T ELEBODIES & T ELEVISIONS: C ORPOREALITY AND A GENCY IN T ECHNOCULTURE

I NGRID R ICHARDSON BA (HONS)

D OCTOR OF P HILOSOPHY U NIVERSITY OF W ESTERN S YDNEY

2003

I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution.

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Ingrid Richardson

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor Zoë Sofoulis at the University of Western Sydney for her friendship, inspiration and encouragement throughout this project. I am also indebted to Zoë for her mentoring guidance, collegiate support and intellectual generosity over the past decade.

As my supervisor in the early stages of this work, thanks also to Horst Ruthrof in the School of Arts at Murdoch University, whose concept of the ‘corporeal turn’ became central to my own thinking about bodies and tools. I am also grateful to both the academic and administration staff in the School of Media, Communication and Culture at Murdoch University for providing a supportive work environment and teaching relief.

Thanks to my honours students Carly Harper, Pam Martin and Erin Hefferon: to Carly, for sharing my interest in corporeality and new technologies over many brainstorming sessions; to Pam, for prompting me to more effectively grasp the notion of ‘flesh’ in Merleau-Ponty’s later work; and to Erin, for her many insights into the ontology of technospaces.

Thanks to my partner Craig for his endurance, and for helping out whenever asked, and to my beautiful children Zoë and Jamie, who were born after this thesis began; my daughter Zoë has been a wonderful help and a caring sister, and my son Jamie a happy presence.

Finally, a special thanks to my parents Krista and Trevor for their support throughout this long process, and especially to my mum who over the past months has looked after me and my family whenever needed, and in every way possible.

T ELEBODIES & T ELEVISIONS: C ORPOREALITY AND A GENCY IN T ECHNOCULTURE

I NTRODUCTION 1

C HAPTER O NE: V ISUALISM i. Oc ularce ntrism 26 ii. Po stc lassic al Vision a nd Tec hno vision 43

C HAPTER T WO: C ORPOREALISM i. The (te c hno )c o rpo real turn 62 ii. Phe no me no log y 69 iii. Co rpo real Diffe renc e 85

C HAPTER T HREE: T HE C ORPOREALITY OF T ECHNOVISION i. A te c hno so matic me tho do log y 108 ii. Biome dic al Imaging : MRI 118 iii. Virtuality and Cybe rso ma 140

C HAPTER F OUR: C ORPOREAL TV i. The me dium spe c ific ity o f TV 160 ii. Televisual spa c e : windo w a nd c o ntaine r 176 iii. Soma tic Invo lve me nt: mo rpho log y o f the te lebo dy 202

C ONCLUSION 224

B IBLIOGRAPHY 232

A BSTRACT

In this work I aim to trace some of the transformative effects of televisual technologies in contemporary post-industrial culture, and to critically assess their impact on the way we produce knowledge, and experience a sense of embodiment and social agency. I question the relation between humans and tools, and investigate the hybridity of words such as technoculture and biotechnology, arguing that the separation of human and technology, and body and tool, at the level of both existence and knowledge is a synthetic distinction. Throughout this work I combine and adapt the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Don Ihde’s philosophy of technology, the postmodern materialism of Donna Haraway, and the recent work of corporeal feminists Moira Gatens, Liz Grosz, Vicki Kirby and Gail Weiss. I suggest that every human-technology relation is irreducible, producing certain kinds of being, and particular ways of knowing and making the world. Nothing – including ourselves – can be defined intrinsically; we are all in some sense extrinsic and relational achievements, conflations of body, culture, environment, technology. Thus, all interfaces can be described as technosomatic interfaces. Moreover, the predominance of televisual and imaging technologies in contemporary technoculture has meant that our visual tools become inseparable from what we might discern as our own perceptual and bodily boundaries as ‘access’ to the world. Specifically, I concentrate on some of the medium specific effects of postclassical visualising technologies, from high-end ensembles such as virtual reality and medical imaging apparatuses, to the mundane apparatus of television and the remote control device. Such ways of seeing, I argue, collaborate in producing an emergent tele-body, or a telesomatic mode of perception and knowing which exceeds standard epistemologies of vision in both science and the everyday. This work thus aims to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding the variable effects of postclassical technovision and televisuality upon our modes of embodiment.

introduction

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introduction

Let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified.

Julian Offray de La Mettrie (1748)

My body is to the greatest extent what everything is: a dimensional this. I t is the universal thing. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968: 260)

With every change to our technological interfaces there is a corresponding modification to perceptual reach and communicative possibility. The shift from analog to digital technologies and forms of media over the past fifty years has mobilised a critical transition in how we relate to and make meaning of the world. One of the most significant effects of this translation of image and information into digital code is the increasing predominance of telepresent interfaces and media forms. These are technologies which both enable some kind of tele-perceptual reach over physical or geographic distance, and technologies which attain a measure of perceptual agency by rendering ‘sensible’ to the human sensorium what would otherwise remain non-visible, inaudible or untouchable. At the very expensive and high-tech end, for example, apparatuses used in both medicine and popular sci-fi films such as The Fifth Element (1997) and Hollow Man (2000), deliver photo-realistic animations of the viscera of living bodies. At the more mundane end of broadcast television, viewers have long been able to see and hear events as they happen elsewhere around the world. Such technologies, a number of theorists suppose, have upset our experience and understanding of subjectivity and embodiment, such that neither can be defined without ambivalence.

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This work begins by questioning the relation between humans and tools, and the reciprocal effects of corporeality and technology. In particular, my critique will focus on the predominance of visualising apparatuses in both contemporary technoscience and everyday life. In both scientific knowledge and philosophical enquiry, the eyes have most often served as the organic prototype of knowing, such that observability is conflated with knowability. This primacy of vision is implicit in the practice of everyday life, where the status of vision as the best and most valuable of the senses is played out in a vast number of visual metaphors and directives (“see what I mean?” “is that clear?” “its right in front of you!” “you need to focus!”). Similarly, this hegemony is prevalent in the technological development of visualising and imaging devices, where the primary aim is to overcome all obstacles of vision, be they barriers of size, opacity or inaccessibility.

From early Greek philosophy onwards, questions concerning the acquisition of knowledge have frequently been reduced to the condition of having seen, and thus the existence of things in the world becomes similarly confined to that which can be seen. Indeed, as I will argue, this primacy of visual perception has provided most of the conditions for a Cartesian objectivity which separates the mind from the body, and continues to uphold the status of visualising technologies in both the scientific realm and that of popular culture. The effect of this ocularcentrism on the subject-object relation cannot be overstated: the difference between subjects and objects of knowledge is largely sustained by a perceptual hierarchy where tactility, haptic proximity, motility and sound have been rendered subordinate and secondary to the act of seeing and the criteria of visibility. As such, the fusion of technology and science into technoscience (sometimes called experimental or instrumental science) has been complexly played out through the in(ter)vention and use of scopic technologies. That is, the prioritisation of visual perception in scientific knowledge has been largely carried over to techno- apparatuses, such that vision machines are considered the best, the most ‘authentic’ or ‘telling’ ones. In quantum physics, for example, the electron microscope is able to visualise genes and large molecules and thus transform them from theoretical to observable entities (Hacking, 1983: 262). Technoscientific visualising tools reinforce science’s visualist bias by making non-visible phenomena present and accounted for by translating data into visual form. That is, the visualising devices of technoscience are the means by which decisions about what exists — i.e. ontological decisions — are made.

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In their work as perceptual devices, then, it might seem that modern visualising technologies further an elite visual bias, the consequence of which has been a marginalisation of the haptic, the tactile, and the kinesthetic. Primarily, this is because technovisions are also tele-visions — that is, they set up a physical or perceptual distance between knower and known, observer and observed. Yet as I will suggest, in both technoscience and the everyday, technologies of seeing actively antagonise the assumption that vision gives us access to the truth of things, or that it is a distal and non-intervening mode of perception removed from the corporeal entanglements of the body. In the investigation of very small sub- atomic particles, for example, it is now well known that simply the act of observation itself affects the behavior of such entities (Hacking, 1983). In such modes of observation, the eyes quite literally ‘handle’ and alter things in the world, countering the idea that science objectively observes and documents the environment as it is. Moreover, as I will show in the final chapter, even within the everyday technovisual practice of watching television or other media screens, we are not transported by vision away from the body. Rather, our somatic and cultural memories, our sense of collective embodiment, our embodied navigation of the media space, and the specificities of the body-tool interface all work to make the experience quite full-bodied.

The epistemic and ontic trajectories of televisual technologies will be the critical domain of this thesis, from the complex vision machines of technoscience to the mundane domesticity of TV, and their embeddedness into so many of our human- technology relations. At the outset, however, before such an inquiry can take place, I will sketch out the particular interpretations of both technology and the tele- which will be central to my argument and method.

TECHNOLOGY, TOOLS AND THE TELE

Throughout the discussion to follow it is by design that the terms tool and apparatus are often chosen in the place of technology and machine. Both terms are intended to reflect the inclusion of hand-held and non-mechanical devices, and also remind us of the material and built nature of technologies even when they are black-boxed and comprised largely of invisible circuitry and digitalised components. Machines and technologies often presage a systematic inter- — 4 —

functionality of parts, along with automated or semi-automated operation, an apprehension embedded in the ‘-ology’ or logos of the technological. Within discourses such as engineering, for example, there is both a well-defined field of technical knowledge and a discriminatory understanding of complex machines as being quite distinct — in an ontological or substantial sense — from the human. Thus I am proposing that tools are not necessarily located within the ‘-ological’ confines of technology, and the corresponding agentic and ontic hierarchy between knowers and the known; they can reside more easily, perhaps, in the middle ground of a relational ontology.

The use of tool in an adjectival sense can also be applied to the quasi-technical aspects of things — such as our own bodies — that are not usually seen as either tools or technologies. We are accustomed to interpreting our various tools as prostheses to, or extensions of, both our physical bodies and our sensorium, but less comfortable with a recursive understanding of our own bodies as tools — as continuous with the domains or fields of equipment within which we find ourselves. To cite Latour: “What is a tool…? It is the extension of social tools to nonhumans!” (1994: 805). In this sense, ‘tools’ rather than ‘technology’ more successfully troubles the ‘divide’ between human and non-human agency. In a 1967 interview media theorist Marshall McLuhan said: “a medium is not something neutral — it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them, it bumps them around” (cited in Rosenthal, 1969: 20). McLuhan famously argued that all technologies are prostheses or sensorial extensions of some kind; older technologies such as wheels and hammers can be seen as extensions of particular body parts (i.e. legs and hands), whereas today’s cybernetic technologies are more generally extensions of our internal and external sensorium. As Carey writes, for McLuhan:

[s]ight, hearing and tactility derive from a nervous system originally contained within the skin. Each of the media has in turn extended these mechanisms, these aspects of the nervous system, beyond the skin. They have externalised them. The book and camera extend the eye, radio and the listening device extend the ear, television extends not only the eye and ear but also the hand. Electric circuitry in general represents an extension of the entire nervous system (Carey, 1969: 289).

Yet the construal of all technologies as tools problematises this move from particularity (simplicity) to generality (complexity), and also the idea that tools are always merely extensions or additions to the body. Rather, they become part of the way we experience the world, and thus invariably both aspects of our embodiment — 5 —

and ways of being in the world: co-creators of various kinds of environments and living spaces. Clocks, cars, airplanes, houses, electricity, domestic appliances and all forms of digital media are technologies of temporal and spatial transformation that “interfere with biological rhythms within us. We include our perceptions of such disturbances in the truth of understanding them” (Rosenthal, 1969: 154). As Don Ihde (1993) points out, our corporeality is always both magnified and reduced by our tools: telescopic devices may extend the reach of our vision, but while vision is extended other sense-perceptions retract, turning our attention away from the immediate and tactile and towards the distant environment.

The concept of medium specificity is also central to my understanding of tools and their effects. An idea emerging from the technological determinist arguments of McLuhan and Harold Innis, medium specificity describes the fact that specific media have specific spatial, temporal and socio-cultural effects, determining particular conditions of possibility for the way meaning and society are made. While Innis was concerned with the historical breadth and evolving political effects of communications technologies on cultural formation and social organisation, McLuhan claimed that all media are extensions of the body: they alter our sensory access to the world, they determine and organise our experience, our forms of knowledge, indeed the very structure of perception. Here, the ergonomic and ontological affinity between the internal sensorium of the body and its actual and potential technological augmentations is implicitly assumed. As Robert Innis suggests, “the ‘splitting’ effect of technology upon the senses is further paralleled by what McLuhan... called the ‘extension of the sensorium by technological dilation’ which has the effect of ‘setting up new ratios among all the senses’” (Innis, 1984: 70). Put another way, the notion of medium specificity in McLuhan’s sense interprets our ontology as inescapably interfacial or mediate (i.e. rather than ‘im-mediate’). Throughout this thesis I will argue similarly, although more expansively and with a particular post-phenomenological bent: firstly, the concept of medium specificity is broadened to include all tools (from the proto- technological to the post-industrial) as both communicative and corporealising devices; secondly, tools are not considered as extensions or augmentations, but in a phenomenological sense as aspects of our corporeal schematics, partially determining the posture or attitude of one’s body towards the world, and thus the emergence of techno-specific modes of embodiment or technosoma.

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This stress on what I think of as the ‘tool-ic’ aspect of technology also counters the tendency — in particular common with visualising apparatuses — to believe that the technology is transparent in the processes of translating and representing the world. Medical imaging devices in particular are used in this way, as extensions of an objective scientific eye, yet even television, despite our literacy of the camera’s bias and the constructedness of the in-frame scene, is often represented quite simply as a window onto the world. In these and many other instances, it seems that we see through the technology and not in collaboration with it (Ihde, 1993). As I intend it to be understood, the tool-concept makes no distinction between ‘primary’ sense-perception and ‘technological’ sense-perception, as if there were an original human body outside an equipmental environment. As Latour states, this duality of human and technology is inherently flawed:

The very shape of humans, our very body, is already made in large part of sociotechnical negotiations and artifacts. So, considering the human as that which must be protected against the encroachment of technology, or, symmetrically, considering techniques as efficient material objective forces that have to be purged from the polluted effects of human interests and subjectivities, is tantamount to saying that we want to get rid of our humanity. We are never limited to social ties. We are never faced with objects. Where should we position humanity then? Humanity should be positioned in the crossover… as the very possibility of mediating between different mediators (1994: 806).

An understanding of this collusion points to both the complicity between subject and object, and between technology and human, but also to the very materiality and corporeality of our perception and knowing. If tools are understood to enter the corporeality of the body such that they are em-bodied, then they cannot be seen as ‘extending’ only one sense to the exclusion of others. Again, both microscopic and telescopic tools modify the eyes relation to the arm and hand, such that haptic perception is also altered. That is, the focus-function of such devices — and indeed all remote controls — demands a kinesthetic awareness of the knobs and dials. As I will argue throughout this thesis, different mediums elicit different kinds of body-tool relations and sensory participation.

The simplicity of the tool as word and thing — its mundanity and ‘everydayness’ — might also prove a useful counteraction to our interpretation of Technology (with a capital T) as somehow exceeding our comprehension and control in its proportions, complexity, and pervasiveness. Although an understanding of the technicity of contemporary technologies might require a specialised discourse and literacy, their ‘tool-ic’ aspects can return us to their ‘hand-iness’ and certain — 7 —

tactility, and the inevitable continuity between familiar tools and our own bodies. The tool-concept thus works towards a translation of technology in terms of embodiment, and insists that all technological interfaces — even those tele- technologies which offer distal perception — are implicated in a corporeal immediacy. All interfaces, in fact, are technosomatic interfaces. Such an approach can re-orient the well-traveled trajectory of modern technology which prioritises the visual over other senses, by insisting that our engagement with tools, even primarily visual ones, nevertheless involves some kind of haptic interface and instills a specific body-world relation. This interpretation can critically reflect upon various contemporary renditions of technology, particularly those which suggest that televisual and virtuality technologies offer us a way to leave the body behind. As I will argue in the third chapter, all tools, including state-of-the-art cybertechnologies, are always-already modes of embodiment.

Having outlined a working interpretation of technology, and some theoretical implications of the tool-concept, I will briefly turn to a discussion of the tele- as a particular form among other domains of equipmentality. What is it that the tele- signifies in contemporary technoculture? Does it have its own trajectory or telos? Potentially it may be useful to distinguish between technoculture, which names our increasing dependence on electronic and digital equipment in the lifeworld, and teleculture, as a more specific and predominant dependence on prostheses and sensorial probes which seek to conquer distance by rendering the world virtually proximal. If, as I will argue, agency is always-already both embodied and equipmental (a matter for body-and-tool), and if the field of equipmentality is in so many ways dominated by visualising tele-technologies, then what kind of medium specific agency and embodiment emerges out of this sociotechnical relation?

While ‘tele-’ might be semantically defined as a prefix indicative of distance, from a philosophical and cultural studies perspective it has become a complex yet paradoxical indicator of the postmodern or late modern experience: epistemologies of time, mobility, and distance, and the material parameters and limits of bodies and objects become mutated, in particular, by ‘tele-technologies’ such as the telephone, the television, and telecommunications technologies such as the internet. Media theorists such as McLuhan, Innis and Carey have argued that such technologies have had gestalt-like effects on cultural practices, the physical formation of societies, the manner in which we conceive of objects of knowledge, and on the ways in which we understand the body and its limits. — 8 —

In ontological terms, the distancing effects of the tele- can be theorised as impacting directly on the trajectory of subject-object relations in Western metaphysics. As Romanyshyn suggests:

Technological instruments like the telescope and the microscope, the telephone and the television, the automobile and the airplane, are not merely or even primarily instruments which bridge distance. Rather, they are instruments called into being by the distance we have created, by the distance we have put between ourselves and the world, between our senses and the world of which they make sense. They become possible and necessary only when the distance between us and the world has increased (Romanyshyn, 1989: 97).

Thus high technologies are manifestations of a pre-existing epistemic ‘tele-effect’ set up between knowers and known; they realise that very condition of distance as a mode of knowing (Romanyshyn, 1989: 97). Heidegger’s analysis also considers the effect of modern technology in this context of distance. In ‘The Age of the World Picture’ he deliberately juxtaposes “the annihilation of great distances” evidenced by airplane travel, and “the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness” produced at random by the radio (Heidegger, 1977: 134). For Heidegger, both the overcoming of physical space by transportation technologies, and the appropriation of distant places by telepresencing technologies such as radio and television, are both the equivalent and dire effects of the essence of modern technology. Indeed, in Heideggerian terms, such tele-technologies are the typical instruments of Enframing (das Ge-stell) which names modern technology’s translation of the world into picture, object and resource. Enframing thus generates a dynamic of revealing and concealing within which we relate to Being as present-at-hand (vorhandenheit), or as that which can be represented or literally ‘placed-before’ our eyes. That is, the ocular or eye-subject becomes the central figure against which all representations are measured and relativised. This dynamic instantiates the conditions of ontological difference between subject and object, and epistemic distance between knower and known (i.e. the knower knows the known but not vice versa).

This mode of re-presentation — positing the totality of entities as ‘standing before’ — is intricately related to the primacy of vision in Western culture. The dialectics of revealing and concealing within tele-technological enframing gives primacy to a particular kind of vision, an ocularcentric metaphysics which translates the world as-picture and reinforces the ontological difference of subject and object. As Heidegger states: — 9 —

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word ‘picture’ [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is (Heidegger, 1977: 134).

For Heidegger telematic and imaging technologies clearly exacerbate this separation of subject and object, and in particular, the televisual distance between observer and observed. Thus the essence of modern technology, as that which converts objects into that-which-stand-before, and the real into standing-reserve, is coterminous with the translation of world-as-picture, in which we as subjects take up the position of organising and articulating visually-biased interpretations of the world. As Silverstone suggests, Heidegger’s conceptualisation of enframing finally becomes almost “indistinguishable from knowledge as such” (Silverstone, 1994: 81). For the most part, within Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, tele-technological instruments and apparatuses further protract the distancing/deferring effects of enframing. In the third chapter, however, I suggest that state-of-the-art telematic apparatuses in medicine and virtual reality often work to perplexify this effect. Similarly, in the final chapter, against the more common visualist analysis, domestic TV will be interpreted as a complex topology combining tele-effect and soma.

More recently, theorists of new media and cybertechnologies have appropriated the term ‘telepistemology’ to describe the study of knowledge acquired by way of state- of-the-art tele-technological ensembles such as the Internet, virtual reality and telerobotics.1 As Goldberg states, “each new invention for communication or measurement forces us to recalibrate our definition of knowledge” (Goldberg, 2000: 3). Yet it is difficult to adequately capture the epistemological difference between pre- and post- tele-technologies, or to make the even finer distinctions between early and contemporary telecommunications. If we acknowledge that no perception is precisely immediate — always mediated by a complex array of environmental, corporeal, cultural and historical specificities — then surely all perception is telepistemic. How then to grasp the particular effects of the more recent televisual and telemediatic apparatuses? In the chapters to follow I will trace the mutable relationship between the tele- and ways of knowing/being in

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1 As evidenced in Ken Goldberg’s edited collection The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2000. — 10 —

contemporary technoculture. In particular, I will work towards an equipmental and corporealist theory of agency, and argue that both knowing and being are intrinsically and inseparably embodied and tool-ic. Insisting on the imbrications of somatics and instrumentality is a reaction against, and critique of, both postmodern textualism and some of the recent celebrations of cyberspace and virtual reality, the latter of which are supposedly said to have freed us from the fleshy barrier of our bodies, and made possible the unencumbered creation of disembodied ‘post-corporeal’ identities. Given the close relationship between postmodernism and the growth of digital/visual technologies, in the next section I will follow the trajectory from theories of the postmodern and the tele- technological, to arrive at more recent developments in theories of embodiment.

F ROM POSTMODERNISM AND TEXTUALISM

TO THE CORPOREAL TURN

For theorists of the postmodern such as Paul Virilio, Arthur Kroker and Jean Baudrillard, tele-technologies have hyper-realised the world by translating it into images and information. Such theorists also focus on the paradoxical effect of these apparatuses; on the one hand, the contraction of time brought about by communication and military technologies seeking ever greater efficiency and speed, and on the other, the expansion of the senses over physical space, and the excess of information and simulacra in mass media. High technology is often considered central to postmodernism, and digital and electronic technologies as ‘post’ the mechanical and industrial modern era. Yet ironically, theorists such as Baudrillard and Virilio see in the implosion of time and space characteristic of recent tele-technologies, a return to the pre-Enlightenment desire to reduce everything to a single and transparent interface between bodies, selves and the world (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983: 62). For Baudrillard (1983, 1990), in particular, simulation — the copy of the copy enabled by digital information — is the emergent post-representational mode of communication which defeats the logical Cartesian binarism. This is an elision, as Baudrillard points out, emerging from the neutrality and impartiality inherent in digital imaging techniques and televisual codes, which do not distinguish between real and hyperreal, representation and simulation. Paradoxically, however, it is also the result of two contradictory effects: the economy of the code (the 0/1 or on/off switch of computer language), where everything is reduced and manipulated in terms of — 11 —

binary linearity, and the excess or gluttony of images and information which is characteristic of today’s tele-media.

On television, for example, the relation between the simulated TV-event (edited and reconstructed) and the ‘reality’ of that event is effaced. This is nowhere more deliberate and explicit than in the proliferation of reality TV shows, which attempt to capture a voyeuristic peep into the lives of ‘real’ people by first setting up the very conditions for each televised life-fragment (e.g. a surprise garden/house makeover, a dream date). But Baudrillard refers also to the more sinister effects of the hyperreal in his critique of the first Gulf War as media event, during which we saw not war but “a programmed and melodramatic version” of war; a virtual war (Baudrillard, 1995).2 The perspectival depth and space of primary reality has been flattened and absorbed by the model or simulation: the real is now a secondary and indifferent text of the virtual.

Baudrillard’s work is perhaps recognised as conveying most radically the incursion of informatic media into the fabric of late 20th and early 21st century Western culture. He figures an all-pervasive and entropic hyperreality: the ad infinitum proliferation of information and images-as-real-effects making chaos out of individual and collective experience. As we are all increasingly drawn into using tele-apparatuses as interfaces, communication is unhinged from contactual relations, and communities rendered virtual and bodiless. There is little room in this schematic for any viable notion of agency: liveliness becomes a property not of a corporeal being, but of information itself. This theory of the postmodern takes the linguistic turn of poststructuralism to its extreme, by situating existence within an informatic or semiotic domain: our being-in-the-world is wholly disembodied and textualised, inscribed by discursivity and the ‘code’. Indeed, much postmodern and poststructuralist thought is quite clearly resistant to any materialist approach to technoculture, equating tele-media with a dematerialising effect upon communicative possibility. From this perspective, in fact, tele- technologies are most frequently given as exemplary of this effect; that is, they are apparatuses which ‘defer’ perceptual experience away from material being-in-the- world. For Baudrillard, the couch potato as TV-viewer accurately describes the mute stasis of today’s audience. Our only strategy in this mediatised world, in

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2 He states: “By the way, do you know how General Schwarzkopf, the great Gulf War strategist, celebrated his victory? He had a huge party at Disney World. These festivities in the palace of the imaginary were a worthy conclusion to such a virtual war” (1996). — 12 —

fact, is to be deliberately uncommunicative and reticent; to discard any pretense of subjectival agency and appropriate instead the taciturn recalcitrance of the object (Baudrillard, 1990).

Yet the postmodern struggle against institutional and humanist narratives of a universal real can in many ways be read as a crucial first step in apprehending the specificities of our epistemo-technic merger with electronic media and information systems. Interestingly, this struggle has also intersected with postclassical science. While for Baudrillard tele-mediatic technologies create a debilitating excess of information, such that simulations infinitely defer the real, some theorists of the postmodern such as Lyotard (1984) were more optimistic. Lyotard proposed that the emergence of postmodern sciences such as quantum physics and fractal geometry — and their instrumental embodiment in high-tech tele-apparatuses such as electron microscopes — could give us blueprints for envisaging and realising fragmented and non-coincident realities. Thus postmodern sensibility can be complemented by technoscience; indeed, postmodernism is sometimes construed as a trajectory of high technology and technoscientific knowledge, precisely because it is through technoscientific apparatuses that the ‘compound’ eye of postmodernism has emerged (Ihde, 1990). Clearly, high technologies — most obviously perhaps ‘smart’ machines with ‘fuzzy’ logic, but also devices used in quantum mechanics, modern thermodynamics and molecular biology — have made it increasingly difficult to sustain the dichotomising metaphysics embedded in Cartesian epistemology. Indeed, they seem to ‘reveal’ our lack of integrity as prime movers and knowers, and thus the contingent nature of our being and knowing. Yet, as I will show, it is not only high technologies which suggest such incursions, for there is such a technocorporeal history to be traced across the whole range of our visualising and communication tools.

Although the embeddedness of postmodern culture within tele-technologies and telecommunications systems may be widely acknowledged, the consonance between tele-media and the postmodern cannot be uncritically assumed. Early theorists of the postmodern such as Lyotard, who were uncritical about this relation, did not deal adequately with an inherent contradiction. That is, while the postmodern may serve as an indicator of semiotic release, of liberation from the constraints of classical paradigms through its skepticism towards grand narratives (Lyotard, 1984), technology’s essence, pace Heidegger, is more inclined towards — 13 —

utility, calculability, and the systematisation of knowledge and language as information. Moreover, while early postmodern theory worked to liberate more fluid or de-binarised performances of agency, the tendency to give primacy to the text at the cost of marginalising the ontic dimensions of being also concealed the body-tool relation as a crucial factor in technoculture. At a time when our ‘realities’ are increasingly appropriated by high-tech systems of communication and iterated by digital coding, such elisions of the material and the corporeal are unable to extricate agency from a thin existence within techno-textual determinism. Despite postmodernism’s various enablings, the rematerialisation of bodies and tools as the concrete bearers and mediators of knowing can only be achieved via a realisation of equipmentality and corporeality as consequential modalities of being. This is not to discard the insights of postmodernism: as will become clear, the indebtedness of many body-philosophies to theorists of the postmodern lies in the latter’s establishment of non-foundational and multiple interpretations of meaning, their dissemblage of hierarchies of knowledge, and the consequent weakening and fragmentation of canonical authority.

The relationship between postmodernism, theories of the postmodern, and the condition of high technology is clearly quite complex and ambiguous. As I have suggested, much postmodern thought was positioned quite firmly within the textualising tendencies of poststructuralist semiotics, while at the same time information technologies, being digital and electronic rather than mechanical, were typically represented as immaterial, non-visible and disembodied. But the strong textualism of postmodernism — however it seemed to ‘fit’ information society — has been effectively countered by instrumentalist and corporealist interpretations of the human-technology relation emerging from phenomenology and certain branches of philosophy of technology. Phenomenology, in particular, has become fundamental to the corporeal turn of theorists across the humanities,3 which is itself a “reaction to the excesses if the ‘linguistic turn’” and a rediscovery of the material traces in even the most abstract semantics (Ruthrof, 1997: 289). Within the corporeal turn, Ruthrof argues, “meaning has ultimately to do with the body and… linguistic expressions mean anything or nothing at all unless they are activated by haptic, visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, and other non-verbal signs” (Ruthrof, 1997: 7).

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3 To the best of my knowledge, this phrase was coined by Horst Ruthrof (1997) in Semantics and the Body, Toronto UP, Toronto. — 14 —

Nevertheless, a number of phenomenological approaches to technology — in particular within corporeal feminism — have made use of conceptual achievements in both poststructuralism and theories of the postmodern. Firstly, the emphasis on language and texts enabled feminists to see the gendered body as an inscriptive surface, ‘marked’ or made legible by any number of discourses. The question of material and embodied agency has in fact always been of central concern for feminist theorists; among others, the well-known Australian corporealist philosopher Liz Grosz (1994) has utilised this body-as-text metaphor in much of her work. Although the relationship between texts and bodies within these theories may not always be construed as a mutually defining or reciprocal one, it nevertheless brought to light certain questions regarding the possible re- writing of the body and thus the plasticity of body images and representations. It is this implication — the unstable mutability of embodiment — which has strong affinities with subsequent post-phenomenological renditions of technocultural agency, such as those I explore in this work, where the body is seen as a readily expandable and retractable technosoma.

Secondly, to argue that language, textuality and discursivity are the primary conditions for knowledge, implies that specific discourses are complicit with specific conditions for knowledge. Thus, very basic and foundational assumptions can no longer be seen as universal or representative across multiple contexts. Although the deconstruction of traditional epistemology, such as binary thought, cannot be attributed only to postmodernist theory (philosophers such as Spinoza, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty having already shown us how this might be done), it became popularised to such an extent that many theorists now presume tout court the inherent non-validity of classical and early modern parameters of knowledge. Ironically, although within the linguistic turn existence becomes accountable only through language, thus positioning ontologies — theories concerning modes of existence — as derivative of epistemology, postmodern textualism made the coupling or hybridising of previously diametric terms possible, including the opposition between semiotics and materialism. The work of Donna Haraway is central to this critique. In her early writing on situated knowledges and material-semiotic actors (1988), she engaged in an uneasy complicity with postmodernism, while insisting on the embeddedness of materiality and embodiment in ways of knowing.

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Haraway’s materialist semiotics emerged concurrently with Bruno Latour’s actor- network theory, and both approaches offered a radical understanding of agency in technoculture.4 Within Latour’s irreductionist or variable ontology, social agents are described not by any specific or exclusive morphism,5 but rather as sociotechnical mediators. He thus emphasises the ‘middle place,’ which has long been ignored or remained ‘unthought’ by modern epistemology; for Latour, this middle place is the sociotechnical realm where everything happens, because everything happens by way of sociotechnical mediation. He writes:

According to my origin myth, it is impossible even to conceive of an artifact that does not incorporate social relations, or to define a social structure without the integration of nonhumans into it. Every human interaction is sociotechnical (Latour, 1994: 805-6).

Similarly, Haraway’s strategy refigures all agents as material-semiotic (socio- technical) actors, a phrase which points to the active implication of subjects, objects and others, both materially and semiotically, in the construction of knowledge. Thus we cannot define either our subjectivity or our objects purely within the parameters of sociality, textuality or discursivity: materials themselves — our bodies included — have specific inclinations, and place certain conditions on what can be made and known. No thing can be defined intrinsically — all knowledge is extrinsic and we are all in some sense relational achievements. Both the material-semiotic and the actor network models of agency, then, dis-covered that objects, tools, humans and bodies exceed their constraints within all humanist interpretations of subject-object relations. Indeed, Haraway’s work might be seen as a kind of postmodern materialism, and her writing throughout the 1980s and after has influenced a number of theoretical fields, from corporeal feminism to cybertheory (Sofoulis, 2002a).

Many techno- and body-theorists following Haraway, such as Manuel de Landa, N. Katherine Hayles, Vicki Kirby, Vivian Sobchack and Cathryn Vasseleu have since argued for a materialist yet non-essential ontology or being-in-the-world, and the equiprimordiality of bodies and texts. It is partly through their work that an embodied and materialist account of tele-mediated experience, a new type of body-

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4 Although actor-network theory ‘networks’ the ontology of the body perhaps further than corporealists would; as Sofoulis comments in this context: “If bodies are entities within networks across which various capacities and properties are distributed, it makes little sense to attempt to say what a body is or what it can do. Instead, what a body is becomes more a matter of what it is connected to, which kinds of nonhumans it shares its world with, and what properties it has swapped with those entities” (Sofoulis 2002: 275). 5 “They can be anthropomorphic, but also zoo-morphic, phusi-morphic, logo-morphic, techno- morphic, ideo-morphic, that is ‘(x)-morphic’” (Latour, 1997). — 16 —

tool configuration emerging out of teleculture, can be thought. In particular, as will be discussed in detail within the methodology outlined in the second chapter, corporeal feminism provides a much-needed antidote to anti-materialist accounts of our experience with tele-technologies of all kinds. Machines which appropriate the eye-function, argues Haraway (1988), are active perceptual systems built into our own partial way of seeing. This of course has important consequences for a theorisation of embodied agency, since visualising technologies themselves are installed into the rubric of corporeality. Any understanding of embodiment must then take into account a correlative tool-horizon or field of equipment. Our own sense of embodiment, of the capacities of our bodies, their limits and abilities, their morphology and mutability, both informs and is informed by our tools, objects and modes of representation. Materially and semiotically, this relational existence is also both endo- and exo-somatic: prostheses such as artificial organs and limbs are not ontologically different to telephones, televisions and other sensorial probes as organ-ic body parts. Indeed, the Greek word organon quite literally means tools or complex of tools — the organic is always-already contaminated by the idea of the technical.

In contemporary techno-theory much has been hyperbolised about the way that technologies are no longer simply tools and apparatuses; they have seemingly attained their own quasi-agency by exceeding our sensorial capacities and appropriating our sense-making procedures, while at the same time producing virtual microworlds and alternate realities. This confluence of technologies with human ways of knowing is often described by hybrid words such as technoculture, socio-technical, biotechnology, cyborg (cybernetic organism), and by conceptual re-packaging such as Donna Haraway’s material-semiotic actor, Don Ihde’s human-technology relation, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject, and my own rendering of the techno- or telesoma. Such hyphenated terms do not however suggest post hoc correlations between two originally separate ontologies, they point to the way in which our being in the world is relational and collaborative, or as Haraway puts it, a matter of affinity and kinship rather than integrity. Such terminology then affirms that there is no a-priori separation of humans and technologies; any such distinction can only be understood as posterior and heuristic. As Haraway (1991) famously insists: we are all cyborgs, which means not only that we assimilate tools as aspects of our selves and bodies, but that the very boundaries of our selves and bodies are realised in collaboration with those tools. — 17 —

But if, as I am arguing along with Haraway, it is faulty theory to maintain the boundary between human and tool, what kind of agency and corporeality might replace such a resilient and potent binary relation? What might be considered now the ‘necessary’ and ‘essential’ components of our agency in technoculture? Do objects and tools now exceed their constraints and become aspects of our own bodies? Can we think — as Manuel de Landa (1991) does — in terms of hybridised ontological and epistemological ‘lineages’ or morphologies of the human and the technical? Is the apparent consonance between subject and object, human and machine, body and technics, a ‘new’ condition or a recursive one? In answer to this question Latour writes:

we often imagine that there is no difficulty in defining material entities because they are objective, they just stand there, unproblematically composed of forces, of atoms, of elements. Only the social, the human side, would be difficult to interpret, we believe, because it is so complex, hermeneutic, and historical. The principle of my genealogy, however, is that whenever we talk of matter as given, we are in fact considering a package of multiple layers of former crossovers between social and natural elements so that what we take as primitive and pure terms are belated and mixed ones (1994: 799).

That is, high technology further discloses the primary relationality of the sociotechnical or human-technology relation, revealing or materialising the always-alreadiness of a relation we have with our tools that pre-exists our separate integrities.

The postmodern materialism of theorists such as Haraway, and subsequently the corporeal turn towards reinstating the body as actively participant in the production of knowledge, have clearly altered the epistemological foundation of the subject-object relation, and consequently the relation between humans and technologies. If the role of the body shifts from that of ‘containing’ both viscera and mind, to that of an agentic environmental probe — for as Merleau-Ponty suggests, the body “applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument” (1964a: 5) — then body-prostheses also become complexly integral to that agency. Moreover, the notion of synthetic, artificial or post/non-human perception as it has been developed by a number of contemporary theorists such as Virilio, de Landa and Innis, also goes some way towards following the material agency of technovisual apparatuses. The inference that visualising tools are perceivers — as are we — rather than perceptual mediums, implies that such tools gather up and embody the eye-function, just as our own ‘human’ vision comes to embody and incorporate — 18 —

visual prostheses. Bodies and tools are thus apprehended within a reciprocal embodiment-relation. Knowledge of our bodies is technologically mediated, and our perception is technologically embodied, both in the sense that tools assimilate and materially impinge upon our field of vision, and that as probes visual tools become virtually inseparable from what we would discern as our ‘own’ perceptual and sensorial boundaries.

A TECHNOSOMATIC METHODOLOGY

In what follows, my own techno-corporealism emerges out of a tripartite methodology, a theoretical framework which implements the convergence of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), philosophy of technology (Ihde), and the body- theory of contemporary feminism (Gatens, Grosz, Weiss). For these theorists reality is always-already produced at the juncture of language and matter, semiosis and materiality, body and tool, being and world, subject and object.

As Ihde suggests, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty developed a latent ‘phenomenology of instrumentation’ (Ihde, 1990: 40) and thus lay the potential groundwork for a promising reconfiguration of agency in relation to high technology.6 Heidegger undercut classical metaphysics and renditions of the subject-object relation by way of critiquing (pace Husserl) the spectatorial distance set up between subject and object in the Cartesian tradition. Also, for Heidegger, the ‘in-ness’ of being-in-the-world is distinctly material and equipmental; being is always-already being-in an equipmental field, within which we comprehend our relation to object and the environment. Beings are never simply given or created ex nihilo, they come into being within a certain framework or field of revealing.

While these insights are important, for my own analysis Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is directed more explicitly towards lived experience, prioritising

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6 Ihde suggests that there have been two avenues of influence in the history of philosophy of science and its interface with philosophy of technology. The first moment comprises the twin appearances of Kuhn (paradigms) and Foucault (epistemes) on the one hand, and the phenomenologists Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty on the other. The second moment involved the development of instrumental realism via Hacking and Heelan. The first moment “switched the interpretation of science toward a gestalt model of operation” but it was only with the second that science’s instrumental embodiment became central (Ihde, 1991: 115). Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Ihde argues, can be held accountable for the emergence of this quasi-materialist interpretation of the production of scientific knowledge. — 19 —

the body as a condition of knowledge, and situating technics or equipmentality in primary relation with each body’s corporeal schema. Merleau-Ponty also challenges neo-Cartesian models of subjectivity by highlighting the a priori coincidence of consciousness and the body in the term body-subject. The body- subject confronts the ‘excluded middle’ or entre-deux that remains unexplained and unaccounted for in the mind/body configuration. As Vasseleu comments, this middle space is at the centre of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project, whose “challenge to metaphysics begins with the development of the concepts of the entre-deux or the ‘in-between-two,’ which brings the excluded ground of oppositional terms into play” (Vasseleu, 1998: 22). As I will show, both the body- subject and corporeal schema are pivotal concepts in Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual/sensorial and artifactual epistemology: the corporeal schema or lived experience of bodily spatiality is always-already ‘extendible’ through artifacts. The first part of chapter two provides a detailed critique of these concepts in the work of Merleau-Ponty, both of which are of particular use in chapter three, where they are applied to an analysis of cybertheory and our experience of virtual reality environments.

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty laid the foundations for the branch of philosophy of technology which Ihde refers to as instrumental realism (Ihde, 1991). Ihde suggests that assumptions about what constitutes a ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in technoscientific practice have frequently been carried over from early scientific rationality, in particular, the powerful collusion/confusion of sight with discovery and control by the subject of scientific knowledge. In this view, technology is simply an ensemble of tools for the manipulation and control of nature, and the subject or tool-user is placed immediately in the position of coloniser. A superficial account might then easily convert the rational colonising subject of modern science to the machine-manipulating and nature-plundering subject of technology. Yet as Ihde argues, technoscientific practice itself has had a hand in various decentering epistemologies that have ejected the subject from its position of dominance. In particular, technoscientific knowledge, being instrumentally embodied, is inherently practical, perceptual, and contextual. The technoscientific incursion of instrumentation and experimentation into scientific knowledge- making has therefore also been in part the condition for reassessing the properties of subjectivity and objectivity. Indeed, as previously noted, many contemporary scientists in the fields of molecular biology and quantum mechanics argue that classical or even modern renditions of the subject and its objects of knowledge, — 20 —

observer and observed, are insufficient to account for the intervention and agency of both the scientist and the sub-atomic particles themselves in the experimental process. Objectival boundaries — exactly that which designates the object as such-and-such a thing — are made in uncertain collusion with the very materiality of the object itself, and thus knowledge is a co-operative effect across modes of being.

The branch of philosophy of technology Ihde lables “body-philosophy” (of which he himself is a proponent along with Patrick Heelan and Ian Hacking) claims that embodiment plays a crucial role in all knowledge-producing endeavors, in coincidence with tools that are always in use. Scientific knowledge is thus both corporeally and instrumentally embodied — the tool or apparatus a ‘partner’ in the construction of knowledge. For example, in both the Human Genome Project (HGP) and the Visible Human Project (VHP) the techno-apparatus is understood as the framework for an understanding of the body as ‘information.’ In both projects the body — as binary code — literally becomes enframed within the logic of the computer; the VHP male comprises about thirty gigabytes, while the DNA sequences of the HGP are equivalent to 13 sets of Encyclopedia Britannica, and in both cases the amount of information can only be handled and manipulated at speed by supercomputers. Such ensembles thus highlight the co-operative and instrumental or equipmental nature of knowledge at both the ontic and epistemic level. That is, these kinds of knowing are collaborative effects of the human- technology relation.

As I will show, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the body as “the universal thing” (1968: 260), is well-complemented by the notion that tool and soma collaboratively embody knowledge. Yet phenomenology’s generalisation of an essential and universal body is precisely what corporeal feminism finds problematic. Taking up central concepts such as the body-subject, the corporeal schema, body-image, and intercorporeality, feminist theorists such as Moira Gatens Liz Grosz, Vicki Kirby, Elizabeth Wilson and Gail Weiss provide a critical supplement to the Merleau- Pontian body. They argue that the legitimacy of corporealist phenomenology depends on a considered account of bodies in their specificity — in their socio- cultural context and spaces, in their gender and ethnicity, in their collective and individual sensory memories and experiences, and in their particular equipmental or tool-ic environments. Moreover, they argue that Merleau-Ponty’s body is an impossibly acultural and neutral exteriorised body. i.e. it lacks a body interior. — 21 —

Elizabeth Wilson (1999), for example, suggests that throughout much of the corporeal turn, attention on the body and embodied knowledge has been in many ways superficial. That is, although some of this work does recognise the irreducible correlation of body and world, it still conceives of the body predominantly as a shell or container, as an all-exterior corporeal surface for material inscription. The ontology of such a body is exo-somatic. Wilson suggests that a counteractive measure in the form of literate non-essentialist quasi- biological accounts of endo-somatic morphology is needed; that is, of a body ‘filled’ with a composite of substances, which can be understood and represented in an interdisciplinary way. In partial response to this criticism, chapter three of this work offers a phenomenological explanation of the body’s interior within the context of biomedicine and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Theorists across these fields of critique have either instigated or mobilised the corporeal turn, and help us to work out how our being-in-the-world can be understood as necessarily embodied yet non-essential and relational. i.e. always located within the domain of specific tools and specific modes of embodiment. They thus reinstate a kind of altered materialism whereby bodies and tools are not derivative, as within the linguistic turn, but primary yet mutable conditions of knowledge and experience. Combining these insights with a post- phenomenological rendering of medium or technical specificity, in this work I argue that not only is our being-in-the-world technosomatic, but that there are as many variations of the soma as there are technologies and media interfaces.

C HAPTER O VERVIEW

Primarily this work seeks to critique the body-tool relation in the context of contemporary technovisual apparatuses. Before examining phenomenological accounts of the relation between bodies and tools, it is thus necessary to review the configuration of vision itself as a distal and objectival mode of perceptual involvement. The first chapter, “Visualism,” will begin by tracing the way in which ocularcentrism, and perspectivalism in particular, have largely sustained a belief in disembodied knowledge, and the hierarchical relation between subject and object. Indeed, ‘perspective’ denotes a strictly determined visibility — a field of vision — prescribing the subject as the eye-locus or point of departure. The

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subject-object relation — at least its neo-Cartesian and modern variety — is of this field. My aim is to question the epistemological containment of knowledge in a vision understood as largely decorporealised. This critique of vision attends not only to the ways in which knowing has been determined and confined by ocularcentric authority, but also to the ways in which the corporeality of bodies or embodied being has been increasingly marginalised by this authority. Such a critique, I suggest, can only be achieved by tackling simultaneously the continuing hegemony of perspectival visualism, and the complicity of vision as the dominant paradigm for agency and knowledge-making.

In the second part of chapter one, my study of ocularcentrism will then move on to a critique of visual primacy in technovisual perception, and the emergence of post- classical (or postmodern) ways of seeing brought about by visualising apparatuses in both science and popular media. Scanning tools such as those used in ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission and computed tomography, quite literally translate and make visible that which is not of the seen — sound, magnetic resonance, molecular disturbance. In everyday life, the multiplicity of media screen interfaces and the inherent manipulability of data means that the digital image is inherently a fragmented, transitory and capricious assemblage. Such ways of seeing, increasingly normalised in today’s informatic and mediatised lifeworld, can suggest several things. Firstly, the variable nature of this seeing implies that all vision is partial and situated across cultures and technologies. Secondly, the embodiment of techno- and tele-vision, as it enters into different kinds of body-technology relations, underscores simultaneously the equipmental and corporeal — the technosomatic — specificity of seeing and knowing. Finally, the embodiment of vision in such tools has realised a certain ambiguity in the ontological difference between subject and object. Each of these factors indicate that postclassical technovision has generated an altered mode of being and knowing, a tele-sensorium which exceeds both epistemological convention and ontological expectation in science and the everyday.

Following this critique of disembodied vision and some potentially anti-Cartesian, postclassical and technovisual permutations, I turn to the task of corporealising the human-technology relation, and towards the conception of a technosomatic methodology. Such an approach, I argue, is critical to understanding the contingent complexities of our ontic and epistemic embeddedness in the tele- equipmental environment at this moment in human history. In the second — 23 —

chapter, “Corporealism,” I investigate in detail several methodological proponents of the corporeal turn in contemporary theory, combining some central conceptual tools of Merleau-Ponty with Ihde’s post-phenomenology, Haraway’s material- semiotic ontology, and the context-sensitive insights of corporeal feminism.

Chapters three and four then apply this methodology to three examples of televisual body-tool relations pertaining to biomedical imaging, virtual reality and TV, developing further my argument that techno-specificity and corporeality have reciprocal ontic effects. From each of these domains, I suggest, emerges a particular mode of embodiment, which might be incompletely described as infosoma (the body as information or data), cybersoma (the virtualised and augmented body) and telesoma (the telepresent or remote body). Chapter three, “The Corporeality of Technovision,” firstly considers the biomedical apparatus of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and develops a phenomenology of our visual representation and perception of the body’s interior. Although medical science is strongly visualist in its attempts to overcome the body’s opacity, I suggest that biomedical imaging often confounds both the primacy of vision and the scientific belief that vision is ‘truthful’ and abstracted from the locus of particular bodies and their multi-sensory perception. The second case-study of chapter three focuses on the phenomena of cyberspace and virtual reality (VR), arguing against the notion that a disembodied telepresence is possible. Our experience of virtual environments is in fact embedded in our experiences and expectations as-bodies, both in the way that we interface with prostheses such as head-mounted displays and data gloves, and in the way we navigate such environments as spaces. In a phenomenological analysis, VR is an emergent aspect of our corporeal schema, an extension of the body into the virtual, and thus a way of having/being a body.

Chapter four, “Corporeal TV,” applies my phenomenological method to a particularly unruly and multipart domain of technocorporeality, that of domestic television. Here, I suggest that even the mundane and familiar space of TV demands its own medium specific telebody. TV is an incredibly pervasive and mutable ensemble consisting of an increasingly complex range of interfaces and hybrid technologies for which it acts as a conduit; this aside, its variable placement in and out of the home, and numerous content-specific and intertextual genres, render it a difficult apparatus to capture. The body-tool relation specific to TV is equally complex, and in order to adequately describe this relation, in this

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chapter I further develop the conceptual methodology deployed in the previous two chapters. In particular, I establish and explore several key conceptual and experiential domains of the tele-body: televisual space (the virtual space of the screen and the built space of the viewer) and somatic involvement (indicating modes of bodily participation specific to TV). Of the three technovisual examples, MRI and VR are quite specific and contained in their application and corporeal- material modalities. Domestic television is by far the most importunate and contextually ‘loaded’ of tele-technological ensembles, and so in applying my technosomatic and relational ontology to this most disorderly of apparatuses, I hope to show the interpretive apposition of such a methodology. More generally, this work aims to provide a post-phenomenology of technovision, thus furthering our conceptual grasp of emergent tele-perceptual modes of being and knowing in their specificity.

chapter one

visualism

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part one: ocularcentrism

I f we cease to accept the visual metaphor as necessarily natural or intrinsic to the meaning of knowledge, then it is essential to inquire into the ways in which our reliance on it has formed and shaped this meaning — to ask what particular relation between us as knowers and the nature to be known is implied by such a metaphor, and to ask how that relation affects our conceptions of reality.

Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine R. Grontkowski (1983: 208)

When the window of linear perspective vision has become the primary cultural metaphor, a habit of the mind, the world has become primarily a matter for the eye alone. I t has become primarily a visible matter, well on the way toward becoming a bit of observable, measurable, analyzable data, readable as a computer print-out, for example, or perhaps as a blip on a radar screen. I ndeed, so many of our technological instruments emphasise this feature of visibility — microscope, telescope, camera, television — we might venture to say that our sense of reality has nearly become identical with our ability to render something visible.

Robert Romanyshyn (1989: 184)

Tele-technologies embody an epistemology which gives primacy to vision — or rather a particular kind of perspectival and geometric vision — as the most veridical access to truth and knowledge about the world. This bias towards ocularcentrism is deeply imbued in the relation between agency and technology, even despite the fact that new media and new technologies and the agencies in question have worked to upset this bias. A critical appraisal of this visualist tradition, its manifestation in technoscientific practice and technoculture more generally, is an important part of a larger critique concerning the epistemological and ontological effects of tele-technologies.

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The historical dominance of visual paradigms and ocularcentrism in Eurocentric cultures has been the subject of much analysis in the critical domains of philosophy, cultural theory and feminist theories of science and technology. Some of these contributors include Evelyn Fox-Keller and Christine R. Grontkowski (1983), Martin Jay (1993), Jonathon Crary (1992, 1999), and David Levin (1988, 1993), all of whom identify an epistemological tradition in which specific modes of vision, and particular tools for achieving that vision, become privileged and indistinguishable from the acquisition of truth as such. Theorists engaged in this critique emphasise different aspects of the visualist trope, be it the highly masculinist bias of science’s objectivity and truth-function, its disempowering effect on the non-expert, or the recognition of marginalised and under- acknowledged non-perspectival visualisms throughout Western histories of science and art. Regardless of this varying focus, the basic premise upon which most theorists agree is that both vision and light reside at the sensorial apex, with sight singled out as the purest of the senses, continuous with both truth and the mind. The historical weight of this link in Western thought can be traced to Plato’s view, that “if light is a thing of value, the sense of sight and the power of being visible are linked together by a very precious bond, such as unites no other sense and its object” (cited in Harding and Hintikka, 1983: 210). Centuries later, Rudolf Arnheim (1954) continues to celebrate the confluence of sight and light in his psychology of the structure of visual perception:

Light is one of the revealing elements of life. To man, as to all diurnal animals, it is the condition for most activities. It is the visual counterpart of that other animating power, heat. It interprets to the eyes the rejuvenating life cycle of the hours and the seasons. It is the most spectacular experience of the senses, an apparition properly celebrated, worshiped, and implored in early religious ceremonies.

It is in this heightened capacity that vision is equated with knowing per se, to become a deep-seated epistemological convention played out in our practices and discourses from technoscience to the everyday.

Technoscience, or the embodiment of scientific knowledge in the technical device or instrument, is in fact more aptly technovisual science, if we recall that the majority of technoscientific apparatuses either visualise phenomena or translate non-visual information into visual form. As Waldby comments, technoscience has demonstrated a strong preference for visualisation as the chosen mode for ordering, displaying and constituting its knowledge of ‘things’ (Waldby, 1998: 373).

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This predominance of vision is also evident in analyses of both biomedical science and the modern scientific enterprise, and in the emergence of what is termed ‘visual culture’ in cinema, television, photography and digital imaging (Mirzoeff, 1999, Burnett, 1995). Both within popular culture and scientific discourse, perception is now so deeply entwined in its vast array of imaging technologies that it is now no longer possible to conceive of scientific or common knowledge outside of its embodiment in televisual instrumentation.

The primacy of the eye as the dominant sense organ is thus firmly established in the instrumentalisation of visual perception, evidenced by the extended array of optical devices systematically developed to extend the perceptual reach of the eye (e.g. the lens, telescope, and microscope), along with the numerous assemblage of other visually inspired communication practices and technologies (Judovitz, 1993: 70; Harper, 2000). There is thus a reciprocal relation at work: visualising technologies establish new terrain in which perceptions are transformed, effecting changes in certain hierarchies and ratios of the senses, and these biases in turn privilege the development or some technologies of discovery over others. As I will argue, vision is contextual, dependent on the social and mediatic apparatus of a given place and time. Distinct historical and mediatic ‘regimes of vision’ identify different transformations of these apparatuses, different relationships between seeing and seen, and the interpenetration of what can be seen with how it is seen.

