Page 135 - Cyberculture and New Media

126 The Implicit Body
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We might say that the body schema, like touch in the
higher office accorded it by Jonas, forms an infraempirical
form: one that is immanent to bodily life without being
reducible to its empirical contents; moreover, like Jonas’s
conception, the body schema involves vision and touch
(along with the other senses) in an irreducible co-
functioning that, in and of itself, indicts the more abstract,
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visual conception of the body-image.

This conception of the body-schema, says Hansen, resonates with
the potential for thinking psychasthenia beyond the optical and projective. As
with his mediation on the haptic, Hansen here advocates for the importance
of the body as a filter and for the framing function of the embodied viewer
participant, thereby drawing attention to the role of bodily affectivity in
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“producing and maintaining … experience.”
Thinking alongside Hansen’s work forms an important foundation
for the thinking of the implicit body in interactive body art. However, while
this work takes us outside of the crisis narratives of disembodiment and the
recursive hegemony of visuality, it tends to embody a preformist
understanding of enfleshment. As we will explore in the last part of this
paper, assuming a body prior to interaction and/or subsuming touch into the
haptic may run the risk of reiterating an implied reference to an a priori
materiality. The implicit body, we are arguing, is not found in the co-
mediation of body and image - in what Hansen calls the “digital middle” of
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body and prosthesis - it is rather in the of of the relation of co-emergence; it
is incipience of a not-yet extant flesh doubled with a not-yet finished artwork.
Here, digitality engenders a horizon in spatial-temporal location (an interval)
in which the advent of the subject is simultaneously the advent of the object:
the implicit body.
It is also important to bear in mind Dag Petersson’s caveat, a caution
against regarding computers as prostheses. This, he says, would place
computing under the dominance of reflection. Speaking of the work of the
artist Marcaccio, he argues that

knowledge does not form materiality; knowledge is formed
by materiality… the body of movement [in interactive art]
has a capacity for conceptualization that is not opposed to
the materiality of the conceptualized. Instead of the
traditional hierarchical order that arises from such a
metaphysical opposition, materiality is a constellation of
curves that conditions knowledge. But this knowledge has a
particular capacity to understand and conceptualize the