This example has a long history of recyclings through the xlist activity
system, at moments when the theme has been how tools enter into functional
systems -- or, to stick closer to Bateson's little story, how to draw
boundaries of mental systems. The consideration of tools as functional
continuations of bodies would seem to be more in the line of J.J. Gibson,
whose products have often been made to dance in the vicinity of Bateson's
through this long multilogue. (While Bateson suggestively poses the
question of system boundaries, Gibson offers an answer, a starting point
for what kinds of analysis *he* would have us do next.)
Bill brought his contact lenses into the discussion as a kind of
counterexample to Arne Raeithel//Heinz Zuellighoven's cautions against
taking the beneficial effects of transparency in tools for granted. What I
heard our German friends saying was merely that while it is fine to think
of tools as functional continuations of our bodies, one of the advantages
with tools is that they afford a *different* perception of the
counterprocess-object than the "naked" body does. In the case of contact
lenses the absence of an edge is clearly an advantage -- this may be
because they are tools for *vision*, where an "edge" to the perceptual
field is a disturbance (like the one that bothers me most of the time when
walking outdoors wearing glasses, which I have only been doing for less
than five years). Touching things, or working them into new shapes, the
qualities of "edge" between me-tool and counterprocess-object would be of a
different importance. And in the virtual tool realms of computer
software... well, designers need to be aware of the consequences of their
metaphors, right Bill?
Then Eugene asks whether Bills contact lens is a tool OR a body. I do not
quite see the context for making this an exclusive-or choice? If we take up
the Gibsonian trail of considering *any* tool as a continuation of the
body, and travel on through the textual terrain on a trail leading us to
domains where these bodily continuations are studied as cyborgs... then the
contact lens is not a very problematic case, is it? Again, the computer
would seem to contain much more difficult puzzles? Or the furnaces of some
big steel mill... who would be cyborged to THOSE?
Eugene also asks if people that he uses for his purposes are functionally a
part of his dynamically changing body, and reminds us that people, too, can
be functionally the objects of manipulation. I would add to this that other
people can function both as our tools and the objects we act upon. Perhaps
then it is YOU that are functionally part of some larger cyborg, some
larger, dynamically changing body?
Eva
amazed at the consequences
of simply wishing to get rid of
that "18th-century China" subject line...