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The body and its "thumbnails": the work of the image in mobile-imaging

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The body and its "thumbnails": the work of the image in mobile-imaging

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THE BODY AND ITS THUMBNAILS: THE WORK OF THE IMAGE IN
MOBILE-IMAGING

by

Heidi Rae Cooley
____________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2007

Copyright 2007 Heidi Rae Cooley

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many to whom I wish to express my deepest
thanks—for the support, encouragement and wisdom (of varying
sorts) they have generously offered me during the course of my study
and writing. Unfortunately, the words at my disposal are insufficient
for such a task. Nonetheless, I attempt to convey my appreciation by
way of these simply uttered yet sincerely felt lines.
I thank Anne Friedberg, whose scholarship has borne the
greatest influence upon my own, whose keen theoretical eye,
meticulous prose and nuanced insights epitomize the kind of thinker
I hope to become. Moreover, my thanks to her for many hours of
conversation over coffee-ed beverages, for rightly-timed emails of
encouragement and for her committed mentoring and honestly-
imparted guidance. I thank Michael Renov, whose generous
enthusiasm for my project and gentle yet persistent inquiries
regarding its ethical and aesthetic dimensions have made me a more
sensitive and responsible theorist-practitioner. To Anne Balsamo and
Tara McPherson I extend my thanks for willingly engaging in my work
and inviting me to pursue lines of thought beyond those to which I
turn most readily. But also, I find that I must thank Akira Lippit and
Mizuko Ito, as well as John Carlos Rowe and John H. Smith, whose
iii

words of advice and support and whose conversation have been
indispensable to my ongoing development as a scholar.
I also thank my colleagues and friends. In particular, I thank
James Leo Cahill for his time and energy in reading the dissertation
at its most unrefined moments. His nimble eyes and dexterity of
response were crucial to the nuancing of theory and argument. I
thank Nicole Woods and Sharon Saxton, with whom I have spent
many hours in smart conversation and whose unflagging support
and consistently astute remarks regarding my work have been
productive throughout my course of study. Likewise, I thank Raiford
Guins, whose early encouragement and continued interest in my
scholarship have made me a stronger thinker. And to Virginia Kuhn,
Jaime Nasser, Noah Shenker, Stephanie DeBoer, Allison DeFren,
HyeRyoung Ok and Michele Torre, my thanks for friendships which I
hope last for many years to come.
This dissertation would not have been finished with such
timeliness had it not been for generous funding provided by the USC
Graduate School Digital Dissertation Fellowship (2006-07) and the
USC Communications Critical Pathways Ph.D. Dissertation
Fellowship (2005-06). This financial support ensured that I could
focus my sights on writing, and for this I am immensely grateful.
iv

To my parents: mom and dad, you are my biggest advocates,
my most steadfast allies—and you have become my friends. Your
love and reassurance have helped to nurture in me resilience,
compassion and generosity of spirit. My appreciation to you for your
kindnesses and your patience. I thank my brother, Jon, whose quiet
support is very important to me. And thank you to Kay Potocki, my
second mom, whose shoulder has provided much needed strength
and encouragement, whose wisdom is true and kindly offered and
whose wine glasses are always at the ready. And Gigi Branc, a most
dedicated friend, thank you for decades (quite nearly so) of
conversation and laughter.
To Pete, who loved me and invested himself in my goals, who
made me laugh but also challenged me, I thank you for
accompanying me for so many years. I wish you much happiness.
And, Marmalade, whose honeyed eyes, mottled coat and
rounded belly bespeak a personality which exceeds felinity, whose
robust purr has broken through many sad and lonely hours and
whose loyal company continues to keep me in smiles, I thank you as
well.
v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

ii
Abstract

vii
Introduction: Of Bodies, Technologies and Thumbnails 1
The Hand and the Device: Rethinking the Body and
Technology

5
This Is Not a Mobile/Camera Phone Study 13
The Thumbnail 18
On Practice 21
Anatomy of a Dissertation

24
Chapter 1: What Remains: Tactile Vision, Screenic Seeing and
Mobile-Imaging as Citation

34
Thumbnail Remains 34
Tactile Vision 37
Screenic Seeing 59
Thumbnail Citings

69
Chapter 2: Living Corpus I: The Autobiographical Impulse and
Medium Specificity

83
―The End‖: Regarding Autobiography‘s Demise 83
Medium, Specificity and Convergence 89
―The New Autobiography‖: Remediation, Intermediality 94
The Autobiographical Impulse & New Media Forms:
The Streaming of Thumbnails

100
The Recombinatory Logic of Self-Record: Or, the
Expressive Potential of Thumbnails

110
The Measure of Autobiographical Intensities:
Autobiometrical Accountings of the Self

117
Chapter 3: The Bio-Logics of Thumbnails: A Biomedial
Intervention (Hypothesis)

127
―Thumb-nail, n.‖ 127
Thumbnails, digital 133
Thumbnails, biological 138
Biomedial Intervention 143
Bio-logical Processes 149
A Divergence: About Vitality 153
Vitalities: In Living and Streaming 163
vi

Chapter 4: Living Corpus II: Life-Caching and the Biopolitics of
―Healthful Living‖

169
―Life-Caching‖: Mobile-Imaging as Life Process 169
Biopolitics and Processes of Living: Managing ―Life
Itself‖

