Page 129 - Cyberculture and New Media

120 The Implicit Body
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what it means to be an embodied agent and, as such, we need an approach to
digitality that acknowledges affect, perception, bodiliness and cognition.
Ursula Frohne and Christian Katti, in their discussion of the politics
of the body and language in new media, contend that the “‘body’ and
‘language’ gained new significance with the emergence of action,
performance, and conceptual art,” and retrospectively, “they may be
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considered preliminary impulses for the introduction of ‘new media’.” This
historical trajectory foregrounds, they argue, the need “to develop a critical
concept of media that neither presupposes nor excludes the categories of
body and language … to address the political implications for changing
notions of the body and language under the impact of electronic space and
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communication.”
Much of the work in action, performance and concept art that
prefigures “new media” art draws attention to the dominant structures of
representation and meaning-making, and works to reveal the body as a site of
inscription, surveillance and power. While these works may not invest in
bodily affectivity of the participant, they do ask the spectator to grapple with
“the body’s” explication in discourse and in art practices (for example, in
primitivism), and attempt to make visible the relations of seeing - who sees
and who is seen - embedded in these discourses and practices. Because these
works also disrupt inherited structures of representation (and question the
hegemonic relationship between the so-called “real” and the “copy,” the
“subject” and the “object”) we start here in taking up the challenge to develop
a critical vocabulary that does not exclude or presuppose the body.
The “explicit body,” a term coined by Rebecca Schneider to
describe feminist performance art, speaks to a “mass of orifices and
appendages, details and tactile surfaces … [that] in representation is foremost
a site of social markings, physical parts and gestural signatures of gender,
race, class, age, sexuality - all of which bear ghosts of historical meaning,
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markings delineating social hierarchies of privilege and deprivilege.” The
explicit body in performance “explicate[s] bodies in social relation” and
“renders the symbolic [as] literal” in order to “pose a threat … [to] implicit
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structures of comprehensibility.” It is a body which is scarred by a history
larger than the bodies’ wearer - we are peeling away to reveal what is already
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there, but unbeknownst to us.
Through an “explosive literality,” and with an eye towards the Latin
root explicare (or, to unfold), the explicit body is performed to “peel back
layers of signification,” to “expose not an originary, true, or redemptive body,
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but the sedimented layers of signification themselves.” Explicit body
performance deploys the material body to collide the literal against the
symbolic order of meaning in order to implode the binary logics of capitalism
and patriarchy and reveal, to paraphrase Judith Butler, which bodies come to
matter and why.