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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 Cronenberg’s 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 relationship——and the question of its overcoming——is 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 bypassing——an 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?

 

 




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