, the machinic and the non-human the precarious 
nature of the centered human subject, to which Descartes drew our attention, 
has become manifest. 
Lacan's meditations are germane to this issue. He argued historically 
154 
Life as Screen ? Or how to grasp the virtuality of the body 
that the Ego (and I mean here the ego and not the subject) is not only a 
precarious psychic structure but also a fragile socio-historical accomplish-
ment. The tragedy of this subject, to put in its fully pathetic dimension, is 
that in order to avoid losing itself in its environment, it must erase all 
difference between itself and its surroundings. (Cf. Brennan 1993, 4 ff.) 
The tenor of the theorists of the new technologies is that this subject 
has come to a total end. In the epoch of the human interface there is no 
more place for Cartesian dualisms: Instead nature/culture, body/mind as 
well as male/female are transformed into technical questions in the sense 
that they are only temporarily fixed through a coupling of the human with 
the machine. (Cf. Poster 1995)' 
Donna Haraway's cyborg illustrates this new hybrid form of being, half 
electronic, half biological, but also historically constituted. According to 
Haraway the cyborg arises at historical moments of social transition; times 
of radical uncertainty when borders are broken or under threat, and 
traditonal strategies of drawing boundaries no longer function: moments 
such as the present when the distinction between man and cybernetic 
organisms are breaking down. (cf. Haraway 1990) In this context Haraway 
draws particular attention to the porosity of bodily boundaries, in particular 
the skin. According to Freud the skin is a key element in the construction of 
the Ego as such. It follows that the bodily interface is not only a question of the 
NT but also, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the quesion of the subject itself. 
Thus, when Lacan refers to a historical formation of the Ego he means 
this in a thoroughly material-bodily sense. This historically unfolding Ego -
a social-psychotic figuration — must physically demarcate the boundaries of 
its body. 
In the next section I move from considering the historical Ego to an 
exploration of the psychic subject, a subject which according to Lacan's 
theory of the mirror stage, is always and already at war not only with its 
environment, but also and especially with itself, and with its image which is 
always othered, and to which it can never be reconciled. 
The excess of the image 
Lacan relates the embattled status of the subject to narcissism. The 
subject neither loves its image nor is beloved by it, but rather loves that which 
1 This is, of course, only one dominant strand in discourses on the NT. The other strand 
signals the fullf i l lment of the Enl ightenment conception of the subject. (Cf. Penny 
1994, Žižek 1997) 
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Marie-Luise A ngerer 
exceeds the image. The subject loves the picture's excess, a picture behind 
the picture. This »behind-the-picture« is the ideal-ego, that psychic function 
in which the child exists as its own ideal or, to put it more correctly, will 
have become its own ideal retrospectively. As Lacan makes the point, the 
ideal-ego is that point »at which he [the subject] desires to gratify himself 
in himself«. (Lacan 1981, 257) Or as he defines it elsewhere: »That where 
the subject sees himself, namely, where that real, inverted image of his own 
body that is given in the schema of the ego is forged, it is not from there that 
he looks at himself.« (Lacan 144) 
Here a distinction appears between the eye and the gaze which will be 
important to us in what follows. 
The basis of this distinction is Freud's differentiation between the drive 
and the instinct. Through this radical differentiation, which Freud and Lacan 
were never tired of invoking, the notion of primal lack is introduced. This 
lack is the proper place of the subject. For the rest of his life the subject will 
haunt and be haunted by this lack, which takes form in his image, before 
his image, behind his image. 
The drama of being part of the picture 
Lacan has associated this overdetermined split (Spaltung) between drive 
and instinct, ideal-ego and egoideal, eye and gaze with the constitutive 
function of primal aggression. He explains this aggression in terms of an 
unusual concept of mimesis as an intransitive resemblance in which there is 
no resembled object. 
Lacan adapts this concept from Roger Callois's work on the mimetic 
capacity of insects. According to Callois the tendency of insects to take on 
the colour of their background is not to be understood as self-protection or 
flight from an aggressor but rather as an attempt to become part of a picture. 