175
Mobile-Imaging in Medicine and Health Care:
―Healthful Living‖ and the ―Strategic Enterprise‖ of Life
Itself

207
Care for the Mobile-Imaging Body: (Self-)Monitoring
and the Articulation of Vitalities

222
Conclusion: The Body-in-Relation: On Living One‘s Vitalities

229
Bibliography 241

vii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation pursues a biotheoretical inquiry into the body,
mobile-imaging and biopolitics. Deploying the thumbnail—the image
materialized and mobilized via camera phones (and similar devices)
but also the outgrowth of the thumb—it considers life (bio-) in terms
of its being the site and subject of the visual-cultural practice of
mobile-imaging, a system of vitalities (physiological processes and
informatic coding simultaneously), and the medium through which
regulatory processes of management and control exert their force.
Ultimately, it asserts that the thumbnail, in being the material
remains of the living body, is the vehicle by which life as such is
counted (made calculable), taken into account (bio-graphed) and
accounted for (regulated). (In this regard, I am interested in the
analogy between metadata and genetic code—both information borne
by thumbnails.) But also, the thumbnail provides a particularly
appropriate means for interrogating relations between the body and
new media technologies. In this regard, the dissertation draws upon
the upon the feminist-materialist philosophies of Elizabeth Grosz and
Karen Barad in order to move beyond notions of prosthetic extension
and the cyborg. In doing so, it argues that we need to think (about)
the body as a body-in-relation. This means understanding the body
viii

as an ongoing and living articulation, across various linkages and
transactions, which are kinetic, physiological, as well as virtual and
which are mobilized through the body‘s engagement with technology.
In particular, the dissertation focuses on the innervating relation
between the hand and device in mobile-imaging (for example,
multimedia-messaging with mobile screenic devices such as camera
phones); and it addresses the specificities (of form, content,
movement) of the streams of images produced. Essentially, the
dissertation pursues questions concerning the nature of visuality, the
function and possibility of self-record, and the ways in which power
operates in relation to both of these.
1

INTRODUCTION: OF BODIES, TECHNOLOGIES AND THUMBNAILS

―The Body and Its Thumbnails: The Work of the Image in
Mobile-Imaging‖ is intended as a biotheoretical inquiry into the inter-
relations between the body, visual-cultural practice—as materialized
through mobile-imaging
1
—and biopolitics. In the context of this
project, bio-, i.e., life, figures broadly. First, bio- is the point of
departure for considering the life of a person. It comprises the
subject of the visual-cultural practice of mobile-imaging, at the same
time that it refers to the time of such practice: a person, in his/her
living, produces a potentially ceaseless self-record of his/her life via
mobile-imaging. Second, bio- articulates a notion of bodied (and
embodied) life as a system of vitalities; not only does life come to be
understood in terms of its biological and physiological processes, but
also and simultaneously informatic coding. In this regard, life also
becomes a matter of proliferating streams of mobile-imaging
thumbnails. Finally, bio- posits life itself as the medium through

1
Mobile-imaging refers to a socio-cultural practice and technology, in the
Foucauldian sense of the word, in which digital (thumbnail) images are sent
electronically via some mobile-imaging device or mobile screenic device
(MSD), usually camera phone, to another MSD, email inbox, or online
weblog. ―Mobile-imaging‖ is my term for what is known as picture-
messaging (also referred to as multi-media messaging, or MMS-ing). My
use of ―mobile-imaging‖ is intended to emphasize the processual (and
mobile, i.e., on-the-go) character of imaging, while shifting the terms of
discussion away from communications theory and sociology (frequently
privileged in analyses of multi-media messaging).
2

which regulatory processes of management and control exert their
force. In fact, life as such is the very condition of possibility for a
kind of risk management, i.e., healthful living, which has as its goal
the ―improvement‖—indeed, optimization—of life.
In pursuing these strains of biotheory, I focus on the nature
and logic of the thumbnail, the image materialized and mobilized via
camera phones and other handheld imaging devices (to which I
ascribe the term ―mobile screenic device,‖ or MSD). Here it is
important to admit that I do take some license in my use of the term
―thumbnail.‖ While the Oxford English Dictionary (online) recently
added a definition to its entry for ―thumbnail, n.‖ which addresses its
digital form, it does not explicitly identify the image produced via
MSD as being of this kind. Neither does Wikipedia‘s entry list the
mobile-imaging thumbnail as a proper digital thumbnail, although its
description of attributes, specifically dimension, allows for the digital
image produced during mobile-imaging to be considered ―of the size
of a thumbnail‖ (OED). It is by means of fusing (but also, confusing)
the Wikipedia description and OED definition that I posit the mobile-
imaging thumbnail. I do so in order to take advantage of a
homonymic ambiguity: thumbnail—mobile-imaging thumbnail and
anatomical thumbnail simultaneously. As such, I endeavor to engage
a larger discussion regarding the body, technology and the vitalities
3

of life in its living. The thumbnail, then, is a material remains of the
living body, it is the vehicle by which life as such is counted (made
calculable), taken into account (bio-graphed) and accounted for
(regulated). In this way, I insist upon the body‘s substance in
relation to mobile images—and that insistence is borne out through
the work of something more than an analogy between the thumbnail
as mobile image and the thumbnail as bodily outgrowth. Ultimately,
the thumbnail emphasizes the material and materializing effects of
mobile-imaging practices, wherein the body and biological life are at
issue.
Broadly speaking, this dissertation strives to acknowledge our
particular (bio)technical-historical moment, a moment in which the
body can be and is dismantled and abstracted to its molecular,
enzymatic, and genetic processes; a moment when ―life itself‖
becomes ―informatic,‖ and yet when the codes, patterns, and
sequences comprising the body—its life—are not merely immaterial
and informational but simultaneously material and substantial, a
complex articulation of materialization, of being information and
being in-formation. The thumbnail becomes the point of departure for
several critical questions regarding this moment: How might we
approach, interrogate, and theorize the various codes, sequences,
and patterns the body produces as a—biomolecular, neurochemical,
4

biotechnical—life in process? How might the corpus of thumbnails
accumulated through the techno-cultural practice of mobile-imaging
invite and, indeed, warrant parallel consideration? In what ways is
the body‘s materiality and presence decode-able through the visual
remains of its thumbnails? That is, how might thumbnails, e.g.,
streaming in strings on moblogs, constitute an ―informatization‖ of
the body, along the lines of DNA coding or gene sequencing?
Likewise, is it possible to assert that such strings of thumbnails
participate in a (re)materializing of the body, one which impacts the
substance of the body? Importantly, the thumbnail, and the
subsequent turn to the biological—and ―bio-logic‖-cal—it allows,
provides a means of conceptualizing the (potential) ―recoding‖ or
reconfiguration that the body sustains as a result of its encounters
with and transpositions through other formats and media.
Ultimately, I argue for a notion of the body-in-relation, in order to
acknowledge the body‘s being a material(izing) site of complexity, its
being an ongoing and living articulation, across various linkages,
transactions, or what might be better termed, ―vitalities‖ (kinetic,
physiological, virtual).

