Response of “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”

In N.Katherine Hayles’s “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”, she is mainly discussing about the transition from the concept of “absent/present” to “pattern/randomness” under the era of the information and cyborg age.  But why it is so important to emphasize the shift?  For me, the shift itself may generate a debate in embodiment theory. Does it initiate a new experience of embodiment or completely deny it?

 Generally when talking about embodiment theory, the first thing come to mind is the coupling of cognition and human body. Here the body is no longer a shell purely executing the instructions from brain. Instead, it plays an essential role actively determining the formation of cognition. However, things changed a lot when technology is developed at a breathtaking pace. Without the need of physical forms, we need to take a fresh look at embodiment theory.

Combining with the content in the article, I’d like to firstly summarize and analyze the differences and similarities between before and after the shift in three different aspects. The most obvious difference is from the relationship between the body (the material substrate) and the message (the codes of representation). Hayles makes a very interesting analogy between the human body and traditional printing media, such as books and newspapers. “Like the human body, the book is a form of information transmission and storage that incorporates its encodings in a durable material substrate.”, once the relation between texts and media is built, these two separate things would coexist as a symbiont and can hardly be changed, this can also be applied to the human body.  To be short, the relationship is anti-dualistic, integrated and stable. On the contrary, the link between the media and digital information is not that closely tied. In some cases, the physical entities are even no need to exist. As for the information (e.g. digital texts), although it can be exported into hard drives for permanently storage, you will find that there are no fixed correspondences between the media that are used for visualization (like monitors) and the content. For example, when you are reading an e-book, once you turn to another page, the previous one is no longer there. In other words, what information technologies create is just a temporary mapping relationship.

Secondly, I will talk about the inner interpretations between the body and the message. Unlike digital platforms, the contents of the cognition are supplied by the media when dealing with traditional media and human bodies. According to Lakoff and Johnson’s concept, human’s abstract thinking abilities are built on metaphors. For example, the rose is often a metaphor for love because of the similarities of the beauty and danger. People tend to interpret unfamiliar and obscure things with the aid of what they already understood. Thus, it’s not difficult to find out that the human body is the most familiar thing for people. There are a lot of concepts originally perceived by our bodies, like temperature, distance, etc. With these raw concepts, people then extend them into more advanced and abstract ones. Similarly for books and newspapers, since the printed texts and the paper cannot be separated as a whole, the contents composed of realignments of alphabets are indeed supplied by the media. However, precisely because of the peculiarity of transiency, digital media itself doesn’t rely on such direct mechanism. Even so, we still cannot ignore the similarities. The process of encoding from machine language to high-level language exactly simulates the way that people interprets abstraction from metaphors.

Last but not least, information technologies alter the relation of signified to signifier. This shift is due to the multi-layer hierarchy of computer system. The two ends of the hierarchy need to talk to different objects and they also need to communicate with each other through a series of dynamic interpretations. There is actually no strict boundary between the two.

Hayles summarized these differences into the shift from “absent/present” to “pattern/randomness”. I have to say that the new relation of “pattern/randomness” indeed deviates from the embodiment theory and we all need to admit a possibility that it will completely dominate the world. I understand the fear of abandon of materiality because people have already been living for millions of years in physical world. From the embodiment theory, I personally can realize humans’ complex of their physical bodies. Pure immateriality may make them question their self-existence. For me, I don’t think if there is a way to combine pattern and presence as complementary rather than antagonistic unless they redefine what pattern, presence, embodiment means. Or maybe in the distant future, “posthuman” will get used to it and will not have that complex anymore.