Reworking the Female Subject: Technology and the Body

Abstract

The legacy of Cartesian mind/body dualism on Western concepts of subjectivity has been an enduring perception of the self as abstract. Identity is thus situated in the brain (or the soul, according to religious discourse) and is separate from the material body. Within this ideological framework, the human body is situated as an object, something to be controlled and dominated but which is not intrinsic to the formation or development of subjectivity. Developments in cognitive science, psychology and continental philosophy in the twentieth century have sought to redress this relegation of the body to a position of inferiority. In particular, the interdisciplinary concept of “embodied cognition” holds that all aspects of cognition are shaped by the processes of the body. The material body has often provided the basis for the exclusionary practices used to construct the unitary humanist subject — and for this reason embodiment is crucial to models of posthumanism that seek to redress such concepts of selfhood. Using the ways in which the body can be transformed and extended by technology as an ideological starting point, Nayar views embodiment as “essential to the construction of the environment (the world is what we perceive through our senses) in which any organic system (the human body is such a system) exists” (2014: 9).