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Bodies In Technology (Electronic Mediations)

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Working off phenomenological and soci-cultural defintions of embodiment (borrowed largely from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault), Don Ihde's central task in Bodies in Technology seems to be to argue that even our most foundational bodily technological acts (everything from the Virtual Reality we may typically imagine to the simpler act of holding a gun) redefine our worldliness as selves and as relations. Ihde works hard to posit a post-Cartesian space in which technologies allow the body to open itself to many definitions of identity - most simply, chat rooms engage (and maybe encourage!) multiple self identifications, but, more complexly, Ihde argues powerfully that we can not ignore that, when I am holding a gun, our relationship (that's you, reader, and me) is not the same as when I am not holding a gun.

And this is all great. As I (admittedly a novice in the Philosophies of Science and Technology!) read this book, new worlds and ideas were constantly opened to me, and generally I would say - what more can one ask of a book? So I agree with nothing Ihde has to say about semiotics -- it's still a space to think, reflect - to learn.

But as I finished the book, I was left feeling that it never really cohered - each individual essay holds, but the book ultimately feels rushed - not thrown together - but without an overarching force of unity. And as much as I'd love to attribute that to the "plasticity and polymorphism" of identity for which Ihde so potently argues , in the end I think the disunities of the text (and I grant that it's a collection of essays!) betray the quality of thinking it posits and fosters.