Disembodiment and Re-embodiment in Mass Communications:

Cyber-and Mechanistic-Spatiality and Perceptions of the Body

Abstract

This paper abstract will attempt to signify the spatial relationships of the body to mass communication methods and their respective technologies, looking to historical, contemporary, and future models. Specifically, this paper will examine humankind’s innate desire for disembodiment and re-embodiment using examples from theological, cultural, artistic, and technological references.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.¹

Any new form of technology has inherent pre-conditions that, while mostly unseen until retrospection demands acknowledgment, bring paradigmatic shifts, not merely to the functional attributes of the technology itself, but ultimately to the cultures that embrace its functions. Technological revolution creates cultural revolution in so much that societies changed even from the oral era to the written era; from written to print; print to electric; and electric to digital. Yet, despite seeming progressive orders of technology and culture, a commonality that subsists is humankind’s persistence in embodying the very tool which he uses, and the stasis that brings equilibrium is the goal of telepathic order: communication as extension of thought and cognitive embodiment within that extension.

The Oral Era gives little cues as to telepathic order in part because oral biomechanical communication demands proximal co-presence. Plato, however, articulates the precipice between the Oral Era and the Written Era in Phaedrus when he writes, ‘The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves….You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.’² Plato’s concerns illustrate his foreseeing of cultural change as an effect of technology and his discernment that the learners’ trust will shift from their internalized knowledge system to an externalized knowledge system, thus describing a new system, the written technology, that embodies knowledge for the learner. Plato also describes the art of rhetoric and that experienced rhetoricians, and learners in general, used an internalized technology known as the Art of Memory during oration. This process, similar to the method of loci and also called mnemotechnics, involved projecting conceptual knowledge into spatial architectures, visualized internally, in order to ‘acquire’ them up from the appropriate ‘room’ during recall. This spatial framework allowed forms and concepts to be interrelated, functioning similarly to interdisciplinarian activities and processes that cultures today might recognize as significant. Plato’s argument is the notion that young learners were transpositioning memories from their souls to an inanimate, written character, apart from them.

It is this very concept that is central to various themes in Judaism and Christianity, that mankind was created in the image of God, as an extrapolation of Divinity and as coming from the mind of God – His thoughts becoming corporeal. The original Hebraic word tselem for image in this sense connotes the idea of a resemblance, a representative, a figure. Yet, this notion is not reprimandable in either faith system as Plato was condemning the written word, corporeal to human thought. Divine authority according to the Torahic text, however, did reprimand the fashioning of carved, or made, images by man, this being found similar to Plato’s disdain for the ‘corporeality’ of spoken word into written word. In their book Visual Culture: An Introduction, John A. Walker and Sarah Chaplin reference mankind’s creation of images of God. They state:

In societies dominated by religious ideologies, control of the population’s behaviour was facilitated by the idea that God was watching and judging everyone all the time. The Christian God’s scrutiny was assisted by painted icons, murals and mosaic images showing God or His Son Jesus. Icons were present in churches and in virtually all homes. As explained earlier, the eyes in full-face portraits seem to follow viewers when they move. This visual effect reinforced the omniscience of God’s gaze. (p. 106-107) ³

The Torahic accounts of idolatry are well-known, even outside Judaism and Christianity, but less so is the concept that the reasons for such are that, according to Torahic text, God would see a shifting of internalized knowledge and concept of Him from his people towards and unto an external form that merely held a resemblance of the God concept, but which would justify being a simulated event, or a simulacra (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)⁴. The original Hebraic word t^emunah for image in this sense of image-making by man means: something portioned (i.e. fashioned) out, as a shape, i.e. (indef.) phantom, or (spec) embodiment, or (fig.) manifestation (of favor): -image, likeness, similitude. Inherent to the definition of the Hebraic concept of image-making is a perception of an immaterial body as either re-embodied in an inanimate form or the disassociation of the original concept from the learners due to cognitive disembodiment. In either perspective, mankind exhibits the propensity to envision an extension of anthropomorphic traits contained inside a mechanized form.