Throughout this chapter my argument will be two-fold. Firstly, I will suggest that each scopic regime necessarily entails an oculo-specific rendition of space, and that spatial ontology and spatial perception, in fact, are essential corollaries of all visualisms. The relationship between seeing and knowing has particular repercussions for both the status of the body and how space is consequently perceived and experienced; our understanding of space is always to some extent co-opted by how it is visually represented. That is, our modes of vision teach us how to “see” spatially. In a very literal sense, we construct the world as an artefact of particular types of vision. For example, in Space-Perception and The Philosophy of Science, Heelan (1983) describes the way Euclidean geometry organises our visual/spatial perception in the everyday world and our place within it. He suggests that the “readable” visual phenomena of “ready-at-hand” artefacts such as evenly distributed lamp-posts, buildings of certain dimensions and uniformity, and roads of standardised width, “establish to the observer that Euclidean criteria are in possession of space” (Heelan, 1983: 251). Secondly, I suggest that across all

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forms or regimes of ocularcentrism, vision is always-already corporeal even when it is seemingly abstracted and disembodied. Vision, spatial perception and corporeality are thus correlative. Every visualist bias effects differing sensory ratios, that is, different relations between sense organs and different priorities given to particular ways of seeing, and thus different ways of having/being a body. As Ihde points out, in the context of the telescope a particular body-world relationship emerges, one which extends visual reach within the confines of the telescopic framing of space, but one which also reduces or constrains; the body is largely gathered up in support of the eye and immobilised by the device, where the slightest movement disrupts visual acuity. This complicity between space, vision and soma, as I hope to show in the chapters to follow, is at the same time medium-specific, and complexified as vision, space and embodiment become instrumentally enframed or augmented.

Beginning with a critical discussion of ocularcentrism in an historical context, this chapter will then locate alternative postclassical perceptual modalities of technovision. The first part of this chapter will thus work through some of the lasting effects of Platonic and Cartesian renditions of vision and knowing, and in particular their impact on spatial perception, embodiment, and agency or subjectivity. Part two will concentrate more specifically on postclassical technovision and the decomposition and fracturing of linear perspective into what Ihde calls screen-dominated ‘compound vision’. My critical interest is thus not directed towards the demarcations between pre-modern, Enlightenment and postmodern variations of ocularcentrism, although the numerous critiques tracing this trajectory have much to contribute to histories of subjectivity and the making of knowledge.1 There is no doubt that photography and the digital imaging technologies that followed can be located within the late modern and postmodern disintegration of grand narratives, universal conventions of time and space, and generative norms against which people could “reliably be measured” (Mirzoeff, 1999: 117). But this decline of certainty in the domain of aesthetics and the humanities is not a trajectory mirrored in most technoscientific knowledges and practices, or even in those of the mundane and everyday, where our reliance on an objective and real world, and on vision and technovisual apparatuses to provide

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1 Jonathon Crary (1992) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge; H. Foster (Ed.) (1988) Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle; Martin Jay (1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in twentieth-century French thought, California UP, Berkeley; Chris Jenks (Ed.) (1995) Visual Culture, Routledge, London; David Levin, (Ed.) (1993) Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, California UP, Berkeley.

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the approximate details of that world, is still strong. The supposed fact of the body and the fundamental integrity of its sensory perception also underlies such practices, and it is these implicit assumptions which can effectively be questioned by way of a phenomenological method. As I will suggest, postclassical technovision currently exceeds the habitual vocabulary of classical or modern epistemology and its visual paradigm, and thus it is crucial that we develop a critical understanding of such apparatuses and their effects on our being and knowing.

Thus, in this initial chapter I trace the legacy of objectivity, and the way it has defined to this day a particular kind of bipartite relationship between agent and world, and the body as a concrete boundary between these two domains of ontological difference. Nevertheless, the subject/object relation has become in a material and corporeal sense increasingly antagonised and hybridised by various kinds of technovision and the virtualisation of environments, which is the focus of the second part of this chapter. Overall, this critique of visualism will lay the fundamental groundwork for a phenomenology of medium specificity in the context of techno- or tele-vision, which will be fully developed in the third and fourth chapters.

P LATO’ S RESEMBLANCES

As Carly Harper suggests, the privileging of vision in Western epistemology, technoscience, and media is founded on the premise that vision is a universal and natural attribute, providing humans with unmediated and candid access to an external and objectively quantifiable world (Harper, 2000). Vision is understood as a primarily neutral and transparent mechanism which accesses inherently perceivable objects. Moreover, vision is the impartial means through which the subject ‘grasps’ knowledge about the world, that knowledge being understood as entirely distinct from the ontological processes through which it is acquired. Indeed, many theorists have pointed out that this ocular framework — both sustaining and sustained by a metaphysics which maintains the ontological difference between subject and object — enables the subject to occupy a spectatorial position outside the world (Harper, 2000), to exercise a gaze ex nihilo.

The ocularcentric paradigm is most often referred to as the hegemony of vision (Levin, 1993), a phrase which points to both the marginalisation of the other

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senses, and the consequent insignificance of perceptual domains marked out by these subordinate senses. As Vasseleu notes, the hegemony of vision originates from a conviction that knowing must ultimately be corroborated and authenticated as truth in primarily visual terms; no other sense is as trustworthy, objective and reliable (Vasseleu, 1998: 3). Thus, knowledge is described as illuminating or enlightening, and the process of coming-to-know becomes synonymous with using one’s eyes. The articulation of vision, light and knowledge is so embedded, in fact, that we often forget that it is not a universal perceptual reality, but a very powerful metaphor with particular perceptual biases.

In their essay “The Mind’s Eye,” Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine Grontkowski (1983) provide an incisive critique of this metaphor in the broader context of feminist philosophy of science.2 Their historical analysis of vision’s primacy in scientific knowledge and Western epistemology offers a useful framework for understanding the relationship between vision’s epistemic affluence, corporeality, and instrumental or technovision. Keller and Grontkowski argue that the intertwining of vision and knowledge in Western thought has not biological but cultural or psychological roots, with implicit assumptions which can be exposed and challenged:

How is it, we might ask, that vision came to seem so apt a model for knowledge? And, having accepted is as such, how has that metaphor ‘colored’ our conceptions of knowledge? … If we can cease to accept the visual metaphor as necessarily natural or intrinsic to the meaning of knowledge, then it is essential to inquire into the ways in which our reliance on it has informed and shaped this meaning — to ask what particular relation between us as knowers and the nature to be known is implied by such a metaphor, and to ask how that relation affects our conception of reality (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 208)

Their archaeology begins with Plato, because as they suggest “the tradition of grounding our epistemological premises in visual analogies” is clearly evident in his theory of knowledge (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 208). Moreover, he is generally regarded as the first philosopher to fully explore and critique the connection between visibility and knowability, while at the same time distinguishing between the intelligible and the sensible. The methodologies and presumptions of the Platonic tradition provide much of the ground for Western

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2 Keller’s and Grontkowski’s paper is one of a seminal collection of essays in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Eds.) (1983) Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht.

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philosophy tout court (Grosz, 1995b), so it is important to examine this legacy and its implication in our understanding of sense-perception, space-perception and (dis)embodied knowledge.

Plato’s theory proposes that knowledge is not empirical or perception-based, but rather a priori and, in a sense, already known (Harper, 2000). Knowledge of the sensible world is always-already within us, because our souls once “dwelt with the gods” and attained a “pure understanding of the cohesiveness of all things” (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 211), but it remains dormant until it is recognised, remembered or intuited. Such recollection is possible because of the inherent kinship between knower and known — the likeness of the objects we perceive to the essences or forms we already intuitively know. However, even though we are already endowed with a pre-existent cache of knowledge, for Plato perception and vision play a crucial role in inducing the recollection of that knowledge (Harper, 2000). In his model, the eyes, as the organs which are ‘sensitive’ to light, are singled out as integral to the intellect, while all other senses are of the order of the sensible. It is this distinction between the intelligible and the sensible — or the “in-principle intelligibility of all things” of which the sensible reminds us — which became fundamental to science’s belief in objective knowledge (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 212). The radical separation of subject and object essential to the principle of objectivity is not fully realised within the Platonic affinity between perceiver and perceived; as Keller and Grontkowski comment, this is not achieved until Descartes. What is realised by Plato, however, is “the separation of knowledge from the unreliability of the senses or, so to speak, the dematerialization of knowledge” (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 212). For Plato, vision is a metaphor for knowledge, in that it is the one sense that can retreat from situated and proximal perception, enabling an intelligibility which is distinct from the actual in-the-world conditions of being.

Keller and Grontkowski argue that there are two paradoxical functions of the visual to be found in this metaphoric use: the connective (where vision connects us to truth) and the dissociative (where vision distances us from the corporeal) (1983: 209). Within the Platonic tradition, the seeming paradox of the dissociative and connective becomes compatible and mutually reinforcing, for here vision is rendered that sense closest to truth and objectivity because it is the least embodied, and able to perceive objects at a great distance from the body without materially intervening or coming into substantial contact with those objects.

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Nevertheless, for Plato the disembodiment of vision did not correlate with passive detachment from the world; the process of visual perception was rather a dynamic and vital link between the intelligible and the sensible.

THE MIND’ S EYE

The more crucial epistemological premise of modern science — the ontological difference between subject and object, which undercut their Platonic kinship and allowed for the complete objectifiability of nature — was not completely articulated until Descartes. This divergence from the Platonic model aside, Descartes consolidated many of Plato’s claims concerning the role of vision and light in the intelligible acquisition of knowledge; for both philosophers the eyes were the unique analogues of disembodied intellection (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 214). However, Descartes’ interpretation of the eye-function in the context of the science of optics and the actual workings of the eye finally led him to consider the physiological eye as a passive lens, and to draw the critical distinction between the eyes of the corporeal body and the mind’s eye. Descartes thus transposed the difference of subject and object onto the dialectic of mind and body: the Cartesian human contained this ontological difference within itself.

Yet if vision and knowledge are to be considered analogous, then Descartes’ interest in a technics of vision, and the inevitable conclusion that the eyes mechanically and passively record what is objectively ‘there,’ meant that knowledge itself must be construed as similarly passive (215). This conclusion was of course intolerable; as Keller and Grontkowski suggest, the humanist project would itself “preclude such an epistemological posture” (215). Thus it would seem that the mechanisation of vision threatened to undermine the suitability of sight as a trope for knowledge (Harper, 2000). But Descartes was committed to the visual metaphor, and managed to recuperate it “by severing, finally, the mind from the body” (215); that is, by claiming that mind and body were of distinct ontological and epistemological orders. Keller and Grontkowski write:

As light and vision become more explicitly technical, physical phenomena, the eye itself a more mechanical device, the active knower is forced ever more sharply out of the bodily realm. The subject becomes finally severed from the objects of perception. With this move, the knowing agent has lost its last links to the percipient organism whose sense organs can now be relegated safely to the

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‘purely material.’ Having made the eye purely passive, all intellectual activity is reserved to the ‘I,’ which, however, is radically separate from the body which houses it (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 215).

Thus the intellectual capacity of the mind or soul is what actively ‘sees’ and understands, although this intellectual (in)sight loses its kinship with the sensible or physiological functioning of the eyes. Here, Descartes stretches the visual metaphor well beyond its origins in sense perception, and in a way that is now quite familiar and recognisable to us in our everyday concepts and language. The interdependence of the sensible and the intelligible sustained in Plato is irrecoverably detached in Cartesian metaphysics; the natural world becomes a field of material objects rendered both objectifiably knowable, yet independent of the specificities of culture, history, and more crucially, from the ‘I’ of any particular body: a thoroughly disembodied and universal knowledge attainable only by a disembodied and universal subject. This shift from the more interactive Platonic model of visual communion “to the dichotomous grammar of Cartesian metaphysics,” became both a central catalyst in the constitution of modern theories of scientific objectivity, and integral to modern understandings of the individual (Harper, 2000: 13).

It is worth noting here that Cartesian dualism and its denial of embodied knowledge can be apprehended differently. While critiques such as Keller’s and Grontkowski’s are now well-accepted within contemporary philosophy and feminist theory, phenomenologist Drew Leder (1990) offers a different explanation for the longevity of Cartesian metaphysics. In his book The Absent Body (1990) Leder draws a correlation between the experiences of our ‘lived body,’ as distinct from the organic or biological body, and culturally dominant Cartesian interpretations of embodiment, specifically relating to the way in which the body is interpreted as separate and inferior to the mental realm. He explores the way in which our body in-use is largely forgotten, or at least partially recedes from our conscious awareness and perception: “While in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is also essentially characterized by absence. That is, one’s own body is rarely the thematic object of experience” (Leder, 1990: 1). Here Leder is referring to the insensible and largely invisible character of our visceral interior, and more specifically how this tendency toward literally being out-of-mind works to sustain a Cartesian metaphysics of disembodiment. According to Leder it is this intrinsically paradoxical nature of bodily presence — its “inescapable presence” as our corporeal ground on the one

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hand, and its visceral tendency to recede from our conscious experience on the other — that accounts for the cultural supremacy of Descartes’ dualist ontology.

For Leder this retractability of the soma is essential to the body’s healthy functioning and corporeal structure (Leder, 1990: 69). Leder’s approach to the embodiment problematic is particularly unique in this way, as it adopts a logic which is the reverse to that usually deployed in conventional critiques of Cartesianism. These critiques work from the assumption that the ontological reductionism of Cartesian epistemology is a direct consequence of neglecting to attend to the schema of lived experience, whereas Leder argues that it is precisely the experiential realm of the lived body which demands bodily absence. Leder’s description of the body’s interior is for the most part biological, and in this respect it depends on a definition of the visceral as the region of our body which is invariably secluded and concealed from our everyday awareness and perception. Accordingly our visceral depths constitute the most hidden dimension of our lived embodiment, and thus for Leder “rarely make an appearance in our life-world” (Leder, 1990: 111). Yet as Mason-Grant (1997) notes, while visceral containment may aptly describe (an ideal) masculine embodiment, women’s bodies are quite often depicted as leaky and uncontainable. The cultural and gender specificity of the biomedical representation of our visceral interiors is discussed in some detail in the third chapter; here, suffice to say that ignoring the specificity of bodily interiors and their representations is a quasi-Cartesian move, reiterating ontological difference and the dualism of mind and body.

The separation of the mind from the sensorial domain meant that the body and its perceptual abilities could not collaborate in determining what can be known, or how it can be known; in epistemic terms, the body then becomes a subsidiary entity, at best a conduit or vessel for the mind. Yet there are some paradoxical implications here. For Descartes the corporeal body is both a container and a limit for the ‘I,’ limiting the specificity of one self or mind to one particular body. Although the mind could be distinguished from the body, it nevertheless ‘belonged’ to a body, and was secured to that body from birth to death. Although one’s conscious self may be complex and mutable over time and circumstance, the body provided a stabilising anchor, an inescapable somatic habitat or place of containment. This would suggest that the body does indeed partially establish both the what, and the how, of the known. Yet Descartes insisted that the mind was a separate kind of entity, and of a higher epistemological order, with a

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determining and delimiting effect on the knowable that the sensible body could never realise. This elevated mode of knowing — abstract, intellectual, contemplative — was hierarchised over sensory perception, and became the ‘proper’ epistemic mode for scientific and mathematical thought. As Keller and Grontkowski note, for Descartes mind “is not only ontologically primary but a priori reliable; only the validity of aspects of our experience which are not purely mental requires explanation; the senses are repudiated ab initio” (214). This distrust in the human sensorium is thus intricately embedded in the modern scientific attitude; objectivity is only guaranteed by a bracketing off or decontamination of somatic influence. The dynamic agency of the subject is then split from the passive mechanisms of the physical body, such that we can only truthfully know the world by seeing it with the eye of the mind. Regardless of how the visual metaphor has been rendered thoroughly intangible and decorporealised here, a principal effect of Descartes’ argument was to instill a belief in observation as the only accurate means of knowing.

The Cartesian model, then, implied a distance between subject and object-world, knower and known, an ontological deferral which is set in place by a kind of distance-vision, or tele-vision. As Keller and Grontkowski argue, “in objectifiability the world is severed from the observer, illuminated as it were, by that sense which could operate, it was thought, without contaminating” (1983: 218). This objectifying gaze has to date been maintained and extended by a wide array of scopic technologies, reinforced by Descartes’ association of the physiology of the eye with the mechanical lens, and with a distinctly light-based optics. Yet as will be argued in the section to follow, postclassical visualising apparatuses have in many significant ways disturbed this link between knowing, seeing and illumination by moving away from the –scope or lens paradigm, to a visual modality that translates non-visible data to lisable image.

This trajectory away from both light and lens, and towards data conversion and the manipulation of computer code, has also worked to destabilise the ontological difference between knower and known. Today, even certain domains of technoscience do not simplistically continue to regard their knowledge as purely objective, or their practices as affording a transparent revelation with no material effect on the process of observation. In particular, such an ideal is being challenged in many areas of technoscience via the Heisenberg revolution in physics (1930’s), more recently in chaos theory, and in some areas of

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biotechnology, cybernetics and quantum mechanics. As previously described, quantum mechanics is often cited as a postclassical field of science in which the very act of observing changes the behavior of the subatomic objects studied, irretrievably muddying the distinction between observer and observed such that vision itself becomes a contaminant. Nevertheless, it is certainly also the case that the visual metaphor and its claims to objectivity continue, often paradoxically, to run alongside the more radical postulates of postclassical technoscience. In biomedical science, for example, doctors and radiologists accept both the artifactual nature of technoscientific seeing (and are often able to clearly identify ‘artifacts’ or imperfections in the image), yet there remains a firm belief in the eventual elimination or such rogue elements; that is, with the increasing sophistication of visual instrumentation a ‘truth’ of the body can be realised (Harper, 2000).3

Keller and Grontkowski end their critique of ocularcentrism by pondering the possible consequences of alternative perceptual metaphors. An aural metaphor, they suggest, “could not have made the same claims to atemporality, and might well lend itself more readily to a process view of reality” (221). Similarly, a tactile metaphor:

which invokes the experience of touch at its base cannot aspire to either the incorporeality of the Platonic Forms, or the ‘objectivity’ of the modern scientific venture; at the very least it would have necessitated a more mediate ontology (221).

As many theorists have noted, although the presumed consonance between knowledge and vision may seem primordial and irrevocable, it is in fact historically and culturally specific, leading us to ask: “How might a conception based on another metaphor differ?” (Keller and Grontkowski, 1983: 221). Such a question is in itself revealing, suggesting the possibility of variable epistemologies and ontologies, and more significantly situating the very source of ‘the knowable’ — its realm of possibility — in the perceptual body. As will be discussed in the next chapter, this is properly the domain of phenomenology; in what follows, I will continue the historical narrative of visualism and disembodiment by tracing the legacy of linear perspectivalism.

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3 Ironically, the same digital imaging techniques which in biomedical science supposedly bring us closer to the truth of the body, are recognised and celebrated in popular culture e.g. the genre of science fiction film) as a highly sophisticated manipulation of the real.

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PERSPECTIVALISM

A number of theorists such as Heidegger, Romanyshyn, Ihde, Jay and Levin have noted how the Cartesian model of subjectivity correlates to an ocularcentric or technovisual way of apprehending — literally ‘taking hold of’— both local and remote environments. Ihde states:

This distanced self embodied in the creation of a disengaged spectator consciousness, is illustrated by the metaphor of the world seen through a window, and signifies the beginnings of the invention of the observer. This visual invention which enables a certain kind of distanced relation on the world, however also simultaneously embodies a vision about the world, an ocularcentric ontology which will eventually be identified as objectivity (Ihde, 1993: 19).

More specifically, Descartes’ mathematical model of co-ordinate axial space, realised by means of disembodied intellection, emerged concomitantly with an historically specific model of visual and spatial perception — linear perspectivalism — which transformed the world into a ready-made visual container, or a field into which the visible could be deposited and arranged. As Erin Hefferon (2002: 13) points out, pace Judith Roof (2001):

the idea of three-dimensional space is predominantly a Western concept… developed through graphic drawing techniques based on the flat-plane, where dimensionality or depth, understood as supplemental, is represented through the addition of another flat-plane attached at a right- angle to the xy-axes of Cartesian space, so as to give the impression of cubic space. This kind of dimensionality, in the Western context, is both mathematical and measurable; as such, it emerges as an independent thing-in-itself, which can be entered, exited, and occupied and bounded by material substances, as in the notion of built or architectural space.

This visually configured space is now so transparent to Western sensibility that it seems the effect of a ‘natural’ vision, if not a quality of the objective world. Yet as the theorists listed above argue, linear perspectivalism is the result of a particular instrumental development in Renaissance art, a technique which enabled the translation of three-dimensional space onto a two dimensional flat canvas (Jay, 1993: 51; Harper, 2000). In Alberti’s model of perspective (see figure over page), the artist uses a grid — sometimes referred to as “the square grid of the Renaissance” (Naughton, 2003) — to illustrate a two-dimensional representation in terms of a pyramid, with its apex the vanishing point, so as to give the illusion of three dimensional depth.

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Alberti's Grid - c.14504

This grid was ideally used by a single privileged spectator (the artist), who could step back from the scene and observe from an elevated position. Accordingly, as Romanyshyn and others claim, in the space of linear perspective the observer sees the world as if through a window (Romanyshyn, 1989: 67; Harper, 2000). Significantly, the viewer’s bodily movement is restricted by the device, in that the grid needs to remain directly between the scene and the line of sight: the body is at the service of vision, an eye-body.

Clearly this technological and corporeal specificity of perspectival vision permeates and dominates spatial models of contemporary understanding, models which we have incorporated into the spatial schematics within and around our various technological interfaces. For example, the rectilinear dimensions of the media window — and its immobilisation of the body in front of the screen — is an instance of the epistemological containment of knowledge in perspectival vision, today most familiar through the ubiquitous ‘boxiness’ of the (tele)visual image and media apparatus. This conceptualisation of space as container in the configuration of such interfaces will be examined in the final chapter of this work. In his analysis of Alberti’s window or veil, Romanyshyn (1989) points to the broader artifactual effects of the apparatus (Harper, 2000), and suggests how it

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4 Illustration from: Russell Naughton (2003) ‘Drawing Aids to Perspective’ Accessed 9th August 2003.

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demarcated what could be counted as the visible. The gridded device operates as a boundary, a frame which defines the seen/scene as separate from the observer. From the viewer’s perspective, the field of vision is fixed, and begins at a point beyond the imaginary surface of the window; the viewer looks into the scene, but is not themself in it. This model of linear perspective underlined and popularised the Cartesian dialectic of subject and object, and supplemented this dichotomy with a sympathetic rendition of space. As Jay suggests, ‘Cartesian Perspectivalism’ serves as a “short-hand way to characterize the dominant scopic regime of the modern era” (Jay, 1993: 69-70). Perspectival space is implicitly understood to be a passive ‘thereness’ awaiting occupancy and organisation; it is geometric, mechanical, uniform and objective, always-already open to scopic dis-covery. Yet if we focus not on the observer or observed, but on the device itself, the window-on- the-world, we can interpret both perspectival vision and space as tool-ic effects. i.e. as instrumentally embodied. Indeed, in chapter four, by tracing a lineage from Alberti’s window to contemporary screen technologies such as television and cinema, we can see the medium specificity of our understanding, our spatial and somatic perception, and our ontology.

Linear perspectivalism is thus much more than simply a quasi-mechanical invention or artistic device — albeit one that continues to significantly inform artistic, design and engineering practices in popular imaging, architecture and science (Harper, 2000). Rather, it enunciates a particular way of thinking the world and ourselves in it. In particular, it is the predominant way in which, to use Heelan’s term, we carpenter the environment, and typically build and perceive reality in Western culture (Heelan, 1983). There is little doubt that since Plato the eyes have stood as the sensory prototype of knowledge acquisition, given certain “prominence among the body's cognitive organs” (Jay, 1993: 21). This primacy of visual perception has long upheld the status of visualising technologies in both the scientific realm and that of everyday life.

Yet much of the commentary on the historical primacy of vision has taken the form of questioning, in particular, the seeming naturalness or transparency of vision.5 As Levin states: “vision is never simply an immediate, straightforward or

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5 This has prompted Martin Jay to describe such commentary as participating in the project of “denigrating vision’” (Jay, 1994).

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unproblematic presentation of the phenomenon and experience of vision” (Levin, 1993: 7). In particular, theorists have demonstrated that there is no universal, essential vision or way of seeing but many culturally-, historically-, and medium- specific visualisms. Indeed both Crary (1992) and Jay (1993) have separately pointed out that the historical and contemporary domination or privileging of vision has not entailed a single, uniform, or continuous manifestation of ‘vision’ or visuality (Harper, 2000). Somewhat paradoxically, within this tradition there are many and divergent visual subcultures, and a palimpsest of consequent effects on the relations between subjects, corporeality, tools and the world.

While neo-Cartesian perspectivalism maintained a geometric, mathematical and homogenous 3D space, other medium-specific visualisms ran counter to this model. The development of the microscope, for example, brought discrete minutiae into visual experience; the emergence of impressionist and surrealist art also antagonised the universality of a three-dimensional and objective world-landscape; and possibly of the greatest significance within everyday life, photography’s ability to frame the momentary, the fragmentary and the arbitrary disturbed the very notion of a uniform, continuous and holistic perspective. These anti-perspectival subcultures, however, have not to date significantly destabilised the pervasive supremacy of perspectivalism and the Cartesian eye-dialectic, in both scientific and commonsense understandings of what constitutes objective reality. In Foster’s words: “each scopic regime seeks … to make of its many social visualities one essential vision, or to order them in a natural hierarchy of sight” (Foster, 1988: ix).

*

The foregoing overview of ocularcentrism has discussed the visual metaphor in Western metaphysics and its part in configuring subject and object (and mind and body) in terms of ontological difference, in prioritising a disembodied knowledge, and in translating space as a co-ordinate and quantifiable container of the visible. Thus far I have drawn on a widespread critique of the primacy of vision and neo- Cartesian perspectivalism. However, while my overall argument is consistent with previous claims that Western epistemology is deeply embedded within the Cartesian framework, in the section to follow I will also argue that at a more ‘local’ level, the medium specificities of televisions and post-classical ways of seeing contradict and trouble this framework.

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Although the Western epistemological tradition may have set the ground for a dominant visualist trajectory, in many ways this trajectory has been appropriated and mutated by various post-classical scientific and popular discourses, and by the medium specificities of technological ensembles themselves. Developments in medical imaging, for example, enable technological ‘eyes’ to translate non- visibilisable information such as magnetic fields and density into visual data that is neither perspectival nor geometrically measurable or representable. Digital imaging, too, has been theorised as destabilising the way we ascribe truth to photographic documentation, while virtuality technologies rearrange the epistemic correlation between embodiment, space and environment. In the next part of this chapter, focusing more specifically on postclassical vision and technovision, I will explore not only how tele-technologies might be said to paradoxically both embrace and hybridise the visual bias, but also how at times they work against the specific epistemological dogmas of ocularcentrism by turning our awareness to the composite layers of corporeal, technical, and cultural specificity.

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part two: postclassical vision and technovision

Ours is a pluricultural vision… I t is the seeing with what I call the compound eye. That vision is never single. I t is a series of multi- and alternative visions, symbolized in the growing presence of the multivisual screens we have become familiar with, such as those found in all television newsrooms, in control centers for large plants, and even in department stores. Compound vision is multiple vision. One scans the multiple screens, focusing here, then there and, out of the mélange, forming new directions and possibilities.

Don Ihde (1993b: 29)

The eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence- linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer tomography scanners, color-enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office video display terminals, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system…. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (although not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment... allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity.

Donna Haraway (Feenberg and Hannay, 1995: 180)

A critical appraisal of ocularcentrism, scopophilia and televisuality must also consider the mutation of classical ways of seeing effected by imaging technologies, interpreting the various renditions of what Ihde (1993) calls “postmodern” or “compound” vision, and in particular tracing the medium specificities of various technovisual apparatuses. Accounts of visualism and the image excesses of visual culture have figured complexly within much postmodern critique of Western — 44 —

technoculture, an influence that continues the trend towards an absenting of the haptic body in favour of the eye-body. Although theories of the postmodern worked to deconstruct any semblance of a universal and objective reality, their recuperation of visualism in the form of the image or simulation nevertheless deferred knowledge-making from the body; visual possibility is reduced to screen- based and digital media, ironically fortifying — as perspectivalism did centuries before — an anti-materialist epistemology.

Nevertheless, an important theoretical movement within philosophy of technology, feminism and cultural theory in general — largely begun by the poststructuralist and postmodern perspectives — concerns the delegitimation of dualist metanarratives. In this climate, all modes of perception are considered perpetually mutable, non-universal, and culturally and discourse specific. Visual perception, albeit still primary, is similarly culturally diverse and epoch-specific; as with all sense-perception, vision is assembled by way of a complex dynamic involving historical and political permutations of regimes of knowledge. As Ihde comments, this insight dis-covered that the “epistemic organization of perception... is highly variable” (Ihde, 1990: 51). Techno-theorists and philosophers of science and technology working outside or against the poststructuralist turn have also had much to say about the effect of the televisual on contemporary Western culture, and on the way in which conventional notions of presence, space, embodiment and agency have been modified. What these various theoretical traditions seem to have in common, then, is the notion that televisual or technovisual apparatuses are typically paradigmatic of contemporary perception.

The classical ocularcentric and perspectival tradition, in which the human eye is the dominant trope reflecting the relationship between humanity and reality — the “paramount organ of distance” — set up an epistemological environment that was centralised yet distant, controlling yet unaffected, penetrating yet autonomous (Romanyshyn, 1989: 45). Yet with the emergence of technovisual apparatuses of increasing capability and translatory power, we need to question whether such devices are simply prosthetic extensions of this symbolic eye and the trajectory of Cartesian perspectivalism. Implicit in critiques of ocularcentrism is the suggestion that an anti-realist and post-ocularcentric epistemology could potentially mobilise an altered dynamics of agency, embodiment and perception. In such critiques, any attempt to determine the nature of the object of knowledge must account for the entry of entities, humans and apparatuses into a matrix or network of agency. — 45 —

This means that being able to see — or creating the technical conditions for visualising an entity — no longer secures objects of knowledge in themselves, and consequently sight loses at least some of its integrity as perceptual guarantor of scientific reality. This loss of certain truth in scientific imaging also resonates with the lost status of the photorealistic image as documentary truth in popular media, and the problematic truth-status of digital imaging in general.

In what follows I will trace the emergence of technovision and its antagonism of the visual metaphor of Cartesian perspectivalism. I will argue that in contemporary technoculture the visual metaphor is thoroughly invaded by an amalgam of visual apparatuses. The device of linear perspectivalism has been both appropriated and compromised, its neutrality and universality deconstructed as a partial way of seeing. This incursion, in turn, has had lifeworld-changing effects on the human-technology relation. An account of some of these effects will work to foreground my own phenomenological analysis of television, telebodies and telespaces. Specifically, in the context of my own phenomenological interest, I attend to the medium-specific way we experience both our perceptual organ- isation, and our sensory and spatial limits.

In Technics and Praxis, Ihde (1979) argues that a phenomenology of vision reveals the deficient constitution of the modern visual paradigm, and shows how visualising technologies have in fact disclosed postclassical and postmodern visual possibilities in their discord with Cartesian perspectivalism. Ocularcentrism conflates the acquisition and production of knowledge into a limited visualism, closing off experience from other perceptual dimensions. Additionally, this visualism reduces all visual possibility to one type — objectification — thus delimiting what counts as visible, representable and knowable. Technology and science in their modern forms have depended on the supremacy of this particular scopic regime, dominated largely by three-dimensional geometric spatiality, with a range of corresponding scale drawings, maps, charts, graphs and diagrams. As Heelan states:

The Cartesian structure of visual perception is something so familiar and so transparently evident that we regard it as normative for ordinary observations. It is, nevertheless... a product of scientific culture and an artifact of a technologically reconstructed human environment (Heelan, 1983:1).

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Moreover, the hegemony of Cartesian and linear perspectival vision is a diminished and “mono-dimensional” possibility within a “vaster visual richness,” and the sedimentation of beliefs about vision — however manifested in particular epistemes — is always in actuality exceeded by the “polymorphy of vision” (Ihde, 1979: 85,87). For Ihde, a phenomenology of vision must then begin with this polymorphic range of visual potential beyond the usual objectifying “set of possibilities” (83). To some extent, this multiple vision has been partially disclosed by postmodern media forms such as computer-generated or manipulable graphics, and here again, the consonance between postmodernism and high communications technology is made apparent. Thus, for Ihde postmodern “pluriculture” is linked to technological mediation, and specifically to the way technovision and television multiply and fragment our worlds of reference. He writes:

That vision is multiple, aware of multistability, refracted, and perspectival. At present, its field of vision, not yet fully gestalted, still appears something like a bricolage field. It is strewn with cultures and culture-fragments (Ihde, 1990: 223).

The multistable and disparate nature of contemporary vision is thus the partial effect of the many screens encountered in the everyday — televisual, cinematic, information/text display, closed-circuit, video — each with their own technical, environmental and interfacial specificities. What we experience is an aggregate vision, a continuous slippage and merging between televisual events, temporal zones, “culture-fragments,” genres of visual meaning (photorealism, animation, simulation). Concurrently, we develop a literacy of a range of imaging techniques, of various modes of visual and audio intervention, such as the freeze-frame, the close-up, and slow-motion, and perhaps even an awareness of some hidden qualities of digital imaging including manipulation, repeatability, and compression. The recent work of Lev Manovich and Peter Lunenfeld on new media and “interface culture” articulates some of the visual specificities of digital and screen media, from the multiple layering and spatial incoherence of the Windows interface (Manovich, 2001), to the visual maneuvers of hypertext and virtual reality (Lunenfeld, 1999). These permutations of telematic interfaces aside, we have also become collectively familiar with a growing number of instrumental or hypermediated visions, via scopic tools used in science and medicine such as ultrasound, x-ray, endoscopes, among other scanning devices which translate the opaque into the visually accessible. Increasingly, such instruments of vision permeate our mundane sensibility. As Derrida says, televisual technologies have — 47 —

irretrievably and “profoundly transformed” the contemporary terrain of perception and experience (Derrida and Steigler, 2002: 40).

Polymorphic or pluricultural vision, for Ihde, is a latent inclination of contemporary media and image technologies. This notion of the technological inclination or trajectory ascribes an aspect of agency to techno-apparatuses in their phenomenological capacities or material ‘intentions,’ and is thus a contingent counterpart to the idea that knowledge is instrumentally or equipmentally embodied. This anti-humanist attribution of intention to tools also resonates with Haraway’s claim for an irreducible relation between the material and the semiotic, and her insistence that we are all — tools, humans, objects, environment — material-semiotic actors who together arrive at the conceptual and actual boundaries of objects (Haraway, 1991). In contrast to the suggestion that technoscience simply validates an anthropocentric visual primacy, the instrumental embodiment of scientific knowledge discloses that such vision is subject to the material and technical proclivities of the apparatus. Such an idea of material agency is also very useful in tracing the epistemic and ontic effects of technovision, although they are often far from the supposedly liberating and open terrain of postmodern multiplicity. A salient example of one such inclination is the way in which the instrumental enframing of human biology as genome map — an interpretation only made possible by today’s computers — reconfigures the body as information. Such an ontic translation of the soma is accompanied by a range of military and data metaphors which identify the body as imperfectly coded or with compromised boundaries. Indeed, the informatic turn in both science and media culture, and the subsequent re-negotiation of knowledge as data, has had many such consequences on our perception of bodies and the lifeworld.

Despite the postmodern effect described by Ihde and others, the predeliberation of objects-as-mere-objects within the visualist telos of both classical and modern science, although one among many perceptual possibilities, remains as a particularly dominant and tenacious inclination of technoscientific visualising technologies. Scientific discourse strives to maintain its privileged access to the visual truth of the body and world. Within this discourse, sight is further hierarchised over other modes of perception; state-of-the-art scopic instrumentation is seen as purifying the objectivity of the observer, perfecting the deficiencies inherent in human eyes, and providing a more direct and lucid representation of the world than could ever be achieved with our own primary — 48 —

organs. It is not surprising then that visual prostheses remain as the most important among the techno-apparatuses.

In Ihde’s analysis, this conviction has been carried by our belief in instrumental realism, such that we elevate visualising instruments as representative of the ‘real.’ He traces the effects of our acceptance of an instrumentally mediated vision as superior to the limited vision of “unmediated” eyesight, and documents how we doggedly maintain the primacy of vision by developing instrumentation to translate an ever-increasing range of phenomena into visual modalities:

Suppose that I believe that the instrument is the very model of precision and perfection. Then I begin to believe that my eyesight is very limited, that it hides more from me than I see. And the superiority of the instrument mediated ‘world’ is what lies underneath (if not behind) the mundane world. In short, I begin to accept, literally, the instrument mediated ‘world’ through what may be called here an instrumental realism. The instrumentally constituted ‘world’ becomes the real ‘world’…

But I am now faced with a problem: the relatively effortless acquaintance I have with things in the mundane world ‘phenomenally’ reveal aspects to me which are present through sensory dimensions other than visual and my instruments are all optical. It may still be the case that I can adumbrate my instrumentally constituted ‘world’ to account for everything I find in the mundane world. To accomplish this I invent and develop an instrumentation which not only reduces the world to a visual ‘world’, but an instrumentation which ‘translates’ all other aspects of the world into visible results... I am now on my way towards the construction of a totally mono-dimensional ‘world’ which through my belief in an instrumental realism, is taken for the ‘real’ world. I am here suggesting that the latent telos of such an example may enhance a certain type of metaphysics. Yet, ironically, it is enhanced precisely because the instrument has a hidden ‘phenomenological’ capacity. Instrumental realism becomes possible and even convincing because what was invisible becomes present (Ihde, 1979: 46-47).

This brief history suggests how visualising technologies have been instrumental in the continuation of the vision-truth trope, and have themselves inclined towards the conflation of this metaphor with the enhanced revelatory capacities of instrumental or technoscientific seeing.

The technical enhancement of the eye is often more accurately a translation of information which is not see-able, a making-accessible of that which is either not immediately visible (but through mediation can be made available to vision), or not visibilisable (by converting into graphic images data readings of that which would never be available to vision). An incomplete and overlapping list of the various — 49 —

modes of technovisual translation might then include: magnification, overcoming the problem of smallness by way of magnifying devices such as glasses and microscopes; remote sensing to overcome the problem of distance with the use of telescopes, radiotelescopes, satellite surveillance systems, radar and sonar devices; transparency technologies which pass through the barrier of opaque surfaces, especially the tissues of the human body, including X-rays, ultrasound, computerised tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission tomography; conversion technologies which change the non-visibilisable into visual data, such as thermographic cameras which transform heat into images, cameras or resonators which ‘see’ radiation, vibration (sonar and ultrasound), radio waves or other wavelengths, infra-red or ultraviolet, and convert them into images; schematisation technologies such as mammography, computed tomography, and deepspace photography, that use artificial intelligence to enhance visual features in certain ways, to ‘decide’ upon priorities of information, to eliminate visual ambiguities or to pinpoint changes in behaviour over time (this would include colour- enhancement techniques for satellite images and human tissue images, and programs which scan images for particular salient features or compare successive images of the same object — e.g. breast tissue and battlefields — for changes over time); special environment technologies, camera devices and fibre optic technologies which are designed to go where humans cannot, such as endoscopes which travel into the cavities and organs of the human body, bathoscope cameras which travel to the ocean floor, and heat resistant cameras which can operate in subterranean conditions.6 In its complexity and palimpsestual nature, this list conveys the powerful epistemic and ontic stronghold of visualism and its tools.

These technologies, as aspects of the eye-function, seemingly enable us to see and know everything, from the DNA nuclei of a virus to the surface and texture of distant moons. Yet these modes of seeing do not reflect a universal perspective, or indeed the same relationship between vision and epistemology. As Ihde points out, each visualising tool has its own ‘trajectory,’ its own sense ratios of magnification and reduction; all ways of seeing both enhance or magnify, and reduce or detract from, the environment and our own sensorium. For example, in the seemingly simple case of telescopic sight, we can identify a complex range of technology-embodiment relations.7 Firstly, as the term ‘focus’ implies, when something is brought into focus, one focal

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6 Thanks to Cathy Waldby for her inspiration in compiling this list. 7 Aspects of this example originate from Ihde (1993).

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length is chosen at the expense of others, such that other objects are backgrounded or extracted from vision; focal range brackets out much of the environment in order to see a particular object/scene with visual acuity. Secondly, telescopic sight flattens out depth, such that what is seen appears to have a two-dimensional or depthless quality. Thirdly, the lens frames the object, which decontextualises its environmental ‘situatedness,’ while reflected light on the lens can cause back glare, and flecks, stains and cracks on the glass may generate visual anomalies or ‘artefacts’. Finally, the telescope changes the eye-body relationship; while a distant object may seem close, it cannot be touched, heard or smelt. We might say that a telescopic object is attained by particular kind of medium-specific telebody; a long-sighted, one-eyed body without auditory or olfactory function! In a broader historical and cultural sense, too, the telescope is perhaps an emblematic visualising technology, as it enabled the ‘capture’ of distant objects and space as things to be discovered and colonised; it offered a way of seeing and a particular relationship between vision and the known.

Significantly, the displacement of vision from the human eye to the apparent materialist veracity of the visual mechanism represents a subtle departure from the abstracted model of perspectival vision. The neo-Cartesian schema represents an anthropocentric metaphysics: knowledge (via vision) is still causally and ontologically of the human mind. Yet this causal status is being challenged from within many areas of technoscience such as biotechnology, biomedicine, systems theory, chaos theory, artificial life and emergence theory. In such postclassical technosciences, the apparatus perceives and translates in such a way that the human eye-function is not so much enhanced, as appropriated and mutated, to reveal that which human visual perception — physiologically or metaphorically — could never itself uncover. Thus, as Haraway (1991) argued in ‘Situated Knowledges,’ the perception of things in the world becomes a collaborative act, such that the ontic and epistemic autonomy of the human from the technological is irretrievably compromised.8 The broad-spectrum trajectory of high technology in these domains is thus towards an ontological consonance between the human and machine, the organic and the digital, a material articulation between human sensoria and artificial perceptors. The integrity of the Cartesian individual, distinct in both mind and body from all other beings-in-the-world, is here thoroughly dismantled.

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8 Consider, for example, the title of Steven Johnson’s book Emergence: The connected life of ants, brains, cities and software, Scribner, New York, 2002. — 51 —

Indeed, this reciprocity between embodied and equipmental perception has led some theorists to argue that all technologies are to be considered exosoma. For example, Robert Innis — and Freud and McLuhan before him — claims that all technologies are externalised organs which “substitute, extend and compensate for the body” (Innis, 1984: 68); in his renowned article ‘Machine and Organism’ Canguilhem aims to justify the view “that machines can be considered as organs of the human species”, which as he recognises was pre-empted by Bergson’s earlier consideration of “mechanical invention as biological function, an aspect of the organization of matter by life” (Crary and Kwinter, 1992b: 55, 69). Manuel de Landa’s use of the phrase machinic phylum also points to an inevitable and categorical convergence between human and machine life (de Landa, 1991). De Landa suggests that it is the computer screen which has become our ‘window’ onto the machinic phylum, since computers are able to visually represent phenomena such as nonlinear mathematical models of bifurcation processes, which are said to occur in both human and non-human machine entities (de Landa, 1991).9 Moreover, the way in which our own bodies are traversed by non- organic life, carriers of many self-organising processes, has been ‘revealed’ by visualising technologies, and in particular by those that perform conversions of non-visual information to visual images.

Again, for de Landa it is the technological apparatus in its supervisual capacity that exposes the ‘truth’ of this affinity between human and machine; he thus conveys a nostalgic belief in the vision-truth dialectic, albeit in terms of a strong technological determinism. That is, for de Landa the facticity of technologically enhanced or transmogrified perception cannot be denied. The artifactuality and situatedness of both human and machine vision, as shown by theorists such as Haraway over a decade before, is here completely disregarded. Yet notwithstanding the problems associated with de Landa’s argument, his point does support a change to conventional notions of subject and object; at the very least, the very nature and definition of ‘object,’ and its oppositional relation to the subject, becomes problematic, since all matter is seen to inhumanly organise itself and perceive in various ways.10 Additionally, since both objects and visualising

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9 For de Landa, bifurcations (as the source of creativity and variability) and attractors (stable features or long-term tendencies) are sufficient to define the behaviour of all orders of reality, and the machinic phylum designates a single phylogenetic line assimilating both organic and non-organic life (de Landa, 1992). 10 In his discussion de Landa refers to the work of Ilya Prigogine and Gregoire Nicolis, who argue that although at equilibrium “matter is blind,” when in a dynamic condition it can be said to “perceive” even weak gravitational and magnetic fields (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1989: 131). — 52 —

technologies become active partners in the perceptual process, the human subject is no longer the exclusive protagonist defining objects-of-knowledge, calling into question the routines of both scientific and ‘common-sense’ objectification. The subject of vision, and perception more generally, is no longer recognisable as explicitly human, or exclusive to the human body; it is rather a complex and mutable assemblage of the human and the non-human.

It is worth noting here, that the presumed ontological consonance between human and technology as argued by theorists such as Haraway, Innis and de Landa with varying degrees of rigor, is critically countermanded by other techno- or tele- theorists. Virilio (1994, 1995), for example, argues that on a vaster epochal scale the cycle of apperception in which humans have played a central role as perceivers, is now coming to an end. Today, visualising technologies from digital imaging applications to info-graphic software and computer-aided design, have automated perception in such a way that human organs are no longer necessarily involved in, or even compatible with, the process of visual perception or the production of visual data. This trajectory towards human-technology incompatibility has already been well-documented in ergonomic and physiological terms; for example, human eyes blink less often when viewing screen texts such that vision becomes fixed, unfocused, leading to refractive error, and often physical discomfort or injury. Yet this incompatibility would seem to extend to the level of the ontic and epistemic. In the process of knowledge-making, Virilio (1994, 1995) suggests that there are two ways in which we are excluded from the process of highly technical perception. Firstly, as Cartwright and Goldfarb (1992) point out, the graphic registers of visualising technologies are often not in the form of immediately recognisable images, as in electrocardiographic readings or the informational code of DNA strands. In other words, they are not always within with our field of apperception; that which is rendered visible is quite literally not ‘of’ the visible in human terms. In some manifestations, too, such as automatic backup or scheduled tasks regularly performed on a computer hard drive, automated perception often remains ‘black-boxed’, where there is no graphic or videographic output at all (Virilio, 1994: 60). In The Art of the Motor Virilio reminds us that this non-compatibility is not only specific to the newest technologies:

[L]et us not forget that before the invention of this ultimate ‘synthetic vision’ that will allegedly deliver us from ‘the act of seeing,’ inventions like photographic instantaneity, Jules Janssen’s astronomic revolver of 1832, the later chronophotographic gun of physiologist Jules- Etienne Marey that enabled the movement of objects travelling — 53 —

through space at great speed to be visualised, or, finally, the cinema motor of the scientific camera - all of these new apperceptual techniques essentially tended to cover what was invisible to the naked eye with the mask of the visible (Virilio, 1995: 65).

Secondly, Virilio argues, our own human visual apparatus is no longer adequate for the perceptual spectrum of today’s vision machines. Although a recognition of the deficiency and imperfection of un-augmented human vision has already become embedded in the ocularcentric trajectory, this inadequacy has now taken on different dimensions. Virilio writes:

These synthetic-perception machines will be capable of replacing us in certain domains, in certain ultra high-speed operations for which our own visual capacities are inadequate, not because of our ocular system’s limited depth of focus, as was the case with the telescope and the microscope, but because of the limited depth of time of our physiological ‘take’ (1994: 61).

Should such intra-machinic seeing bypass us altogether, we will undoubtedly be displaced from participating in perception tout court due to the absence of humanly recognisable informatic or visual outputs. There is a distinction here, too, between the conventional form of prosthetic vision, where apparatuses are attached to the body as sensorial enhancements, and the new synthetic vision, where “vision machines” are completely detached from and replace the tasks of the human sensorium. Virilio argues that this is a splitting of viewpoint, where perception is not so much a collaborative act, but a composite of discrete modes of awareness, some ‘of’ the human, and some not (1994: 59-60). This synthetic perception is thus not the same as prosthetic vision. For Virilio, the term prosthesis belongs to an older paradigm where techno-apparatuses are seen as extensions of the body, augmenting and mediating otherwise direct and unmediated sensory capacities, whereas now technologies exceed the body, moving beyond our sensorial field of experience and perception. In the context of Ihde’s technological trajectory or inclination, such vision machines are directed towards an autonomy irreconcilable with the human.

Virilio suggests, then, that human-centered vision is at the end of a long and triumphant cycle. The claim that perceptual knowledge is no longer necessarily of human origin is a radical departure from Cartesian metaphysics, yet it also has major implications for the principles of linear perspectivalism. Our habits of seeing in both science and the everyday, it could be argued, construe the visual field as empirical, experiential and image-oriented, such that what we see must be — 54 —

rendered recognisable in terms of familiar objects and pictorial or graphic representations. Even in art we customarily recognise the abstract or the surreal as images of the familiar. Yet a number of postclassical visualising technologies — particularly, as I will argue, those developed in the field of biomedical science — are quite literally non-perspectival. That is, they don’t simply transform or deliberately antagonise perspectival space and modes of seeing, as might be the case in digital imaging and new media art, and nor are they aberrations of perspective and co-ordinate space. Rather, they depict ‘other’ spatial and visual domains governed by registers of density, stratification, magnetic fields and sonar waves. As Cartwright and Goldfarb (1992) point out, the Cartesian and perspectival bias of lenticular optics has been on the wane in scientific knowledge since the 1920s. Sight- or lens-based apparatuses and their dependence on luminosity have been replaced by stratigraphy, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) and ultrasound, all techniques which “share a nonperspectival method of representing spatial dimensions” (Cartwright and Goldfarb, 1992: 201). For example, conventional X-ray techniques depict an image of the body as dimensional, because the shadowy outlines of organs, muscles and bones can be discerned as the different depth levels of the body. Tomography, on the other hand, interprets the body as a composite of many planes that in themselves are “dimensionless” (196). Therefore, as Cartwright and Goldfarb write:

stratigraphy introduced a method of visual analysis surpassing the optical laws that informed prior visual practices. In stratigraphy... it is a superimposition of multiple exposures taken from a multiplicity of positions, and not the optical limitation of a focal field from a single vantage point, that isolates a single plane (197).

In the case of CT scans, an object space is described “according to numerical registers of density, rather than according to the laws of perspectival space” (200). Again, these registers are not ‘dimensional’ in any way similar to Cartesian or Euclidian geometric space, but rather relate to scales of density and intensity in perceptual fields outside the human sensorium, or the measurement of what Cartwright and Goldfarb call “nonvisible space” (197).

The way in which the “nonvisible” has become a central object of medical knowledge has necessitated a shift from lens-based visualising technologies to visualising technologies which must first perform the act of translation from non- visual to visual data, and back again should manipulation of the data be required. — 55 —

In fact Cartwright and Goldfarb argue that technoscientific knowledge has worked to repudiate sight itself, as the “technician’s disassembling of lenticular optics constitutes a challenge to the empirical gaze and the sight-based epistemologies informing Western culture” (1992: 201). Yet it could also be argued that even though such translations become a problem of coding or programming a graphic register, the epistemological bias remains ocularcentric in that the translation is always directed towards visual representation. Nevertheless, the type of imaging to emerge from biomedical vision is quite “radically divorced... from the sensory act of seeing and the phenomenal” (Cartwright and Goldfarb, 1992: 199). Although we might convert non-visual information into visual information, the focus of science’s epistemological probing is on that which is not visible, and the converted visual information is usually unrecognisable to non-experts, which troubles the direct relation between seeing and knowing in ocularcentric metaphysics. Such conversion technologies quite literally transform non-visible, sometimes physical yet often intangible phenomena into observable entities. Against the truth-function of science and reason implicit in Descartes’ visual metaphor, technoscientific apparatuses have severely compromised the self-apparent link between the visible and the (f)actual.

Within philosophy and sociology of postclassical sciences over the past two or three decades, there has indeed emerged a denial of the idea that observation is non-intervening, or that vision is neutral and objective. As such, these denials imply, we need to reassess our commitment to subject-centred and perspectival modes of knowing. In the process of postclassical visualisation occurs the irreducible inter-dependence of various agencies: those of the scientist or observer, the object of scientific analysis, and the apparatus itself. All of these actors, as Latour and Haraway would claim, collaborate in finally defining the boundaries and nature of the object. In much biomedical imaging, for example, the apparatus often translates non-visible information — or information that is simply not of the order of the visible — into a readable macroscopic image. The ensemble of tools and bodies — complex machines, scanning devices, screens and hard drives, and those doctors and technicians who operate, service and adjust them — work to reveal that which can be configured as data code, thereby rendering unknowable that which cannot. The scanning process may also contribute a number of wayward ‘artifacts,’ often inexplicable visual objects in the image which, if not recognised as such by the expert, can be misinterpreted. The patient-body, immobilised, ‘answers’ viscerally, or at a molecular level, to the magnetic fields or — 56 —

sound waves of the apparatus. The doctor or radiologist appropriates or embodies a dissected and machinic vision, or is able to prioritise a particular computer- aided ‘order’ of vision in greyscale, where gaseous or fluid substances are luminous, and solid or dense substances such as bone are represented in darker shades. In James Gibson’s terms, the visual world, where sight is ecologically intertwined with other senses to create three-dimensional depth, is obscured in favour of the visual field, where sight is intentionally detached from the environment and the eyes fixated to create two-dimensional or projected visuality (cited in Jay, 1994: 4). At no juncture is this process a transparent seeing of what is objectively there, but rather a mediated, artifactual and many-sided collaborative effect or achievement.

A significant byproduct of this postclassical critique of perception as intervening, variable and partial, is that a distinction between natural vision and artificial, synthetic or mediated vision cannot be maintained. This of course has important consequences for a theorisation of embodied agency, since the status of prosthetic visualising technologies is now altered; they too are quite literally installed within the structure of embodiment. Any understanding of embodied subjectivity must then also take into account each body’s field of equipment or tool-horizon, since together they shape the epistemic and ontic boundaries of our knowledge and praxis.

