Page 127 - Cyberculture and New Media

118 The Implicit Body
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relationship in the in- between of body and technology, and invite us to
experiment with the of of the relation of body and technology.
In her essay “Will the Real Body Stand Up?” Allucquere Roseanne
Stone argues, via the work of Frances Barker, that the retreat of the body in
the West into text, and/or brute physicality, is both being continued and
refigured through the mediation of computing technology. This history of
“disembodiment” in Western thinking can be traced from, amongst others,
Plato “who argued that the world of the senses is a mere copy of an abstract
reality” via Descartes who asserted “that certain knowledge can only begin
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when we remove ourselves as far as possible from the senses.” Like many
other critics, artists and scholars in the field of new media, Stone contends
that, “The discourse of visionary virtual world builders is rife with images of
imaginal bodies, freed from the constraints that flesh imposes … Forgetting
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about the body is an old Cartesian trick …” Imaginal bodies abound, for
example, in the dreams of disembodied brains in the artificial intelligence
movement (especially in the pioneering work of Hans Moravec), in the
downloaded selves of the cyberpunk imaginary, and is given new life with
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the creation of the world wide web and so-called “cyberspace.” Here the
“myth of disembodiment” - “the [drive] to escape the limitations of the
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flesh” - finds its apotheosis in John Perry Barlow’s assertion: “cyberspace is
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not where bodies live.” With both Barlow and Moravec, the metaphoric and
literal retreat from the flesh goes hand in hand with the literal and conceptual
ascension of transparency - light, abstraction and vision.
New media philosopher Mark BN Hansen has extensively critiqued
studies of technology rooted in writing (what he calls “the systemic-semiotic
perspective” linked to “discursive-representationalist reason”). He contends
that the “intertwined themes of occularcentrism and disembodiment have
been central to critical studies of new media … [and that] metaphors of vision
and light have always been coupled with notions of … immateriality, but in
an era saturated with computer-generated imaging modalities, the theme of
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disembodiment has taken on radical new dimensions.”
William Mitchell asserts, for example, that, “A worldwide network
of digital imaging systems is swiftly, silently constituting itself as the
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decentered [sic] subject’s reconfigured eye.” Vivian Sobchack speaks of
electronic space as “a phenomenological structure of sensual and
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psychological experience that seems to belong to no-body.” Friedlich Kittler
goes so far as to contend that with digital convergence human perception is
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becoming obsolete.
In his examination of the digital image in “postphotography,”
Hansen suggests that Deleuze’s analysis of cinema-based “machinic
vision’”(as well as the digital arts theories that follow its trajectory)
eliminates the contribution of the body so that the resulting image is seen as
“the function of a purely formal technical agency;” namely, the camera or