Corporeal Literacy: New Modes of Embodied Interaction in Digital

Culture
Maaike Bleeker

This section affords a perspective on intermedial theatre practices through the

lens of corporeal literacy. It proposes that theatre practices create situations in
which communication happens through several sensory modalities at once. The
perspective brings out the performative character of processes of perception and
cognition, focusing particularly on the corporeal dimension of these practices.
Accordingly, it draws attention to how perception is performed and also to how
theatre performance involves complex processes of selection and combination of
sensory input.

The Performance of Perception

Perception, as Alva Noë points out, “is not a process in the brain but a kind of
skilful activity on the part of the animal as a whole” (Noë 2004, 2). By means of
our perceptual systems, we probe our surroundings as animals. Perceiving there-
fore is a mode of acting. It is not something that happens to us but something we
do. It is something we learn to do. Exploring their surroundings through several
perceptual systems (Gibson 1966) simultaneously, children learn to perceive
through sight and hearing as well as through smelling, touch, proprioception
and kinesthesis. From this active engagement, an experience of these surround-
ings emerges as both visible, audible, and tangible, and all at the same time.
The theatre presents a staged version of the performance of perception that
may illuminate how this performance is marked by culture. The multi-media ad-
dress presented particularly by intermedial theatre is constructed in such a way as
to play into (and sometimes also to play with) culturally specific modes of perceiv-
ing. Famously (or infamously) the conventional theatre set-up, putting the audi-
ence in the dark in front of a brightly lit stage confirms modes of perceiving of the
so-called disembodied I/eye, the (supposedly) passive observer of a world existing
independently from her perceptual engagement with it. The aesthetic logic of the
dramatic theatre (characterised by Lehmann (1999) as logocentric and teleologi-
cal) supports a sense of the world that exists as a perceptual unity independent of
our perception of it. A similar sense of unity characterises the synaesthetic ideal
of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet the intermedial character of the theatre may
also be used to undermine seemingly self-evident modes of perceiving and to
draw attention to the performativity of perception: how perception actually pro-
duces what appears as the object of our perception. The transition described by
Lehmann as the development from dramatic to postdramatic theatre manifests
itself in performances in which the different sensory modalities of theatre, no

38 mapping intermediality in performance

longer united by the dramatic frame, challenge established modalities of audience
and spectatorship and turn the theatre into an experimental set-up for exploring
and playing with the performance of perception.
Lehmann points specifically to the connection between the development from
dramatic to postdramatic theatre and the rise of media culture. The transforma-
tion of the aesthetic logic of the theatre, he argues, may (at least partly) be under-
stood as a response to the mediatisation of society. Here corporeal literacy allows
for an approach of both the new experiences provided by the theatre and the
mediatisation to which this theatre responds from the intersection of our bodies
and the technologies with which these bodies engage. The impact of media tech-
nologies cannot be understood only in terms of representations or content, those
intentional manifest meanings signified to pre-existing self-sufficient subjects.
Thus intermedial theatre practices are even more likely to trouble established
modes of perception than postdramatic theatre understood more broadly. What
particularly remains unexamined is the effect of technology’s materiality ("
term: materiality), an effect that transforms its users.

Corporeal Literacy
Corporeal literacy affords a perspective on these new experiences that recognises
their novelty while also acknowledging how these new experiences emerge as the
result of the performances of bodies cultured to perform perception in some ways
rather than others. Furthermore, corporeal literacy is meant to acknowledge the
impact of a history of media technologies of various kinds on how our bodies
perceive and make sense. Literacy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the
quality or state of being literate. This condition is mostly associated with lan-
guage and books, but need not be necessarily. Literacy is also used to describe
skills and understanding of other media, as in visual literacy, in which literacy
denotes the capacity to engage with visual media in an informed manner. Similar-
ly, media literacy pertains to a sophisticated understanding of communications
media such as film, television and the Internet. Literacy thus understood denotes
the capacity to engage in a well-informed manner with modes of communicating
information specific to media other than written or printed language. Such ex-
pansions of the notion of literacy acknowledge the growing importance of com-
munication through means other than the written or printed word, and promote
an expansion of our understanding of literacy to include communication through
other means as well. The prefix ‘visual’ or ‘media’ describes new objects or as-
pects of objects or practices of reading that may produce new types of literacy.
Corporeal literacy involves a slightly different approach to rethinking literacy.
Unlike the ‘visual’ in visual literacy or ‘media’ in media literacy, the ‘corporeal’ in
corporeal literacy does not denote a class of objects or an aspect of the object of
reading. Rather, corporeal herein refers to aspects of the cultural condition or
“mind-set” (Ong 2002) called literacy. In his seminal Orality and Literacy, Ong

