Abstract
The contemporary digital media ecology is one of convergence and hybridity. As
virtual and technical interfaces intersect in increasingly complex formulations, the
ability to identify organic vs. technical forms has become problematic. Virtual
environments predominate within “everyday” cultural practice arguably limiting
“real” or unmediated human experience. The advent of social media artifacts
and networks in particular — those that create fusions of personal experience and
communal activity and that support and broadcast user-generated content as a
foundation for media productions of real-life — have made organic bodies and personal
experience difficult to discern.
Extending Mark B.N. Hansen’s model for identifying embodied experience within
contemporary “mixed reality” culture, I argue
that embodied expression is more, not less, present in the contemporary media age.
Organic expressions, those that emanate from primal, tactile, and motile forces and
that operate prior to formal mediatization, are at the core of many social media
artifacts circulated within the networks of contemporary culture and operating
outside the aesthetics of traditional semiotic representation. Recovering the organic
body and foregrounding its presence in such media asserts the functional
non-aesthetic principles at work in many social media forms, particularly in those
dependant on documenting the minutiae of real-life under-represented in mainstream
and traditional media. As personal and public spaces collide, situating the “me”
or the embodied subject within production is problematic. I identify such embodiment
within contemporary social media, particularly on YouTube, to illustrate that the
human body does not operate from a position of “erasure” within social media
networks and artifacts, and its expressive value is therefore central in much current
user-generated me-dia.
In this age of heightened media and genre convergence, the depths and surfaces for
considering the relationship between virtual and physical forms of embodiment require a
nuanced perspective. The shift in media production and broadcast practices from
predominantly mainstream outlets with mass audiences who consume
professionally-developed content sourced from specialized technicians and technical
apparatus has been radically altered. The introduction of Web 2.0 principles and
practices and the development of social media networks in the late 1990s and early 21st
century marked a definitive shift in the elemental foundations of digital media culture.
User-generated content now circulates via internet technologies in dynamic
micro-networks of equivocal exchange, bypassing industrial media methods and outlets for
production, distribution, and exchange, while fusing producer and consumer into what
Axel Bruns terms hybrid
produsers
[
Bruns 2008, 2]. As the product and the producer converge, the
(in)ability to clearly discern one from the other has extended theoretical
considerations about real and virtual designations within internet-based technological
and media innovations. In the decade before, in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s,
web-based media, along with digital art and hypermedia forms and applications, underwent
fast-paced revision and innovative reconstruction. The methods of inscription and the
expressive and creative capabilities for computer-mediated production reconfigured not
only the technologies, but the complex cultural networks that supported them. As
distribution practices enabled rhizomatic content structures (and infrastructures) and
as convergent media forms proliferated, the bodies (text-bodies, author/user-bodies,
machine-bodies, for example) engaged by these innovative transformations became
increasingly complex.
Currently, digital media
remix culture is one where “real
life” (RL) and “virtual life” (VL) structures have
migrated more fully from the desktop to otherly-mediated life worlds, and they occupy
all states in-between. The space one occupies, for example, in the
twitterverse, the term in common usage to describe the network engaged
by the micro-blogging application Twitter, exemplifies such ambiguity and malleability.
The term twitter
verse itself underscores the conceptual pseudo-spatial
dimensions it occupies. It evokes the materiality of planetary outer-
space,
as well as the universal expansiveness of the celestial bodies that orbit within the
social media networks they engage, in infinite and intricate patterns, only partially
discernible to the theoretician’s naked eye. One’s own
tweets (messages)
are able to migrate from hand-held to desktop displays, confusing or eliding the site of
real vs. virtual production. I can tweet my location, thereby affirming
my
presence in both real and virtual spaces, but also as part of a collective: “I (/We) am (/are) (t)here.” Twitter
content too is labile and may comprise numerous forms, modes of inscription, and states
of being. The twitter user serves multiple functions, as: diarist; locative
documentarian; disseminator of others’ content (via re-tweets); photographer or
videographer; corporate mouthpiece, or pawn, circulating or advertising other media; or
merely as a gateway or conduit to other equally distributed networks — to Facebook,
YouTube, Flickr. Self-fashioning in social media is as fluid as the networks through
which data circulates, and the possibilities for dis-
playing one’s self,
for performing one’s experiences, move far beyond the virtual identity crises and
cyber-theatrics once reflected in the work of Sherry Turkle, Brenda Laurel and others to
account for life on the screen-stage enabled by computer media. For Lawrence Lessig, the
“hybrid economies” supported by the
new social media networks are driven by their association with a slippery dialectic
structure and ever-shifting oscillation between personal and private spaces, grassroots
and corporate interests, and global vs. local community interests [
Lessig 2004]. Experiences are circulated through a variety of alternate,
other, and liminal states of in-between-ness, and shifting allegiance. Uncovering the
embodied source(s) of such highly convergent mediations and experiences necessitates new
theoretical perspectives to account for organic vs. technical structures and for RL vs.
VL constructions in an age where social networking practices intersect with personal
expressiveness.
