u

RE_VISIONING BODIES Edited by Daniel Neugebauer, with contributions

by Maaike Bleeker, carmen Morsch, Zeyno PekUniU, and Eliza Steinbock
 Contents

Daniel Neugebauer. Introduction 5

Eliza Steinbock. t4t: Archival Legacies of Trans for 9
Trans Adoration
Maaike Bleeker. Corporeal Literacy 28
Zeyno PekUniU. Hairy Tale 42
Carmen Morsch. Revision of a Text on Othered Bodies 58
in Art Education: A Discrimination-Critical
Reflection Loop
 Maaike Bleeker
28
Corporeal Literacy
In a scene not long after the beginning of The Matrix w .
protagonist Neo dunng · h'1s fi r.s t comb at ~ratnmg
· · session.
' eLaWltne
. ss the
in what looks like an old-fashwned dentist chair he is c Ytng back
. ' onnect d
computer system by means o f a p1ug 1n the back of hi h e to a
small computer screen in front of him, we see a schemat~ .ead. On a
. .
body in kung fu poses, rem1n1scent o f a " How to do KungIcF unag
,, e of a
Instead of learning kung fu from these images, he lays b uk ~anual.
eyes closed wh1'1 e t h'tngs seem to b e h appentng · inside h'ac b Withh·1s
. . b k . h' h . IS ody F
although Neo 1s lay~ng ac 1~ lS c. au, we ~re also given all ki · or,
signs that his body 1s very actively Involved m something T nds of
later, he opens his eyes and says: "I know kung fu."l · en hours
What does he know? How does he know it? What does ·t
know kung fu? To know kung fu, in this film, is to be able t~ mean to
. . d. . . k movere
spond, antictpate, an 1mprov1se 1n a ung fu-ean manner N ' . ·
challenged to demonstrate h 1s . k now1e d ge of kung fu in a friend!. eo Is
test with his master Morpheus. The actu al goal of him learningtcon-
fu, however, goes beyond his ability to meet his master's challeung
Kung fu is presented as a tool to make him think differently. Not b~ge~
plaining or showing him that th ings are different than previou:t
thought, but by changing his way of responding to what he encounter~.
Through kung fu, Neo learns to move anew, and this is shown to trans-
form his modes of enacting perception as well. Through these new
ways of moving, N eo learns to engage with what he encounters in new
ways, and even to think in new ways- he develops a new literacy.
Although literacy is traditionally associated with language and
books, the use of the term is no longer limited to this context. Over the
past decades, various other literacies have been proposed, expanding
the notion of literacy beyond the domain of the written and printed
word. Literacy is used to describe the skills involved in interpreting
various information, as in visual literacy, media literacy, or aural
literacy. Likewise, corporeal literacy aims ~o expand the notion ~f
literacy but in a slightly different way. Unlike the "media" in medta
literacy, "corporeal" in corporeal literacy does not denote a class of
informa~ion or an aspect of objects b eing read but rather refers to the

1 Lana and Lilli Wachowski, The Matrix. Holiywood, CA: Warner Bros.
et al., 1999.
 29 Corporeal Literacy

corporeal dimensions of perception and sense making and to how

these corporeal dimensions are informed by practices of doing, by the
affordances of tools and technologies, by the environments with
which humans engage, as well as by habits and practices they have
incorporated. This emphasis on the corporeal dimensions of
perception distinguishes corporeal literacy from corpoliteracy-pro-
posed by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung in Volume 3 of this series,
Counter_Readings of the Body- although the term likewise acknowl-
edges the body as a site and "a medium of learning, a structure or
organ that acquires, stores, and disseminates knowledge."2 Going
further, corporeal literacy as a conceptual tool sheds light on how the
sedimented effects of bodily practices co-shape the human mind and
the ways in which we perceive and make sense. Mind here does not
refer to something existing separately from the body. Rather, what we
conceive of as "mind" emerges from the interaction of our bodies
with the world we encounter-including as part of our coevolution
with technology-that is, the bodymind.