The re-embodiment of perception — one aspect of the corporeal turn in theories on culture — has been evident in both philosophies of the body and technology, and in some ‘postmodern materialist’11 theories of agency. The task of reinstating the body as actively participant in the production of knowledge has had a considerable impact on refiguring the subject-object relation. For if bodies and objects shift from ‘objecthood’ to become agents, then firstly, the nature of objecthood changes (since all objects can be potentially reconceived as protagonists in active environments), and secondly not only the body but also body-prostheses — i.e. tools — become complexly integrated into the subject-object dialectic. As I will discuss in the next chapter, phenomenological approaches to the body, technology, and agency attempt to problematise this dialectic, and the work of Merleau-Ponty in particular is useful in showing how the duality between subject

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11 As I have indicated, Donna Haraway’s work in “Situated Knowledges” and “A Cyborg Manifesto” are early applications of this kind of hybrid theory (Haraway, 1991).

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and object might be overcome, or how a moment prior to their binary articulation might be choreographed. The way in which phenomenology demonstrates how perception is constituted rather than immediate also facilitates a critique of high- tech perceptual apparatuses as implicated in and mutating that articulation.

It would seem that if scientific knowledge as the bastion of the vision-truth function can no longer uphold the universality of Cartesian metaphysics, ontological difference, or perspectival and geometric spatiality, then such norms can no longer be maintained as the necessary ontic backdrop to the commonplace domain of the lifeworld. If the classical scientific image is under attack from within contemporary science and medicine itself, then as Heelan suggests “we should ask whether a privileged cultural position should continue to be given to Cartesian/Euclidean space in everyday life and language” (Heelan, 1983: 278). The norms of such space, Heelan argues, can readily be countered by the variable ontology of what he terms hyperbolic vision, which lends itself to a spatiality dependent on the somatic and environmental context of the perceiver. He claims that in certain (and frequently occurring) circumstances, perceived objects do not correlate with Euclidean physicality or Cartesian perspective, but we more often than not attribute such nonconformity to illusion rather than giving credence to altered parameters of perception:

The inclusion of hyperbolic visual space within an enlarged realism would make a positive statement about the primacy of perception, and the centrality of perception of physical embodiment in the (material fabric of the) universe.... The mating of Euclidean and hyperbolic visual spaces is not as problematic as would appear at first sight, since they merge smoothly in ordinary vision; they are like the ‘stereopsis’ of sensed and spectral color, or felt and thermodynamic heat, and of all pairs of manifest and scientific images. Such a ‘stereopsis’ of realistic spaces would enlarge the scope of possible Worlds … by adding to our current Cartesian World, horizons deliberately related to the in-der-Welt-Sein character of human perceivers (Heelan, 1983: 278).

Indeed, we learn three-dimensional vision and perspective a posteriori — always after our motile, tactile, haptic and aural engagement with the world: “[t]actile sense is correlated with our allegedly two-dimensional retinal image, and this learned cueing produces three-dimensional perception” (Heelan, 1983: 189). Perspectival vision is then essentially an embodied vision, dependent on our somatic encounters with the world. For Heelan there is no ontological difference between our so-called natural or common vision and the scientific vision given by — 58 —

our various technological praxes: both visions, all visions, are of worlds for humans as-bodies (Heelan, 1983: 279).

In a similar way, Hans Jonas argues in the appendix to his detailed phenomenological critique The Nobility of Sight, that although sight is a mode of perception where distance is often an advantage over proximity, this does not mean that vision is any less embodied or motile. The fact that we have a body is indeed the “primal fact of our spatiality,” and vision as “the part-function of the whole body” is dependent on exosomatic relations with the worldly environment (Jonas, 1966: 154). For Jonas, percipients are not passive observers mirroring the world, but in the act of perceiving always also “do something” to that world: perception is always perception-as-interaction. He writes:

I can indeed view the world from my fixed standpoint and apprehend it in depth, in perspective, and in the order of its differently extending directions. I may then be the stationary and inactive observer who lets the spectacle of the world pass by his eyes as on a screen. But in this contemplative situation my former activity of actually moving through space, of directing myself toward some goal, of changing my direction, of correlating time used to distance covered, of measuring exertion against the visual results of change, all these and the always present possibility of performing the same acts again, underlie and impregnate that seemingly static presence of space which vision enjoys. We may therefore say that the possession of a body in space, itself part of the space to be apprehended, and that body capable of self-motion in counterplay with other bodies, is the precondition for a vision of the world (1966: 156).

There is no departure from this embodiment: the abstracted visual metaphors of Descartes and linear perspective are themselves heuristic devices contrived to palpate and manage the world, and in doing so they have prioritised a certain relationship between the world and the body. The Cartesian body may be a quasi- body or even a body in absentia, but as I will show throughout what follows, and especially in my critique of virtual reality, what we experience as ‘disembodiment’ must still be apprehended as another mode of embodiment. A significant component of this critical framework will also involve refocusing on the instrumentality of knowledge — a crucial factor which neo-Cartesian accounts of knowledge either ignore or render epistemically subordinate.

My position thus runs counter to the implication that technoculture has increasingly discarded the body as the unnecessary and unwanted counterpart of the fixed gaze of Western visualism; or further, that eye-technologies such as the lens and screen will emerge as bodiless vehicles of that gaze (Romanyshyn, 1989: — 59 —

99). As I have suggested, some postmodern critique has tended to equate electronic and digital technologies with a consequent dematerialising effect upon communicative possibility. From this perspective, tele-technologies are given as the prototypical examples of this effect — they are apparatuses which suspend perception from both the body and the material world, and thus work to detach corporeality from the production of knowledge. Against this I will argue that while technovision or postclassical vision effects a different relationship between seeing and knowing, and thus between agency, bodies and tools, it nevertheless remains a full-bodied vision. As I will suggest, in relation to contemporary technological and mediatic incursions into the body, this means that visual perception is also dependent on endosomatic relations with domains of equipment. Such human- technology relations demand that the very notions of body and environment begin to accommodate tool-bodies and technological agency, becoming what Guattari refers to as “new Universes of reference” able to house the “machinic dimensions” of subjectivity (Guattari, 1995: 4-5). Synthetic vision, plurivision, and artifactual vision are all descriptors of how the body-tool configuration “handles” or “carpenters” the sociotechnical world, and how our embodiment is made endlessly mutable by our tools and equipmental environments. This is a post- phenomenological position which I will detail and apply to various technological ensembles in the chapters to follow.

*

This chapter has reflected on the changing epistemological and ontological parameters of visualism, from Plato and Descartes to linear perspective, and the ocular permutations of technoscientific imaging devices and apparatuses. As I have shown there are non-perspectival and anti-Cartesian ways of construing the trajectories of technoscientific modes of seeing. The changing cultural habits and sense ratios emerging through our use and apprehension of technologically mediated perceptors, calls for a corresponding adaptation in how we define the variables of corporeality, technology and agency. Part of the work of defining these variables involves tracing the instrumental inclinations of tele-technologies and tele-visions.

Of key significance in such a inquiry, as I will propose in the next chapter, is Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method, Ihde’s critical approach to instrumental realism, and the corporeal feminist adaptations to this method. — 60 —

Within these post-phenomenological matrices, all knowledge emerges as essentially embodied, located and non-neutral praxis. Merleau-Ponty’s and Ihde’s studies of equipmental perception, and corporeal feminism’s supplemental attention to gender and culture, are central to my argument that tools are materially and culturally specific attributes of our own sensorium. Indeed, once tools are seen as aspects of the body, we can begin to theorise knowledge-making as contingent upon a mutable and contextual range of body-tool configurations.

chapter two

corporealism

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part one: the (techno)corporeal turn1

While distinct terms, body and technology will always necessitate their interdependent consideration as a relationship. Likewise it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about bodies and technologies as separate entities — and therefore similarly to separate theories of technology from theories of our embodiment. Eugene Thacker (1999)

The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.

Donna Haraway (1991: 180)

In the previous chapter I identified and critiqued both the ocularcentrism of Western epistemology, and some of the more recent technovisual permutations of the visual metaphor. More specifically, I discussed the way in which this visualist tradition translates our being-in-the-world largely by depending on the ontological difference between subject and object. This dialectic, in turn, works as the foundation for the objectivism of scientific and technological discourse, whose concern it is to visibilise a transparent and factual knowledge of both bodies and objects. The interdependence of the visualist tradition and dualist ontology inevitably entails an understanding of technology as epistemically mute, merely a translating or mediating device. In particular, technologies are configured as non- agential perceptual extensions of the body. As Hillis argues, “[t]he Cartesian metaphysics divorcing mind from body undergirds a view of technology as

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1 Aspects of this chapter have been published in: ‘Corporeal Virtuality: the impossibility of a disembodied ontology,’ co-authored with Carly Harper, Body, Space and Technology, vol 2, no 2, July 2002, Brunel University.

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only an insensate object or tool that humans manipulate, rather than a process ‘that disrupts and reconfigures whatever we take to be ‘essentially’ human’” (Hillis, 1999: 34). Even within the technovisual metaphor this reliance on the truth- function of machine vision continues to uphold the ontological difference between the objective world and perceiving knowing subject.

This chapter provides the theoretical and methodological foundation by which I will challenge ocularcentrism, its disembodying effects, its dualist ontology, and its ascription of agency to the one subject-based existential mode. Instead, I will argue that knowledge production is irreducibly corporeal, socio-culturally embedded, and toolic or equipmental. This reconfiguration will involve a complex re-thinking of the relationship between subject and object, and between body and world; the attempt to collapse ontological difference entails more than the reconciliation of two seemingly oppositional terms. The theorisation of an essentially embodied subjectivity — and adjacent to this, the claim that both corporeality and tools are crucial aspects of that subjectivity — must convincingly rework generative concepts such as embodiment, technology, and subject or agency.

The theoretical ground of this chapter draws on recent work from a broad spectrum of disciplines, and can be linked in particular to a strong current of ‘body-theory’ in contemporary critical thought, which has responded to neo- Cartesian metaphysics and mainstream Western philosophy, and has begun to take the body and its materiality seriously. Theorists in such diverse fields as feminism, cyber-theory, philosophy of technology and science studies have been keen to interrogate and contest the legacy of Cartesian thought, the dissatisfaction with neo-Cartesian representations of disembodiment in virtual reality and cyberspace being one recent example. As I have argued, Cartesian perspectivalism inevitably marginalises the place of corporeality in the production of knowledge, or even more than this, depends on its exclusion as a prerequisite in the pursuit and foundation of truth or objectively generated knowledge.

The interpretation of body-tool relations in contemporary culture — the coincidence and codependence of these two ontological domains — can be usefully theorised by way of both phenomenology and several contemporary perspectives on technology and embodiment. On the one hand, in technoscience, there has been the development of the idea that scientific knowledge is

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instrumentally embodied. This trajectory — the instrumental embodiment of scientific knowledge — can be partially traced to Gaston Bachelard’s The New Scientific Spirit (1984), and more recently to Heidegger’s claim concerning the historical and ontological priority of technology over science. Both theorists argue that technologies, in the form of scientific apparatuses, are the instrumental/material ground upon which scientific knowledge and practice can exist at all. Sociologists of scientific knowledge2 (SSK) and subsequent actor- network theorists3 are also proponents of this idea, while Don Ihde, Patrick Heelan, Ian Hacking and others have continued this thinking within philosophy of technology, and more recently post-phenomenology.4

Additionally, in the arena of cultural criticism the works of a number of theorists, often qua phenomenology, have initiated a return to the body. Corporeal feminists, in particular, have in various ways taken up and extended Merleau-Ponty’s theorisation of body and world, contributing significantly to the corporeal turn occurring more generally in theory over the past decade. Such theorists include Vicki Kirby, Cathryn Vasseleu, Elizabeth Grosz, Gail Weiss and Katherine Hayles; more generally, body-philosophers such as Donn Welton and Drew Leder also make use of the phenomeno-corporealist method.5 These theorists have in common a notion that embodiment, corporeality, materiality, physicality and biology are — at the risk of sounding oxymoronic — culturally specified yet essential conditions of being and knowing. As Ruthrof puts it: “We are directly linked with the things that make up our world by way of our body’s ‘own ontogenesis’” (Ruthrof, 2000: 11). Within these perspectives, embodiment becomes

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2 W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes and T. Pinch (Eds.) (1990) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.; Michel Callon, John Law and Arie Rip (Eds.) (1986) Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology, The MacMillan Press Ltd, London; Andrew Pickering (1992) Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago UP, Chicago. 3 Bruno Latour (1994) ‘Pragmatogonies: A Mythical Account of How Humans and Nonhumans Swap Properties,' American Behavioural Scientist, vol 37, no 6: 791-808; John Law and John Hassard (Eds.) (1999) Actor Network Theory and after, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. 4 Don Ihde (1993) Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context. Northwestern UP, Evanston, Illinois; Don Ihde (1991) Instrumental Realism: The Interface Between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology, Indiana UP, Bloomington; Patrick Heelan (1983) Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science, California UP, Berkeley; Ian Hacking (1983) Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge UP, Cambridge. 5 Vicki Kirby (1997) Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, Routledge, New York; Cathryn Vasseleu (1998) Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, London and New York; Gail Weiss (1999) Body images: embodiment as intercorporeality, Routledge, New York and London; Elizabeth Grosz (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana UP, Bloomington; N. Katherine Hayles (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago UP, Chicago and London; Donn Welton, (Ed.) (1998) Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, Mass.; Drew Leder (1990) The Absent Body, Chicago UP, Chicago.

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the elementary ground of variable epistemologies. In this chapter, both (post)phenomenology and corporealism will be critically approached in terms of their viability for my own theory on techno-somatic agency. More specifically, from these various approaches I will extract a methodology which articulates the relational ontology of soma and techne.

To this relational ontology — which establishes that instrumental embodiment and corporeal embodiment are not distinct ontological modes — I have ascribed the term technosoma. In a Heideggerian sense, the soma-techne relation is equiprimordial, or non-derivatively commensurate. As Ihde comments, the relation between Dasein, being-in and world contains what he calls phenomenological relativity: “No element of the relation may be separated or divorced from the other; each term in Heidegger’s language is equiprimordial” (Ihde, 1991: 49). Instrumental embodiment recognises the technical embedment of knowledge, such that any analysis of tools, also simultaneously requires addressing their context of operation, or their domain of equipmentality. Heidegger argues that the condition of being in-the-world is characterised primarily by being-with-equipment: we perceive and experience always within domains of equipment, and all tools belong within an environmental or world relation. Once we understand the meaning of environment or world here, and the involvement of bodies, subjects and objects within them, it becomes apparent that from a phenomenological perspective tools and body-subjects are intrinsic to each other, and ontological difference dissolves in the ‘synopsis’ of being-in-the-world. Environment, then, is to be understood as a combination-effect of worlds ‘carpentered’ (pace Heelan 1983) by domains of equipment, a dialogic space. Our implantation within this environment and its contingent equipmental domains is a condition of our existence.

Indeed, according to Merleau-Ponty, as perceptual articulations of various kinds, tools are in-use, and are thus incorporated into our corporeality, into our inherently pliable corporeal schemas. Thus technologies are not simply prostheses — detachable attachments or perceptual extensions — they are an aspect or vector of an embodied knowledge. The handy separation of entities into beings, subjects, objects and tools is quite clearly heuristic and a posteriori. Today, our increasing remote control of the world — what we call telepresence or telematics — indicates a need to re-articulate the constitution of our very modes of being. As I will show in the final chapter, in the context of the televisual there is no doubt that the technological materiality or the medium specificity of a technology impacts upon

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embodiment. As indeed sociocultural specificity is an aspect of embodiment, this work is an exploration into the ontology of medium-specificity or techno-specificity as an aspect of embodiment.

One of the initial problematics for this theoretical project is in deciding what is meant by both ‘body’ and ‘embodiment,’ which is why corporealist perspectives are so important and instructive, particularly in apprehending how our somatics might be understood in relation to our technics. In the process of staging this remembrance of the body and its equipmentality, the very concept of a singular body — as the physical ‘container’ of the self — has become problematised and obscured, and increasingly replaced by the term ‘embodiment’ (Weiss and Haber, 1999: xiii). Katherine Hayles clarifies the difference between body and embodiment:

In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specificities of place, time, physiology, and culture which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with “the body”, however that normalised concept is understood. Whereas the body is an idealised form that gestured toward a Platonic reality, embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference. Relative to the body, embodiment is other and elsewhere, at once excessive and deficient in its infinite variations, particularities, and abnormalities (Hayles, 1999: 196-197)

Embodiment of course has to do with bodies, but it also describes the way that bodies are both the ontological and epistemological condition for human being-in- the-world, necessary yet contingent: culturally, historically and technologically specific. This shift from singular body to contingent embodiment signals a radical restructuring of the terms on which our agency is conceptualised. Philosophers have often utilised the distinction within the German language between Korper (physical body) and Leib (living body). Cartesianism tends to figure the human body in the image of Korper, treating it as one instance of the general physical class of things. Yet the body understood as Leib, or “lived body” as it is commonly translated into English, reveals the deeper significance of corporeality as a generative principle. This notion of the lived body provides a potential mode of escape from cognitive habits of dualism deeply embedded in our culture (Leder, 1990: 5). In other words, the lived body as embodiment is always in-the-world, implicated and engaged in activity, and thoroughly embedded in the praxes of existence. Understood as experiencing or lived, it is no longer possible to conceive of the body as a decontextualised entity, isolated in its activity, or as passive or

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extended substance animated by an interior willful consciousness: corporeality cannot simply be [bracketed out] of consideration; it is integral to our agency.

As will become clear in chapters three and four, this understanding of embodiment also partly inspires my own use of the word soma, which can (and should) be prefixed by such descriptors as techno-, cyber-, info-, tele-, endo- and exo-, among many others, as a way of discerning medium and techno-specific effects on the lived body. That is, the suffixes -soma and -somatic aptly capture both the corporality or bio-facticity and potential technicity of embodiment in a way that ‘body’ and ‘embodiment’ alone cannot. Each –soma blending is intended to describe a way of being rather than a what of being — any soma is not an entity (as the body might sometimes be understood) but a process/network or ontological schematic. This interpretation is amenable to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeality, and also grasps the way in which individual bodies digest the collective embodiments or shared habits of the wider cultural milieu (Verran, 1999).6 Thus contextualised, corporeality can no longer be understood as secondary or even only simply ‘necessary,’ but assumes an essential role in our subjective existence, and therefore more broadly in all our epistemological activities. This distinction between necessary and essential is fundamental to my principal argument concerning embodiment. Each term has been used to convey a highly specific set of meanings in relation to bodies and subjectivities. When it is argued that the body is ‘necessary,’ as we find in the Cartesian model of subjectivity, the body continues to remain in a marginal or disempowered epistemological position; that is, it is ‘necessary’ but not central. Essentiality, however, catalyses embodiment as a condition of knowledge and perception. Arguing for embodiment as essential to agency, as Merleau-Ponty does with his notion of the body-subject, is a significant beginning to challenging discourses of disembodiment.

In the next section I will critique aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work and suggest its validity for my own argument. Following this, I will look to philosopher of technology Don Ihde, whose critique of instrumental realism has emerged with strong links to theories of embodiment and the agency of technological apparatuses. Haraway’s insightful approach to technoscience and agency will also

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6 Helen Verran (1999) describes the collective embodiment of counting habits, and highlights the cultural specificity of those conventions. For example, in most of the Western world we use only our fingers as counting devices, whereas in some non-Western countries toes are equally crucial components of numeracy skills.

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be examined briefly, as will the relevance of Robert Innis’ (1984) article “Technics and the Bias of Perception”; both Haraway and Innis have engaged explicitly with the artifacticity of technobodies, and thus indirectly with the osmotic medium specificity of ontology. The third part of the chapter will explore the work of several feminist corporealists — Moira Gatens, Liz Grosz, and Gail Weiss — and suggest how attention to the gender and cultural specificity of embodiment is an important facet of the human-technology relation, yet often problematically neglected by phenomenologists. The visceral work of Drew Leder (1990) will also be examined here in the context of corporeal feminism, foregrounding the following chapter’s focus on biomedical imaging.

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part two: phenomenology

To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962: 143)

There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.

Donna Haraway (1991: 178)

Over the past few decades French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has been taken up as a central antagonist of Cartesian metaphysics and the constitution of ontological difference. By insisting on the concurrency of consciousness and the body, Merleau-Ponty offers a way to think outside the dualist framework of subject and object, nature and culture, and the human and the technological. Both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology have as their imperative the theorisation of an ontological domain where being is not grounded in the dichotomous relation of subject and object, such that the structure of knowledge does not surface from this polarity. Significantly, this is an argument for a pre-dichotomous understanding of ontology, discovering how the subject-object relation has hidden the essential collusive nature of being. This should be distinguished from some posthumanist notions of a post-dichotomous understanding of techno-being, which proposes that the unique condition of high tech apparatuses becoming ‘agentic’ has resulted in the dissolution of boundaries between subject and object.

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As corporeal feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu points out, Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the body and perception must be located in relation to his claim that “perceptual experience has a corporeally defined reality that is missing in empiricist and consciousness-based explanations between a body and its world in perception” (Vasseleu, 1998: 21). That is, empiricism, as a theory of pure ‘exteriority,’ which “construes the body as having a purely causal role in perception,” and consciousness-based formulations which rely on a theory of pure ‘interiority,’ reducing perception to the actions of a disembodied thinking mind, are equally unsatisfactory (Vasseleu, 1998: 21). To escape both reductions, which simply privilege one of the binary terms at the expense of the other, Merleau-Ponty affords us the insight that binary terms are heuristic devices that have mistakenly been ascribed an ontic or truth status. i.e. they are the synthetic attributions of a particular methodology of understanding and not of existence per se.

Three key Merleau-Pontian terms widely appropriated by embodiment theorists are body-subject, a recuperative concept which stresses the co-incidence of agency and the body, corporeal schema, which illustrates the mutability of our body boundaries and body image, and intercorporeality, which describes the way in which embodiment and our corporeal schema “is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and nonhuman bodies” (Weiss, 1999a: 5). Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on our corporeal and perceptual engagement with the environment provides valuable insights into the interpellation of bodies and tools in all human-technology relations.

Within the Cartesian model of existence, being human requires that we negotiate the fundamental split between mind and body. For Descartes, the hub of human- ness resides in the mind; the role of the body is as a sustaining materiality that is ontologically necessary (for the mind could not be in the world without it) but not epistemologically necessary (the mind contemplates and knows apart from the body). Thus for Descartes, the body can be set apart from the mind as an ‘object,’ and its various sensory capacities — i.e. vision, smell, taste, touch and hearing and their combinations — can be both experienced, and objectively and critically investigated, through disembodied thought. Moreover, the brute viscera of the body, the working of its internal organs and digestive system, remains largely inaccessible or below the horizon of conscious thought. As Drew Leder (1990) comments, it is this inaccessibility or absence of the endosoma, unless through injury, illness or pain it is revealed or demands attention, that has maintained the

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tenacity of mind/body split. This has resulted in a particular understanding of the kind of thing a body is: it is a natural, given, organic and biological object, but never does it actively participate in the production of knowledge.

For Merleau-Ponty the body is not an object but a primordial context, with all the environmental and ambient complexity that the term implies, although as recent feminist theorists claim, the context of embodiment must be broadened to include socio-cultural and gender specificity. Both as and in context, our body perceives according to a complex interspersion of physicality and biology, material and cultural environment, somatic memory and habit. This, Merleau-Ponty argues, describes the pre-objective and primary realm of experience. He states that “objective thought is unaware of the subject of perception… because it presents itself with a world ready made” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 207), whereas pre-objective thought presents an embodied subjectivity that is part of a world-in-the-making.

Perception is thus always-already of the body, and the relation between self and world is first and foremost by way of perception, such that embodiment is both condition and context through which relations between ‘me’ and other ‘things’ become possible. It is clear here how Merleau-Ponty’s theory is at the outset compatible with the idea of technosomatic agency, an agency that emerges precisely as an irreducible correlation between subject and object. As Grosz suggests:

[The body] is defined by its relations with objects and in turn defines these objects as such — it is ‘sense-bestowing’ and ‘form-giving,’ providing a structure, organization, and ground within which objects are to be situated and against which the body-subject is positioned. The body is my being-to-the-world and as such is the instrument by which all information and knowledge is received and meaning is generated. It is through the body that the world of objects appears to me; it is in virtue of having/being a body that there are objects for me…. The relations of mutual definition governing the body and the world of objects are ‘form-giving’ insofar as the body actively differentiates and categorizes the world into groupings of sensuous experience, patterns of organization and meaning (Grosz 1994: 87; my emphasis).

Merleau-Ponty thus challenges the notion that the human subject is made up of two ontological modes, the subject/mind and object/body, a split which brackets consciousness from its being-in-the-world. The central term he employs to override this ontological difference is ‘body-subject,’ a term which stresses the originary co-incidence of consciousness and the body (Macann, 1993: 176).

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Although hyphenated, it is a term which is conceptually, existentially and praxically holistic. The way to think the body-subject, Merleau-Ponty suggests, is to take as its focal nexus the ‘middle space’ or entre-deux which remains undisclosed in neo-Cartesian philosophy. It is quite literally impossible for us to experience mind and body as separate entities, or to imagine that embodiment is either ontically or epistemically escapable; in fact, the body-subject effectively renders ontic-material being and epistemic knowing as indivisible, and as methodologically extemporised as the categories of mind and body.

The collapse of ontological difference within Merleau-Ponty’s work is perhaps most effectively realised by the terms corporeal schema and intercorporeality. Corporeal schema or body image reflects the way we experience our bodies as a mutable yet unified and felt structure comprised of a synergy of parts and organs:

Body parts are related in a peculiar way… they are not spread out side by side, but enveloped in each other… they form a system, not a mosaic of spatial values. Similarly my whole body for me is not an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space. I am in undivided possession of it and I know where each of my limbs is through a ‘body image’ in which all are included (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 98).

The body image is how we understand and experience the body in a pre-objective way; that is, in a way “which is not reducible to a perception of these relations, from ‘without’, nor to an association of images from within” (Macann, 1993: 175). There is an original coincidence and continuum of consciousness and the body: as body-subject, I don’t have to reflect on or call up any independent knowledge of physiology and how the body functions; its gestures and the order of their execution are consistent with what it requires, and with what is demanded of it, in terms of its inescapable exposure to the solicitations of the world. This implicatory and symbolic structure of the body, whereby body-parts are interrelated and enveloped in each other to form a synergy, also extends to the unity of the sensorium and the world, and the necessary implication between them. The relation of the body to the world is not to be understood in terms of objective distances and boundaries, but instead in terms of a body-world amalgam. So, in the same way that we experience a sense of undivided tenure in relation to our own body, in that our different organs and limbs will aim towards a collective goal, we also extend that sense of collaboration to objects and space/environment. There is thus a kind of anticipatory mobilisation of the body in relation to a specific situation and environment, an “entering into a relationship” with the world:

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Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’. Sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationship with objects … it is the momentum of existence, which does not cancel out the radical diversity of contents, because it links them to each other, not by placing them under the control of ‘I think’, but by guiding them towards the intersensory unity of a ‘world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 137-8; my emphasis).

This model of the body is useful in challenging notions of disembodiment in neo- Cartesian discourse, as it points to the ‘expandable,’ inherently open and tractable nature of the body, its aptitude for incorporative activity and morphosis. In his well-known phenomenology of the blind man’s stick, Merleau-Ponty illustrates how we are ontically pliable beings, our corporeal schematics malleable to both environment and tool:

The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch. . . . In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term. There is no question here of any quick estimate or any comparison between the objective length of the stick and the objective distance of the goal to be reached. To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 143).

In the context of everyday activities, the experience of one’s own corporeal schema is not fixed, but may encompass a range of familiar body-aspects in the form of tools and technological mediations that may be potentially embodied. For example, learning to drive a car involves learning to function according to the spatial organisation and limits of the vehicle, its speed, the corporeal network/schematic of the hand-wheel-direction vector and foot-brake-deceleration continuum, and so on. Within the material shape and capacities of the car, we adjust our physical deportment, spatial orientation, and our entire physical relationship with the world. Drivers need to train their car-body, or as Mike Michael (2000) suggests, become a “carson” able to accommodate entirely new ways of thinking about and moving through space, becoming familiar with emergent ratios of hand-eye and foot-eye co-ordination, judging distances with the visual device of the rear-view mirror (a new vision which warns ‘objects are closer than they appear’), and many other technosomatic proficiencies. Initially, learning to drive involves constant attention and concentration, because we must consciously orient our bodies towards the unfamiliar spatial and motile logic of the car, but after some practice

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driving becomes habitual, and our being properly ‘dilated.’ In this way, the car becomes an aspect of our embodiment, part of our repertoire of proprioceptive skills; we have appropriated the body of the car as a temporary body or quasi- body, a supplemental being-in-the-world.

The augmented continuity of body and tool is perhaps nowhere more overtly proselytized than by phenomenologist and philosopher of technology Robert Innis (1984) in his article ‘Technics and the Bias of Perception.’ It is worth briefly examining Innis’ commitment to a wholesale elision of difference between technology and the body, and in particular his problematic reification of the natural body and unmediated perception, in contrast to the a-priori adaptability of Merleau-Ponty’s schema of embodiment. Innis claims that all technologies are somatic organs, and that this mediating function of technology — the supervention of an artificial body — is also its primary one, independent of socio- historical or instrumental specificity. Every self-world interface is hence constituted with an exosomatic organ in a “probing-sorting encounter” (Innis, 1984: 76). Along with McLuhan, Innis argues that “systems of exosomatic organs have their own ‘trajectories’ — dynamic logics or vectorial paths... [T]hey define, and predefine the ultimate grounds for the historical variability of consciousness and the forms of perception and apprehension” (68). The idea that technologies as somatic expansions have their own ‘logic’ and operational conditions, comprising the ultimate grounds for perception and understanding, is undoubtedly a strongly determinist approach which sublimates the role of cultural and historical context.

For Innis the potential list of exosomatic organs is “truly endless” and includes language itself as the most distinctive organ; pace Arnold Gehlen, he argues that each technosomatic organ functions as compensation, substitution or extension for/of the human body. More radically, all sense-modalities have their own “exosomatic organ space” (Innis, 1984: 68). For example, visual exosoma include eyeglasses, the microscope, television and state-of-the-art medical visualising technologies such as 3D ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. Every technology, in its affinity with particular sensorial modes, reveals a specific perceptual and spatial domain, or in McLuhan’s sense, alters the ratios of the senses (McLuhan, 1964, 1967). This suggests that technologies either enhance an underdeveloped and inadequate human sensorium (providing a more accurate or proximal mediation of the world), or they distort the “natural” unaided perception

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of the human body.7 Indeed, Innis does refer to the “instrumental auxiliaries of perception” as either magnifying or reducing the perceptual range of the “unaided sense organ” (76; my emphasis). Although his conceptualisation of exosomatic organ space is useful, Innis’ reification of the “natural” body (with its own innate trajectories) remains problematic, as such a body cannot find concrete consistency across culture and gender, nor among numerous other micro-somatic and sub- cultural differences between humans. As I will suggest in the section to follow, the problem of embodied cultural specificity and corporeal diversity in phenomenology is not effectively dealt with until the emergence of corporeal feminism.

Innis’ rendering of technologies as exosomatic organs is a way of insisting that in the perceptual aggregation of body-and-tool, we must critically assess the perceptual biases of modern technology, and guard against its increasing dis- embodiments. His central argument is concerned with critiquing the debilitative effects of modern technology on our perceptual capabilities; he insists that post- industrial technologies have brought about a “human manipulation of the world” that contravenes “the natural trajectories of embodiment relations” (79). Here, Innis is wanting to maintain or recapture the integrity of the human subject in its deepest somatic affinities with particular kinds of pre-modern technologies. That is, earlier non-machinic tools have embedded structures and rhythms which “mime” the originary structures and rhythms of the human body, whereas the more complicated utility of machines and their inorganic rotary motion cannot be said to extend the proper function of the natural body (81). As such, he warns against “tacit appropriation” of the “intentional vector fields” of modern machine and electronic technologies within which we find ourselves (86). In this analysis, Innis is largely indifferent to the medium specificities of modern technology, collapsing them to include machines of industrial production, post-industrial image and information technologies, and televisual apparatuses. These latter, in particular, sustain mono- or at best duo-dimensional perceptual possibility, thus atrophying the potentially enriching relation between bodies and tools. He writes:

Modern civilization… is really based on the elimination of embodiment relations as exemplified in tool use... and thus tends to eliminate the ‘kinesthetic’ component and substitute in its place rather a ‘non-somatic cybernetic’ ideal and to displace somatic satisfaction, embodied in the immanent quality of an activity, by a social ‘phatic’ component of interpersonal solidarity in group

______

7 With regard to tele-technological apparatuses, it is in fact often implied that technoscientific tools such as the telescope or microscope enhance perception, whereas ‘cultural’ tools such as the television distort our perspective of the world.

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cooperation, which, looked at from the point of view of a philosophy of the body, is scarcely adequate compensation (Innis, 1984: 80-81).

In their work as environmental probes and world filters, then, modern technologies are in fact somatically negligent, their trajectories having furthered a perceptual bias that detaches the body from the tool, a technological inclination or vector that is increasingly anti-materialist and decorporealising. While Innis’ attention to technology’s damaging effects on the corporeal schema is potentially salient, the notion that all bodies have an original or generative state which is intuitively suited to some tools more than others, denies the kind of osmotic malleability inherent to Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema.

Bodies are enduring and relational projects. Augmentation, extension, and prosthesis are words which approximate the incorporative or intercorporeal achievements of embodiment. For Merleau-Ponty, intercorporeality is a term which describes the very condition of a corporeality partially comprised of numerous, ongoing yet ever-changing interrelationships with other bodies, tools and environmental fields. For Merleau-Ponty the nature of intercorporeality must work as a complete refusal of both ontological difference and the disembodied Cartesian subject. In particular, his recuperative concepts of the body-subject and the corporeal schema — their inherent ambiguity and irreducibility — are crucial theoretical catalysts which have undermined the core tenets of disembodied knowledge and mobilised the corporeal turn.

Employing the insights of Merleau-Ponty (and other ‘body philosophers’ such as Heidegger), and in contrast to Innis, Don Ihde also situates knowledge in the context of embodied perception, yet emphasises in particular the non-neutrality, or the cultural, historical and material situatedness of technological intervention and mediation (Harper, 2000). As Harper points out, for Ihde the phenomenological insight that tools are primarily orientational in structure, and thus “incorporated into our corporeal schema — or embodied — immediately presents further insights with regard to artifact use; namely that ‘in extending bodily capacities, the technology also transforms them’” (Harper, 2000: 11-12; Ihde, 1990: 75; emphasis added). In what follows, I will discuss Ihde’s phenomenological elaborations on the human-technology relation, and suggest how a theory of such relations might effectively attend to the medium- or techno- specificity of such transformations.

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Ihde argues that the traditional understanding of scientific knowledge as abstract and contemplative has secured the relationship between science (as theory) and technology (as praxis) in hierarchical terms (Ihde, 1991: 6). In this understanding technological apparatuses are the material or instrumental substrate; they work to prove or provide evidence of what is already effectively known via contemplative reasoning, or by way of a thinking which is untainted by the secular and carnal fallibilities of either bodies or technics. Yet increasingly, experimental praxis and perception have become essential to scientific knowledge, such that science can be more aptly named technoscience (after first Bachelard then Latour), a coupling which indicates the inextricable and irreducible relation between modern science and the apparatuses used to achieve that knowledge. Technology, then, is no longer an application of science, but rather, according to Heidegger’s materialist inversion, it is “the essential material condition and possibility upon which scientific knowledge can exist at all” (Harper, 2002: 12; Ihde, 1983: 235). It is precisely this intervention through instrumentation, the way in which objects of knowledge become instrumentalised and drawn into the techno-perceptual logic of the apparatus, and the non-neutral and transformative effects of such activity, that effectively enables much scientific knowledge.

Significantly, in this emphasis on the practical and perceptual dimensions of contemporary technoscience, we can begin to recognise a more fundamental relation between knowledge and perception. That is, if science is experimental and technologically acquired, and if perceiving an object with a visual apparatus is increasingly the originary and not the derivative moment of discovery, then sensory perception itself becomes irrevocably entangled with the articulation of scientific knowledge. As such, the technologies that ‘mediate’ these enquires are themselves perception-transforming devices, which extend perception into the world. Extensions of perception are always about framing, de/recontextualising, effecting; technologies do not simply provide us the means to observe what is transparently there, they renovate and collaborate in that ‘knowing’.

The collaborative nature of technoscientific knowledge production is also convincingly theorised and politicised in a number of articles written by Haraway throughout the 1980s, and collectively published in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991). Though not a phenomenologist, Haraway’s work on technoscience is a significant backdrop to the work of many corporeal feminists, and thus deserves some attention here. For Haraway, technoscientific discourse is intrinsic to the

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way we understand our bodies, and our biology and physiology is increasingly secured by a range of technological ensembles and machine visions. In particular, such discourses and ensembles surrounding the female body have contributed significantly to the presumption that women are more fixed to, and predetermined by, their corporeality than men. Feminists must therefore develop a strategic techno-literacy enabling deconstructive work from within technoscience. At this point, Haraway’s argument concerning technoscience takes an interesting turn, for she suggests that technoscience has already effected a blurring or boundary breakdown across many fields and domains of scientific knowledge, and thus is itself conducive to the kind of epistemological irreverence theorised by feminism. Thus, for example, artificial life and intelligence technologies collapse the ontological difference between organisms and informatic entities as the latter attain self-organising and self-replicating agency; biotechnologies such as medical prostheses, genetic engineering, in-vitro fertilisation, and oral technologies such as hormone replacement, contraception and anti-depressants blur the boundaries between human bodies and machines. Even more significantly, perhaps, in the domains of neuroscience, genetics, physiology, and immunology, the human body is itself interpreted as an informatic or machinic entity, effecting a conceptual blurring between the human and the technological. Haraway claims that both a discursive and a material seepage between the human/non-human binary is nascent, a leakiness that will so alter our ontology, that potentially all other dichotomous relations and origin stories will be similarly compromised.

Thus for Haraway there is not simply a human ontology, and not only women’s bodies and men’s bodies, but technobodies, alien bodies, bodies across species and other ficto-possible ontologies. While it may be important for feminism to extricate the body from purely biologistic or essentialist accounts, in a move which corporeal feminism simulated almost a decade later, Haraway also argued against the constructionists that material and corporeal effects are not simply cultural or purely semiotic effects. Rather, bodies are mutable threshold entities, both more than biology and more than cultural productions. Feminism can be enabled and empowered by the epistemic and ontic leakage within technoscience, because the parameters of subjectivity and embodiment are altered; a discourse is opened — a very powerful scientific discourse — which may in some ways validate the kind of leaky and transgressive subjectivity that has always been specific to women. That is, women’s bodies have always been ‘leaky’ and resistant to definition: the experience of seeping and unstable boundaries between body and world, the

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invasion of body space by various ‘others,’ including babies and gynecological devices, are aspects of women's ordinary experience.

This emergent ontology is relational, with an agency defined by the term “material- semiotic” (Haraway, 1991: 208), a phrase which indicates the dynamic negotiation of all entities, and the interpellation of both matter and language, in the construction of our bodies, selves and realities. We are all material-semiotic actors — humans and non-humans, organic and otherwise — hybrids of social or semiotic construction and materiality neither of which can fully account for the other. Objectival and bodily boundaries — exactly that which designates objects and bodies as such — are therefore contestable and reconfigurable, and not only by us, but always in collusion and continuity with environment and substance. And, materially and semiotically, these continuities are also both endo- and exo- somatic; technologies used both inside and outside the skin are similarly construed:

historically specific human relations with nature must somehow — linguistically, scientifically, politically, technologically, and epistemologically — be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational. Machines and prosthetic devices can no longer be known simply as tools which have a function, because they are also active, extra-linguistic, surprising participants and fantastic protagonists in our collective realities (Haraway, 1991: 208).

Our sensorial convergence with technological apparatuses has effected strange permutations in the distinctions between humans and objects, a space of overlap. Viruses, auto-immune responses, and biomedical practices like organ transplant surgery and transgenic engineering, generate models of selves in constant intimate interchange with others, living organisms whose every cell bears the mark of technoscientific intervention. In other words, the construction of knowledge and social reality become cooperative effects achieved with other non-human partners, such that we are not the only actors in that production. Epistemology and ontology are contingent and negotiable.

Technologies, and specifically visualising apparatuses, figure prominently as material-semiotic actors and world-organisers, negotiating the “boundary projects” of objects and bodies. Machinic visions in this analysis comprise “active perceptual systems” which translate always partial and situated “ways of seeing” (Haraway, 1991: 190). Such ways of seeing and organising realities are therefore always embodied, whether that manifestation be organic or machinic, or a variable

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permutation of a range of embodiments. What must clearly be accounted for in the ontic hybridity of these material-semiotic embodiments, is the agency, inclination and telos of the body-tool incarnation. As I discussed in the previous chapter, one of the interesting aspects of Ihde’s work involves his theorisation of the latent inclinations, “instrumental styles,” or unintentional trajectories both of human- technology relations, and of technologies themselves in their medium specificity (Ihde, 1979: 43). These ideas are useful because they clearly position technologies as agentic, and so supplement perspectives which insist on both the corporeal and material agency of things- and bodies-in-the-world, and further dismantle the oppositional account of the subject/object relation. In Haraway’s terms, technology’s ‘eyes’ are dynamic ways of seeing and arranging worlds, and the agency of synthetic vision and the artificial perception of high-tech apparatuses, must be accounted for in any perception-representation dialectic.

To elaborate further on the phenomenological ground of the human-technology relation and its various trajectories, Ihde develops the generative concept of the relation from Heidegger’s earlier claim that the relation per se is ontologically primary. That is, for Heidegger the term relational ontology means that objects and subjects are not separate entities which are then a posteriori gathered up in a relation; instead, the relation itself is a priori, such that our separation of subject and object, human and technology, nature and culture — or indeed this applies across the whole range of oppositional couplings — is heuristic and after-the-fact. With this understanding of relationality in mind, Ihde differentiates between various human-machine-world relations, each of which indicates a particular mode of being in relation to equipment. These relations are based on the correlational schema Human <==> World: the upper line of the bi-directional arrow indicates the “first intentionality” or the directedness of experience towards the world, while the lower “‘reflective’ intentionality is the movement from that which is experienced towards the position from which the experience is had.... [precluding] any simple talk about ‘objects themselves’ or, equally, ‘subjects themselves’, since whatever falls out in the analysis is about relations between experiencers and experienced” (Ihde, 1979: 17).

Ihde categorises the relations as follows: embodiment relations (semi-transparent relations such as wearing eyeglasses, where we experience the world through technology); hermeneutic relations (semi-opaque relations which require us to

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‘read’ a device such as a thermometer or gauge); and alterity relations (technology as ‘other’ such as the computer or artificial intelligence). He states:

the three sets of distinguishable relations occupy a continuum. At the one extreme lie those relations that approximate technologies to a quasi-me (embodiment relations). Those technologies that I can so take into my experience that through their semi-transparency they allow the world to be made immediate thus enter into the existential relation which constitutes my self. At the other extreme of the continuum lie alterity relations in which the technology becomes quasi-other, or technology ‘as’ other to which I relate. Between lies the relation with technologies that both mediate and yet also fulfill my perceptual and bodily relation with technologies, hermeneutic relations (Ihde, 1990: 107).

Thus, for example, embodiment relations have a telic inclination towards transparency, and achieving a complete non-recoverable symbiosis where the body absorbs the technology without residue. With the hermeneutic relation the inclination is towards realism; that is, towards producing observational results that have not been tampered with by the mediation of the instrument itself, and thus achieving literal rather than transformative representation (Ihde, 1979: 43- 44). Also, in a more marginal and perceptually partial sense there are background relations (experience among machines such as the constant background hum of domestic appliances), and horizonal relations (technology as surrounding and world-changing potential, such as the threat of nuclear holocaust or ozone depletion, an awareness which remains on the horizon of our collective consciousness). Although background relations as field relations are also of importance, indicating the way in which “we have our being among machines” (Ihde, 1979: 15), the relation of most import for my analysis is that of embodiment. Ihde’s theorisation of the embodiment relation is closely aligned with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-image or corporeal schema, for it indicates “the polymorphous sense of bodily extension [where] the experience of one’s ‘body image’ is not fixed but malleably extendable and/or reducible in terms of the material or technological mediations that may be embodied” (Ihde, 1979: 74). Ihde’s analyses of technologies such as the telescope, and a range of other modern scientific apparatuses, however, enable a more indepth distinction between body- tool relations in their specificity.

Embodiment relations are effects of the “partial symbiosis of observer-instrument” (1979: 72), such that the phenomena being observed are always also transformed by the observational relation. Technological apparatuses can only ever be semi- transparent, and they are usually mono-sensory or at most duo-sensory.

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Moreover, we always have a residual awareness of the limits of our own bodies, and the ways in which our bodies’ sensorium does not directly map onto the device or vice versa. As Ihde points out, there is no doubt that the developmental telos of technological devices is towards the creation of a seamless union between body and tool (1979: 20). Yet he insists that even though we might fantasise about purely transparent devices, such as VR bodysuits or direct interfaces between brain and computer, or even more mundanely, spectacles and contact lenses that escape notice, there is always an element of either technical or bodily over- extension, or frame/interface detection. The vestigial awareness to which Ihde refers concerns the extent to which the technology-in-use is recoverable from its involvement in one’s corporeality; the less recoverable, the more complete the symbiosis. Significantly, however, Ihde does make a gesture towards a possible (future) relational ontology between bodies and technologies which might change the ‘original’ condition of the human body: “Yet [there is] the question of the extremities beyond which there is no recovery, where perhaps technologies cease to be technologies... In the case of embodiment relations, are there embodiments which fall ‘below’ recovery…. [to] allow a being-towards-the-world as a modified bodily being?” (Ihde, 1990: 113). Here, the distinction between bodily extension (where the technology remains semi-transparent), and bodily modification (where the technology is fully transparent or corporeally assimilated), is collapsed. This latter merging is already partially hinted at in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality, and as I will argue in the final chapter, it is a conflation which aptly describes our experience of televisual technologies, and more generally, the osmotic effect of teletechnologies and other remote devices on our collective and variable ontologies.

Ihde’s insistence on the recoverability of the technological device or tool — back, presumably, to its proper ontological place — reflects a tendency present in much of his earlier work, to depend on some notion of an original or protogenic condition of being, which distinguishes humans from their technologies/artifacts. Although on one level Ihde suggests that all perception is in some sense mediated by various tools and technologies, he also implies that there is a pre-technological or normal body with primitive perceptual capacities:

While what can be seen has changed dramatically — Galileo’s New World has now been enhanced by astronomical phenomena never suspected and by micro-phenomena still being discovered — there remains a strong phenomenological constant in how things are seen. All lenses and optical technologies of the sort being described bring what is to be seen into normal bodily space and distance. Both the

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macroscopic and the microscopic appear within the same near- distance. This ‘image-size’ of galaxy or amoeba is the same. Such is the existential condition for visibility, the counterpart to the technical condition, that the instrument makes things visually present... The mediated presence, however, must fit, be made close to my actual bodily position and sight. Thus there is a reference within the instrumental context to my face-to-face capacities. These remain primitive and central within the new mediational context (Ihde, 1990: 79).

The argument of this thesis, of course, is that there is no unmediated or ordinary perception as such, and no return to a pre-relational ontology, but that part of our human condition is that we are techno-somato-cultural beings; our being-in-the- world is always a mediated being, determined in the context of our being-with- equipment.

Nevertheless, as I have shown, Ihde provides a number of vital insights into the technospecificity of human-technology relations. By combining the corporealism of Merleau-Ponty with a critical interpretation of instrumental realism, we can recognise that knowledge is both equipmentally and corporeally embodied. Throughout this discussion I have also argued that Merleau-Ponty’s rendition of body and world provides valuable insights into a theory of technosomatic agency. In particular, bodies are never simply bodies — they are always involved in a process of environmental incursion, incorporating tools and “fresh instruments” into their perceptual faculties. In the following two chapters, both the corporeal schema and intercorporeality will be focal concepts in the context of biomedical imaging, virtual reality and domestic television. In particular, if this intercorporeal relation to the world is a condition of our existence, it is no longer possible to maintain the autonomy of bodily boundaries from the technological practices and assemblages that are continually altering and redefining them (Weiss, 1999a: 3). As Haraway suggests, if an analysis of visual and scientific tools requires a recognition of their necessarily embodied condition (i.e. they have material and non-organic bodies), it also simultaneously necessitates an acknowledgment of their interpellation or ontic continuity with the bodies of users. As perceptual prostheses, tools are ‘identifiable’ only in their context of being in-use, as they become part of our embodied field or corporeal schematics (Harper, 2000). In fact more than this: just as our own perception is always-already toolic, so too is instrumental perception corporealised, an augmentation of the human soma to the tool. In short, both tools and humans have bodies, and these bodies are primordially intercorporeal.

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The potential of intercorporeality to encompass not only macro-cultural and technological specificity, but the micro-specificities of bodies and body-tool relations in their full differential complexity, is an insight finally and fully realised by corporeal feminism. In the next section, therefore, I will discuss a number of feminist critiques which point to some inadequacies of Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology in general — in particular, the relative absence of any discussion about the cultural specificities of sex, age, race, ethnicity and class, or indeed about the visceral substrata of corporeal difference, and their collective effects on the body and its schematic. Indeed, what feminists such as Gatens, Grosz and Weiss offer, is a more accurate construal of an intercorporeality pluralised.

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part three: corporeal difference

Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. Embodiment is significant prosthesis; objectivity cannot be about fixed vision when what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about.

Donna Haraway (1991: 195)

I have suggested that an ontology of medium or equipmental specificity is necessarily embedded within a more general insistence on the intercorporeality of bodies and tools. In the following section I will argue that this relational ontology must also respond to the significant inroads of corporeal feminists into the question of embodiment. In particular, their work offers a critical addition to both Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality, and to post-phenomenological interpretations of the technobody. Such interpretations of the body and perceptual apparatuses have often failed to adequately account for the specificity of embodied being, a deficiency ably handled by corporeal feminism and its legacy of ‘difference’ debates.

There are some key intersections between the commitments of Merleau-Ponty, in particular to overcoming the subject-object binary by way of the soma, and the issues with which recent corporeal feminist theory concerns itself. Since the 1980’s Australian feminism has been particularly interested in the corporeal body; in the specificity of women’s bodies, in providing an alternative to the sex/gender distinction and its inherent distrust of the body as a determining site for subjectivity, and in articulating new conceptual models for understanding — 86 —

embodiment. At the same time, such theory has sought to avoid the essentialist risk of making binary sexual difference elemental to embodied being. In the early eighties Moira Gatens offered a critique of the sex/gender distinction and its understanding of the body as a ‘passive mediator’ of ways of knowing (Caine, 1998: 12), insisting instead that the sex/gender, mind/body splits were untenable ways of interpreting subjectivity and embodiment. In Sexual Subversions Elizabeth Grosz (1989) developed the idea of morphology (via Luce Irigaray), defining it as “the ways in which the body and anatomy of each sex is lived by the subject and represented in culture” (xix). Subsequent feminist philosophers and theorists throughout the nineties and into the new millennium have continued to theorise embodiment in critical ways, many deriving concepts from the work of Merleau- Ponty, and emphasising the ‘pliability’ of the body (Kirby, 1997), while others have turned to the interdependence of our biology or viscerality with the technocultural inscription of embodiment (Wilson, 1999, Waldby, 2000a).

This theoretical convergence is largely motivated by contemporary feminism’s obligation to interrogate the inherent problems of dichotomous thinking, which both underpin and impede current debates concerning the relation between gender and biological sex. By invoking Merleau-Ponty’s model of embodied experience, corporealist feminism seeks a way out of the ontological reductionism of dualist epistemology, and its dyadic understanding of the human subject in terms of the social and the biological, and the natural and the cultural. In part, corporeal feminists respond to a burgeoning dissatisfaction with constructivist or textualist accounts of the sex/gender distinction, for such accounts minimise the significance of biological differences, often at the expense of developing an adequate theorisation or even an acknowledgment of the corporeal. In short, as Genevieve Lloyd sums up, feminist discourse — Australian corporeal feminism being a central proponent — needs to “take the body or biology seriously” (Lloyd, 1989: 14). Merleau-Ponty’s reconceptualisation of the phenomenological lived body — a term which extricates the body from its purely biological or acultural role — enables the reintegration of corporeality into feminist discourse, without necessarily incorporating or reproducing the inequities contained within the sex- gender distinction and its anti-materialist collaboration with the mind/body dualism.

However, this feminist engagement with phenomenology not only provides a way of escaping feminism’s own theoretical impasse (the limits of the sex-gender binary), — 87 —

but also reveals serious limitations in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological configurations of subjectivity. Indeed, the confluence of corporeal feminism and phenomenology highlights the immediate, specific and ‘concrete’ conditions of an embodied subjectivity, which conventional phenomenological perspectives often fail to recognise in any localised context. Simply centralising the role of the body is in itself problematic for feminism, as it seeks to avoid the essentialist reduction of women to their bodies, or universalising the notion of what a body is. Rather, sufficient consideration must be given to how embodiment is lived out in its specificity, that is, not only in terms of its corporeal proviso, but in its inescapably cultural, social, historical, gendered, technological situatedness. There is not a universal body, or even two gendered bodies, but an ever-changing and disorderly wealth of corporeal modalities. As Gail Weiss points out, Merleau-Pontian accounts of the body often pay insufficient attention to these specificities which reside in the interstices between bodies and their corporeal schematics (Weiss, 1999).

In the following pages, I will provide a brief history of the conditions and context in which the theoretical impasse of the sex/gender dialectic emerged within feminist discourse, before explaining how a specifically corporealist feminist analysis can address some of the inadequacies of Merleau-Pontian versions of embodiment. Although feminist theorists focus their concern on the problematic of gender and the sexed body, a consequence of their deliberate attentiveness to being-in- difference is the potential recognition of a number of other ontic osmoses emerging from the circumstances of techno-material specificity.

CORPOREAL FEMINISM

The human body is permanently open to its surroundings and can be composed, recomposed, and decomposed by other bodies.

Moira Gatens (2000: 61)

The sex-gender distinction has been the focus of a central problematic in feminist theory over the past forty or fifty years — the attempt to explain the difference between the representation of gender and the supposedly fixed fact of sex. Embedded in feminist critiques of this distinction is a concurrent attack on Cartesian dualism. As Moira Gatens argues: — 88 —

The mind/body dualism, associated with Cartesianism, has fed into the sex/gender dualism where the bodily capacities of each sex are considered to be relatively fixed (within a given range). Culture, it is allowed, may influence the final form which gendered subjectivity takes, but only within the parameters set by nature. These common ontological and metaphysical assumptions about human being have had profound effects on theorizations of the proper place of each sex within social and political life (Gatens, 2000: 59).