To enable creative and critical expression and critique, and to address the texts and
bodies supported by current emergent digital media forms, I propose the human body and
its relation to technical mediation is a core site for investigation. An understanding
of the human body, both as a stimulant for expressing organic forms of agency and
production as well as a primal site from which to establish the dynamic dimensions of
new technical interfaces, particularly the complex ones supported within socially
networked media, is critical for future digital media studies. Embodiment as a state of
organic (non-technical) and sensory being-ness — one that foregrounds its physicality
and its tactility and serves as a necessary force for technical rendering, or
representative mediation — cannot exist as a discursive abstract in contemporary media
theory. Its conceptual position as a referent within representation (within traditional
discourse), and therefore outside of the expressive, anti-aesthetic (social-)media
politics informing emergent contemporary media forms, is not adequate to account for the
primacy of the physical body. This organic reference point situates and contextualizes
much of social media and its networks of exchange. Embodied expression, that is, organic
communication that originates prior to pure external mediation, particularly prior to
mediation through visual means, offers a provocative site from which to investigate the
networks of social media. However, recognizing the embodied or internal experiences of
social media is particularly challenging. Most social media and networks, on the
surface, seem hyper-invested in creating overt visual displays or public performances,
mediatized externalization as a means of communicating private, personal experience. One
may consider, for example, the overt/covert use of visuality and internalization on
YouTube. This online user-generated video platform supports predominantly visual media
as a cover for circulating private experience. All manner of personal expression is
rendered into video clip micro-documentaries and shared with a community of users, who
may further circulate, comment, and edit it. Its communicative media power lies in the
connective tissue built in the personal network of exchange that stem from
produsing private internal expression, not in the externalized
aesthetics of the videos (which are often low budget and low quality). In other such
social networks (Facebook, Daily Booth), personal and public spaces converge, rendering
the “me,” or the embodied (interiorized, organic)
subject within media production, subverted. In this analysis, I track a historical
context for considering the relationship between organic bodies and digital intervention
and illustrate ways in which the human body currently operates as an expressive referent
within social media networks. Drawing particularly on examples from YouTube, a social
media network overtly dependant on visual content, I demonstrate that internal
expression and pre-subject, pre-aesthetic organic value, is central in much current
user-generated me-dia. The pre-aesthetic impulse is one that
I identify as a primal desire towards creative production and display. Deeply connected
to one’s sense of embodied being-ness and need to express, it is, nevertheless, outside
a model of aesthetic production bound to traditional representative models for artistic
creation — to photography, painting, cinema, theatre, and literature, for example.
Social me-dia, I argue, operate and circulate with a deep
connectedness to experience-production. That is after all its trademark, a proliferation
of personal artifacts, radically increasing with each new iterative media type, or
spontaneous desire to self-promote or to share. And yet its connection to the subject
and site of production, the “me,” is one which
depends on a configuration of the material body where organic (vs. technical) material
is a primary element of creation. The body of social me-dia,
as such, is not overwritten by the technical apparatus that seemingly mediates it. Mark
B.N. Hansen, particularly in his work Bodies in Code: Interfaces
with Digital Media, offers the most radical, yet direct course to discover
(recover) organic bodies and to resist such external and technically dominant models.
Furthermore, he offers an intriguing perspective from which to explore the inherent
organicism in contemporary social media practice and forms, particularly those that
appear overtly ocularcentric, or visually-dependent and which are tied to aesthetic
expression.
As we move into the embodied spaces of social media, where the call to “Broadcast Yourself” is fully embraced by
a next wave of user-generating content-subjects, one may ask, what is the content of
such subjects, and how do they
matter in the new media ecologies that
spa(w)n them? New hybrid virtual and physical inscription spaces, social media spaces, I
argue, have become more than surfaces for writing reality and are now complex mediated
life worlds where inscription is no longer a metaphoric practice but an act of
(pre-)self/real-world environmental coupling, inadequate to be viewed from the
perspective of discursive representation. Hansen’s models for recognizing the
relationships between real and virtual bodies and worlds, and for revealing the
underlying tactile and motile forces that resist abstract formulation, offer a
provocative in-road to these new hybrid
spaces of production. Furthermore,
Hansen’s insistence on promoting the primacy of the body as an agent in technical
ordering, on revealing “the constitutive or
ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world” enables a critical
perspective that foregrounds the functionalist perspective of much social media [
Hansen 2006, 5]. As forms of functional documentation, as opposed to
representational media practice, many social media artifacts resist the drives of
traditional media that operate with clear aesthetic goals and values and with a
conscious intent to produce formal and professional media objects.
As contemporary texts and representational contexts have become increasingly complex,
semiotic surfaces and the inscription spaces which “contain” them have challenged theorists and media practitioners to identify,
access, and engage the full spectrum of material surfaces which proliferate.
Historically, embodiment and the varied forms of its discontents have been a profound
focal point for critical reflection within digital media studies. This is particularly
true within the late 1980’s to mid 1990’s wave of hypertext and then cyberstudies
theorists. Arguably it is, in fact, the center-point for such critique.