As written did to oral, so print did to written; with the advent of print technology came nationalism (as a politic and as a national identity), literacy, mass education, democratic learning, Protestantism, and various other reformations. Print technology allowed for accessibility and affordability, and, simultaneously, mobility. This mobility allowed thought to be carried farther distances, to various points and cultures and thus, print helped to instigate a larger audience beyond regional boundaries. Proximal co-presence was no longer necessary; ideas and concepts demanded no biomechanical vocalization. ‘Electronic technology’, as McLuhan points out, ‘encouraged unification and involvement’ in what he has termed the ‘Global Village’ and ‘mass man’, taking boundaries beyond national identities and into global identities. The global citizen, while a commonly used term presently, was at the time of early television for once able to see simultaneous events occur in real time around the world. McLuhanism is the critique of the idea of Modernism in that ‘electronic technology’ creates a denial of the self as individual and, as a somewhat prescient gesture towards a post-modern sense of identity, the acceptance of an individual amalgamized into a group identity, or ‘tribe’. ‘Global citizenship’ is an identificational term meant to reconcile individual behavior to the world identity.

Significant to McLuhan’s terminology while describing technology is the anthropomorphizing of semantics: ‘global village’, ‘tribe’, ‘mass man’, ‘figure/ground’, ‘electronic man’ all relate to corporeal experiences and how a figure interacts spatially, cognitively, behaviorally, and socially. He views technology as a social commons, where figures interact in disembodied spaces, using the physical mechanism of that technology as supplanter of a human body and thus inverting the very notion of body as one that is the mechanism itself. He states:

Any medium presents a figure whose ground is always hidden or subliminal. In the case of TV, as of the telephone and radio, the subliminal ground could be called the disincarnate or disembodied user. This is to say that when you are “on the telephone” or “on the air”, you do not have a physical body. In these media, the sender is sent and is instantaneously present everywhere. The disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electric information. It is these people who constitute the mass audience… ⁵

As radio, television, telephone, and, later, the personal computer, expanded to the vast majority of the public, the topic of technological omnipresence arose. Similar to print technology, ubiquity in electric technology allowed for the non-elite to communicate broadly, taking advantage of mass coupling. In many cases, biomechanical vocalization was still necessary at some point in the communication in radio, telephone, and television, even though television reruns were eventually offered. Yet, these forms of communication still circumvented the need for proximal co-presence between sender and recipient. Alternatively, McLuhan critiques technology as offering the disembodied omnipresence that is likewise ascribed to religious iconography, whereby proximal co-presence between man and mechanized image was dominant, but man and man (or man and God) was not. In the case of iconography, a bodily God was never envisioned in anthropomorphic terms, but rather it earmarked man’s latent desire to embody God’s Spirit within a man-made structure. A contemporaneous system of authorial omnipresence can be seen in totalitarian societies where dominance by a dictatorial presence is found in portraits and posters within homes and schools. Religious iconography was supplanted by such images of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and, recently, Saddam Hussein, all of whom used image-making as a form of disembodied presence, governmental surveillance, and attempts at thought extension. Democratic societies may exhibit more egalitarian televisual images, but much of it is dependent upon telegenics as this is the commodity of the recipients. In a remark about telegenicism, image-making, and propaganda, McLuhan states:

We may be approaching the time when political and executive figures may have to be recruited on the same basis as was formerly used for movie stars. Alternatively, it might be possible to transfer the Paul Newmans or John Waynes from the entertainment sphere to the political sphere directly in order to satisfy the need of people to be reassured by images that remind them of all the people they might have been in some ideal existence.⁶

