Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory

Tracing the evolution of contemporary body discourse Getting Under the Skin analyzes the tension between a fragmented and holistic body concept in performance art, popular culture, new media arts, and architecture.

" Getting Under the Skin breaks the impasse over embodiment and disembodiment haunting recent studies in new media through a brilliant critical engagement with the traditions of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and corporeal feminism. Arguing that our notions and experiences of embodiment are enmeshed in a dialectical tension of fragmentation/holism framed by media, Wegenstein draws on various sources of popular culture to demonstrate that at the turn of the millennium, the body has turned into an "organ without a body" or, better, into an "organ instead of a body." Her timely reconceptualization of the body as the basis for media offers new direction for thinking about the body and human agency in an era of nanoscale fragmentation and rapidly blurring distinctions between hardware and life." Tim Lenoir , Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies in Society, Duke University " Getting Under the Skin is a major contribution to the debate over the relation of new media to the human body. Wegenstein argues convincingly against both the humanist defense of the body against the "abstractions" of mediated communication and against those who would "upload" their consciousness and leave their "meat" behind. Instead, she invents a third path that sees the body as always already mediated. With great theoretical subtlety she explores the dialectic of the body and media from the Surrealists and Situationists, installation art, and experimental body performances to new media artists and architects. Wegenstein sheds striking new light on the all-important question of the relation of humans to information machines." Mark Poster , University of California, Irvine