5

The Hand and the Device: Rethinking the Body and Technology
In the case of mobile-imaging and the subsequent proliferation
of thumbnails, the hand-device
2
ensemble is an obvious point of
departure for discussing the body and technology. The fact that a
mobile-imaging device or mobile screenic device (MSD) is potentially
always in hand is significant in this regard. Of course, notions of
prosthetic extension and cyborgian human-machine hybridity come
to mind, as do the names—McLuhan and Haraway—to which these
figurations allude. And certainly, both tropes have proved productive
for theorizing relations between bodies and technologies. In
announcing that media are ―the extensions of man‖ (sic), Marshall
McLuhan caused us to acknowledge that the medium through which
any content is borne conditions, i.e., shapes, the nature of our affairs
and interactions.
3
To the extent that a medium introduces new scale,
pace and/or pattern into our ways of experiencing the world, it
extends our senses and capacities for awareness.
4
Donna Haraway,
for her part, deployed the ―unnatural‖ and dangerous figure of the

2
I use ―device‖ for reasons of economy and simplicity, since ―mobile
screenic device‖ or ―MSD‖ and the necessary enumeration of such devices,
specifically camera phones, would be too cumbersome here.
3
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, intro.
Lewis H. Lapham (1964; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).
4
Many others have argued similarly. For example, Martin Heidegger and,
before him, Walter Benjamin, as well as Paul Virilio, have all addressed the
effects of technology and media forms on modes of thinking and processes
of perception. But it has been McLuhan‘s aphoristic theorization that has
become the most widely recognized.
6

cyborg to incite us to imagine a model of transgressive being—the
transgressive body as transgressive being.
5
She introduced the
possibility of a radical politics, i.e., a mode of acting in the world that
destabilizes notions of subjective unity and the naturalness of
identity categories (race, gender, sexuality) as imposed and
perpetuated by the technologies, instruments and mechanisms (the
violences) of Western patriarchal tradition.
And yet, while McLuhan and Haraway have been productive in
challenging generalized assumptions regarding bodies and
technologies, there is a way in which both prosthetic extension and
cyborgian hybridity resolve—or in the case of popular appropriations
of these figures, reduce—the relation between the body and
technology to the relative stasis of discrete parts. That is, what
comes to be emphasized (even if inadvertently) is the elemental
components—a body part and a technological device or apparatus—
constituting the relation. What goes missing is an account of the
dynamic inter-relation that transpires across the meeting of body and
technology. For my purposes, the mutually reciprocal relation—the
symbiotic relation—of body and technology is paramount. Thus,
without dismissing or discounting McLuhan‘s and Haraway‘s

5
Donna Haraway, ―A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,‖ Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 149-181.
7

particular and important interventions, I turn to the feminist-
materialist philosophies of Karen Barad and Elizabeth Grosz.
6

Drawing upon
7
their respective notions of ―agential intra-action‖ and
―acquaintance,‖

I endeavor to characterize the relation between
bodies and technologies in terms that move beyond (the sometimes
utopic, but certainly conventionalized, notions of) prosthetic
extension and cyborgian hybridity.
In ―Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter,‖ Barad offers a critique of the atomism
undergirding much of modern (scientific) thought, which breaks
things (including bodies) down into elemental units with ―separately
attributable properties.‖
8
In lieu of atomistic abstraction, she argues
for acknowledging ―nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness
of their becoming‖ while also ―remaining resolutely accountable for
the role ‗we‘ play in the intertwined practices of knowing and
becoming.‖
9
Informed by Niels Bohr, whose philosophy-physics

6
Karen Barad, ―Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter,‖ Signs 28.3 (2003): 801-831; Elizabeth Grosz,
Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space
(Massachussetts: MIT Press, 2001), especially ―The Thing‖ (167-183).
7
Actually I ―draw upon‖ Barad only indirectly until very late in the
dissertation, although her notion of ―agential intra-action‖ serves as a
pervasive undercurrent propelling the project as a whole. By contrast, I
directly cite Grosz on several occasions, especially in chapters 1 and 3.
8
Barad 812.
9
Barad 812. ―Becoming‖ refers to the ―differential mattering‖ which is
reality (817); it is the very condition of the dynamic process of intra-action
8

radically challenges both Newtonian physics and Cartesian
epistemology, she theorizes ―an agential realist ontology,‖ i.e., a
―relational ontology,‖ wherein causal relations of ―agential intra-
action‖ materialize in and as phenomena.
10
Importantly, she uses
―intra-action‖ in contradistinction to ―inter-action,‖ a word which
presupposes the prior existence of separate entities with already
defined properties. Intra-action, by contrast, refers to ―the
inseparability of ‗observed object‘ and ‗agencies of observation‘‖ which