These two spherical references, according to McLuhan, encounter each other within the televisual space, in which are enmeshed the actor and the politician, so much so that the identity of politician as actor becomes concluded, whereby actors exhibit embodiment of a false identity to convincingly portray their scripted character. Within the Digital Era, the internet becomes the televisual space, but more so, it becomes a social commons where identities are enmeshed with other online or on-air avatars. These social commons such as Facebook, mySpace, or various chat rooms mirror telegenicism as democratized to non-actors who select or craft their profile information and their avatar’s image to construct their online identity. Anthropologist Mizuko Ito contrasts the ‘space of the home’, where youth find parental governing obtrusive, to an alternative social space through texting where youth are able to “construct a localized and portable place of intimacy, an open channel of contact with generally three to five others.” ⁷ Ito continues, “Getting a mobile phone grants teenagers a degree of privacy and right of assembly previously unavailable, which they use to construct a networked alternative space that is available from anywhere they are.” ⁸

Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, raises the question, “Has the definition of ‘presence’ become uncoupled from physical places and reassigned to a social network that extends beyond any single location?” ⁹ He quotes Ito as saying, “As long as people participated in the shared communications of the group, they seemed to be considered by others to be present.”¹⁰ In earlier forms of mass communication, lack of co-presence was naturally understood; however, in telephonic and cyberspatial communications, it is increasingly thought, perhaps mainly in youth oriented subcultures, that co-presence exists despite geographical distances.

This form of co-presence, one lacking geographical proximity, demands re-consideration towards religious iconography, whereby the Spirit of God was thought to have embodied inside the mechanics of an inanimate device. In similitude, youth cultures that consider co-presence possible are doing so within the mechanics of their cell phone and cyberspace. Is the anytime, anywhere mobility re-enacting the omnipresence of early icons? Has contemporary culture removed a Divine spirit from the containing mechanism to replace it with themselves? ‘Avatar’ in its original definition is a Hindu term meaning “a manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form on earth; an incarnate divine teacher; an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea.” Is this truly disembodiment and reembodiment or merely a psychological simulation of these events, but which we falsely experience and believe just as convincingly as those that encounter out-of-body experiences? If it is disembodiment and re-embodiment, is it similar to the experiences of those having lost a body part and thus feel a phantom limb (the phantom limb concept many remark is possibly psychological rather than phenomenological)? ‘Smart prosthetics’, as I would term them, are replacing phantom limbs with prosthetics that utilize electrical/digital connectivity which in turn controls the prostheses just the same way our brain controls our biological limbs, via inter-neural thought-output. The ‘spirit’ of the former limb can now rest comfortably within a mechanized limb.

As Plato lamented over the loss of the conceptual to the physical form of the written word, and as the Judeo-Christian God made it reprimandable to make the concept of Him into a corporeal iconographic form, it is intriguing to find Camille Utterback’s opening sentence on her website’s artist statement as saying, “My work is an attempt to bridge the conceptual and the corporeal.”¹¹ Utterback’s interactive software ‘paintings’ evoke existentialist abstractions, particularly those of Jackson Pollock, by way of gestural bodily movement. While complex algorithms and patterns can be found in Pollock’s drip paintings, Utterback actually employs complex algorithms to create her pieces. Operating in an interactive public space not unlike the social spaces of Facebook, mySpace, or wiki software that encourages peer-topeer interaction, her pieces model themselves, somewhat presciently of self-assembly, after this p2p paradigm. Yet, the networked social spaces simulate social presence through notions of disembodiment even in times of physical isolation, while Utterback’s work brings these notions of social presence while the participants are still socially present. As viewers move about, a motion-sensing camera and video tracking software (similar to what is known as ambient intelligence) capture and respond to body movement to create the digital painting, thus their actions are embodied within the painting. Utterback becomes the facilitator, while others help contribute visually to the non-static, morphological painting. Artist Guilds, studio assistants, and apprenticeships have historically been involved in the creation of works of art and attributed to one individual; Utterback’s works carry this attribute into the digital sphere, but with the stipulation that the contributors contribute for free and without much benefit, a marked characteristic of Wikipedia and p2p file sharing.

