A Self-Model under Quarantine

Brent Lucia

The theoretical philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, and his “cockpit theory” on human subjectivity: imagine you are sitting in a futuristic cockpit of an airplane, surrounded by instruments and controls. A computer displays the landscape where the windshield would be. In this cockpit you can maneuver your plane easily; you can hear and feel the throttling of the engine when you press down on the gas. But naturally, you begin to have some questions: how accurate is the landscape on the screen? What kind of plane am I flying? One could be flying a simulator, thinking it’s a “real” experience. Metzinger believes this is how we live our lives: confusing the real world from content produced by our cockpits, or as he calls them, “self-models,” activated by our brains. We are forever bound inside our cockpits, locked inside a simulation; we are just made not to pay attention.

If life is about being tricked into believing this simulation is real, then our bodies are certainly guilty in helping stage the show. My lack of mobility may be why I am beginning to sense the walls of my cockpit, watching the flickering lights on its walls and thinking that it's real. Of course, you can’t ever experience yourself as a “self-model,” since we are always looking through it; seeing with it.  But as the body becomes less apparent so too are its abilities to help me feel less networked and more human. Less of a system and more of an organism.

I can feel the thin plastic keys against my fingertips, the breeze reaching my legs from the air conditioner that rests near me. There’s a focus on these limited, bodily experiences which now rise to the surface. I remember the days I could move from viewing the details of a metal subway cart to skyscraper skylines with ease, putting my senses into overdrive. In quarantine, the slight carving of sunlight between two clouds now tells me a million stories and I’m its avid reader, desperately seeking stimulation. The windows of the building across my street stand perfectly still like etchings on a canvas. I watch them from my office on 119th street, brick columns separate their concrete frames. Nothing moves. The shades of the bricks change depending on the amount of sunlight, and I often stare at their colors to guess the temperature. A dessert tan means it’s sunny out; a dark beige means overcast and cloudy.

Will I go outside today? Probably not.

As New York City continues to be on “pause” thanks to the COVID epidemic, I live out most of my days in a tiny, two-bedroom apartment in East Harlem. The extra room now serves as my office. If I do “leave” my apartment, it’s usually through a shiny, gray object on my desk; its window a complex, retina display of colors and forms.

For such a thin object, my MacBook Air takes up a lot of space, expanding into multiple locations. Unlike the view from my office, its window can’t be tied down to a single image and is often unpredictable. Smaller windows emerge and carve out a territory on its LCD screen, each having multiple tabs, which house multiple pieces of content, leading to multiple flashes of work or pleasure. One window opens to the voices of demanding students, while another leads to flat, clunky sentences resting on a word document, hoping to turn into my next published article. Some windows relieve me of my stress, others produce it through slow drips of content. I’m still waiting for the perfect window to reveal my Howard-Beele-moment, pushing my head through its thin frame:

“I’m mad as hell, and I can’t take it anymore!”

Windows aren’t the problem though, they’re the symptom of confinement. My office is a small, 100 square foot room facing the quiet side of the street. Family photos stare at me from my desk. A few dress shirts hang lifeless on the door. Old textbooks and novels line the bookshelf behind me. Thanks to incessant boredom, a few books have recently escaped their tight quarters and are scattered in stacks on my floor. Books are now growing like weeds around me. Tolstoy and Hemmingway have crossbred with Bloom and Kuhn.

I’ve spent most of my working, quarantine life in this space, and like many of us, I’ve severely cut down on my bodily movement throughout the day. Where once I was walking into various classrooms and offices on campus, I’m now confined like a hamster, spinning my wheel between four walls. I’ve transferred this desire to move or travel onto my computer’s mouse, allowing this tiny object to reveal new spaces for me. New windows on the shiny screen. I was there at my nephew’s third birthday when I watched a five-minute clip of him blowing out candles on Facebook; I was there for my students’ presentations, their smiling faces fitting neatly in their Zoom frames.

My body feels less and less important with every click and drag of the mouse. What was once an embodied experience now seems immaterial, locating myself here and elsewhere simultaneously. I was both witnessing and absent from my student’s presentations. I met them somewhere in this new Zoom Universe where bodies are only vessels for verbal exchanges and our senses fade into our digital backdrops. These digital windows pull together fragments of the “real,” sharing ideas, images and animations that quickly reconnect me to the world long enough to meet the bare minimum of my professional and social needs. Somehow, I’m finding ways to stay close, and to build a shared community in this solitude.

I’m scared that I’m getting used to it.

But the days go by, and my office space quietly surges on like a river of banality. A flowered coffee mug squeezes between the framed picture of my sister’s wedding and a ruffled, pile of New Yorker magazines. An empty water glass sits near me, wishing to be cleaned. Today, surrounded by these objects I’ll “travel” to go teach a course on Document Design (synchronous Webex lecture), then hold office hours (meeting with the students in a Webex room who signed up through a Google Doc.) and eventually meet friends for happy hour (Zoom meeting at 5pm). By the time the martini reaches my lips my Fitbit will let me know I put in roughly 300 steps for the day. By 6pm I’ll be adjusting the instruments in my cockpit, releasing my foot off the gas pedal and slowing the self-model down for landing. A few too many martinis and the landing may prove difficult, but I’ll welcome the challenge to struggle with its controls and not take it for granted.