Getting under the Skin: The body and Media Theory (Bernadette Wegenstein) MIT Press

Foreword by Mark Hansen

what does Wegenstein argue agasint?

1) ix   "challenged prevailing conceptions of the body as an integral organization that is bounded by the skin and differentiated systematically from the environment"

2) Katherine Hayles    how information lost its body
xi      the burden of Hayles's argument is to demonstrate the impossibility of a disembodied instance of information, since the latter always must take on some concrete material form.
Rather than expanding discussion of how humans are now "seamlessly articulated with" computers (Hayles) or how humans retain a distinct form of embodiment that differs categorically from the materiality of computers, even though the two can be "interactively coupled" through "indirection"(Verela, Hansen), Wegenstein here charts her own course: specifically, by welcoming the capacity of the (human) body to disappear, while insisting in the incapacity of (human) embodiment to do likewise.

Xii-Xiii  Thus, she can insightfully claim that "the holistic discovery of the body as constitutive mediation has converged with an age of mediatic proliferation, such as what we are in fact witnessing in the apparent continuing fragmentation of body is the work of mediation itself as the body." ...Wegenstein here clarifies exactly how the terms for the holism or integrality of embodied function now coincide perfectly with the radical fragmentation of the body."

Xii the human as a form of distributed embodiment, an "organ instead of a body," that does not so much demarcate itself against an environment as extend seamlessly and robustly into the now ubiquitously digitized technosphere.

XV Her conception of human embodiment as distributed, temporary, and organ-centered manages to reconcile the humanist dimensions of McLuhan's thesis (those dimensions most distasteful to Kittler) with a post humanist conception of technics, demonstrating in the process that technical autonomy need not come at the expense of human perceptual ratios.




Conclusion chapter
161  As new technologies have allowed for the opening of the body and its dispersal into fragmentation of information, these technologies have in turn served as strategies for understanding and ultimately controlling the body, which artists, architects and others have deployed in the realization of the new bodily configurations. What the outcome of this process may mean in the long run certainly is not yet determined.

In this understanding there is no body as "raw material," which would imply that there is something like an original body, a body that is prior to inscription and semanticization. But no, the current body under the influence of media technologies can merge and bend; and by inhabiting it, we– the viewer-participants can become part not only of its genotype, but also of its phenotype.... What is at stake in these examples is a holistic body notion that has been fed or informed by a fragmented body.... But the output of this process does not assume a unified subject that archives its "wholeness" only through the interrelation of the various body parts. The holism in question in these media art and architecture installations is of a different kind. It is a holism that authorizes every bit and every piece of the fragmented body to take over the body as a whole, to serve as interface. In late-twentieth -century popular culture the body and all its organs no longer simply serve as a medium of expression, as a semiotic layer toward the outer world. Rather, the body and its parts themselves have adopted the characteristics of a medium, wherein lies the return to a holistic body concept.

Chapter 1 Wegenstein's summary of Hayles
(p10) According to N. Katherine Hayles, the post human is not a being, but a point of view that privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, that views consciousness as an epiphenomenon rather the seat of human identity( a perspective similar to that of Friedrich Nietzsche or Martin Heidegger), that considers the body as an original but replaceable set of prostheses, that– most important– is capable of seamlessly articulating humanness with intelligent machines. For Hayles, the "posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material - informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.(p 3 in how we became posthuman)"