As Michael Taussig puts it in »Mimesis and Alterity« it is a matter of being 
seduced by space, a spacing out of the self, a drama »in which the self is but 
a self-diminishing point amid others, losing its boundedness.« (Taussig 1995, 
34) 
Whereas animals hunt each other through the sense of smell, mimicry 
arises in the field of seeing. It signals a failure to maintain the boundary 
between inner and outer, between the body and its environment, or as Joan 
Copjec def ines it, between »an unconsc ious be ing a n d a conscious 
semblance«. The effect of mimicry or the effect of representation, as Copjec 
argues, does not place the subject in »happy accord with the reality« but 
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Life as Screen ? Or how to grasp the virtuality of the body 
rather induces the »suspicion that some reality is being camouflaged«. 
(Copjec 1995, 37) In response to such representation - mimicry, the subject's 
own be ing breaks up between the unconscious be ing and conscious 
semblance. As Lacan makes the point: »To imitate is no doubt to reproduce 
an image. But at bottom, it is, for the subject, to be inserted in a function 
whose exercise grasps it.« (Lacan 100) 
Picture and gaze do not meet 
How do these considerations bear on the question of NT's, mourning 
for the subject and the hymn to a new »fluid and polymorphic structure of 
identity«? 
At the end of the Four Fundamental Concepts Lacan surprisingly mentions 
what he says we can call the »mass media«. He indicates that it is tempting 
to see these media as augmenting the society of the spectacle, to use Guy 
Debord's term. Instead, he claims, they contribute to a diffusion of the gaze 
and the voice, but he makes no further comment on this matter. 
I shall at tempt to relate this diffusion of the gaze to the novelty of the 
NT specifically in order to follow up the question of the »location of the 
subject«. 
In his book Techniques of the Observer (1995) Jonathan Crary argues that 
NT are new insofar as they operate without a point of view, that is without a 
place which the viewer can occupy. Thus the camera obscura model with its 
centrally focussed perspective is undermined. And this, Crary observes, might 
potentially have fatal consequences for the subject and might foreground 
in concrete fashion the spectacle of its fragility. 
As I already noted, Lacan defines the Ego as historically and psychically 
always already precarious. He has emphasized this precarious status through 
his distinction between the Subject and the Ego, echoing the split between 
eye and the gaze, a gaze which poposes an impossible location which cannot 
be occupied by the subject. 
By thinking together these two impossibe locations, the computer-
generated one mentioned byjonathan Crary, and the psychic one considered 
by Lacan, I propose to bring together the radical exteriority of both the 
technical and psychic structuration of the subject. 
In order to undertake this thinking together I will criticize two strands 
of thought in media theory: on the one hand, Screen and Apparatus theory, 
which both focus upon the image, the screen, and their equation with the 
mirror. And on the other a similar equation of the mirror with the monitor 
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within the discourse on NT. In the latter discourse the monitor is understood 
as a mirror and virtual reality is conceived as the space of the Lacanian 
imaginary. 
At the center of film theory lies the model of the Lacanian mirror stage 
as an original misrecognition of the subject in the image of »an-other«. Both 
Apparatus theory (Baudry, Comolli, Metz) and British Screen theory 
(Mulvey, Heath, Wollen) take over Lacan's theory of the mirror stage in 
order to identify the screen as a mirror before which or better in which the 
subject misrecognizes itself. In this taking over, the Lacanian mirror stage is 
subjected to an overgeneralization which is fatally repeated in the field of NT. 
I want to demonstrate this briefly by discussing Kaja Silverman's 
definition of the gaze as a cultural gaze. 
According to Lacan, in the relation between the mirror image and the 
child a third element intervenes, the gaze of the mother. In the same way, 
according to Baudry, in the relation between the screen image and the 
spectator a third element is involved, which Baudry like Lacan identifies as 
a gaze. This third element makes possible and guarantees the identification 
between the child and the mirror image as well as that between the spectator 
and the screen image. In the case of the cinema, Baudry argues, this third 
element is the gaze associated with the camera. 
I now want to return to the question of the split between the eye and 
the gaze about which Lacan says: »1 see only f rom one point, but in my 
existence I am looked at from all sides.« (Lacan 72) We are, he continues, 
»beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. (...) Is there no 
satisfaction in being under that gaze (...) that circumscribes us, and which 
in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing 
this?« (Lacan 75) 
In a conscious waking state this function of the gaze is usually elided, 
but shows itself only in special moments (Lacan mentions the images of the 
dream, paintings etc.). In other words, the gaze is that which is invisible. 
