ABSTRACT
The problem of theorizing the body, which, as we have seen throughout this book, is always central within performance theory and criticism, has taken on a new urgency in light of everaccelerating technological interventions. Computer bulletinboard users take full advantage of the opportunity to create and sustain disembodied identities and discourse in cyberspace. Virtual reality technologies promise an even more developed version of disembodied experience in which the participant’s body will become a somatic synthesizer whose primary function will be to produce “real” physical responses triggered by artificially created sensory stimuli. To an ever greater extent, medicine, too, takes the virtual body as its object. An MRI (magnetic resonance image) is, after all, an image of a digitized, videated body (see Kember 1995); a surgeon may then operate on that body guided by its mediatized image on a video monitor. The object of both diagnosis and treatment is a virtual body thoroughly penetrated and constructed by imaging technologies. Even as developments such as the AIDS crisis and the appearance of a flesh-eating virus remind us of the body’s fragile materiality, that body is increasingly dematerialized by the medical practices designed to help it withstand destruction.
