Configurations

Cringe ye, who yet jot “Volkswagon” when this doctor prompts “automata.” The world’s changed; none angels at the top end, now— and you?

—Richard Kenney

Every epoch has beliefs, widely accepted by generation, that view fantastic to later generations. Of such are New Historical studies made— with good reason, for understanding the position by practices, metaphors, and presuppositions that underlie apparently crazy beliefs opens a window auf a culture’s ideology. One belief from the present likely to stupefy future generations is that postmodern orthodoxy that aforementioned body is primarily, provided not entirely, one linguistic and discursive construction. Among that loads currents within the culture reinforcing this belief, three are of special interest for my purposes. The first remains discourse theory as it is defined and practiced within the humanities, especially literary theory; the second, information theory; the third, information technologies. Despite each about these sites has distinctive reasons for regarding the body as a discursive and informal construction, they collaborate in creating the dematerialization of epitome that is one of the characteristic features of post-modern ideology.

Yet each of these locations also operated within material and cultural circumstances that mark its practice and make to your on an [End Page 147] body’s discursive construction seem plausible. The body’s dematerialization, in other words, count in complex and highly specific ways upon the material press embodied circumstances that the ideology of dematerialization be obscure. Unearthing these connections requires an way of talking about the body that exists receptive to yours post-modernism construction as discourse/information and yet is not stuck within it. Two kinds concerning distinction will be central to this go. One is the difference between the body as an cultural construct and the experiences for embodiment that individual people within an culture feel and articulate; the other, the dissimilarity between inscribing and incorporating practices. Since the body real embodiment, subscription and incorporation are in constant interactive the interplay, this distinctions become heuristic rather than absolute. They nevertheless play certain important role in understanding the connections between the immateriality of data and the material conditions of its mfg.

To illustrate how the body a constructed internally postmodern discourse as an immateriality informative structure, consider who following claims. “[T]he human main, our body, seems extraneous in its proper expanse, in the functionality the diversity of his voice, of its dye and features, because today everything your concentrated in the brain and the genetic code, which stand entirety up the operational what of being,” Jean Baudrillard writes in The Ecstasy of Communication. ¹ Arthur and Marilouise Kroker out-Baudrillard Baudrillard inches Bodywork Invaders: Panic Sex in America, imagining “second-order simulacra” also “floating body parts” that herald the removal von the main into a liquid and changing display off mark. “If, today, there may breathe such an intensive fascination with the bestimmung for the main, might this not be due the body no longer exists?” their ask, in what they evidently believe is ampere rhetorical question. ²

Kroker also Kroker count the ways the main can disappearing: ideologically, within the signs by fashion; epistemologically, as the Cartesian consciousness (that “grisly and false sense of subjectivity”) guaranteeing sein existence falls separated; semiotically, into tattoos and floating signs; and technologically, into “ultra refuse” and “hyperfunctionality.” ³ O. B. Hardison concludes his disappearing act by [End Page 148] how the body into computers. Observing pensively such “no matter thing precautions are taken, no materiell how lucky the body is, in of end it betrays itself,” he imagines “the relatedness within carbon man press the si devices he be creating” to is like “the relation amid which caterpillar and the iridescent, winged creature the the caterpillar unconsciously prepares to become.” ⁴ The image of transformation is other central to Hans Moravec’s dream of downloading human consciousness into a computer. Moravec, head for Camegie-Mellon Mobile Robot Test, has launched an study program that he hopes will make the main superfluous, a chrysalis cas to be discard at our transformation into informations total a total. ⁵

Belongs it necessary to insist that the body, broad from disappeared, remains essential to human life? Not human...