Responding to the “new” paradigms afforded by technology-assisted writing practices
— Storyspace texts and environments, for example, followed closely by the creation of
Internet-based cyberspace production — the webbed and malleable properties of hypertext,
intrigued and stimulated a rich and fundamental first-wave of material-based critical
reflection exploring new frontiers. Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork
Girl (1995), a re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through the foregrounding of the female monster and her
monstrous body, is an early and overt example of how the metaphorical material of text
and body may be interlinked through digital media. The creative potential of fragmented
text-bodies and the ironic potentialities of the stitched-together body-text (the
hyperlinked text) revealed the power of the scar, the space between body parts, to
express deeply embodied creativity through otherness and other voices. And yet this
embodiment was driven by a politics of difference, or deformation from the norm to probe
and critique normative value. Liberation was attained through an acceptance of self as
other, organicism as abject power, text as broken (until re-worked).
The shift from page to screen within digital media has been well-documented: Bolter,
Lanham and Landow, for example, explored in depth the liberating and fluid properties of
hyper-linked electronic texts, defined by the immaterial semantics and semiotics of
digital inscription texts and technology. Shifts in authorial agency, the material
reconstruction of reading-practice, and the revolutionary ideological identity
reconstructions, unrestricted by organic genealogy-parables and enabled by the new
digital and cyberspaces were and are foundational critical perspectives for considering
(dis)embodiment. In
Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the
History of Writing, Bolter asserted the fixed nature of print text and
identified hypertext production as a practice for “liberating the text” in digital space [
Bolter 1991, 21]. Lanham explored the political implications of
computer-mediated texts and found the interactivity of digital text as a basis from
which to overcome the fixed authority of the literary canon and to establish a new
electronic democracy [
Lanham 1993, 31]. Landow unequivocally
proclaimed in his analysis of the future of the book in the context of computer
intervention that digital textuality, in comparison to print, was now “virtual, not physical”
[
Landow 1992, 216]. In his second edition of
Writing Space in 2001 (re-subtitled
Computers,
Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print), Bolter surveys the theoretical
field for electronic writing in relation to the increasing influence of the Internet. He
isolates debates about the materiality of digital media as central to understanding the
changes brought about for inscription in the digital age, “the late age of print”
[
Bolter 2001, 1]. For Bolter debates about the unity (or not) of the Cartesian ego in the digital
age and continuing reflections on mind-body paradigms struggle to situate media
production. The impulse to explore singular vs. multiple authorship signals a revolution
in material culture imagined through the communal matrix of network culture. Bolter
acknowledges an irony in the claim that digitally produced texts inspire theorists to
associate virtual production with materiality: “Our culture in the late age of print seems
inclined to accept the materiality of writing not in spite of, but because of, our
increasing use of electronic networked communication ”
[
Bolter 2001, 202]. As is with many of the hypertext and early cyber-age theorists, such
materiality, however, is clearly not associated with any pure physicality or organic
singularity. It is associated with postmodern signification or mediated representation
within the distributed network culture of electronic “affiliation and community”
[
Bolter 2001, 203]. One’s private media productions are always subservient to a more public value
associated with an aesthetics of representation driven by shared consumption. For
Bolter, electronic media are produced when “the private and the public, the inner self
and the outer persona, are so closely connected [that] the writer is never
isolated from the material and cultural matrix of her networked culture”
[
Bolter 2001, 202]. The singular body is literally overwritten by the mass mediations of the network
and it disappears under such pressure.
Disembodiment as a response to cyberspace reconfiguration is exemplified by the idealism
of Donna Haraway’s anti-body, anti-goddess cyborg in her great “manifesto”, where everything is made possible by
purely organic bodily transcendence. For Haraway, cyborgs “are as hard to see politically as
materially. They are about consciousness — or its simulation. They are floating
signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe”
[
Haraway 1991, 153]. They are inexorably fused to technological functioning, and as such, liberated
from oppressive organic identifications, a flickering convoy of signification. Like
hypertext, they thrive in a new affinity culture, driven by unnatural “space stories” and characterized by
technologically-assisted fragmentation [
Haraway 1991, 181]. Joel
Perry Barlow, in his oft-cited and significantly titled reflection on the utopian
democracy of a web-based internet world, “A Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace”, suggests that flesh has become a “weary
giant” of the “industrial
world,” and without it, the promise of freedom awaits in a cyber-site of pure
thought, “the new home of the mind.”
Barlow’s new world “consists of transactions, relationships,
and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications.
[It is] a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies
live”
[
Barlow 1996].
Critical challenges to the innovative claims that rhizomes, lexia, and looping
structures formed the definitive (im)material of new media were inevitable, and
counter-debates quickly developed. Espen Aarseth’s ergodic taxonomies, outlined in
detail within
Cybertext, for example, argue for historical
links to digital innovation — to the codex model, for example — that defy
multi-directional paths as unique to digital models. As multimodal texts progressed in
their material innovation through the end of the millennium, they moved beyond linking
functions to more complex formal constructions and network structures; they comprised
recombinatory database structures working in tandem with hypertexts, for example, and
the ability to identify
organic agency from, or within,
technical
functioning was further challenged. The process of reading itself as a
critical practice, disrupted and revealed by digital interventions, became central to
the rhetorics of a developing new media “poetics,” and in works such as Brian Kim Stefans’ “the
dreamlife of letters” (1999), Stephanie Strickland’s
Vniverse (2002), Ana Maria Uribe’s
Anipoems
(2003), language, its transformation in the reading-mind, and the spaces occupied by the
digital reader-writer are all explored. Audio, image, text, and video components
converged to form richly material surfaces and genre conventions also merged: cinematic
models for Quicktime movies embedded on web pages and graphic design principles utilized
within literary and linguistic conventions freely comingled, and such miscegenation
proffered hybrid artifacts. Media production via futurist mutant manifesto reigned.
