The affect of imagination on pseudo embodiment of cognition in digital worlds

Bernard Stiegler, in his 2002 lecture Transcendental Imagination in a Thousand Points, quotes Adorno and Horkheimer, who fault cinema with paralyzing the imagination: “The more densely and completely its techniques duplicates empirical objects, the more easily it creates the illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed in the cinema.” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947, 99). The power of cinema to do that is the power of the imagination, where secondary retentions stem from. Secondary retentions and therefore imagination rely on memory. Cinema has the capacity to evoke the memory of an unlived or non-lived past, a prosthesis of consciousness. The memory of an unlived or non-lived past is a tertiary form of memory and is evoked in a particular kind of imagination. This ability of cinema to function as a tertiary memory, says Stiegler, can be equally applied to video games and virtual reality.

But the passive bodily experience of cinema is very different from the interactive experience of digital worlds. The sense of presence and agency in digital worlds creates a much greater expectation of an embodied experience. This was evident at Connect 2022, Meta corporation’s annual developer’s conference. Meta announced “The most requested feature on our roadmap”: Avatars will have legs! While a step in the right direction, more anatomically complete avatars can only have a limited impact on an embodied cognitive experience. Phantom Physicality, my current area of research, proposes a form of pseudo embodiment: evoking physical sensations without physical a trigger. The paper will explore the role of imagination in the experience of this kind of pseudo embodiment in digital worlds.