Working within the rather wide field of "body criticism,"
Wegenstein adventurously
probes the relation between media and the body in Getting
under the Skin.  Her main contention is that the body has been and
still is a site of mediation.  Her approach arguably harks back to an ancient,
venerable tradition of viewing our body as the intersection of macrocosm and
microcosm.  This affords her work a broad and profound appeal.  Relying on a
rich theoretical mélange of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and
phenomenological perspectives, Wegenstein illustrates her points with examples
from the Surrealists, Situationists, installation art, experimental body
performances, developments in architecture, and medical technologies for
visualizing the body.  These examples must be
understood in the context of postmodernism: simultaneity, fragmentation,
collage, problems of representing the non-representable, and a privileging of
the process and materials over the product. 

            Wegenstein
frames her arguments within two foundational concepts that can be traced back
to the sixteenth century: body fragmentation and body holism.  She helpfully explains what she means by the latter: the
idea that the components of a system have significance by virtue of their
interrelatedness with other components.  We
can obtain a sense of what fragmentation means by noting that the medicine of
early modernity opened up the body, cut it into pieces, took it apart, and laid
out its components for scrutiny.  Modernist art would treat the body in the
same way.  Through time the bodily concept has oscillated between holism
and fragmentation, though by the twentieth century, these two perspectives on
the body had been integrated.  At the turn of the twentieth-first century (and
concomitant with the digital revolution and other technological advances), "the
body was best able to shows its mediality," which Wegenstein calls its "real
face."  Indeed, fragmentation and holism, despite their apparent
contrariness, are actually aspects of the same historical trajectory.  The body
is portrayed not as a mere intermediary, in-between the subject and the world;
rather it is a unifier of holistic subjectivity and a fragmented objectivity (the "body-in-pieces"). 

Wegenstein argues against both embodied and disembodied views of
human nature.  The former is a humanist perspective of the body that distrusts
abstracted mediated communication.  As Mark Hansen writes in the
Foreword, humanists might find might Wegenstein’s work disconcerting since she
confronts issues about our "technogenesis," or "our coevolution,
as a living species-being, with technics" (p. xiii).   The disembodied viewpoint sees the body as something that
can be left behind by new technologies, some of which permit the virtualization,
improvement, and extension of the body (e.g., artificial intelligence,
cognitive studies, nanotechnology, prosthetics, and
robotics).  Wegenstein notes that, far
from the disembodiment of information, the new age media witnesses a process of
"embodiment of corporealization" (p. 148).

The book is divided into four chapters.  The first one, "Making
Room for the Body," judiciously reviews the relevant literature and the
different ways of looking at the body, whose social role can be viewed from
different angles, — sex, gender, age, race, etc.  Moreover, since our
corporeality implicates sexual interactions, property relations, political
economic changes, and medical advances, the body should be acknowledged as an
interpretive lens.  The body, as well as our experiential and perceptive
center, is also a mirror, screen, and front for powerful social forces.  We
both "are" and "have" bodies. 

            During the twentieth century,
an increasingly mediatized environment influenced aesthetics.  In other words,
technological means of conveyance and modes of artistic expression, such as
radio, TV, and cinema, put a distance between the artists, the art, and the
consumers of entertainment.  Wegenstein explores this topic in Chapter 2,
"Body Performances from 1960s Wounds to 1990s Extensions."Advances in
technology have allowed more and more layers of mediation (screens, monitors,
TVs, etc.).  Think of windows within windows, or how TV screens are divided
into several frames, with text and numbers dancing around the framed images. 
Moreover, the body became a material in and of itself and performance art
collapsed into an internalized space, i.e., the body.  Moreover, in the late
twentieth century the body would eventually be extended into "new digital
spaces." Due to hyper-mediation, we long for lived experiences of
immediacy, intimacy, and proximity.  A quest for authenticity is evoked: "the
desire for the real has become more and more eminent in the immersively present
media environment of the late twentieth century" (p. 43).

