An Evening at Home with the Telephone Herald, Newark, New Jersey, 1912
3 Locating the Body in Electrical Space and Time Competing Authorities The young ladies of Frankford . have recently discovered that by holding a piece of tin against the iron foot-rests driven into the wooden poles of the Suburban Electric Light Company they receive a weak elec tric shock, and almost every evening a group gathers around the poles that are not situated on the main thoroughfares and enjoys the fun for hours . One pretty miss was heard to remark, after her first expe rience, "Oh, I thought I was squeezing a handful of pins." "Yes," said another, "it's something like being kissed by a young man with a bristly moustache." —Philadelphia Record, 1891 An evening at home with the Telephone Herald, Newark, New Jersey, 1912. (Literary Digest) In any culture codes for bodily communication are conventionally elab orated and, like other codes, require skillful manipulation. The body is the most familiar of all communicative modes, as well as the sen sible center of human experience, which lives or dies with it. Upon it, all other codes are inscribed to a greater or lesser extent. There is no form of communication that does not require the body's engage ment, though printed and written messages may involve a smaller di rect range of its perceptual and motor capacities than oral-gestural mes sages do. In addition, strange experiences are often translated and made familiar by comparisons with the body, and by categories of classifi cation derived from the body's experience. The body is a convenient touchstone by which to gauge, explore, and interpret the unfamiliar, an essential information-gathering probe we never quite give up, no matter how sophisticated the supplemental modes available to us.
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