through which ―phenomena come to matter—in both senses of the word‖: as
both materiality and meaning, i.e., as both relations (not things) and
discursive practices/(re)configurations (not utterances/words) (817). For
Barad, ―The world is a dynamic process of intra-activity in the ongoing
reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures with determinate
boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies‖ (817).
It is important to understand that the dynamism of intra-action is agency,
wherein agency is not an attribute but the very ―ongoing reconfiguring of
the world‖ (818). I note, here, that Barad‘s conceptualization of becoming
as the ―differential mattering‖ enacted via ―intra-action‖ is very Bergsonian
in its articulation, very much in accord with élan vital which propels the
bifurcating tendencies of differentiation and through which the ongoing
merging of mind (duration) and matter (spatiality) transpires.
10
Barad 814. A contemporary of Einstein and one of the founders of
quantum physics, Bohr is important for his belief that ―things do not have
inherently determinate boundaries or properties, and [that] words do not
have inherently determinate meanings‖ (813). He also calls into question
the ―Cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject and object,
and knower and known‖ (813). Likewise, he does not agree that language
and measurement mediate through the processes of representation, which
necessarily institutes separation (between representation and that which is
represented) through processes of abstraction. For Bohr, ―the primary
epistemological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries
and properties but rather phenomena‖ (815, emphasis in original). Barad
elaborates, explaining that ―phenomena are the ontological inseparability of
agentially intra-acting „components.‟ That is, phenomena are ontologically
primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata [would-be
antecedent components of relations]‖ (815, emphasis in original).
9

constitutes the property of a phenomenon.
11
In other words, that
which is observed is never separate from processes of observing. It is
only through the agential intra-acting of ―components‖—discursive
practices/(re)configurations and relations—that ―agential
separability‖ is materialized and resulting boundaries and properties
become determinate (although not permanently so).
12
Intra-relational
acting enacts an ―agential cut,‖ thereby enabling a separability (a
word which, unlike its relative, ―separation,‖ emphasizes contingency
and, subsequently refuses definitive closure) between a subject and
an object.
13
But this separability must be understood as a ―local
resolution,‖ only materializing an exteriority, a boundary, from within
a phenomenon as such—and only within the spacetime
14
of a
particular intra-action generative of the phenomenon. There are no
characteristics inhering in a body of any sort that precede the
process of intra-action; properties and boundaries only become
apparent—and measurable—in and through agential intra-action.
Here, it is relevant to emphasize a point regarding technology.
Given the context of Barad‘s ―realist agential ontology,‖ technology—

11
Barad 814.
12
Barad 815. (Emphasis in original.)
13
Barad 815.
14
According to Barad, intra-action transpires ―in the making of spacetime
itself,‖ such that there is no time separate from space (vice versa) prior to
the ―mattering‖ of intra-activity (817).
10

devices, apparatuses, mechanisms, instruments, etc.—can never be
understood as being discrete or inert. According to Barad,
apparatuses are not mere static arrangements in the world, but
rather apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world,
specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through
which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted.
15

Apparatuses (inclusive of various other technologies) are constituted
by and constitutive of ongoing intra-activity. As such, they are not
closed systems, but rather ―open-ended practices.‖
16
More to the
point, apparatuses themselves are phenomena and, therefore, they
―are not preformed interchangeable objects…waiting to serve a
particular purpose,‖ as is a typical assumption of those deploying
them.
17
Like other phenomena, such as bodies and objects,
apparatuses become so through the very practices which come to use
(engage) them, the very practices which, themselves, are ―perpetually
open to rearrangements, rearticulation, and other reworkings.‖
18

Thus, through intra-action bodies and technologies are mutually
constituted—in and through each other. Through the ongoing
reconfigurings of determinate causal structures (boundaries), bodies

15
Barad 816. (Emphasis in original.)
16
Barad 816.
17
Barad 816.
18
Barad 817. Barad goes on to explain that any apparatus might be in
intra-active relation with other apparatuses, the intra-action of which
materializes new phenomena. Additionally, intra-action may or may not
involve humans. While this grants apparatuses—technologies—a high
degree of agency, it is important to recall that agency, as enacted through
intra-action, is not subjective agency.
11

and technologies become mutually but differentially intelligible, the
particularity of their respective ―matterings‖ immanent to their intra-
action.
In similar fashion, Grosz speaks of the necessity of thinking the
inseparability, i.e., the mutually informing inter-relation, of people
and things, specifically technologies. In ―The Thing,‖ she explains
that the thing, which comes to be materialized as architecture or
digital technology, is that which exists as a provocation, as ―the
obstacle, the question, the means by which life itself grows, develops,
undergoes evolution and change.‖
19
Which is to say, the thing is not
a thing per se, it is not any thing in particular: the thing is an
invitation, a proposition through which the intra-relationality of
matter and life is instantiated. The thing exists as the ―condition and
the resource for the subject‘s being and enduring.‖
20
Not simply
noumenal, something which exists behind an appearance, the thing
―has a ‗life‘ of its own,‖ which we must accommodate, i.e.,
―incorporate into our activities.‖
21
Moreover, the thing is not passive,
inert matter awaiting our measure; rather, it is an ongoing
transmutation, a ―conversion of a previous thing, plus the energy
invested in the process of its production as a different thing‖—always

19
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 168.
20
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 168.
21
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 168.
12

a thing in the making, something virtual.
22
It is our engagement with
and acting in relation to the teeming multiplicity of reality that brings
anything into being; the thing as object or technology is our response
to the mobility and flux of, the tendency which is, the world, or in
Bergsonian parlance, élan vital. It is by means of this ―active
making‖ that we make the world amenable to our needs at the same
time that we ―render ourselves vulnerable to their [objects] reactions‖
by extending ourselves into matter.
23
Ultimately, we are correlates to
the things we make. Or put another way (and in allusion to Barad),
we and things are component parts within phenomena, their
stability, i.e., determinacy, enabling our own (and vice versa).
But, as Grosz asserts, the point of this realization is not to
pursue an ever-more functional and pragmatic, i.e., reduced, relation
with things, by rendering them ―microscopically understood‖ and
further abstracted and, subsequently, more contained.
24
Instead, we
should seek to engage and experience ―the teeming, suffuse network
within which things are formed,‖ to coincide with things.
25

Committed to a Bergsonian notion of intuition, Grosz suggests that
we

22
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 170.
23
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 173.
24
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 183.
25
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 179.
13

develop an acquaintance with things through intuition, that
Bergsonian internal and intimate apprehension of the unique
particularity of things, their constitutive interconnections, and
the time within which things exist.
26

Acquaintance, as posited here, is more than an automatically
instantiated coexistence or relation between people and things—
bodies and technology. Rather, Grosz calls for an ethics of
reciprocity, ―an empirical attunement,‖ which is not unlike Barad‘s
advocating for an ―onto-epistem-ology,‖ i.e., ―a study of practices of
knowing in being.‖
27
For Grosz, what matters is thinking—and
simultaneously inhabiting—technology, our relation to technology,
otherwise. It is with Grosz and Barad in mind that I ultimately
pursue a notion of the body-in-relation.