Literacy, Technology, and the Mind

This understanding of corporeal literacy builds on and moves beyond

Walter Ong's conceptualization ofliteracy as the cultural condition or
"mind-set" that has resulted from the widespread use of the technol-
ogies of writing and print.J More than providing human users with a
means to capture, store, and transmit spoken language, these tech-
nologies, Ong argues, quite literally changed people's mind-sets. Ong
locates these transformations in the way writing and print turn
language from an aural-transitory phenomenon into a visual-spatial
one, which affords new ways of handling language and relating to it.
Importantly, Ong's account of the impact of the invention of writing
and print technology is not concerned solely with what the use of
language does per se. It is not about what words do to the mind, but

2 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, "CORPOLITERACY," in Daniel

Neugebauer (ed.), The New Alphabet, Volume 3: Counter_ Readings ofthe
Body. Leipzig: Specter Books, 2021, p. 22. First published in: Sepake
Angiama, Clare Butcher, Alkisti Efthymiou, Anton Kats, Arnisa Zequo
(eds), aneducation - documenta 14. Berlin: Archive Books, 2019, pp.l14- 21.
3 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing ofthe Word.
London: Routledge, 1988.
 Maaike Bleeker
30
bout the transformations in modes of managing kno 1
ath · king and of being which are brought about by exten ~ e?ge, of
m ' f .. d . s1ve Int
tion with the medium o. wntlng an. pnnt.. erac,
Once written down, words ga1n an eXIstence indepe d
. 1ate 1n. d ependently acen ent fr Olll.
th e situation of utterance, can c1rcu
· sma11er pieces, · ' inumulate In ·
libraries' be categorized, cut Into
. at d'&r
analyzed
and accessed time and again Iuerent p1aces and times. Wneww. . ays,
f 1
print thus support . a sense o c osure, a sense that what is found and
" ntmg i
text has been finahzed, has reached a state of completion " ?a
. . . d h' k' h
the new modes of Imagining an t In Ing t at Ong proposes ,, ' creatmg
"4 S h 1 . not only to thew as
.
mind-set ofhteracy. uc c osure pertains ·r the.
self but also to the possibility that knowledge can be defini~~ tng It,
. 11 IVe, ex,
haustive, and all-encompassing, as we as an understanding ofk
edge as somethmg · th at can be pI ace d so mewh ere and ordered. Wr't· now},
and print partake In . a " spatia . I'Izat10n
. " o f k nowledge that is also mI tng.
fested ·m taxonomies,· In · 'dexes, ch arts, an d maps: a 11 modes ofknow·am-
that seek to determme the position
. . . or·Ind'IVI'duai elements in a totalitymg
Such knowledge places the knowing entity in a position ofoverview at.
a distance from and outside a spatially ordered objective system. '
M~ny have reftecte~ on thi~ s~pposed obj~ctivity, drawing
connectiOns between the sllent and Ind1v1dual practice of reading and
the emergence of the modern Western subject, characterized by a
sense of disconnection between the private interior mind (doing the
reading and the thinking) and the public exterior body. That is, read-
ing written or printed language facilitates particular modes of atten-
tiveness and supports a sense of self or "I" as first and foremost
located in the mind. Such a disembodied "I" can never truly be
attained however, because, as Brian Rotman-in his Becoming Beside
Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being-shows:

"[B]efore disembodied agencies come embodied ones. Alpha-

betic writing, like all technological systems ang apparatuses,
operates according to what might be called a corporeal axiomatic:
it engages directly and inescapably with the bodies of its users.
It makes demands and has corporeal effects." 5

4 Ibid., p.l29. .
5 Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Dzs-
tributed Human Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, P· 15·
31 Corporeal Literacy

