| The project is a synthesizing project aimed at formulating a multi-layered theory of the mediated body. It will be devoted to a comparative analysis of the theoretical approaches that are used in the four other projects. Its central questions are: What does it mean, philosophically, to regard the body as historically mediated? What requirements should be met by a theory of mediation? The central assumption of the program as a whole is that the human body is historically mediated, that it is not a naturally given, fixed, and self-sufficient entity, but that is affected by historical change and responding to its scientific, technological, social and cultural context. Yet the program remains (deliberately) ambiguous in its definition of mediation. Sometimes we speak about the body as being mediated in a sense in which the body, as an unknown but necessary an sich, can still be distinguished from the sum total of its possible mediations. What we view as being mediated is not the body itself, but rather the knowledge or experience or feeling we have of it and that is constructed through mediating agencies. But at other points in the program, the body is spoken of as being no more and no less than its mediations, actual or possible. In this conception of mediation the body itself is regarded as subject to continuous transformation, leaving no residue of unmediated physicality. The refusal to choose between those two philosophical options allows for indispensable theoretical latitude in the program. It enables us to include approaches such as phenomenology and constructionism that may have a lot to contribute to each other as long as this bone of contention is passed over. Yet the first task of the fifth project is to make the ambiguity explicit, and to clarify and examine its consequences. The ambiguous use of the concept of mediation in this program is further complicated because the object of mediation, the body, is also ambiguous, although in a different way. The body figures alternately as object and subject of the practices we study, and sometimes it functions concurrently as object and subject. As indicated in the proposal for the project, the anatomist s hand was considered a major instrument for obtaining knowledge in the practice of dissection from the thirteenth century onward, involving him (or her) physically with the body examined. This reflexivity of the subject/object relation is nicely expressed in the privileged status of the dissection of the hand as the most important and beautiful dissection. In recent times, the body s reflexivity has become even more complex. A major historical transition traced by the program is that between the times in which the body as object of research was necessarily dead and recent developments allowing the investigation of living bodies. These developments have turned the object of research into a potential witness of its own insides into a subject as well. A question arising, then, is whether and to what extent the body that is visualized and discussed by the medical experts and the body that is seen and felt by the patient is still one and the same thing. As is indicated in the proposal for project 3, the same ultrasound picture may have different meanings to a gynecologist and to a pregnant woman, visualizing the body as an object for both, but for the patient also informing her experience of her own body. So the question what it means to consider a reality as mediated might require a specific answer in case this reality is a body something we are as much as something we have. A third complication arises from the fact that we deal with the interior body and its boundaries and the way in which they are mediated in the history of their medical and artistic visualization. Because of the body s particular subject/object structure, the proprioceptive experience of the inner body and its boundaries offers us the closest possible example of immediacy. Nothing seems as private, as directly accessible, as the pre-reflective experience of inward bodily sensations such as pain. The history of the scientific and artistic opening up of the body, however, imposes the question whether and to what extent this region of interior, immediate experience may historically have shifted its boundaries. In project 2 the question is addressed to what extent the meaning of the skin as a direct mediator between inside and outside changes during the nineteenth century as a result of the interplay between cultural meanings, popular knowledge, technical means and scientific insights. In project 3 the question arises to what extent, for a pregnant woman, an ultrasound picture will transform an internal, immediate experience into an external and mediated one. Her earlier awareness of her pregnancy was already mediated: the public availability of ultrasound pictures allowed the woman to form mental pictures of her fetus. Still, the actual situation of being visualized from the inside out makes an experiential difference for the individual involved. However, the latter example already indicates a fourth ambiguity, that of the body as both intimate and strange. We might be tempted to equate the immediately felt experience of our own bodies with selfhood, as we tend to do in the example mentioned above. Yet a direct feeling such as pain may estrange us from our bodies, rendering