Ludology gamed the narrative system, and stories became playable, programmable, and
code-worthy; users and interactors
participated in media, and reading
became an applied critical practice, an integrated part of discursive representation.
Jim Andrews in his poem-game
Arteroids 2.5 (2003) deftly
mixes metaphors, genres, and media as well as visual, kinetic, and audio signifiers to
display language as a representational system to be played, and to be played with. Some
theorists, like Janet Murray in
Hamlet on the Holodeck
(1997), find a comfortable allegiance between tradition and invention, between stories
and games, and unite them with new genre titles, with
cyberdrama, for
example. Others, like Nick Montfort in
Twisty Little Passages: An
Approach to Interactive Fiction, suggest a more complex basis for identifying
creative co-mingling and its offspring. For Montfort, the core components of developing
hybrid genres unite simulated
world models that are run through a
computerized
parser to create interactive fictions [
Montfort 2005, viii]. Riddles are the base form for interaction in the
new genre, and they lead players into a plenitude of puzzling metaphor, simulation, and
abstraction. The riddle leads one away from internal bodily experience and into new
digital thought-experiments, mind-games ruled by “recategorization and transformation — both of the external
world, and the world of our consciousness” — far from organics [
Montfort 2005, 60]. Computer code and its relationship to language,
machine language and human discourse hybrids also came under scrutiny and were seen as
crucial to understanding digital aesthetics and signification as linked to programming.
John Cayley, digital poet and theorist, recognizes digital textuality as based on a
procedural “phenomenology of
language,” leading one not to real “things” but to “processes”
[
Cayley 2006, 309]. In the early 21st century, theoretical
reflections on experimental creole languages, code-talk, unnaturally shifted the figure
and ground elements of behind-the-scenes programming and on-the-screen texts. For Rita
Raley, this meant that programming operations lead away from organic self-realization
toward an ontology of the technical device: “Broadly, codework, makes exterior the
interior working of the computer”
[
Raley 2002]. The notion of embodiment was complicated in the extra-inscribed surfaces and the
resulting over-supplementary semiotic code-talk. The
container challenged
the
contained, and an epic battle of anti-binary misproportions ensued,
erasing organics in favor of discursive abstraction.
Currently digital media has fully traveled beyond the computer screen, encroaching into
physical spaces, and corporeal liminality continues to instantiate new rules:
text-bodies, user-bodies, architectural-bodies, avatar-bodies, reading-bodies, and
writing-bodies overlap, recombine, devolve, and bewilder. Clearly the media ecology of
the digital domain has become a fertile breeding ground for new life-forms, and
developing a measuring stick for pure organicism vs. embodied representation is an overt
critical challenge. As such, it is embraced by an increasingly interdisciplinary set of
theorists who approach embodiment from a wide array of perspectives. Eugene Thacker in
Biomedia is representative of a movement to recapture
organic bodies through a theoretical melding of molecular biology’s “wet lab” techniques and those of computational
bioinformatics, or “dry lab”
considerations [
Thacker 2004, 2]. Thacker presents a context for
recognizing a deeply intertwined duality of virtual and physical bodies: “The biological and the digital domains are
no longer rendered ontologically distinct, but instead are said to inhere in each
other; the biological ‘informs’ the digital, just as the
digital ‘corporealizes’ the biological”
[
Thacker 2004, 7]. Thus, although Thacker seemingly moves toward a more scientific method to
situate
real bodies, outside the aesthetics of pure representation and
towards more scientific renderings, his approach is ultimately discursive. Biomedia
bodies are not machine/human hybrids, or transcendental markers of erasure, and their
mixed ontology (biological and digital) means the singular body is not expressed in the
genetic/computer code hybrid. One does not ask, then, what a body is, but rather “what a body can do?”
[
Thacker 2004, 6]. That is, one asks what a body becomes when viewed through its discursively
rendered behaviors, a step removed from its essential nature.
Since Hayles first identified the struggle to recover the Cartesian body lost to
“information” in
How We Became
Posthuman, she has also remained in an iterative critical loop focused on
material embodiment in digital contexts. In texts such as
Writing
Machines, she enacts the recursive impulse to reassert material metaphors as
the basis for human-machine signifying practice. For Hayles, the material metaphor is
the eternally changing red-yellow-green signal regulating the semiotic flow between
signifiers and texts, the “traffic between
words and physical artifacts,” a
technotext control-measure for
inscription, where the technically-rendered text is exposed through a foregrounding of
its machinery — a distinctly un-organic enterprise [
Hayles 2002, 22].
