Fantasy of Disembodiment and Desire for Presence: The Paradox of Cybernetics in The Nether

Jennifer Haley’s The Nether(2014) interrogates the ethical and ontological boundaries of online behavior through its central premise: “What if someone were interrogated for something they did online?” Set in a dystopian, post-internet virtual environment referred to as “the Nether,” the play introduces “the Hideaway,” a domain modeled after the Victorian era, where pedophilic acts towards and even murder of prepubescent girls are permitted as a means of fulfilling taboo desires prohibited in the “in-world.” At once informed by N. Katherine Hayles’s critical posthumanist approach and the play’s metatheatrical design, this article examines how participants in virtual reality like Sims and Doyle mistake their pursuit of disembodiment and immediacy as a desire for presence. While simultaneously positioning itself as an embodiment of “the Nether,” a novum for this play, which induces cognitive estrangement in the audience, the body of the avatar Iris performed by a live actor demonstrates how actions within virtual reality are the result of the interplay between technology and the body. Tapping into ethical questions that might be posed by VR environments “in the near future,” a nuanced reading of the Nether as a reversed metaverse in this article will ultimately shed a light on the paradoxical relationship between information and materiality in cybernetics.