Amidst debates surrounding the nature/nurture problematic and the sexual discrimination that accompanied it, feminist theory thus strove to find a firm distinction between the natural, biological and binary category of sexual difference, and the cultural or semiotic constructedness of gender difference. Such theory proposed that while there seemed to be a closely approximate translation of the biological onto the cultural, a link which appeared essential and universal, the actual correlation was superficial and largely arbitrary. In other words, the fixed categories female and male (or woman and man), were not assimilable to the more malleable, culturally defined, discursive and thus political constructs of the feminine and the masculine.

Once the difference between sex and gender could be shown, liberal feminists of the seventies argued, the constructedness of women’s political and economic marginalisation and disempowerment could be exposed. That is, although women could not deny their biological place in the cycle of human reproduction, this did not mean that they were therefore closer to nature and the body, destined for the domestic and private sphere and dependent on their “citizen-husbands” (Gatens, 2000: 59). The biological determinism and essentialism underlying this discrimination could then be revealed, and women would be liberated and seen as ‘equal’ to their male counterparts. It is clear that within this ‘equality’ argument the division between mind and body is sustained; although men and women were biologically different, they were — in the right conditions — of the same mind. For equality feminists, then, the sex-gender model appeared to provide a promising avenue through which to attack the biological essentialism of patriarchy and scientific discourse, yet its assumptions were very problematic. Ironically, by saying that sex is a primordial biological reality — inaccessible to cultural artifactuality — the sex/gender distinction maintained a revised dualism between the mind and the body.

These concerns aside, by the eighties feminists such as Jaggar (1983), Bordo (Jaggar and Bordo, 1989) and Gatens (1996) claimed that equality feminists were — 89 —

themselves guilty of a more insidious discrimination. If men and women were potentially of equivalent mental capability, then the benchmark of that capability was defined according to a specifically masculine standard. The sex-gender distinction was thus revealed as a faulty and politically biased model. Although liberal feminism sought to achieve equality through the inherent gender neutrality of consciousness and reason, emergent ‘difference feminists’ insisted that such constructs were highly masculinised and patriarchal from the outset. This politics of difference effectively argued an inverted version of biological determinism: because women have different bodies, they have different modes of experiencing, perceiving and apprehending the world. But whereas traditional determinist or essentialist accounts hierarchised both the corporeal and cultural embodiment of men over women, difference feminists flattened this hierarchy, claiming autonomy without devaluation. French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous8 were central and influential protagonists in this debate, celebrating the bodily and sexual difference of ‘woman’ as an alternative essence cast outside the usual dualisms. In this way, a categorically and emancipatory non-masculine place for woman could be enabled, where non-patriarchal and non-phal(logo)centric discursivity and ways of understanding could finally emerge.

The ontology of this politics of difference was seen as dangerously akin to both essentialism and biological determinism; if women are ‘essentially’ different because they have different bodies, then surely this difference is determined by nature and thus unalterable and uncontrollable. The response to this essentialism came in the form of a feminism informed by the linguistic turn in theory — the semiotic, poststructuralist, deconstructionist and finally the postmodernist perspectives. Under poststructuralism nothing could rightly be placed outside culture and the text — everything in our knowledge, experience and reality is constructed by way of language, texts and discourses. Poststructuralism did not look for causes as its framework for understanding the world; meaning emerged from systems and structures, institutions and discourses — it was contextual, not intrinsic or essentialising. Within this semiotic turn biological sex was just as ‘cultural’ or ‘discursive’ as gender — there was therefore no sex/gender distinction. Following this effacement of the culture/nature divide, postmodernism finally fractured binary difference into unmanageable multiplicity — claiming not two but manifold constructions of gender and as many configurations of the body.

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8 Luce Irigaray (1985) Speculum of the other woman, Cornell UP, Ithaca, N.Y; Luce Irigaray (1985) The Sex Which is Not One, Cornell UP, Ithaca, N.Y.; Susan Sellers (Ed.) (1988) Writing Differences: readings for the seminar of Helene Cixous, Open UP, Milton Keynes. — 90 —

Poststructuralist and postmodernist accounts of reality and experience thus revealed the constructed nature of our knowledge, and then worked to deconstruct familiar binaries that have shaped the structure of Western thought. The hierarchical oppositions which underpin our understanding of ourselves and our environment — and which seem to guarantee the superiority of male over female, mind over body — are not enduring, but unstable mechanisms of power. Such deconstructions do not deny that we have gendered subjectivities and sexed bodies, but they do deny their facticity: at every moment our apprehension and understanding of the body is contextual — and here context means literally con- text, or within the textual. In many ways feminists have incorporated poststructuralist and postmodernist theories into their work on the body. In particular, the work of Foucault and his focus on the discursive construction of sexuality and the body has been taken up in various ways to suggest that all bodies are marked by history, discourse, power and knowledge.

The contestation between difference and constructivist feminism has resulted in much theoretical debate. The fixing of each perspective in oppositional relation to the other, Gatens claims, effectively divided “the entire theoretical field of social enquiry into an exclusive disjunction: social theory is either environmentalist or it is essentialist” (Gatens, 1996: 5). For Gatens, Kirby, Lloyd and others, the polarity of this divide, which insists that one must be either essentialist or constructivist, distorts the insights and potential conceptual collaboration of each position. Diana Fuss (1989) also suggests how we might complicate the relation between constructionism and essentialism by distinguishing between ‘nominal’ essentialism and ‘real’ essentialism, or ‘linguistic’ essentialism and ‘ontological’ essentialism:

If we are to intervene effectively in the impasse created by the essentialist/constructionist divide, it might be necessary to begin questioning the constructionist assumption that nature and fixity go together (naturally) just as sociality and change go together (naturally). In other words, it may be time to ask whether essences can change and whether constructions can be normative (Fuss, 1989: 6).

The complication of these two perspectives is one of the effects that corporealist feminists are wanting to achieve. Neither the pure constructionism of poststructuralist feminism or the biological determinism of difference feminism are adequate, and do not account for the way in which bodies are simultaneously both materially and culturally determined. In a move reminiscent of both Merleau- — 91 —

Ponty’s and Heidegger’s relational ontology, corporeal feminists suggest that we might separate the cultural and material/corporeal as a way to understand them, but their interrelation nevertheless precedes that separation.

Corporeal feminism has emerged, in part, in response to the tenacity of the binarism in feminist theory. The idea that reality is a wholly cultural or discursive construction empties the body of material agency, or renders it a passive surface of inscription upon which culture writes. The return to quasi-essentialist arguments concerning the relation between women and their bodies has been a reaction to the linguistic turn and its hybrids, and their ensuing indifference to embodiment and corporeality. Corporeal feminists reclaim the body without reinstating it as a unified, closed and given category; there is no normative body, only multiple bodies, marked by sex, race, class, age, and so on, such that the universal category of the body disappears in favour of a fluid and open embodiment. Grosz states: “As an essential internal condition of human bodies, a consequence of perhaps their organic openness to cultural completion, bodies must take the social order as their productive nucleus. Part of their own ‘nature’ is an organic or ontological ‘incompleteness’” (Grosz, 1994: xi). Thus while corporeal feminism might be broadly understood as a reaction to social constructivism, it also tackles the problematic of essentialism by suggesting that embodiment is both necessary and essential yet non-universally and changeably so. The body is not fixed, ahistorical, mechanistic and purely biological, but neither is it a blank surface to be written on by culture.

As a discourse, corporeal feminism is associated with a diverse group of predominantly Australian theorists including Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Wilson, Moira Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd, Vicki Kirby, Cathryn Vasseleu, Rosalyn Diprose, Penelope Deutsher, Robyn Ferrell, and Gail Weiss.9 In their work the

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9 The special issues of Hypatia on ‘Australian Feminism’ Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2000), and ‘Feminism and the Body’ Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 1991), and the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 29, all contain articles from many of the corporeal feminists I have named. See also: Elizabeth Grosz (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney; Elizabeth Grosz (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: the Politics of Bodies, Allen and Unwin, Sydney; Gail Weiss (1999) Body Images: embodiment as intercorporeality, Routledge, New York and London; Moira Gatens (1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Routledge, London and New York; Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd (1999) Collective imaginings: Spinoza, past and present, Routledge, London; Vicki Kirby (1997) Telling Flesh: The substance of the corporeal, Routledge, New York and London; Cathryn Vasseleu (1998) Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, New York and London; Rosalyn Diprose (1994) The Bodies of Women: Ethics, embodiment and sexual difference, Routledge, London and New York; Elizabeth Wilson (1998) Neural geographies : feminism and the microstructure of cognition, Routledge, New York. — 92 —

phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty figures prominently,10 and he is identified as a potential ally in their attempts to theorise the body across the diverse fields of philosophy, cyber-theory, sociology and philosophy of medicine, and psychoanalysis. While the arguments and methodologies among the corporeal feminists are wide-ranging, they uniformly agitate the conventional terms upon which both gender and embodiment are understood. The sex/gender distinction, like the mind/body dichotomy, naively and uncritically posits the body as neutral and passive ground, a passive communicator of social relations; that is, as necessary, yet fundamentally anterior to meaning-making and subjectivity. It is this configuration of the body as fixed, ahistorical, mechanistic and purely biological that corporeal feminists seek to re-trace and contest. In what follows I will briefly consider Gatens’ concept of the imaginary body, as a precursor to Weiss’ elaboration on the body-image within phenomenology. In more detail I will then examine both Grosz’s inside/out and outside/in thematic in Volatile Bodies, and finally the visceral insights of Drew Leder. These theorists all work to reconfigure and complicate the contours of Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema, and their more holistic grasp of what constitutes embodiment is integral to my own exploration of the technosoma.

INTERCORPOREAL DIFFERENCE

For Gatens, the concept of the ‘imaginary body’ captures the interspersion of individual biology with “the social and personal significance of that biology” (Gatens, 1996: 11-12). In defining the ‘imaginary body’ Gatens explains:

I am concerned with the (often unconscious) imaginaries of a specific culture: those ready-made images and symbols through which we make sense of social bodies which determine, in part, their value, their status and what will be deemed their appropriate treatment (Gatens, 1996: viii).

The imaginary body refers to the historically and culturally contingent nature of bodily experience; it is a fundamental part of our beliefs and attitude towards our own bodies, but these beliefs also bleed into the very establishment and functioning of variably defined collective modes of embodiment. Thus, while the corporeal schema of Merleau-Ponty can be seen as the body’s inherent tractability,

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10 Gatens and Lloyd are also significantly influenced by Benedictus de Spinoza, while others such as Grosz and Weiss utilise the phenomenological work of Paul Shilder. — 93 —

Gatens’ imaginary body suggests that at the outset the modus operandi of both individual and collective bodies is coalescent, and determined by the contingencies of history, culture and the specificities of local environment. Thus the way in which a body becomes tractable and open to the world is not altogether determined by that body. A particularly tenacious aspect of the imaginary body, for example, is the way it is configured in terms of binaries which are embedded within biological narratives around the active male and the passive female.

Gatens’ concept of the imaginary body is thus able to articulate specificities across cultural practices and contexts, and to show how “culture marks bodies” by producing the variable parameters within which bodies are generated (Gatens, 1999: 230-231). She writes:

The imaginary body is socially and historically specific in that it is constructed by: a shared language; the shared psychical significance and privileging of various zones of the body … and common institutional practices and discourses (medical, juridical and educational) which act on and through the body (Gatens, 1996: 12).

These practices and discourses use the body as a “vehicle of expression,” targeting particular parts of the body in terms of their interests; as bodies we are all defined in terms of this imaginary body, and always-already historically and culturally delegated. Yet ironically, it is precisely through this historical and cultural placement of the body, and a conflation of the sex/gender distinction reminiscent of poststructuralism — i.e. the body as a discursive construct — that Gatens articulates an altered politics of difference. While her critique does offer an alternative to the nature/culture or sex/gender model of conceptualising sexual difference, Gatens loses some of the material specificity and corporeal excess of embodiment captured by Merleau-Ponty and Ihde. For Gatens the body is always wholly recuperated by the discourses which precede it, and as such she must reject the idea that tools, and the praxes which surround them, can have sometimes unintentional and ontic effects upon the body, and thus morphologically fashion different kinds of bodies.

In her theorisation of the body image in Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality, Gail Weiss (1999) does acknowledge the body’s potential for technosomatic osmoses. Similarly to Gatens, she argues that as-bodies we are embedded within cultural contexts where some kinds of endo- and exosomatic body forms are privileged and naturalised over others (Weiss, 1999: 66-67). This explains, for example, the way in which immunological and pathological discourse — 94 —

surrounding AIDS and HIV define the parameters of an ideal body that is heterosexual, white, and male: a body which is not ‘penetrable.’ As Waldby (1996) argues, this describes the immuno-competent body, while the immuno- compromised body includes women and homosexual men; that is, leaky and permeable bodies without integrity. Within such discourse, itself thoroughly infiltrated by medical and military visualising apparatuses, and military metaphors of invasion and border protection, both the surface body and the body interior are configured in particular ways according to fixed representations of body-standards. Yet for Weiss bodies are particularised not only or even predominantly by sex or gender, but through an intercorporeal and mutable palimpsest of cultural norms according to race, ethnicity, age, class, disability, equipmental fields and tool-use. While there are hierarchies of collective body- images within which we are expected to ‘install’ our individual corporeal schemas, the body image is also a site of cultural contestation which is open to “a vast horizon of possible differences”:

Exploring the corporeal possibilities that have been foreclosed by a given culture’s own imaginary itself helps bring into being a new imaginary — one that does justice to the richness of our bodily differences. Changing the body image, I maintain, must involve changes in the imaginary . . . [W]e must in turn create new images of the body, dynamic images of non-docile bodies that resist the readily available techniques of corporeal inscription and normalisation that currently define ‘human reality’ (Weiss, 1999a: 67).

Weiss thus provides an important elaboration on the body image in terms of its potential for corporeal and cultural transformation. Indeed, more than this: the body-image retains its material agency and relational ontology while simultaneously embedded within specificities of culture and, I would add, specificities of media and equipmentality. Her theory allows for the possibility of an “alternative metaphysics” which can “adequately account for the processes of construction, destruction, and reconstruction that are constitutive of human corporeality” (Weiss, 1999a: 67). As I will suggest in the equipmental contexts of biomedical imaging, virtual reality and domestic television, such an “alternative metaphysics” is emerging.

Feminist theorists have sought to antagonise the scientific facticity of the sexed body for some decades, and have attempted to conceptualise a model of embodiment which counters both the singular and universal human body, and the binary representation of gender difference. Both Gatens and Weiss, among a number of other corporeal feminists, describe how our corporeal schema is both — 95 —

locally and collectively determined by a complex spectrum of contingencies, providing a crucial response to the elusive cultural and gender neutrality of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject:

In such a model the universal category of the body disappears, not as a result of the disembodiment characteristic of masculinist discourse, but in favour of a fluid and open embodiment. At any given moment we are always marked corporeally in specific ways, but not as an unchanging or unchangeable fixture (Gatens, 1999: 8).

Thus, they have argued convincingly that there exists not one or two body types, but a multiplicity of bodies marked by an infinite array of technologically, culturally and sexually embodied differences, which in turn are always lived-out, recreated, and constituted by a complex interplay between materiality, corporeality, and symbolic systems of meaning.

More recently, corporeal feminists such as Grosz (1994, 1995) and Wilson (1998, 1999) have pointed out that there is a lack of attention directed towards the material specificities of biological function, and consequently to the space and matter-ing of the organic, fleshy and visceral endosoma. In other words, the body has largely been figured as purely exosomatic — a surface for inscription and representation. Wilson (1999), for example, analyses hysteria within an informed critique of somatic and biological detail, arguing that a full-bodied account of the body must do more than treat the body as a shell or container, or as a surface for social inscription. Rather, we must become more literate about our knowledge and experience of biology — including the muscular capacities of the body, the function of the internal organs, the biophysics of cellular metabolism, and the microphysiology of circulation, respiration, digestion and excretion (Wilson, 1998). This critique has become increasingly relevant as it pertains quite specifically to the relation between televisualised technosoma, and the incursion of tele- technologies into the body, particularly in the context of endoscopic apparatuses which work to render the inside of the body visible, and thus literally draw the visceral into our collective and individual body images.

In Volatile Bodies, Grosz (1994) tackles this issue of the opaque and overlooked corporeal inside as a way to deconstruct both the mind and body binarism and its particular setting within the complementary yet oppositional ontologies of interior and exterior. As she notes, this is a bifurcation upon which the privileging and elevation of mind over matter has been historically erected and sustained. The traditional Cartesian model which privileges the psychical interior (consciousness) — 96 —

over mute corporeal surface, effectively masks the essential significance of material differences and specificities. Against this, Grosz theorises a non- hierarchical process of articulation between inside and outside, and the biological and the psychical (Grosz, 1994: 7), contending that such an inversion of the inside/outside logic will inevitably speak the concrete specificities of embodiment. This attempt figures an alternative to the binary models of subjectivity, and more properly represents the equiprimordial dynamic between culture and matter. As I will show, however, Grosz calls upon an intriguing analogical device — the Möbius strip — and her metaphorical use of this device in its technical materiality finally works to recursively effect and limit her theoretical approach.

The Möbius strip (see figure below) was initially devised by German mathematician Augustus Ferdinand Möbius in the late 1800s. Simple to construct but surprisingly difficult to visualise, it is comprised of a single strip of paper twisted and secured end-to-end in such that it has only one side or surface. Although the

11 paper itself has two sides (and one edge), when it is looped and joined together the surface is continuous from one side to the other, and thus the strip is transformed into a paradoxical (yet actual) one-sided three-dimensional surface. It would seem that such a model is well-suited as a material metaphor for Grosz’s project; composed of interfacing elements, the strip represents the mutual implication of the inside and outside of the embodied subject, representing “the inflection of mind into body and body into mind” and demonstrating the possibility of a “relation between two things, which presumes neither their identity nor their radical disjunction” (Grosz, 1994: xii, 209). The strip of paper thus represents the impossible continuity of exterior corporeal surface and interior psychical consciousness.

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11 Image from Bob Dickason Interactive Visual Design website (originally from Mathematics, Time/Life, 1965), http://www.bobdickason.com/addenda/ images/mobius2.gif, accessed 24th August 2003. Dickason illustrates that when a cut is made around the middle of a Möbius strip, we might expect it to divide in two. However, when one cuts along a line drawn around the strip, the result is not two strips but one two-sided strip, further confounding our topological expectations.

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Throughout the text Grosz explores the work of Freud, Lacan, Schilder, Foucault and Merleau-Ponty to develop this articulation between inside and out, a “psychologically pliable” anatomy which is at the same time integral to a thinking through the body (Grosz, 1994: 28). The first section — ‘The Inside Out’ — reflects the movement from the psychical to the corporeal, or the psychical constitution of the body, using psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In particular, extrapolating from Schilder’s concept of the body image, Grosz claims that corporeality emerges from dynamic modes of contact with the environment:

Schilder shows that the body image cannot be simply and unequivocally identified with sensations provided purely by the anatomical body, the body image is as much a function of the subject’s psychology and sociohistorical context as of anatomy. The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic: its borders, edges and contours are ‘osmotic’: they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange (Grosz, 1994: 79).

From this, Grosz distinguishes three main characteristics of Schilder’s body image, explaining how the corporeal exterior is both represented and lived by the subject, and readily appropriated in variable ways by the equipmental environment. Firstly, the body schema is an anticipatory map of future corporeal activities, in which a knowledge of the body’s current position and potential capacity for action must be registered in order for the subject to act, initiate movement and ‘move forward’ in the world (Grosz, 1994: 67). Secondly, (retaining Freud’s notion of ‘libidinal’ investment) the body image consists of various emotional and libidinal investments and attitudes to the body (Grosz, 1994: 68). Finally, the body image describes a social relation in which the body-subject’s perception and experience of its own corporeality is connected to, and mediated by others’ relations to their own bodies, the subject’s body, and the collective body (Grosz, 1994: 68).

Combining these insights from Schilder with Merleau-Ponty’s corporealisation of perception, Grosz then introduces the term “body phantom” as a way to describe an alternative to the common understanding of technology as extension or prosthesis, and to adjust our conceptual grasp of artificial or synthetic augmentations to the ‘natural’ body:

The body phantom is the condition of the subject’s capacity not only to adapt to, but also to become integrated with various objects, instruments, tools and machines. It is the condition of the body’s inherent openness and pliability to, and in, its social context... It is the condition that enables us to acquire and use prosthetic devices — 98 —

— glasses, contact lenses, artificial limbs, surgical implants — in place of, or supplementary to, our sense organs (Grosz, 1992: 6).

Through her exploration and elaboration of these various frameworks and developed concepts of the body image and corporeal schema, Grosz thus offers a compelling and convincing argument for the decidedly technosomatic disposition of our experience.

The second section entitled ‘The Outside In,’ traces the movement from corporeal surface to psychical interior, or the way in which culture inscribes the contours of the body to “generate a psychical interiority” (Grosz, 1994: 115). In contrast to many “theorists of inscription,” for Grosz the body is not merely a receptive surface or tabula rasa — “only inscribed, marked, engraved, by social pressures external to them” — but rather it is the product and direct effect “of the very social constitution of nature itself” (Grosz, 1994: x). Significantly, these inscriptive productions include the technological trajectories of embodiment, whereby the complex interplay between bodies and tools are implicit to the shape a body takes. As Grosz writes elsewhere, our technological productions can themselves be interpreted as a “reading of bodily zones as sites of prosthetic transcription, a mapping and remapping of corporeal alignments and intensities” (Grosz, 1992: 8). Indeed, to take the metaphor further, the etching implement is itself a tool which carves different kinds of marks depending on the matter it is applied to. For Grosz the substances of both inscriber and inscribee, their very materiality, are mutually implicated in what is produced (but never finished). Nevertheless, the metaphor of etching is problematic at its core, for there must always be a dichotomous relation between the engraver and the surface to be marked. As Kirby (1997) points out, it is difficult to extricate such inscriptive analogies from poststructuralist accounts of the body as pure surface. This aside, in such a trope the body itself is not given incisive agency; that is, it does not itself actively inscribe culture.

While Grosz’s revised metaphor of etching does offer an improved interpretive framework, it finally reiterates a binary structure which configures body and culture as a priori different things which then come together to produce meaning. This aside, the psychical is continually equated with the subject’s interiority, an equation which must then render corporeality in terms of its exteriority. This inability to unthink the binary is also exacerbated by the Möbius strip analogue, which also works to reinscribe dualism. The Möbius strip is a device with its own medium specificity; defined as a one-sided continuous surface, it nevertheless is — 99 —

two-sided at any one point or specific location. i.e. in its specificity it is binary in structure. Although the strip may represent the continuity between inside and outside, structurally it limits Grosz’s overall framework by demanding that we identify an inside and an outside, or in Grosz’s analysis, a psychical interiority and a corporeal exteriority (Harper, 2000). Finally, then, as material tropes both the Möbius strip and etching metaphors leave the agency of the body’s interior — and indeed the technological augmentations, morphoses and visualisations of such endosoma — mute and unaccounted for.

It seems then that Grosz does not successfully counter the somatophobia of the physiologyical body, which Wilson (1999) has identified as prevalent even within much contemporary corporeal feminism. In Kirby’s words, left out is any serious consideration of the corporeal interior, and “all the oozings and pulsings that literally and figuratively make up the differential stuff of the body’s extra-ordinary circuitry” (Kirby, 1997: 76). In this context, as it will relate specifically to my analysis of the technosoma of biomedical imaging in the next chapter, it is worth considering the work of Drew Leder, a body-philosopher who does attend to the complex intertwining of inner and outer corporeality.

T HE VISCERAL BODY

I t is the body surface, visioning and visible, that is taken as the “exemplar sensible” of flesh …Yet this is not the body as a whole. We have seen that the perceptual and expressive surface always rests on a hidden base. My inner organs are for the most part neither the agents nor objects of sensibility. They constitute their own circuitry of vibrant, pulsing life, which precedes the perceptual in fetal life, outruns it in sleep, sustains it from beneath at all moments. Drew Leder (1990: 65)

Leder ’s principal thesis in The Absent Body explores the way in which the body in-use partially recedes from our conscious perception, and more specifically how this tendency to some extent encourages and supports a Cartesian-like metaphysics of disembodiment. In many of our day-to-day habitual activities, our body retracts from immediate awareness, and this withdrawal has led us to believe that the body is epistemically and agentically peripheral to the actively knowing and perceiving mind. According to Leder it is this intrinsically paradoxical nature of bodily presence — its inescapable presence as our corporeal ground on the one — 100 —

hand, and its tendency towards absence on the other — that accounts for the tenacity of the mind/body hierarchy in Western thought. Thus what might appear as the somatic negligence of the visual metaphor and its hierarchical configuration of the mind/body dialectic, could in fact be considered a trajectory or proclivity of the mode of embodiment itself. Yet although for Leder the various modes of bodily disappearance are clearly necessary, both for the body’s healthy functioning and for coherent thought to be possible, he critiques both the hierarchical and the strictly binary structure of the dualism.

Leder identifies three modes of absence specific to human embodiment — focal, background and depth disappearance. As I will suggest, the first two of these are particularly interesting in the context of tool use and human-technology relations. Firstly, he argues that focal disappearance is an effect of the way in which the sensorimotor surface of our body — our corporeal extremities — are characterised by a form of self-concealment which is directly related to the ‘ecstatic’ nature of corporeality. Here ecstasis is defined as “that which stands out,” which for Leder describes the primary disposition of the lived body (Leder, 1990: 21). Contact with the world and its objects is first and foremost through my body-surface, and as such this exterior functions as the boundary and horizon which makes such tactile, kinaesthetic or multi-sensory acquaintance with that world possible. He writes: I do not attend to the hand as a physical thing but employ it as that through which I explore the world… It is thus possible to state a general principle: insofar as I perceive through an organ, it necessarily recedes from the perceptual field it discloses (Leder, 1990: 14).

Drawing on definitions originally developed by Merleau-Ponty and earlier phenomenological traditions, Leder identifies this mode of absence as a form of focal disappearance, which describes the elision of external sensory organs when they deliver the focal origin of a perceptual or actional field (Leder, 1990: 26). Thus when my hand touches another physical object, the phenomenon of a “nullpoint” occurs, such that I attend to the telos or trajectory of my action, or to the general process of handling itself, rather than to the point of contact between my skin and the object. The face, the hands, and the mouth, by virtue of their corporeal specificity, most frequently play this focal role in our communication with the world (Leder, 1990:105).

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Leder then supplements this description, with the slightly different yet complementary notion of background disappearance, which describes a type of absence that occurs when regions of body are not the focal origin of our sensorimotor engagements, and momentarily adopt a background or supportive role, again disappearing from explicit awareness (Leder, 1990: 25-26). This describes the sensory engagement of more complex and/or articulated actions, such as holding a book while in the process of reading, or walking while conversing on a mobile phone; in both cases, the hand plays a background rather than a focal perceptual role. In complex activities such as driving, the range of background absences are compounded. Both focal and background disappearance lie at the heart of our corporeal capabilities and schemas, and indeed make possible our being-in-the-world. Revealing what is ‘other’ in the world is always correlative with this form of bodily presence-absence; our organs of perception and motility appear transparent at the moment in which they are engaged (Leder, 1990: 111, 53). The lived-body is thus a medium of access, contained within a dynamic of retraction and ecstasis.

Leder’s analysis of everyday perception here clearly resonates with Heidegger’s study of tool use, and his distinction between the present-at-hand and the ready- to-hand. For Heidegger, when we use a hammer or other hand-extension, not only the hand becomes transparent or focally absent; the hammer, as an aspect of the body or corporeal schema, partners the hand in its focal disappearance. If the hammer (or indeed the body) becomes dysfunctional or does not fulfil its intended purpose, then it become present-at-hand, or returns to focal presence. As long as the hammer is utilised within its intended and familiar context, the hammer-as- bodypart becomes ready-to-hand, and tacitly “withdraws” from our perceptual attention (Ihde, 1991: 54). As Ihde comments, in such instances, “the technology — instrument — is taken into perceptual bodily experience, as with Merleau- Ponty’s blind man’s cane or Heidegger’s hammer. The technology becomes a ‘part’ of my now extended bodily experience of the world” (Ihde, 1991: 75). Similarly, the tool can also become an aspect of the body in its role as background absence. Chairs, keyboards and vehicles are just some of the apparatuses which collaborate with aspects of the corporeal body to become non-focally absent; in each case, the material surface or substance is not the object of our attention, yet provides vital support for the primary goal, whether it be watching a movie, driving, or writing a thesis. It is because of this exterior corporeal structure of background and focal disappearance, elucidated in analogous ways by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and — 102 —

Leder, that we integrate tools into our domains of embodiment, so that they function transparently in-use, becoming actualised aspects of our embodiment. Leder’s analysis of the body here not only shows how tools as ‘bodyparts’ take on embodied modes of absence, but also how the body and its parts are conceptually and praxically amenable to being theorised and experienced as if they were tools. The body is itself tool-like, both ergonomically and ontologically consonant with the being of equipment.

Although both focal and background disappearance are not directly related to the visceral, Leder derives the final mode of absence — depth disappearance — by defining it against the other two modes which have pertained specifically to the body perimeter. The paradox of bodily presence-absence is for Leder quite clearly of a different order when applied to our corporeal depths, where the mode of disappearance is more pronounced and to a large extent irrecoverable. Our inner bodily processes and organs remain perceptually elusive, in contrast to the more tangible and visible surfaces of our somatic exterior which, by virtue of their ecstatic being-in-the-world, sustain a more prominent and pervasive presence in the everyday experience of our environment:

My hands, in order to explore and work upon the world, must extend outward from my corporeal extremities. My expressive face can form a medium of communication only because it is available to the Other’s gaze. No organ concealed in the hidden depths of the body could actualise intersubjectivity in this way (Leder, 1990:11).

The visceral, in contrast to the perceptual or sensory surface of the body, is marked by a deeper, innate form of resistance which “falls back” from our conscious perception and control (Leder, 1990:69). Leder identifies these visceral resistances — which vary according to their nature as muscle, organ, flesh, blood and bone — such that the “notion of depth indicates not only a physical site but a genuinely distinct phenomenological dimension” (Leder, 1990: 53 my emphasis). This distinction works according to a dynamic of exosomatic outward projection and endosomatic introjection, where the latter falls back to a level of imperceptibility.

Thus, Leder concludes, it is only the corporeal surface, able to “actualise intersubjectivity” and shape our everyday experiential field, which accounts for the tendency within the tradition of phenomenology to identify the body principally in terms of its outer boundaries. Thus, we have cosmetic surgery performed on our faces and breasts, not on our spleens; we don’t control our digestion with the — 103 —

same degree of “personal mastery” with which we control our posture or surface musculature, because it functions primarily according to the tacit structure of autonomic12 operation (Leder, 1990: 46, 48). Admittedly, as Leder acknowledges, while our surface organs may also be forgotten via their varying structural roles, focal or background, this self-effacement is typically temporary and reversible. Visceral processes on the other hand exhibit an innate resistance, because they recede beneath the intentional ‘arc’ of personal control altogether:

Unlike the surface organ in background disappearance, a viscus [internal organ] is largely irreversible with corporeal foci. It cannot be summoned up for personal use, turned ecstatically upon the world. Its recessiveness is not simply the function of a current gestalt but of an innate resistance (Leder, 1990: 54-55).

By acknowledging the particular phenomenological significance of the visceral dimension of our embodiment, Leder goes some way towards addressing the deficiencies both he and corporeal feminists have identified in Merleau-Ponty’s project. Leder argues that just as there is the tendency to overlook our viscera “vis a vis myself as experiencer,” there is also a corresponding and equally persistent tendency to neglect the visceral in phenomenological accounts of our embodied experience (Leder, 1990: 36; Harper, 2000). As he suggests in a later article, the “primacy of embodiment and the primacy of perception that Merleau-Ponty advocates are usually understood as one in the same thesis,” yet the visceral foundation remains largely unacknowledged (Leder, 1999: 200-202). In particular, Leder draws attention to Merleau-Ponty’s term ‘flesh’, which he suggests already embodies connotations of the bodily surface — its “superficial muscle and fatty tissue” — and thus reveals phenomenology’s tendency to privilege this region of the body (Leder, 1999: 204). Leder’s specific antidote to this oversight is to replace the singular word flesh, with the terms ‘flesh and blood’, which account for both the dry exterior and the previously suppressed ‘wet’ dimension — the word ‘blood’ operating as a trope for viscerality.

From the perspective of corporeal feminism, however, Leder’s analysis is flawed in several respects. Firstly, he draws a dramatic distinction between our experiences of the exosomatic and endosomatic dimensions, claiming that we can only ever attain oblique awareness of the latter. This analysis of bodily absence depends on a definition of the visceral as the region of our body which is invariably secluded

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12 Autonomic is a physiological term referring to the non-voluntary functioning of the body. e.g. the autonomic nervous system is responsible for the control of bodily functions not consciously directed, such as heartbeat. — 104 —

and concealed from our everyday awareness and perception. Accordingly, our visceral depths constitute the most hidden dimension of our lived embodiment, and thus for Leder “rarely make an appearance in our life-world” (Leder, 1990: 111). The way in which Leder figures this relation as largely disconnected and divided by an axis of visibility and sensation is problematic, however, in that it fails to capture the meshing of the visceral into the lived experience of embodiment, or our experience of what Julia Kristeva (1982) has termed the abject, the material surfacings of blood, mucus, and faeces which properly belong in the ontic domains of neither object or subject. Indeed, as Mason-Grant points out, this seemingly un-problematic distinction nominates one particular form of embodiment — i.e. the masculine — as the universal and unspoken norm:

Although bodily fluids belong to all human beings, the patriarchal construction of the relation between sexed bodies has cast as sexually differentiated the highly charged cultural meanings of pollution and contamination associated with bodily fluids. In particular women’s bodies are represented as a source of contamination for men in a way that men’s are not for women … women’s bodily fluids are conceptualised as leaking, uncontrollable, seeping. In this dynamic of sexual difference men have cast out liquidity from their self representations. Women’s bodies are not only marked as different from but inferior to men’s bodies. This inferiority is structured in terms of the notion that the female body lacks self containment (Mason-Grant, 1997: 214).

Women’s bodies regularly transgress Leder’s conceptualisation of the perpetually contained and unrevealed visceral bodily interior: when menstruating, for example, our visceral depths ‘come to the surface’ of our corporeality; when pregnant, inner bodily changes and foetal movements are frequently both focal and visible. The model that Leder offers is thus unarguably one that describes a specifically masculine embodiment, and viscera which are more easily ‘negotiated’ and overlooked. As feminist interventions have repeatedly foregrounded, it is highly problematic to assume that women’s bodies (and the specificity of women’s viscera) conform to these standardised definitions and ideals iterated within biology: “what is conventionally understood as biology is insufficient to account for the plasticity and variety of our real biology” (Spanier, 1995: 42). By presenting the contained and impermeable body as the seemingly neutral and universal standard, Leder reinforces and reiterates normative understandings of corporeality and sexual difference that dominate our cultural landscape and collective embodiments, and in doing so inevitably suppresses other forms of embodiment which don’t conform to these ideals.

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Nevertheless, it would seem that Leder’s recognition of our bodily interior is particularly pertinent in the context of televisual apparatuses which precisely target these previously imperceptible visceral depths. Magnetic resonance imaging, for example, like other biomedical imaging technologies, is presumed to enable direct perception of viscera-in-action. Yet Leder suggests that the variety of exscriptive technologies used to visibilise internal organs only highlight and exacerbate our alienation from the strangeness of our own interiors. Clearly, his reliance on a strict inside/outside dialectic, belies a more latent oppositionality between nature’s ‘otherness’ and the cultural known, and rests on a conventional interpretation of the relation between our bodies and visualising prostheses. In contrast, feminist theorists such as Haraway (1991) have revealed the cyborgian affinities between our own sensorium and those of perceptual machines, recognising that the body in its entirety is always open to sociotechnical arrangement. We can and do have an instrumental awareness of the interior of our bodies; our familiarity with skeletal representations via X-ray technology is but one example of how we quite familiarly envision our insides within an instrumental framework. As I will show in the next chapter, magnetic resonance imaging is another example of such cyborg perception.

*

In the first part of this chapter I considered the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and the post-phenomenology of Ihde, and how they can be brought together with a renewed focus on the mutual incursivity between embodiment and technology. Within this analysis I also turned to Haraway’s discerning speculations on technoscience, and Innis’ less optimistic cautions concerning the unhappy coupling of modern technology and the body. In this section I have suggested how the particular imperatives of corporeal feminism have reconfigured the body image or corporeal schema, such that a range of cultural and gender specificities be included in any investigation of the technosoma. The recent focus within corporeal feminism on the corporeal interior, along with Leder’s offerings in this context, have tendered potential insights into the layered relation between viscerality and equipmentality. In particular, while phenomenology might investigate how the visceral crosses over into the perceptual dimensions of our being, feminist phenomenology can attend to the gender specificity of that traversal. In terms of my own explorations of the telebody, the combined importance of these perspectives lies in their ability to enable a critique of technoscientific and — 106 —

telemediatic effects upon our individual and collective embodiments, and to reveal the imbrication of such incursions with our elemental experience as embodied beings. In the chapter to follow, I will apply this conceptual package to the practices and technosomatic relations emerging from biomedical vision and virtual reality.

chapter three

the corporeality of technovision

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part one: a technosomatic methodology

I t cannot be simply a question of inverting the dualism of machine and organism which has structured the history of metaphysics. Rather, the mapping of machines can be constructed in novel ways to the point where the fixity and certainty of techno-ontological boundaries and distinctions begin to de-stablize and break down in true machinic fashion.

Keith Ansell Pearson (1997: 137)

The new techniques of scientific visualization extend into the endoscapes of the body as well as the cyberspaces of virtual reality. The two are connected by more than the technology that unites internal perception to external computer. They are also articulated together through their social construction as areas newly available for colonization.

N. Katherine Hayles (1993: 185)

In the first chapter I discussed some of the tenets and influences of Cartesian metaphysics, and in particular its presumption of a disembodied subject, which independently inspects a pre-existing and inherently knowable object-world. As I have suggested, Cartesian perspectivalism is a pervasive kind of visualism, sustaining the truth-function within contemporary scientific discourse, and determining with specific imperatives those things which can count as knower and known. Moreover, the dualist ontology of Cartesianism reinforces a fixed and hierarchical routine of human-technology relations, in which technology becomes simply a tool, or a complex of tools, through which knowledge is obtained and human ends furthered. In this classical anthropocentric and humanist definition, the visualising apparatus functions wholly within the telic intention of the human user — simultaneously distinct from, and posterior to, the conditions of being and knowing; at best, as an epistemically quiescent interface between subjects and — 109 —

their objects of knowledge. Given the predominance of visualising and imaging technologies in science and popular culture today, I have argued that we need to examine the trajectory of ocularcentrism and disembodiment, and its salience as a paradigm for human-technology relations.

In the context of postclassical, postmodern, or in Ihde’s terms pluricultural vision, I suggested in the second part of chapter one that there is a need to reconsider both our commitment to subject-centred perspectival modes of knowing, and classical or conventional parameters of matter and corporeality. On the one hand, in the postclassical sciences such as contemporary physics, modern thermodynamics and quantum theory the link between technovision and the truth of an objectifiable world has been severely compromised. As Cartwright and Goldfarb (1992) have pointed out, high tech visualising devices themselves have disclosed post-classical visual possibilities, and are quite often antagonistic to conventional ways of seeing and knowing the world. On the other, the linguistic turn in theories of culture, theories of the postmodern, and more recently post- phenomenological and feminist philosophies of technology and science, have rejected the notion that any vision can be neutral or ahistorical. Perception is variable, partial, and encultured, and more radically, distinctions between natural vision and artificial, synthetic or mediated vision cannot be upheld. Thus there have emerged a range of perspectives on human being — in the context of cultural practice and formation — with either a latent or explicit insistence on collapsing binary thought and the constraints of ontological difference. This current epistemic and ontic climate, I argue, discloses the notion that there is no material or conceptual discontinuity between humans and tools, and that technovisual ensembles are combinations of various non-human and human agencies.

Determining the nature of this agentic continuum is problematic and complex. The anti-materialist trajectory of some postmodernisms and techno-based theories, in part an effect of the popularity of textualism and its hybrids, and of the digital turn, has tended to skew analyses of human-technology relations towards the promise of informatic disembodiment. Such theories cannot attend to the concrete materiality and medium specificities of human-tool interfaces, nor to the shifting boundaries of their considerable endo- and exo-somatic effects. The corporeal turn in recent feminist theory and philosophies of the body can effectively counter this conceptual trajectory of disembodiment, and instead propose that knowledge is a collaborative achievement of bodies and entities — 110 —

(human and non-human), tools and apparatuses, within culturally specific contexts.

In the previous chapter I described and evaluated Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, wherein tools are not conceived as merely perceptual attachments or extensions, but rather that our corporeal schemata make room for, dilate and embrace these instrumental incursions. The fundamental and irreducible consonance between tools and bodies, and between bodies and bodies, is articulated by the term intercorporeality, a word which also names the implicatory relation between technics, embodiment, knowledge and perception. In opposition to those proponents of the linguistic turn — semioticians, poststructuralists and deconstructionists alike — for Merleau-Ponty the world is not fundamentally textual; rather, the body is the provision of language, and being-in-the-world the concrete ground for all communicative possibility.

The term intercorporeality reflects a different ontology to intertextuality: for the latter, ontology is somewhat vacuous, thinly constructed within the text and pre- constituted by language; for the former, “axiology, epistemology, ontology — all are irreducibly correlated in human experience” (Sobchack, 1992: 57). Although intercorporeality might seem to refer to the relation between human beings, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh-of-the-world suggests that material agency — via an altered interpretation of what embodiment in all its permutations might mean under such conditions — can be ascribed to tool-ic aspects or “technical things” (McHoul, 1997). For example, the very idea of synthetic or artificial perception, of perceiving tools, indicates that such visualising technologies are in some way also embodied and intentional. In her work on the phenomenology of film experience, Vivian Sobchack suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s theorisation of bodily agency, intentionality and subjectivity are conducive to being transferred over to technologies or technologically produced entities such as film and television. Films, or moving pictures, have being in the sense that they be-have (Sobchack, 1992: 61). She writes:

Unlike the photograph, a film is engaged semiotically not merely as a mechanical objectification, a reproduction, that is itself merely an object for vision. Rather, however mechanical its origin, the moving picture is experienced semiotically as also intentional and subjective, as presenting a representation of the objective world. Perceived not only as an object for vision but also as a subject of vision, a moving picture is not experienced precisely as a thing (Sobchack, 1992: 63).

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As Sobchack notes, the substances of the electronic and the digital have their own ontology — for example, the way in which the digital image, and the televisual hybrids of the VCR and DVD allow us to materially possess and temporally rearrange photographic and cinematic embodiments in the form of cassettes and discs. Different informatic, graphic and spatial ontologies are also embedded in the various mediums of technoscientific vision, virtual reality, and broadcast TV, each of which will be examined in this and the fourth chapter.

As was argued in the previous chapter, Merleau-Ponty, along with other body- philosophers and phenomenologists, supports Ihde’s theory concerning the instrumental embodiment of scientific knowledge, from which the agency of technology, and the artifactual and material containment of knowledge, becomes apparent. Technology, so theorists such as Ihde, Hacking and Heelan argue, is the instrumental/material ground upon which scientific knowledge and practice can exist at all. The fact that modern scientific visualising practices are contained and enabled by actual instruments effectively disables the idea that scientific vision — or by extension, vision itself — is disembodied, impartial, unmediated, and closest to truth. Consequently, the embodiment or containment of knowledge in techno- apparatuses, combined with the notion that high-tech tools are prosthetic extensions of our sensoria, means that vision is both corporeally and instrumentally incarnate. Haraway’s insights into the postmodern ontology of technoscience, and her theorisation of the material-semiotic hybrid as a generative agent of knowledge, also become vital adjuncts to this emergent methodology. Consecutively, corporeal feminism’s particular attention both to embodiment in its contextualised and collective practices, and to the technovisual representation and agency of the endosoma, finally facilitate a full-bodied account of intercorporeality in its manifold dimensionality. The phenomenological and corporealist approaches, then, offer a particularly useful foundation for thinking through the ways in which the variously augmented visions of today are both agentic and somatic.

From this conceptual combination of phenomenological and corporealist approaches can emerge a theory of the technosoma which treats bodies and technologies as correlative and mediatic. Every mode of existence is dependent on equipmental or toolic fields — literally the everyday devices, high-tech apparatuses and technovisions which impinge upon our collective embodiments — and on the — 112 —

realities enabled and constrained by this technosomatic relationality. My central claim is that instrumental embodiment and corporeal embodiment are neither ontically nor epistemically discrete. They can be seen according to the actor- network principle of symmetry elucidated by Latour, in which humans and non- humans are rendered an equivalent agency. In Heidegger’s sense, they are equiprimordial, or equally generative in terms of our being-in-the-world or ontogenesis. Technology is never merely instrumental, and neither does corporeality stop at a fixed body-world boundary, but variably extends into the equipmentally textured environment.

In Postphenomenology, Ihde (1993) provides a discerning example of this technosomatic imbrication which can be applied across our whole range of techno- and televisual assemblages. He remarks that the telescope — an early form of the televisual with its own telic inclination of privileging seeing-at-a-distance — also became involved in a new embodiment relation. Since all artefacts both extend and inhibit bodily capacities, they must also necessarily transform them (Ihde, 1990: 75). The production of knowledge in technoculture is contingent on the intervening, transformative and agentic capacities of equipment; there would be no point to such devices if they were only to duplicate our own quasi-immediate perception. Ihde writes that when observing the moon through a telescope, an altered ergonomics of coordination and embodied vision emerges:

Spatially the moon is magnified … in the new context of difficult-to- control bodily motion. Both body and moon are thus magnified. And both factors are part of the now technologically transformed observational context... part of what occurs in this transformation of seeing is an implicit dialectic between the instrument and the body (Ihde, 1993: 46).

This describes the coincidental nature of technovision — the transformative coincidence of tool and sensorium where the interface is not simply where the image or device reaches the eyes. As Sobchack insists, seeing images mediated and made visible by technovision enables us not only to see technological images but to see technologically (Sobchack, 1992). Today, vision machines in both popular media and high-tech ensembles, such as those used in technoscientific imaging, virtual reality, telesurgery, and tele-robotics, are often portrayed as displacing ways of knowing away from the tactile and the haptic, towards the achievement of disembodied effects-at-a-distance. Yet against this presumption, in the chapters to follow, I aim to trace a somatology of three technovisual modalities: — 113 —

biomedical imaging, virtual reality and domestic television. I argue that while there may be commonalities across technosoma, each techno-specific assemblage produces and is produced by a particular somatic modality in an ongoing dynamic. I will argue that when we experience or represent the endosoma as data, absorb a simulated environment, or more mundanely (but vastly more complexly) watch TV, we are fully embodied beings; our vision is neither distracted nor abstracted from our bodies, nor from other modes of perceptual access, or from the various collective embodiments or body images we inhabit as selves. Today, the very word telepresence indicates not the fact of disembodiment, but rather a need to critique and rearticulate the conceptual and material parameters of corporeality.

Ihde notes in the context of the early visualising technology of the eyeglass, that the telos of perfect macrovision is coupled with the desire for transparency, such that the eyeglasses, optimally, will withdraw from notice (Ihde, 1990). Yet even in this simple instance, the temporary achievement of perfect and transparent technovision by way of a contraction/expansion dialectic signals the realisation of a body-tool continuum, an accomplishment of habitual use which could be said to be the goal of all television. Within medical science, for example, one trajectory of telepresent perception which has emerged with the development of scanning devices, is the desire to render the interior of the body in terms of a volumetric (photo)realism. Magnetic resonance imaging is perhaps one of the most recent instances of this imperative, where planar sections of the body appear as black- and-white photographs of what we would see if the body were to be impossibly and momentarily frozen in time, and sliced open, alive, for a quick snap-shot. For the radiologist, within such an ‘as if’ structure of perception, the resulting image is transparently available, ‘virtually’ unmediated. This logic of transparency — the suspension of the interface — also permeates our experience and representation of virtual environments, and in a more complex and multi-faceted way, of TV. Yet as I will show, in the contexts of medical imaging, virtual reality and domestic television, there is always a body-tool morphosis, a blending of organic and inorganic embodied vision, which forms the sensorial and material-semiotic ground for each perceptual experience.

The reciprocity between tool and body is also apparent in the technical specifications and ergonomic development of every apparatus. Yet there is also resistance here, in the interstices of our many technosomas. The materialities of — 114 —

human bodies and nonhuman bodies are often in ontic conflict, and ensuing material-semiotic compromises are deeply embedded in the trajectories of embodiment relations. Thus, for example, computer keyboards and numbered keypads must remain of certain proportion in order to fit the somatic specificity of human hands, despite the technology surpassing the need for such bulk; similarly, special screens and glasses are sometimes required to compensate for the irritation of screen glare and flicker. Indeed, the teleology of technological design is always towards the reconciliation and eradication of perceptual and ergonomic incompatibilities. As Ihde suggests, there is a “dialectic between the instrument and the user in which both a learning-to-see meets an elimination-of- bugs in technical development” (Ihde, 1999: 178). Thus the contrivances of the body are quite literally built into the blueprints and specifications of any technical device or assemblage, just as the body is manoeuvred and disciplined by the procedures of the apparatus. As I will discuss in the context of MRI and VR, this sometimes uneasy assimilation between tool and body has been reflected in a number of interface defaults and amendments. In MRI, for example, refinements in software have dramatically enhanced image clarity and capture to accommodate the physiological ‘take’ of the human eye, while the use of colour instead of greyscale is superimposed to oblige the non-expert, and the development of ‘open- air’ MRI is an adaptation of the architecture to alleviate claustrophobic effects on the patient (Harper, 2000).

If vision is thoroughly embodied and contingent, then televisual apparatuses — as synthetic perceptors and not simply mediums — must also be understood as embodied, or as aspects of embodiment, caught up in the body-tool ontology. Our use of techno-apparatuses such as the television and computer are instances of this intercorporeality, from the transformation of our spatial topologies by telepresent perception, to the more mundane manipulations of the keyboard and remote control. As I discuss in chapter four, the spatial ontology of TV is largely configured either in terms of a window-onto-the world, or as a medium-specific container of microworlds and dimensional image-layers, each of which has its own measure of somatic involvement. Thus against the hyperbolic claims of cyber- theorists and Moravec-inspired extropians,1 I would argue that telepresent,

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1 See for example the Extropy Institute News: Journal of Transhumanist Solutions website at http://www.extropy.org/

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telerobotic, virtual and simulated environments are exceedingly corporeal. As Virilio points out in relation to cyberspace as a ‘new’ perspective:

It does not coincide with the audio-visual perspective which we already know. It is a fully new perspective, free of any previous reference: it is a tactile perspective. To see at a distance, to hear at a distance: that was the essence of the audio-visual perspective of old. But to reach at a distance, to feel at a distance, that amounts to shifting the perspective towards a domain it did not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: tele-contact (Virilio, 1995).

If touch can be conceived of as a ‘distance’ sense, such that we can become tele- robotically embodied at-a-distance, so too can television be reconfigured as an increasingly predominant mode of corporealising the world. As Merleau-Ponty would remind us, there is no essential or ontic difference between vision and television, between touch and tele-contact; looking, tasting, smelling and hearing are all variants of “handling” the world. Indeed, palpating with the eyes — a prehension, a prise — literally translates as holding (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 133). Whatever difference there is between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ perspective reveals simply the persistent mutability of our corporeal schemas in their ceaseless adaptation to the equipmental environment.

If a technosomatic method recognises both the bodily and tool-ic nature of knowledge, then any analysis of the tool-body as epistemic agent, also simultaneously requires addressing contexts of operation — that is, pace Heidegger, their domain of equipmentality. As perceptual articulations, tools are identifiable only in their context of being in-use as they are integrated into our corporeal schemas. A vital factor of this context can be found in the trajectories of each specific human-technology or body-tool relation: the cultural, technical, experiential, sensorial and interfacial loci and histories of that relation. As I will show in relation to both virtual reality and biomedical imaging, this insight helps us to understand how adjusting and conforming to the instrumental parameters and cultural logic of the apparatus — as the radiologist, VR user, or even the watcher of TV must do, in learning to ‘see’ with and not through the apparatus — also inevitably involves a medium specific tweaking of the corporeal schema. In addition, there is a complex slippage or tweening between the body-tool habituations of one’s own corporeal schema and the collective corporeal schematic of a community of telebodies. To this intercorporeality of bodies, collective corporeal schemata and material-semiotic tools I have ascribed the broad- spectrum name technosoma, a term which aims to capture the conflationary — 116 —

nature of our being. In a movement from the general to the specific, I also apply the terms endo- and exosoma to refer to the technocorporeal gatherings coalescing on either side of the skin-membrane, info- or datasoma to describe the modes of embodiment emerging from the demands of digital representation, cybersoma as a name for the ‘putting-on’ or ‘handling’ of virtual environments, and finally telesoma, as perhaps our most common mode of being-with-media in contemporary Western culture.

In the context of televisual technologies there is no doubt that the technological materiality or the medium specificity of a technology impacts upon our individual and collective embodiments. Just as many feminist and contemporary theorists have increasingly come to recognise that sociocultural and gender specificity is fully implicated in the variable schematics of our bodies (and vice versa), what I offer here is an exploration into the medium specificity of our equipmental environments as an equiprimordial aspect of that variability. As evidenced by our habitual use of various technovisions and technospaces, medium specific effects on our sense perception and corporeal materiality demand a corresponding change in how we define the variants and liminalities of embodiment, technology and agency. This of course has quite radical consequences for a phenomenology of embodied agency, since the status of televisual technologies must be upgraded; they too are installed within the agentic structure of embodiment. As I have suggested, part of the work of defining these variables involves tracing both the corporeal and equipmental agencies of tele-technological and tele-visual ensembles. Indeed, what is medium specificity but the agency of tools embedded in the processes and embodiments of knowing?