For Hayles, the
writing machines she imagines, and the (machine-like)
materiality they foreground as essential components of their inscription practices,
embody meaning primarily at a level of discursive signification, or at “the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic
signifiers”
[
Hayles 2002, 25]. The organic body, per se, is only revealed as a component
within
systems of representation; it is “an emergent
property” and one that arrives as a result of interactions “between physical properties and a work’s
artistic strategies”
[
Hayles 2002, 33]. Materiality
is mobilized, and it
clearly mediates: it literally exists in a middle ground between the world of things and
the world of ideas, “in between the richness of a physically
robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create
meaning”
[
Hayles 2002, 33]. Materiality is, thus, coextensive with meaning, with signification, or
representation. Abstraction, as such, is not fully evident, and liminal bodies, sites of
ambiguous non-identification, resolve into consciously registered aesthetic
production-machines. The machine-body of the text encodes meanings and is itself encoded
in a semiotic assembly-line where physicality is represented through a body’s strategic
artistic properties. However, this material formulation does not account for media
production outside of aesthetic valuation. The “metaphor” itself
implies resolution, equivalency, x = y. But what of the work-production that engages
bodies, mobilizes expressions, exudes tactility, and yet resists the politics of pure
aesthetic production? The metaphors at the heart of Hayles’ material reflections allow
little room for slippage in terms of intentionality for finding physicality or pure
organic expression within production. As the physical properties of a work, the embodied
content and the container, can only be seen within iterative discourse loops, the
irresolute excesses remain unaccounted for, as materiality always becomes
“representable” when connected to technical mediation.
Mark B. N. Hansen offers an alternate theoretical perspective from which such organic
excesses — those excesses outside of exterior mediation practices, outside of semiotic
visualization exercises — may be examined. His work also provides a basis for
considering the embodied aesthetics at work within social media artifacts that do not
always seem motivated to produce meaning, or substantive matter even, within the
generative politics of discourse and artistic semiotics. When one considers, for
example, what Patricia Lange calls the “personal ephemera” or the minutiae and small-life moments evident in many
YouTube videos, one can recognize that traditional cinema art-house aesthetics do not
apply [
Lange 2009, 74]. Popular YouTube subjects range from the more
familiar video-fare recognizable in home-movies and videos: birthday parties, family
holiday gatherings, and graduation events; to a whole range of more unfamiliar
documentations now publicly circulated: belly-fat jiggling, Lego-building, baby
lemon-sucking, and bedroom web-cam dancing. Hansen’s reflections on embodiment within
contemporary media forms are at an extreme end of the organic vs. technical interface
spectrum and may allow then a method to account for these equally radical
ephemeral media-modes that have emerged on sites such as YouTube.
Hansen argues in
Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital
Media that currently there is a “fading of the hype surrounding virtual reality 10 years ago,” and this
devolution offers new opportunities to explore the “deep correlation between embodiment and
virtuality”
[
Hansen 2006, x]. He recognized the ways in which virtual reality (VR), assisted by digital
technologies, has created a rich dimension of experience where virtual being is not
discrete from reality. Citing media artists and researchers Monika Fleischmann and
Wolfgang Strauss, he defines the new realm of virtuality:
Central in this reimagining of VR as a mixed
reality stage is a certain specification of the virtual. No longer a wholly
distinct if largely amorphous realm with rules all its own, the virtual now
denotes a “space full of information” that
can be “activated, revealed, reorganized and
recombined, added to and transformed as the user navigates…real space.”
[Hansen 2006, 2]
Hansen proposes that in the realm of contemporary media culture, where one
continually negotiates between the saturated information spaces of RL and VL, “all reality is mixed reality,” and the
relationship between natural and virtual worlds is deeply rooted in understanding the
role of embodiment in both [
Hansen 2006, 6]. However, Hansen argues
that the
mixed reality paradigm — the fundamental model through which he
asserts that all current embodied experience is shaped in seamless, fluid transitions
between real and virtual media spaces — foregrounds the “primacy of the body as ontological access to the
world”; the body offers a “functionalist perspective” where the “role of the tactility in the actualization of that
access” belies traditional constructivist paradigms focused on representation
of bodies only within discourse [
Hansen 2006, 5]. Mixed realities
assert physicality and bodily motility, emphasizing not only what a body can do, but how
it operates in physical motion, rather than in mental abstraction. (One may consider
then those belly fat jiggle and Lego construction ephemera videos in this context, for
example.) This model moves away, then, from a critical perspective dependant on
deforming, disrupting, or foregrounding representative discourse by reasserting
new digitized versions with which one may interact (as with works like
Strickland’s
Vniverse, Andrews’
Arteroids 2.5, or Jackson’s
Patchwork Girl).
Although earlier digital works such as these consider the body as an integral mediator,
they also ultimately mix realities only in the realm of the mind (or the intellectual
sphere) and on the screen, and are highly dependent on knowledge of previous aesthetic
and creative systems, of sonnet forms, novels, or games. For Hansen, “embodied human agency” is a perspective
for “perceptuomotor activity,” a site
of heightened perceptive and physicalized action, where tactility and biological
functioning are not merely referenced within iterative discursive leaps, or mediated
with an end-goal of intellectual understanding [
Hansen 2006, 3].
Instead the biological body, the organic body, overshadows and overpowers critical
attempts to place it inside signification and make it a mere surface for representation.
