Page 145 - Cyberculture and New Media

136 The Implicit Body
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stuttering thus creates a tense environment through its
inescapable barrage of stuttering sound and visual
stuttering: noise. Only by lessening their participation will
the information explosion slow into an understandable text
for the viewer…. Their minimal movements, and the
phrases they trigger, literally create new meaning.

The spaces between speaking and listening, between
language and the body, add to the complex experience of
communication. stuttering is not displaying data, but rather,
pushing us to explore these practices of speaking and
listening…

… and to do so in, and as, and with, our bodies. stuttering “suggests
that communication comes to and from us, in ways that even we do not fully
comprehend. ”
Most stuttering performances begin with a barrage of noise and
motion, but its participants inevitably slow, so as to hear the work’s voice.
“The piece asks them not to interact,” and often results in Bhuto-like
gestures, a heightened body-awareness, a flesh informed by and influential in
language, but that cannot be captured or experienced in full. stuttering
performs what Massumi says theory struggles with - the “real incorporeality
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of the concrete” - and frames us as of the between and in relation.
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the central thinkers to
take up this struggle, and thus, helps us understand the embodiment of
interactive art as implicit. For Nancy, our language and discourse are
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remarkably inadequate with regards to the question of embodiment. In On
Touching - Jean Luc Nancy, Derrida’s moving tribute to Nancy, Derrida
asserts that the corpus of Nancy is an “implacable deconstruction of modern
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philosophies of the body proper and the ‘flesh’.”

And all of the ways of thinking the ‘body proper,’ the
laborious efforts to reappropriate what was believed to be
unfortunately ‘objectified’ or ‘reified;’ all of the ways of
thinking about the body proper are contortions of
comparable scope: they end up with nothing but the
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expulsion of what one wished for.

While Nancy does not reject ontology he does reject the traditional
questions of ontology - What is Being? What is Meaning? - instantiating
instead a questioning of the mode of questioning, and asking (with
Heidegger) “how it is that the world and we ourselves as part of the world are
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accessible and available to meaning.” Nancy’s unequivocal answer is: