Page 143 - Cyberculture and New Media

134 The Implicit Body
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A body that is a “dimension of the real” not a mirror of an a priori body
that precedes construction and discourse; a body that is a figure of thought
outside dominant Western conceptions and that can begin to speak of the
relationality of materiality and the materiality of the body as event not
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thing.
As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern points out, it would be a
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mistake to think we know what a body is when we see one. For example,
with regards to certain “feminist quests” to critique and alter dominant
Western modes of embodiment she comments: “Sometimes, though, the
discourse on the embodiment of vision seems to share with rather than
obviate an earlier representationalist obsession with uncovering facts about
the world. Embodiment is brought from under the text - a hidden influence is
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made explicit, and analysis invites us to see what we did not see before.”
There may be, she argues, that in the visual play of embodiment there is
nothing to be “uncovered” about embodiment “since the body is the medium
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- and deliberately incomplete.”
For Massumi what we have to do is think the body neither as naïve
realism nor subjectivism, neither as concrete materialism nor linguistic text,
but rather as “in motion … in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own
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nonpresent potential.” From Deleuze, he asserts that this relation is real but
abstract: “never present in position, only ever in passing … a body in its
indeterminancy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in only
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here and now.” In a completely different context, cultural theorist Tom
Cohen thinks through the work of Walter Benjamin to think materiality again
- not as immediacy, immanence, closed ontology, or an ideality of a before -
as an “as if” that precedes phenomenalization and mimesis. In other words, as
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a virtuality or site of emergence that is non-representational.
What is common to all of these attempts is the thinking of thinking
bodies and materiality that requires that we think anteriority and inscription
again; that we think them not as anthropomorphised figures in which
interiority is privileged. From de Man, Cohen argues that to achieve this
thinking again we need to explore a radical exteriority (an “ex-scription”) that
does not deny the material nature of language and representation, but instead
works with that which precedes the production of referents. This is not, he is
at pains to show, the pre-discursive or extra-discursive (that is removed from
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power and mediations). Here materiality is neither referential, nor
subjective, nor mimetic, nor present as positivity. It is rather present as the
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non-figural, as trace, as movement, and as force.
This thinking of the body - as we are arguing, this thinking of the
body as implicit - means accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal
dimension to the body (a dimension that Hansen in his turn to biology, for
example, occludes somewhat). For Massumi, it is with regards to this “real