This is Not a Mobile/Camera Phone Study
While ―the cellular idea‖ (the idea of call ―hand off‖ between
―cells,‖ as made possible by hexagonal patterns of radio frequencies)
has been around since 1947, preceded by the promise of personal
mobility in the form of, for example, the cordless phone (as presented
at the 1939 New York‘s World Fair),
28
it wasn‘t until 1973 that the
prototype for the handheld cellular phone actually was realized. By

26
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 183.
27
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 183; Barad 829. (Emphasis in original.)
28
Jon Agar, Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (UK: Icon
Books, 2004[2003]).
14

the mid-1980s 1G (first generation) networks were introduced, the
first fully automatic mobile phone system, the Nordic Mobile
Telephone (NMT) system, appearing in 1981. As for the camera
phone, the first (albeit individual) instance of a camera phone with
server infrastructure was demonstrated in June 1997 by Philip Kahn
(who recorded and transmitted images of the birth of his daughter to
a private website), and the first commercial camera phone (the J-
Phone) with sharing infrastructure (called Sha-Mail, or Picture-Mail)
appeared in 1999 in Japan. Nokia, then, marketed its first camera
phone in 2001. And by 2003, more camera phones were sold
worldwide than digital cameras—a statistic which remains
accurate.
29

As these developments in mobile phone technologies have
occurred, talk in and out of the academy has focused in large part on
the social implications of the proliferation of these devices, with
particular attention given to the mobile phone.
30
Central to these

29
Marc Davis, Nancy Van House, Jeffrey Towle, Simon King, Shane Ahern,
Carrie Burgener, Dan Perkel, Megan Finn, Vijay Viswanathan, and Matthew
Rothenberg, ―MMM2: Mobile Media Metadata for Media Sharing,‖ paper
delivered at CHI 2005, April 2-7, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA. 16 May
2007, 13 June 2007 http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/pub.cfm.
30
See: Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, and Jack Linchuan Qiu,
Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2007); Janey Gordon, ―The Mobile Phone: An Artifact of
Popular Culture and a Tool of the Public Sphere,‖ Convergence 8.3 (2002)
15-26; Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda, ed., Personal,
Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Cambridge, MA: The
15

ongoing debates are questions pertaining to the status of
interpersonal relations and the blurring of public and private
domains. Within these categories of concern, discussions address
transformations in community and cooperation, reconfigurations of
the codes of social interaction, the tendency toward public
performance of private conversation, the possibilities of mobile-
parenting as well as new forms of mobile democracy and political
activism, and the increasing confusion of work and leisure. Likewise,
concerns regarding the perceived and impending strain these devices
place on personal liberty and privacy have emerged, since such
devices ensure that people are always locatable and, therefore,
support and extend the effectiveness of existing processes of
surveillance. But also, the camera phone has introduced additional
considerations, such as those directed toward issues regarding the
banning of camera phones in public places (e.g., gym locker rooms,

MIT Press, 2005); James E. Katz, ed., Machines that Become Us: The Social
Context of Personal Communication Technology (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2003); James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus, ed.,
Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Timo Kopomaa, The City in
Your Pocket: Birth of the Mobile Information Society (Helsinki: Gaudeamus,
2000); Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002); Sussex Technology Group, ―In the
Company of Strangers: Mobile Phones and the Conception of Space,‖
Technospaces: Inside the New Media, ed. Sally R. Munt (London:
Continuum, 2001) 205-223.
16

classrooms), citizen journalism (and the fading division between
professional and amateur) and the sociality of image-sharing.
31

But, as media culture scholar Gerard Goggin explains in Cell
Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life, much of the work
focusing on the mobile phone (and camera phone, too) has been
mindful of national context, interested in cross-cultural comparative
study and primarily oriented toward the social dimensions of mobile
phone use (with emphasis on the social contexts of use, as well as
the impact of the mobile phone on communication).
32
What has been
underrepresented in this scholarship, he claims, is the cultural
aspect of mobile phones, what he calls ―cell phone culture.‖
33
In
particular, he cites the lack of analysis of the relations and structures
of power operating in cell phone culture, and the relatively

31
See: Ilpo Koskinen, Mobile Multimedia in Action (New Jersey: Transaction
Publishers, 2007); Ilpo Koskinen, Esko Kurvinen, and Turo-Kimmo
Lehtonen, Mobile Image (Finland: Edita Publishing, 2002). See also: Garage
Research Group website http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu; Mirjana
Spasojevic, Nancy Van House, Ilpo Koskinen, and Fumitoshi Kata,
organizers, PICS 2006: Workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing,
Ubicomp 2006, Newport Beach, CA, 18 September 2006, 16 May 2007
http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/pics/index.html; Mirjana Spasojevic,
Nancy Van House, Ilpo Koskinen, Fumitoshi Kata, and Daisuke Okabe,
organizers, PICS 2005: Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing: New Social
Practices and Implications forTechnology, Ubicomp 2005, Tokyo,
11September 2005, 16 May 2007 http://www.spasojevic.org/pics/;
Likewise, see: Reiter‘s Camera Phone Report, by Alan A. Reiter, October
2003, 20 June 2007 http://www.cameraphonereport.com.
32
Gerard Goggin, Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life
(London: Routledge, 2006).
33
Goggin 5.
17

unexplored question of medium, i.e., the cell phone as a medium for
communication. His intervention is to take up the question of
culture by approaching the mobile phone as a cultural artifact and
medium for cultural production, as Paul du Gay et al. did with the
Sony Walkman in 1997.
34
And he provides a straightforward and
descriptive analysis of the mobile phone as a metaphor, indeed,
metonym for contemporary technological culture, as well as its
participation in a broad and contingent networking of people, things,
practices and relationships. Likewise, his chapter on the camera
phone and moblogging provides a useful history of development and
practice. And yet, he declines to think beyond these more concrete
matters, instead concluding with a rather banal statement regarding
the fact that moblogging is still taking shape.
35

