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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. ________________________ 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 — 1 — 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. — 2 — 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. — 3 — 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.