Embodiment
Embodiment – Hanson, Lyotard
In New Philosophy for New Media Marc Hanson sets out to argue that the “digital image demarcates an embodied processing of information”. Hanson’s definition of embodiment is rooted in neuroscience perspective that focuses on the bodily mechanics of perception with emphasis on the visual register. The body experiences images in the center of indetermination. The center of interdetermination functions in Hanson’s essay as the periphery through which images enter human experience and where life occurs. Perception acts as a filter through which experiences are processed and changed thus embodied knowledge is never really “pure”. Perception alters are knowledge of everything. Hanson mentions the aim for researchers to achieve a “sightless ‘vision” and perhaps it is this, the alteration of knowledge through our own subjectivity, that causes the scientist so much discomfort. The “sightless’ vision” would allow for “pure” unaltered and total experiences while stripping away consciousness and any actual utility that such a thing would actually have as the results of the sightless vision could only ever be known through the imperfect sight we possess as human beings.
Both his notion of embodiment and affectivity (and their compound embodied affectivity) are derived from the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Hanson’s study is a narration from the object to embodied affectivity. He writes that “to the extent that this shift involves a turning of sensation away from an “object” onto its bodily source it can be directly correlated with the process of digitization currently well underway in our culture: for if the digital image foregrounds the processural framing of data by the body, what it ultimately yields is a less a framed object than an embodied, subjective experience that can only be felt” (12).
Lyotard makes good on an argument about the futility of constructing a sightless sight or life beyond life. His question of whether thought can go without a body is also a question of whether such a project is a worthwhile endeavor. In technological industry’s attempt to produce artificial life there’s a confounding desire for original purity – minds that capture and process everything and forget nothing – pure knowledge. It’s curious as such a life-form, because it “sees” and processes in such a way, is completely inhuman. The unique and imperfect nature of perception and memory are an integral part of life. These scientists have taken it upon themselves to decide what the next step of human evolution is going to be and in this way have rendered the human, with all its complexities and inefficiencies, as not good enough. In this way the conception of the inhuman human or the post-human, as Katheryn Hayles discussed, is relegated to hierarchical position above humanity.
Lyotard relies on a very flaccid understanding of gender construction as a trope for his argument about the dynamic relationship between mind and body. His discussion of gender renders it into a binary with a throwaway statement about how “there’s masculinity in women as well as femininity in men”. To put such an emphasis on gender difference and to render issues around gender, femininity and masculinity in such a simplistic way is irresponsible. The conflation of the social construction, the experience and the biological reality reinforces the very binary that he most likely wishes to deconstruct.
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