Fleshing it Out

While reading about issues of embodiment in Hayles' text, I couldn't help but think back to the phenomenological philosophers, specifically Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty (M-P), like Heidegger before him, was interested in dismantling the Cartesian division of body and soul, and the supremacy of a transcendental consciousness. Hayles' struggle against the disembodiment of information and virtual reality has echoes of M-P's attempts to weave consciousness back into flesh and flesh into consciousness.

Both theorists discuss issues of amputation and of tool use (prosthesis?). M-P writes a lot about the phantom limb phenomenon, and how it doesn't seem to fit a scheme of presence and absence. In one sense, the amputated limb is "there" because it is part of the amputee's construction of the world, his gestalt--indeed, the neural pathways (the negative space) still exist. Yet, if the amputee were to attempt to operate with the assumption of the limb's existence, he would falter and fail. That moment of failure is of great interest to M-P. This is the paradoxical moment in which the body is lashed to the present as the world around him flies out of his grip.

So, we have a situation in which, inextricably, the man has shaped the tool as the tool has shaped the man. Here I like to think about the notion of structural information, a communication that refers back to the communicator even as it reaches out. Just as the phenomenologists see consciousness and intentionality as that fluidity between inside and outside, so structural information becomes more action than thing.

The binary which splits subject from object, man from tool, doesn't function in the phenomenologists' dynamic scheme of consciousness. Thus, M-P introduces the intermediary notion of the "flesh." Flesh is a "style" or "texture" that allows a meeting-halfway of the perceiving consciousness and the perceived object; it is an irreducible distance or hinge between subject and object that ultimately subsumes the two poles into a fluidity.

This fluidity, for M-P, is what lays the groundwork for intersubjectivity. I don't think it is a stretch to derive the intersubjectivity of the web, of cyberspace, in a similar manner. As I become integrated with the net, my consciousness is open to a kind of alterity, a formless heterogeneity that somehow precedes and makes possible my own selfhood. Of course, this still allows for that wonderful moment of failure as the prostheses shut down and the world rushes into the valence of my body; it is the very limitation of embodiment (Levinas might refer to our inability to penetrate the opaque Other) which makes possible that state of vulnerability and openness toward the transcendent chaos (heterogeneity) of cyberspace.