Disembodied Process Research Articles

Re-embodiment and Rehabilitation

This article examines the process of rehabilitation through Wendy Seymour's concept of re-embodiment and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus. It argues that rehabilitation practitioners need to focus not only on the damaged body of the patient, but also on the patient's subjective experiences of health and illness and the wider social context in which they occur. The process of disembodiment caused by periods of injury or sickness creates a rupture in the ordinary experience of the individual in society. In doing so, it renders both the individual habitus and ordinary societal conceptions problematic. Individuals must then embark on a process of transformation or identity reconstruction, whereby they again come to understand themselves as “healthy”. As rehabilitation workers are likely to work closely with people over an extended period of time, they are in an excellent position to consider the person not just as an objective patient, but as a person or subject influenced by many overlapping social forces and relationships that have an impact upon their reconstitution of identity, their rehabilitation and re-embodiment. Thus, rehabilitation as re-embodiment offers an opportunity for both the patient and practitioner to reconsider themselves and their place in society, and in doing so, to effect social change both within themselves and society at large.

Spectacularizing Crime: Ghostwriting The Law

Beginning with an examination of the process whereby punishment turns its point of application from body to subject, and its scene of application from public to private -- as Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish -- this paper attempts to complicate Foucault’s thesis of a shift from corporeal visibility to invisibility as it appears in his account of the withdrawal of punishment from a public, spectacular domain into the no less public yet private sphere of the prison by attending to the transformations of spectacle itself which accompanied this process of disembodiment. The embodied spectacle of punishment -- the state’s theatre of cruelty -- gave way to a disembodied discursive explosion of images of crime and punishment, and this process can be traced through the texts of Bentham (Panopticon Letters, Fragment on Ontology) and Dickens (Great Expectations). Foucault’s dichotomy between the spectacle of public punishment and the disciplinary, non-spectacular prison overlooks the importance of images of crime and punishment which come to pervade public discourse and imagination as part of the installation of the disciplinary regime. Spectacularizing entails a move from the specific, embodied singularity of spectacle to the condition of a generalized, disembodied, and continual insistence: it is this that constitutes and characterizes the shift from spectacular sovereignty to disciplinary surveillance. This spectacularizing is akin to the spectre: “some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other” (Derrida). The spectre haunting the nineteenth century was the criminal, and that century’s rationalizing of crime and punishment was based upon a fear of the spectral itself.

Foundations of AI: The big issues

The objective of research in the foundations of AI is to explore such basic questions as: What is a theory in AI? What are the most abstract assumptions underlying the competing visions of intelligence? What are the basic arguments for and against each assumption? In this essay I discuss five foundational issues: (1) Core AI is the study of conceptualization and should begin with knowledge level theories. (2) Cognition can be studied as a disembodied process without solving the symbol grounding problem. (3) Cognition is nicely described in propositional terms. (4) We can study cognition separately from learning. (5) There is a single architecture underlying virtually all cognition. I explain what each of these implies and present arguments from both outside and inside AI why each has been seen as right or wrong.

Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Activism and Social Movement "Newness"

Examining the dynamics and activities of the AIDS activist movement—here, through an analysis based on a participant-observation study of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in San Francisco—provides an opportunity to clarify issues on which social movements literature tends to be hazy. ACT UP mixes strategic action and material targets with expressive action and cultural targets; their cultural activity takes the form of boundary-crossing and the contesting of images. They often have difficulty distinguishing their targets, and are caught both denying and affirming that AIDS is a gay disease. I argue that these actions and dilemmas are best understood in the context of changed forms of domination, more and more an invisible and disembodied process of “normalization,” with the state gradually less directly involved. This argument not only explains the particulars of ACT UP's activism, but also poses challenges to theorizing on contemporary (“new”) social movements.

Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Activism and Social Movement "Newness"

Examining the dynamics and activities of the AIDS activist movement—here, through an analysis based on a participant-observation study of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in San Francisco—provides an opportunity to clarify issues on which social movements literature tends to be hazy. ACT UP mixes strategic action and material targets with expressive action and cultural targets; their cultural activity takes the form of boundary-crossing and the contesting of images. They often have difficulty distinguishing their targets, and are caught both denying and affirming that AIDS is a gay disease. I argue that these actions and dilemmas are best understood in the context of changed forms of domination, more and more an invisible and disembodied process of “normalization,” with the state gradually less directly involved. This argument not only explains the particulars of ACT UP's activism, but also poses challenges to theorizing on contemporary (“new”) social movements.

Being and Non-Being: Samuel Beckett's Not I

WHEN THE CURTAIN RISES ON NOT I, Samuel Beckett's most recent work for the stage, the first thing we are aware of is a disembodied human mouth, seemingly suspended eight feet in the air, trapped in the harsh glare of a spotlight amid the surrounding darkness. The long line of partially disembodied characters in Beckett's drama makes its first appearance with Nagg and Nell in Endgame; having crashed on their tandem in the Ardennes and lost their shanks, the two now inhabit dustbins. Whatever else they may represent, the ash bins (or dustbins) are clearly death images, symbolically apt containers of decaying human flesh, linked with the grave via such traditional Biblical images as "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Genesis 3.19). In Happy Days, the process of disembodiment has gone one step further. At the beginning of Act I, Winnie is discovered interred in a mound of sand up to her waist; by the second act, however, the mound has reached her neck, thus obliterating her entire body except for her head. This mound of sand is, once again, a brllliantly conceived icon of death-in-life; figuratively and literally, Winnie has both feet in the grave, and the rest of her must inevitably follow. The three characters of Play are likewise imprisoned up to their necks, in vases which Beckett specifically labels "urns," thereby evoking both the ashes of cremation and the tomb. All that remains of their bodies are their faces — "Faces so lost to age and aspect," Beckett directs, "as to seem almost part of urns." And in Not I, there is no longer even the entire face, but simply a mouth, chattering compulsively. By now we know full well what disembodiment signifies in Beckett's drama; there is no longer the need for an implicity coffin-like receptacle.