{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":128,"pdf_page":141,"physical_index":141,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"567369a6f76bab2c007b92fe6a87ee02092047fba82e3313b666fd0b9c126306"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"Like Olalquiaga, Grosz sees in psychasthenia a perfect figure for the contemporary technologized lifeworld or, to cite her more descriptive terminology, for the “deceptive simulations\" of cyberspace. Insofar as it names a disturbance in the subject's capacity to differentiate itself representationally from its environment, psychasthenia marks a danger of contemporary culture—one that, for Grosz at least, has profound implications for the way in which gender has been written out of considerations of contemporary technological culture and, specifically, of virtual reality.\n\nIf psychasthenia is a danger in this sense (a danger endemic to our technoculture that is differentially experienced by differently gendered subjects), the reason is that it compromises the function of the body image as a mediator between self and world, body and environment, subject and space. Unable to represent one's position in space, and thus one's being, the psychasthenic subject suffers a kind of visuai objectification: it becomes a mere point in a space projected by another.\n\nLess obvious than the gender politics underwriting this understanding, however, is the prosthetic model of technics that lies behind it. For Grosz, as for Gail Weiss following in her wake, the body image functions to couple the subject and its biosocial environment and thus forms the proximate agent of any prosthetic modification of the human body. It is\n\nthe 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 (glasses, contact lenses, artificial limbs, surgical implants) in place of our sense organs.18\n\nBy insisting on the primacy of the body-image in mediating the interchange between subject and environment, Grosz ends up advancing a very conservative view of prosthetics: effectively, technological enhancements like virtual reality goggles (not to mention those she enumerates in the passage cited previously) can only have an impact on experience insofar as they are mediated by the body image. There is, for Grosz, no question that technological prosthetics might actually modify the way in which the senses work and, subsequently, the way in which the body experiences sensation; rather, as she puts it, prosthetic devices function in place of our sense organs\" as the vehicle of a substitute set of data for the body-image to compute.\n\nBODIES IN CODE\n\n128","previous_page":127,"next_page":129}