Data Made
Flesh: Embodying Information
by Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle,
Editors
Routledge Press, NY, 2004
292 pp. Paper, $29.95
ISBN: 0-415-96905-0.
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and
Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
As a fan of science fiction and horror,
I have a particular weakness for stories
that revolve around ideas that are both
technically innovative and wonderfully
perverse. Take, for example, David Cronenbergs
film eXistenZ. It imagines a world
in which video game systems are genetically
engineered from amphibian DNA, and are
thus quasi-living, fleshy "pods"
that connect directly into the central
nervous system through an umbilical cord
that taps into a specially-inserted "bioport"
orifice at the base of the spine. But
what makes the film interesting is that
it is filmed with a minimum of special
effects. In fact, the visual language
of the film is at once hyper-realistic
and banal. The characters/gamers find
themselves in game worlds that, above
all, feel real. It is almost as
if the best way the film can convey the
intimacy of data is to only represent
the flesh.
This relationshipand the question
of its overcomingis the terrain
addressed by the anthology Data Made
Flesh. The general topic of the relation
between information and materiality has
been covered by many new media studies,
but what makes this collection noteworthy
is that it begins with the assumption
that the dichotomy between data and flesh
has already been bypassed, if only in
a confused way. Furthermore, many of the
essays in Data Made Flesh are united
in that they see the complexities and
tensions of embodiment and control
as a sign of that bypassingan
approach the editors call "materialistic
information studies."
As the editors of Data Made Flesh
note, while the discourses of cybernetics
and communications have historically separated
immaterial information from the materiality
of bodies, recent developments in science
(e.g. genomics), economics (patenting
of biological materials), entertainment
(video games) and aesthetics (transgenic
art) have challenged this separation,
in which "information
and bodies seem to function
almost as ripples that pass from pools
of liquid across one another" (2).
While a number of other cyberculture books
tend to obsess over the future possibilities
that digital technologies present, Data
Made Flesh begins from the position
that the practices are, in a sense, already
ahead of the theory. The issue, then,
is not to imagine new hybrid, cyborgic
forms, but rather to eschew the data-flesh
dichotomy altogether, to think embodiment
as inseparable from the concerns of control.
Thus, each of the chapters in Data
Made Flesh focuses on "those
moments when information and flesh co-constitute
one another." Contributions include
essays on both historical and contemporary
issues by Richard Doyle, Mary Flanagan,
Katherine Hayles, Robin Held, Eduardo
Kac, Elisabeth LeGuin, Timothy Lenoir,
Mark Poster, Steve Tomasula, Anne Vila,
Bernadette Wegestein, Kathleen Woodward,
and editors Robert Mitchell and Phillip
Thurtle.
Data Made Flesh is interesting
because I believe it asks us to begin
to think beyond the phenomenological and
anthropomorphic vantage point of embodiment.
It opens up connections with a number
of other discourses, such as that surrounding
"animality," game studies, or
the loose group of activities known as
software art. While Merleau-Ponty rarely
commented on technology, per se,
his extension of the notion of embodiment
provides a worthwhile perturbation in
the supposed dichotomy between data and
flesh. The insight of the Data Made
Flesh anthology is to have leveraged
the concept of embodiment against both
the presumed immateriality of data, and
the presumed materiality of "the
body."
That being said, the essays in Data
Made Flesh, with their focus on DNA,
"digibodies," and what the editors
call the "material poeisis
of informatics," elicit some intriguing
questions. If, methodologically, the phenomenological
approach "brackets" the lived
experience of the perceiving and sensing
human subject, what happens when we consider
the "molecular" level of genomics,
computer software, or drug compounds (and
would this be a "molecular phenomenology")?
Is there an embodiment specific to the
realm of bits and atoms? To what extent
does embodiment implicate "bare life"
or "living labor"? How would
such an apparently "nonhuman"
viewpoint impact the domains of science,
ethics, communication, and economics that
the authors of Data Made Flesh
point to?