In the two sections to follow I will focus on the medium specific agencies of embodiment and equipment that surround the technological ensembles of magnetic resonance imaging and virtual reality. However, while recognising that the technoscientific “eyes” of MRI and VR simulations are active perceptual systems — agents bound up in the transformative body-building and space- making practices of biomedical science and cyber-technology (Haraway, 1991: 190) — I am not suggesting that these technovisions are at any moment either ontologically discrete or epistemologically independent from human corporeality. Rather, consistent with the methodology developed here and in the previous chapter, each of the assemblages will be situated in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s composite universe of intercorporeality and the extendible aptitude of the — 117 —

corporeal schema, Ihde’s transformative interpretation of the human-technology relation, Haraway’s material-semiotic agency, and corporeal feminism’s demand for the acknowledgement of micro-specificities across culture, gender and the inner/outer body image. It is my aim to consider these two cases of postclassical vision as endo- (MRI) and exo- (VR) technosomatic gatherings of agency. — 118 —

part two: biomedical imaging: mri2

Microscopes, telescopes, X-ray imaging... belong to a long history of perception-enhancing technologies which embody scientific observation. They are an essential element in the technological embodiment of science in its instrumentation. Don Ihde (1993: 43)

I f all technology implicates and supplements bodily organs … then biomedical technologies give an extra depth to this implication, and in the process throw into question the viability of a distinction between natural inside and technical outside of the organ-ism, or of setting out any defining limit or distinct interface between organs and technics.

Catherine Waldby (2000: 31)

The pre-dominance in Western thought of the visual metaphor, combined with an expansive range of visually-oriented social and technocultural practices in both image- and screen-based entertainment and scientific discourse, is indicative of the close relationship between vision, visuality and human understanding. Yet our culture is so deeply embedded in this visualist tradition that the emphasis on the visual appears not as a bias, but rather as completely natural and given. As discussed in chapter one, ocularcentrism has been critiqued at some length by theorists such as Martin Jay, David Levin and Jonathan Crary. Implicit within Cartesian perspectivalism, these theorists suggest, is a decorporealised way of knowing because it presumes that vision, as the action of a disembodied spectator, presents the possibility of universal access to an external world that is ready-made. This reduction of vision to a merely spectatorial role has proven particularly profound in the scientific and medical world-view, initiating new paradigms for a specifically modern scientific gaze on the body. In these ______

2 A number of the conceptual insights contained in this section are the result of collaborative research and fieldwork with Carly Harper in 2000.

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paradigms, vision is assumed to be a non-interventionist, mechanistic practice which transparently observes and records: an ocular subject (i.e. the pathologist, doctor or scientist) is configured as distinct from a world composed of orderable objects, each of which is waiting to be dis-covered and described. Waldby states that biomedicine

unlike some relativised domains of the physical sciences utilises a model of knowledge based on a simple subject/object distinction, whose concept of adequate knowledge presupposes ‘both the separation of thought from its object and the priority of the latter over the former’ (Waldby, 1996: 26).

As feminist philosophers of science argue, it is important to question traditional biomedical and scientific claims to an immaterial and disembodied objectivity, and also, more specifically, to disable the conception of technologies as neutral or transparent. The connection between tele-technologies and the visualist paradigm is strong, and thus a critique of medical vision is part of a more elaborate critique of television.

The attribution of epistemological primacy to vision can be contextualised as a continuation of ocularcentric themes initiated in the Enlightenment period, where pictorial classification and the visualisation of knowledge assumed a particularly central and significant role. Enlightenment science and medicine, in particular, were motivated by a desire to uncover causes and reveal essences, bringing the inaccessible to the surface. This approach to knowledge involved the assumption that what was immediately observable was in some sense an incomplete or inadequate account of the object/body itself. Instead, the objective was to locate and articulate a ‘truth’ beyond merely external and superficial manifestations: the “physical but subtle realities” were assumed to lie beneath the confusing symptoms and dysfunctions of the individual, to be located at a level which ‘ordinary’ superficial observation would be unable to reveal (Stafford, 1993: 28, 44). Typically, this desire was reflected in the ruling metaphors of the Enlightenment — tropes of surface and depth, appearance and essence, exterior and interior, close and distant, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, known and unknown. In this figuration of the biological body, non-visible, opaque or inaccessible regions were seen to be of a resistant yet more primary and vital ontology. Such an understanding remains complexly embedded in the contemporary technoscientific desire to deliver such spaces up to vision and ergo to knowledge.

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This desire was clearly expressed in a medical discourse of discovery and bio- colonisation — i.e. the need to instrumentally and visually traverse and control the remoteness and nonvisibility of the living corporeal interior. As Stafford has observed:

Physiological insights into ‘profound’ or ‘obscure’ bodily hollows were gained by means of the same relational or comparative system of ruling metaphors that governed eighteenth century geographical and anthropological discussions concerning distant foreign countries and remote alien customs (Stafford, 1993: 28).

The aim of medicine, therefore, was to reveal the underlying essence of the disease itself and to uncover and give ‘shape’ to the phantom causes, that is, to visually exscribe the internal organs, musculature, flesh and blood into lisable form.3 Here, the process of visualisation was the necessary and exalted method for rendering the imperceptible knowable: visualisation was revelation. Today, this belief is exemplified in many specialist biomedical journals, and also within a number of recent documentaries which aim to bare the body in vivo to the public eye, framing developments in medical vision as part of a progressive telos towards achieving the final truth of the body. For example, the popular BBC documentaries The Human Body: The Incredible Journey from Birth to Death (1988), Superhuman: The Awesome Power Within (2000) and How to Build a Human: The Future of Being (2002) all feature an underlying narrative which interprets primarily visualist instrumental invention as breakthroughs in discovery and objective knowledge. The Human Body (1998) concludes with an episode entitled ‘The Making of the Human Body,’ which unveils a range of state-of-the-art apparatuses enabling the macro- and microscopic ‘capture’ of the body in 3D. Such representations of the biomedical body in both popular cinema and television cannot be disembedded from the understanding we have of our own bodies and their inherent availability to technovision.

It might be said that ocularcentrism finds its ultimate manifestation in the disciplines of modern medicine and science, whose very sustainability as objective knowledges are parasitic on the visualist trajectory (Jay, 1994: 81). This objectifying relation is further mediated and reinforced by the wide array of scopic technologies which medicine regularly utilises to collaborate in its realist

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3 Here I am employing Waldby’s (1999) use of Lippit’s (1996) term ‘exscription’ as the description of “technologies which write the living body’s interior morphology as externalised image-objects, traces or reflections projected onto screens” (Waldby, 1999: 73).

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epistemology. When ocularcentrism converges with medical and scientific practice, the objects of this spectatorial epistemology — the world, nature, and the body — are conceived as homogeneous and self-enclosed entities; together, they comprise a reserve of naturally organised objects, which science and medicine as privileged discourses can then objectively frame, individualise and re-present (Jay, 1994: 63). This location of contemporary medical visualism within the parameters of a classical ontology clearly contradicts the distinction between conventional and postclassical science I described in the first chapter. Yet it must be said that science today has a diverse metaphysics, ranging from prognostic and diagnostic medicine and its claim to a truth of the body, to the more radical sciences such as artificial life, which locate “life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it- could-be” (Langton in Hayles, 1999: 207). This caveat aside, in chapter one I nevertheless claimed that within much current practice and experimentation — even in the application of state-of-the-art medical scanning techniques — both the visual metaphor and the subject-object dichotomy have been compromised. That is, somato-technological exigencies of postclassical vision machines which are no longer lens- or sight-based exceed the visualist and ocularcentric epistemology of Cartesian metaphysics. What I would suggest, then, is that the postclassical or postmodern deployment of such apparatuses exists paradoxically in tandem with a more fundamental belief in the truth of science and the objectifiability of nature and the body. Moreover, the actual practices surrounding the use of scanning devices such as PET, CT and MRI exist, at times uncomfortably, entirely within such a contradiction.

This paradox, and the collaboration of the visual metaphor within it, can best be explained in the context of biomedical discourses such as immunology, molecular biology and genetics. There is no doubt that within each of these discourses the category nature remains an unproblematised referent for the original and ‘proper’ state of things. The rhetoric surrounding AIDS and HIV, for example, sustains the notion that normal conditions stem from natural behavior, and that abnormal conditions stem from unnatural behavior. In this way, an obdurate and hierarchical binary between the heterosexual, immuno-competent ‘good’ body, and the homosexual, immuno-compromised ‘bad’ body is maintained (Waldby, 1996). This is a binary which depends on the facticity of a natural world within which universal and immutable properties and laws apply. Yet as I will show, biomedical

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knowledges such as immunology and genetic engineering simultaneously work from the assumption that nature both is and is not the yardstick by which the truth of human biology can be measured.

As Waldby (1996) points out, classifications of natural and unnatural which work to enforce predictable normative relationships between bodies, are couched within a number of bio-military metaphors of border patrol and control. Medical and military discourse and practice have long been intertwined; much medical research, and the development of visualising technologies such as the X-ray and ultrasound, have been substantially funded by the U.S. military(1996). This is undoubtedly because both medical science and military strategy are pervaded by the desire to reveal their object or target in visually hindered conditions. Penetrating the opaque surface of the body to discover malignant tumors is thus analogous to dis-covering an invading enemy through the obscurity of night; infrared, laser and sonar apparatuses used to hunt out disease, infection, and inflammation become, quite literally, the same technologies used to seek out an enemy in battle. In this way, then, discourse about the body and its imaging are reliant on military analogy and trope, such that visualisation is a form of surveillance and attack, or in Stafford’s analysis, of discovery and colonisation.

The correspondence between immunological and military discourse is particularly potent. Within immunology both the regulation of bodily boundaries and protection of the body’s interior, are achieved by an effective immune system. The function of the immune system is to maintain the perimeter of the self (typically the membrane of the skin), and to repel all that is non-self. Consider the following quotations, the first from an article in National Geographic titled “Our Immune System: The Wars Within,” and the second from Military Review:

The T cells that first detect antigens, known as helper T's, carry no weapons. Rather they send urgent chemical signals to a small squadron of allies in my body - the killer T cells.... Like all T cells, killer T's are trained to recognise one specific enemy. When alerted by the helper T's, the squadron reproduces into an army. The killer T's are lethal. They can trigger a chemical process that punctures the cell membranes of bacteria or destroys infected cells before viruses inside have time to multiply (Jaret, 1986: 716, cited in Waldby, 1996: 66).

In the next quotation, U.S. Colonel Frederick Timmerman argues for the necessity of an élite corps of soldiers in the “army of the future:”

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The most appropriate example to describe how this system would work is the most complex biological model we know — the body's immune system. Within the body there exists a remarkably complex corps of internal bodyguards. In absolute numbers they are small — only about one percent of the body's cells. Yet they consist of reconnaissance specialists, killers, reconstitution specialists, and communicators that can seek out invaders, sound the alarm, reproduce rapidly, and swarm to the attack to repel the enemy (Timmerman, 1987: 52 cited in Haraway, 1991b: 254, note 12).4

Thus the immune system is envisaged as an ideal model for a special strike force, and vice versa, a consonance which continues an already combined trajectory and cross-fertilisation of medical and military discourse and their shared technovisual ensembles.5

The anxiety over corporeal margins is also complexly both exosomatic and endosomatic, where the skin and the molecular integrity of one’s own cells must be protected from penetration and mutation. The perfect body is a body without orifices or points of vulnerability, in fact an impossible body with thresholds which will never be compromised. Bodies with unstable boundaries which are permeable, or which seep beyond their borders, are both threatened and threatening. As Waldby (1996) argues, the heterosexual masculine body is idealised as resistant to infectious aliens (it is anally and orally non-receptive), while the body of the homosexual is transgressive, forming a duplicitous alliance with viral elements, and the bodies of women are similarly hazardous, leaky and capable of harboring non-selves such as babies. In such an account, micro-perceptual imaging of the body’s interior is clearly complicit in manufacturing a continuum which moves unbroken from cause to effect: that is, from the non-normative and illicit behavior of the macro-body to the minute invasion of healthy cells. Within immunological discourse — particularly in the context of AIDS, HIV and more recently flu epidemics — the everyday practices of one’s body is replicated in miniature by the wayward behavior of one’s viscera or micro-body. Inversely, the body will

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4 As Haraway states: "It is not just imagers of the immune system who learn from military cultures; military cultures draw symbiotically on immune system discourse" (Haraway, 1991: 254, note 12). 5 It is well worth noting here Haraway’s description of the work of scientists Scott Gilbert, Edwin Blalock, Richard Dawkins, Neils Jerne and Leo Buss. Geneticists and immunologists, they all argue counter to the conventional and militarised conception of the immune system and the contained body. Leo Buss, for example, suggests that the immune system is made up of variant cell lineages which exploit each other: the individual human is therefore an accident, and contingent upon the continued cooperation between the cells/organisms. Thus, Haraway argues that the body is an ontologically contingent construct from the point of view of both cultural critic and biologist, with modes of existence dependent on local conditions (historical, biological, environmental, cultural, sociotechnical). In this way, the body can be reconceived as inherently vulnerable and contingent, depending on fragile affinities (Haraway, 1991: 218-220; 252).

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‘naturally’ maintain immunity if it maintains a ‘natural’ engagement towards the world and other objects.

This is where the contradiction lies, for biomedicine itself has a problematic and paradoxical relationship to what is reified as natural and normal. In scientific terms, biomedical discourse — genetics, biotechnology, molecular biology and immunology — no longer takes nature as the benchmark or blueprint against which biological fitness is measured. Where the ‘old’ biology upheld the natural and observed the body, biotechnology and genetics intervene, interrupting and altering the so-called natural processes and development of the body. The underlying assumption in this intervention is that the natural body is not the ‘best’ body; it can be improved upon, upgraded, engineered or recoded. Biomedicine today interprets the body as coded or cellular information, and as such ‘reads’ the diseased body as badly programmed. Many congenital diseases are then translated in terms of a malfunction of information processing, resulting primarily from the misrecognition or transgression of the boundaries of the self.6 For genetics, the body is an information system that is inherently flawed; the BBC documentary How to Build a Human: The Future of Being (2002) describes a future where “genetic destiny” will be in the hands of scientists who will “rewrite the story” of our genes:

The secrets of DNA, the genetic code for life, are now being unraveled and the ability to genetically engineer human beings will change the human race forever.

At a most fundamental level, genetic science and biomedicine perceives the original body as imperfect, or at most a work-in-progress, to be repaired and worked upon with the use of appropriate biotechnologies. The ‘natural’ body, to attain its optimum ontology, must be remade. No longer bound by the constraints of an immutable nature, biomedical metaphors too become rewritable, vitally important in contemporary understandings and representations of the body, and in their implication within our collective and individual corporeal schematics.

The tenacity of the vision-truth-nature rubric, even within what is clearly a postclassical framework which engineers rather than observes both world and

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6 This understanding of the body is itself technological, stemming from the conceptual conflation of molecular biology (DNA) and computer science or cybernetics (binary code), which together interpret the body and body-parts as information feedback systems. As a number of theorists have noted, the body has often been conceived in terms of contemporary technologies; that is, as clockwork mechanism, as a motor or machine, and as electronic circuitry and data.

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body, is signaled by biomedical science’s description of itself as a revelatory practice. In this rhetoric, the material and non-neutral embodiments of that knowledge-making are denied; both the visualising apparatuses and the corporeal embodiments of scientists and radiologists are considered to be epistemologically transparent, such that there is no epistemic intrusion of tools and bodies upon the work of discovery. Yet as Ihde (1991) suggests, a more accurate understanding of technoscientific and expert observation as an active and corporeal seeing, acknowledges the essential co-operative effects of praxis and perception, and of instruments and bodies, in all scientific activity; that is, the embodiment relations that ensue.

This hybrid condition of technical and corporeal seeing can be explored via the particular biotechnological apparatus of magnetic resonance imaging. MRI is a computer-conversion technology, which optically renders quantitative non-optical data into recognisable visual images which we can ‘read’ and interpreted on the screen. In this respect, MRI follows the usual visual prejudice of scientific discourse in its translation of non-visual information into a visual display. Yet at the same time, as a translation technology it provides an amplified example of the highly mediated and non-neutral nature of all technoscientific modes of vision (Cartwright and Goldfarb, 1992: 200). Foregrounding the role of instrumentation in medical knowledge thus reveals the way in which technics and techniques are both equipmentally and corporeally embodied; that is, the way they are incorporated into our perceptual and bodily experiences of the lifeworld. My investigation of MRI will illustrate the combined effect of both apparatus and embodied perception, and the collaborative technovisions and technosomas to emerge.

M AGNETIC R ESONANCE I MAGING

MRI deploys images from body territories which have remained dark to other kinds of illumination… [it] has shifted our sense of transparency.

Bettyan Kevles (1997: 176)

Magnetic resonance imaging is among a number of contemporary digital imaging technologies which are renowned for their ability to non-invasively visualise the interior as it is “live and functioning” (Kember, 1998: 55). Employed with the aim

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of rendering the previously occluded corporeal interior open to observation, such technologies are distinguished from the techniques of dissection or surgery, which entail physical alteration or material transgression of the body. Along with positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT), and other more commonly used contemporary imaging technologies including X-ray and ultrasound, MRI is primarily a diagnostic technique, a pathological probe which identifies anomalies often as a precursor to surgical or therapeutic intervention.

Typically, scans are made of the head (brain), knee or torso, and these various body-parts are enclosed in a cylindrical apparatus which generates a powerful intermittent magnetic field. The intensity of the magnetic field works to excite the alignment of hydrogen atoms in the body. Each time the emissions cease, these atoms return to their original ‘relaxed’ positions, emitting small electric currents which vary according to the density of their location in organs, tissue, blood or bone. In this way, the often subtle biochemical and physical differences between distinct corporeal substances can be calibrated and converted to a high resolution greyscale image. At each end of the spectrum, tissues which are high in water content or hydrogen appear white, whereas those which do not, such as bone, are darker; in particular, MRI is able to reveal the complexity of soft tissue and organs. The resulting images are the work of expensive and powerful computer hardware and software technology, and they offer precisely detailed macro- perceptual slices or cross-sections of the body which are recognisable in their photorealism even to the lay observer (see figure below).

Magnetic resonance image of male head Joseph Hornak, Rochester Institute of Technology (2003)

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For most patients, scanning time may last for around thirty minutes, during which the body or body-part must be kept completely still. In my own observations of the MR machine in operation7 I was firstly struck by the sheer size of the cylinder required for full body and head scans. Upon entering the scanning room clad in a protective vest, after several minutes I became aware that the very loud pulsating hum — caused by the flux of magnetic field generation — was moderately difficult to bear. Today, the radiologist monitors and adjusts the machine from within a sound-proof cubicle, but when first introduced the MR apparatus and radiologist shared the same room. From my brief experience, it was immediately clear that for human body-part interiors to be rendered as data in this way, and translated as sectioned images onto transparencies to be ‘made ready’ for the doctor’s expert interpretation, the patient must confront both the arduous work of remaining motionless, and the daunting and concrete materiality of the throbbing enclosure. In a visceral sense, too, the hydrogen atoms in the body matter to be imaged can be said to ‘behave’ in a techno-specific way according to the density of the particular corporeal substance in which they are located. Thus it is not the case that biomedical imaging produces a dematerialised data-body, but rather that the infosoma or human-apparatus gatherings specific to particular scanning procedures are undeniably corporeal and substantial. It is these technosomatic effects, specific to the body-tool ontology of MRI, that are of primary interest here.

Magnetic resonance imaging has now been widely adopted as a central and preferred tool in neuroscience, as it is seen to provide a direct assessment of the bio-chemical composition of the brain’s functioning in-vivo (Nemeroff, 1988: 3). In this context, MRI optically translates complex and dynamic bio-chemical data — the physiological intricacy of the brain — into a clearly-defined and discernible visual image, rendering the brain as a visible, and hence intelligible, object (Keane, 1999: 2). This visual configuration has proved crucial to recent advances in psychiatry and addiction studies, disciplines which now associate abnormalities in the brain’s bio-chemical mechanisms, as visually revealed by MRI, with the existence and origin of the disease itself, thereby reconceiving these symptoms as biological. In short, the graphic documentation provided by MRI has led to these previously contested and ambiguous conditions being reworked as distinct and scientifically verifiable diseases. Following the conventional scientific trope of

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7 Many thanks to Dr Steve Davies for inviting me and my honours student Carly Harper to observe the magnetic resonance machine in operation at St John of God Hospital, Subiaco, Western Australia, August 2000. Both Dr Davies and the resident radiologist kindly gave of their time and expert knowledge in extended interviews.

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vision as transparent discovery, magnetic resonance imaging is celebrated for its enhancement of the penetrative power of the scientific gaze, a position summed up by one scientist who proclaims that with the “sophisticated” capabilities of MRI “what was previously invisible is now coming into view” (Nemeroff, 1988: 2, Keane, 1999: 4).

Indeed, modern medicine’s technoscientific teleology can be viewed as a succession of strategic attempts to overcome the impenetrable and recalcitrant nature of the body’s flesh, blood and bone. However, the idea that these technologies simply embody a shift from a lesser to a greater, and more heightened, sense of vision or level of transparency — a logic which is evoked by medical discourse in its claims to make the body newly visible — is a problematic one. Emerging from the premise that technologies of observation are by definition non-invasive and veridical translations of the body interior, such rhetoric suggests that visibility is transparency. This discourse treats scopic technologies as simply a means towards the realisation of a more sophisticated and enhanced level of vision, a new kind of ‘window’ through which the corporeal interior of the human body can be transparently viewed.

Yet technoscientific optical instruments such as MRI need to be recognised as agents materially implicated in the production and generation of the life processes they claim to objectively study. What must be acknowledged, Cartwright argues, is the active body-building practices of biomedical science as they are embodied in its technologies and domains of expertise (Cartwright, 1995: 28). As Haraway famously states:

The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life. There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organising worlds (Haraway, 1991b: 190).

This position rejects the notion that bodies or machines are entities of either epistemic or ontic integrity, that scientific accounts of bodies are separable from or ontologically prior to technics, or are in any way reducible to their individual parts. The biological body is not the essential body, a reality waiting to be discovered, but always-already a technically-augmented or technosomatic agent, and always partially of our own fabrication.

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In this way, the materiality and agency of both technology and soma are interwoven. In her history of medical imaging and its tangible embodiments, Waldby (2000a) documents a number of bio-graphic representations of the corporeal, suggesting that the various medium specificities of such representations quite literally work over the materiality of bodies according to different economies of technology. Thus, for example, book technology actively privileged the surface and visual terrain of the page, such that the body was transformed into an accretion of surfaces and layerings of tissue, organ and skeleta (Waldby, 2000a). That is, the volume of the book ‘ordered’ the material volume of the soma; even today, the pages of the medical tome Gray’s Anatomy render the corporeal as a sequence of layers and spatial planes. Waldby suggests that the spatio-visual device of linear perspective is directly implicated in the translation of the volumetric three-dimensional body into a two-dimensional series of flat surfaces, a process which converted it into both accessible and workable terrain (Waldby, 2000a: 53). This incursion of Cartesian perspectivalism into medical imaging is still prevalent in contemporary techniques such as MRI. The Cartesian system configures space as an empty container which can be geometrically organised as an abstract and uniform grid, or a set of mutually perpendicular axes (x,y,z), and physical substance as coordinate points located in terms of their distance from the axial origin. Mathematical models of gridded space were also deeply embedded in the discourse of discovery, colonisation and mastery in eighteenth century geographic and anthropological cartographic practice (Stafford, 1993). It is not surprising, then, that within the perspectival model the pre-modern body registered as a traversable anatomical space, a coherent “body landscape,” which could be explored (Waldby, 1999: 55). Anatomical atlases, as exemplified by Gray’s Anatomy, were nothing less than body-maps, and the anatomical body, far from representing an unmediated actuality of internal organ-isation, was produced by the medium specificities and technical devices of linear perspective, coordinate space and the book.

In a similar way, contemporary representations of the body according to the logics of the computer and screen rework the body as a three-dimensional coordinate space to be traversed and explored. MR images, because they can be stacked in such a way so as to produce a three-dimensional representation, are considered primary resources in the creation of 3D animated body-atlases. Software developed for manipulation of MRI, CT and photographic images of the Visible

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Human Project8 configure the data body as topography and landscape, inviting the user on a navigable virtual flight through the Visible Man.9 In other applications (see figure below) users can orient themselves with a mouse-directed avatar. Although the Visible Human is governed by the operative logics of computerised conversion— the technosomatic specificities of electro-magnetic fields, hydrogen atoms and digitalisation — it nevertheless continues the trajectory of visualism and dis-covery particular to earlier body representations. Moreover, this discourse of exploration in the Visible Human Project reiterates the androcentric bias within classical anatomical illustrations; despite the increased detail of the Female data- set, 10 her body is only used in its capacity to represent the functioning of women’s gynecological specificity, whereas the Visible Male is deployed as representative of

Visible Male pelvis with prostate gland. Richard Robb, Mayo Foundation. (Robb, 1996)

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8 See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html. The Visible Human is a project of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, U.S. It comprises two data-sets of what were actual cadavers – male and female, launched in 1993 and 1995 respectively – involving an ensemble of imaging techniques. Waldby describes this process as follows: “The body was placed… in a MRI machine and fully scanned. This first imaging process was to provide a template for the intact body, which was to be digitally ‘duplicated’. It was then frozen…cut into four sections and each section was CT and MRI scanned… After that, the body was systematically and very finely sliced… After each planing the cross-section of the remaining body section was digitally photographed, so that each photograph registered a small move through the body’s mass. Each of these photographs was then converted into a computer data file, and their position in the overall body registered according to the initial template” (Waldby, 2000a: 14). The full data-sets enable volumetric stacking, animation and manipulation, and are available for download from the U.S. National Library of Medicine website. 9 These traversable volumetric interiors actually use flight simulation software in their construction, so the parallel is more than metaphoric (Waldby, 2000a: 103). 10 The cadaver of the Visible Female was sliced into approximately .3mm planar sections, and the Male into 1mm sections.

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all other endosomatic function. As Waldby states, the anatomical image has never been, and can never be, “simply a benign reflection of the human body as referent, an illustration of its pre-existing anatomical order” (Waldby, 2000a: 48); rather, it is a composite of visualist traditions and scopic devices.

Biomedical modeling of the endosoma as terrain ultimately migrates into popular discourse, as evidenced by the narrative and numerous endoscopic flythroughs in the six hour series The Human Body, which at the outset claims to take the viewer on “an incredible journey through the most complex biological mechanism on earth” (1998). Such representations become invested in our cultural landscape (Harper, 2000), reaching us in the everyday lifeworld through televisual media. An anti-smoking campaign launched by the Australian federal government several years ago employed virtual endoscopic flythroughs, ‘inhaling’ the viewer along a current of cigarette smoke towards a nascent cancer. Such mediations cannot be disentangled from the way in which we currently experience and apprehend our embodiment in Western culture. As Thacker states, although the U.S. National Library of Medicine claims that their goal is to enhance the study and observation of modern anatomy, imaging of the body such as the VHP is clearly a process of intervention and alteration:

[A]s any cursory glance at the visual images of CT, MRI, CAT, PET, and other diagnostic technologies will demonstrate, what is at issue is the explicit recoding of the body of medical science and what will come to be culturally understood as a body more generally (Thacker, 1998).

Such representations impart a visceral schematic into our collective body-image, an understanding and experience of our own insides as comprised of a discrete collection of layers and organic components. At times we can sense internally (e.g. the ‘gut feeling’) or haptically (e.g. bumps and lumps such as swollen glands) the material facticity of our interior, but we also rely on the telepresent collaboration of biomedical imaging to visualise both the layout and the dynamic “oozings and pulsings” of the endosoma (Kirby, 1997: 76).

Moreover, in the tradition of medical vision and its intersections with our mutable corporeal schemas, there exists a complex reciprocity, for the phenomenological condition of embodiment is also a primary ontic ingredient. That is, the body- subject’s incorporative aptitude, its capacity to intercorporealise both tools, and collective yet culturally specific aggregations of the body image, are precisely what enable the various technovisual and medicalised ‘versions’ of the biological body to

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take hold. Recalling Waldby’s genealogy of anatomical representation, we could argue that the atlas itself is gathered up in a specific cluster of body-book embodiment relations; its size, heft and print specifications are incompletely determined by a centuries long history of sensory, ergonomic and intercorporeal ‘fit’ with the comportment of the body. Just as the materiality of the book has resolved a specific representation of the medical body, the body’s own contribution induced the emergence of a ‘bookish’ aspect of the corporeal schema. In the case of both the Visible Human Project and MRI, there are also several attendant exo- and endosomatic agencies which work to further collapse the subject-object, tool- body distinctions. With regard to an organic agency, for example, Keane (1999) points out how the brain is conceived as both unimaginably complex on the one hand, and as an easily represented intelligible object on the other. She explains this double identity as follows:

In one guise, the brain is presented as the mysterious seat of human consciousness, the most complex structure in existence and the source of all that makes us human — society, culture and technology. In the introduction to a text which explains advances in brain research to general readers, neuroscientist George Singer suggests that the brain may be not only more complex than we imagine, but more complex than we can imagine. At other times, the brain is presented as a bodily organ like any other… [a] logical mechanism of electrochemical cause and affect (Keane, 1999: 4)

Even with the exponentially increasing power of computer processing and software sophistication, the brain is frequently interpreted within biomedicine as resistant to veridical semblance, as in some way transcending or artifactualising the capabilities of technovisual representation. In a similar way, breast tissue has long been considered a disobliging participant in ultrasound and mammogram imaging, in that it is materially uncooperative to the manipulations of the scanning device, and its tissues do not always reveal themselves to the satisfaction of radiologist or doctor (Cartwright, 1995). As such, the interior body is imbued with an agency which at times may be inscrutable or obdurate, but it is an agency nonetheless. In other words, the body, conventionally treated as passive and inert, a biological substance located outside the cultural sphere, can be recognised, pace Haraway (1991), as a sometimes coactive, sometimes recalcitrant material agent.

Indeed, medicine deploys its apparatuses — MRI, PET and CT scans, volumetric models, anatomical atlases — as machines with which to overcome precisely the resistance of viscous and fleshy bodies to scientific modes of knowing. Yet the body in its own recursive materiality can be seen to ‘order’ the ensemble of

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visualising strategies. MRI, for example, is a technique enabled by several molecular and visceral specificities: hydrogen nuclei have a magnetic resonance signal; fat and water have many hydrogen atoms; human bodies are primarily made up of fat and water, and thus are comprised of approximately 63% hydrogen atoms (Hornak, 2003). This combination of technical ‘readability’ and visceral accommodation render the MR visualising process possible. In a less compliant example, in the case of the Visible Human Man, the initial MRI imaging process was performed on the intact body due to the quite simple fact that even when frozen at extremely low temperatures, the body-matter could not ‘hold together’ once sliced: the body’s mass was “effectively obliterated… each planed section dissolving into sawdust due to its extreme desiccation” (Waldby, 2000a: 14). Moreover, even despite such disintegration, the body-membrane performs its own ironies; tattoos on the surface of the Visible Male body are tenaciously reconstituted on the virtual skin of the volumetric reconstruction (see figure below), such that the uniquely marked identity11 of the body-in-life resurfaces, and the data-set abruptly loses its status as representative prototype of the human corpus.

Head and upper torso 3D reconstruction of Visible Male data set William Katz, Multimedia Medical Systems (Robb, 1996)

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11 Convicted murderer Joseph Paul Jernigan donated his body to medical science while on death row; upon execution by lethal injection his body was appropriated by the National Library of Medicine VHP coordinators and medical experts.

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This reciprocity between body and tool, and the way in which apparatuses such as MRI have been ‘instrumental’ in how we realise our inner workings can be theorised as an essential supplement to Merleau-Ponty’s body image, such that our interior morphology becomes a requisite part of the relational ontology of intercorporeality. If instrumental ways of seeing are aspects of embodiment, such that observer and observed are inextricably engaged, when that perceptual merger turns inward, inside and outside are similarly confounded. Although Leder is one of few phenomenologists who attend to the visceral, this perceptual arrogation of MRI and other imaging tools directly counters his recuperation of the inside/outside dichotomy, and his claim that the visceral mode of being is one of terminal disappearance. In the case of the Visible Human, for example, the body interior is made available as serialised cryosectioned surfaces for use on the Internet and digital-visual media networks, “reconstituted along the lines of scanning and surface data most appropriate for digital image processing and digital file standardization” (Thacker, 1998). Moreover, for Leder in vivo imaging technologies are primarily estranging, revealing an alien and unknowable bodyscape, yet this overlooks the way in which we have quite readily digested the more familiar somatic terrain of X-ray and ultrasound, and even found them both empowering as evidence of effective surgery or implants, and cherishable as first baby photos. Indeed, biomedical macro- and micro-perceptual imaging manifests our lively insides to sociotechnical apprehension in such a way that it is no longer possible to make clear ontic distinctions between culturally inscribed body surface and exscribed organic or natural interior.

Nevertheless, Leder’s argument concerning the persistence of Cartesian metaphysics in contemporary technoculture is a salient one. MRI and its surrounding practices continue to be pervaded by ocularcentric metaphors and strategies, a continuation of medicine’s strategic uncovering of the body. For example, the compulsion to get to the core, essence, or definitive origins — the ‘disease itself’ — continues to be demonstrated in the uses of MRI as a way to uncover and track the brain’s neurochemical structure (Keane, 1999: 5). Similarly, the logic that underpins the use of MRI in psychiatry and addiction studies assumes that there is a ‘truth’ of the disease — a truth which is hidden beneath the various external manifestations and “symptoms and dysfunctions of the individual” (Keane, 1999: 4). In these claims, MRI operates to expose the ‘true’ identity of the disease, and we witness a perpetuation of the Enlightenment’s

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treatment of the concealed as ontologically superior to that which is outwardly apparent or superficial. Thus the inner, previously non-perceptible, essence or truth of addiction and mental illness is revealed by MRI through the process of visualisation. The pictorial logic of MRI imparts a concreteness to the brain’s bio- chemical processes, both capturing and privileging abstract non-geometric processes, by paradoxically reducing them to something less complex. These visual delineations of molecular events then serve as ‘actual’ ocular markers of distinct pathologies.

Here, MRI quite evidently does not function as a transparent or visually isomorphic representation of the body; it instrumentally extends and reconfigures the scientific subject’s epistemological domain, while at the same time the image itself becomes as it were an aspect of the body, a concrete material trace of the body’s corporeality. Thus, the visualising process simultaneously translates and recreates the living processes of the body studied (Cartwright, 1995: 23). Moreover, the medium-specific qualities of MRI — its “particular technical trajectory” — establishes the logic according to which the body is to be arranged and understood; in this instance, the configuration of the brain as a chemical system (Waldby, 1999: 49). This medium-specific condition of scientific knowledge is acknowledged in the technical literature, which points to technologically- embodied transformations in conceptualising the brain:

I hasten to point out that underlying assumptions of brain mapping are distinct from those held by early phrenologists. They posited that single areas of the brain, often identified by bumps on the skull, uniquely represented specific thought processes and emotions. In contrast modern thinking posits that the networks of neurons residing in strictly localised areas perform thought processes (Raichle, 1994: 36).

And:

Increasingly sophisticated strategies and conceptualisations are emerging as powerful new technologies are being applied. Focal regions have been replaced by circuits and static changes by plasticity and molecular mechanism (Andreasen, 1997: 8).

MRI does not simply produce re-presentations of spatially defined and already visible bodily properties, rather it maps non-visible interior properties. In part, it is MRI’s technical and material agency which visually reconstructs the chemical components of molecules, facilitating the configuration of these chemical, dynamic and plastic renditions of the brain. Accordingly, MR images are not secondary or

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tertiary copies of the phenomena itself, they are themselves phenomena, materially implicated in, and mutually constitutive of, the very life processes that they appear to capture (Waldby, 1999: 21).

Nevertheless, MRI and other digital-translation technologies are identified with earlier inscription instruments which are seen not simply as beneficial tools, but as instruments which communicate directly the “language of the phenomena themselves” (Daston and Galison, 1992: 81). Thus for example, the MRI signal is understood to come directly from the brain tissue, enabling one scientist to proclaim that it is like doing a chemical experiment on the body in vivo instead of extracting a small sample in the lab (Sandrick, 1994). Yet the resulting MR image is a computerised interpretation; a visual model synthesised from emitted pulses and molecular reaction. Crucially, it is only after the MRI signal is transformed by a series of algorithms, and translated by computer, that it is able to graphically register a recognisable visual representation and operable diagnostic form in the shape of voxels and pixels. Thus while MRI seems perfectly consonant with medicine’s historical and epistemological privileging of sight, it is more precisely a process of translation. Nevertheless, the eventual appearance of the MR image as documentary-like visual representation can be located within a broader critique of medicine’s ocular bias; as a retrospective concession to the “viewer’s need for recognisable form,” rather than as verification, or self-presentation of flesh in its actual — although partially occluded — form (Kember, 1998: 58).

From this analysis, MRI and other similar conversion technologies do not simply function as unprecedented and more penetrating forms of vision. The notion that imaging technologies simply extend the senses is rendered problematic in processes such as these, for what is deemed merely experimental observation transgresses the boundaries between observation of the phenomenon, and the very life of the phenomenon itself:

Touching, looking, and other sensory acts performed to observe phenomena are now recognized as agents acting not only on the body but in and through it, as instruments implicated in the life processes studied (Cartwright, 1995: 28).

In objectivist scientific and biomedical accounts of such diagnostic practices, the notion of ‘looking’ in particular is conceptualised as a primarily disengaged and spectatorial activity (Keller, 1995b: 107). This logic of the biological gaze as non- invasive or transparent is reified in scientific accounts which distinguish between

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touching and penetrating (i.e. surgery) as a direct mode of manipulation and intervention, and observation as a neutral technique, which passively registers the body but does not alter it physically. What these accounts neglect to acknowledge, however, is that the production of biomedical knowledge, such as the analytical physiological knowledge generated by MRI, necessarily effects a partial instrumentalisation of the body, and thus the re-interpretation and re- configuration of its corporeality.

Perhaps particularly in the context of modern instrumentally-mediated medicine — that is, technoscience — any attempt to position the body as a pre-technical or organic point of origin is interrupted when we acknowledge that the body appears only as it is revealed through the instrumental logic and trajectory of the technological ensemble itself (Waldby, 1999: 21). For example, MRI as a computerised conversion technology must translate the behaviour of hydrogen atoms within the body into data, and this binary code must then be made to correspond in very precise ways to pixels of greyscale in order to compose a coherent image. This kind of instrumental embodiment or infosoma is only possible with the processing speeds and memory capacity of recent computer technology. Moreover, the computer cannot simply ‘see’ inside the body; the corpus must first be metamorphosed as a data-compatible or computational substance. As I have described, in MRI this involves intervention and alteration in the form of electromagnetic radiation, a procedure which remakes the body as bits of mathematical data, and thus as open to, and best represented by, the logics of the computer system. This new technoscientific circumspection is first established as part of the scientist’s own partial, mediated and expert perception, and then into popular scientific knowledge more generally. In films such as Hollow Man (2000) and The Fifth Element (1997) for example, MR imaging techniques and software, such as those used in the Visible Human Project, are appropriated to represent the body as a completely evident and discriminate accretion of layers, which can be built from the inside out (The Fifth Element), or visually peeled from skin to marrow (Hollow Man). Thus eventually these volumetric representations of the endosoma become a part of our own culturally and technologically contingent perceptions of the body, and finally, they are incompletely and variably assimilated into our individual and collective body images.

Scientific discourse is both intrinsic to, and inseparable from, the ways we understand and live our bodies in contemporary Western culture. Both within its

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own domain, and in its frequent incursions into popular media, such discourse has delivered the images with which we comprehend our biology and its constitution. Feminist philosophers of science have long recognised that if specifically feminist analyses continue to ignore biology, or to theorise the body primarily in terms of its corporeal perimeter, then technoscientific and biomedical discourse will itself remain invulnerable to critique. Molecular genetics, in particular, has become a primary instrumental mode of understanding about the organisation of life, and an increasing range of behaviors are attributed to genetic causes. Yet as theorists such as Keller (1995) and Spanier (1995) have suggested, the reductionist model of hierarchical control within molecular biology, where DNA is represented as the “master molecule,” is only one among many possible interpretations or bio-cultural paradigms. Instead of focusing on command and control, for example, human biologists could focus on metabolism and the flow of energy from the sun, thus centralising the agency of energy conversion systems rather than informatic code (Spanier, 1995). Such views are as accurate as those made about DNA, but are derived from a different focus and a different set of assumptions about what constitutes life. Recent cultural studies analyses of medical science and its visualising practices by Waldby, Cartwright, Stafford and others are also effective enablements of this kind of critique.12 As I have argued, post-phenomenological accounts of endosoma in their specificity also contribute a crucial component to contemporary theorisations of the body.

So far I have suggested that a critical and alternative construal of MRI and biomedical imaging apparatuses, and the various practices and agencies surrounding their use, can complicate dominant accounts of technovisual apparatuses within medical science. Such conventional accounts work to sustain Cartesian and perspectivalist dialectics between observer and observed, mind and body, subject and object, and natural and technical. Indeed, it is in their potential to overcome both the body’s opacity and resistance to optical penetration, that translatory exscription technologies such as MRI can be seen as continuous with medicine’s dominant epistemological dilemma and instrumental teleology: that of how to render the body’s interior morphology external, visible and accessible, and

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12 Linda Treichler, Lisa Cartwright and Constance Penley (Eds.) (1998) The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science, New York UP, New York; Lynda Birke (1999), Feminism and the Biological Body, Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh; Lisa Cartwright (1995) Screening the Body: Tracing Medicines Visual Culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London; Barbara Stafford (1993) Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, Cambridge and London; M. Berg and A. Mol (Eds.) (1998) Differences in Medicine: Unravelling Practices, Techniques and Bodies, Duke UP, London; Cathy Waldby (2000) The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine, Routledge, New York and London.

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so available to medicine’s therapeutic intercession (Waldby, 1999: 43, 73). MRI translates for the expert eye that which is visually distant, and so in this sense it can be described as a tele-technological or televisual ensemble. Yet the ‘distance’ here is not calculable in physical terms, as it involves a way of seeing, a perceptual modality, where the deferral between what is brought to vision, and the object of that vision, is not of the order of that which can be measured. Primarily, this is because MRI involves an ontic translation from non-visibilisable electro-magnetic fields and radio waves to an image as lisable representation of the inner body, a translation that relies on the mapping of difference across different modalities. As Crary states, this is indeed typical of contemporary imaging practices tout court:

Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a ‘real’ optically perceived world. If these images can be said to refer to anything, it is millions of bits of electronic data (Crary, 1992: 2).

As I have suggested, the presumption that imaging technologies enable pure transparency draws on a dichotomous logic of knowing — one which separates an observer from a world of external objects that can be independently accessed and properly known. Yet when the process of observation becomes irrecoverably perplexed by the operative dialects of binary code, radio waves, magnetic fields and visceral specificity, perceiver and object enter an altered order of knowing which radically shifts the relationship between vision and truth. The relation between perception and apparatus, and between body and tool, in the deployment of magnetic resonance imaging is an irreducibly collaborative and specific kind of truth, a technosomatic compromise of ontological difference. Rather than a collection of autonomous and distinct entities contributing to a cohesive telos of discovery and cure, I would argue that bodies, apparatuses and imagers comprise an often untidy and intercorporeal ensemble of human and non-human agencies. Indeed, the medium- or techno-specificity of magnetic resonance imaging, and the infosoma both produced by and producing such visions antagonise the fundamental tenets and assumptions of the conventional ocularcentric trajectory, including medicine’s claims to being a disembodied, impartial, transparent, non- intervening way of knowing.

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part three: virtuality and cybersoma13

Nothing could be more disembodied than cyberspace. I t's like having your everything amputated.

John Perry Barlow (Nunes, 1999)

[Cyberspace] does not coincide with the audio-visual perspective which we already know. I t is a fully new perspective, free of any previous reference: it is a tactile perspective. To see at a distance, to hear at a distance: that was the essence of the audio-visual perspective of old. But to reach at a distance, to feel at a distance, that amounts to shifting the perspective towards a domain it did not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: tele-contact. Paul Virilio (1995)

Cyberspace and virtuality are terms which have been mobilised in relation to a wide variety of technologies and phenomena, some of which are commonly available teletechnologies, and some of which remain largely tropological, like the virtual reality (VR) systems depicted in films such as the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy. In a broad sense, both virtual reality and cyberspace can be described as digital, mediated and simulated environments enabling interfaces between humans and humans, and between humans and computers. These can range from the electronic networks of familiar and mundane apparatuses such as the telephone, television, internet and their hybrids, to more experimental and technically sophisticated virtual reality applications. In the final part of this chapter these latter VR interfaces will be examined in a post-phenomenological context.

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13 Aspects of this section have been published in: ‘Corporeal Virtuality: the impossibility of a disembodied ontology,’ co-authored with Carly Harper, Body, Space and Technology, vol 2, no 2, July 2002, Brunel University.

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VR comprises a coordinated multimedia system, which aims to surround or immerse the body within an artificial sensorium of light, sound and touch. It is distinguishable from other forms of media in its use of technological extra-ceptors such as stereo headphones, computerised clothing or data-suits, and head- mounted displays, which together are able to simulate a three-dimensional visual, aural and haptic micro-world. Such worlds are quite explicitly designed to produce a predominantly visual, auditory and tactile, immersive sensory experience; that is, an experience which recalls with the closest possible isomorphism the body’s own sensory memory, such that the distinction between actual and virtual sensation is confounded. The creation of a compelling sense of presence — or telepresence — where the user feels immersed in a surrogate environment, thus paradoxically aims to mimic actual perception yet somehow exceed the ontic boundaries of an actual and collectively normalised body image.

The desire to use media for physical transcendence, or transportation beyond the location of the physical body, is not unique to VR. In the course of media history, particularly in the period of early electronic communications and telemedia, both the discovery of telephony and wirelessness were also expressed in terms of their immateriality and fluidity; as mediums which created new kinds of virtual communities, by linking a “multitude of minds” and allowing “millions of people to be present in the ‘same’ space” (Stone, 1994: 87; Marvin, 1998). Like the rhetoric employed in discussions of VR and cyberspace today, they professed the same utopian desires, and introduced similar problematisations of notions of subjectivity, identity and presence (Dyson, 1996: 76). This points to the way in which VR is embedded in a familiar and habitual set of understandings and discourses surrounding human-technology relations. Yet the desire to create a convincing sensation of presence is perhaps more pronounced with virtuality technologies. Within VR, apparatuses are us; they are optimally part of the felt structure of our virtual or tele-embodiment, for quite simply we cannot remove the prosthesis without also extinguishing the virtual micro-world.

The seeming inconsistency within VR design and the hyperbole surrounding it, where the ergonomic and sensorial body is both template and point of departure, is what I aim to investigate here. As I have suggested, the dominant goal of VR is for users to feel themselves to be in a unified field of awareness similar to our lived phenomenological experience; to replicate with the greatest verisimilitude a

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sensory environment that our bodies recognise. Yet this pursuit of sensory immersion or telepresence paradoxically depends on a heuristic disaggregation of the corporeal from the conscious made possible by the Cartesian model of ontological difference. The paradox between the pursuit of disembodied experience and the simultaneous reliance on technology’s ability to mimic the body’s sensorium is expressed in the rhetoric surrounding VR. That is, the sense of ‘being there’ — the semblance of being ‘taken in’ that lies at the heart of the VR experience — can only be adequately imagined when measured against the ‘actual’ body, and the extent to which we can depart from it. As Vasseleu points out, we can only fully experience virtuality, that sense of “disembodied agency”, because we are embodied (Vasseleu, 1994: 160). Consistent with the technosomatic ontology I have developed thus far, I will argue that the body does not recede or disappear in virtuality, but rather that an altered technosoma — a cybersoma — emerges at the interface. As Balsamo states:

Enhanced visualisation technologies make it difficult to continue to think about the material body as a bounded entity, or to continue to distinguish its inside from its outside, its surface from its depth, its aura from its projection. As the virtual body is deployed as a medium of information and of encryption, the structural integrity of the material body as a bounded physical object is technologically deconstructed. If we think of the body not as a product, but rather as a process — and embodiment as an effect — we can begin to ask questions about how the body is staged differently in different reality (Balsamo, 1996: 131)

The application of a technosomatic phenomenology to virtual reality engages directly with much of the debate surrounding virtuality technologies and cyberspace concerning the issue of disembodiment, or whether it is possible to transcend the limitations of biologically determined boundaries and ontologies. Perhaps another way of theorising this is via the concept of telepresence, and thus of alternative types of embodiment not necessarily based on our normalised sense of the opposition between physical or actual presence and immaterial absence. Thus, experiencing virtual reality is still a way of having/being a body, which means disrupting common sense associations that link mind with virtuality and information in opposition to the body and materiality.

This argument clearly runs counter to the disembodying proclivities of cyber- discourse, offering instead a materialist, somato-logical approach to being and knowing — an approach which insists on embodiment as a generative condition for even ‘virtual’ experience. Moreover, the following critique continues my claim

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that both knowing and being are always-already embodied, and that embodiment is also always-already instrumental or ‘toolic.’ In terms of agency, this reinstatement of the corporeal and the material-technical also implies that knowledge is partial and situated; that is, embodied and equipmental. As I have insisted, knowledge boundaries — exactly that which designate the object or body as such-and-such a thing — are made in uncertain collusion with the very materiality and recalcitrance of both soma and res extensa. Insisting on the imbrications of somatics and instrumentality is a direct reaction against the idea that cyberspace and virtual reality have made possible post-corporeal agency and identity. It involves not only re-establishing the significance or value of the body without the Cartesian formula, but a complex rethinking of the nature of subjectivity and agency themselves. The attempt to extricate dualist ontology from apprehensions of virtual reality is a recombinant strategy for reconstituting two seemingly oppositional terms as an irreducible relation — a generative and non- dichotomous understanding that applies equally to being-in actual and virtual worlds.

The ideational trajectory of bodily transcendence is evident in both critical and popular discussions of virtual reality and cyberspace, which frequently disavow the corporeal basis of these technological assemblages, positioning them as mediums which enable users to escape from their own organic embodiment. For example, internet enthusiast and hacker Jaron Lanier declares that cyberspace is “an open world where your mind is the only limitation” (Woolley, 1992: 14), well- known cybertheorist Michael Heim suggests that “in cyberspace minds are connected to minds, existing in perfect concord without the limitations or necessities of the physical body” (Heim, 1993: 34), and internet guru John Barlow claims that cyber-technologies work to radically sever the body from a fundamentally insubstantial ‘I’ (Nunes, 1999). In these statements it is implicitly assumed that the self (as mind or consciousness) can exist apart from the biological body. This discourse of disembodiment is manifest most extremely in Gibsonian representations of cyberspace or interactive online VR, where embodiment is vilified as an unfortunate barrier against achieving a ‘post- corporeal’ subjectivity configured in purely informatic and immaterial terms (Kirby, 1997: 135). Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson initially coined the word cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer (1984), where it is described as a techno- social “consensual hallucination” experienced collectively by billions of disembodied computer operators (Gibson, 1984: 51). Gibson’s original fictional

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concept of cyberspace is actually a merging of the internet and virtual reality — i.e. VR online — where human users ‘jack in’ via a node at the back of the head, and are immersed in the virtual data landscape of the matrix, able to move around and interact with data objects and others human avatars. The most significant aspect of Gibsonian cyberspace, in relation to this project, is its representation of the possibilities of disembodiment facilitated by virtual systems, to the extent that the mind is seen as departing into pure data to leave the ‘meat’ body behind. While Gibson’s work is located within the science fiction arena, his concepts have influenced computer and information systems design, and are characteristic of the amplified predictions about cyberspace expressed in both popular and critical discourse. The fact that many of the actual technologies supposedly facilitating this immersive online space of interaction do not yet exist has done little to discourage hopeful renditions of the fleshless ontology of cyberspace, highlighting the recursive relation between science fiction and techno-criticism.

In particular, the notion that corporeality is non-necessary has been activated by a number of cybertheorists, who consider virtual environments as potentially liberating in their ability to disengage identity from the “problematic constructions embodied in biological and socio-cultural determinants” (Gunkel and Gunkel, 1997: 130). This logic of a disembodied post-corporeality is an implicit evocation of Cartesian metaphysics. That is, cyber-enthusiasts and theorists, such as those mentioned above, appropriate the dualist schematic of mind and body, and this divided model of subject and body-object provides the ontic containment for, and conceptual deployment of, disembodied experience. It should be noted, however, that cybertheory and Cartesian metaphysics cannot be so simply equated, for while the latter may lay the ontological and epistemological groundwork for post- corporeal theory, the body nonetheless does retain a necessary albeit marginalised role within Descartes’ thinking. In the Cartesian understanding of selfhood, the body provides a convenient and very compelling ‘container’ for identity. i.e. one body, one identity. Although the mind can be distinguished from the body, it nevertheless ‘belongs’ to a body, and only one body, from birth to death. Though the self might be complex and mutable over time and circumstance, the body is a stabilising anchor, a place of holding. Cybertechnologies, however, have provided a context for a quite radical reworking of this understanding of the self. Where in Descartes’ thinking the body served to spatially limit the self, the singularity of which was guaranteed by the physical containment of the mind in the body, in cyber-discourse there is an increasing acceptance of the idea that not only are

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consciousness and body ontologically different, but that the self is not limited and determined by the mind’s containment in the body, or to put it another way, mind or consciousness can somehow escape the body’s containment altogether. Thus in virtual space mind, consciousness and subjectivity are not predicated upon material embodiment.

One could argue then that the teleology of cyberspace and virtual reality is directed towards the final non-necessity of embodiment, or achieving a mode of existence that can intentionally do without the body. Proponents of this discourse argue that online user-subjects are unencumbered by problematic constructions arising from the perils of embodiment, and are free to create identities and participate in communities that are raceless, classless and genderless. i.e. without physical or socio-cultural markers. Yet cultural theorists need to question this desire to transcend the body, on both political and ontological fronts. Rosanne Stone, for example, warns of the politically fraught nature of somatic amnesia, when typically it is the bodies of ‘others’ that risk exclusion and effacement in this process:

Forgetting about the body is an old Cartesian trick, one that has unpleasant consequences for those whose bodies are silenced and whose speech is silenced by the act of our forgetting; that is to say, those upon whose labor the act of forgetting the body is founded — usually women and minorities (Stone, 1994: 113).

As an antidote to this utopian anti-corporeal discourse Stone argues for our inevitable return to the physical, insisting that “no matter how virtual the subject may become there is still a body attached” (Stone, 1994: 111). This argument begins an important critique of the discourse of disembodiment, by highlighting the necessity of embodiment as a corporeal ground. However, as Kirby maintains, “Stone’s concession that we must inevitably return to the physical implies that at some point we successfully took leave of it” (Kirby, 1997: 139). Indeed, Stone assumes that the subject can be detached from the body-as-housing, and consequently, like the cyber-discourses from which she attempts to disengage, returns to those unspoken assumptions embedded in the Cartesian mind/body split, where organic substance is a life-support mechanism and not a condition of both being and knowing. In other words, while bodies may be necessary, they are not essential.

