Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments

Dualistic thinking is as difficult to avoid as the sticky clay that passes for topsoil where I live in Topanga Canyon. When it gets even a little wet, it attacks my feet so resolutely that I look as if I am wearing snowshoes. I try to avoid it, of course, but inevitably something lures me off the beaten path and there I am again, stomping around with elephant shoes. In similar fashion I struggled to avoid the Cartesian mind-body split in my recent book How We Became Posthuman when I made a distinction between the body and embodiment. ¹ The body, I suggested, is an abstract concept that is always culturally constructed. Regardless of how it is imagined, "the body" generalizes from a group of samples and in this sense always misses someone's particular body, which necessarily departs in greater or lesser measure from the culturally constructed norm. At the other end of the spectrum lie our experiences of embodiment. While these experiences are also culturally constructed, they are not entirely so, for they emerge from the complex interactions between conscious mind and the physiological structures that are the result of millennia of biological evolution. The body is the human form seen from the outside, from a cultural perspective striving to make representations that can stand in for bodies in general. Embodiment is experienced from the inside, from the feelings, emotions, and sensations that constitute the vibrant living textures of our lives—all the more vibrant because we are only occasionally conscious of their humming vitality. ² I tried to stay on the holistic path by insisting that the body and embodiment are always dynamically interacting with one another. But having made the analytical distinction between the body and embodiment, I could not escape the dualistic thinking that clung to me regardless of my efforts to avoid it.

I want now to construct the situation in a different way. This essay pushes beyond the position articulated at the end of How We Became Posthuman, where I argued that the erasure of embodiment characteristic of the history of cybernetics should not again be enacted as we move into the technoscientific formations I call the posthuman. Rather than beginning dualistically with body and embodiment, I propose instead to focus on the idea of relation and posit it as the dynamic flux from which both the body and embodiment emerge. Seeing entities emerging from specific kinds of interaction allows them to come into view not as static objects precoded and prevalued, but rather as the visible results of the dynamic on-goingness of the flux—which in itself can be neither good nor bad because it precedes these evaluations, serving as the source of everything that populates my perceived world, including the body and experiences of embodiment. ³

Beginning with relation rather than preexisting entities changes everything. It enables us to see that embodied experience comes not only from the complex interplay between brain and viscera that Antonio R. Damasio compellingly describes in Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, but also from the constant engagement of our embodied interactions with the environment. ⁴ Abstract ideas of the body likewise arise from the interplay between prevailing cultural formations and the beliefs, observations, and experiences that count as empirical evidence in a given society. In this view, embodiment and the body are emergent phenomena arising from the dynamic flux that we try to understand analytically by parsing it into such concepts as biology and culture, evolution and technology. These categories always come after the fact, however, emerging from a flux too complex, interactive, and holistic to be grasped as a thing in itself. To signify this emergent quality of the body and embodiment, I will adopt the term proposed by Mark Hansen to denote a similar unity, the mindbody. ⁵

While a study of anatomy textbooks written across the centuries will confirm that...