Excerpts:
“…the body terminal of man…the witness’s own body becoming the last urban frontier. Social organization and a kind of conditioning once limited to the space of the city and to the space of the family home finally closing in on the animal body.
“This makes it easier to understand the decline in that unite of population, the family, initially extended then nuclearized, that is today becoming a single-parent family, indivudualism having little to do with the fact of a liberation of values and being more an effect of technological evolution in the development of public and private space, since the more the city expands and spreads its tentacles, the more the family unit dwindles and becomes a minority” (11-12).
“Speed not only allows us to get around more easily, it enables us above all to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely. Tomorrow, it will enable us to act at a distance, beyond the human body’s sphere of influence and that of its behavioural ergonomics” (12).
Scott Fisher’s ‘DataSuit’ for NASA (16).
“Having been first mobile, then motorized, man will thus become motile, deliberately limiting his body’s area of influence to a few gestures, a few impulses, like channel-surfing” (17).
“…the law of least effort or least action. To reduce, to eliminate the range of action to the point of introducing a machine, a tool of instantaneous communication, into the human body’s very guts poses awesome questions about the new technological environment, the postindustrial ‘technosphere’…Indeed, acting at a distance renders problematic the very nature of the interval that makes up this distance…” (51). Get more sources.
Timothy Leary, example of the law of least action (105).
“‘The deepest thing in man is his skin,’ Paul Valery once claimed. This is where the very latest perspective comes in: the tactile perspective of so-called ‘touching at a distance’ (tactile telepresence)…In donning the DataSuit, the individual slips into information…information becomes the sole ‘relief’ of corporeal reality…” (105).
The absence of high and low referents induces a spatial (atmospheric) void. “How, indeed, can we picture any spatial or atmospheric perspective once we have lost ‘high’ and ‘low’ as referents? And the same goes for the split between ‘near’ and ‘far’, once we have lost resistance to forward motion” (31).
Transport revolution = 19th century railway system, automobile and aviation. Transmission revolution = 20th century propogation of electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio and video. Transplantation revolution = 21st century “is now secretly gearing up, not only with the grafting of livers, kidneys, hearts and lungs, but with the implantation of new kinds of stimulators, much more effective than the pacemaker, and the imminent grafting of micromotors capable of overcoming the defective functioning of this or that natural organ and so improving on the vital performance of this or that physiological system belonging to a person in perfect health…” (51). Use with Balsamo.
“…can we still talk of images when there are no longer any pixels…?” (94).
Mobilizing our field of perception (96).
“…the individual’s freedom of perception and the threats brought to bear on that freedom by the industrialization of vision and of hearing — noise pollution being doubled more often than not by a discreet pollution of our vision of the world through the sundry tools of communication” (96). Does this explain our attempt at extending ourselves in the creation of insulation things?
Napoleon Bonaparte quote/’The Man-Machine Interface’/the changing terrain of the real (98).
“To prefer the virtual being — at some remove — to the real being — close-up — is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to a substantial being who gets in your way, who is leterally on your hands, a flesh-and-blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else” (103-4).
“…the end of the supremacy of physical proximity in the megalopolis of the postindustrial age will not content itself with promoting a boom in the single-parent family. It will go on to provoke an even more radical gap between men and women, thereby directly threatening the future of sexual reproduction” (106). Love at a distance sets the stage for ‘procreating’ in ‘virtu’ — the online equivalent to in vitro. Back this up.
“…’the commingling of genes which all sexual reproduction implies allows the risk of extinction to be reduced to a minimum where species are faced with various infections, but especially, where they are faced with predictable mutations of the species.’ Now there is just one single mutation that nature overlooked: the mutation of biotechnology” (106). Further explanation of the “development of the technosciences of the living organism.” Recombination. Biosphere/technosphere/nanotechnologies.
Physiological and demographic disintegration (108).
“…whatever is necessary to life: motion, heat or inner equilibrium” (109).
Man loses his energy as a result of the law of least action (111).
The ultimate mode of procreation/’telesexual’ decentralization/sexual harassment (112). Link to Dibbell’s “Rape in Cyberspace.”
Sex is replaced by fear: assault on the living being. Or just evolution? Separation of bodies, the distaste for the living (113). High risk sexual behaviors/experiences (114).
“‘Communication technologies and biotechnologies are important tools that enable us to reinvent our bodies…the sensory and organic architecture of the human body, sexual and cultural identities, indeed our modes of thinking, and the place each of us occupies will be modified‘” (115). Cyberfeminism.
Engaging the virtual body is influenced by how the codes and specifications are generated (116).
“Cyberfeminism then weighs in with the big question of political responsibility in the construction of such a body, ‘a truly revolutionary subject’: ‘What will happen to the social relationships of sexuality, the body’s sexual modes of communicating, desire and sexual difference in the age of the coded metaphor? Control of interpretation of the body’s boundaries is a truly feminist issue‘” (116). Link to Cyborg Manifesto.
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