The body in the readings

With a focus on the blurring, intertwining and merging of the private and the public sphere, we find different outlines of (the constitution of) subjectivity and the self in this week’s readings: an outward self exploring while (re)producing its environment (McPherson); the public invading the interior of the private realm (Colomina); an ambivalent experience of mobile subjectivity as at once the reinstating of a “core […] secure, intact, and at rest in a vortex of speed” and the feeling of a “freely displaceable and subsitutable” “subjecthood” (Morse). Moving/static (kinesthetic) body- experience in the context of perception and subjectivity seems to be crucial here and yet do the two former authors not explicitly address the body.
While Colomina introduces the outside into the very home – and sees “the only form of defense” in a “counterdomesticity” (19, as the only remained possible form of domesticity), i.e. to articulate oneself in(to) the world – her emphasis is on visuality. McPherson seems to proceed in a similar vein in her writing about a very personal phenomenology of websurfing. It is less the moving finger or the situating of oneself sitting in front of the computer screen that counts here in the experience of vocational mobility, scan-and-search and transformation, but rather “the mind and the eye” that predominate in this experience. Though all of the three authors stress (self-)experience through more than just the visual sense, and also in accordance with what Lara opened up as new possibilities of embodiment and (nonvisual) perception, I wonder if the internet does in the end not mean a (return to a?) visual regime – our desire to know (McPherson) coupled with “desire for optical possession” (Colomina) which eradicates the body (or comes to be the only means to experience and know and (over)write it).

In this context it could be interesting to question the in/separability to write about the internet and the body; not least to think the body through approaching/thinking the internet: Where does it start, where does it end, what constitutes it, how do we experience it, what other ‚biopolitical‘ flows are involved, shaping ‚it‘, i.e. the body of human beings, the body of the internet (there have been writings about the body of film)...