Bodies in Technology

by Don Ihde
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2002
232 pp., Trade, $47.95; paper, $18.95
ISBN: 0-8166-3845-4; ISBN: 0-8166-3846-2

Reviewed by Maureen Nappi
Long Island University
Brooklyn, NY
USA

man5@nyu.edu

Ironically in the age of high computation and technological focus on cerebration, the philosopher Don Ihde wittily begins the introduction to his recent book Bodies in Technology with the proclamation "Bodies, bodies everywhere." Is this merely an ironic gesture which harks back to the Cartesian split of mind and body? Or is this precisely a reminder to resist the temptation of such binary and omnipresent delusions despite the fact that our reach does seem to be, if even only at times, globally extended through our technology?

As a longstanding phenomenologist, in Bodies in Technology, Ihde discursively revisits the Cartesian bifurcation of mind and body by traversing the polemical processes of physical embodiment with that of contemporary technology by initially asserting that "We are our body." Thereafter, Ihde ontologically triangulates our experiences of our bodies in [relation to] technology as: body one, a first order sense of embodiment in which we experience ourselves as "motile, perceptual, and emotive being[s]-in-the-world;" body two, a second order sense of embodiment which is engendered, and constructed within the context of social and cultural definitional interplay; and body [in technology], a tertiary sense of embodiment which, while traversing body one and body two, places the body in relation to technology through some mediating form of technology or technological artifact.

Using data primarily derived from the author’s family, students and associates, in Bodies in Technology Ihde commingles the personal with the technical by interweaving the antidotal with the analytical. Thus, he consciously adopts a writing method which he attributes to the feminist writer Susan Bordo by incorporating "the autobiographical within the experiential." As Ihde’s early work in phenomenology includes flights into imaginative variations, he cites an in-class "thought experiment" which he uses to elicit his students to articulate their sense of the non-technological virtual body. The assignment: to imagine themselves jumping out of an airplane. Their responses, Ihde points out, fall into one of two possible categories. They are either one in which the student has imagined an "embodied" perspective as self as actor which Ihde refers to as the "here-body" — a present tense version of a "‘be here now’ body," or the student has imagined a disembodied perspective of self as observer of the other as actor, that is, "already a kind of virtual body in a nontechnological projection." This form of virtuality, which Ihde refers to as the "image-body," illustrates a body image which visually objectifies the body as a delayed and disembodied observer [temporal comments mine].

As each technology extends and culturally enwraps its participants within its unique environment, as Marshall McLuhan so evocatively illustrated, Ihde’s distinctions serve to build on McLuhan’s insights while further grounding us in the very physicality of our bodies. Thus, by articulating and differentiating the specificities of these experiential embodiments which we, perhaps unknowingly, sense in our bodies even as they extend into a shared, cultural embodiment, Ihde’s categories prove conceptually meaningful precisely because they bring to light something which previously remained relatively concealed. This ontology, founded on Heidegger’s interrelationship between the technological artifact and its cultural contiguities, serves to define technology not only by its raison d’ etre but also by other possible assignments it may be contextually allotted.

Moreover, just as technology must be defined in relation to the complexities of its assignments and its allowances for embodied agency, so too must the body be thus defined. Hence, as our bodies and our technologies form a symbiotic relationship in which each are characteristically and relativisticly adaptable to the other, they remain inextricably bound to each other within a cybernetic union of production. This relationship is once again emphasized by Ihde in Bodies in Technology as he reiterates in the last paragraph of his conclusion, "We are our bodies….We are bodies in technologies."