This is also the moment through which the absence of the signified is 
manifested. The gaze does not acknowledge the subject, it does not look, 
but rather causes a disturbance, a toppling of the subject. This gaze unfolds 
itself in the place of the Other and enables the child's first identification at 
the cost of an originary alienation: »The gaze is something from which the 
subject has separated itself off, but which was once part of the subject; it is 
thus an object petit a.« (Cowie 1997, 288) 
Silverman takes up this difference between the eye2 and gaze in asserting 
that the gaze does not look, that in this sense it is misleading even to refer to 
2 In Silverman's considerations the eye is the look, the bodily context of the eye, the 
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Life as Screen ? Or how to grasp the virtuality of the body 
it as a gaze. Nevertheless in her subsequent arguments she indicates, in 
explicit reference to Lacan, that the gaze is in a metaphoric relation to the 
camera . The only func t ion of this cinematic apparatus, according to 
Siverman, is to put the subject in the picture. How this »being in the picture«, 
this »being photographed«, how this operates is not a function of the gaze, 
but rather the concern of the »cultural screen«. While the gaze represents 
the presence of the others as such, it is the function of the eye-look to 
determine the direction of meaning production, that is to decide which 
aspects are mobilized in / th rough being photographed. Thus the eye-look 
becomes the place in which the imaginary subject encounters the almighty 
gaze. In this context there is a dedifferentiation of the gaze and the eye 
through the mediation of the »cultural screen«. The gaze as cultural gaze 
becomes the site of socio-cultural power which leads individuals into their 
respective modes of being. 
The definition of the gaze as an anonymous societal look in the sense 
of the Foucauldian panopticon resurfaces in modified form in the analysis 
of the NT. 
In this context the computer monitor is assimilated to the mirror and 
the electronic space is taken as a materialization of the unconscious. In this 
respect, then, it is the ideal ego which greets us in cyberspace. 
To consider these claims, I shall briefly consider two examples, taken 
from Kathryn Hayles and Slavoj Žižek. 
Virtual reality, Žižek writes, renders explicit that mechanism which until 
now has been hidden but was always and already foundational to the subject. 
And Kathryn Hayles claims in connection with cyberspace that it materializes 
the Lacanian mirror stage. Lacan's imaginary is thus given a threedimen-
sional physical reality. That is, the imaginary is made real in the sense of a 
technological product ion. Whereas Hayles equates the imaginary with 
physicality, she introduces the symbolic through equating it with the virtual, 
i.e. the electronic produced data realm or data space. Thus, she argues, 
»cyberspace represents a powerful challenge to the customary construction 
of the body's boundaries, opening them to transforming configurations that 
always bear the trace of the Other. The resulting disorientation can function 
as a wedge to destabilize presuppositions about self and the Other.« (Hayles 
1993, 187) 
As is well known, Lacan makes a distinction between the (lower case) 
»other« and the (capital) »Other«, a distinction which Žižek equates with 
the difference between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal as well as between 
look as bodily spectacle, which is to a certain extent resistant to the gaze. (Cf. Silverman 
1996,137 ff.) 
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symbolic and imaginary identification. Whereas the relation with the other 
is imaginary in the sense that the self resembles the other, the relation with 
the Other is symbolic, that is, depends on the structure of language. Symbolic 
identification is identification with the Other, the place f rom where we see 
ourselves as likeable. This place of the Other, the symbolic order, carries 
within it a kernel, a Thing (das Ding), a void which the subject must conceal. 
That is, this gaze from the place of the Other is not a gaze in a full sense. 
Rather, it is an empty gaze, by which the subject is haunted and feels itself 
observed, but nevertheless for whom the subject wants to »play a role«, as 
Žižek points out. Both identifications — the imaginary and the symbolic — 
are not strictly separable because imaginary identification is always an 
»identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other«. (Žižek 1994, 106) 
In Hayle's considerations of the »Mirror of the Cyborg«, thus the 
Lacanian Other slides very over into concre te o thers . Cyberspace is 
unde r s tood as of fer ing a whole range of possibilities to in terac t , to 
communicate with »other people«. According to Hayles, the self s boundaries 
have to denigrate their outside. Thus women are constructed as castrated 
men, blacks as inferior whites, etc. The mirror (of the cyborg), by contrast, 
conflates self and Other, thus entailing new encounters where the Other »is 
accepted as both different and enriching«. (Hayles 188) The puppet on the 
screen, the avatar, thus carries the »potential to become more than a 
puppet, representing instead a zone of interaction that opens the subject to 
the exhilirating realization of Otherness valued as such.« (188) 
Here it becomes clear, that both the Lacanian mirror stage and his 
concept of the Other have lost their meaning. The Other, as the site f rom 
which the subject is spoken, has been reduced to multicultural and social 
differences. 
