Virtual reality : : the last human narrative? / / by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein.

• Superior document: Critical Posthumanisms, Volume 1
• VerfasserIn: Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands ;, Boston, Massachusetts : : Brill Rodopi,, 2016.; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Critical posthumanisms (Leiden, Netherlands) ; Volume 1.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (242 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Is virtual reality the latest grand narrative that humanity has produced? Our civilization is determined by a shift from an “original event” to a virtual “narrative”. This concerns not only virtual reality but also psychoanalysis, gene-technology, and globalization. Psychoanalysis transforms the dream into a narrative and is able to spell out the dream’s symbols. Gene-technology narrates dynamic, self-evolving evolution as a “gene code”. Discourses on “globalization” let the globe appear as once more globalized because reproduced through narrative. Finally, reality itself has come to be narrated in the form of a second reality that is called “virtual”. This book attempts to disentangle the characteristics of human reality and posthuman virtual reality and asks whether it is possible to reconcile both.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Prelude: Narrated Time and Non-Narrated Time or Why We Are All Dreaming of the Japanese Clock -- 1. Eighteenth-Century Rationalism and the Search for the Absolutely Real: When Friedrich Bouterwek Invented Virtual Reality -- 2. Posthumanism: The “Autistic Condition?” -- 3. From Civilization to Culture: About the Dreamlike Character of Global Civilization -- 4. Genes and Pixels: Bio-Genetics’ Posthuman Aesthetics of the Virtual -- 5. Posthumanism and “Multi-Realism”: Comparing The Matrix with Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Solaris -- 6. The Aesthetics of Frozen Dreams: Jeff Koons and Mariko Mori -- 7. From Perspective to “All-Unity” or the Narrative of Virtual Cosmology -- 8. What Would Nietzsche have Thought about Virtual Reality? Nietzsche and Cyberpunk -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.