Although Ong observes the shift from the aurality of speech towards
the visuality oflanguage to be key to the emergence of the "mind-set"
that is literacy, he does not reflect on the embodied implications of
this shift more than observing that, as an aural phenomenon, language
has no permanent existence-since, as he explains, sound disappears
while being uttered- while as visual phenomenon it has longevity.
That is, Ong points to how ~riting changes the way in which language
is present for perception, yet he does not reflect on what writing does
to perception and to bodies engaged in perceiving.
Writing proceeds by means of a symbolic notation of the sounds
of speech through visual signs. This symbolic notation requires from
the reader the capacity to read the letters in terms of the sounds they
stand for, as a result of which successions ofletters become recogniz-
able as words. Understanding how to read written language requires
learning to read what is seen in terms of these sounds. The difference
between speech and writing, therefore, is not (or not only) that writ-
ing turns spoken language into a visual phenomenon, but also that
speech (either live or recorded) requires us to make sense of what we
hear, whereas written language requires us to make sense of what we
see in terms of sound. Writing thus alerts us to perception as a bodily
grasping that involves our senses, or, as James Gibson puts it, as
perceptual systems through which we make sense ofwhat we encoun-
ter.6 This therefore changed the embodied hierarchy of the senses
when it came to perception. ,
Writing and print also operate on the bodies of their users
through the practices they afford, the routines, patterns of movement,
and gestures involved in using them, and through the perceptual
activities that are mobilized by the medium or that are part of the
background conditions that brought the medium about. Technologies
like writing and print impose what Rotman describes as their "medi-
ological needs" on the bodyminds of their users. They facilitate
behavior and engage their users in patterns of action and/ in percep-
tion, the effects of which extend beyond any technologies' explicit
functioning and beyond the evident perceptual and cognitive skills
required to use them.? The logic of these effects, Rotman observes, is

6 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston,

MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
7 Ibid., p. 82.
 Maaike Bleeker
n
not one of representation but of e.nactment: of how media en
bodies of users in patterns of actiOn and perception of h gage
propagate s9me behaviOrs an d suppress oth ers.
. ' ow th ey
The fact that most humans are capable of engag· .
. 1 h . Ing Wtth
language as a visual-spatia p enomenon. IS a matter of ca pacihes ..
given in the structure o f h uman em b o d Iment to see writ'
. . f h tng and
roduce it. In this sense, t h e InventiOn o t e technology of . .
P · h · · . wntmg
and print meets with t e pre-exiSting potential of bodies · Th e sarne
might be . argued about more recent technologies . · The control
mechamsms of a smartphone, for ex~mple, are designed to meet the
potential of bodies to perform certain movements. Humans able to
perform these movements are therefore capable of using th
. . . th . ese
technologies. Howev~r, musing ese move~ents to mteract with the
touch screens of devices, the movement skills to engage with the
technologies become part of something they were not before. Th:e
b~come part. of navi~ating throu~h information, findi~g the rig~
p1ece of music, scrolhng through hsts of data, communicating with
friends and strangers, and organizing and making connections
between diverse materials. As a result, the skills involved in perform-
ing these movements become part of how bodies make connections,
how they relate to what they encounter, and how they make sense of
it. These new technologies now mediate in the handling of informa-
tion and, by extension, hold the potential to change modes of
understanding and thinking, including our understanding of what
knowledge is and what it means to know.
Literacy thus understood describes a situated condition that
results from how, once incorporated, those skills acquired from the
use of writing and print affect modes of understanding, not only of
language but also of other things: of the world, of human "selves."
Similarly, corporeal literacy is not about how language affects bodies
or how bodies are involved in how we make sense of language. It is
about what the medium of writing and print, as well as other technol-
ogies, do to bodies and vice versa. How do technologies afford modes
of engaging with knowledge that respond to the bodies' potential for
perception and understanding? At the same time, how do technolo-
gies mediate the development of new cognitive perceptual skills and,
by extension, new modes of thinking and imagining?
 Corporeal Literacy
JJ
The Mind, the Body, and the World