            Chapter
3 ("How Faces Have Become Obsolete") provides an example of the
fragmentation of the body by investigating how we have lost our "faciality,"
i.e., the face has ceased to be the most representative signifier of human
appearance.  "Faces are becoming obsolete" (p. 89).  This de-facement
leads to the privileging of other bodily components, such as blood, organs, and
DNA.  Any bodily part can now become the window into the soul. 

            The
body as a mediating force in its own right is evident in postmodernist
architecture.  This is the focus of Chapter 4, "The Medium is the Body."  Working
from the premise that surface and flatness are defining features of
postmodernism, Wegenstein provides illustrations of how they have become the building itself.  Actually, the issue
is "deep surface," which points to the ambiguity between–or an implosion of–inside
and outside.  This indicates a shift from interiorizing the body to exteriorizing
it into the environment.  Architecture is no longer a separate, exterior
structure that houses the body.  It has become "a continued or extended
embodiment of that body’s essence as it has been grasped by the discourses
analyzed throughout this book–a primordial mediation" (p. 160).  This "interplay
between people and building is due to the absence of clearly definable floors
and walls and the non-distinction between horizontal and vertical–between
floors, walls, and ceilings" (p. 135).  Postmodern
flatness and surface resonate with the changing notions of the skin.  No longer
a mere border, it has become separated from its natural body-environment, or
from its function of surfacing the body.  The skin is now an organ, and
like other bodily components, it has taken on the role of pure mediation.  Moreover, as seen in advertising, the skin has become a
detached commodity. 

            Bodies
are living media, and a
history of the body is a study of the media that constitute embodiment.  The
body is nothing without mediation.  Moreover, "mediation already is what
the body always was in its various historical and cultural strata" (p.
158).  This is true, but what is being mediated?  The
content of any medium may always be another medium, but we still need to ask
what the medium is conveying.  What is missing from Wegenstein’s work is a
more concrete political economic perspective that explores the "content"
of the corporeal conduit. 

            Perhaps
one way to elucidate what is being conveyed is to posit a third "space"
in which values and content are expressed: the
individual "introcosm."  In other words, we need an approach that,
besides taking into account fundamental shifts in microcosm–macrocosm dynamics,
highlights concomitant changes in individual subjectivity (changes in
psyche).  It is readily apparent that the body
(microcosm) represents/reflects/is dispersed through the environment
(macrocosm).  However, the human condition requires an "introscape"
visible only to the individual’s private "mind’s eye."  After
all, we are arguably now passing through a historical period (whether labeled
as postmodern, posthuman, or late modern) in which classic dualisms–such as
inside-versus-outside, subject-versus-object, mind-versus-body,
nature-versus-culture, etc.–are breaking down.  This dissolution of
conventional binaries, which is being replaced by new ones (such as
human-versus-machine and subject-versus-media), results from a deconstruction
of perspectivism, certainty, and predictability.  Super-perspective, randomness, and chance characterize late modernity, and
multi-viewpoint post-Cartesianism has replaced
single-viewpoint Cartesianism. 

So
many rich themes run through Wegenstein’s book that it is sometimes difficult
to bring the main contentions into sharp focus (e.g., virtuality, simulation,
representation, the nature of personhood, posthumanism,
and the loss of the distinction between technology and biology).  On the other
hand, this probing of an array of topics is what makes the book so engaging. 
Beautifully illustrated with examples and photographs from the art world,
advertising, and architecture, the book’s strength is in its demonstration of
why difficult questions demand subtle approaches employing a judicious
interdisciplinarism. 

©
2006 Brian J. McVeigh

Brian J. McVeigh teaches in the East
Asian Studies Department at the University of Arizona.  An anthropologist and
Japan specialist, his latest book is The State Bearing Gifts: Deception and
Disaffection in Japanese Higher Education.  He is currently writing a book
entitled The Propertied Self: Politics, Psychology, and Ownership in Global
Perspective. 

Categories: Psychology