Introduction to the Special Issue: Digital Technologies, Bodies, and Embodiments

摘要

We begin with a differentiation between the body and embodiment-two distinct but interwoven concepts: the body as abstraction and generality; and embodiment as particular, corporeal process and experience. The body is a marked site/cite; that is, it is written. The body is composed (and decomposing). The body is delimited, though never in a fixed or static sense despite any desire toward, as N. Katherine Hayles (1999) asserted, "an idealized form that gestures toward a Platonic reality" (p. 196). When we write of the body, however, through and with our actual bodies (embodiment), we are always already speaking of and with a composition-a mark, a text, an ever-penultimate elaboration. But we are also speaking of a decomposition. As a rhetorical event, embodiment is the process of the revision, a practice of becoming. "In contrast to the body," Hayles (1999) noted, "embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. … embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference" (p. 196). Put differently, the body is abstract and normalized; embodiment is specific, of difference, nuanced, lived, and felt. The body is a noun (product/being); embodiment is a verb (process/becoming). The body is our name; embodiment is our breath. Embodiment, Anne Frances Wysocki (2012) claimed, "calls us to attend to what we just simply do, day to day, moving about, communicating with others, using objects that we simply use in order to make things happen" (p. 3). If material bodies constitute what we are, then embodiments constitute what material bodies do. Digital technologies have complicated and compounded the compositions and decompositions of the body and embodiment as such.