[-empyre-] Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures”

[davin heckman]

Melinda (and everyone else),

I am sorry to have let my participation lapse...  between grading and
a lot of other obligations, I have dropped out for a while.  BUT, I am
really interested in this month's topic and have been quite fascinated
by what I have read so far.

I want to respond to Melinda's question:

> i'm imagining a future of wearables that work on electrodermal activity,
> that feed both off and back into the body and the bodies, environments and
> networks around them - and i'm DEFINITELY NOT thinking along the lines of
> the old "father of cybersex" stahl stenslie's full-body, tele-tactile
> communication system -cyberSM of 1993. We should have come a long way in
> this area in 20 years -- but have we?

I think that there is a good question about the spectacular way in
which we have imagined wearable technology in the past, and the way it
actually looks once said technology is incorporated into being.  I
think that Heidegger's discussion of "dwelling" and being are useful
here.  I recall in my own dissertation research on smart houses, I was
dealing with similar issues:  The difference between the spectacular
futurism of the previous cultural imaginary and the more modest
futurisms of the present.  Leaning on Foucault's "Technologies of the
Self," think the true full-body, tele-tactile system would be realized
primarily in psychic terms.  That the apparatus itself could be
shrunken and minimalized might, perhaps, be the sign of its
centrality.  When we talk about SM as a sort of fantasy role-play, it
seems to lend itself to a certain amount of setting, staging,
costuming, and external markers that seem to exist precisely to shore
up the fantasy in the absence of real sadism/masochism.  When we talk
of truly sadistic behavior, not as a role-play, it usually presents
itself as its opposite.  For instance, abuse often marked by elaborate
performances of domestic harmony?  So, we might be talking about the
difference between fantasies about technology that we wish could
release us from responsibility for our actions AND/OR extend our
power....  and real technologies that could conceivably do the inverse
rob us of responsibility (via compulsory connectivity) AND/OR hold us
accountable (via surveillance).  While a house is very different from
a jumpsuit in a certain sense, as these objects relate to our being,
our presentation in the world, and the memory we manage...  they are
quite similar.  So, maybe we haven't come a long way, except in the
sense that we have to live with the actual technologies, rather than
merely signify them through fashion.

A second useful thing to think about, and pardon me if I am
inadvertently repeating a point made earlier in the month, is that
Bourdieu's discussion of the habitus.  Here you have a term for the
person's immediate region of consciousness which can be expressed
through dress, posture, voice, vocabulary, identity, thought.  I am
particularly keen on seeing the resonance between wearable technology
and more archaic notions of habitus, particularly the religious habit,
which is a garment that denotes a way of being.  BUT it also
habituates the individual towards a mode of being.   In this sense,
the wearable technology departs from sensory signification and
migrates more towards modifying action and interaction (which is what
clothing has done historically), but does so with a programmed memory
and more deeply codified structure.  In other words, the interactions
do not carry the same sort of performative character that old cloths
might have required to legitimate their function (i.e. a police
uniform requires a certain performance of virtual authority, while the
gun and billyclub perform a sort of ultimate actual authority).

I am still trying to creep through the month's messages.  But this
represents the half-baked form of my thinking on what I have read so
far.  I am hoping that whoever makes it to Istanbul might want to sit
down and talk about this stuff face to face.

Peace!

Davin