Certainly, the work on mobile/camera phones produced to date
has been important. And many of the social- and communications-
oriented studies are rigorous in their quantification of practice and
attitude, thereby providing pertinent information regarding issues
having to do with the personal, the socio-cultural, and the political.
Likewise, emerging scholarship on the cultural aspects of mobile-

34
Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus,
Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Walkman (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 1997).
35
Goggin 160.
18

imaging has begun to consider interesting and relevant questions
regarding, for example, convergence, remediated notions of sharing,
new photographic genres. Yet, most of this work tends to elide or
relegate to secondary status broader philosophical questions,
questions of ontology and epistemology. These are the sorts of
questions I pursue here: questions which challenge us to consider
mobile-imaging and the subsequent streaming of thumbnails in terms
of conditions of possibility, limitations and potential (and likely)
consequences for being, living, and knowing.

The Thumbnail
The thumbnail is best understood as a theory object, a vehicle
for thinking through the relations between the body and technology
in the context of visual-cultural practice. Referring to the mobile-
imaging thumbnail and the anatomical thumbnail simultaneously, it
inhabits the ambiguity of homonymicity, a position which renders it
neither illustration nor example. (In this regard, formal analysis
makes rare appearance in the dissertation, and no description of
particular thumbnail images is offered.) But neither is the thumbnail
simply a figure or figuration, i.e., metaphor; whether or not, or how,
the thumbnail image is (like) or functions as its biological cognate
matters very little, if at all. And although the thumbnail takes
19

advantage of the work of analogy (the idea of equivalence), as implied
by its appellation, it does so in order to pursue something other than
analogy. Ultimately, the thumbnail, in its contingency and
indeterminacy, given its the status as both-and, provides for a
different sort of work. That the thumbnail image always re-sounds a
reference to the thumbnail proper is significant, for it signals a
mutually compensating relation between digital and biological
domains and, consequently, prepares the way for a reconsideration of
the ways in which life—vitality—is propelled, lived and registered.
From a disciplinary standpoint, the thumbnail functions to
constellate analysis and theory across multiple areas of study.
Operating within and across the fields of visual studies, documentary
film studies (particularly as pertains to a tradition of
autobiographical practice), media theory and philosophy of science
and technology, the thumbnail becomes several distinct yet mutually
informing objects. At the most basic level of consideration, the
thumbnail is a byproduct of the reciprocal relation between a hand
and a technological device, simply the result of the device potentially
always being in hand. At the same time, it exists as the trace of a
particular mode of visuality, in which incidental looking ―crosscuts,‖
as it were, between embedded frames, various screen/s and
20

surrounding scenes.
36
By extension, then, the thumbnail is (visible)
evidence of a practice of self-record, a rigorous system of monitoring
and control, which is always already implicated in a broader
biopolitical project of risk management.
But the thumbnail is something more. The thumbnail always
operates as a biomedial artifact, as the condition of possibility for
thinking biomedially. In other words, the thumbnail becomes a way
of thinking beyond the boundaries of biological and digital, natural
and artificial, the body and technology. It becomes a way of
theorizing the integral correlation between the body and information.
And, therefore, the thumbnail is not any particular thumbnail as
such, but rather a means to acknowledge the mutually compensating
relation between biological and digital thumbnails—without collapsing
the two into sameness. It is a way to imagine an inter-medial
complexity of the body, a body that is simultaneously biological and
something more than biological—that is, something bio-logical (to be
understood as being comprised of patterns of relationships, e.g.,
code). As biomedial artifact, then, the thumbnail speaks to a notion
of life (bio-), which, too, is biological and yet more than biological (bio-

36
―Crosscuts‖ is a term Anne Friedberg uses to describe what she calls
―post-Cartesian, post-perspectival, post-cinematic, post-televisual‖ visuality.
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2006).
21

logical). And, therefore, it signals a process of living, which is
articulated across multiple vitalities—kinetic, biological and virtual.

On Practice
A comment about practice is relevant at this point. In order to
consider the ways mobile-imaging informs processes of living, I have
found it necessary to merge theory with practice. Practice, as I
embrace it, is a concerted, reflexive exercising of what
technohumanist and practitioner Anne Balsamo calls ―the
technological imagination.‖
37
The technological imagination ―is a
cultural sensibility,‖ Balsamo explains—a way of being in and
engaging with the world.
38
Moreover, it is the technologically-
inspired

37
Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
(Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). Balsamo‘s theorization of
the technological imagination is specifically oriented toward addressing
technological innovation, i.e., (re)production of new technologies and
technological artifacts, and its role in ―the work of designing culture‖
(―Introduction,‖ emphasis in original). And while her project speaks to a
particular practice, i.e., the practice of designing, her point about the
technological imagination being ―a quality of mind that enables people to
think with technology‖ has been useful to my formulating a rationale for
practice. Likewise, her position that the technological imagination requires
(and deserves) training makes explicit the fact that practice is not as
transparent as it might otherwise appear and, therefore, it, too, requires
effort and careful consideration. I thank Anne Balsamo for sharing several
unpublished chapters of the book manuscript with me.
38
Balsamo ―Introduction.‖
22

capacity to make things and, as such, facilitates ―thinking with
technology.‖
39
Given that thinking with technology has the potential
to enact cultural change—―transform what is known into what is
possible,‖ it is important that such imagination be attentive to the
work that it does.
40
As a practitioner who theorizes with technology, I
understand this charge to mean taking my practice seriously; in
other words, to be critical and self-aware about my practice because,
like the technology with which I think, it is not transparent and
straightforward but always implicated in larger social and cultural
workings (of power).
41
One potential outcome: a more insightful
socio-cultural analysis, itself able to effect change. But also, there is
the possibility of one‘s practice opening on to philosophical insights
regarding being and knowing materialized in relation to technology
and its artifacts.
Not surprisingly, my critical engagement with practice
transpires through mobile-imaging. I currently and actively maintain