Insights in corporeall~t~racy also find parallels in current develop-

ments in en active cognition. From an enactive-cognition perspective,
perception and und~r~tanding are ~rounded in bodily practices that
contribute to the bulldmg of sensonmotor schemata or skills in inter-
action with the environment. These skills or schemata provide an
answer to what Alain Berthoz describes as the fundamental problem
ofperception- unity. 8 Human bodies have a great number of sensors
through which they are capable of receiving stimuli. Sensory inputs
are therefore multiple, n1anifold, ambiguous, staggered over time,
they do not cover the same range of velocities, and they are often
fuzzy and incomplete. And so, as Berthoz writes, "Perception is an
interpretation; its coherence is a construction whose rules depend on
endogenous factors and on the actions that we plan."9 According to
enactive approaches, sensorimotor schemata (Berthoz) or sensorim-
otor skills (Noe) are crucial to creating this unity, acting as blueprints
for possible action and organizing perception even before sensory
stimuli are processed. These schemata, Berthoz points out, are not
sets of data but organizing frameworks for understanding relation-
ships between action, perception, and memory. They are part of how
bodies engage with what they encounter, and they presuppose certain
capacities given in the structure of our embodiment. For example, the
possibility for humans to develop the ability to walk up and down
stairs requires particular physical possibilities. Once they have
learned to do so, this embodied knowledge will be incorporated into
a wider schema that includes memory, particular physical strengths,
the interpretation of visual stimuli, an implicit understanding of the
workings of gravity, and so on.
Referring to these capacities as sensorimotor skills (rather than
sensorimotor schemata), Alva Noe highlights the fact that these
capacities are not merely given but have to be acquired in and through
experience.lONeo's kung fu training illustrates his observation that
"What we perceive is determined by what we do (or what we know how

B Alain Berthoz, The Brain's Sense ofMovement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2000, p. 90.
9 Ibid., p. 91.
10 Alva Noe, Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
 Maaike Bleeker
34
to do); it is determined by what we are ready to do."ll Perceptio N ..
points out, is not an activity in the brain but a skillful activity~' ~e
part of the animal as a whole. And the basis of perception is imnl~ :
. k now1e d ge o fth e ways movement giVes
practical ' ' to change
nse p lClt
.
. 1 . F 1 d' ·
sensory stimu atwn. or examp e, rea Ing . requires the impl'lClt sIn.
knowledge that movem.ent of the eye~ to the r~ght produces leftward
movement across th~ visual fiel~ . Eating requires the implicit knowl-
edge that, when looking at one side of, say, a tomato, what is in fro t
of us is a whole tomato; what we see is the presence of a three-dimen _
sional object in space. Even in the dark, or with our eyes closed wn
can touch different sides of a box and not only feel a successio~ 0~
surfaces but grasp their spatial relationships as different sides of the
same box. Such a perceptual sense of presence results from our
practical grasp of sensorimotor patterns that mediate our presence in
relation to what we are perceiving. Perceiving is not merely to have
sensory impressions but rather to make sense of seJ?.sory impressions,
and this happens through our sensorimotor skills. This understand-
ing is not only constitutive of our experience of the world, but also is
the root of our ability to think about it.
This makes Noe's theory of enactive cognition particularly inter-
esting for a non-representational understanding of literacy as a
corporeal condition. His approach suggests that bodily practices and
ways ofinteracting with technologies and the environment may affect
the ways in which sensorimotor skills come about and thus co-shape
the ways in which human beings perceive and order information.
Enactive cognition approaches like Noe's therefore also call into
question the assumption that perception and cognition "consist of the
representation of a world that is independent of our perceptual and
cognitive capacities by a cognitive system that exists independent of
the world" and instead propose a view of perception and cognition as
embodied action.12
This concept is explored imaginatively in The Matrix, where
humans receive electrical stimuli via the plug in the top of their spinal
column, which are interpreted by their bodies and from which. the
world of the matrix emerges as a world with a visible, audtble,

