Beyond the Body: Arthur Kroker's Body Drift

Discussion on Roy Christopher's blog.

Kroker_Body coverOnce declaring that an individual is a “montage of loosely assembled parts,” and furthermore that when “you are on the phone or on the air you have no body” (p. xxix), Marshall McLuhan (1962) dismembered the body. Our media might be extensions of ourselves, but they’re also prosthetics, amputating parts as they extend them, turning us into cyborgs. If we are and always have been cyborgs (Clark, 2003), then where does the body end and the media begin?

Judith Butler (1990) reassembles the body as “culturally intelligible” (p. 167). That is, as one that is recognized by the members of its society, what Sandy Stone (2001) calls the “legible body” (p. 195). On the phone, on the air, or online, you are “read” as a member. Stone also postulates the “illegible body” that exists “quantumlike in multiple states” (p. 196): “Their social system includes other people, quasi people or delegated agencies that represent specific individuals, and quasi agents that represent ‘intelligent’ machines, clusters of people, or both” (p. 196). Bringing Bulter, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway together, Arthur Kroker’s Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) tackles these theorists and their theories in turn. His “body drift” is not just the fragmentation of the body into different codes and constructs, as Stone does (e.g., gendered, sexualized, augmented, virtual, etc.), but also the fact that concerns about the body haven’t been marginalized by technological evolution as largely predicted. Just as telecommuting de-emphasizes place (i.e., we can work from anywhere) as it reemphasizes it (i.e., where we are matters more), not having a body or having a technologically mediated one now matters in a different way. Under the themes of contingency, complexity, and hybridity, Kroker provides an introduction to and synthesis of the thought of three major feminist critics and what it means for the body to drift.

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Published in: RoyChristopher.com