And even Žižek takes on a somewhat mystical tone when discussing the 
increasing computerization. He like so many others asks himself the 
apocalyptic question whether it is possible that the end of sexuality and the 
end of the human subject are at hand through the emergence of the PC. 
(Cf. Žižek 1996, 284) 
According to him, a confusion arises with the advent of the computer, 
one which reactivates a stage before originary loss, before the split between 
ideal ego and ego-ideal. 
The end of sexuality as Žižek describes it, is introduced through a 
partnership with a post or non-human being. Here the story between Shira 
and Jod, which I mentioned in the beginning, is relevant. Through this non-
human being into which the subject is so to speak locked, a primordial 
asexual stage of being is achieved, a stage before any sexual marking and 
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Life as Screen ? Or how to grasp the virtuality of the body 
therefore before subjectivity. Žižek illustrates this in terms of the possibilities 
the net offers for gender switching and creating new bodies: »What fascinates 
people far more than the unprecedented access to information, the new ways 
of learning, shopping, and so on, is the possibility of constituting 'virtual 
communities, in which I am free to assume an arbitrary sexual, ethnic, 
religious, etc., identity. A gay male, for example, can enter a closed sexual 
community and, via the exchange of messages, participate in a fictionalized 
group sexual activity as a heterosexual woman.« (Žižek 1996, 285) 
Žižek concludes that these encounters represent the absolute fulfillment 
of the Cartesian subject, because all features (of the subject's identity) are 
contingent and interchangeable. In his description of changing one's identity 
on the net, Žižek equates sexual identity with ethnic and religious identity. 
Thus he conflates the decisive difference between the »role of gender« and 
the »imperative of sex«. According to Charles Shepherdson, sexual difference 
in contrast to gender roles is not a »human convention, like democracy or 
monarchy, a social form that was invented at some point in historical time, 
a cont ingent format ion that one culture produced, but that might be 
replaced by another form«. (Shepherdson 1994, 160) Rather it has to be 
seen as the effect of the drive which Freud has strictly distinguished from 
the instinct. Gender difference, by contrast, is tied to representation, to the 
symbolic order, to the call of the Other and his desire. 
To emphasize the imperative of sexual difference means to insist upon 
the structural inevitability of representation for human sexuality. This does 
not imply a return to a bodily nature or a natural body but rather is an 
ind ica t ion tha t sexuali ty (accord ing to both Freud and Lacan) is 
c o m p r e h e n d e d ne i ther as gender nor sex, and the body nei ther as a 
biological fact nor a social construct, but rather as constitutively denaturalized 
»organ-ized by the image and the word«. (Shepherdson 1994, 170) 
Upon entry to the symbolic order, the subject is organized in terms of 
a binary opposit ion, e i ther having or being the Phallus. The Other is 
implicated in this relation in the sense that the subject wants either to have 
or be for the Other. The question of which position will be /can be taken up 
depends upon the desire of the Other. As such switching between gender 
positions is only possible to a limited extent. That is, the phantasmatic 
exchange of sexual positions is always accomplished from an already relatively 
fixed position. This applies equally to Žižek's phantasies as to other stories 
of gender exchange on the net such as Sherry Turkle's. As Elizabeth Cowie 
makes the point: »The apparent mobility of sexual fantasy, whether enacted 
or imagine, can only arise with a — relative — fixing of the subject's position 
of sexual difference and its identifications.« (Cowie 1997, 248) 
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Marie-Luise A ngerer 
The earlier mentioned connection between the field of vision and sexual 
difference »takes place« on the level of the drive. Due to the split between 
the eye and the gaze it is »in which the drive is manifested at the level of the 
scopic field«. (Lacan 73) The way in which Lacan defines masculinity and 
feminity coincides with this split to the extent that the two sexes or better 
their appearance in the symbolic order , involve a similiar s t ructure of 
deception, of masquerade. 