11 Ibid., p.l (italics in the original).

12 Francisco J.Varela et al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and
Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, p. xx.
 Corporeal Literacy
35
ngible existence, a world in which they can participate through
tahat they perceive as fully embodied interaction. In The Matrix, this
world is opposed to a world that is material and that-like Plato's
,:Veal world" outside the famous allegorical cave- exists elsewhere,
~nown only by some enlightened ?eings and in constant threat of
being destroyed by the same machines .th~t produce the illusionary
world that most humans are caught Within.13 The narrative of the
movie thus reiterates a well-known binary opposition between the
digital and the material: that technology provides mere illusions,
which prevent us from direct engagement with the more real, mate-
rial world. Interestingly, however, the last human venue in The
Matrix is not projected outside but inside a cave, somewhere deep
down below the surface of the Earth. Outside is the "desert of the
real," a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by machines that have
outsmarted human beings and now keep humans locked in the tech-
nological surroundings that produce the illusionary world. On either
side, humans find themselves locked within.
A central theme in both Plato's allegory and The Matrix are the
limitations to knowledge and how these limitations keep humans
imprisoned. Whereas Plato's allegory suggests that the way to libera-
tion is to be found in leaving the body behind, in The Matrix, it is
through his body, and in particular through movement, that Neo
learns to understand his world anew, including the world that is
produced by the technology referred to as the matrix. The way to
liberation is imagined here as an embodied understanding of the
rules that govern his world and also how "some of these rules can be
bent, others can be broken" (as stated by the character Morpheus). In
The Matrix, enlightenment does not happen to the Cartesian "I think"
to whom the world is a spectacle, but to Merleau-Ponty's "I can" to
whom the world is given as a system of possibilities and as potential for

13 The allegory of the cave is introduced in the seventh book of Plato's The
Republic. The allegory describes a group of people who have lived their
entire life in a cave. Chained to one wall, they watch shadows projected
on a blank wall in front of them, generated by objects passing in front
of the light from a fire which is behind them concealed by a low wall. They
take these shadows for reality. The allegory compares philosophers
to prisoners who, once freed from the cave, come to understand that the
shadows on the wall are actually not reality at all.

'
36 Maaike Bleeker

action.14 Furthermore, The Matrix suggests that, approached . h'

. . b ut actua11y expands our potent'In t ~ lS
way, technology does not 1Irnit
. al . 1c . . la1lOr
action, and through th Is, ~o our potentia 10r Imagining and thinkin
Crucial to ~eo a~d his fellow fr~e~om fighters is their develo g~
ment beyo~d ?eing ~Ither locked Within. the technically produce~
world or within their real-world cave, Instead learning to m
. . h h ove
between the two. In dmng so, we mig t say t at they learn to enga
with their world in terms of what Mark Hansen (after Moni~e
Fleischma~n and ~olfgan? Str~us~) ref~rs to as :'mixed reality."l~
Mixed reahty descnbes a Situatwn.In. which the VIrtual is no longer
conceived of as a separate realm, distinct from the real, but a dimen-
sion of reality opened up by technology. Or, as Hansen puts it:

"Rather than conceiving the virtual as a total technical simu-

lacrum and as the opening of a fully immersive, self-contained
fantasy world, the mixed reality paradigm treats it as simply
one more realm among others that can be accessed through em-
bodied perception or enaction."16

In the mixed reality paradigm, virtuality emerges from the various

ways in which our interaction with technology expands our reality and
affects human behavior. This leads Hansen to his observation that
mixed reality turns an ontological condition-in this case, that our
reality has been expanded by technology since the very first use of
tools- into an empirical reality. Mixed reality, he observes, "appears
from the moment that tools first delocalized and distributed human
sensation, notably touch and vision."17 Today's virtual reality technol-
ogies expose this technical conditioning ofexperience and foreground