portal: performativity and corporeal literacy 39

points out that the technology of writing alters ways of understanding and think-
ing (including how we think about language) and, ultimately, changes conscious-
ness itself. Important to the constitution of the mind-set of literacy is the way in
which writing turns language from an aural transitory phenomenon into a visual
spatial one, and how this gives rise to new modes of organizing information as
well as to the availability of information over time. No longer depending on oral
transmission, language is disconnected from a speaker. Turned into a visually
accessible phenomenon, written or printed language mediates in new spatial or-
ganisations of processes of thinking and imagining. Literacy, thus understood,
more than describing the capacity to read and write, denotes culturally-specific
synaesthetic modes of information processing brought about by culturally speci-
fic practices of noting down, storing and transmitting information. These prac-
tices, therefore, beyond simply providing useful tools, profoundly influence how
we think and understand.
Corporeal literacy points to the bodily character of these perceptual, cognitive
practices and draws attention to the relationship between bodily practices and
modes of thinking commonly associated with the mind. Literacy inscribes these
practices in history and culture, linking them to a history of bodies being cultured
through interaction with written and printed language. Corporeal literacy thus
builds on Ong’s insights, while, at the same time, corporeal literacy is meant to
argue for a step beyond the rather problematic binary opposition of mind/culture
versus body/nature underlying Ong’s account. Ong suggests that writing and
print caused profound changes to a more primordial oral mind. His prediction
that new modes of communication made possible by new media developments
will give rise to what he terms a condition of “secondary orality” reinforces the
suggestion that literacy is, in the end, to be understood as the condition of being
disconnected from orality as a more primordial, embodied state of being. This
condition, furthermore, is about to be challenged by communication technologies
which, by allowing for embodied interaction, will undo the condition of disembo-
diment associated with the subject of writing and print culture. Corporeal literacy
acknowledges these developments and their importance, not as a return to na-
ture, however, but rather as the next step in a continuous co-evolution of humans
and technology. Helpful here is Brian Rotman’s assertion:

The medium of alphabetic writing introduced as silent collateral machinic ef-

fects an entire neurological apparatus enabling practices, routines, patterns of
movement and gestures, and kinematic, dynamic and perceptual practices as
part of the background conditions – in terms of Deleuze and Guattari, the a-
signifying dimensions of the medium lying beneath the medium’s radar as
part of its unconscious – giving rise to the lettered self, a privately enclosed,
inward and interiorized mind, structured by the linear protocols and cognitive
processing that reading and writing demand (Rotman 2008, xxvi).

40 mapping intermediality in performance

Like Ong, Rotman acknowledges the profound impact of the technology of writ-
ing and print on how we think and imagine, and like Ong he observes that these
technologies gave rise to a new kind of self (“the lettered self”) that he describes
as a privately enclosed, inward and interiorised mind, structured by the linear
protocols and cognitive processing that reading and writing demand. However
instead of opposing this lettered self to a more natural, authentic and embodied
condition of orality, Rotman – following Clark’s assertion that human beings are
“naturally born cyborgs” – argues that “the ‘human’ has from the beginning of
the species been a three way hybrid, a bio-cultural-technological amalgam: the
‘human mind’ – its subjectivities, affects, agency, and forms of consciousness –
having been put into form by a succession of physical and cognitive technologies
at its disposal” (Rotman 2008, 1). There is no such thing as a natural or original
state of mind. From the very beginning, what emerges as ‘mind’ is the effect of
interaction of human bodies with the outside. Subjectivity emerges from this in-
teraction and a variety of technologies, from the very first stone axe to parallel
computing, mediate in how this interaction takes shape.