39
Balsamo ―Introduction.‖
40
Balsamo ―Introduction.‖
41
Specifically, Balsamo explains that an astute technological imagination is
also aware of technology‘s double nature, its being ―both autonomous of
and subservient to human goals,‖ and, as such, ―is able to hold this
contradiction throughout the process of technology development‖
(―Introduction‖). A theoretical praxis mobilized through a technological
imagination likewise recognizes and, subsequently, proceeds with this
tension in mind so as to better direct—because it is sensitive to the
potential effects of—its intervention.
23

three moblog (mobile weblog) sites.
42
Certainly, my practice of
mobile-imaging proliferates thumbnails that mimic, in many ways,
those streaming on other moblog sites, for I practice in relation to
observation (and some, albeit limited, interaction with other
mobloggers). However, my moblogs also perform a substantially
different sort of work, since they are expressly engaged in theoretical
praxis. Each moblog approaches mobile-imaging according to one or
more lines of inquiry. For example, I inquire into the nature of self-
expression, considering, firstly, what constitutes the ―expressive‖
register of thumbnails proliferated as a result of my camera phone
nearly always being in hand and, secondly, how and to what extent
tags might function expressively (in the context of individual as well
as socially-networked practice). Likewise, I explore the impact of
rigorous self-monitoring on narratives of self, my imaging frequently
testing the limits of narrative possibility by means of its committed

42
A moblog is a mobile blog, a site for electronic journaling, wherein a
person can log his/her thoughts, provide links to other sites, and upload
images (via multimedia messaging, i.e., MMS-ing, from a camera phone) to
which others can respond and contribute. The names and urls for the
moblogs I maintain include: mobileroutine,
http://mobileroutine.buzznet.com/; thumbnails,
http://flickr.com/photos/26808577@N00/; pedxings, too,
http://pedxings2.blogspot.com/ (which continues the work of pedxings,
http://pedxingsbyh.blogspot.com/, which became inaccessible to me for
reasons I cannot fully explain). My initial moblog, exSighting imaging,
http://myimaging.textamerica.com/, no longer exists, TextAmerica having
eliminated all moblogs whose ―owner‘s‖ did not become subscription
members.
24

registering of patterns and sequences in living. And I am very
attentive to shifts in the character of visuality as vision is reframed
according to the mobile micro screen and in the context of mobility.
But this is not to say that my practice simply illustrates my
argument or that it merely produces examples for purposes of
theorization. Quite the contrary, for frequently the thumbnails that
stream in and across my moblogs vex and trouble argument,
although my intent is that they do so in a way that allows for a more
robust and deep theory. In the end, it is my hope that such ―thinking
with technology‖ might make more readily apparent various
complications posed and potentialities offered by mobile-imaging.

Anatomy of the Dissertation
It is worth noting that this dissertation was supposed to have
been born digital. That is, it was imagined as a multimedia project
and, as such, the logic of multimediality was to have figured
prominently and materially in the structuring and writing of its
argument. Thus, I understood the project to be a matter of two
complementary endeavors: I would be inquiring into the nature and
logic of the biological and technology, and, more specifically, issues
and questions having to do with life itself as pertains to the thumbnail
(both the image materialized via mobile-imaging and the bodily
25

outgrowth), at the same time that the dissertation itself—its
argument—would develop as a ―living‖ system. According to this
conceptualization, the dissertation, its argument, was not understood
as linear but, perhaps, sculptural or multi-dimensional, i.e., along
the lines of metabolic pathways, wherein two or more moments
across the ―body‖ of the dissertation would have been mobilized
automatically and simultaneously. (For example, separate moments
in chapters 1 and 2 would have come into dynamic relation, in
adjacent frames on screen, during a reading of chapter 4, at which
point a reader could opt to read along one of three trajectories of
thought). Likewise, the principle text of each chapter would have
been articulated with streaming thumbnails (from ―live‖ RSS feeds
and hard drive archives), which would have registered a biofeedback
of the perturbations introduced by a reader‘s engagement with—the
pace and movement of his/her navigating through—the ―living‖ of the
system. Unfortunately, this did not come to be.
And yet, vestiges of the multimedial persist in the dissertation‘s
present form. The dissertation still retains a mildly articulated or
faceted structuring, particular aspects of its argument—nodal
points—echoing/resonating/reverberating across the chapters.
Sometimes these are overtly acknowledged, either parenthetically or
in footnotes; at others, they are apparent as subtle repetitions. And
26

the thickness of footnoting is the shadow of a formerly adjacent mode
of thinking. That is, the footnotes are not necessarily (or always)
secondary or ancillary to the text occurring on the main of the page
(screen) but a matter of a thinking-alongside. (To indicate this
adjacency, I have used a larger font in the footnotes.) Finally, what
goes missing from this version of the dissertation, and yet must also
be considered a consequence of the dissertation‘s present status as a
Word document/pdf, are the thumbnails. That is, no thumbnails
appear here; I have chosen not to still any for the purposes of
illustration or example. As a part of my practice, the thumbnails that
would have ―streamed‖ through the digital dissertation are
proliferated in conversation with and counterpoint to the work of
theorization. As such, their work has been more than might be
mobilized by their being filtered (through selection) and stilled upon
the static page. I do list the urls to my moblogs (see previous
section), and a multitude of moblogs are available for viewing online
(for example, TextAmerica, Buzznet and Blogger all host moblogs).
This caveat regarding medial form thus concluded, I turn to the
dissertation‘s organization and content:
―Chapter 1: What Remains: Tactile Vision, Screenic Seeing and
Mobile-Imaging as Citation‖ argues that thumbnails, as images, speak
to the momentarily captivating character of the incidental and the
27

