Invitations and Becomings

Reading Bernadette Wegenstein's Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006
I picked this book up while killing some time in the library before a very annoying meeting on Wednesday. I won't go into the details of that meeting, but the meeting I was coming out of prompted me to look at possible cross-overs between my thesis and Media Theory. I think Wegenstein's book popped up via a search for phenomenology and media. In any case, it's got me quite excited, largely because of the kinds of reading this book promises to open up.
I mentioned elsewhere that I have always thought of my relationships with philosophers as a kind of erotic encounter - covering the entire range from domestic bliss (Merleau-Ponty) to childish love-hate (Nietzsche) to prostitution (Husserl). Well, Wegenstein (can I call you Bernadette?) just seems to push all my buttons. The materiality of the body; Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology; Liz Grosz's corporeal feminism, for a start... but (and this is where my pulse starts to race) all brought to bear on the task of updating the study of modernity to take account of new media.
Mark Hansen puts it nicely in his Foreword: "If some dissolution of bodily boundaries seems to be an undeniable fact of our contemporary experience ..., then the critical problem to be addressed must be that of rethinking what the experience of human embodiment - the experience of embodiment that is constitutive of the human - is in our world today." (xi)
And later: "What Wegenstein is telling us is that the human today is a being whose integrity as a being comes from its utter dispersion..." (xiii)
That is, rather than resisting the disembodiment thesis which claims that the body disappears within contemporary technoculture, Wegenstein can (I think, I'm reaching here) argue that this disappearance is precisely the constitutive labour of the body. The body does indeed disappear into technoculture. However, this is not the death of the body, but rather what it does: it's very mode of being. It's surprising that Wegenstein doesn't seem to mention Drew Leder, who arguably introduced the concept of the disappearing (or absent) body. It's also tantalising, since it leaves dangling the companion notion of the "dysappearing body" - the presencing of the body as pathological.
Disappearance as a constitutive labour of the body also leaves open the possibility, explored by Wegenstein, that this disappearance into technoculture is nonetheless always particular. A sense of embodiment, as a manner of inhabiting a situation, is still preserved. In this way, Wegenstein seems to
be able to have her cake and eat it too. New media, as the continuation of the dispersion of the body that began with the cybernetic revolution of the 1960s, do not however provide the conditions for a genderless, race-less, etc mode of being. We are not, cognitive science and AI notwithstanding, on the precipice of an age in which the fantasy of a radical freedom from historical or social constraints, or downloading one's consciousness onto the web, become a reality. If you like, the body may disappear, but differences in modes of embodiment do not.
Disembodiment is not, then, the absence of these constraints, but the surplus of the productivity of the body over and above its expression in (dispersion into) any systemic terms. As Hansen puts it: "disembodiment itself paradoxically becomes an irreducible dimension of embodiment" (xiv).
One final point, because this isn't supposed to be a review. Though it shows how much mileage you can get out of a quick scan, doesn't it!
Without getting hung up on deep incompatibilities (as if philosophy begins in the depths, anyway!) Wegenstein allows herself to blend Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach with D&G's critique of organ-ization and territorialisation (no, Belinda, not Dolce & Gabbana, Deleuze and Guattari - but you knew that already, didn't you). Even if this doesn't provide a de facto reconciliation, it offers at least a topic of discussion via which a phenomenologically inclined Merleau-Pontyan like me can engage more fully with D&G.
Anyway, there's enough here to keep me amused for quite a while. I will try to keep you posted, as I get into the thick of the text. Of course, if any of you want to read this along with me, please let me know.