As I have suggested, this distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘essential’ is fundamental to the application of a technosomatic method, and no less to a

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critical understanding of virtual environments. Each word — in philosophical terms — has been used to convey a highly specific set of meanings in relation to bodies and subjectivities. When it is argued that the body is necessary, as we find in both the Cartesian model of subjectivity and Stone’s argument, the body continues to remain in a marginal or disabled epistemological position; that is, it is necessary but not a fundamental or equiprimordial agent of knowledge. Essentiality, however, centralises embodiment as a condition of knowledge, experience and perception. In order to counter both the extreme anti-body theorists, and the more nuanced argument presented by Stone, we need an alternative to the Cartesian dualist ontology altogether. Arguing for embodiment as essential to being and knowing in the world — as Merleau-Ponty, Ihde, Haraway and corporeal feminists do — is significant to this process, and thus to challenging discourses of disembodiment. Phenomenology and its hybrids provide a particularly appropriate mode of critique here, as it is a method of enquiry which looks at the lived world of experience, and critiques the mind/body dualism as a flawed conceptual or heuristic device rather than an actual structure. Much of the theoretical and social commentary surrounding VR implicitly depends on a reiteration of this dualism, which also functions interchangeably with a surfeit of other binaries and assumptions. In what follows I will aim to illustrate the impossibility of such assumptions and dichotomies embedded in our understanding of virtual environments, and suggest that VR is another instance of the technosoma, one that might be labeled a ‘cybersoma’. Finally, I will discuss the work of Char Davies, a VR installation artist who deliberately confronts both the Cartesian metaphysics of presence and the claim that virtual worlds offer an escape from the primary condition of our embodiment.

C YBERSOMA

Conceptualising VR as an inherently disembodied medium relies on an unambiguous understanding of bodies, and bodily location. This perspective assumes that the body is limited and confined by its own materiality and physicality to a singularity of location and possible actions. The body becomes nothing more than location, an extended and passive substance reduced to an inert housing for consciousness. The presentation of VR as a post-corporeal medium works from the logic that because the body remains either in front of the screen rather than inside it, or at least detachable from the head-mounted

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prosthesis or data-glove, and because the user experiences a feeling of presence inconsistent with the location of the physical body, that this body is consequently extraneous to virtual being. As Kirby puts it, the purely physical is understood as necessarily separated from the purely psychical, the body of the screen or apparatus acting as a neutral interface which mediates between these two independent and self-evident entities (Kirby, 1997: 137).

This peripherality of bodies and presence effectively elides the difference between the phenomenological or lived body and the body-as-representation, presuming that because the latter is not visually or familiarly available through the interface, it is therefore absent. In phenomenological terms, such complacency forgets that our body is an essential anchorage and opening onto the world, the originary condition by which all information and knowledge is accessed and meaning generated. The body in fact plays a crucial role in VR simulations. In Balsamo’s words:

[A]lthough the body may disappear representationally in virtual worlds — indeed, we may go to great lengths to repress it and erase its referential traces — it does not disappear materially in the interface with the VR apparatus or, for that matter, in the phenomenological frame of the user (1996: 126)

Or similarly, for Hayles:

[T]he specificities of our embodiments matter in all kinds of ways, from determining the precise configurations of a VR interface to influencing the speed with which we can read a CRT screen. Far from being left behind when we enter cyberspace, our bodies are no less actively involved in the construction of virtuality than in the construction of real life (1996: 1).

It is through the material and sensual minutiae of body-tool engagement, and the intercorporeal aptitude of embodiment, that we can ‘take on’ both apparatus and technospace. All ‘techniques’ are thus inescapably techniques of the body: “there is no world without things or bodies” (Bernet, 1993: 65), and this applies no less to the worlds of VR which are always-already aspects of the body’s projects and intentions. We live through our bodies, and through them we have access to space, not an homogenous a priori space, but an oriented space which is, in a Heideggerian sense, ‘at hand.’ Neither is the virtual a parallel space existing outside of or beside the realm of embodied experience, because like ‘real life’ its very availability depends on intercorporeality as perceptual and ontic access.

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As discussed in the previous chapter, Merleau-Ponty explains the implicatory relation of the body to space and objects with his concept of the corporeal schema. It is the corporeal schema which accounts for the body’s capacity to intertwine with the world, to integrate, internalise or intercorporealise seemingly ‘external’ objects into our corporeal activities, or conversely to transplant our own habitual embodiment into extracorporeal objects and environments. This expandable and pliable nature of the body’s schematic further reinforces the notion that bodies are not limited by the boundaries of the skin, so that technological interfaces like the VR apparatus can become an aspect of our phenomenological body. Virtual reality tools, then, cease to be something that we experience as objects, and become part of the felt structure of our embodied agencies.

Included in the notion of the corporeal schema is also a correlative claim for an artifactual or symbolic mapping of the body outside or beyond its neurological structure. This notion of a fictional or symbolic element of the corporeal schema is particularly useful in critiquing our understanding of VR technologies, and the way in which they are positioned as not ‘of’ the corporeal realm. In Merleau- Ponty’s work, emphasis is shifted from the inherent nature of the objects themselves, to the spectrum of possibilities or intercorporeal projects that is made possible by the body-tool relation:

In the action of the hand which is raised toward an object is contained a reference to the object, not as an object represented, but as that highly specific thing toward which we project ourselves… to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 139).

In this revision, the components of virtual space are meaningful objects for our perception, as highly specific things “towards which we project ourselves,” and which thus demand and incorporate the interventions and participatory operations of embodied agency. As Vasseleu attests, cyberspace and VR, rather than transparent or neutral electronic media or informational interfaces, are caught up in a participatory orientation between bodies and objects, spaces and tools (Vasseleu, 1994: 155). Re-mapping the relationship between bodies and objects in this way thus involves a double displacement. To begin with, it challenges any perspective which constructs the virtual as an a priori objective or parallel world, which can be perceived or entered independently of our corporeality. Redefining concepts of space and embodiment in this manner also extricates the body from its role as passive housing or location for consciousness.

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That is, it reinforces an agency of body and tool that corresponds to the relational ontology of the instrumental and the corporeal.

In stark contrast to this relational construal of agency, in her well-known book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace Margaret Wertheim makes the claim that “(t)he ontology of cyberspace is ex nihilo” (1999: 221). In her objectivist account, the virtual world is a colonisable dataspace that is empty prior to our own informatically enframed ‘arrival’ as cursor or avatar. According to Wertheim, the nature of virtual being, of what can be said to exist in cyberspace, has emerged as it were out of nothing. This claim is integral to her argument that it provides the conditions for disembodiment. Indeed, these two ideas must include each other, for if we could not escape the body in cyberspace, then we would remain beings of a particular gender, age and culture, with all the historical and cultural specificity that entails. It is only by escaping the body that cyberspace can be configured as a totally new and independent realm. Undoubtedly, it is appealing to believe in the emergence of a brand new space, to consider the body in 21st century technoculture as neither essential or necessary, and we are increasingly persuaded of this by both the apparent disembodying and digitalising effects of high tech apparatuses, and in technoscientific discourses such as genetics, of bodies rendered informatic and post-corporeal. Yet the virtual is far from self evident, and can stabilise its meanings only when measured in relation to the “here and now locatability” of existence (Kirby, 1997: 141). Contesting notions of VR as a disembodying medium thus requires a shift from thinking of the virtual as de-corporealised subjectivity, toward a notion of embodiment as incorporating the virtual, as a way of having/being another kind of body.

For Wertheim, the arena of virtual space cannot be defined by any physical ruler or marker — it takes on a completely new non-physical spatiality. She suggests that the new technologies return us to a “dualistic theater” or “two-phase reality” (1999: 227), the material realm of science and the immaterial realm of cyberspace. She writes:

As Descartes recognised, there is a sense in which I am first and foremost an immaterial being. After three hundred years of physicalism, cyberspace helps to make explicit once more some of the nonphysical extensions of human beingness, suggesting again the inherent limitations of a purely materialist conception of reality (1999: 250).

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Such a return to a dualist ontology antagonises the principal tenets of phenomenology, wherein the ontological binary or dichotomy — e.g. mind and body, presence and absence, the subject and the object — are interpreted as purely heuristic devices. That is, while the separation of mind and body might offer a simple way of apprehending the nature of human being, their distinction is a structural, metaphorical and conceptual technique rather than a reflection of actual experience and perception; the relation itself precedes the integrity of entities. Wertheim’s own purist separation of the physical and non-physical, mind and body, and the way in which she gives ontological priority to immateriality over materiality by evacuating the corporeal from cyberspace, is thoroughly compromised by the relational ontology of phenomenology.

Finally, for Wertheim, the idea that cyberspace is ex nihilo means that it has no precedent, and as such cannot be historicised or traced to any past interfaces or body-tool relations. Yet our experience of virtuality and cyberspace are embedded in the ergonomics, body-habits and spatial configuration of preceding perceptual devices and media interfaces such as the stereograph, the camera obscura, television, the screen, and console and computer games of various kinds. In other words, cyberspace has a legacy and a history, and in fact it is necessary that we understand this history in order to develop a critical literacy of our experiences of cyberspace and VR technologies today. Of equal significance, the spatial perception induced from devices such as Alberti’s grid and the Cartesian coordinate system, have also impacted considerably on the design and spatial arrangement of virtual environments. Wertheim suggests that it is only our perceptions of nonphysical space that are changing and multiple — she names for example topological space, algebraic space, phase space, viral space, and data space, all of which have emerged out of various technoscientific discourses. Yet both physical and non-physical space are historically specific, mutually implicated and changeable concepts — for example, linear perspective, which marks out space as geometric and Cartesian, is a culturally specific phenomenon, a tool with which we have learnt to ‘carpenter’ the environment (Heelan, 1983).

In everyday life, we tend to treat space as a constant, as an empty place or as a container for physical things. In this naturalised version of space, tools such as maps and the Cartesian coordinate system are just a way to measure the distance, size and location of things in space. Yet our understanding of the geopolitical organisation of space, of the globe and outer space, or simply of the extension

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between particular points, are all worked over by means of particular devices and technologies. The mapping practices of the Renaissance, and the trigonometric representation of geographical and geometric space, have thus largely set the conditions for our present understanding of space, and its representation in terms of an abstract grid of imaginary coordinates. Descartes’ mathematical model of co- ordinate tri-axial space (the x,y,z axis), and its coincidence with linear perspectivalism, transformed the world into a ready-made visual container, or a field into which the visible could be deposited and arranged in an orderly way. The dimensionality of Cartesian perspectivalism is both mathematical and measurable; as such, it emerges as an independent thing-in-itself, which can be entered, exited, and occupied with material substances. This spatial model has clearly been imported into the spatial schematics of our many technological interfaces. Indeed, we are so accustomed to thinking about space as a three dimensional, geometric and volumetric container, that we carry these assumptions into the configuration of virtual spatiality. For example, the virtual space of the personal computer screen is populated by a desktop, a filing system, and folders, with ‘windows’ which are layered like the pages on a desk; in common applications such as Microsoft Explorer or Outlook we use mailboxes, navigation bars and home addresses. In 3D animation software such as LightWave 3D® (see figures below and over page), the geometric and tri-axial paradigm is appropriated as a tool to build, morph and locate objects in virtual microworlds. Here, objects are mapped,

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Screen grabs from Lightwave organic animation tutorial by Dan Ablan (2003)

extruded and surfaced as discrete entities occupying polygonal and uniform three- dimensional grids that are otherwise vacant. Of course, virtual space is configured in this way not by necessity — it is comprised of code, with no inherent spatial properties corresponding to the Cartesian perspectival system or the sociocultural norms as ‘actual’ spaces — but because interface designers deliberately render them familiar and user-friendly.

Often, too, the spatial representation of virtual spaces discloses our reliance on familiar and habitual corporeal models of ‘holding places’ and our traversal within them. In a generic sense, the way in which we understand and navigate spatiality, and use spatial models of touring, mapping, topology and geometry, to ‘locate’ ourselves in virtual space is in collaboration with modes of embodiment. Quite clearly, “spatial or ‘orientational’ metaphors are the most common of all, ... which has to do with the fact that mental mapping is 'grounded' in fundamental bodily experiences (our perceptions of back, front, beside etc). Spatial metaphors arise ‘from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have and that they function as they do in our physical environment’” (Gripsrud, 1999: 119). Our embodiment then has a significant influence on how we perceive space — including virtual space — while on the other hand, embodiment is in some sense ‘medium specific,’ in that our experience as embodied subjects is in part a condition of the technologies we use and the spaces they configure. As Hayles puts it:

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Culture rushes forward, creating an imaginative space that technology scrambles to occupy; technology speeds along, creating phenomena that culture contextualises and interprets in new representations (Hayles, 1999: 219-220).

If we use technologies that alter our space-perception, our modes of embodiment are also affected; and vice-versa, such that there is a continual interplay between technospace and technobody. In this way, we can conceive of virtual spaces not as disembodied micro-realities, but as emplacements through which we experience an altered kind of embodiment. i.e. cyberspace and VR do not offer us the possibility of disembodied reality, but rather, there have been significant cyber- technological effects on embodiment and the spaces they configure. Contesting notions of VR as a disembodying medium thus requires a shift from thinking of the virtual as de-corporealising subjectivity, toward an understanding of how the body incorporates the virtual, and of how the virtual becomes an aspect of our embodiment, or conversely a corporeal virtuality.

This reciprocal and mutable relation between embodiment and technology is also present in the technical specifications and development of the VR apparatus itself. In both an ergonomic and design context, the body is built into the development of the technology, just as the comportment of the body and its perceptual boundaries in VR experience is regulated and disciplined by the technology, whether immersive or prosthetic. Thus, for example, we are accustomed to controlling and interacting with information spaces primarily by way of vision and hand-control, with a screen, mouse, keyboard or a VR data-glove and headset. Yet this hand- eye-device interface can effectively be challenged and reorganised, deploying a different ratio of somatic involvement. The pliability of the corporeal schema, and the possible reconstitutive effects of the VR-body as technosomatic intercorporeality, is explored in an unconventional way by Canadian VR installation artist Char Davies. In her work Davies attempts to produce “anti- environments” and “counter-spaces” (pace Lefebvre) which deliberately antagonise our normalised experience of Cartesian geometric space and the visualist metaphor. She states:

For a long time, I have been interested in conveying a sense of being enveloped in an all-encompassing, all-surrounding space, a subjective embodied experience that is very different from the Cartesian notion of absolute, empty, abstract, xyz space. As an artist, I am interested in recreating a sense of lived, felt space that encircles one with an enveloping horizon and presses closely upon

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the skin, a sensuous space, subjectively, bodily perceived (Davies in Gigliotti, 2002).

Her virtual environments Osmose and Ephémère are new technospaces or ‘habitats’ in which we can experience embodiment, space and time in non-habitual ways. Osmose is organised as a series of natural realms arranged around a central clearing, while Ephémère is organised in layers of landscape, subterranean earth, and body interior depicted as bones and circulation, “suggesting a symbolic correspondence between the chthonic presences of the interior body and the subterranean earth” (Davies, 1998a). Both environments are meandering spaces directly oppositional to the usual “adrenaline-pumping techno fantasies common to VR” (Davies, 1998a). Thus, as Hefferon notes, too rapid a movement in Osmose is experienced as “bad feedback” in the shape of an intrusive Cartesian grid, which invades the more serene and organic virtual landscape; this is an intervention Davies has worked into the design to persuade users towards “a more contemplative and less goal-orientated exploration of virtual space” (2002, 40).

To enter the environment the immersant is strapped into a breath and balance tracking interface vest (which registers both position and breathing through chest movement), and wears a stereoscopic head-mounted display with 3D localised sound, the movement of which is monitored by a motion-capture device above the head (one is advised to remain on a circular piece of carpet to ensure the sensor’s efficiency). To move forward or backwards in the virtual space requires that the immersant tilt their upper body either forward or back, and to bend the knees is to control the speed of the VR-body’s movement through the space. During public museum performances, visitors can vicariously view the real-time journey of an immersant both aurally, as sound is generated by the immersant’s actions, and visually, via the immersant’s point-of-view projected onto a large screen. In addition, in order to underscore the relation between bodily presence and virtual immersion, a silhouette of the immersant is projected onto another back-lit screen.14

Admittedly, as Hefferon (2002) comments, ‘immersants’ experiencing Osmose initially have “some difficulties negotiating the technical equipment” (41); the

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14 Char Davies’ exhibited Osmose and Ephémère at the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) 31st July – 15th September 2002. During this time, along with members of the public, I booked a half- hour session in Osmose (either installation could be experienced). Technical details from http://www.immersence.com/

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helmet is quite heavy, which means one needs to adjust its position every few minutes, and one is also aware of people speaking, of light coming in under the head-mounted display, and thus intermittently of the immediate space beyond the immersive environment (Hefferon, 2002). After ten or fifteen minutes, however, helped along by a willingness to disregard these distractions, familiarity takes over; this dialectic of somatic strangeness and habit is in fact always at work in media interfaces. To move through the space of Osmose as one would in the physical world, that is, to attempt to walk or use one’s hands was meaningless within the logic of the interface; such movements were not ‘read’ by the apparatus (Hefferon, 2002). Moreover, to move through the environment, one needed to attend to breathing in a deliberate and reflexive way, as might be practised in meditation or relaxation techniques. In this way Davies offers an alternative to the common somatic reduction of “disembodied eye and probing hand” (Davies, 1998a) prevalent in many of our technovisual interfaces, exploring the ontic pliability of the corporeal schema. The default priority given to the hand and eye in most media interfaces — through the use of screens, keyboards, mouse, remote controls or data gloves as orientation tools — has become so habitual as a way of controlling virtual environments, that we find it difficult to imagine otherwise. As Davies notes, in her environments the “hands-off interface” frees the immersant from the “gravity-bound modes of interaction and navigation,” and also from the desire to touch or “handle things” (Davies, 1998b). Hence, to navigate through Davies’ simulations is to adapt to a new kind of bodily movement and orientation, and to modify the body’s relation to space.

The body’s spatial relation is also altered by the way in which objects and their boundaries within Davies’ environments are not discretely defined, but rather transient and semi-transparent, such that both the surface and interior of rocks, trees, earth and body are simultaneously accessible.15 The predominance of Cartesian perspectivalism and “the ubiquitous aesthetic of hard-edged objects in empty space” (Davies, 1998a) inherent to 3D computer graphics and software, is thus dissembled by ambiguous perceptual cues and a ductile and luminous spatiality. Davies likens this experience to the gentle enfolding and sensual diffusion of diving or immersion in water, and also to Merleau-Ponty’s description of night in Phenomenology of Perception: ______

15 Davies and her team developed and patented the animation software SOFTIMAGE®|3D to achieve these effects. See: http://www.softimage.com/home/

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When, for example, the world of clear and articulate objects is abolished, our perceptual being, cut off from its world, evolves a spatiality without things. This is what happens in the night. Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through my senses, stifling my recollections, and almost destroying my personal identity. I am no longer withdrawn into my perceptual outlook from which I watch the outlines of objects moving by at a distance... it is pure depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distance separating it from me (Merleau-Ponty cited in Davies, 1998a).

As Davies states, a withdrawal of the visual acuity which presently dominates the human-world relation “allows another way of sensing to come forward” (Davies, 1998a). For example, our understanding of sight as an observing rather than intervening sense is challenged within Ephémère, where objects dissolve and morph, seeds bloom and rocks ‘open’ to temporary landscapes, according to the duration and direction of the immersant’s gaze.

In Ephémère the interior of the body is itself experienced as an internal landscape which can be traveled through, the user simultaneously both visually inside a body and aware of their own body’s breathing and orientation, an experience which muddles the perceptual boundary between interior and exterior. In her explicit turn away from conventional VR control and directional devices such as joysticks, trackballs, datagloves and wands, Davies forces her immersant to attend to the visceral, proprioceptive and kinesthetic functions of breathing and balance. This unfamiliar means of respirating oneself through an environment also works to confound the boundary between corporeal inside and external environment. As Davies herself points out in connection to Leder’s work, the process of inhalation and exhalation renders the air which one breathes both self and not-self in an ephemeral and relational ontology:

Breath is a potent tool of overcoming dualism. Physiologically, respiration stands at the very threshold of the ecstatic and visceral, the voluntary and the involuntary... inside and outside, self and Other are relativized, porous, each time one takes a breath. The air is constantly transgressing boundaries, sustaining life through inter- connection (Leder, 1990: 178).

Moreover, Davies’ endosoma is an agentic, metamorphosing and elusive environment. This counters the corporeal inside of biomedical imaging, which is commonly depicted as a virtual bodyscape dis-covered and colonised via goal- oriented and documentary representation, with body organs and bones ‘realised’

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as isolated objects in space. Indeed, the body-technology relation as articulated by phenomenology, and the way in which bodily activity and bodily investment become both a source and effect of space itself, is clearly suggested by Davies’ work.

In a phenomenological sense, the primacy of vision and hand-based devices is embedded in many of our technological interfaces, and demands a particular spatial perception, and a particular mode of somatic attachment, that is culturally, historically and technically determined. Indeed, it is perhaps corporeal feminism’s pluralised version of the body-image which best describes the cultural and medium specificity of spatiality as it is persistently worked over by the body- tool relation. What Davies’ work shows us is how our intercorporeal involvement with technoscapes and virtual worlds can be configured differently, illustrating the collaborative effect of tool and soma as it exceeds both the boundaries of the skin and the materiality of technology and environment, in a dynamic and cosubstantial coupling which remakes space. Such a transmogrified tool-body- space relation is well iterated by a Merleau-Pontian understanding of our being-in- the-world. As Mark Hansen comments, for Merleau-Ponty:

the body and space are dynamically coupled, such that changes in bodily motility (e.g. the blind man’s stick) necessarily correlate with changes in lived spatiality, the sum of which is expressed in the body schema (Hansen, 2001).

This immanence or interpenetration of body and world is a realisation to which Davies overtly aspires. As she comments (1998b), her installations aim to return us to our bodies, to use VR as a way to “refresh” our perceptions of an embodied being-in-the-world, perplexing the conceptual and somatic distinctions between actual and virtual, interior and exterior, mind and body, self and world.

*

In this final section, I have attempted to problematise the way in which both cyberspace and VR are continually theorised as inherently disembodying mediums. I have shown how this discourse of disembodiment is dependent on a reiteration of the Cartesian mind/body dualism, an inherently flawed model of agency, which nonetheless remains an insidious and often unacknowledged framework in many of the writings on VR and cyberspace. In order to counter this discourse of disembodiment I have employed a post-phenomenological method,

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arguing that like our lived corporeal experience, the virtual becomes conceivable and perceivable only insofar as technosomatic specificities provide the basis for that perception. The corporeal turn in recent theory, which has taken on the task of reinstating the body as actively participant in the production of knowledge, has effectively reworked the epistemological foundation of the subject-object relation. For if the role of the body shifts from that of container to that of an agentic being- towards, then body-prostheses also become complexly integral to the making of knowledge. Our own sense of embodiment, of the capacities of our bodies, their limits and abilities, their morphology and mutability, both informs and is informed by our tools. We are all corporeal-instrumental relational achievements, and VR is simply another instance of this relation.

Throughout this chapter, I have developed a methodology that configures our being, in both ontic and epistemic terms, as relational and technosomatic. The irreducible corporeality and equipmentality of this condition opposes the notion that any ontology is ex nihilo, and insists that it is not possible to keep our actual and corporeal ontologies separate from our virtual and techno-mediated ontologies — they are inevitably leaky and interdependent. I have suggested that this relational ontology is as multiple and diverse as technological specificity itself, and in the context of MRI and VR, can be approximately identified by the terms infosoma and cybersoma. In the following chapter, in the context of our mundane experience of TV, I will also suggest that distinctions between ‘more’ or ‘less’ embodied interfaces are not viable — there are rather mutable sensory registers, sense ratios or somatic involvements specific to every body-tool assemblage. Embodiments which are primarily audio-visual, or all hands, eyes and ears are nevertheless still embodiments. As with our new experiences of immersive environments, our first encounters with radio and TV were also distracting, and demanded altered body-space and body-tool relations; indeed, TV radically modified our sense of visual presence and demanded the dichotic separation of the ‘here’ and ‘there’. Today, new media spaces are having significant effects on our sense of bodily boundaries in all kinds of ways — and the televisual remote control is becoming increasingly complex as a navigational or mapping device. In turning my attention to the complex ensemble of domestic TV, and developing further a phenomenological and critical literacy of the telesoma, I propose that what we consider lean-back or extractive media are as intercorporeal as ‘immersive’ VR simulations.

chapter four

corporeal tv

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part one: the medium specificity of tv

[T]elevision is not so much a piece of furniture as a potential body-part.

David Morley (Jenks, 1995a: 183)

The whole enigma lies in the perceptible world, in that tele-vision which makes us simultaneous with others and the world in the most private aspects of our life. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964a: 16)

You remember TV? Kind of a curiosity now, but your grandparents may talk about it. Those were the days, right? TV worked the brain cells and the muscles, too. With TV, you had a choice. You could shut it off. You could reach right out and change the channel just like that… All that was healthy! That was the peak of our evolution! That was exactly the sort of thing our sun and planet and minds and bodies evolved a hundred-billion years to achieve: TV watching. We were built for it, people. I t didn’t involve invasive technology; it didn’t mean growing polynerves. Nope. I t was natural, stimulating, healthy. Marc Laidlaw, Kalifornia (1994: 657)

In the initial chapter of this work I situated teleculture within a particular epistemological bias, an ocularcentrism which prioritises certain kinds of vision strongly associated with linear perspective, scientific objectivity and the oppositional relation between subject and object. Caught up in theoretical appraisals of tele-technologies and televisuality is a whole history of ocularcentrism, scopic regimes, and visualisms of various kinds. There have been many critiques of the way in which the affluence of vision-metaphors, and their equivalence with the acquisition of knowledge, have sustained our epistemological habit of collapsing seeing with knowing. Perspectival vision in particular — with its vanishing point and visual pyramid, and its orthogonal projection — carries a notion of space that is abstract, geometric, mechanical, uniform and objective, as

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if the visual field were a frame/window organising and containing vision. Some effects of the Western bias towards ocular metaphysics — or what Heidegger terms the metaphysics of presence — have been the validation of abstract thought in scientific discourse, of theory over practice, the disembodiment of knowledge, the ontic distancing of knower and known, the radical separation of subject from object and the claim for objective truth. There is clearly an affinity between this scopic regime and Cartesian metaphysics, the configuration of mind and body in terms of a duality, and the location of conscious self in the mind and knowing in the mind’s eye. This privileging of the ideational over the material involves at the same time a masculinist and ethnocentric assumption that matter is the base support of an ascendant entity; that is, mind over matter, male over female, culture over nature, the West over ‘the rest’ (Kirby, 1997: 137).

How then is this visualist and Cartesian metaphysics implicated in our experience of the televisual? Televisuality is itself a trajectory that began centuries before television, with the first apparatuses that attempted to attain visibility at a distance. It might seem that visualising technologies today are wholly consonant with the ocularcentric paradigm, at least in that they seem to continue to reinforce and maintain the primacy of vision as the most direct and truthful access to the world. In fact, some critics go so far as to say that

The primacy of the eye… as the dominant sense organ of the twentieth century is a partial effect of a technical revolution that put an enormous apparatus to the service of vision. The rise of the eye is rooted in the fact that all of its aspects (creation, transmission, reception) were supported by analog and digital machines. The triumph of the visual in the twentieth century is the triumph of techno-vision (Weibel, 1996: 339).

This is also Heidegger’s point: technology gathers up and orders the world visually ‘as picture.’ Indeed, this collaboration between technology and visualism worked to further disembody knowledge: as Keller and Grontkowski argue in ‘The Mind’s Eye,’ vision became increasingly technical, while the eye itself was rendered as a mechanical device, the “active knower was forced ever more sharply out of the bodily realm” (215), severing the link between knowledge and embodiment.

I have argued that in order to grasp both the epistemic and ontic status of television and televisual agency, it is important to trace this ocularcentric legacy. It is only by understanding this conceptual history that we can interpret how state-of-the-art televisual apparatuses sometimes work to bewilder such classical

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notions of visual perception, agency and knowing. As discussed in the context of postclassical vision, theorists such as Ihde argue that these apparatuses have induced a postmodern compound vision. Using examples from medicine and virtual reality technologies, in the previous chapter I provided a possible framework in which to locate certain kinds of ‘tele-vision’ as distinct human- technology relations, and televisual technologies as specific yet dominant forms of instrumentality in contemporary post-industrial society. In this chapter I will explore the televisual in its more mundane habitat within the domestic apparatus of TV.

There is no doubt that this familiar techno-object in the household — the black box, remote control and its fixed range of broadcast channels — is currently undergoing quite radical transformation. In contemporary Western technoculture, television is emerging as a complex assemblage of tele-technologies — increasingly occupied by something ‘other’ than TV — from video and DVD (rented and home movies), digital camera video and stills, elaborate information and interactive display systems, to hybrid game consoles and net-surfing devices (such as Sega’s Dreamcast, Sony’s Playstation II, Nintendo’s Gamecube and Microsoft’s XBox), and other incursions by telephonic technologies (via TV shopping, phone-in polls, and internet overflow from dedicated program sites). Additionally, the TV window is populated by scrolling text, screen-in-screen or split-screen enhancements, and other transformations brought about by digital compression, high definition, and enhanced or interactive television. Various forecasters claim that television sets and computer terminals will certainly merge or cohabit in the near future, integrating web access with TV viewing through cable or set-top boxes (STBs), which would enable the use of double windows and hidden channels, wireless keyboards and TV remotes with data entry features. In 1996 computers with built-in television tuners became available, as did set-top boxes to allow internet access through the TV set. This represents a paradigm shift that is set to modify the activity of television viewing and the very role of television in society. In the discussion to follow, while for the most part I will attend to the specificity of domestic broadcast television, in its methodological and conceptual work my analysis can potentially be applied to the complex ontologies of telesoma across these changing conditions of TV media.

Within the ocularcentric proclivities of western thought, many visions are also televisions, in that they are distantiating perceptual modes which seemingly

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overreach haptic corporeality. Cultural and semiotic analyses of popular culture and television audiences frequently celebrate the interpretive freedom of audiences and the multiplicity of tele-textual ‘readings.’ Moreover, the argument that electronic and digital communication is essentially based on non-material coding is often used to support the claim that when interactive such networks actually liberate subjectivity from “rationalistic or Cartesian models of the self” (Sofia, 1993: 99). As Sofia states:

Deconstructionists and postmodernists have hailed the computer as a ‘factory of postmodern subjectivity, a machine for constituting non- identical subjects’... ; instead of being caught up in the phonocentric ontotheology of ‘presence’, the subjects of computer speech and writing are in some way ‘liberated’ through the dematerialisation of the graphic mark or phonic signature to enjoy tele-presence within a virtual (possibly global) community. (Sofia, 1993: 112)

Moreover, within much contemporary and postmodern theory tele-cultural experience often takes a decidedly decorporealist turn: no body is to be found in information culture except as the endpoint of tele-technological effect. Baudrillard (1990a), for example, is well-known for his pessimistic and implosive rendition of our future as image-saturated couch potatoes, mute and object-like — the inevitable telos of the mass-media audience. Virilio (1994, 1995), too, suggests that we are now entering an age of synthetic perception, where we will become puppet-like tele-bodies, having handed over our agency to automated audio-visual technologies. It is these purely informatic renderings of televisual media, and the notion that an ontic divorce of the techno-perceptual from a properly ‘human’ or ‘organic’ perception is possible, that my critique hopes to counter.

It is also worth mentioning here how on a technical level, the actual workings of TV in terms of signal and reception is explained in purely informatic or electronic terms. Thus, for example, Dienst informs us:

What is transmitted, at the simplest level, is simply a stream of pulses that scan a field at a certain speed: light entering the camera hits a plate where it can be registered line by line, translating a two- dimensional spatial arrangement of light into a sequential signal. When this signal reaches the other end, it is translated back into a field by projecting the electrical intensities line by line onto another screen. The transmitter strips light from one place, and the receiver traces it back in another. That is it: a one-way, synchronised movement of electrical devices, beginning and ending with the shape as a luminous rectangle, lasting only as long as the signal goes (1994: 17-18).

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The understanding that television remakes light and sound as manipulable electronic code is not of course incorrect, but it is inadequate and overly deterministic to suggest that this is a sufficient explanation of how television works for us, or that from this description we can apprehend much about the human-technology relation as it pertains to TV. Our engagement with TV at a perceptual and phenomenological level is of course much more than this, and deeply embedded in an assorted history of image technologies and collective media-body interfaces.

Nevertheless, on one level televisual techno-apparatuses can be interpreted as extending the epistemological trajectory of ocularcentrism, aggravating the breach between corporeal bodies and knowledge production. In the particular case of television, the boxiness of the apparatus and the framing qualities of the screen might be clearly interpreted as carrying forward the ‘windowed’ perception of perspectival vision, and therefore further exacerbating the boundary between subject and object. Yet the predominance of televisual apparatuses in contemporary Western society — televisions and other domestic screens as well as scientific and medical visualising devices — has impacted upon theories of knowledge and existence in complex ways. Today, our increasing remote control of the world — the possibility of extended intervals of telepresence or telematic perception — indicates a need to rearticulate the physical, material, corporeal and actual, to think other ontologies and other ways of being embodied. Rather than unproblematically accepting that disembodiment is a condition of using the internet, the telephone, or TV, this chapter asks: in what ways do teletechnologies modify the body, and what kind of embodiment is afforded by telepresent media? The difficulty here is to rework and apply a phenomenological approach to perceptual technologies and remote control devices, an approach which recognises the ‘distancings’ or alterations to somatic involvement that may inhere in human- television relations, but nevertheless retains tele-being as at once embodied, motile, mobile, and in-the-world. The interpretation of remote control and tele- action as in some sense haptic or corporeal is problematic because it can so readily be theorised as a much reduced or deferred perception. Although the notion of a tele-body may be difficult to ‘fit’ within a strictly Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, where it is always finally the corporeal body which is the condition of being, it is thinkable within a non-foundational postphenomenology that finds body-and-tool as an irreducible variable of being-in-the-world. Such a notion of the telesoma destabilises many of our assumptions underlying both

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materiality and corporeality, including those surrounding our use of remote controls and our experience of tele-environments and tele-perception.

Before embarking on a post-phenomenological interpretation of TV, however, it is important to both acknowledge and qualify the contributions of cultural studies approaches to television and its audience.1 Television has been the much- investigated object of cultural studies, and such critiques have added greatly to an understanding of television as ‘cultural form’ (Williams, 1974) and the medium specificity of its socio-cultural effects. These studies concern the interpretation of audiences as ‘active meaning-makers’ and pleasure-seekers in the context of VCR use and specific programme genres (Ang, 1996: 11), the reconfiguration of public and private space, the spatial and temporal re-organisation of the home (Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992), the effect of television-watching practices on the construction of identity and the ‘family circle’ (Spigel, 1992: 40),2 and the “elective affinity” between suburbia and television (Silverstone, 1994: 56).3 John Ellis (1982) in his study Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, for example, compares the medium-specific experiences of cinema and television: our dedicated attention to cinema in contrast to TV-viewing as part of multi-tasked domestic activities; the site-based, self-enclosed narrativity of cinema as opposed to the broadcast, episodic and often fragmentary nature of TV content; the different composition of audiences and the viewing environment; and the post-facto permanence or containment of cinema production versus the telepresent immediacy of TV. Here, Ellis points to the situational variability of televisual interfaces according to the specificity of the medium’s physical placement, an analysis applicable across the range of TV habitats — the family room, home theatre, shopping mall, pub, plane, and the portable TV, among others.

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1 See for example: John Hartley and John Fiske (1978) Reading Television, Methuen, London; John Ellis (1982) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York; John Hartley (1992) Tele-ology: studies in television, Routledge, London; Lynn Spigel (1992) Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Chicago UP, Chicago; Ien Ang (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world, Routledge, London; C. Brunsdon, J. D’Acci and L. Spigel (Eds.) (1997) Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, Clarendon Press, Oxford; John Hartley (1999) Uses of Television, Routledge, London. 2 Silverstone argues that “the offerings of broadcast television” have become core components of our daily lives, and is the stuff out of which we construct our cultural identities (Silverstone 1994: 77). 3 The suburb has become possible, and been sustained by, transport technologies and their infrastructure, by other technologies such as “the refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner,” and by the communication technologies of the telephone and television (Silverstone, 1994: 61-62).

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Cultural studies analyses of television have also provided an indepth account of the complexities of domestic life. As Silverstone suggests:

Television has become embedded in the complex cultures of our own domesticity. We can no more think of television as anything other than a necessary component of that domesticity than we can think of our domesticity without seeing both in the machine and the screen a reflection and an expression of that domestic life. (Silverstone, 1994: 24)

Contiguous with an increase in the number and affordability of entertainment technologies, the domestic space once viewed as private family space has become increasingly multiple and fragmented. Where families once shared space around the television, TV theorists now suggest that viewing practices are increasingly isolated, with house members separating into discrete entertainment areas such as bedrooms, family rooms, games rooms or home theatres, for a more personalised entertainment experience. As Morley points out, ‘television’ and ‘home’ have redefined each other: television was initially designed as a private or mini-cinema, but at the time of its introduction this intended use could not be integrated into 1960’s domestic space, so programming was modeled on “radio- with-pictures” (Morley in Jenks, 1995a: 177). Thus, just as conventional television architecturally transformed the living areas of the home into ‘viewing space,’ today the proliferation of televisual entertainment technologies within the home is now facilitated by recent architectural practice, to literally ‘make room’ for new media spaces in the domestic environment, by way of open-plan design or the designation of a ‘niche’ for the home theatre or entertainment centre. These studies have shown that the televisual medium actively transforms and sets the conditions of possibility for both the message and its environment of reception.

The cultural studies methodology, however, has largely emerged out of the textual turn in theory, and has thus paid little attention to how medium specificity is corporealised, or to the relation between television and the body, and the way in which TV impinges on our corporeal schemas and vice versa, shaping and shaped by our perception and experience of the medium. Some theorists4 have developed phenomenological analyses of television which account for the televisual domain as both constitutive and communicative of the ‘Lebenswelt’ or life-world in the

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4 See Paddy Scannell (1996) Radio, Television and Modern Life: A phenomenological perspective, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford; Tony Wilson (1993) Watching Television: Hermeneutics, Reception and Popular Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge.

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Husserlian sense. Wilson, for example, suggests that more often than not TV assumes the nuclear family (or a demographics comprised of its members) as audience, and thus constructs a life-world which “a family audience can recognize as its own,” producing “epistemological security for its viewers [and] providing both the experience and guarantee of an intelligible world” (Wilson, 1993: 22, 23). Yet despite the phenomenological insight that a life-world is “embodied subjectivity” (17), Wilson does not take note of the corporeal effect of the televisual apparatus itself, and the way in which different aspects of TV — for example, its boxiness, its rectangular screen/window, its remote control device — have become integral aspects of both our individual and collective embodiments. Wilson argues that the frameworks of horizonal knowledge — knowledge that allows us to relate aspects of an experience as familiar and recognisable in the context of other experiences — are the foundation of lifeworlds, but he does not acknowledge that these horizons emerge perpetually from specific equipmental environments, and that this specificity must always partially determine the horizons of our knowledge and embodied perception.

This said, there are some notable critical analyses that contribute significantly towards an understanding of television in terms of sensory and somatic involvement. Robert Romanyshyn (1989) critically locates the television screen within the visualist trajectory of the Renaissance and perspectival window-on-the- world; both Vivian Sobchack’s (1990, 1992) and Laura Marks’ (2000) discerning phenomenological accounts of electronic presence and intercultural embodiment in the cinematic context, also speak more generally to the relation between soma and screen technologies per se; in Mass Mediauras Samuel Weber (1996) attends to the specificity of the televisual medium and aesthetic, the effect of TV on our embodied sense of space and time, and upon a heightened sense of the unreliability of everyday perception; the sensory upset instigated by tele- technologies is also critiqued by Margaret Morse (1998, 1998a), who locates television amidst a number of technospatial disturbances to our sense of presence, such as that experienced in malls, freeways, cyberspace and virtual reality; Lev Manovich (2001) makes several key points about the mode of embodiment particular to cinematic and screen media, arguing that the body is largely immobilised by the televisual interface. In what follows, these theorists among others will offer insights into television qua the body-technology relation and post- classical forms of vision, and thus into a corporealist post-phenomenology of TV. Each also contribute to my own argument concerning the ontology of the

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telesoma, and my claim that the TV-body ontology has shifted the boundaries of our corporeal schema such that we experience tele-perception and telepresence in ways quite familiar and everyday.

MEDIUM SPECIFICITY REVISITED

Cultural analyses of television and communications media — whether considered cultural studies ‘proper’ or interdisciplinary critiques of visual culture in its various forms — explicitly or implicitly appropriate the much-used media theory concept of medium specificity. My own critique also adopts this term, although with some notable modifications. Indeed, the conceptual salience of medium specificity, and its continuing validity for an understanding of the new media technoscape, is deeply consonant with my own argument concerning the corporeal and equipmental embodiment of knowledge. Just as we are familiar with the notion that sociocultural specificity is inherent to our embodiments and body- images, in this work I have explored the idea that technological specificity itself is also — equally and collaboratively — an aspect of embodiment and agency. The very notion of variable ontology insists that being emerges through a network of extended relations between the body-subject and the equipmental environment. As I will suggest, the kinds of spatial and ontological metaphors we use to situate ourselves within particular environments (all of which might be considered ‘technospaces’ in one way or another), while grounded in corporeality, are still mutable, and so undergo various ‘tele-effects’ as they become more or less compatible with new media. Concepts such as telepresence, non-space, virtuality, and telepistemology (Goldberg, 2000) are all attempts to describe and explain the spatial and ontic effects of tele-technologies on our being-in-the-world. Yet while televisuality is an experience that can be generally critiqued in terms of the predominance in Western culture of visualising technologies and scopophilic epistemologies, the phenomenological impact of TV and its hybrids must be considered in medium-specific terms, and cannot be adequately extrapolated from the effects of other media. The transformative spatial and somatic work of TV, I would argue, can be revealed by a post-phenomenological rendering of medium specificity.

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Although some might question whether medium specificity is still a central concept in this time of supposed digital convergence,5 I would argue that it is still elemental to our understanding of contemporary media. At a recent seminar on interactive TV (iTV),6 Jane Roscoe and Fat Cow Motel developers Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield argued that media will not converge; rather, they will become increasingly multi-platform, with each platform delivering appropriate and unique content.7 This would suggest that medium specificity remains an important and viable methodological tool, one that can continue to discern the various body- medium cohorts. By organising data in particular ways, various interfaces may appear simultaneously or separately within the same TV or computer screen, but they will nevertheless still privilege particular corporeal attitudes and modes of agency. At the same iTV seminar, interactive services consultant Chris Winter claimed that industry experts in the development of interactive TV typically refer to the difference between conventional broadcast and interactive media in terms of body posture — i.e. as ‘lean back’ in contrast to ‘lean forward’ screen interfaces. This is an example of the variable embodied orientation we have towards different kinds of media spaces. Indeed, as several speakers and commentators at the seminar stated, people sometimes complain that iTV is too much work — it requires active participation and decision-making, an immersive investment of the body such that one can’t ‘lounge’ and simply watch in the familiar extractive way.

The application of medium specificity to new and supposedly convergent televisual media is well-articulated by Bolter and Grusin (2000) in their concept of remediation. Their collaborative work Remediation: Understanding New Media, argues that new media ‘remediate’ already mature cultural forms and vice versa, either by appropriating and integrating aspects of older media, or incorporating

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5 There are loosely two interpretations of convergence. The first refers to the convergence of the telephone, television and computer. As they come together, each medium promotes its own versions of immediacy and accessibility, which sometimes results in interesting media hybrids e.g. videophone, or the blurring of the line between TV and internet, such that web surfing and channel surfing become the same activity. The second interpretation of convergence sees the Internet as a focal system or catalyst within new media — and being online and accessible a focal ontological practice. The way in which the Internet colonises and reworks old media have led some to call it a meta-medium. 6 ‘Producing Interactive TV,’ Australian Film Television and Radio School Seminar, Sydney, Australia, August 2002. 7 Robertson and Mayfield produced Fat Cow Motel as a ‘multimedium platform space’. An interactive whodunit in thirteen half-hour episodes, FCM allows its viewers or ‘players’ to find out the who, how and what of the crime by participating in lateral thinking games, asking simple Yes/No questions and following clues in order to solve a series of mysteries. These clues are distributed through multiple platforms such as interactive TV via Austar, dedicated websites, SMS, voicemail and email, and viewers can follow the narrative either on broadcast TV or online.

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new media developments. For example, news online remediates both standard front-page newspaper format and the conventional talking head of TV news. Similarly, TV remediates or simulates face-to-face communication (news, cooking programs and advertising), and also remediates digital imaging and computer graphics techniques (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 185, 193). Moreover, the visuality of television has long exceeded the ‘realistic’ or documentary status of photorealism, and this is not a new phenomenon. In the mid-eighties Stanley Cavell identified a range of digital image manipulation techniques within the ‘new’ television syntax8 that transformed TV from a post-production low resolution medium to a highly stylised ‘post-dependent’ one. He writes:

Instead of transferring scenes correctable only as whole takes or scenes, new devices such as [Quantel’s Paintbox software] allow for extreme precision and manipulation inside visual fields. Field footage and unfolding takes are no longer considered the basic building blocks... Viewing each frame as terrain surely is a far cry from the academic view of television as a crude and low-resolution medium. The new electronic and post-dependent TV no longer works under the burden that programs are pre-determined during production (Cavell, 1986: 29).

This television syntax continues to be remediated as new developments in digital imaging and animation emerge.9 Caldwell offers an instructive and media-literate instance of this grammar at work in TV presentations of the Gulf War and LA uprisings in 1992:

Within minutes of origination, even raw, amateur videotape footage was crunched into highly stylized videographic configurations. Scenes of reality, chaos, and suffering were immediately rendered as pictures, reflective surfaces, and flying text-image projectiles. Social trauma and rebellion were turned into artifice (Caldwell, 1993: 45).

The idea of technological trajectories is also central to remediation, questioning the notion that new technologies are ‘new’ by arguing that their technical and cultural trajectories are partially set in place by previous technologies. The telegraph, radio and television, for example, in severing communication from

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8 For an indepth description of these techniques — what Cavell calls the painterly, plasticity, transparency, and intermedia — see Stanley Cavell (1986) ‘The Fact of Television’ in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation (Ed, Hanhardt, J. G.) Video Studies Workshop Press, New York. 9 The manipulability of the televisual image is in fact a quality inherent in television’s own technicity. Dienst comments: “At the scale of microseconds and electrons, scanning cannot deliver an image all at once – its composition is always in process, and a ‘stable’ frame can be instantaneously switched midway through. Although pixels can retain luminosity long enough to await the next scanning cycle and thereby approximate the succession of discrete filmic images, the fact that no image is ever constituted entirely in a single instant grants television a range of technical options for framing and editing, including incision and torque of the image’s surface” (Dienst, 1994: 20-21).

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physical transportation, opened the way for our experience of — and foregrounded our familiarity with — today’s more sophisticated telerobotic and virtuality technologies. Remediation reflects this reciprocal relation between new and old media, and insists that all media emerge within environments of cultural and medium specificity. These are crucial insights if we are to critically discern the many effects of TV.

Yet distinguishing television from the tele-technological in general is difficult on both a cultural and an instrumental level. As Silverstone has argued in his study Television and Everyday Life (1994), simply by watching television we are drawn

… into a world of ordered meanings, ordered by and within an increasingly global network of institutional and cultural systems: systems which include the increasingly sophisticated and converging technologies of information and communication — the screens, satellites, fibre-optics, computers of an emerging information age; systems which include the multinational institutions that increasingly control the production and distribution of the programmes of software on a global scale; and the systems which include the international- isation of programme content, wherein hybrid cultural products are produced through co-production deals for worldwide distribution or national products are simply and relentlessly exported to cultures that have few means of resisting them. But the systems also include the domestic, the suburban and the local, where the certainties of domination become the uncertainties of resistance, as audiences and consumers overlay their own meanings on the hardware and software of television technology in an always unequal, but constantly engaged, struggle for control (79).

The television is thus an epistemologically and ontologically multifaceted assemblage — and in this sense more complex than the apparatuses of virtual reality or medical imaging technologies discussed in the previous chapter. VR environments and MRI apparatuses are micro-worlds designed and used for quite particular practices and purposes, with quite specific perceptual experiences and knowledges intended. Television, however, occupies a diverse range of cultural spaces and is in many ways a “defining technology” (Bolter, 1989), determining a particular trajectory of media interfaces and setting in place various body-media comportments — the hand-eye default of the remote control device, the ‘couch potato,’ the channel-surfer or ‘zapper’ — which translate across and influence many of our interactions with other conventional and new media.

In McLuhan’s (1964) understanding of medium specificity, each communication medium works to ‘fix’ particular sensory ratios, stipulating forms of knowledge and orchestrating the structure of perception by “attuning” our sensory equipment

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to absorb reality in medium-specific ways (Carey, 1969: 284). Yet I would argue that revealing the body-media comportments and corporeal schematics specific to TV and other media interfaces is not adequately achieved simply via an application of McLuhan’s notion of sensory ratios. The corporeal schema exceeds a purely sensory perception both in its intercorporeal mingling with the world and in its visceral dimension. Thus rather than use the idea of ‘sensory ratio’ I will explore the TV-body relation in terms of somatic involvement, a concept which can recognise the medium-specific prioritisation of both senses and body-parts, and the translation of body-metaphors into televisual space and vice versa. Implicit in the claim for a relational ontology, is an understanding of the body as a material- semiotic assemblage with constantly shifting boundaries; but also, in my analysis, as quite literally mediatropic — disposed both metaphorically and materially towards media technologies. Eugénie Shinkle (2003) writes:

[T]echnologies are material parameters in the world, embodied praxes… Functioning as an embodied agent in the world requires attention — maintaining objects within the confines of perceptual reach, holding them at the ‘correct distance.’ At the same time, however, it also calls for a certain kind of inattention — a persistent openness to the world, a subsidiary awareness that is different from reflection as such. Inattention is not the same thing as distraction — a scattering or absence of attention — rather, it refers to the different distances at which we hold the rest of the perceptual field, including the body.

Thus different types of technovisions set up different medium specific proportions of attention and inattention, including (in)attention to one’s own body. In the case of perspectival vision, Shinkle suggests, the working or perceiving body is concealed in the interface, as the subject is rendered a disembodied eye/I; in the case of immersive VR, on the other hand, the body becomes a mechanism of the very instrumentality of vision, and feedback interpreted in terms of changes to the visual/virtual environment (Shinkle, 2003). It could be argued that this too is the case with much new media and interactive televisuality; once the interface becomes present-at-hand in a Heideggerian sense (i.e. we become explicitly aware of its function and usability), a certain kind of embodiment is realised, prioritising some sensorial-somatic modes over others. For example, as is most often the case with our use of contemporary media, the hand-eye-screen interface or the hand- eye-remote control arrangement works as the preferred default.

One of the difficulties in interpreting television is due to the complexities not only of its medium specificity, but also the socio-cultural complexity of the physical

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spaces it inhabits and the way in which it is thoroughly interwoven with so many aspects of our cultural and perceptual existence — its very ‘macro-worldliness.’ The multi-functional, multi-spatial, multi-environmental character of television thus requires an equally versatile set of conceptual tools; a critical typology, which can, in part, point specifically to the relational ontology of television and body. The following list or ‘inventory’ of conceptual resources and interpretive categories relates broadly to the various disciplinary approaches to TV, but it is the final two — televisual space and somatic involvement — that clearly pertain to a post- phenomenological interpretation, suggesting ways in which the televisual experience and apparatus might be reconsidered in telesomatic terms.10 Although these two perceptual/conceptual domains inevitably intrude upon each other, in the sections to follow their separate foci will provide a way to negotiate the complex technocorporeal and technospatial terrain of TV.

(i) technical specification and infrastructure: This domain relates to media policy and mass communication analysis. Does the TV display free-to-air, community or cable programming? Is it satellite or fibre- optic? Is it globally available or geographically localised? Does it offer enhancements or interactivity; is it digital or analog? Is it part of a larger multiplatform infrastructure, with dedicated websites or online chat forums? How are network infrastructures embedded in economic, political and/or national interests and policies?

(ii) hybrid or adjacent technologies: Here we can ask: Is the TV used as a conduit for a games console or digital camera? Is it linked to a PVR (personal video recorder), VCR or DVD player? Is it used in conjunction with other screens (e.g. a laptop or desktop computer)? While some of these hybridities are relevant to my analysis, for the most part I will be focusing on stand-alone broadcast TV.

(iii) content, genre and audience: This typology is extensively explored by cultural studies analysts; it includes the demarcation of specific genres of TV (sport, news, drama, talk shows, reality TV

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10 This typological inventory of TV was inspired by Chris Chesher’s response to my paper ‘Corporeal TV,’ presented at the Cultures of Science and Technology (CoST) Research Interest Group Postgraduate Symposium: technologies/powers/cultures, University of Western Sydney ( Parramatta Campus), Australia, July 24, 2002.

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and so on), and the critical interpretation of audiences and viewers’ experience, understanding and use of televisual content.

(iv) televisual space: Televisual space is a conceptual and experiential domain of central interest to a post-phenomenology of TV. Our technosomatic engagement with telespace is thus of primary concern in this chapter, and discussed in the following section ‘Televisual space: window and container.’ For heuristic purposes here, televisual space might be distinguished in terms of the virtual or inner domain of the apparatus, the endo-televisual domain, and the built or exo-spatial domain of TV and its domestic setting, although it is the inner technospace of TV, largely under- theorised in the context of embodiment, which will be of principal focus.11

(v) somatic involvement: This conceptual category attends to televisual corporeality or the TV-body ensemble. That is, what is the relation between embodiment and telepresence, and how might we describe a tele-body? This also includes issues of augmentation and body-technology interfaces, the accessibility and design of the remote control device, and its capacity as a navigation tool to configure both the space of the screen, and the somatic commitments of the body. This is the second typology to be studied in the final section entitled ‘Somatic Involvement: morphology of the tele-body.’

This is of course an incomplete typology, but one which might nevertheless imperfectly contemplate the complex ensemble of TV. Some of these typologies overlap with others, and with other media or technologies; most can be applied to a range of media (new and old); some are of primary interest to a post- phenomenological analysis, others are more relevant to issues of media policy and development, or to cultural studies proper. In the two sections to follow my investigation of televisual space and somatic involvement contains some

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11 As media theorists Silverstone and Hirsch (1992) suggest, the actual location of the TV set has implications for our embodied and spatial experience of both the interface and immediate environment, including our placement and proximity among other viewers and domestic objects. That is, the location of televisions and bodies in the built environment partially determines degrees of attention, practices of viewing, and the spatial arrangement of the ‘watching-place’ and one’s mode of embodiment within it. As I have mentioned, cultural studies has thoroughly engaged with these factors of domestic and public space, and the architectural and temporal modifications wrought by the presence of TV. My own discussion here will not reiterate these surveys, but be redirected more narrowly towards the phenomenological corporeality of TV as technospace.