Lacan takes the reality of the unconscious as a sexual reality, which has 
no representation of masculinity and feminity. Their difference appears only 
in the symbolic order as a masquerade which has to conceal its fundamental 
loss. A loss which is not a sexually marked loss, but rather refers, as Lacan 
says, to »the relation between the living subject and that which he loses by 
having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle.« ( Lacan 199) 
The fact that masculinity and feminity have to mimic this loss, to conceal 
it in a masquerade, can now be identified with the dialectic relation between 
the eye and the gaze. That is, both relations bear upon a fundamenta l 
s tructure of deception. Describing love Lacan himself has m a d e this 
comparison. 
»When in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always 
missing is that - You never look at me from the place from which I see you.« (Lacan 
103) And with respect to the field of vision he continues: 
»Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see. (...) A triumph of the 
gaze over the eye.« (Lacan 103) 
What I have said, suggests that media apparatuses such as film and NT, 
each in their different way, conceal this masquerade, in the sense that they 
make the subject believe him/herself to be part of the picture. One now 
could speculate about NT's different modes of concealing than film's. 
In sum, in order to theorize the end of the modern subject, and relatedly 
the end of art and media, as well as to understand the novelty of NT, it is 
necessary to define the notion of the subject one is talking about. Merely to 
state that NT undermine Cartesian dualisms and its gender-marked subject 
trivializes the issue. It is also misleading to equate the subject of the 
unconscious with the social other in the net, as Kathryn Hayles does echoing 
the »cultural screen« as introduced by Kaja Silverman. In Zižek's approach 
the Other is excluded in NT. But as Henry Krips made the point - isn't the 
Other in the case of the net a prosthetic Other (a cruel superego) from which 
pleasure can be derived. And isn't this function taken over by the virtual 
community of the users? In his more recent analysis - in the Plague of 
Fantasies (1997) - Žižek argues that what happens in VR is the foreclosure 
of the real. This comes very close to what I am arguing: that med ia 
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Life as Screen ? Or how to grasp the virtuality of the body 
apparatuses are means of concealing the void. The question, then, is in what 
different ways NT blurs the line between the subject and the user? More 
specifically, what drives the subject, so that his location, which is strictly 
speaking a non-location, can be encompassed - as image, before the image 
and behind the image. Or to put it in a slightly different way: ... in-betiveen 
time after before but before after. 
This phrase by Brian Massumi, then, marks the bridge between the body 
(as such) and the representational body and might therefore be taken as an 
image to think with, to think of the relation between the body and its various 
stages of virtuality. 
Thanks to Henry Krips for stimulating disscussions and the translation. 
Notes 
Baudry, J.-L. (1980) »Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic 
Apparatus«, in T. Cha APPARATUS. Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected 
Writings. New York: Tanam Press. 
Brennan, T. (1993) History After Lacan. London, New York: Routledge. 
Copjec, J. (1995) Read my Desire. Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge 
(Mass.), London: MIT Press. 
Cowie, E. (1997) Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanaylsis. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 
Crary, J. (1995) Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the 
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge (Mass.), London: MIT Press. 
Haraway, D. (1990) »A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Science, Technology, and 
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s«, in L. Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/ 
Postmodernism. New York, London: Routledge. 
Hayles, N.K. (1993) »The Seductions of Cyberspace«, in V. A. Conley (ed.) 
Rethinking Technologies. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota 
Press. 
Lacan, J. (1981) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York, 
London: W.W. Norton & Company. 
Penny, S. (1994) »Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment 
Project«, in G. Bender & T. Druckrey (eds.) Culture on the Brink. 
Ideologies of Technology. Seattle: Bay Press. 
Piercy, M. (1992) Body of Glass. Hamondsworth, Middlesex (UK): Penguin 
Books. 
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Poster, M. (1995) »Postmodern Virtualities«, Body & Society, vol. 1, no. 3-4, 
79-96. 
Shepherdson, C. (1994) »The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex«, in 
J. Copjec (ed.) Supposing the Subject. London, New York: Verso. 
Silverman, K. (1996) On the Threshold of the Visible World. New York, London: 
Routledge. 
Taussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses. New 
York, London: Routledge. 
Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen. New York: Simon & Schuster. 
Žižek, S. (1994) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, New York: Verso. 
Žižek, S. (1996) »Lacan with quantum physics«, in G. Robertson et al. (eds.) 
Future Natural. Nature/science/culture. London, New York: Routledge. 
Žižek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies. London, New York: Verso. 
164