14 The Cartesian "I think" refers to Rene Descartes' famous saying "I think
therefore I am." With this, Descartes identifies being with thinking, .
and the mind as the site of self or "I." In his Phenomenology ofPerceptzon
(London: Routledge & K.Paul, 1962), Maurice Merleau-}?onty argues,
against this Cartesian understanding. Replacing "I think" with "I can, he
draws attention to the ways in which being and thinking are grounded
in the body and its capacity for action. . .
15 Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Medla. London.
Routledge, 2006, p. 2.
16 Ibid., p. 5.
17 Ibid., p. 9.
 Corp oreal Literacy
37
hat Hansen describes as "the constitutive or ontological role of the
~ dy in giving birth to the world."18 This bodily basis of experience
''h~s always been cond~tio.ned by a tech?ical di~ension and has always
curred as a cofunctioning of embodiment With technics."l9
oc Hansen 's observatiOns. . to h ow h uman modes of perceiving,
pOint
xperiencing, acting, and thinking are thoroughly intertwined with
;he technologies we use. Technologies-like our computers or the
above-mentioned smartphones- are not merely technical extensions,
we actually perceive and think through them. This is what leads Andy
Clark to his assertion that human beings are natural-born cyborgs.2o
Bernard Stiegler, Katherine Hayles, and Hansen refer to this as tech-
nogenesis: the human co~volution with technology. 21 The proposition
recurring in their works is that humans-and what we associate with
the human mind and thinking-coevolved with the tools humans
developed and deployed. This is supported by research in radically dif-
ferent fields, namely palaeoanthropology and evolutionary neurology.
Long before it was possible to imagine the kind of intimate
intertwining of humans and technology envisaged in The Matrix,
humans have been "natural born cyborgs" in the sense that their
modes of encountering the world took place in interaction with tech-
nologies of various kinds. Terrence Deacon observes that:

"Stone and symbolic tools, which were initially acquired with

the aid of flexible ape-learning abilities, ultimately turned

18 Ibid., p. 5.
19 Ibid., pp. 8- 9.
20 Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technology, and the Future of
Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
21 Bernard Stiegler,Technics and Time 1: The Fault ofEpimetheus, trans.
Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998; Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2:
Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009; Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time
and the Question ofMalaise, trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2011; Katherine N. Hayles, How We Think: Digital
Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press, 2012; Mark B. N. Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology
Beyond Writing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003;
Hansen, Bodies in Code.
\
38 Maaike Bleeker

the tables on the~r users an~ forced them to ad~pt to a new niche
opened by these technologies. Rather than being just useful
tricks, these behaviol?"al prosthesis for obtaining food and
organizing social behaviours became indispensable element
in a new adaptive complex. The origin of "humanness" s
can be defined as that point in our evolution where these tools
became the principal source of selection on our bodies and
. " 22
bratns.

To paraphrase Noe, interactions with technology changed what we do

what we know how to do, and what we are ready to do, and in doing so'
also transformed modes of perceiving and thinking. Referring to
Clark, Rotman observes that the human:

" [...]has from the beginning of the species been a three-way

hybrid, a bio-cultural-technological amalgam: the 'human
mind'- its subjectivities, affects, agency, and forms of con-
sciousness- having been put into form by a succession of
physical and cognitive technologies at its disposal."23

Whereas Ong's argument is constructed around an opposition of oral-

ity and literacy, in which or~lity problematically seems to stand for a
more natural, pristine, and primitive condition and literacy for culture
and progression, Rotman points out that what writing and print do to
human bodyminds actually builds on and extends previous cognitive
perceptual practices resulting from the invention of speech. Further-
more, as he and many others have pointed out, writing is not the only
medium that imposes "mediological needs" on bodies-so too do
other technologies, environments, and bodily practices. From this
perspective, what Ong describes as the mind-set ofliteracy represents
only one particular aspect of a much longer, complicated, and diverse
history in which writing and print are part of a broad array of physical
and cognitive technologies that have shaped, and are shaping, huma.n
bodyminds. For just two examples amongst many works in which this

22 Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution ofLanguage

and the Brain. New York: Norton, 1997, p. 345, quoted from Rotman,
Becoming Beside Ourselves, pp. xix-xx.
23 Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves, p.l.
 Cor poreal Ltteracy
J9
ore complex picture has been explored, Friedrich Kittler has shown
:ow the gramopho?e, film, and the typewriter have become part of
hoW we think; 24 Gtlles D~le~ze famo_usly ~r~ued that cinema has
transformed modes of thmkmg and tmagmmg in modernity, and
explains this through how mon~age and the film camera place new
kinds of demands on our sensonmotor schemata. 25
Going further in terms of situating these theories in particular
times and places, in his Techniques of the Observer, cultural theorist
Jonathan Crary shows how ~echnologies.like t?e camera obscura and
the stereoscope can be considered paradtgmattc for culturally specific
modes of perceiving and thinking and for culturally specific
conceptions ofperception and embodiment.26 In his subsequent book,
suspensions ofPerception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture,
Crary demonstrates that such modes of perceiving are not merely the
result of actual encounters and interactions with specific technologies,
but that these interactions with technologies get incorporated and
thus transform ways of perceiving and understanding.27 Like Ong's,
the work of these theorists points to how technologies affect ways of
perceiving, imagining, and thinking, and they show that the ways in
which they do so are not only a matter of our actual interaction with
them but extend well beyond that to become part of naturalized - yet
culturally and historically situated-modes of understanding.

