Matrices of Embodiment: Rethinking Binary and the Politics of Digital Representation

Abstract

This article explores the critical art practice of Nell Tenhaaf, challenging the continued convention of theorizing the relationship between the body and digital representation technologies in terms of the real and the virtual and the perceived dematerialization of the body into code. Given the importance of histories of the body for so-called second-wave and constructivist feminists, it is perhaps unsurprising that much of the debate regarding the virtual subject was generated from within the combined discourses of feminism and science and technology studies. While the model of equivalence and interchangeability between different kinds of code (binary, genetics, language itself) has accounted in sophisticated ways for the mechanisms by which bodies and artifacts become integrated into the structures of capital, by making everything dis- and rejoinable, the way in which the discourse has been structured around the problem of the subject as code has become overdetermined and suggests a model of subjectivity that is technologically deterministic. In an attempt to speak the language of these very real problems for digital forms of representation and yet simultaneously to speak beyond them, I propose to look at histories of computing that conceive of information technology as fundamentally spatial. The purpose of this is threefold. In the first instance, through the work of Tenhaaf, I hope to explore a recent example of how digital ontology is being questioned through representation. Second, in so doing, I intend to show that replacing the paradigm of the body need not suggest a virtual flight into technophilic fantasies of transcendence or, to use the term set out by Eugene Thacker, extropianism. Thus, finally, I hope that by reconceiving of binary not as a linear series but as a spatial field, we might disconnect binary from its self-limiting association with Western binaries.