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assumptions that should be noted. In all cases, unless otherwise specified, I am presuming the television as a domestic object for shared viewing, as opposed to its use in the classroom or public space; similarly, unless describing particular interactive enhancements, I assume the TV as a broadcast medium for both cable and free-to-air content, and as an occasional conduit for hybrid technologies such as game consoles and VCR/DVD players.

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part two: televisual space — window and container

Can the body, with its capacity for action, and its various energies, be said to create space? Assuredly, but not in the sense that occupation might be said to ‘manufacture’ spatiality; rather, there is an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the body’s deployment in space and its occupation of space… [E]ach living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space. This is a truly remarkable relationship: the body with the energies at its disposal, the living body, creates or produces its own space; conversely, the laws of space, which is to say the laws of discrimination in space, also govern the living body and the deployment of its energies.

Henri Lefebvre (1974: 170)

In the context of new media technologies, many theorists are currently grappling with the constitution of techno- and telespaces, and the way they are disturbing many of our commonplace notions of presence and location. Indeed, Sally Munt’s edited collection Technospaces: inside the new media, is in many ways dedicated to identifying “how we use notions of space to appropriate novel technologies and to translate them into extensions of ourselves and our cultural life” (Munt, 2001: 9). Throughout this work I have argued that a post-phenomenological analysis — attending to the modes of embodiment and technocorporeal spatiality with a particular focus on cultural and medium specificity — can reveal our occupation of the televisual. It is our experience and engagement with what I am calling endo- televisual space, however, which will be of primary concern here. In particular, I will consider the ontology of the TV as technospace, how it is represented and experienced variably as window and container, and as a repository for cultural images. In many ways, endo-televisual space upsets our embodied familiarity with

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physical space, and our culturally specific and conventional representations of space and vision. Yet at the same time particular visualisms and body-world habits are instilled in our experience of televisual spaces. This mutable reciprocity between telespace and corporeal schema will be given in-depth treatment in both this and the final section.

In a phenomenological sense, the perceptual field of one’s embodied being-in-the- world, as one’s opening-onto-the-world, has an orientational structure which institutes fundamental spatiality and topology such as centre, forefront, behind, and up and down; this establishes not only where one is within the world but also how one can move and act within it (Martin, 2002). For Merleau-Ponty we inhabit the world with a point-of-view arrived at from “the double horizon of external and bodily space” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 101). On the one hand, then, the intercorporeal relation between human bodies and the TV as a material object with shape and substance is manifested in a range of bodily habits and the arrangement of other physical things around both body and television. On the other hand, given the profound relationship between vision, space and embodiment, an understanding of endo-televisual space emerges from a consideration of the way in which TV secures the visible and renders itself navigable or topographic. As I will suggest, just as we use spatio-corporeal models of touring, mapping, topology and geometry to find our way through physical space, such tropes are also integral to the way we experience endo-televisual space, and to how we use televisual technologies and remote control devices.

As Merleau-Ponty points out, the world is an agentic environment that also changes in common relation to our own flexible corporeality. It is our openness to the spatially non-coincident flesh of the world — not only bodily flesh but the ‘stuff’ of our environment — that allows us to incorporate technologies and equipment into our own corporeal organisation. The concept of ‘flesh of the world’ in his later work The Visible and the Invisible (1968), is intended to imbue the world/environment itself with its own embodiment and agency; this reversibility then describes the relationships between humans and humans, humans and non- humans, and between non-humans and non-humans, all of which are enabled in space (Martin, 2002). As Liz Grosz puts it:

[S]pace is not simply an empty receptacle, independent of its contents; rather, the ways in which space is perceived and represented depend on the kinds of relation the subject has to those objects. Space makes possible different kinds of relations but in turn

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is transformed according to the subject’s affective and instrumental relations with it…Form and size, direction, centeredness… location, dimension, and orientation are derived from perceptual relations. These are not conceptual impositions on space, but our ways of living as bodies in space (Grosz, 1995: 92-93).

Thus, as Hefferon points out, our understanding of space is always to some extent “co-opted by how it is visually represented” (Hefferon, 2002: 32). That is, we learn to see spatially through our visualising technologies, and quite literally construct the world as an artifact of shared modes of vision (Hefferon, 2002). As argued in Chapter One, in Western culture sight is ‘revelatory,’ and vision becomes the governing model for knowledge, conflating what is seen with what can be known. This correlation between sight and knowledge has repercussions for how space is implicitly understood and experienced: as a passive, inert, infinitely extensible grid, always already ‘open’ to visual and equipmental dis-covery. As Hefferon states, “this not only implies that space becomes, or is, in fact, the surface or topological ground for certain types of instrumentalised ordering or spatial regimes of knowledge in a Foucaultian sense,” but also that “the problematic of delivering spatial depth to visibility becomes the very condition of knowledge” (Hefferon, 2002: 33).

It is suggested by a number of theorists that spatial perception is experienced and arranged largely by way of metaphor, reflecting Hayden White’s insight that “(c)ommitment to a particular form of knowledge predetermines the kinds of generalisations one can make about the present world [and] the kinds of knowledge one can have of it” (White, 1973: 21).12 The embeddedness of spatial metaphors in the lifeworld is investigated in detail by Lakoff and Johnson in their two collaborative works Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999). Lakoff and Johnson claim that a range of embodiment and ontological metaphors are embedded in all our experiences. Elaborating on this claim, the way in which we understand and experience televisual space is secured by a

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12 White (1973) identifies four dominant tropological modes by which the theorist prefigures their domain of inquiry: metaphor, metonym, synecdoche and irony (the last three all being specific kinds of metaphor). Metaphor – literally “transfer” (31) as White points out – characterises phenomena, by analogy or simile, in terms of their similarity or difference, e.g. neural network, machine DNA; metonymy – literally ‘name change’ – refers to something or someone by naming one of its attributes, e.g. the ‘brain’ when referring to a control center or organisational hub; synecdoche characterises a phenomenon “by using the part to symbolise some quality presumed to inhere in the totality” (34), e.g. the expression ‘I’m all ears’; and irony either conveys a meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the words used, articulates a contrast between expectation and outcome, or an event or situation that contains such contrast, e.g. the oxymorons artificial life, smart machine, and virtual reality.

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number of technocorporeal metaphors, which are steeped in a history of more general analogies and tropes of embodiment and tool-use. That is, the way in which we understand and experience spatiality is very much a non-random coincidence and prioritisation or ordering of various modes of technosomatic involvement. Indeed, the perceptual tropes of perspective and Euclidean space have greatly influenced the kinds of space and place metaphors adopted as navigational tools for mapping and orientation within technospaces such as television. Similarly, Lakoff and Johnson argue that body-metaphors (e.g. of congestion and contagion), and conduit-metaphors (e.g. of movement and passage through space) are often adopted as explanatory tropes for the transmission and corruption of information.

An interesting entry-point into the spatial ontology of television is by considering one of the more common metaphors of the TV screen — that of the frame or ‘window-on-the-world.’ This is a comparison easily made and understood — the shapes of window and screen are similarly rectangular, they can be similarly interpreted as membranes between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ and what one sees through the frame is a portion of the world in space and time (in the case of TV, often aimed towards a ‘realistic’ depiction of a place/event in a parody of the scene-through-a-window). Yet how apt is the window metaphor as a way to describe or explain television? It is worth examining in some detail the portrayal of the television as frame or window, and how such a rendering clearly instantiates a particular kind of relationship to the body and its somatic involvement with/in the medium. As I will later suggest, this relationship is quite different to that between the body and TV when the latter is configured as a ‘container’ or technospatial repository of some kind.

The frame-ontology of cinematic perception — in particular the mobile camera and the rectangular framing of represented reality — remains as one of the most significant cultural interfaces influencing contemporary media today, from television to computer games and interactive animation (Manovich, 2001: 79-88). As Manovich argues, the filmic interface is now “being poured into the computer” such that “[t]he window into a fictional world of a cinematic narrative has become a window into a datascape” (2001: 88). Clearly, what has remained consistent through all these media forms is the model of the frame, which divides space into that which is ‘inside’ and that which lies ‘outside’ its boundary, a constantly changing dialectic as the frame is mobilised. Televisual mediaspace is increasingly

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‘remediated’ by both cinema and computer in ways consistent with the frame and its rectilinear topology. In particular, the human-computer interface — what Manovich refers to as the metatool and “key semiotic code of the information society” (2001: 66) — is now increasingly deployed on TV. On TV news and sport, and in a range of enhanced or interactive TV interfaces, for example, we see the existence of the menu directory and the use of contiguous windows, where another program or camera angle can be viewed in a smaller window within the main screen.13 This is to treat the screen as comprised of several picture elements rather than a continuous image, although as Manovich points out this is probably not a new condition for television, as it can be compared to “the phenomenon of zapping” in that “the viewer no longer concentrates on a single image” (Manovich, 2001: 97).

The splitting or layering of the space within the televisual frame is also rendered mundanely familiar by way of another common practice in TV and video production since the 1970s. This technique, called “keying,” works to combine two different image sources (Manovich, 2001: 150). Enabled by electronic and digital imaging techniques, keying creates a hybrid reality within the frame by substituting a part of one video image with an image from another source, whether it be live or prerecorded footage or computer-generated animations or graphics (Manovich, 2001: 150). In all such “electronic montage” (150), the visual disjunction between image spaces can be deliberately open and obvious, such as when a presenter is superimposed over sporting or news footage, or conflated in sophisticated ways, as is the case in Space Jam (1996) and Who Framed Roger

Rabbit (1988). In these two productions, cartoon figures enter photoreal environments and interact seamlessly with human actors. In either case, the collision of two or more visual realities or modalities in televisual space is now the routine expectation of everyday watching.

The now widely accepted graphic user interface (GUI) of the personal computer originally made popular by Apple also rendered the screen as space, and Microsoft Windows contributed to the perception that what is behind the screen is a space or virtual environment.14 Interface developers now speak of the screen in terms of

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13 On the other hand, news on the Internet also ‘remediates’ the talking head of the TV newscaster. 14 In terms of depth, the hierarchical directory system of the standard GUI can also be contrasted to the flat, non-hierarchical network of internet hyperlinks. These contradictory models are also complexly embedded within each other.

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‘real estate’, while certain areas of the screen have ‘sweet spots,’ and are intrinsically more valuable than others, a view that applies to both website development and enhanced or interactive TV design. The Interactive Television Research Institute (ITRI) at Murdoch University in Australia currently utilises faceLAB™, state-of-the-art eye-gaze equipment, to precisely track the eye- movements, blink-rates and other minutia of eyelid behaviour of TV-watchers across the screen.15 Such a device literally parcellises the intercorporeal spatiality of both face and screen-surface into complex and integrated dynamic matrices, such that it is possible to monitor the duration and frequency of vision’s containment within, or attachment to, particular areas of the screen. The fact that the faceLAB apparatus was originally designed to track eye-movement across the virtual windscreens of motor vehicle and flight simulators indicates a readiness to apprehend the television screen and window in similar terms: in both instances, at the least, the visual scene moves while the body remains seated.

The window-on-the-world is a trope emergent from linear perspective. In the space of linear perspective the observer looks at the world as if through a window. The ‘tropological effect’ of linear perspectival vision and the ‘window-on-the-world’ can be characterised by the way visibility and light have come to stand for truth, belief and knowability. The corporeal effect here is clearly one which elevates visual perception and the eyes as those organs which can most accurately deliver the truth of something. As Romanyshyn argues, this put the hegemony of the eye firmly in place, such that “Alberti’s window, which begins as an artistic device, thus becomes a style of thought, a cultural perception, a way of imagining the world… The window as membrane becomes the boundary, the place where the world is divided into exterior and interior domains” (Romanyshyn, 1989: 69). Romanyshyn insists, then, that the window of perspectival vision set up an ontological boundary and distance between the space of the observer and the space of the observed. Moreover, it is precisely this ontological boundary and distance which becomes the endorsing condition for technovision tout court:

Technological instruments like the telescope and the microscope, the telephone and the television… are not merely or even primarily instruments which bridge distance. Rather, they are instruments

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15 faceLAB™ is a human performance measurement device developed by Seeing Machines to be used in conjunction with the faceLAB Analysis Toolbox software. It is applied to a range of human- machine interfaces to track head, pose, gaze direction and eyelid closure, and currently used in motor vehicle and flight simulator testing, along with a range of computer-based work environments. See: http://www.seeingmachines.com.

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called into being by the distance we have created, by the distance we have put between ourselves and the world, between our senses and the world of which they make sense. They become possible and necessary only when the distance between us and the world has increased (Romanyshyn, 1989: 97).

Romanyshyn does however acknowledge McLuhan’s and Lowe’s analyses (cited in Romanyshyn, 1989: 185), that television partially challenges the hegemony of the eye. McLuhan, for example, suggests that television breaks into the cultural metaphor of the window by favouring both eye and ear, creating a reality which is “multi-perspectival and environmental” in contrast to the more uni-perspectival and objective typographic reality, while Lowe argues that television creates a surreality that eclipses the eye-body, by prioritising the reality of eye and ear over the reality of the eye.16 Yet for Romanyshyn the eye-ear ‘reality’ can only be superimposed on the more tenacious realism of the eye and its window, not least because the televisual offers its own robust technical support:

Of all that can be said of television, of its power to break the reign of linear perspectival vision, and/or of its power to solidify the presence of the window in emphasizing that visibility matters, the one feature which is central to the idea and the actual workings of television needs our emphasis. On the television screen the world, broken down at its source, is reassembled as dots of light, and in this respect the television screen is everyone’s personal converter of light back into matter which originally has been decomposed into light. The television screen, then, is very much our technological elaboration of the window of linear perspective vision, because in each instance the world dawns as a matter of light. Indeed, of the window and the television screen we have to say, with the full power of the pun intended, that light matters. (Romanyshyn, 1989: 185- 186)

With both televisual technologies and the workings of television described in such a way, the emergent TV-body becomes all eyes, and the space of the TV screen is predominantly visualist and light-based in the tradition of ocularcentrism, where that which is visible is perpetually conflated with that which is objectively real, existent and knowable. In this analysis, the frontal ontology of Western visualism — the idea that what can be seen, what turns to show itself, is what can be said to exist — is intrinsic to the spatio-somatics of television.

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16 As discussed in chapter one, Ihde also attacks the notion the television mimics the perspectival window of perspectivalism, arguing instead that television antagonises the conventional hegemony of vision by becoming postmodern plurivision.

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Romanyshyn’s argument concerning televisuality, and the ontological difference/distance between the two spaces of observed and observer, is clearly reliant on the window metaphor. There is no doubt that in some aspects the TV screen and window are similar. Both are surfaces which are in focal disappearance — they are looked through or past rather than at, such that the material ‘glassiness’ of their surface recedes from awareness when the window is clean and closed, or when the television is on. Yet corporeally and phenomenologically their differences are perhaps more significant. The window can be opened, shouted through, become stuck, or objects can be thrown through it both open and closed; in the case of the latter, it can be broken in such a way that the television screen cannot, for the visual field remains. Moreover, it can be ‘handled’ as a boundary to keep out the world — rain, dust, noise, people etc — and often works as a variably secure limit between domestic/inside and public/outside space. The window is thus caught up in quite distinct body-tool relations. The TV screen on the other hand has a technical ‘body’ which can be moved about from one place to another, whereas the liminal window remains fixed in the structural design of its housing. In this sense, the television as physical object — as material shape, substance and electronic interiority — enters into the domestic lifeworld, and impacts upon the placement of other bodies and objects there, and the spaces and habits of home life in Western technoculture.

While on a technical and material level television can be understood to reconstruct images as ‘dots of light’ or pixels, even this supposedly insubstantial explanation must interpret the TV set itself as a container of hardware, wires and circuits, rather than as a window or frame; it has an ‘inside’ as only black boxes can. For the TV-body to ‘work,’ it must be connected to networks of electricity and transmission devices. Thus it can be ‘on’ and ‘off’ in a way specific only to the ontology of electrical and digital machines, and ‘off-ness’ in particular immediately renders the TV set decidedly ‘non-window’. Moreover, the screen itself is a space/container — as Sofia (2000) comments, “containment can also be performed by flat surfaces” — and this surface functions as a micro-worldly space such that we commonly use containment metaphors like ‘TV-land.’ With these indications in mind, we can begin to think the spatiality of television outside the trope of the membrane, boundary or window, and thus consider a conceptual movement to the endotelevisual, exploring further the metaphor of TV as multi-dimensional container on both a spatial and corporeal level.

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Of course, the apprehension of space — and technospace — as container has its own corporeal history. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre (1974) critiques “the myth that space is transparent, neutral, passive, empty, abstract, and objectively ‘real’” (Munt, 2001: 3), and claims instead that spaces are culturally and technically specific; that all spaces are always-already appropriated and lived spaces (Lefebvre, 1974: 31). As such, he argues, our conceptual understanding of space remains limited to our own bodies and modes of production. Such understandings are reliant on specific technocultural and somatic metaphors. In the traditions of Western philosophy, tropes of space are often formulated as particular kinds of containment, such that our being-in-the-world is always also a mode of ‘holding’ and ‘having’, even though at the same time we may see ourselves as substantially and ontologically separate from that which contains us (Hefferon, 2002). In this view, space and environment are rendered as outside us, as “the mere vessel or (back)ground through which we move as beings of ontological integrity” (Hefferon, 2022: 11). This representation of space also becomes embedded in certain praxes of spatiality through our use of contemporary visualising tools.

In his study of virtuality technologies17 Hillis states that certain aspects of the most predominant spatial models — Plato’s chora, Aristotle’s theory of “place,” Euclidean geometric space, Cartesian tri-axial co-ordinate space, Newton’s substantival or “absolute space”, and Einstein’s “space-time” — are inevitably “incorporated and conflated” into contemporary virtual and telepresent environments (Hillis, 1999: 72). As Hillis observes, developers of virtual environments explicitly use spatialising terms such as inside/outside, world, cyberspace, theatre, gradient, platform, room, and Cartesian space (Hillis, 1999: 73). As Hefferon (2002) notes, to this we could add a range of other words such as interface, site, environment, terrain, or most familiarly, the box or tube. The representation of the computer and game console as spaces of containment or as microworld reservoirs, I would argue, largely relies on the already recognisable container-like and geometric boxiness of previous media apparatuses such as the television and radio. In their various representations of their own media boxes —

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17 Although Hillis is referring to virtual reality environments, in this discussion I am presuming there is significant consonance between these and the more mundane televisual environments. As Sofia comments: “[an] object represented on a screen is only comparable to the material object in its aspect of appearing; an equation between them is only possible if all other senses are subsumed to the visual and intellectual faculties, and if the ontological differences between real and virtual objects are overlooked. Is not ‘virtual reality’ a reality inhabited visually?” (Sofia, 1993: 108)

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Sony’s advertising slogan the “third place” for their PlayStation® II, Microsoft’s XBOX and Nintendo’s GameCube — designers rely on a depiction of the digital apparatus and its occluded interior in the context of a long history of Euclidean or geometric space in Western culture. Indeed, the invention of cubic dimensional space as “an independent thing-in-itself” which could be entered and exited was originally reminiscent of actual built or architectural space, and subsequently the inside/outside logic of spatial containment in Western culture became common- place (Hefferon, 2002: 12). Against this Western conceptualisation of space, and showing that our experience of space is culturally specific, Judith Roof observes “that in the East space is seen as an extension, created by unfolding through the dimensions, involving various degrees of freedom to move” (Roof, 2001: 22; Hefferon, 2002). This non-Western experience of spatial perception is conceived in relation to embodiment and movement, rather than as something determined through precise and co-ordinate measurement of distance and quantity (Hefferon, 2002). In contrast, the television is experienced as instantiating the epistemological containment of knowledge in vision, whereby the world, also perceived as container, is made familiar and knowable through the cubic dimensions of the (tele)visual screen. Indeed, techno-mediated spaces such as televisual, computational, and game spaces, are dominated by this metaphor of containment, and our ability to enter or be in these spaces is predicated on a perceptual and corporeal assimilation of this metaphor.

It is worth noting here that this metaphor of containment is embedded in much television content within an ‘as if’ structure of experience, such that we understand and engage with narratives about endo-televisual worlds ‘as if’ these spaces have the same or similar properties as ‘real’ space — i.e. television itself is a container which we can enter through the permeable membrane of the screen. In his historical account of electronic presence in telecommunications media, Jeffrey Sconce (2000) critically interprets the representation of a number of tele- technologies including TV, the telegraph, radio and computer. He suggests that the most dominant fantasies or fictions — each of which “appear as new incarnations with the advent of each new medium” (Sconce, 2000: 8) — are those of anthropomorphisation, or attributing human-like agency to media technology; disembodiment via the transportation of consciousness; teleportation, or the dissolution of the entire body into an “electronic elsewhere”; and the idea of media-generated “sovereign electronic worlds” (Sconce, 2000: 9). In particular, Sconce argues that:

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television came to be conceived, not only as an electrical extension of human sight, but as an uncanny electronic space in and of itself. Fantastic discourses of televisual presence frequently portrayed the new medium as generating its own self-contained electronic world, a depiction that has its legacy in the now familiar premise of the television viewer who is somehow transported into this virtual realm within the TV set. As a box in the living room, the dimensionality of television has been particularly conducive to indulging fantasies of technological incorporation. (Sconce, 2000: 17)

Televisual space, both historically and in contemporary discourse, has often been perceived as encroaching and treacherous, with an insidious agency of its own and little respect for the proper boundaries between the actual and the virtual. As Sconce reminds us, critics at the time of television’s invention feared that “television’s lurking presence of electronic nothingness threatened to one day spill out and consume the real world, colonizing and destroying real culture, real politics, real life” (Sconce, 2000: 18). Indeed, for some dystopian theorists of television and mass media, this threat has been realised in the proliferation of reality TV — television’s most recent colonisation of the real — as in such programs as Big Brother, a trend which has been critiqued in a number of films such as The Truman Show (1998), Showtime (2002) and EDTV (1999).18 In The Truman Show, for example, we follow the televised life of Truman Burbank, who has unknowingly grown up as the main star in a media-contrived world populated by actors, underneath a high-tech dome which ‘simulates’ a small town and its natural environment. The immersive illusion in which Truman finds himself, as an invention of corporate television, is intended to grimly reflect the media landscape of reality TV in which we all reside.

The metaphorical representation of “TV-land” — often conceived as an enormous communal viewing space — is nevertheless made up of many complex spatial topologies: as an otherworld, a precursor to virtual space; as part of the “transmedia intertext” of converging media forms; as a lobotomising ‘nowhere’ or ‘elsewhere,’ rendering ‘real’ people mute and vegetative; an electronic limbo of white noise; and often as a space of terror and ghastly morphosis. These narratives can be seen in a range of science fiction and fantasy genres. In the Australian ABC children’s TV production The Timekeepers, for example, the screen

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18 These effects have perhaps been nowhere more excessively described than in Baudrillard’s rendition of our postmodern hyperreal and mass-mediated existence. See Jean Baudrillard (1983, 1990, 1990a).

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of one particular television in an appliance store becomes a breach in the ‘fabric’ of time, and the boy-traveler steps through the screen as if through an entry point into another parallel world, finding himself in the middle of an otherworldly game show. More dramatically, in the Japanese horror film Ringu (1998) — recently remade as The Ring (2002) — a videotape of eerie images, once viewed, results in a telephone call in which the viewer/listener is told “you will die in one week.” Upon investigating the simultaneous death of four teenagers, journalist Reiko subjects herself, and inadvertently her young son, to the same threat, finally discovering that the only way to avoid a terrifying death is to show the video to another person. In this narrative the death-delivering images are portably contained within the unmarked videotape, which as Reiko’s ex-husband states, “is not of this world.” Once the tape is inserted into the VCR machine, the television as conduit literally brings the content to life, becoming the visual receptacle for both the stream of images and white noise, and a literal container out of which a ghoulish figure climbs to petrify the viewer. A significant media symptom is subsequently revealed when photographs taken of victims within the seven-day hiatus reflect an erasure of identity through distorted and blurred facial features. The effects of this horror phenomena are clearly cross-mediatic; the capacities of videotape to splice, replay, decompose and degrade moving image fragments, and the mesmerising entrapment of the television screen collude with the irresistible ‘ring’ of the telephone. As Sconce (2000) suggests, the potentially and fantastically uncanny effects of televisual media are not depicted as exclusive to TV, but surface as narrative themes with the emergence of each communications technology.

In these and other representations of television, then, there is a clear sense that TV functions not simply as a membrane or mediating screen, but also as a space of containment. As noted by Hefferon, the new technospaces generated by today’s digital and information technologies “exceed the passivity conventionally attributed to both objects and space,” and as such they provide the basis for re- thinking and re-situating the meanings we attach to concepts such as space, agency, and environment (Hefferon, 2002: 45). In order to address this televisual metaphor of containment in more detail, I will turn to the work of Sofia (2000) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999). Sofia identifies how we come to perceive spatiality and containment in the context of tool-use, and enables an understanding of the spatial agencies of television and body in terms of the container-metaphor. In particular, via Sofia we can complexly realise how different container ontologies embody different world-self configurations, and thus different

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interrelationships between embodiment and tools. Lakoff and Johnson argue that our perceptions of space are fundamentally grounded in our embodiment and the complex range of metaphors we accumulate, an insight which can be applied to our experiences and expectations of televisual space.

One of the central ideas embedded in Sofia’s ‘Container Technologies’ (2000) is the notion that the container “is a structurally necessary but frequently unacknowledgeable precondition of becoming”, and by extension, that containment is one of the primary conditions of being-in-the-world (Sofia, 2000: 188). The close relation between space and the female body has a long history (including but perhaps not beginning with Plato), a correlation that is the focus of a number of feminist theorists.19 Typically, these analyses have shown how in Western metaphysics space is habitually configured as “(metaphorically) feminine, passive and dumb” (Sofia aka Sofoulis, 2001: 182; Hefferon, 2002). In such understandings, the container is configured as a thing with no ontic intelligence, but rather in reactive terms as a holder of things. As Hefferon (2002) suggests, Sofia’s aim is to overcome these biases, to “unsettle habitual assumptions that space is merely an unintelligent container, or containers dumb spaces” (Sofia, 2000: 182), and to consider how spaces and containers can be understood as an agentic ‘holding’. By reflecting in some detail here on the conceptual development of the container technology in Sofia’s work, we can examine how ‘holding-spaces’ are experienced and conceptualised, and extrapolate from this how and what television contains.

On a large scale, container technologies would include environmentally controlled and cocoon-like spaces such as shopping malls, cinemas and the like, but also basic sheltering technologies such as the home. The embeddedness of TV into such spaces, and their consequent transformative effects, has been well documented. The introduction of TV into the home required not only the disruptive place-shifting of other objects within the space of each TV’s allocated room, but eventually the mobilisation of walls, TV-friendly architectural design, and the emergence of dedicated home-theatres. Moreover, the television also

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19 See Elizabeth Grosz ‘Women, Chora, Dwelling’ and ‘Space, Time, and Bodies’ in Grosz, E (1995) Space, Time and Perversion, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, Australia; S. Best (1995) ‘Sexualizing Space’ in Grosz, E. and Probyn, E. (Eds.) (1995) Sexy Bodies, Routledge, London and New York; Luce Irigaray (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, Cornell UP, Ithaca, New York; Genevieve Lloyd (1984) The Man of Reason, Methuen and Co Ltd, London.

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effected the redisciplining of family habits and activities, both temporally and spatially, in accordance with both the placement of the TV and its broadcast schedules. As Silverstone suggests, our “everyday spatiality is grounded in the patterns of everyday life as we move together and separate around the single or multiple television sets in bedrooms, sitting rooms, bars and public arenas” (Silverstone, 1994: 20). Today, televisions are no longer confined to the controlled space of the home, but can be found in pubs, malls, shops, cars, elevators, waiting rooms and restaurants and many other technological cocoons; as such, they have come to saturate the spatial texture of everyday experience (Morley, 1995a: 183).

On a smaller scale, we can interpret technological objects themselves as mobile containers. In her “armchair survey of containers and nestings of containers in the kitchen/dining/living area of the shelter technology I inhabit,” Sofia records:

Books, photographs and albums, telephone directories, the television, the stereo, cassettes and CDs: all these media technologies… [have] their container-like aspects too. Working analogously to the holding-functions of memory, and with some similarity to the kind of poetics of space Bachelard identifies with the miniature, which ‘deploys to the dimensions of a universe’ and where ‘large is contained in small’ these electronic and print media are storage technologies for other spaces and experiences: a CD or tape can open up a whole concert, or an aural landscape of feelings; a book can disclose another world (Sofia, 2000: 189-190).

Until the introduction of Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) into the home, in an informatic or technical sense the television cannot be seen as the kind of container used for ‘storage’ — what it holds is permanently transient and streaming unless captured on video cassette or DVD. But it is nevertheless a holding place, an apparatus which enfolds a familiar and accessible ‘public’ space, an ever-ready and ever-changing ‘containment’ of the global neighbourhood.

The televisual apparatus also educes a transitional and intermediate space of sociotechnical reality, which resides in the interstices between fantasy and reality, a space where virtual and actual worlds are negotiated. All techno-mediated space is potential space, and techno-artefacts like televisions and game consoles are liminal entities “straddling the inner and outer worlds” (Sofoulis, 2001: 134). These spaces are a consequence of the inter-dependency of human-technology- environment. Here the crucial insight is recognising the collaborative elements which combine to create a tele-world or telespace — they are not simply imaginary and fictional with micro-worldly integrity, but contingent negotiations between

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equipmental domains, and as such are emergent spatial ontologies. Conceptually and in praxis, technologies of containment also convey an “adaptive intelligence,” according to the degree to which the technological environment or container can be said to adjust to our needs and morphology (Sofia, 2000: 185). Thus for example, we can interpret our use of the remote control as a negotiated and adaptive tele-active extension of the hand, and the screen as a roving eye-frame which permits an exploration of one’s tele-world, nested within the safe container of the home. As I will suggest in the following section, the remote control device, designed to ‘fit’ the adult hand in consonance with the handy familiarity of other numbered keypads in everyday use, is organised in such a way that the televisual environment is rendered a spatial extension of the perceptual field; controllable, orderly and immediate. The personal video recorder (PVR), the familiar navigable interface of web browsers populated by iconic representations of domestic space (e.g. the ‘home’ and ‘mailbox’), and personalised search engines are other instances of user-friendliness as adaptive environment-container.

Sofia’s work offers many insights into the combinatory ontological configurations and effects of space and technology, suggesting how the relationship between embodiment and containment can be understood “as an (inter-)active process” (Sofia, 2000). By critically reconsidering the specificities of container technologies, and how they function at a primary ontic and epistemic level, we can begin to understand how various media — in this case television — can usefully be interpreted as complex “contingent manifestations that are part of a whole environment” (Sofia, 2000). The TV itself both nests and is nested within an array of containers: ‘holding’ and putting into view the everyday-ness of domestic existence; enclosing a myriad of ‘otherworlds’ in the form of video content/narrative/events and as conduit for gameplay. Indeed, space itself has a body, an idea which suggests that new technologies are intercorporeal habitats or emplacements in which people experience embodiment and space variably and in medium-specific ways. Both TV and human have their own ‘bodies’ which form an intercorporeal relation: itself contained by its own largely immobilised box-body, the TV favors an eye-ear soma frontally-located and immobilised, within rooms and built environments each with their own functionality and ways of arranging spaces and bodies. This ontology of the telesoma will be of primary concern in the final section of this chapter.

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The work of Lakoff and Johnson is also particularly relevant with regard to how spatial and corporeal tropes underlie our being-in-the-world. In her critique of Lakoff and Johnson, Hefferon (2002) points out that the way we experience spatial points of reference in the world is embedded in the particularities of our human bodies, and the way they function within the physical environment. In short, “our conceptual understanding of spatial orientation, our being in space is not arbitrary but is grounded in our physical and cultural experience” (Hefferon, 2002: 14; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 14-19). Both reason and abstract concepts are “based on various kinds of prototypes, framings and metaphors” and this means — because all metaphors are fundamentally experiential — that our conceptual systems are always-already materially mediated and arise “through the commonalities of our bodies and brains and the environments we inhabit” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 5). Lakoff and Johnson categorise these metaphors as ontological metaphors — or more specifically as entity, substance and container metaphors. They write:

We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world — as containers with an inside and an outside. We also experience things external to us as entities — often also as containers with insides and outsides. We experience ourselves as being made up of substances — e.g., flesh and bone — and external objects as being made up of various kind of substances — wood, stone, metal, etc. (1980: 58).

Metaphors, then, are the extension of our corporeality into the world: only that which can be metaphorised qua embodiment — interpreted in terms of our complex body-model — is realised or made real.

Lakoff’s and Johnson’s (1980, 1999) analyses of the ontological trope, particularly in the context of spatial and figural metaphors of containment, offer a number of insights into the long-standing and tenacious association between human embodiment and our experiential interpretations of techno- and media-space, whether actual or virtual (Hefferon, 2002). For them we are always-already “bounded” and physical beings, and thus interpret ourselves variably as containers. They write:

We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. Each of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation. We project our own in-out orientation onto other physical objects that are bounded by surfaces.

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Thus we view them as containers with an inside and an outside (1980: 29).

This does not mean that we must necessarily experience our bodies as unchanging vessels ontologically distinct from a Cartesian mind. Instead, as Hefferon (2002) suggests, Lakoff’s and Johnson’s implication that we project this “in and out” orientation and ontology of containment onto other physical objects, is somewhat reminiscent of Haraway’s (1991) proposition that we have a relationship of affinity and connection with all material-semiotic agents in the world.20 This “projective designation of exteriority and interiority” includes material objects as ontic expressions of depth and breadth, in the same way that we conceive of our bodies as flesh, bone and viscera with an inside and an outside (Hefferon, 2002: 15-16). The way in which Lakoff and Johnson consider the figural and material projection of our bodies as and in space, is conceptually akin to the Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of being which posits a plastic and changeable relationship between body-subject and space (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Thus, the container metaphors that implicitly establish ways of knowing our surroundings and the things in them, also generate particular modes of emplacement in the world. As Merleau-Ponty states “being is synonymous with being situated,” and so being is located and ontology spatial (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 252; Hefferon, 2002).

Yet as I have argued, the very ‘idea’ of what a container is, how it is used and what it contains, is itself instrumentally embodied and culturally specified. Returning to the earlier example of linear perspective, for instance, it too is often represented as a highly coordinated container, prioritising a certain kind of visibility — homogenous, regular, isotropic, Euclidean. This understanding of technological ‘ways of seeing’ as containers in themselves — as apparatuses of containment — is reflected in the way that they are part of our collective embodiment. i.e. the technological environment is a container ‘carpentered’ in particular ways for bodies to move through, by artifacts such as buildings, equally spaced lamp posts,

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20 Lakoff and Johnson suggest that these embodiment metaphors are so ubiquitous that we have long conceived of language itself as both a conduit and container. Referring to Michael Reddy’s book ‘The Conduit Metaphor,’ they write: “Reddy observes that our language about language is structured roughly by the following complex metaphor: ideas (or meanings) are objects - linguistic expressions are containers - communication is sending. The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers (1980: 10-11). This containment metaphor is in fact quite complex and slippery, and intricately related to the perception that not only our bodies, but parts of our bodies – our own heads and minds – are themselves containers which carry, transform, ‘massage’ and embrace thoughts and ideas. e.g. in the expressions ‘wrap your head around this,’ ‘put some thought into it’ or ‘can’t get you out of my head.’

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roads of constant width, and mobile markers such as cars and trains (Heelan, 1983). With regard to the “boxiness” of techno-media apparatuses such as television, we can also understand various kinds of television as containers, spaces for virtual or tele-bodies to extend and navigate through, although even within the paradigm of containment the relationship between televisuality and embodiment can be interpreted in different ways. Manovich suggests:

We can imagine that the camera does not, in fact, move at all, but rather remains stationary, coinciding with the spectator’s eyes. Instead, it is the virtual space as a whole that changes its position with each shot. Using the contemporary vocabulary of computer graphics, we can say that this virtual space is rotated, scaled, and zoomed always to give the spectator the best viewpoint. .. [T]he space slowly disrobes itself, turning, presenting itself from different sides (Manovich, 2001: 108).

Here, rather than modeling the experience in terms of a secondary or quasi-body (the eye coupled with the mobile camera) that moves through the endo-televisual space, Manovich maintains the ontological boundary between body and virtual space. i.e. the ‘coincidence’ is between the eye-body and the screen/camera as membrane rather than with the space beyond the frame. Nevertheless, the virtual space is still configured as that which can be contained and managed, almost concrete in its maneuverability.

At a phenomenological level our experience of material things — the fact that we ‘bump up’ against objects in the world through vision, haptics, aural and olfactory sensory involvement — means that we learn to treat objects and substances as contained and discrete entities. Space, too, is treated in this way, primarily as a ‘something’ which collides with our sensorium and accommodates somatic movement. As Lefebvre comments: “space does not consist in the projection of an intellectual representation, does not arise from the visible-readable realm, but… it is first of all heard (listened to) and enacted (through physical gestures and movements)” (Lefebvre, 1974: 200). Even when things have no definite boundary or integrity we tend to “impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomena discrete just as we are: entities bounded by a surface” (25). In their later work Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson write:

Our bodies are containers that take in air and nutrients and emit wastes. We constantly orient our bodies with respect to containers — rooms, beds, buildings. We spend an inordinate amount of time putting things in and taking things out of containers. We also project abstract containers onto areas in space, as when we understand a swarm of bees in the garden (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 36).

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But we can look at this tendency to ‘contain’ in another way. Rather than presuming that we are uniformly attempting to turn the world into a set of discrete objects because that is what we ourselves — as bodies — are, it seems equally viable to suggest that our ability to apprehend ‘things’ at all is due to the fact that we can somewhat paradoxically — yet unproblematically — ascribe ‘containment’ or ‘entity’ characteristics to things that often don’t have (and can never have) distinct or locatable boundaries. This is the case in the ‘physical’ realm, for example when attempting to mark out one’s ‘personal’ space, and also in a non- material or non-physical sense, when we say we are ‘entering’ game-spaces or telepresent environments, or immersive virtual worlds such as Char Davies’ Ephemere. Here, we can know that the boundaries are approximate, arbitrary, temporary, virtual or perpetually unrealisable, yet despite (or because of) this we can reconcile our experience of a space or entity ‘as if’ it is a container of some kind.

It is the plastic flexibility of our conceptualisation of things and boundaries — and the phenomenological experience of our corporeal schemas as extendible and mutable qua tools and objects — that has enabled and sustained the container trope. Lakoff and Johnson argue that the container schema is structured in terms of three components: inside, boundary and outside; moreover, it is “cross-modal,” meaning that we impose this structure across a range of sensory experiences — not only onto the visible, but onto what we hear (“put a sock in it”), and onto our motor movements (“put some muscle into it”) (1999: 32). Vision itself enacts containment by modelling “our visual field as a container… and what we see as being inside it” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 30). This, they argue, is because when we look at something our field of vision demarcates a boundary between what we can see and what lies outside that field (30). Yet again, if we perceive actual or virtual spaces as literally embracing what we see, this is because we can reconcile the arbitrary and transient ‘edge’ of vision with our notion of boundary, and its dependence on our perspective and orientation. The visual-fields-are-containers metaphor relies on our ability to temporarily suspend the final impossibility of containing the visible. That is, due to sensory and/or medium specific limitations, we would need to have either a permanently fixed vision, an ability to ‘stop’ vision at a particular distance, or see everything-at-once in order to contain it. This knowing ignorance accounts for our experience of TV as an image-container — we know that what we see framed by the screen does not stop at the camera’s edge,

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we know that the screen does not actually ‘contain’ the image but is rather a flow of data, and we know that ‘TV-land’ is not a temporally or spatially coherent ‘place,’ yet these metaphors are nevertheless deeply embedded in our experience of television. In the case of virtual and telepresent environments tout court, the ontology of that which is rendered visible is not of the order of the containable, but this does not prevent us from loosely apprehending them as such.

In the context of the combined insights of both Sofia and Lakoff and Johnson, I have suggested that endo-televisual space can be effectively understood as a culturally specific and mutable container. Different kinds of container tools, and their ontology and agency, elicit different kinds of being-with-equipment and world-self relations. This provides fruitful and critical ways of thinking the telesoma. Our flexible and paradoxical experience of televisual space, I would argue, is made possible by a corporeal schema that is not simply experienced as container, but also concomitantly as both contained and extendible or uncontainable, and by an ability to hold these seemingly antagonistic experiences within the same corporeality. Indeed, this ability to embrace ambiguous spatial perceptions and modes of embodiment within one’s corporeal schema, and to oscillate between, conflate and adapt to ostensibly disparate modes of being and perceiving, is precisely why telepresence and virtual space are both somatically and ontologically tolerable.

The term telepresence tells us much about the actual and conceptual constitution of endo-televisual space; describing our embodied experience of telespace and television as a duplicitous kind of ‘being-in’ a virtual environment, it thus appropriates the container metaphor in all its ambiguity. In his analysis of the telepresent landscape, Campanella (2000) suggests: “[t]elepresence is reciprocal, involving both the observer and the observed. In other words, the observer is telepresent in the remote environment, and the observed environment is telepresent in the physical space in which the observer is viewing the scene” (27). As with the expression virtual presence, telepresence can be used to explain an adaptive and reciprocal interaction with any media where we experience visual, aural, and/or multi-sensory presence at a place where we are not physically located, when we extend our senses into a remote location, and simultaneously seize the remote location into our own immediacy. It is clearly an impossible experience within most interpretations of being — how is it that we can we be both

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spatially ‘distant’ and ‘present’ — in exo-televisual and endo-visual space — at the same time?

There is no doubt that televisual technologies have irretrievably altered our normalised sense of embodied ‘location’ and ‘presence.’ In 21st century teleculture it is no longer possible to consider space in terms of the dichotomised categories of here/there, near/far, personal/private, inner/outer or even nowhere/everywhere, dialectics which dominated our understanding at the beginning of the 20th century. Technological developments ranging from the telephone through to television, cinema, videos and video games have created quasi-spaces where a sense of presence can be felt beyond the location of the physical body. These telepresencing technologies, as Morse (1998a) suggests, create virtual environments or ‘no places.’

In her detailed critique of television, Morse (1998a) maintains that television can be named as one of the initial trajectories of the virtual. She describes TV as an interim phase of human-machine relations, in a larger process where the burden of cultural transmission has been delegated to machines. Quite specifically, the human-machine relation particular to TV evokes a mode of being that is neither fully ‘here’ nor ‘there,’ upsetting traditional notions of space, time and body, and undermining simple determinations of location. As Weber argues in Mass Mediauras, television “throws into confusion any notion of the coincidence between bodily location and location of experience, because it precisely dislocates vision from place and enables not images but vision as such to be transmitted” (Weber, 1996: 117). Here-ness, then, literally designates the perceptual location of the physical body, and there-ness the perceptual location of the eye-ear body within the object of vision. Thus we experience at the very least a tripled ontology, residing in our homes (lounges, bedrooms, kitchens, chairs), in the space of the screen, and in-between:

The unity of television as a medium of presentation thus involves a simultaneity that is highly ambivalent. It overcomes spatial distance but only by splitting the unity of place and with it the unity of everything that defines its identity with respect to place: events, bodies, subjects (Weber 1996: 117).

Morse (1998) argues that both TV and more sophisticated VR technologies have indeed effected a kind of ‘parasociality’ — a blurring of the distinction between primary and secondary experience such that we relate to TV actors and presenters

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or game characters ‘as if’ they were real people. One could suggest similarly that from our experience of the televisual has emerged a kind of para-ontology, such that our corporeal schemas — our technosomas — are not simply made extendible by television, but rather split into coexistent yet irreconcilable modes of being-in- the-world.

Morse (1998a, 1998) outlines several medium-specific features of the televisual that resonate with at least two other technospatial repositories, the mall and the freeway. Each of these domains have spatial and ontological characteristics which are frequently theorised as potentially hazardous to both our agency and embodiment.21 The televisual, along with these other spaces, is ‘liquid,’ allowing for movement “between different ontological levels and otherwise incommensurable facets of life, for example, between two and three dimensions, between language, images, and the built environment, and between economic, societal, and symbolic realms of our culture” (Morse, 1998: 195). The account of TV and virtuality in Morse’s work departs significantly from the membrane or window metaphor, and is clearly orientated towards an endo-televisual tropology of unwieldy containment, such that the ontologies of human body and televisual space are not incommensurable, but rather have inherently multi-dimensional and reciprocal effects.

Morse describes the features of televisual space and telepresence in considerable detail. Firstly, distraction is a pun on the diversion entertainment offers, but it also refers to the way our attention becomes divided when we watch television. The etymological origin of the word distraction is distrahere, which means to pull in different directions. This suggests that the locus of our perception is divided between the ‘here’ and ‘there,’ such that we know different times and spaces simultaneously, an effect which shifts the boundaries of what ‘immediacy’ is, and

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21 Morse writes: “Such convertibility between these various systems of communication and exchange is necessary; freeways, malls, and television are not merely similar in form, they are systems constructed to interact in mutually reinforcing ways. Each institution is a kind of socio-cultural distribution and feedback system for the others: Television (most obviously as mass-audience network broadcasts) serves as the nationwide distribution system for symbols in anticipation and reinforcement of a national culture presented not only a desirable but as already realised somewhere else. The mall is a displacement and the enclosure of the walkable street and a collective site in which to cash in the promises of the commodities seen on television. The freeway is the manifestation of personal mobility at its most literal, its radius a lifeline that makes the consumption style of suburban living and shopping economically feasible as well as logistically possible. The auto on the freeway is a juncture between television and mall, a ‘home’ and commodity fetish on wheels” (Morse, 1998: 210).

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how it is defined and experienced. As Avital Ronell comments, television has taught us, in Heideggerian terms, “the impossibility of staying at home,” destabilising and dislocating the ‘in’ of being-in-the-world, and exposing “that constitutive outside that [we] have let into the house of being” (Ronell, 1992). Both telephonic and televisual technologies have problematised the viability of distinctions between interiority and exteriority; in tactile face-to-face contact, or mechanised travel, distance is felt, timely, knowable, but in our use of televisual and telephonic technologies the distance traversed is simultaneously both so far and so close (phone to ear, remote in hand), that the space between can only be virtual, a distal non-space of white noise. This grasp of the word distraction, to describe a fragmenting or pulling apart of one’s attention and spatial focus, also resonates with Weber’s (1996) insightful critique of Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s use of the comparable German terminology Zerstreuung or Zerstreutheit. Zerstreuung literally translates as ‘distraction’ but “the root of the German words — the verb streuen — is cognate to the English ‘strew, strewn’ and carries with it a strong spatial overtone” (Weber, 1996: 92). Benjamin employs Zerstreuung to refer to medium-specific features of mobile camera production and reception which involve the physical cutting and editing of film and the apprehension of these reconstituted fragments by the viewing public. Weber notes that the term Zerstreuung in Heidegger’s usage describes the way Dasein constitutes itself by/as being scattered, establishing “a link between Dasein’s physicality — or more exactly, its ‘fleshiness’, its Leiblichkeit — and its fragmented, dispersed ways of being” (Weber, 1996: 92). Thus it is our capacity for ontic dispersion beyond the physical limits of the body that leaves us open to the distraction of televisual spaces.

Secondly, nonspace identifies the gathering place of a culture increasingly enabled by telecommunications technologies; it is the noplace “in which two people talking by telephone meet” (Morse, 1994) — or where any such tele-activity occurs (videoconferencing, SMS, online chat). Yet this is a space without a single geographical locus; where television, virtual reality, cyberspace and other synthetic realities are situated, and where humans interact with other humans but also within the semiautonomous agency or mediation of machines. Morse writes:

The late twentieth century has witnessed the growing dominance of a differently constituted kind of space, a nonspace of both experience and representation, an elsewhere which inhabits the everyday. Nonspace is not mysterious or strange to us, but rather the very

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haunt for creatures of habit. Practices and skills that can be performed semiautomatically in a distracted state — such as driving, shopping, or television watching — are the barely acknowledged ground of everyday experience. This ground is without locus, a partially derealised realm from which a new quotidian fiction emanates (Morse, 1998: 196).

Nonspace has several sub-features which include (i) displacement, where we become partially separated from our immediate surroundings and drawn into the microworld of the TV or computer; (ii) dislocation, expressing the non-locatability of virtual spaces in any geographical or physical sense, such as the experience of talking on the phone while driving; and (iii) disengagement, which indicates our turning away from a primary orientation to reality, and towards a secondary or tertiary removal from the here and now of face-to-face communication (Morse, 1994).

Finally, for Morse, fictions of presence (or virtualities) describe the livable paradox of stasis and motion — of virtual mobility and actual immobility — intrinsic to televisuality. This feature explains the parasociality and incoherence between the times/spaces of television actors and agents with the times/spaces of the viewer. The effects of keying and electronic montage can also be seen as creating fictions of presence, or the aggregation of multiple worlds within one visual field, using split screens or presenters superimposed on animated backgrounds.

Together, these features of telepresence — distraction, nonspace and fictions of presence — inevitably fluctuate in response both to developments in hybrid television technologies and our unpredictable corporealisation of each new interface. In 2003 Sony Computer Entertainment released a device — the EyeToy™ — that presents a composite amalgam of television, game console, web cam and virtual environment.22 The EyeToy™ is a device which allows a player to enter the space of both screen and game with a real-time image of their own body as avatar. The motion-sensitive camera sits on top of the TV set, plugs into the Playstation®2, and films a player or players in front of the TV (real time), projecting that image into the middle of the screen (see figures over page). Games currently available include dancing, Kung Foo, soccer, and window washing, and

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22 See http://www.eyetoy.com/english/index.html

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TV Screen grabs from Gamespot’s EyeToy preview 23 The player’s image is the centerpiece of each game framed on the TV screen by polygonal images of various themes.

the promotional website encourages players to use “any part” of the body. This hybrid TV-game device is in part a remediation of basic computer graphics techniques, where elements from two different sources are put together in two- dimensional planes rather than a three-dimensional environment.24 Manovich makes the following comment of early VR head-mounted display (HMD) systems, but it can easily be said to apply to the EyeToy™: “the body [is] reduced to nothing less — and nothing more — than a giant mouse, or more precisely, a giant joystick” (Manovich, 2001: 110). The body — while mobile in a restricted way — is nevertheless held in place by the boundaries of the camera frame, and disciplined by the game play; ‘captured’ by the machine, indeed, a ‘toy’ for the eye. Although at first glance the device might seem to effect a shift from an Enlightenment-based looking at or through, to an anthropocentric being-in-the-world-as-picture in Heidegger’s sense, at closer inspection it also gathers up and intersperses both endo-televisual and exo-televisual space in a very complex way. The screen is both mirror and container, reflecting our movements yet supplementing the endo- televisual space by surrounding the player with compossible virtual objects. Our familiarity with televisions, touch screens, hyperlinks, and video camera and console game interfaces as virtual and navigable environments, is here married with the personal and habitual surrounds of our own domestic space. At the same time, it demands the body’s fixed placement in front of the screen, yet also induces a simulated puppetry of outdoor activities, sports and martial arts. We might assume that such a palimpsest of technospaces and somatic involvements would ______

23 See http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/eyetoy/preview_6076428.html. 24 Such devices show an increasing appropriation of the human-computer interface into the television environment, a trend that continues with developments in interactive television and various attempts by game developers and service providers to colonise conventional TV space; or conversely, for television to incorporate other new media forms. The welcome page for the EyeToy™ website effectively remediates television by displaying a conventional TV set (with EyeToy™ and Playstation®2 console) which navigates to other pages via hyperlinked channel buttons.

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confound most potential users, yet the popularity of the EyeToy™ indicates its ready appropriation.25 Although on one level it might be said that telepresence and telespace are troubling to our common experience of spatial perception and corporeality, we might wonder at another equally common effect of televisions and technospaces intrinsic to our use of TV, radio, and personal computers — their very mundanity. Television and its hybrids may elicit an ambiguous nonspace, but we very often integrate this ontological blurring quite unproblematically into our adaptive technosomas.

Both established and new media technologies frequently function by appropriating space as a framing metaphor to enable consumption and use. There is much to be said about the configuration of technospaces and media spaces in their specificity, and the relation between these spaces and their effect on our corporeal schematics. As I have noted, telepresence — a term which is used to describe the kind of ‘distant presence’ enabled by telecommunication devices — is an oxymoronic concept which demands we comprehend alternative modalities of embodiment not necessarily based on our ‘normalised’ tropes of the physical entity, substance or container. If we are accustomed to thinking about space as having things ‘in’ it — containers with substance which we can perceive and ‘handle’ with all five of our senses — then, in these terms, how do we describe telespaces? How are spatial metaphors implicated in paradigms of use? What is the technical and tropological interplay between telebodies and telespaces? How are virtual ontologies dependent on grounded and embodied spatial metaphors? In this section I have attempted to answer some of these questions particular to televisual space and the various tropes surrounding it. In the section to follow, I will consider in more detail a variable ontology of the telesoma.

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25 Statistics from Gamespot’s Official UK sales chart rated the EyeToy™:Play game the number one seller for four consecutive weeks in August and September, 2003. http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/eyetoy/index.html

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part three: somatic involvement — morphology of the telebody

The TV screen is the retina of the mind’s eye.

Professor Brian O’Blivion, Videodrome (1982)

Lyle passed the time watching television. Sitting in near dark-ness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently… He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions… Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Don de Lillo, Players (1977: 16)

Over twenty years ago, Cronenberg’s infamous film Videodrome (1982) portrayed the nightmarish and deadly journey of cable television operator Max Renn, whose brain structure mutates in response to television signals broadcast by the snuff TV channel Videodrome. At one point in the narrative, Renn perceives his own body split open and transformed into a visceral video cassette receptor, and both tape and TV morphing into black flesh in anticipation of merging with his own. This interpretation of the relational ontology of TV and the body is intentionally horrifying and fantastic, and disturbingly it challenges the way in which we habitually conceive of our intercorporeality with televisual media. That is, televisions and human bodies — unless monstrously blended in science fiction such as Videodrome — are usually considered safely distinct modes of being. In this section, I aim to question this assumption of bodily integrity in the context of my technosomatic methodology. Just as the technological materiality or the medium specificity of biomedical and VR technologies have been described as

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collusive with our individual and collective corporeal schemas, so too can the domestic apparatus of TV.

