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Mark B. Hansens Argument: Bodies in Code

By this I do not mean a purely informational body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday

body. I mean a body submitted to and constituted byan unavoidable and empowering technical

deterritorialization a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized in

conjunction with technics it is precisely through the vehicle of bodies-in-code that our

contemporary techno-culture, driven by digital technologies, comes to constitute a distinct

concrete phase in our contemporary technogenesis (our originary yet historico-technically

differentiated coevolution with technics). (20)

The Virtual Body as Resistance

Far from being a mere instrument or the first medium (as some versions of posthumanism

allege, the body is a primordial and active source of resistance; indeed, it is as resistance as the

living expression of something simultaneously organization and obstacle to its organization that

the body form the source of excess supporting all levels of constitution (or individuation), from the

cellular to the cosmic. As source of excess, the body possess a flexibility that belies any effort,

such as that of cyber-cultural criticism (and behind it, of cultural constructivism), to reduce it to a

passive surface for signification. The body is affirms Millon, an entity that becomes a person, a

creative subject, a being or an individual according to the circumstances. (15)

With its picture of an originarily technical organismic perspective, this paradigm effectively

repudiates all externalistaccounts of the body, including constructivists theories that have

recently held sway in critical discourse. It thus offers an affirmative model of bodily agency that

conceives of the embodied organisms constitutive coupling with the social (paradigmatically, the

technically mediated world of images, including linguistic images) in a fundamentally different

manner than does (for example) Judith Butlers theory of performative iteration. The latter, in the

final instance, subordinates the agency of the body (the force of iteration) to the content of the

social images that, following the paradoxical operation of (linguistic) performativity, open up the

space of its exercise. (13)

Technics

Using the broader definition of the Greek tekhne, which means not only technology but also art,

skill and dexterity, technics refers to the interplay of a social milieu and technological innovation -

the "wishes, habits, ideas, goals" as well as "industrial processes" of a society.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford)

Mark B. N. Hansen: Bodies in CodeJessica Steele

CCTP 704: Gender, Sexuality and the Body Professor Michael Coventry

Georgetown University April 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tekhne&action=edit&redlink=1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumfordhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumfordhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumfordhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumfordhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tekhne&action=edit&redlink=1

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Marleau-Ponty & The Phenomenal Body

Body Image: generated from a primarily visual apprehension of the body as an external object

(38-39)

Body Schema (Body-Environment Coupling (20):

emerges from what, with autopoietic *literally: self-creation]theory we have called theoperational perspective of the embodied organism. As such it encompasses an originary,

preobjective process of world constitution that, by giving priority to the internal perspective of the

organism, paradoxically includes what is outside its body proper, what lies in the interactional

domain specified by embodied enaction.

What IS Embodiment?

Embodiment is essentially and orginarily technical(78)

Embodiment and technicity thus comprise two

divergent, yet entirely complementary (indeed, strictlycorrelated) expressions of the negativity of (human)

being as Merleau-Ponty understands itthey each

occasion an orginary form of transcendence and thus,

together, furnish the (double) condition for the

emergence of the human as a form of life that is, as

sensing sensible.(79)

Primary Tactility

Beneath the reciprocity of pure reflexivity and pure

corporeity, activity and passivity, consciousness and

matter, lies the primordial cart of tactilityas a first

(and originary embrace off alterity, an original of the

elsewhere, a Selbst that is an Other(74).

Reversibility & Double Sensation of the cart

Cannot quite occur in fact and yet must, by right, be possible(71)

As the protodivision of primary tactility, the cart generates a protoreversibility a reversibility

prior to and independent of any actual terms to be reversed that forms the sensible-

transcendental condition for sensation(75).

Second-Generation VR/Mixed Reality: allreality is mixed reality(5)

As technology that lays bare the enabling constraints of the body(that is, the bodys necessity),

virtual reality comprises our cultures privileged pathway for laying bare mixed reality as a

technical-transcendental structure, which is equally to say, for exposing the technical element

that lies at the heart of embodiment. (15)