Conclusions

The Matrix is, of course, fiction. In fact, The Matrix is interesting

precisely as science fiction, that is, as an extrapolation from the 1999
state-of-the art in science and technology: an informed fantasy of
where we might go in the future. 'i\lthough it seems unlikely that the

24 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey

Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999.
25 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University
Press, 1986.
26 Jonathan Crary, Techniques ofthe Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
27 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions ofPerception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
. Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
 40 Maaike Bleeker

next generation of "How to" manuals will be . delivered via a bra1n.

plug, first steps have already been taken 1n the development 0 f
brain-computer interfaces. Research into neural plasticity h
demonstrated that it is possible to reorganize brain functions a a~
make the brain interpret electrical impulses detected through t~
tongue as visual images, or impulses from an implant in the inner eae
as sound. Such research points to the possibility of humans participa;-
ing in an environment in which visibility and audibility do not neces-
sarily precede perception but emerge from their embodied response
to these impulses. This would result in further changes to the capabil-
ities, hierarchies, and technologies that constitute and change the
way humans perceive the world, much like the changes brought about
by Neo's kung fu training.
At the time of his writing in the early 1980s, Ong observed that
telephone, radio, television, and various kinds of sound recording
began to alter the mind-set brought ab.out by writing and print. He
suggests that these technologies have the potential to bring about a
"secondary orality." His choice to describe this new phase as a
"secondary orality" (rather than further developments of literacy)
seems to be inspired by the then-rising prominence of media that
capture and transmit spoken rather than written language. The
suggestion that this would mean a return to orality, however, is a
. denial of the difference between speech and speech-that-is-mediated.
It is a denial therefore precisely of mediation: of how sound recording,
radio, and television are also means of what the subtitle of his book
describes as "technologizing the word," albeit in different ways. Both
writing and recording evoke a disconnection of the utterance from a
speaker and the situation of speaking, and require from a listener the
capacity to relate to language thus disconnected. Both give language
a semi-permanent existence, as something that can be stored,
ordered, catalogued, and accessed time and again and in different
places and times. Both afford language the ability to be dissected into
smaller pieces, to be analyzed and recombined. That is, both provide
many of the developments that Ong considers as constitutive of the
mind-set that is literacy.
This demonstrates that bodies can reorganize how the various
sense modalities are encountered as visible and audible, and both at
the same time. Such reorganizations are indicative of transforma-
tion.s in how bodies are corporeally literate. But, just as the technology
 Corporeal Liter acy
41
.ting and print did not mean the end of speech, so the emergence
ofWrl
of other technologies · d oes no t mean t h at w:1tmg
· · w1·11 be replaced by
rn nor that the effect of older technologies on ways of perceiving
th~ thinking is simply undone. Rather, the ways in which bodies are
an ore ally literate bears the traces of histories of engagement with
corp.ous technologies. an d environments
. as we11 as with
. other bodily
vanctices like trainmg
· · an d h a b.Its. H ow b o d.Ies are corporeally literate
~r~n constant transformation and involves both the sediments of
·despread uses of teeh no 1ogtes
IS I . an d other practices of doing and
~agining; they are part of how indivi~u~ls ~r~ cultura~ly and histor-
.cally situated and the effects of theu Individual traJectories and
~hoices. Corporeal literacy as a conceptual tool thus directs attention
to these sediments and how they inform ways of perceiving and
making sense, and how what we experience as our perceptions, our
ways of understanding, are jointly shaped by histories of intra-ac-
tions of human bodies and the demands placed on them by the worlds
they encounter.