As a force of tactile activity, the body shapes experience to conform to its organizing
schema and offers phenomenological evidence that it is a “primordial and active source of
resistance”
[
Hansen 2006, 15]. Specifically, it resists representative models, including creative and aesthetic
ones, that refine meaning only in discursive models, those that come
after
the body has been
overcome by the mind, or ones materializing after the
visual sense has emerged secondarily from the body sense. (Lacanian philosophy, for
example, depends on the primacy of the mirror stage, when the subject sees herself in
reflection, as a key movement into language, into culture.) However, alternately one may
view contemporary media from the site of the organic body, as a
body in
code, a neither purely informational body, nor a disembodied reflection of “the everyday body ”
[
Hansen 2006, 20]. It is anti-representational and is a body “submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering
technical deterritorialization,” emerging only “in conjunction with technics”, with a theoretical
perspective on the
originary technicity of the human
[
Hansen 2006, 20]. For Hansen, technicity — the body’s relation to
exteriority, to something outside of itself, and its mediation of that awareness — is
key to understanding the significance of embodiment to aesthetic production. His
reflections on the phenomenal body (not surprisingly extended from the work of
Merleau-Ponty) allow a critical perspective where the operational mechanisms of the body
(vs. the representational ones) seem suited to the varied practices and emerging forms
evident in social media arenas. The phenomenal body is connected to the body schema
(body map) as opposed to the body image (a specular construct), and it is an active
agent filled with sensory data and not overly dependent on organized intellectual data
or visual cues (Hansen 2006, 38–43). I assert that such bodily and tactile motility,
recognized as agents of embodied production, offer critical models to account for the
deep organism-environment coupling (for Hansen, the technical mediation of the
body schema) one finds in the active embodied productions of social
media where personal-public displays of
affection dominate.
The body
of affect, a state of “one’s
incongruity with oneself” where fixed identity is overcome through singular
“excess” serves as a rich model to
consider the fluid networked me/not me in social
me-dia [
Hansen 2006, 168]. Affect, characterized by emotional and sensory
connections felt in the body and expressed through it, with it, is a defining feature of
social media’s mode of anti-intellectual, experience-based production.
One may again consider, in this context, Twitter as an illustration of a mixed reality
and social media
space: This finger-tip driven micro-blogging network realm
is a site where the humble text message, once firmly connected to cell phone technology,
has been hyper-remediated, redistributed, and repurposed into an array of technical
devices and forms. It operates on computers or handheld devices (the technical device is
irrelevant), and it generates a pseudo-locative life-narrative and experiential trail of
communiqués that comprise many functions. It is innately personal
and communal and inexorably combinatory and flexible in terms of its content,
operating in ambiguous and otherly code-talk, in tweets, anti-discursive
bird-sounds, for example: “(@ishmaelvr please don't encourage him. RT
@limabean: @indistinky and when will the #PPOP unrated version be coming out?” At
its core, Twitter is a platform for documenting and mediating one’s own interests and
experience, as well as a site to disseminate the experiences and interests of others.
Tweets de-personalize
my body, even while announcing
my
presence, and operate via co-evolution with
my followers; they
are driven forward through recursive re-tweeting and often operate via discursive
generalization, via “trending topics,” where the # sign, ironically,
erases singular reflection and joins
me to
you, in an
anti-personal account of personal and collaborative experiential location, no matter how
trivial: “I am at the grocery store buying milk (and you are with me via my
twitter-feed.)” Twitter’s dependence on the circulation of
affect,
rather than the production or mediation of aesthetic meaning, is in fact central to its
operation, although it may also be a container for more direct information: to advertise
goods and services and to announce events. As a platform for circulation, rather than a
pure medium, it can sustain multiple operations and serve a variety of purposes, as the
conveyor of personal information or as an advertising forum. It operates similarly to
what Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau have identified as the ambiguous power and
economic flexibility of the YouTube platform; “The peculiarity of YouTube, then, lies in the way
the platform has been negotiating and navigating between community and commerce. If
YouTube is anything, it is both industry and user-driven”
[
Snickars and Vonderau 2009, 11]. It is a (re)mix of realities with no
allegiance to fixed purposing or singular identity.
For Hansen’s purposes in
Bodies in Code, second-generation
virtual reality artifacts, that is, mixed reality artifacts, best exemplify the ways in
which the body is articulated. This is similar to the applications of Jay D. Bolter and
Diane Gromala in
Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital
Art, and the Myth of Transparency. In this text, Bolter and Gromala use
digital art within the SIGGRAPH 2000 exhibition to exemplify radical new interfaces that
engage the user in their production practice. Hansen too finds rich source material in
digital art and practice. Like Bolter and Gromala, he dedicates much of his theoretical
examples to exploring the operative interfaces of digital art, but ultimately moves into
other virtual domains (architectural space, wearable space, narrative literary space,
and Internet cyberspace, stopping short of social media). However Hansen’s conclusions
differ significantly from Bolter and Gromala’s. They argue that digital artifacts
oscillate between
transparency and
opacity in their interface
constructions. Digital artifacts naturalize representations and reflect and foreground
mediated, yet personal and embodied, experiences for those who encounter them. The
interfaces they foreground depend on deeply integrated relationships with the
viewer-users who
participate in their creative production [
Bolter and Gromala 2003, 3–4]. Like Hayles’ middle approach, embodiment is
iterative. However, Hansen’s critical departure resists any kind of mutually dependent
or recursive configuration and warrants further exploration and application as to the
primacy of embodiment in social media.
