Matrices of Embodiment
Rethinking Binary and the Politics of Digital Representation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18985289 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cadence Kinsey (0000-0001-9025-524X, University College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 897-925 |
| Publication date | 2014-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/675543 |
| OpenAlex | W2320504840 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 39 |
This article explores the critical art practice of Nell Tenhaaf, challenging the continued convention of theorizing the relationship between the body and digital representation technologies in terms of the real and the virtual and the perceived dematerialization of the body into code. Given the importance of histories of the body for so-called second-wave and constructivist feminists, it is perhaps unsurprising that much of the debate regarding the virtual subject was generated from within the combined discourses of feminism and science and technology studies. While the model of equivalence and interchangeability between different kinds of code (binary, genetics, language itself) has accounted in sophisticated ways for the mechanisms by which bodies and artifacts become integrated into the structures of capital, by making everything dis- and rejoinable, the way in which the discourse has been structured around the problem of the subject as code has become overdetermined and suggests a model of subjectivity that is technologically deterministic. In an attempt to speak the language of these very real problems for digital forms of representation and yet simultaneously to speak beyond them, I propose to look at histories of computing that conceive of information technology as fundamentally spatial. The purpose of this is threefold. In the first instance, through the work of Tenhaaf, I hope to explore a recent example of how digital ontology is being questioned through representation. Second, in so doing, I intend to show that replacing the paradigm of the body need not suggest a virtual flight into technophilic fantasies of transcendence or, to use the term set out by Eugene Thacker, extropianism. Thus, finally, I hope that by reconceiving of binary not as a linear series but as a spatial field, we might disconnect binary from its self-limiting association with Western binaries
Aesthetics · Appropriation · Code (set theory) · Cognitive science · Data science · Epistemology · Human–computer interaction · Ontology · Politics · Programming language · Representation (politics) · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Subjectivity · World Wide Web · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Art, Technology, and Culture · Computer Science · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
Six years
The Body in Medical Thought and Practice
Terminal Identity
How We Became Posthuman
On Longing
Volatile Bodies
This Sex Which is Not One
The Birth of the Clinic
Technologies of Gender
Women and the machine
US Third World Feminism
When Species Meet
Nomadic subjects
Programmed Visions
The Second Self
The Body & Society
Gender and Power
Virtual Togetherness
Feminism and Constructivism
On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge
Art Embodies A-Life
Subject objects
Against virtual communityfor a politics of distance
A Cyborg Manifesto
Situated Knowledges
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |