xxxvii. Barbaras goes even further in instituting the philosophical perspective that views the world and the body as ontology and phenomenologization, respectively. The endpoint of this analysis, at least where the body is concerned, is the dissolution of all body boundaries in favor of a generalized sensibility "that is without assignable subject”:
The self-relation that characterizes sensibility is accomplished only as self-difference, an exteriority in the form of a divergence between touching and touched hands. In truth, neither of the two hands is strictly speaking sensing or sensed; nowhere can one isolate a moment of pure consciousness or a moment of pure passivity. One must instead speak of an axis of equivalence—the possibility of changing roles—which is dismembered by what it joins together. Corporeity corresponds to the moment of difference; consciousness corresponds to the moment of reversibility, which is only the other side of the preceding moment.
The ultimate consequence of this understanding is to institute the écart as the operator of a sensory continuum and correspondence that remains distinct, however, from a sensus communis (because different senses disclose different worlds):
This relationship can be generalized, as we have seen, to the other senses. Every sensation, vision or touch, is in accordance with every other through this possibility of reversion. Such is the sense of the flesh: a unity that is realized only as possibility of passage, equivalence without principle between singular sensibilities. Now, to the degree that this carnal unity merges with the articulation of its differences, it cannot be understood as a closed unity—it also differs from itself. (245)
xxxviii. The description that follows owes much to the “Interval Trip Report" of Ars Electronica jury chairman (and influential media artist) Michael Naimark and it corresponds to the version of the work as it was originally presented. The report can be found on Naimark's Website: http://www.naimark.net/writing/trips/ars98trip. html, accessed 7/26/05.
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