the body into something with an inscrutable and hostile logic of its own, whereas a visually mediated knowledge of its source may (but of course not always does) reconcile body and self. Here we encounter a rationale for the traditional, Cartesian and Kantian, identification of subjectivity with the self-transparent, knowing mind as opposed to the body as opaque matter. As the introduction to project 1 points out, this program seeks to modify the Kantian legacy in several ways. Yet it would be too simple to reverse the opposition and turn the body into the primary source of the self . It is precisely by foregrounding mediation and by comparing its various historical and cultural forms, that we might be able to show how distinctions between self and other are shifting constructions cutting across physical boundaries between the body and its environment. That is why, throughout the program, medical imaging techniques are not only considered as investigation devices producing knowledge, but are also examined in their quality of artistic tools producing aesthetic effects. Project 4 in particular will elucidate how experiences of subjectivity and embodiment are generated, reflected upon, and transformed in contemporary art using medical imaging technologies. It will relate these experiments to contemporary French philosophy in which bodily intentionality is often valued precisely for its differential impact vis-à-vis the supposed totalitarianism of identifying reason. The development of a theory of the mediated body calls for an idea-historical and systematic study of the concept of mediation focusing on the ambiguities listed above. In addition, it requires reflection on the relation of various possible agencies involved in the mediation of the body. Whereas traditional idealist philosophies, classical phenomenology included, regarded mediation as consisting in conceptual determination, the linguistic turn of the twentieth century replaced conceptual with textual or discursive mediation. However, in this program visual images, instruments of different kinds, and social interactions, may all function as mediating agencies we do not presume they operate as texts in disguise. Therefore, as has been outlined in the general introduction, a theory of the mediated body should combine several, interrelated levels of historical and systematic investigation. Besides a discursive level dealing with the interaction of ideas, texts and visual representations, a sociological level is required focusing on institutional conditions and interactions between agencies both human and non-human; and a phenomenological level, delineating the experiences of embodiment generated by, and/or contributing to, various visualization dispositifs. As no existing theoretical framework does equal justice to all these levels, the scientific interest of project 5 is to develop such a framework. Mediation as a concept has recently gained currency as an explicit theoretical tool in constructionist studies of science and technology such as Bruno Latour s (Latour 1994). Project 5 will trace the intellectual history of these constructionist uses of the concept of mediation. It will relate its core ambiguity is there a reality outside mediation? - to an old but still ongoing philosophical debate with regard to the possibility of thinking immediacy and the limits to discursive understanding. This debate is at least as old as Hegel s critique of Kant s separation of reality as appearance from reality an sich and his qualification of the apparent immediacy of sinnliche Gewissheit as dependent on negation and Vermittlung (Hegel, 1970: 287-433; 1952: 79-89); it is continued in the recurrence of the issue of corporeal immediacy in recent postmodern thought as what remains inaccessible to, and disturbs the unity of, discursive reason (c.f. Oosterling, 1996). In the program a pivotal role is accorded to the (later) work of Merleau-Ponty that, although not providing a theory of mediation as we envision it, by emphasizing the corporeal and social embedding of thought offers many clues to develop such a theory (Cf. Visker, 1993; Crossley, 1994; Slatman, 1997; Weiss, 1999; Ihde, 1999; Van de Vall, 2000). Project 5 will proceed by critically evaluating the main theoretical approaches taken as starting points by projects 1, 2, 3, and 4, e.g. Latour (1994), Merleau-Ponty (1964), Ihde (1999), Elkins (1999), Sawday (1996), and Nancy (1992). It will examine to what extent and in what respect these theories regard the body as historically mediated, and how it is mediated; how they answer the question of whether there is a body apart from the sum of its possible mediations and, finally, whether and to what extent they offer a theory of mediation which accounts for the specific subject/object structure of the body. These questions will be further qualified by asking how each theory maps interrelations between knowledge formation, representational conventions, technological intervention, social meanings, dissemination, and subjective experiences; how it accounts for changes in these relations; and how it relates the body, its interior and its boundaries to its historical environment. As the other projects themselves reflect upon and develop the theories they start with, the task of project 5 will also consist in drawing together their theoretical results. |
