Getting Under the Skin

49170Wegenstein 1/27/06 3:03 AM Page 1 new media/cultural studies GETTING UNDER THE SKIN Getting Under the Skin Body and Media Theory “Getting Under the Skin is a major contribution to the debate over the relation of new media to the Bernadette Wegenstein human body. Wegenstein argues convincingly against both the humanist defense of the body against foreword by Mark B. N. Hansen the ‘abstractions’ of mediated communication and against those who would ‘upload’ their conscious- ness and leave their ‘meat’ behind. Instead, she invents a third path that sees the body as always The body as an object of critical study dominates disci- already mediated. With great theoretical subtlety she explores the dialectic of the body and media plines across the humanities to such an extent that a from the Surrealists and Situationists, installation art, and experimental body performances to new new discipline has emerged: body criticism. In Getting media artists and architects. Wegenstein sheds striking new light on the all-important question of the Under the Skin, Bernadette Wegenstein traces contem- relation of humans to information machines.” porary body discourse in philosophy and cultural studies —Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine to its roots in twentieth-century thought—showing how psychoanalysis, phenomenology, cognitive science, and “Getting Under the Skin breaks the impasse over embodiment and disembodiment haunting recent feminist theory contributed to a new body concept—and studies in new media through a brilliant critical engagement with the traditions of phenomenology, studies the millennial body in performance art, popular psychoanalysis, and corporeal feminism. Arguing that our notions and experiences of embodiment culture, new media arts, and architecture. are enmeshed in a dialectical tension of fragmentation/holism framed by media, Wegenstein draws Wegenstein shows how the concept of bodily frag- on various sources of popular culture to demonstrate that at the turn of the millennium, the body has mentation has been in circulation since the sixteenth Bernadette Wegenstein is Assistant Professor turned into an ‘organ without a body’ or, better, into an ‘organ instead of a body.’ Her timely recon- century’s investigation of anatomy. The history of the of Media Study and Director of the Film Studies ceptualization of the body as the basis for media offers new direction for thinking about the body and body-in-pieces, she argues, is a history of a struggling Program at the University of Buffalo. human agency in an era of nanoscale fragmentation and rapidly blurring distinctions between hard- relationship between two concepts of the body—as frag- ware and life.” mented and as holistic. Wegenstein shows that by the —Tim Lenoir, Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies in Society, Duke University twentieth century these two apparently contradictory movements were integrated; both fragmentation and holism, she argues, are indispensable modes of imagin- ing and configuring the body. The history of the body, therefore, is a history of mediation; but it was not until the turn of the twenty-first century and the digital revolu- WEGENSTEIN tion that the body was best able to show its mediality. After examining key concepts in body criticism, Wegenstein looks at the body as “raw material” in twentieth-century performance art, medical techniques for visualizing the human body, and strategies in popular culture for “getting under the skin” with images of freely floating body parts. Her analysis of current trends in GETTING UNDER THE SKIN architecture and new media art demonstrates the deep BODY AND MEDIA THEORY connection of body criticism to media criticism. In this approach to body criticism, the body no longer stands in for something else—the medium has become the body. The MIT Press BERNADETTE WEGENSTEIN Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 http://mitpress.mit.edu Cover art: Gabi Trinkaus, J’adore (2005). Courtesy Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna. 0-262-23247-2 Getting Under the Skin Getting Under the Skin The Body and Media Theory Bernadette Wegenstein The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Every effort has been made to contact those who hold rights for each of the images. Any rights holders not credited should contact the author so a correction can be made in the next printing. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wegenstein, Bernadette Getting under the skin : the body and media theory / Bernadette Wegenstein. p. c.m. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-23247-2 1. Body image. 2. Mass media. I. Title. BF697.5.B63W42 2006 306.4613—dc22 2005052045 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Of the Despisers of Body “It is unto the despisers of body that I shall say my word. It is not to re-learn and re-teach what I wish them to do; I wish them to say farewell unto their own body—and be dumb. ‘Body I am and soul’—thus the child speaketh. And why should one not speak like the children? But he who is awake and knoweth saith: ‘Body I am throughout, and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for a something in a body.’ Body is one great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a heardsman. I go not your way, ye despisers of body! Ye are no bridges to beyond-man!” Thus spake Zarathustra. —friedrich nietzsche, THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA: A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE Contents foreword by mark hansen ix preface xvii acknowledgments xxi 1 making room for the body 1 2 body performances from 1960s wounds to 1990s extensions 37 3 how faces have become obsolete 79 4 the medium is the body 119 notes 163 index 207 Foreword Mark Hansen According to historian Bernard Andrieu, the trio of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science/artificial intelligence has yielded—as the twentieth century’s legacy to the history of the body—an “epistemological dispersion of the human body.” Through their cumulative impact, these disciplines have challenged prevailing conceptions of the body as an integral organization that is bounded by the skin and differentiated systemically from the environment, offering instead a picture of the body-in-pieces. While this revolution in the conception of the body—together with the invention of what has been called “body criticism” (Stafford)—picks up on a long-standing history of body fragmentation dating back at least to the invention of modern anatomy in the sixteenth century, it is only in the twentieth century and, indeed, in the wake of these above-named disciplinary inventions, that the concept of body fragmentation can be integrated into a holistic body concept, producing a new and finely nuanced conception of the body as a complex form of mediation or, better, as the potentiality informing mediation per se. In Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory, Bernadette Wegenstein ex- tends the scope of Andrieu’s suggestion by laying out the gradual process through which the body, itself subjected to radical mediation, ultimately is ex- posed as the general potential for mediation at the end of the twentieth century. Through a keenly balanced mix of theoretical argumentation and exemplifica- tion, Wegenstein demonstrates both how the reconciliation of fragmentation and holism under the banner of Andrieu’s disciplinary trio offers a new under- standing of embodiment (distinct from the static body) as a dynamic process encompassing alterity, and also how the advent of new media has intensified the dispersion of the body to a critical point. At once a genealogy of mediation and a status report on contemporary media, Wegenstein’s study performs the crucial task of filling in the historical void that has functioned in criticism over the last decade to disjoin the study of modernity, now vastly expanded in scope, from explorations of the so-called new media revolution. In the process, Getting Under the Skin foregrounds the continuity of the latest digital technologies, together with the cultural and artistic practices they support, with the history of West- ern society in the modern period. Its broad scope and evenhanded tone may make Getting Under the Skin the book that can heal the divisions and disjunctions between die-hard modernists (and there are certainly more of these today than ever) and those of us, myself included, who feel that keen attention to the technico-material conditions of life and of knowledge production—which today means, above all, the digital computer—constitutes nothing less than the very basis for critical analysis of culture, be it historical or contemporary in scope. By focusing her study of mediation on the history of the human body, Wegenstein is able to highlight both the continuity and the novelty of the digital in relation to prior technical regimes. For this very reason, her study is perfectly positioned to forestall reac- tions, which are all too common to those of us working in the area of new media, that accuse us critics—and the artists and practitioners about whose work we write—of reinventing the wheel and of ignoring the precedent of history. In this sense, Wegenstein’s explorations of 1960s body art or Dada performance or sixteenth century anatomical treatises are every bit as important to the argu- ment of Getting Under the Skin as is her analysis of contemporary media art and architecture practices; insofar as they do stand on their own, these explorations make forcefully clear the contention here advanced that the digital cannot be understood in a historical vacuum.

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