To facilitate a discussion of the viability of Hansen’s position in regards to social
media practice, I provide a summary of the four primary elements which Hansen outlines
to illustrate the function of digital technologies and “the sensory commons,” the
me/not me space,
they afford in contemporary media culture [
Hansen 2006, 20].
According to Hansen, digital technologies: 1) expand the scope of bodily (motor)
activity; 2) broaden the domain of the
prepersonal; 3) create an anonymous
medium for co-belonging (a
being-with-ness); 4) transform collective
existence from self-enclosed cognitive functioning to open forms of communal
motor-driven, motile participation to assert the “ongoing technogenesis of the human”
[
Hansen 2006, 20–21]. Such a state of technogenesis (of continual creation, of beginning again) is
characterized by a body’s relation to exteriority, to that outside of or in excess to,
its core sense of embodied being. This state of other-awareness is not dependant on
visual recognition or overt cognitive functions to produce. Therefore artistic
production, as such, may be recognized as an embodied impulse within which to express
one’s own state of being-ness and to connect to the exterior world, indicating a
relationship to communal relations, but separated from representative politics and
objective consciousness. (“I do not need
you to
see
me produce an artifact outside of
my self.”) One may,
then, express aesthetics, without fully extending an awareness of otherness as something
outside one’s own primal experience. Extending these elements within social media offers
a dynamics of expressive embodiment illustrating the ways that the body itself operates
as a core agent of production and as a formal organizing aesthetic within the social
medias and practices that dominate contemporary culture. Users of Facebook, for example,
are not unfamiliar with the status update from the “friend” who
overshares, or who offers “too-much-information,” seemingly unaware
of the public forum on which she or he posts, or who indulges in hyper-trivial, mundane,
or too-personal updates uncharacteristic of public declaration: “I bought toilet paper
today.” One may also consider YouTube as an exemplary model for many other social
media. Driven as it is by user-generated production means, it invites user-producers to
participate in artifact making based on personal experience, but for the purpose of
forming a collective network. The state of co-belonging supersedes individuation, as
evidenced by tagging, commenting, reply, and rating functions, for example. Motile
tactility is referenced in the hyperconscious referencing of self-mediation in the
prepersonal domain, where pure subject-object difference is viewed under
erasure and the
power of imaging via technical means is a form of internal
surveillance and an enactment of primal technics. The talking-head vlog post, now iconic
in structure with its web-cam framing and domestic setting reference point, is a
straw-man set-up for
my experience, a generic device posing as subjective
function. One can consider, for example, the definitive features of the well-known
lonelygirl15 vlog posts. This series of posts made in 2006, although eventually (and
ironically) exposed as a hoax and part of a professional film-making experiment,
epitomize the private and confessional aesthetics of typical vloggers. Set in a bedroom,
and focused on the emotional and impassioned outpourings of a teenage girl at war with
her parents, they strive to defy the slick aesthetics of professional video-making
techniques and operate at the level of hyper-privacy and social mediation. Even though
falsely contrived, they circulated and affirmed a model for YouTube vlogging and
pre-aesthetic rendering. They were straight-to-camera, from-my-bedroom, spontaneous
diary-like musings, combined with a presumed social connection to an ideal someone (in
this case to fake-vlogger Daniel, playing the love interest role). This ideal audience
is always imagined to be somewhere out there, listening to or for
me.
Lonelygirl15, with the head-shot framing and the personal confessions within private
locations, epitomizes what Lange calls
videos of affinity. These videos
foreground the creation of sensory impressions and spontaneous creativity using private
and intimate communication techniques (like eating on camera) and moving, adjusting, or
shaking the camera (to evade transparent media representation). They don’t operate
merely to showcase the vlogger, but to bring her into contact with “potential others who identify and
interpellate themselves as intended viewers of the video”
[
Lange 2009, 71]. This was clear in the construction of lonelygirl15, for example, with the
inclusion of Daniel. The producers recognized that the power of lonelygirl15’s vlog
posts were not in a representation of the vlogger alone, but in her eventual
communication with another via the internal “monologue” she used to
surveille and promote her private state of being. In this sense,
lonelygirl15 was merely a front for an idealized aesthetics of affinity
embraced by most vloggers, and she was never really lonely, as long as she was engaged
by the social media network. The presumed interaction of vlogging is inevitable and
displays of
affect in social media networks eventually lead to bodies of
affection. For Lange, affinity videos on YouTube operate as a form of
“habeas corpus,” bringing the body
firmly into view to forge intimate connections with others [
Lange 2009, 78]. This body of affinity, like Hansen’s body-in-code, shapes the experiences
it relays and deepens the mediations between pre-subject and presumed other, without
exteriorizing production at a pure site of representation. Disconnected from aesthetic
function, it serves as a marker of network affiliation and organic functioning within a
reenactment of primordial technicity: this body performs an awareness of otherness,
without separating it from the deeply personal felt within.