In previous chapters I have argued that all technologies are aspects of perception, and so in some sense also aspects of embodiment or corporeality. In particular, I have grounded this understanding of the human-technology relation — and the medium specificities of that relation — in the theories of embodiment emerging from Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and corporeal feminism. As I have suggested, variable ontology is aptly grasped by Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) “corporeal schema” and corporeal feminism’s subsequent revision of intercorporeality, by the human-tool continuum within Ihde’s (1979) “embodiment relations,” and by Haraway’s (1991) “material-semiotic” agency. As Hefferon suggests, it is the very pliability of bodies, the “plasticity and permeability of relations and interactions between body and environment, body and world, body and tool,” which bring the many configurations of lived bodies into presence (2002: 43). Our bodily limits are not “fixed” but “malleably extendible and/or reducible in terms of the material or technological mediations that may be embodied” (Ihde, 1990: 74). Televisual technologies, and tele-technologies more generally, are not simply prostheses or augmentations of the body-subject’s sensorium, but tools which impact upon our body-image or corporeal schema, shifting the variable boundaries of embodiment, and altering our sense of having a body: they educe altered ‘involvements’ of the soma. As Heidegger suggests, our being is always-already within domains of equipment — so there is a direct and implicatory relation between the tools/technologies we use and the way we ‘have’ a body.

If the metaphors of window and container lead us to both represent and interpret the television experience in different ways, they also imply diverse telecorporeal schemas. In identifying the crucial work of metaphor upon the body in The Production of Space, Lefebvre (1974) suggests that metaphors are not simply figures of speech, but rather they decipher the world into that which is “sayable” or “susceptible to figuration”; in so doing, acts of metaphorisation take as their point of departure a “body metamorphosed” (Lefebvre, 1974: 139-140). Thus all bodies are caught within a complex web of analogies and conceptual metaphors. Similarly, in Norman O. Brown’s (1966) analysis, the bodily metaphor is the source of all metaphor, both as constraint and as potentiality. In what follows I will consider the relational ontology of television and corporeality in this

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tropological context, and suggest that in our experience and metaphorisation of TV, there is always-already somatic involvement.

The screen-as-window sets up a particular kind of corporeal trope: to look out a window and to view a screen, at the imperative of the eyes and face one’s body must be turned towards the apparatus. As such, to remain visually attached the body is rendered relatively immobile. Indeed for Manovich, this bodily inertia has been and remains a predisposition of “the Western screen-based apparatus” in general (Manovich, 2001: 104). He traces this tendency from Alberti’s perspectival window and Renaissance monocular perspective (where the gaze “belongs more to a statue than a living body” (105)), through to Kepler’s camera obscura, nineteenth century camera lucida and contemporary cinema: in all of these interfaces, he argues, “the body has to remain still” and fixed in space (Manovich, 2001: 104- 105).26 Although the dynamic screens of cinema and television might be said to virtually transport the viewer, Manovich argues that this mobility is had at the cost of an “institutionalised immobility” of the body of the spectator (107), in the form of the silent seated rows of movie-goers or the domestic couch potato. This distinction between the virtually mobile or tele-active eye-body and the stationary physical body is made by way of the screen-as-window metaphor, where the screen’s frame separates the ‘normal’ space of the viewer and the represented simulation of the image.

Manovich insists that despite numerous innovations in televisual media, the window remains as the archetypal interface:

Dynamic, real-time, interactive, a screen is still a screen. Interactivity, simulation, and telepresence: as was the case centuries ago, we are still looking at a flat, rectangular surface, existing in the space of our body and acting as a window into another space. We still have not left the era of the screen (Manovich, 2001: 115).

Within this metaphor the eyes alone must remain mobile, to traverse and visually ‘handle’ the surface space of the screen, while the body is held captive by the eyes’

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26 Interestingly, Manovich claims that this condition of the body’s immobility can also be traced through the history of communication: “In ancient Greece, communication was understood as an oral dialogue between people. It was also assumed that physical movement stimulated dialogue and the process of thinking… In the Middle ages, a shift occurred from dialogue between subjects to communication between a subject and an information storage device, that is, a book. A medieval book chained to a table can be considered a precursor to the screen that ‘fixes’ its subject in space” (Manovich, 2001: 104-105, note 48). The mobile phone and video phone, although mobilising the communicator according to the imperatives of push media (the desire for perpetual connectivity), are devices that perhaps return us to the practice of walking and talking.

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attachment. As Manovich says of the spectator: “Why move when she can’t enter the virtual space anyway?” (Manovich, 2001: 112). Yet again, I want to depart from the window analogy and its demands for an ontological difference between body and screen, and suggest instead that our multi-dimensional and corporealist experience of telespace emerges out of the collaborative ontological work of body and equipment as telesomatic gathering. Thus, just as we interpret the televisual in terms of our own mutable corporeal schemas, and as projections of our bodies, and body-parts, television and telespace become indigenous aspects of our embodiment.

In the previous section I argued that when we project boundaries onto abstract and physical spaces, as a way of delimiting, defining and placing things, even that which has no clearly defined boundaries, we are mapping terrain and imposing a corporeal order confluent with own bodily experience (Hefferon, 2002). For Lakoff and Johnson, humans (and animals in general) have a front and a back, or a face and behind, and we embed this ontology or understanding of being-in-the-world into the constitution of spaces and objects in our worldly environment (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 34). There are many instances of this frontal ontology in our use of technologies and the way in which we navigate them. For example, the standard GUI on computer screen such as Windows Explorer is configured in such a way that we experience our progression through directories as forward and back, in and out, up and down. These common navigational and browser spatialities, along with other body metaphors adapted to virtual spaces are clearly and quite simply based in our bodies’ engagement with the world. Importantly, although not of apparent relevance to Lakoff and Johnson, these somatological schemas are not just outcomes of physiology, they are also culturally specific, and vary from culture to culture (Hefferon, 2002).27 Yet it seems that in a more general sense, as humans we project fronts and backs onto objects, and habitually designate the ‘front’ as the aspect with which we interact, because we ourselves have fronts and backs. Lakoff and Johnson write:

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27 Lakoff and Johnson give the example of the Mixtec language of the Otomonguean family who use body-part projections of both humans and animals to describe location: “If you want to say ‘I was on the roof of the house,’ you say the Mixtec equivalent of ‘I was located animal-back house,’ in which animal back, being canonically oriented horizontally, is projected onto the house” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 35). Culturally specific body-orientations are often instilled at a very young age; for example, in contrast to the dominant Western habit of facing a new-born baby toward the holder, “Kaluli mothers tend to face babies outwards so that they can be seen by and see others that are part of the social group,” habituating a particular orientation to both the maternal and wider environment (Woodhead et al. cited in Donald and Richardson, 2002).

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The concepts front and back are body-based. They make sense only for beings with fronts and backs. If all beings on this planet were uniform stationary spheres floating in some medium and perceiving equally in all directions, they would have no concepts of front and back. But we are not like this at all. Our bodies are symmetric in some ways and not in others. We have faces and move in the direction in which we see. Our bodies define a set of fundamental spatial orientations that we use not only in orienting ourselves, but in perceiving the relationship of one object to another (1999: 34).

Clearly most of our communication technologies are oriented in this way, and moreover, even when their purpose is not to provide visual images, they more often than not still have ‘faces’ from which to read information displays. While there is no doubt that we have a primarily ‘frontal’ relationship with the TV screen, this is not to say that we have no association with the ‘backs’ of such devices, although these interactions are for the most part brief and functional, that is, for the purpose of connection, or negotiating an effective relationship with the front. We thus have an affinity with the body of the TV simply by virtue of the fact that human bodies and televisions have ‘fronts’ and ‘backs’ and ‘face’ each other. It is this screen-face consonance which perhaps best explains the phenomenon of parasociality, and the common behaviour of reacting towards televisions and computers ‘as if’ the latter represent ‘real people’ and ‘real places’ (Reeves and Nass, 1996).28 Indeed, the similitude of the TV box with the human head or eyes (see figures over page) is another clear example of this perceived consonance at work.

This front-to-front relationship is one that we have with screens in general. In most if not all cases the screen is a frame of limited dimensions within our own physical space, while the body’s frontal relationship with the apparatus varies between media depending on what Manovich calls “viewing regimes” (2001: 96). With cinema, for example, the viewer is at the outset fully frontal to the exclusion of all diversions, focusing entirely on the screen. In the optimum situation the boundary or interface between body and cinematic apparatus dissolves, a merger which manifests a change in orientation from being ‘in front of’ to being ‘within,’ an effect which is achieved by several factors: the size of the screen, the darkness of the theatre, and not least by surround sound. Front-to-front orientations are

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28 The social and behavioral aspects of this affinity between humans and television (and more generally computers and new communications media) is explored in some detail by Reeves and Nass (1996) in their study The Media Equation.

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Image from an Adbusters anti-advertising campaign29

Image from Weinberg-Clark photography client website30

therefore not achieved by vision alone; in many situations, when facing a moving image we would expect that sound would also approach us from this direction, but the effect of surround or stereophonic sound is to embrace the body in such a way that the frontal relationship with the screen is at least partially compromised. In the case of television — with perhaps the home theatre an exception — the face-to- face relationship between the body and the set is somewhat more informal and less disciplined; viewers can look away to the familiarity of their domestic surroundings, move about or leave the room, or they can be visually and aurally attentive or inattentive to varying degrees, by muting the sound, zapping through

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29 See: http://adbusters.cool.ne.jp/tv2.htm 30 See: http://www.weinberg-clark.com

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channels, talking on the phone or conversing with co-watchers, and reading or engaging in other activities.

This vacillating degree of attention and distraction also contravenes the perception or eye-behaviour proper to linear perspectival vision. As Romanyshyn states:

The eye as a measure of the world’s horizon is, moreover, a special eye. It is characterised in specific ways by the very conditions which give it its central place. It is an eye fixed in its place, a staring eye, an eye focused straight ahead on the world. Such an eye by definition does not wander over and about things which lie off to the side of its vision (Romanyshyn, 1989: 47).

The eyes of television are not those of linear perspective. The televisual eye is always-already distracted, both by the exo-televisual environment and the latent lateral but ever-ready possibilities of remote control devices and multiple channels. In her phenomenological analysis of filmic experience, Linda Singer suggests: “The screen can function as an area of focus only when it is surrounded by a zone of inattention secured by the maintenance of distance” (Singer, 1990: 55). This is almost always not the case with television; in fact rarely is TV enveloped by a zone of inattention — it is always-already surrounded by other domestic objects and zones of practice within the collectively realised domestic spaces and spatial topography of the home. Often, the television’s state of being ‘on’ is simply an index of being-at-home and nothing more.

This analysis describes our sporadic frontal relationship with the TV set in terms of its status as screen within the home, but falls short of clarifying the visual, haptic and aural incursion of televisuality into our corporeal schema. That is, what are the specific corporeal and instrumental features of the tele-body? Our first experiences of TV demanded a particular kind of body-environment interface, and different sensory zones of attention and inattention; over time, this interface became transparent, or retreated from explicit awareness. Yet this is not to suggest that TV — a technology which we usually consider ‘lean-back’ or ‘extractive’ as opposed to immersive media such as virtual reality — is any less embodied. In other words, bodies which are metonymically ‘all hands and eyes (and ears)’ are nevertheless still bodies. Within a post-phenomenological analysis distinctions of ‘more’ or ‘less’ embodied are not viable. Rather, there are different sensory registers or sense ratios, or more precisely, variable modes of what I am calling somatic involvements, which can include the finely attuned coupling of hand and remote control device, the telepresent mobility of vision, the evocation of

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tactile or olfactory memories, or simply a ‘gut’ reaction to horror fiction, scenes of war or graphically portrayed medical emergencies.

The phenomenological approach offers a way to begin a theorisation of telesomatic involvements by apprehending the television as quite literally integrated into the soma. Such a perspective considers the televisual as an aspect of the body- subject’s corporeal schema, both transforming and transformative. As Leder comments:

The term ‘incorporation’ seems to imply an absorptive process operating in a unilateral direction. Via a phenomenological osmosis, the body brings within itself novel abilities, its own temporal history, and tools that remain spatially discrete. However, incorporation is the result of a rich dialectic wherein the world transforms my body, even as my body transforms its world… The demands and solicitations of the world gradually lead me to reshape the ability structure of my body (Leder, 1990: 34).

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh-of-the-world enables us to conceive of the body- subject as always-already somatically involved with tools/instruments and technologies that through routine use have become part of the dynamic arrangement of the body. This concept also makes possible an alternative account of the correlation between body and television in terms of a relational ontology: both bodies and televisions are non-hierarchically flesh-of-the-world.

One of the enablements of this approach is to understand ways of seeing as the combined effect of bodies and technologies, which in turn leads to a pluralised interpretation of visual forms. Thus it is possible to distinguish between a vast range of tele-visualities and the modes of embodiment particular to each — from Alberti’s window to the EyeToy™. It is pertinent to note, however, that in some sense all ways of seeing are necessarily televisions; there must always be a distance of some kind, whether it be a spatial distance (it is difficult to see something when it touches your face), or a perceptual absence of the visceral body.31 But there is no necessary correlation between this kind of tele-vision and the objectifying vision of linear perspective; distance does not deliver an unbiased and disaffected perspective but is simply a condition of seeing at all. Thus the

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31 As Marks points out: “If we were aware of the functioning of our spleens, the constant activity upon the mucous membranes of our nostrils, the traffic on our synaptic highways, we would certainly not be able to drive a car, let alone distinguish perceptions most necessary for survival” (Marks, 2000:132).

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object of this critique is not to suggest that the primacy of vision should be replaced by a primacy of the aural, the tactile or the haptic, but that vision must be understood as a mutable and integral aspect of a full-bodied and multi-sensory perception which includes these aspects. As Marks writes:

A configuration of the senses that would value sense information perceived within the body, on the body’s surface, and at close, middle, and far distances from the body would seem to be an ideal alternative to the current skewing of the modern sensorium in favor of distance. Vision, in fact, is capable of almost all these sorts of perception. Finally, it is worth considering that since humans have developed many prosthetic machines, from telescopes to magnetic- resonance imaging, that render the world optical for us, we have the luxury, and perhaps the necessity, to explore other sorts of visuality as we have not before. (Marks, 2000: 132-133)

Marks documents the neurophysiology of sense memory (via Varela and Rosch), and its embeddedness in social memory, an analysis which can account for the way in which sense-augmenting technologies are gradually integrated to our sensorium. Our experience of television, for example, entails an implicit awareness of the way it mutates and reconstitutes our visual situation. Consider, for example, the number of ‘synthetic’ ways of seeing the cultural interface of the mobile camera has implanted in our vision: the wide angle shot, allowing for ‘maximal digestion’ of the scene; the zoom, a constructed vision organising its space “through the force of intention alone, unmired by distance, time, and its inherence in things” (Singer, 1990: 60); the close-up, where we can witness something at an intimate proximity that would be otherwise disrupted by our actual presence; the split-screen and jump-cut, which establish semantic and temporal cohesion between elements that are otherwise physically distant (Singer, 1990: 61). All of these configure non-normative spatio-somatic relations, but nevertheless ones we ‘learn’ collectively by way of watching film and television.

Indeed, our collective embodiments, a conceptual package Weiss (1999) uses to describe our commonly corporealised body images and schemas — the cultural specificity our intercorporeality — is deeply enmeshed with TV. In her description of what she terms the ‘contagion effect’ in our experience of visual media, Linda Singer comments on the “pleasure of sociality, the moment in which one’s pleasure in seeing is enhanced by its reproduction and affective reverberations in

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others” (Singer, 1990: 55).32 Although less structured than cinema, the televisual experience is also ‘contagious’ in the sense that it is implicated in a collective embodiment — an intercorporeality — which is the foundation of vision per se, and structures the specific visual situation of television. We share the space of the loungeroom, for instance, both in actuality (with friends or family) and with a virtual awareness of a community of perceivers. Our sensory expectation is thus directed towards the television in what becomes a collective and habitual manner: we encounter its rectangularity equipped with a sensorial-social ‘memory’ of the cultural interface of the mobile camera; we anticipate the camera’s synthetic ways of seeing; we orientate our bodies in such a way that visual acuity is best served (i.e. according to the frontal relationship); and we know that it offers a compound vision, a sometimes-linear, sometimes-jumbled stream of images with sound, but without smell or tactile dimension other than what our own sensorium can project. These expectations are essential to our capacity to suspend the artifacticities of television, to disregard them in order that we might experience the image/event/narrative ‘as if’ all elements were present.

The very plasticity of our soma might suggest the possibility of collectively re- learning a non-visualist sensorial engagement with the world, perhaps a “tactile epistemology” or alternative configuration of the sensorium against the cultural importance given to vision (Marks, 2000: 203). That such a change to our sensorium might occur seems unlikely, however, as cultural variations to sensory organisation have significant historical density behind them. As Marks (2000) suggests, a new configuration of the senses would be meaningless without the sensory and collective memory to accompany them. The slowness of changes to our cultural and collective sensoria, however, does not mean that the flexibility of our corporeal schema or the spectrum of sensory possibility is overly determined. As Sobchack comments:

we can both naturally alter and technologically enhance our own ‘normal’ perceptual dynamic in response to the world we inhabit [and also] understand other possibilities for perception than our ‘normal’ upright position…Our own ‘upright’ vision is merely a normative orientation and does not exhaust or disallow our experience and comprehension of other orientations (Sobchack, 1990: 35).

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32 In her footnote to this term she writes “I use the term contagion not to allude to the language of disease but to suggest a mode of transmission resulting from the presence of bodies to one another, rather than as a consequence of some explicit performative” (Singer, 1990: 66).

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It is the inherent plasticity or mutability of our sensorium, a relational somatics which adapts according to a complex range of cultural, personal,33 corporeal and medium specificities, that describes the very nature of embodiment.

In the equipmental environment of TV and other tele-technological communications media, there has been a significant modification to our collective corporeal schemas, a change which was partially addressed in the previous section in the context of telepresence. Telepresence and virtual or endo-televisual space, I would argue, are emplacements for an altered configuration of embodiment, one which dislocates the experience of haptic presence from the ‘here and now.’ In a post-phenomenological sense, the cultural sensorium of the tele- body readily adapts to touch as a distant sense. Indeed, while it could be argued that it is only the visual and aural senses that are capable of being ‘carried the distance’ required by televisual technologies, Ihde insists that touch is also a remote sense, since when using instruments such as the telescope, we become as it were embodied at a distance. This is also the case with virtual and augmented realities, although here the actual distance becomes non-measurable in any conventional sense, while at the same time quite specifically bounded within the limits of an enclosed microworld. Yet in either case, the notion of embodiment-at- a-distance works to redefine the very nature of embodiment in the context of tool use. Touch is effectively telepresent in the use of telerobotic devices: for example, Ken Goldberg’s famous Telegarden at Ars Electronica allows remote users to plant seeds and water a real garden via the Internet (Goldberg, 2000: 4-5); NASA’s various telerobots are deployed across a range of remote environments directed by earth-bound humans, while the emerging practice of telesurgery trains technicians and surgeons to perform operations by way of a virtual exoskeleton. Virtual environment technologies have rendered not only vision but other senses telemorphic too, imbuing them with tele-capabilities; objects of inaccessible and virtual worlds are brought within the reach of a paradoxical teletactility. Just as vision can be haptic — a way of ‘handling’ the world, touch can be telematic. Although the visual and aural senses are seemingly the most compatible with teletechnological apparatuses — i.e. most able to go the distance — telepresencing and telerobotic technologies do alter the somatic involvement of tactile and kinesthetic senses. The study of digital haptics in the development of these

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33 For example, in relation to individual predispositions to different senses, or accidental/congenital malformations leading to specific sensory losses and enhancements.

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technologies is a rapidly expanding field which clearly upsets the ocularcentric dichotomy of seeing and intervening.

In the more mundane space of domestic TV, the hand-held remote control device enables us to somatically and telematically ‘handle’ the telepresent environment, albeit in a more ordinary and habitual way. Indeed the status of the remote control in contemporary technoculture cannot be understated: the medium- specificity of embodiment in the context of tele-technologies can be understood in terms of our increasing remote control of the world, affording us telepresence and accenting the need to redefine what it means to have a body, and the perceptual limits of that body. The effects of remote control are also often paradoxical, effecting both a shrinkage and expansion of the world. It has been argued by both Virilio and Romanyshyn that television collapses the world into a windowed form, and by Ihde that the telescope delimits the object of knowledge by rendering it framed and colourless. Yet new media and televisual spaces also extend perceptual range and possibility, and are having significant effects on our sense of bodily boundaries in all kinds of ways via the remote control device, which is becoming increasingly complex as a navigational or mapping device.

Phenomenologically, the remote control is an incorporative aspect of the hand, a body-part in itself of some consequence as a mutable and world-shaping container. Canetti writes:

The hand which scoops up water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket… It is not enough that this or that shape should exist in the surrounding world. Before we could create it ourselves, our hands and fingers had to enact it… Words and objects are accordingly emanations and products of a single unified experience: representation by means of the hands. (Canetti cited in Rothenberg, 1993: v)

The technocorporeality of remote control use is of particular interest in the relational ontology of TV and body, as the relationship between corporeal schematics and remote control devices literally embodies telepresence. As Leder states:

[The] dialectical body-world relation is concretized even in the simplest of instruments. Ordinarily, any tool will have one end specifically adapted to our human anatomy; the handle of the saw is designed to fit the hand. However, the other end is adapted to the world upon which we act… To incorporate a tool is to redesign one’s extended body until its extremities expressly mesh with the world (Leder, 1990: 34).

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The technical and ergonomic configuration of the TV remote control device is increasingly significant. Remote controls for television are designed with the specificities of particular interfaces, hybrid devices, and user-bodies in mind. In the optimal embodiment relation, the remote should become transparent; the ‘best’ control is one which recedes from the user’s awareness, such that the liminal gap between hand and instrument goes all but unnoticed. Products such as the weemote™2 indicate that different devices are needed for different bodies: designed for children’s hands and embodied experience of televisual space, the weemote™2 has only nine user buttons, promoting “a clutter free environment for young children.”34 Its “safe channel surfing button,” and “programming area for parents that is secured and hidden from the child,” on the other hand, are features clearly designed in the context of parents’ concerns regarding the dangerous incursions of media space into children’s experience of the lifeworld.

The remote control also has important effects on our experience television as an enterable and navigable space. Contrary to the idea that TV-watching is a sedentary, disembodied experience, when we talk about our ‘location’ in relation to the TV, we often use the spatialising discourse of touring and mobility (e.g. “stay with the news,” “go back to Seinfeld”). Quite clearly, we use spatial models of touring, mapping, topology, and geometry to ‘locate’ ourselves in televisual space. As Lakoff and Johnson insist, spatial or navigational/directional metaphors are the most common of all metaphors, and for the most part are determined by a number of orientations due to our somatic involvement in gravitational object- worlds: up-down, in-out, front-back, on-off, deep-shallow, central-peripheral (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 14). These orientations, because they are intrinsic to our motor functions and relative to our gravitational field, are given “priority over other possible structurings” (56-57). They go on to argue that spatialisation metaphors are complexly embedded in both physical and cultural experience, and that the metaphors chosen inevitably vary from culture to culture (18-19). I would add that this embedment is also always-already tool-specific — i.e. that the metaphors we use to orientate ourselves in the world are also in part instrumental effects of our equipmental environments. Thus, for example, early chronometric and trigonometric seafaring tools divided the nebulous space of the ocean into navigable and regular rectilinear domains defined by latitude and longitude. As a

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34 See USelectronics™ at http://www.icxglobal.com/products/weemote.html. Phillips also patented a child’s device – the Roller Controller – for their now defunct CD Interactive range.

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number of theorists have noted, this instrumental trajectory of colonising and coordinating space has impacted on our ordering of virtual technospaces, such as the grid metaphor of cyberspace which predominated in the 1980s (Roof, 2001; Sofia, 1998).

In a televisual environment, our orientation of media space is had primarily by way of an embodied visualising. In fact, as Peter Larsen suggests, “[i]n practice we experience the screen as an opening through which we get access to another place, a place in which channels lie ‘beside’ each other” (Gripsrud, 1999: 114). Larsen theorises the instrumental/corporeal connection in our use of various types of remote control. Once we overcome the non-proportionality of touch to effect (i.e. a push of the thumb can change the televisual world), a body-tool relation specific to many tele-technologies, we use the remote as a navigational or mapping instrument, a tool with which to negotiate the ontological geography of “compossible”35 spaces. For example, if one’s remote zaps through channels in a sequential or juxtapositional manner via the arrow buttons, eventually coming back to the starting point, the corresponding experience of televisual space is likely to be as a virtual terrain organised in a circular fashion. Larsen writes:

Viewers of this type of remote control tend to imagine they are touring in a ‘topological’ space defined neither by distances nor by relational projectivity, but by proximities. In this kind of space the channels lie side by side, each one connected by contiguity to the previous one and the next one… The viewers move like nomads through the landscape, they find their way to the preferred oasis by going from one significant landmark to the next (Gripsrud, 1999: 114).

Another common experience of remote control use is of the numbered buttons arranged in a pattern familiar to other technologies (e.g. calculators and automatic teller machines) and tele-communications devices (telephone and personal organisers). i.e. in a 1 to 9 matrix. In these cases:

the viewers tend to think of the channel universe as a rectangular space…the channels seem to be arranged within a stable grid of coordinates, in stable relational positions… The space is ordered, organized, a pattern easily grasped (Gripsrud, 1999: 114).

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35 Compossibility is a useful term Fry deploys to refer to the often detached ontological status television events and content have to each other (Fry 1993: 50-52).

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In this second example, we also use our sense of touch to find channels by coordinating the position of the numbers in relation to each other. This intimacy with the remote control renders it an object of tactile and kinaesthetic familiarity, although it is salient to mention here that the growing complexity of remote controls for TV and its hybrids often bewilder the non-expert user to such a degree as to make televisual space increasingly impenetrable.36 In such cases there is a conflicting ‘disincorporation’ between the device and the hand-body.

The control and dynamic embodiment demanded by TV is a crucial element in any account of our experience with televisual technologies. As I have suggested, Ihde’s inventory of human-technology relations is particularly useful for an ontology of the tele-body, and the specific relationship between embodiment and the tele- equipmental environment. In particular, body-technology relations, which explain how “I take the technologies into my experiencing in a particular way by way of perceiving through such technologies and through the reflexive transformation of my perceptual and body sense” (Ihde, 1990: 72), include wearable technologies and visualising technologies and their transformative effects upon our sensorium and felt corporeal limits. In such cases the body and instrument form a temporary collusive entity — symbolically designated by Ihde as (I-artifact)–world — which apprehends or handles the world in specific ways. He writes:

The mediated presence… must fit, be made close to my actual body position and sight. Thus there is a reference within the instrumental context to my face-to-face capacities… What is seen must be seen from or within my visual field, from the apparent distance in which discrimination can occur regarding depth, etc., just as in face-to-face relations. But the range of what can be brought into this proximity is transformed by means of the instrument (Ihde, 1990: 79).

Again, the face-to-face relationship of TV to the body is intrinsic to how spatial and sensory perception is subsequently modified. Television and the tele- mediatised body together effect changes to spatial perception by framing the life- world as immediate, fragmented into channels/programmes, and “keyed” in Manovich’s sense, while also prioritising vision and audible range over other sense ratios. TV and digital imaging bring certain phenomena to vision; what

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36 In a recent discussion concerning remote control use, a colleague described having “lost the ABC” (a free-to-air public TV channel available in Australia) due to an unintentional mismanagement of the remote control device, and was consequently unable to recover this space regardless of what buttons she pressed. Since then, she complained, she has been obliged to access the ABC exclusively via her (equally inscrutable) VCR machine. (Conversation with colleague, July 8th 2003, Murdoch University, Western Australia).

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becomes ‘proximal’ changes quite drastically, for as Ihde (1990) points out, on a screen the image size of the earth and an ovum are the same.

Whereas embodiment relations optimally achieve a condition of perceptual isomorphism, hermeneutic relations describe our interaction with readable technologies, where unreadable phenomena are made readable through the transformative mediation of a technology, to become “something through which one experiences and as something to which one relates” (Ihde, 1990: 92-93). Television is hermeneutic in the sense that it is ‘read’ — we interpret the frame, the event, the series, the configuration of channels and learn to read them ‘as if’ they are in some way representative of the life-world. As embodiment relation, we look through the television screen and experience the image as real and three dimensional, and the remote embodies hand/eye coordination such that we are extendible with televisual space. Yet at the same time we are at least intermittently cognizant of the boundaries and framing of this space; as hermeneutic relation, then, we are aware of this framing, of the image as something to be read. Moreover, if at irregular intervals, we are also responsive to the remote control device as a coordinated grid of buttons which must be interpreted and read, although the goal, as Ihde points out, is an hermeneutic transparency where the mediating translation of TV into world is effaced.37

Habitual actions such as television viewing, then, entail incorporation of instruments into oneself, such that they “play a part in the original structure of [one’s] own body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 91). The body ‘understands,’ that is, experiences concord between intention and action in the development of habitual engagement with the world; the manipulation of equipment, tools and technologies is learned “when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it” (Merleau- Ponty, 1964: 139; Martin, 2002). When using a remote control, for example, we incorporate both it and the on-screen space into our own bodily space, and utilise

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37 As I have described in previous chapters, other human-technology relations identified by Ihde include alterity relations, background relations and horizonal relations. The first refers to technology as ‘other’ (a artificial life form, for example), the second to what Ihde calls a ‘texturing’ of the environment, (which aptly describes the effect of TV always ‘being on’ in the home), and the third to technologies which “belong to the boundaries of the experienced environmental field” (Ihde, 1990: 112-114). There are “inner horizons” (the fringes of embodiment)” and “external horizons (the ultimate form of texturing that a specific technological culture may take)” (114). If the latter of these accounts for Heidegger’s understanding that modern technology remakes the world “as picture,” then televisual apparatuses have palpably collaborated in this effect.

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it as an exosomatic but nevertheless corporealised device that extends our reach and the realm of agentic possibility in televisual space. As Pam Martin comments, without having to consciously attend to button-pressing, we are able to aim at the screen by manipulating these instruments somewhat like a second body (Martin, 2002). It is important to note that these habits are not reflex actions, like instinctively drawing back from potential danger, and nor do we actively plan them; rather they are the realisation of action towards the flesh of the telepresent world which is enabled by the non-coincidence of the tool and one’s own body (Martin, 2002). Remote control devices of all kinds organise our bodies and bodily movements in time and space. This spatio-temporal organisation of the body is an aspect of our being-in-the-world, constraining and enabling our place within it.

As I have suggested, tropes and metaphors have an essential role in our understanding and experience of the televisual. Tele-technologies offer a range of corporealist tropes, such as the synechdochal ‘all-hands-and-eyes’ experience of interactive screens and games, or the way in which the mobile phone-body becomes — metonymically — a pedestrian or vehicular node of networked communication (Martin, 2002). If we remember that the combining form –trope indicates an affinitive turn towards something, then teletechnologies have had significant ‘tropological’ effects on our corporeal schematics; our modes of embodiment ‘turn towards’ specific technologies and media interfaces. When we use the expression “glued to the TV,” for instance, we interpret our eyes as limbs entering into an intimate and tele-tactile relationship with the screen. Indeed, the explicit goal of media designers in general is to render the screen ‘sticky’ as a measure of viewer adhesion (Manovich, 2001: 161). Yet this kind of interpretation of the tele-body simply imagines the tropological mutation of physical body-parts by televisual media, rather than attending to the kind of embodiment or corporeal schematic demanded by television. Returning to the container metaphor here offers another way of posing the question of tele-embodiment: what kind of somatic involvement is required by the ‘in-ness’ of televisual space?

This leads us again to the phenomenon of telepresence, this time in terms of its effect on the body. i.e. what kind of body can be said to be telepresent? Although telepresence can be described as a state of quasi-disembodiment — we’re often all ‘hands, ears and eyes’ — it is nevertheless still a way of having a body. Television is not only a visual but an aural medium, and sound itself creates a spatial environment of reception. Televisual sound is in fact what enables the viewer’s eye

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to wander while remaining ‘attached.’ This is precisely because it does not demand the focused attention of cinema, and as such it induces its own perceptual attachment from the body, a specific mode of ‘being-in-space’ or ‘being-with- equipment’ in Heideggerian terms. In a more visceral sense, the ear ‘hears’ when clustered rows of minute hairs amplify vibrations which the brain interprets as sound; sound literally enters and moves the body’s interior, as does light upon entering the eye. Yet whereas in pre-televisual times these sensory entanglements ordinarily entailed a concomitant physical proximity, or a ‘thereness’ of material things within visual distance, today our engagement with the televisual lifeworld involves a telepresent somatic involvement, and a ‘thereness’ of TV’s aural and visual emanations.

This telepresent experience of domestic TV prefigures the supposedly more enhanced telepresence of interactive digital media. As discussed in the preceding chapter, a number of theorists have suggested that a pure and liberated disembodiment is all but realised by online communication and virtuality technologies. Yet even at the most mundane level the haptic field of body-and- medium is often fraught with injury, indicative of numerous ergonomic incompatibilities which finally prohibit any such emancipation from the flesh. The ‘couch potato’ is but one instance of this incompatibility between the demands of the interface and the needs of the body.38 Other more circumspect interpretations of the digital era comment on a need to understand embodiment differently, as a way for us to adequately comprehend our contemporary being-in-the-world. Weber suggests that television:

serves as a surrogate for the body in that it allows for a certain sense-perception to take place; but it does this in a way that no body can, for its perception takes place in more than one place at a time. Television takes place in taking the place of the body and at the same time in transforming both place and body (Weber, 1996: 117).

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38 An article in The Express (April 1997) cited by John Hartley tells of a “Man Who Died of TV” after losing his job. “The 27-year-old jobless bachelor was found dead slumped in his armchair in front of the set he had watched for virtually every waking hour over the past four years” (cited in Hartley 1999: 171). The man’s father lamented, “the telly just sapped all the life out of him,” while the pathologist stated at the inquest that “it was only the second case of its kind [he] had come across in 10 years” and although unable to find a reason for the death during a post mortem, he recorded that it was due to “natural causes” (cited in Hartley 1999: 171). In fact I would argue that in this dramatised and semi-fictional case, the man died not of TV itself but of remote control. i.e. he would not have died of couch potato syndrome had he been forced to change channels manually.

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Against such a claim, I have argued that television does not displace or supplant the body; rather, it demands a technosoma complicit with its own medium specific degeneration of spatial and bodily integrity. In relation to computer-mediated communication Waldby argues for a “new kind of corporeal space” (1998a) where bodies are no longer confined by an “irreducible materiality” to a definite place and time. Yet surely these contentions apply equally to the technocorporeality of the TV-body. Indeed, if the condition of embodiment is defined in terms of “the locatedness of sensory experience” then television too mutates “any simple unity of body and sensation towards its capacity to gather up several locations at once” (Waldby, 1998a).

Relevant here, too, is Virilio’s warning that when telepresence succeeds concrete presence, and teleaction displaces action, the future body is transformed into the ultimate “static audiovisual vehicle” of telematic society (cited in Conley, 1993: 4- 5). Virilio’s point is a significant one for any discussion on the status of the body in teleculture: electromagnetic speed and instantaneous transmission enable us not only to hear and see remotely (i.e. as with radio, telephone, internet and television), but to act remotely as well. He states:

From now on, the disabled person equipped with prostheses so he can control his environment without stirring has become the prototype of the able-bodied person super-equipped with remote controls for all seasons; the latter will then try to get the perspective of a RETROACTIVE environment to come to him, the way you whistle to your dog (Virilio, 1995: 151).

In the pre-televisual era, we physically moved or perambulated through the world as our primary means of entering and engaging with environments; now, we invoke or call the world to us. The contemporary tele-body is thus a “static vehicle… not only audiovisual but also tactile and interactive in nature (that is, radio-active, opto- active, and interactive)” (Virilio cited in Conley, 1993: 8). Particularly in his work The Vision Machine (1994), Virilio argues that this attenuated corporeality has replaced any normalised mode of physical embodiment. His argument refuses the idea that distance perception is necessarily disembodied, suggesting instead that the body has been remade according to its equipmental environment.39

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39 As discussed in chapter two, Virilio (1994) also suggests that prosthetic vision will be replaced by synthetic or automated perception. Such machines will be no longer prosthetic; they will be machines of “sightless vision” — instrumental embodiments of vision to the exclusion of the soma — on the one hand offering a radical alternative to classical renditions of visual perception, but on the other positing an distinctly anti-phenomenological severance of the visible and the visibilisable from embodiment.

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There seems little doubt that television’s delivery of the virtual present-at-hand has evoked an altered medium-specific yet physiognomic knowing. The ‘sensing’ of television, an intimately audio, visual, sometimes haptic and visceral awareness, enables a mode of embodiment and knowing of the world such that prevailing ontological axes of distance and closeness, presence and absence are no longer simply by their definition at odds. Rather, such couplings are increasingly ontologically covalent. What the very concept of telepresence means for the corporeal schema of the TV-body is that one is neither a couch potato, nor an agency dis-located from the body, wandering as a dematerialised nomad from one channel-world to another. Rather, the either/or registers of embodiment have adjusted to the televisual environment to encompass hereness and thereness, actuality and virtuality, within a pliable corporeality. Against dystopian theorists of the televisual such as Baudrillard, who suggest that couch bodies stagnate, superfluous and mute, Morse argues that we are

travellers, responding in a checked, kinetic way to the virtual experiences of motion we are offered as subjects or view in objects passing our screens.... Thus, the overall discursive framework of televisual representation, including the use of hosts and presenters of all kinds, provides a means of passing between object-worlds, be they stories provided for entertainment or fantasies that surround commodities, in a way which virtually includes the viewer (Morse, 1998: 205).

Thus the telesoma as embodied agent shifts unproblematically between — or resides simultaneously in — the ‘as’ and ‘as if’ contours of the lifeworld and telepresent existence, appropriating the remote control as a conduit of this lateralisation.

*

In this chapter, I have offered a post-phenomenological interpretation of telespaces and telebodies, suggesting how we can apply a range of existing and adapted metaphors to describe space and corporeality in terms of the medium specificity of television. As Weber suggests, the television and its environment are particularly resistant to critical thought, not least because of our tendency to use a singular noun to “designate an extremely complex and variegated phenomenon” (Weber, 1996: 109). Despite this variability, television has worked to deliver to everyday perception an intrinsic ambivalence towards space, place and embodiment. TV offers a particular kind of vision and audition, a seeing and hearing which

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‘happen’ in at least two places — where the event or scene is recorded and where it is received. This splitting of sight and sound is simultaneously a splitting of perception and space: a televised place loses its perceptual unity (i.e. our perception of it is both proximal and distal) and spatial singularity (i.e. it both represents physical environment and yet is endo-televisually contained). Moreover, digital imaging and animation techniques trouble the inherent undecideability of televisual perception and spatiality even further, by making it increasingly irrelevant to distinguish between actuality and simulation. As I have argued, the telesoma has digested these ambivalences, to become equally mutable and duplicitous, without either perceptual integrity or determinable locus. More importantly, I have also insisted that while telespaces and telebodies are of shifty ontological status, our experience of the televisual is nevertheless always-already and irreducibly technosomatic. Collective and individual corporeal schematics morphose as collaborative effects of both the medium specificity of the televisual, and the sensorial and organic specificities of human bodies; reciprocally, televisual space and perception is metaphorised — revealed — within the variable prospects of somatic and material possibility. Such effects and possibilities are not the remarkable consequence of a new merger with high technology; they are simply evidence of yet another human-technology relation, a technocorporeal or body-tool ‘happening’ that I have called the telesoma.

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conclusion

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conclusion

Relations spawn objects, beings and acts, not vice versa.

Michel Serres and Bruno Latour (1995: 107)

Prosthesis becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves.

Donna Haraway (Feenberg and Hannay, 1995: 193)

I s an agent an agent primarily because he or she inhabits a body that carries knowledges, skills, values, and all the rest? Or is an agent an agent because he or she inhabits a set of elements (including, of course, a body) that stretches out into the network of materials, somatic and otherwise, that surrounds each body? John Law (1992: 384)

The past several decades have seen significant morphoses to the human- technology relation tout court. In the domain of communicative possibility, ever- evolving tele-technological apparatuses such as television, radio, telephones, computers and online devices have radically altered the ways in which we relate to our tools and ourselves as sociotechnical hybrids. In the arena of science and medicine, informatic and bio-technologies have irretrievably changed the way we understand both the world and our own bodies. Many erstwhile and deep-rooted narratives of reality — for example, that our humanness is innate and both ontologically and epistemologically secure, that our selves are coherent and contained by the body, that there is a ‘natural’ split between subject and object, science and culture, human and technology — have been materially and metaphorically destabilised.

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This work has primarily concerned technocultural agency and corporeality, their relational constitution, and the range of spatial, corporeal and ontological metaphors we deploy in our use and navigation of tele-media interfaces and technospaces. I have suggested that what may appear as our quite recent ontic and epistemic symbiosis with high technology, must be interpreted as disclosing a primordial relation that pre-exists the separate integrity of the human and the technical. This relational ontology is aptly inferred by Latour’s (1993) insight that oppositional categories in no way reflect the hybridity and non-exclusive enantiomorphism of sociotechnical agency. The collaborative effects of agency temporarily accrete or stabilise around specific conceptual-material ensembles such as MRI and VR, or as Pickering (1995) observes, become more determinedly housed by generalised contextures such as “opticism” (Cartesian geometric perspectivalism) and “digitism” (the regime of computers). Importantly, then, just as in the design and utility of tools we are also devising ontologies or ways of being, the material specificity of the world at the same time “leaks into and infects our representations of it in a nontrivial and consequential fashion” (Pickering 1995: 135). Or, to put it another way, we are all technosomatic arrangements of heterogeneous materials; of clothes, history, skin, bones, enzymes, machines and tools. As Callon and Law point out, it is not the case that subjectivity or agency has been fragmented, or that mutability is itself a new condition, for this would imply “agency is sometimes a broken whole.... That if things were better everything might fit together” (Herrnstein Smith and Plotnitsky, 1995: 496). Rather, we need a conceptualisation of agency “orthogonal” to, or diverging from, such understandings (497). In developing and applying a technosomatic methodology to three human-technology ensembles — biomedical imaging, virtual reality and domestic television — I have argued that our agency as-bodies-and-tools is always-already a contingent and relational achievement. In this analysis, terms such as medium, interface, augmentation, and prosthesis, quite literally describe the chronic mutability of our perceptual and sensorial boundaries, our own being- in-the-world as being-with-tools.

The epistemic and ontic matrices of contemporary post-industrial televisual tools has been the critical domain of this study, from technoscientific imaging techniques, to new media VR environments and installations and the everyday vision machine of TV. Yet I argued that before a viable methodology could be applied to technovisual apparatuses of any kind, it was necessary to trace the

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emergence of visual primacy and its conceptual and instrumental incursion into the technologies of Western culture. Thus in the first chapter on “Visualism” I discussed the canonisation of Cartesian perspectivalism and the installation of a specific mode of seeing as neutral, objective, disembodied, and non-intervening; as a way to a singular truth of the world. This ocularcentric tradition consolidated both a strictly dichotomous relation between subject and object, and remade nature and things-in-the-world as epistemologically accessible primarily via an abstract and highly organised way of seeing. The sensorial dominance of the eye, over centuries of scientific experimentation and technological innovation, has become firmly embodied in the instrumental proclivities of both technoscience and popular media apparatuses. In this chapter my critique of the visualist trope attended specifically to the over-determination of knowledge by ocularcentric authority, and to the ways in which embodied and local perception became increasingly invalidated within the visualist paradigm. In particular, I argued that all vision is a collaborative and contextual body-tool effect, and that no specific technosomatic coupling or schematic — including that of perspectival vision — is necessarily privileged over any other.

In the second part of chapter one I discussed a number of emergent equipmental embodiments of vision; postclassical or technovisual ways of seeing currently at play in both scientific practice and popular media. These tool-ic embodiments of sight are quite radically changing what we consider to be both seeable and knowable, what we acknowledge to be properly ‘of the world.’ On the one hand, the manipulable and simulatory qualities of digital information render all representations in popular media potentially fantastic. On the other, scanning devices such as those used in biomedical imaging — MRI, CT, PET and ultrasound — work according to their own partial orders of revealing, their translatory and artifactual work generating altered and often surprising micro- and macro- perceptual reflections of the material world, and indeed of our own bodies in vivo. Such revelations accompany the active perceptual systems of every vision machine; as Haraway comments:

[E]ven the most reliable Western individuated bodies, the mice and men of a well-equipped laboratory, neither stop nor start at the skin, which is itself something of a teeming jungle threatening illicit fusions, especially from the perspective of an electron microscope (Haraway, 1991: 215).

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The variable embodiments and often incommensurable effects of these technovisions suggest that ways of seeing are both culturally and medium specific. Moreover, it would seem that every techno- or television at the same time demands a particular kind of techno- or telesoma (and correlatively, a particular kind of techno- or telespace). That is, each technological embodiment of vision gathers the human body into (yet another) somatic involvement, be it one which prioritises hand-eye coordination or one which fixes the body’s position in front of a screen, thus also reconfiguring or privileging a particular spatial ontology, a mode of spatial arrangement and containment. Finally, the technocorporeality of perception means the collapse of ontological difference; again, in Haraway’s words, “[t]he machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (Haraway, 1991: 180). As a number of theorists have noted, machinic and electronic visions render our own bodies the hosts of non-organic life such as chemical clocks and binary coding systems, highlighting the metaphorical and material interdigitations of humans and tools.

In chapter one I thus laid the groundwork for a corporealist interpretation of technovisual ensembles. In the second chapter, “Corporealism,” I cultivated a technosomatic methodology to apply to such ensembles, by combining the conceptual and phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Don Ihde, Donna Haraway, and corporeal feminists such as Moira Gatens, Liz Grosz, and Gail Weiss. Within Merleau-Ponty’s work, crucial concepts of the body-subject, corporeal schema and intercorporeality configure an embodied being continuously modified by artifacts. Ihde’s philosophy of technology — or “postphenomenology” — suggests that bodily polymorphy can be most effectively interpreted via a “nonfoundational and nontranscendental” approach which attends to the rich variability of ways of knowing and being (Ihde, 1993: 7). Such a strategy is also uniquely able to account for both the ontic and epistemic inclinations or biases of tools themselves. As Zoë Sofia argues:

A philosophy of technology needs additional ways of thinking about the specific character of technological objects, instruments and processes; how they are experienced; how they may have their own ways of mediating knowledge and intention; and how they may exceed 'reason' as bearers of the unintentional dimensions of human practice (Sofia, 1993: 39)

In chapter two I also described how the substantial agency of technologies and objects of knowledge is deftly accommodated by Haraway’s material-semiotic actor

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and cyborg figure; she uses the strategy of narrating with postmodern scientific and mathematical metaphors in order to construct an interstitial possible/actual space for altered ontologies and epistemologies. The irreducible relationality of embodiment and knowledge, matter and language, as theorised by Haraway, continues to resonate throughout much of contemporary techno-theory, including this present work.

The post-phenomenological insights of corporeal feminists who in taking up the concepts of intercorporeality and body-image insist upon their socio-cultural, gender and equipmental specificity. In particular, corporeal feminism renders the body not as exo-somatic shell, but rather as ‘loaded’ with often obfuscating endo- somatic substances. As corporeal feminists argue, a critical and interdisciplinary morphology of the body in its cultural, visceral and prosthetic entirety is needed, particularly in the context and use of biomedical imaging. For each of the theoretical domains covered in chapter two, knowledge is a relational achievement, produced at the ‘crossover’ of subject and object, language and matter, body and tool. More importantly, they all share a fundamental attitude towards embodiment, somewhat reminiscent of Leibniz’s monadology: all bodies are in perpetual flux, with “parts… entering into them and passing out of them continually” (Leibniz, 1698). With these insights I argued for a non-essential ontology, in which both artifact and body are equiprimordial participants in the making of meaning and environment. Materially and semiotically, this relational existence is also both endo- and exo-somatic. That is, our own sense of individual and collective embodiment, of the capacities and limits of our bodies, is both an effect and cause of their sociotechnical morphology and technosomatic mutability. With this approach I then aimed to account for tele-mediated experience in terms of specific body-tool coalescences.

In chapter three, “The Corporeality of Technovision,” I described how state-of-the- art telematic apparatuses in medicine and virtual reality often work to perplexify the ordering and disembodying effects of perspectivalism and Cartesian ontological difference. Firstly, I discussed the continuing pervasion of the visualist metaphor in biomedical apprehensions of the body’s interior as discoverable terrain. Yet imaging of the body such as MRI comprises a complex technosomatic network which confounds the abstract, decorporealised and objectival status of scientific vision; it includes the pathologist’s expert sensory participation (modified according to the lisable requisites of the MRI tool), the perceptual inclinations of

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the apparatus and its demands on the patient’s body (as molecularly mutable by magnetic fields), and the body’s own visceral and recalcitrant specificities. The second body-tool case study of chapter three turned towards the virtual extendibility of the body’s sensorium in cyberspace and VR environments, arguing against the claim that telepresence is a mode of disembodiment. Our experience of telepresence and virtuality, I suggest, is not ‘new’ but a composite familiarity or consolidation of experiences gleaned from earlier tele-media such as radio and television. Moreover, such engagements have intercorporeal (technosomatic) specificities, remaking spaces and bodies partially according to the design of the apparatus. In what we might call conventional VR, the audio-visual display (HMD) and hand-control device (joystick, dataglove) are predominant navigational and spatialising components, following the default priorities given to eye, ear and hand in most telemedia interfaces. As Penny states: “VR fragments the body, giving rise to a powerful eye mounted on a fractured body” (Penny in Bender and Druckrey, 1994: 243). Yet the expectation of the hand-eye-ear as an increasingly normalised virtual technosoma can be deliberately challenged, as it is in Char Davies’ installations Osmose and Ephemere, which clearly show us that the body-space- technology articulation is not fixed but contingent and fluctuating. In a phenomenological analysis, both unconventional and more habitual virtual environments can be seen as imminent aspects of our collective corporeal schema, that is, as emergent somatologies.

In the final chapter, “Telebodies and Televisions,” I shifted focus and scope to the complex topology of domestic TV. Even this most commonplace tool elicits a medium-specific telesoma. The body-tool relation specific to TV is as multipartial as its equipmental field of use; in this chapter I explored both our experience of televisual space and our somatic involvement with the apparatus in terms of a number of fundamental spatial, corporeal and ontological tropes. Our daily interactions with the televisual, our movement between the various exo- and endo- televisual modes already at hand (as broadcast medium, video space, game console conduit), and our easy slippage between the virtual and the actual, between presence and absence, and between instrumental and corporeal embodiment, reflect an increasingly hybrid telesomatic being-in-the-world. Today, the televisual habitat is undergoing quite radical changes implemented by recent innovations in digital and interactive media; the narrowcasting and interactive potential of TV is undoubtedly changing again our sense of bodily boundaries —

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our corporeal schematics — and our sense of presence and agency in the everyday lifeworld.

A central presumption of my argument concerned the ontic continuity between technologies and embodiment, and between bodies and their locatedness in various equipmental domains. Not only does agency always-already perform the conflation of the cultural and the technical, for humans at least — as beings who have technosomatic bodies as a condition of their existence — corporeality, tools and their medium specificity are, for agency, of coincidental primacy. As I have argued, the theoretical trajectories of instrumental, corporeal, and cultural embodiment are not so much complementary as aspects of the same ontological argument. The human-technology relation is irreducible — being-in-the-world is not containable in either term but only explicable as a relational ontology. Again, the condition of our existence is as socio-technical or technocorporeal hybrids.

In many ways the ideas contained in this work began as an engagement with Haraway’s critical and materialist interpretation of technoculture, her notions of the material-semiotic actor and the cyborg, and my interest in the application of such a relational ontology to specific media interfaces. In particular, I was persuaded of an evolving cyborg subjectivity in Western social reality — an agency not exclusively human — and of enabling mytho-material narratives of boundary transgression and body-technology mergers. As Taylor and Saarinen so articulately put it:

The arrival of the cyborg is made possible by the gradual removal of the barrier separating exteriority from interiority, as well as public from private space. This collapse of differences proceeds in two directions at once: from outer to inner and, conversely, from inner to outer. On the one hand, the body is progressively colonised by prosthetic devices. Implants, transplants, artificial organs, artificial insemination, genetic engineering and synthetic drugs make it harder and harder to be sure where the so-called human ends and the non-human begins. On the other hand, artificial wombs, test- tube babies, artificial intelligence and computer literacy ‘externalise’ bodily and mental functions to such an extent that the outer is not more merely outer and the inner is not simply inner (1994).

Over a decade ago, in ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies’ Haraway (1991) quite radically claimed that organisms are made not born, and that our own bodies do not pre-exist as such but are “material-semiotic generative nodes” (1991: 208). In this study I have shifted this hybrid determination somewhat, so as to accentuate the technocorporeality of our agency and lifeworld-making practices. In this way, I

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have suggested that as phenomenological ground, the tool be understood as agentically equivalent to, and fused with, the soma; that is, as a variable but essential condition for knowledge. Ways of knowing and being are situated, partial and collaborative establishments, determined by cultural specificity, equipmental habitat and soma qua locus, approximating objects-of-knowledge always in terms of mobile “contextures” of sociotechnical activity. In this way, we are all technosoma, mutable relations of bodies and tools. In Volatile Bodies Grosz (1994) proposes that bodies are both organically and ontologically incomplete, awaiting transient moments of completion by way of cultural inscriptions. Yet this understanding by itself does not capture the non-organic ingredient of our morphology, for bodies are also the partial and iterable achievements of domains of equipment. In the context of the equipmental domain of televisuality, I have argued that our being and knowing are always-already telesomatic.

This technosomatic approach to the tele — of which the televisual is but one complex variation — has indicated that there is a need to rework some of the common parameters of corporeality and agency. As Robert Innis radically proposes, our current technologies have “provided us with the most controversial ‘body’ in the history of humanity” (Innis, 1984: 69). The ontology of telebodies is equivocal — an ambivalence not only of agency in Haraway’s sense, but also in terms of a corporeal mutability which is always also medium- or techno- specific. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in our easy adoption of the remote control device — the tool sui generis of the tele — which has today become so thoroughly embedded in both our individual and collective technosoma. What this work has proposed, then, are new ways of describing the expandable and pliable nature of our corporeal schemata, alternative metaphors for defining televisual modes of embodiment, and new ways of understanding how our spatial topologies and bodily boundaries are continually reinvented by tele-technological mediation.