perspective as a massively encumbered object. Its physical portability comes at the
expense of an increased ramification and layering of communication infrastructure’
(Mackenzie 2002: 12).
To summarize the argument so far, things form not so much a technological
unconscious as a technological anteconscious; a ‘spreading so extensive that it can
come to the surface in lives entirely different from the one beneath which it is
currently sensed’ (Schwenger 2006: 4 ), a warp and weft of inhuman traffic with its
own indifferent geographies. But I want to see things as having one more dis-
position. That is, the way in which the human bodyinteracts with other things.
I do not want to count the body as separate from the thing world. Indeed, I think
it could be argued that the human body is what it is because of its unparalleled
ability to co-evolve with things, taking them in and adding them to different parts
of the biological body to produce something which, if we could but see it, would
resemble a constantly evolving distribution of different hybrids with different
reaches. Indeed, the evidence suggests that organs like the hand, the gut, and
various other muscle and nerve complexes which have evolved in part in response
to the requirements of tools have subsequently produced changes in the brain. The
human body is a tool-being. This is, I think, an important point. Of late, there has
been a large literature generated on corporeality, most particularly by feminist
theorists, which often seems to want to endow the flesh with some form of pri-
mordial distinction: goo is good, so to speak.^27 But, whilst it would be profoundly
unwise to ignore the special characteristics of flesh,^28 it would be equally unwise to
think that the make-up of the human body stopped there, or that it produced an
ineffable perceptual membrane. It does not. There is a sense of touch in all parts
of the extended physiognomy of the material body.^29 At the same time, it is
important to enter a note of caution which has been generated, at least in part, by
feminist theorists. Too often, the recent turn to corporeality has also allowed a series
of assumptions to be smuggled in about the active, synthetic and purposive role of
embodiment which need closer examination. In particular, it is assumed that bodies
are bodies-in-action, able to exhibit a kind of continuous intentionality, able to
be constantly enrolled into activity.^30 Every occasion seems to be willed, cultivated
or at least honed. My own work has been periodically guilty of this sin, I am sure.
But the experience of embodiment is not like that at all; not everything is focused
intensity. Embodiment includes tripping, falling over, and a whole host of other
such mistakes. It includes vulnerability, passivity, suffering, even simple hunger. It
includes episodes of insomnia, weariness and exhaustion, a sense of insignificance
and even sheer indifference to the world. In other words, bodies can and do become
overwhelmed. The unchosen and unforeseen exceed the ability of the body to
contain or absorb. And this is not an abnormal condition: it is a part of being as
flesh. It may be that it is only ‘because the self is sensible, open to the pangs of
hunger and eros, that it is worthy of ethics’ (Critchley 2002: 21).^31
All that said, this emphasis on things questions the solidity of the world, since
so much of it is ultimately mutable, working according to a spectrum of different
time scales (Grosz 2005). Increasingly, many human activities seem to realize
this. Indeed, it is a point that has been brilliantly made by Kwinter (2001). Thus
10 Life, but not as we know it