The Alphabetic Body

Rotman introduces the notion of the “alphabetic body” to describe the body cul-
tured by practices of writing and print. The alphabetic body is a literate body
which has acquired the skills necessary to read and write, and to engage with
written and printed language in a conscious and critical manner. The alphabetic
body is the body that does the reading and writing of language. It is also the body
that perceives its surroundings, thinks and makes sense in ways that are pro-
foundly impacted by writing and print. Alphabetic writing like all technological
systems and apparatuses, operates according to what might be called a corporeal
principle. It engages directly and inescapably with the bodies of its users. It
makes demands and has corporeal effects. As a necessary condition of its opera-
tions it produces a certain specific body. The alphabetic body points to the inti-
mate intertwining of bodily practices of perception and cognition and the tech-
nologies of writing and print, and how this intertwining not only impacts the
perception of written language but also how we perceive and make sense of other
things. This does not mean that these bodily practices necessarily happen at the
level of our conscious awareness.

Communicational media and semiotic apparatuses never coincide with their

intended social uses or cultural purposes or their defined instrumentality or
the effects sought and attributed to their manifest contents. Always something
more is at work, a corporeal effect – a facilitation, an affordance, a restriction,
a demand played out on the body – which derives from the uneliminable ma-
teriality and physicality of the mediological act itself, and which is necessarily
invisible to the user engaged in the act of mediation (Rotman 2008, 6).

portal: performativity and corporeal literacy 41

New Modes of Embodied Interaction in Digital Culture
Theatre, dance and performance as staged versions of such mediological acts al-
low for a critical experimentation with the corporeal dimensions of these acts.
(“Mediology” is a term introduced by Régis Debray to reframe the study of media
in a manner in which not only the content but also the form of media practices is
essential to an understanding of media objects.) The intermedial character of
theatre and performance make it possible to intervene in synaesthetic processes
of perception and to bring to conscious awareness the facilitations, affordances,
restrictions, and demands played out on the body. Here one might think of sy-
naesthetic habits such as the ways in which what is perceived as visual or auditory
is actually the product of a combination of sensory input, patterns of preference
in how perceptual input gets combined, but also the role played by movement and
gesture in the performance of perception, a role that tends to get obscured by the
alphabet’s reductive relation to the corporeal dimension of utterance. Alphabetic
writing supports an understanding of the mind or self as disconnected from the
body as well as of meaning as separate from embodied materiality. Crucial to this
disconnection, according to Rotman, is not only the shift from the aural to the
visual observed by Ong but also how the alphabet eliminates the body’s inner and
outer gestures which extend over speech segments beyond individual words. The
alphabet is a means of noting down the sounds produced by the bodily organs of
speech. The visual form of the letters used to do so have no relation to the body or
to how the sounds of speech are received by those hearing them. As a result, what
gets lost is:

both those visually observable movements that accompany and punctuate

speech (which it was never its function to inscribe) and, more to the point,
those inside speech, the gestures which constitute the voice itself – the tone,
the rhythm, the variation of emphasis, the loudness, the changes of pitch, the
mode of attack, discontinuities, repetitions, gaps, elisions, and the never ab-
sent play and musicality of utterance that make human song possible. In short,
the alphabet omits all the prosody of utterance and with it the multitude of
bodily effects of force, significance, emotion, and affect that it conveys (Rot-
man 2008, 3).

This ignored gestural quality gains new importance now that contemporary body/
machine interfaces increasingly include haptic and tactile modalities. Mark Han-
sen (2006) observes that, with the convergence of physical and virtual spaces in-
forming today’s corporate and entertainment environments, researchers and ar-
tists have come to recognize that motor activity – not representational
verisimilitude – holds the key to fluid and functional crossings between virtual
and physical realms. These new developments allow for new modes of embodied
interaction between body and machine, highlighting in the process aspects of the

42 mapping intermediality in performance

performance of perception that remain unnoticed in more conventional means of
communicating. Making possible alternative modes of handling information and
knowledge, of navigating through information by means of gesture, new infor-
mation technologies require us to become more corporeally literate in the sense
of becoming more consciously aware of corporeal dimensions of the way in
which we read and process information.

portal: performativity and corporeal literacy 43