As mankind seeks out alternative social spaces (some being cyberspatial, others telephonic), precursory telepathy, or simulations of it, emerge and allow for non-biomechanical communication. In group atmospheres, where individuals identify with the group socially, politically, or behaviorally, communication reinforces the group’s identity. McLuhan and Rheingold mention that group identity begins within these social commons; that is to say that groupthink occurs. Rhiengold’s ‘Smart Mobs’ raises topics and questions regarding collective agency; inherent in the title of his book is a sociologist’s definition of mob behavior. Artist and educator Golan Levin confronts mechanical telepathy and collective agency in his work ‘Dialtones: A Telesymphony’ (2001), by which attendees register their cell phones to be equipped with a specific ringtone. During the concert, on-stage performers act as conductors and call the attendees at specified times which results in a highly synchronized conduction of electronic and telesymphonic sound. An accompaniment is a synchronized lighting projection that illumines the attendees whose cell phones are actively ringing. An oversized ceiling-mounted mirror allows attendees to see the lit projection, but its efficacy really is in the visual representation of the audience as corporate body. The attendees, being both proximally and cyberspatially present, thus exemplified embodiment in a larger whole, an aggregate where each member is necessary for the collective construct and collective action. Yet, in Dialtones, each attendee had no physical or mental participation (in some much as their physicality and cognitive actions had no effect on the performance) and therefore became autonomous parts to the whole. Interestingly enough, those on-stage assisting Levin with his piece became the ‘controllers’ or the enactors of the collective body, thereby centralizing authority in similar fashion to McLuhan’s comments regarding politician’s telegenics and media communications to mass audiences.  With no criticism implied, the concert bears similarity to the previous dictatorial examples where a centralized body communicates to autonomous attendants who have no or little participatory actions that can greatly effect the collective action. The concert conceptually then is dependent upon the bodily reference to the audience and the telepathic notions of thought extension to the mass body, just as the head ultimately supercedes and controls the body. In his words regarding collective agency Levin explains, “If our global communications network can be thought of as a single communal organism, then the goal of Dialtones is to indelibly transform the way we hear and understand the twittering of this monumental, multicellular being.”¹²

Collaborative team Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault’s works are antithetical to collective participatory creation and instead allow viewers to see self-portraiture as interfaced with computers and software. Using computer mapping software, the team envisions the body as topographical forms, interjecting matrices in or on to their portraits, or at times, as the architectural matrix themselves, proposing the interwovenness of body and internet, or body and code. LoCurto and Outcault digitally reconfigure the long-standing genre but not at the cost of introspective intimacy or psychological interrogation with which the genre typically associates. In other portraits, shreds of flesh-colored ribbons connect and disconnect, at times opening up to flatten as strips of flesh and other times recoiling around a vacuous void as if yearning to become a form. When a form is managed, the portrait floats in another vacuous space, content yet discontent, seemingly trapped existentially within the space of the ethernet, or the space of an eternal past. This difficulty in discerning whether the form is primordial or eschatalogical beckons inquisition but perhaps answers itself by either collapsing space-time or by transitioning between two significant moments in human history: the end of humano-centric materialism and the beginnings of techno-centric spiritualism. Or, quite frankly, disembodiment from a human bodily structure to reembodiment into a techno-space.

Notes: Possible additional notes/citations to be included in revised version: Notes on Telepathic Order, including citations from current technological and scientific studies Ray Kurzweil – The Age of Spiritual Machines Jean Baudrillard – simulations and simulacra, icons, idolatry, panopticism; Michel Foucalt – panopticism; Torahic and Biblical accounts: God as incorporeal; inhabitation of tabernacles, tents, and arks; Christ as corporeal figure, vessels and contents.

References:

1. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967

2. Plato, Phaedrus, 370 BC

3. John A. Walker and Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction, p 106-107

4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1996

5. McLuhan, “A Last Look at the Tube”, New York magazine, 1978

6. McLuhan, unpublished essay, 1974

7. Mizuko Ito, Society for the Social Studies of Science Meetings, Boston, <http://www.itofisher.com/PEOPLE/mito/Ito.4S2001.mobile.pdf> (2001)

8. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, 2002, p. 5, conversation with Mizuko Ito, 2001

9. Rheingold, p.6

10. Ibid.

11. <http://www.camilleutterback.com/statement.html>

12. Golan Levin quote, New Media Art (2006), p.58, by Mark Tribe