Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

mark b. n. hansen

bodies in code

bodies in code

interfaces with digital media

mark b. n. hansen

Routledge York London

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contents

The Author vii
Preface ix
Introduction: From the Image to the Power of Imaging:
Virtual Reality and the "Originary" Specularity of
Embodiment

1. All Reality Is Mixed Reality
2. The Power of Imaging and the Privilege of the Operational 6
3. Virtual Reality as Embodied Power of Imaging 14

Part I: Toward a Technics of the Flesh 23
Bodies in Code, or How Primordial Tactility
Introjects Technics into Human Life 25

1. "Make Use of What Nature Has Given Us!" 25
2. Body Schema As Potentiality 38
3. Technics and the Dissolution of the Body Image 43
4. Specularity beyond the Mirror-Image 53
5. All Exteriorizations Are Exteriorizations of the Skin 59
6. Primordial Tactility 67
7. Seeing through the Hand 71
8. Worldskin 82
9. The Tele-Absent Body 94

Part II: Locating the Virtual in Contemporary Culture 105
2 Embodying Virtual Reality: Tactility and
Self-Movement in the Work of Char Davies 107

1. The Primacy of Self-Movement in Conferring Reality

on Perception 113

1. Beyond the Body-Image: Embodying Psychasthenia 126

3 Digitizing the Racialized Body, or the Politics
of Common Impropriety 139

1. Beyond Symbolic Interpellation: Understanding

Digital Performativity 142

1. Beyond Visibility: the Generalization of Passing 145

3."Corporeal Malediction" and the "Racial-Epidermal
Schema" 147

1. From Negrophobia to Negrophilia 156
2. Mobilizing Affectivity beyond the Image 163
3. Forging the Affection-Body 168

4 Wearable Space 175

1. Encountering the Blur 178
2. The Architectural Body 183
3. The "Interiority" of Architecture 191
4. Internal Resonance 197
5. A New Organicism 199
6. Wearing the Blur 210

5 The Digital Topography of House of Leaves 221

1. The Digital 229
2. Media 232
3. Body 238

Notes 253
References 299
Bibliography 309
Index 319

V

BODIES IN CODE

vi

the author

Mark B. N. Hansen teaches cultural theory and comparative media studies in the English department and is on the Committee for Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Michigan 2000) and New Philosophy for New Media (MIT 2004), as well as numerous essays on cultural theory, contemporary literature, and media. His essay, "The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life" appeared in Critical Inquiry in Spring, 2004. He has coedited (with Taylor Carman) The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty and is currently coediting two volumes: Critical Terms for Media Studies (with W. J. T. Mitchell) and Neocybernetic Emergence (with Bruce Clarke). His current projects include: The Politics of Presencing, a study of embodied human agency in the context of real-time media and computing, Becoming Human, an ethics of the posthuman, and Fiction after Television, a study of the novel in the age of digital convergence.

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