The Body and Technology - Brief Article

Whether overtly or not, all visual culture plumbs the complex and profound intersections among visuality, embodiment, and the logics of mechanical, industrial, or cybernetic systems. By making and interpreting visual culture, visual theorists (artists, art critics, and art historians) explore aspects of the human body/mind complex as a "complicated machine" capable of extension into the world through vision (per Julien Offray de la Mettrie in his 1748 book L'homme machine).

Enacting technologies of representation through embodiment, visual theorists articulate "bodies" of visuality in images or words, in each case performing our own specific historical relationships to the body/machine matrix. At the height of the industrial revolution, avant-garde artists conceived their role in utopian terms: the goal of the artist (per Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in his 1947 Vision and Motion) was to "search the new dimensions of the industrial society and to translate the new findings into emotional orientation" through visual form. Translation was thus conceived as the primary mode of interface between body and technologized world.

Since World War II, with the explosion of cybernetics and commodity culture (the latter facilitated by new technologies of reproduction, manufacture, and communication) and the growing awareness of the brutal potential of technology in its militaristic forms, the utopian view has collapsed. Enactment or performance have replaced translation as modes for articulating the hinge between body and technology. Visual theorists from the 1950s into the 1970s reveled in more and more aggressive enactments of the body as a performance of the work of art and, through this practice, insisted on the coextensivity of body/machine and vision/machine, of artist and interpreter (Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnes comes to mind). In the 1980s, technological shifts began to be theorized in terms of a loss of the real; the body became the forbidden term in a highly codified rhetoric of the "gaze." According to this theory, the gaze--like the commodity culture it seeks to examine-turns everything in its purview into a Heideggerian "w orld picture"; any attempt to call for a return to embodiment risks essentializing the self.

At the end of the second millennium into the third, a precipitous return to corporeality has looped subjectivity back toward the explicit embodiments of the heyday of performance around 1970. The body has, however, been dramatically reconceived as nonauthentic, defined through otherness (alienated in the visual or carnal experience of others), and specific in its identifications. As the speed and intensity of technologically mediated modes of being have accelerated in recent years, visual theorists have come to recognize that technology not only transforms our ways of doing things, it profoundly conditions our experience of ourselves and others. Serious questions arise: What have been the specific intersections among visuality, embodiment, and the technological in the history of Western art? What place do artists' or art viewers' bodies have in the violently revised nexuses of power relations that arise with shifts in technological processes of imaging, traveling, healing, procreating, making, and knowing?

Amelia Jones is Professor of Art History at University of California, Riverside. Jones contributed to and co-edited the anthology Performing the Body/Performing the Text with Andrew Stephenson (1999) and has published the books Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994) and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998).

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