ABSTRACT
The second half of the thesis begins with Chapter 4, which deals with disembodiment as the binary opposition to embodiment, here in this chapter as materiality. In terms of the phenomenal relationship between the embodied subjects and external objects, Merleau–Ponty’s notion of corporeal schema explains how the body gains its completeness in terms of embodiment with organs, senses and sometimes external objects. These are integrated, and thus all become unified as a body–proper, with certain types of such external objects being defined as poles of action. Here, the ambiguity is also the fundamental perceptive experience of the embodied subject in its oscillating relationship between lived body and physical body. The investigation of performing things begins with the toy birds and miniature of Hagia Sophia which appeared in The Lastmaker, the syringe in Franko B’s performance and the sense of costume and face/mask in Orlan’s work, which all raise phenomenological questions pertaining to the body schema relationship and the biological boundary of subjectivity. The chapter ends with a discussion of Uber–marionette, robots and puppets, as the symbols of materiality–disembodiment based on the conclusion of thing performativity. Such a view leads to the assumption that performative landscape is manifested by the oscillation between embodiment and disembodiment.
