[Image: Traces by Simon Penny] “Dualistic thinking is as difficult to avoid as the sticky clay that passes for topsoil where I live in Topanga Canyon. Topanga Canyon is a beautiful place, a vibrant reminder of what this Southern California coastal region was like before it was despoiled by freeways, smog, condominiums, and the exoskeletons we natives call cars. The valleys here are filled with spreading live oaks, and the chaparral-covered mountains rise up to the sky like hymns of stone. But down where I live, there is this torment my geologist refers to as «highly expansive soil.» When it gets even a little wet, it clumps so grotesquely onto my shoes that I look as if I am wearing snowshoes. I try to avoid it, of course, but inevitably something lures me off the gravel paths we have painstakingly created—a ball thrown by a mischievous dog, a wildflower too beautiful to resist—and there I am again, clumping around with shoes grown to elephant size. In similar fashion I struggled to avoid the Cartesian mind-body split in my recent book «How We Became Posthuman» when I made a distinction between the body and embodiment. The body, I suggested, is an abstract concept that is always culturally constructed. Regardless of how it is imagined, ‹the body› generalizes from a group of samples and in this sense always misses someone’s particular body, which necessarily departs in greater or lesser measure from the culturally constructed norm. At the other end of the spectrum lie our experiences of embodiment. While these experiences are also culturally constructed, they are not entirely so, for they emerge from the complex interactions between conscious mind and the physiological structures that have emerged from millennia of biological evolution. The body is the human form seen from the outside, from a cultural perspective striving to make representations that can stand in for bodies in general. Embodiment is experienced from the inside, from the feelings, emotions and sensations that constitute the vibrant living textures of our lives—all the more vibrant because we are only occasionally conscious of this humming vitality that accompanies every song we sing. I tried to stay on the holistic path by insisting that the body and embodiment are always in conversation, always dynamically interacting with one another. But having made the analytical distinction between the body and embodiment, I could not escape the clay of dualistic thinking that clung to me regardless how strenuously I tried to avoid it…” Continue reading Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments by N. Katherine Hayles, Media Art Net.