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Perceptions of Self 241human senses of it. Specifically, there is an obvious appeal to a relinquishingof the viewer’s self because she or he experiences no option but to play along.It was Freud who coined the term "ego" for the consciously motivated aspectsof human selfhood that involve will, rationality, values, sociality, etc., and it doestend to be the notion of "ego-self" that we mean by "self" in common parlance.There is another approach to selfhood that may apply closely to human-IAdynamics, which is to remove the notion of self from the Freudian tradition thatfixates on intrapsychic phenomena, and locate it equally or even predominantlywithin social relations. In her analysis of human willingness to abandon self inrelationships of domination and submission to authority, feminist theorist andpsychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin rejects the primacy of the oedipal quest for alost original unity in the self, and focuses instead on dynamics between self andother that begin in infancy and continue to evolve in adulthood. For Benjamin,domination and submission are signs of failure in the mutuality of recognitionwithin primary relationships that is necessary for a fully realized sense of self.She says, "The need of the self for the other is paradoxical, because the self istrying to establish himself as an absolute, an independent entity, yet he mustrecognize the other as like himself in order to be recognized by him. He mustbe able to find himself in the other" [5, p. 32]. Our receptiveness or resistance tothe authoritarianism of technologies might also be shaped by these deep-seateddevelopmental processes involving our closest relations.Freud’s corollary idea about those aspects of the human psyche that lie outsideego could be described as a kind of excess of self that is outside rationalunderstanding. In my personal absorption of the Freudian schema, there is a"good" excess of self that is fundamentally creative – instinctual, emotional,libidinal, etc. (the "bad" excess of self is a distortion into loss of will or submissionto values that have no creative dimension). In George Bataille’s writingson the erotic, selfhood or individuation is a trauma of discontinuity with theuniverse, a splitting from a once unified state that the self is always seekingto repair, an idea closely related to Freud’s death instinct. Bataille calls thesuper-abundance of energy that typifies individuation a plethora, which is alwayspoised for crisis: the cell splitting, or the organism sexually climaxing.The crisis only momentarily resolves the violence of excess energy: ego-selfequals ongoing violence and crisis [3, pp. 94-108]. This portrait of too muchself I think is closely linked with the Cartesian mind-body split. It is an alternateway of describing a deeply felt ineffectuality in separating the rational mindfrom the affective domain to reconcile desires, needs and the rest of the humanrange of experience.The expansion of the human sensorium that is invoked in multi-sensory artworks do exceed the constraints of ego boundaries by appealing directly to affectthrough senses other than the visual. Consideration of emotion is also oneof the more enticing and challenging aspects of modeling social intelligence in