Offering a perspective to view organic and technical operations, many YouTube posts
couple the pre-subject with digital technologies to display a primary or primal state of
the body-in-code. In
YouTube: Online Video and Participatory
Culture, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green reflect on the complicated structure
of YouTube itself as an identifiable media form. They recognize the inability to reduce
theoretical considerations of YouTube to a singular phenomenon. It currently operates
both as a mainstream media outlet and as critique and counter-cultural model subverting
those political and aesthetic models. Burgess and Green acknowledge it as a business,
but also as a form of what David Weinberger has termed a “meta-business,” one that serves as a
distribution platform to enhance the value of content developed elsewhere and draw
attention to it [
Burgess and Green 2009, 4]. In this sense, it does not
assume the pure aesthetics and production qualities of other mainstream media that
clearly foreground their own creations, rendering them artistic for (and before) public
consumption. Similar to the claim Lange makes that homemade, anti-aesthetic ephemera
dominate YouTube media content, Burgess and Green suggest that “vernacular creativity,” that is, a wide range
of creative practices, from scrapbooking to informal story-telling in conversational
chat, is at work in many YouTube expressions. Amateur content-makers according to this
model are more inclined to personal expressions “outside the cultural value systems of either high
culture or commercial creative practice” and as a method to enforce social
networking. Operating, as a body-in-code, they express an affiliation with technics,
with a primal desire to express a relationship to exteriority and to specular rendering,
without erasing a form of primordial tactility inherent to pure embodied and private
states-of-being. In this site of co-belonging, one desires to be
felt (that
is, as opposed to being
seen) in order to instantiate a form of communal
ontology and sharing, one that is organic, and one that is both mine and yours. Burgess
and Green support this position when they claim that when considering YouTube “it is important not to fall into the
trap of simply assuming that vernacular video is organized primarily around a desire
to broadcast the self”; instead it operates to promote “social networking” over modes of traditional
cultural production [
Burgess and Green 2009, 25–26].
Another popular YouTube genre is that of the homemade dance remix video. In fact, such
videos characterize some of the earliest YouTube successes, marked by the number of hits
(views by others) and by their circulation to achieve viral status via the social
network. Unlike the movie theater or Broadway stage, there is no one space to find these
expressions; you can come to them, or they may find you — via email inbox, twitter feed,
or Facebook post. Burgess and Green cite the video dance version of the Pixies song
Hey (identified as the
Hey
Clip on YouTube) as one of the most popular YouTube videos to date with more
than 21 million views as of March 2008 [
Burgess and Green 2009, 26].
Dance videos like the
Hey Clip are generally edited remakes
of mainstream music, usually in a domestic setting, like a bedroom or living room. They
illustrate the strong drive to foreground embodied experience and transmit communication
codes outside of traditional signifying systems, and most often outside a professional
aesthetics. The amateur nature of the videos, which often appear spontaneous and
unrehearsed, or rehearsed to a degree, but never to expert level, is a key component of
this genre. In the dance remixes, the dancing subjects seem to be enacting a private
(and somewhat universal) experience of embodied musical pleasure and fantasy
reenactment: “I want to express how the music makes me feel and materializes in my
body-moves”
and
“I want to learn to dance like Shakira and embody her presence in me.” Although
prior to social media outlets, these dances may have happened in private, now they
operate at another level of private and conjoined expression. Peters and Seier in “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube”
acknowledge the mixed messages of YouTube dance videos that proffer a “specific ambivalence of self — control
and forgetting, discipline and pleasure.” Here the bedroom mirror is replaced
by a YouTube audience, and I am alone, yet joined to you [
Peters and Seier 2004, 199]. Peters and Seier describe the popular
bedroom site as one like Foucault’s heterotopia: “equally private and public,
actually existing and utopian, performative and transgressive”
[
Peters and Seier 2004, 199]. This site, like the mixed reality sensory commons that envelops Hansen’s
body-in-code correlate, is one where “motor
activity — not representational verisimilitude” express the core organic agent
at the heart of convergent digital culture [
Hansen 2006, 2]. The
motility of the body, dancing on camera with an imagined audience and equalized by the
interior pleasure of just
moving to the music, is evident in these YouTube
videos. Beyoncé’s popular song “Single Ladies” has been
remixed thousands of times on YouTube and performed by everyone from babies to
grandfathers, dancing with wild abandon and with varying degrees of allegiance to the
actual choreography. The original video, with its minimal sets, engaging choreographed
moves, and impossible to forget tune, was itself seemingly created with an eye toward
reproduction. It was made to be remade, and it represents a shift in production politics
where the ambivalence of ownership gives way to a performance of functional expression.
Watch me (or “Feel” me), watch (“feel”) my body watching (“feeling”)
Beyoncé’s body, and I will watch (“feel”) you, etc….
One may recognize how all of these examples defy generic identity politics and operate
at a revolutionary level to recover organic presence from transcendental cyberculture.
Like the homey bedroom sets glimpsed behind the webcam-framed vlogger,
bodies slyly materialize both as the backdrop for creative and critical mediated
self-expression and as dynamic pre-personal text-subjects asserting a pre-aesthetic
drive to mediate outside traditional spaces of representation. These contemporary forms
resist the disembodied abstraction promised by early-generation cyber-theorists and
traditional poststructuralist perspectives. They assert a primordial drive to overcome
ocularcentric dynamics, that threaten to subvert the phenomenal body to the visually
constructed one. They clearly put expressive bodies before external signification and
challenge new me-dia politics grounded in the production
aesthetics of tactile motility and amateur organics.