[-empyre-] forward from Navjotika Kumar

[Timothy Murray]

Hello empyreans,

I'd like to pick up on the discussion of flows from last week and 
turn to Virilio's conception of the flows between bodies and 
technologies as created by the blurring of the boundaries between 
humans and machines. Virilio invokes the body under siege as it is 
invaded internally by "micromachines that travel through it in all 
directions without causing pain" and externally as it is rendered 
telepresent. He regards interactivity as disintegrative of bodies and 
the interconnected body's inertia or "its loss of a sense of its own 
energy" as the basis for re-conceiving it in terms of the disabled 
body or "a whole new episode in the history of prosthetics which is a 
history of debilitation." On one hand, this disintegrative meltdown 
of the body is liberating - especially for the purposes of 
cyberfeminism when it can be used to develop a cyberimaginary or as a 
tool for self-construction. On the other, for Virilio it remains 
largely debilitating. He writes: "with biomechanical extension on the 
one hand and 'energy' ablation on the other, the individual of the 
technoscientific age effectively loses the capacity to experience 
himself as a center of energy; he becomes useless and will eventually 
become totally superfluous when faced with the automation of his 
productive and perceptual function.." In what sense, if at all, is 
the dream of autogenesis, as embraced and articulated by the Italian 
Futurists, transformed for the "multiplied man" (with "surprising 
organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks") of the 
digital age whom Virilio images as both radically extended and 
severely handicapped? Are the practices of artists like Sterlac and 
Orlan that ecstatically embrace digital, medical, prosthetic, and 
mass-media technologies to enact extreme self-fashionings or to 
realize a post-gender, post-evolutionary body whose ontology is 
cyborgian, a form of "paradoxical autogenesis" - an autogenesis that 
is (dis)empowering even as it renders malleable the very notion of 
"the human" or opens it up to constant flux....?        

Navjotika Kumar
Kent State University
>


-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853