chance encounter. They are indicative of imaging that happens
without concentrated effort and with immediacy and, consequently, is
spontaneous, haphazard, and/or serendipitous. As such, thumbnails
provide evidence of imaging that happens on-the-go. That is, imaging
is made mobile (hence, ―mobile-imaging‖) precisely because MSDs are
potentially always in hand. With hand and device in constant
relation, a person tends to record ―more fleeting and unexpected
moments of surprise‖
43
—and with greater frequency. Thus, I argue
that thumbnails are the remnants of a particular relation between
hand and device, an innervating relation which opens onto what I call
―tactile vision.‖ At the same time, thumbnails are traces of a way of
seeing, which I call ―screenic seeing.‖ Screenic seeing, or seeing that
transpires in relation to a screen in hand (and in contrapuntal
relation to a proliferation of scenes and screens across a field of
vision), proceeds according to what screen media historian and
theorist Anne Friedberg refers to as ―post-perspectival, post-
cinematic, post-televisual visuality.‖
44
But to the extent that they are
fragments, they are fragments that remain behind, so to speak; they
are remains, the remains of (tactile)visual encounter and, as such, I

43
Mizuko Ito, ―Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy,‖
Japan Media Review (August 29, 2003), 14 September 2003
http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1062208524p.php
44
Friedberg, The Virtual Window.
28

argue that they have a secondary function as citation—the signature,
or auto-graph, as vital sign.
―Chapter 2: Living Corpus I: The Autobiographical Impulse &
Medium Specificity‖ addresses the ways in which specificities of and
inter-relations between medium and technology inform
autobiographical practice—and, in the case of mobile-imaging,
wherein the device is potentially always in hand, catalyze an
autobiographical impulse. Essentially, then, the chapter is a
response to Elizabeth Bruss‘s 1980 pronouncement regarding
autobiography‘s demise at the hands of film (and video) practice. In
this regard, I pursue a discussion begun by documentary scholar
Michael Renov, who has argued that, in fact, autobiography ―[is
showing] new signs of life.‖
45
Renov‘s theorization of ―the new
autobiography‖ in film and video and his discussion of the personal
webpage serve as points of departure for considering the
autobiographical potential of more recent Web 2.0 practices,
specifically blogging and, by extension, moblogging (including mobile-
imaging). Of particular importance, in this regard, is the seeming
compulsion for continuous imaging, which makes apparent the fact
that mobile-imaging is less a matter of a particular story of the self to

45
Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004) 111.
29

be told or presented and more a matter of the very act or process of
telling. What‘s of interest in proliferating strings of thumbnails is the
information they offer about intensities and trajectories of attention
and interest, instead of narratives of self. Thus, I argue that the
―expressive‖ register of autobiographical practice requires
reconsideration; to these ends, I turn to a recombinatory logic as
described by media theorist Tara McPherson.
46
Finally, I propose the
neologism, ―autobiometry,‖ as a means of considering the
implications of an autobiographical practice which might better be
understood as a rigorous (self-)monitoring.
―Chapter 3: The Bio-Logics of Thumbnails: A Biomedial
Intervention (Hypothesis)‖ functions as a provocation. It proposes
that mobile-imaging thumbnails and biological thumbnails exist in a
mutually compensating relation. By mutually compensating relation,
I mean a relation which transpires across material substrates: a
crossing of the biological and the digital. Such a crossing shifts the
terms of discussion from the biological to the bio-logical. The term
―bio-logical‖ derives from media theorist Eugene Thacker‘s notion of
―bio-logic,‖ which refers to the ―essential data‖—the ―patterns of

46
Tara McPherson, ―Beyond Formalism: Thoughts on New Media and Race
in Post-World War II Culture,‖ unpublished conference paper, Seattle, 14
February 2003.
30

relationships‖—inhering in any matter-form complex.
47
It is the
quantifiable nature of a bio-logic that affords processes of inter-
mediality and, therefore, allows for correspondences across material
substrates, such that what is biological becomes more than biological
(hence, bio-logical). In this way, mobile-imaging thumbnails and
biological thumbnails can be thought together, in complementarity
and as inter-relation. To think in terms of the bio-logical is to think
biomedially (informed by Thacker‘s ―biomedia‖
48
). It is to think
beyond the discrete, instrumentalizing boundaries (and binaries)
between the digital and the biological, the artificial and the natural
and, consequently, technology and the body. But more importantly,
it is to think the body‘s inter-medial complexity. It is to introduce the
possibility that the body‘s vitalities include not just the kinetic and
the biological vitalities belonging to its biomechanical capacities and
nonconscious physiological functioning, but also the virtual vitalities
of its streaming thumbnail images.
―Chapter 4: Living Corpus II: Life-Caching and the Biopolitics of
‗Healthful Living‘‖ moves beyond (but does not dismiss) an
understanding of mobile-imaging as a means of producing an
autobiographical account—engaging in an autobiometrical

47
Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004) 16.
48
Thacker, Biomedia.
31

accounting. Given this perspective, mobile-imaging becomes a
networking of vital processes, processes which account for life itself.
Moreover, mobile-imaging instantiates (and coincides with) what I call
―healthful living,‖ which I describe as a life process which ensures life
processes. ―Healthful living‖ is intended to underscore the relation
between an emphasis on personal health and fitness and political
(State) investments in risk management. In theorizing ―healthful
living,‖ I address the ways in which mobile-imaging functions, not
only as an extension of traditional medical imaging, but also—and
perhaps more importantly—as a mode of health maintenance (e.g.,
via moblogging to online nutritional services). I argue that mobile-
imaging as a mode of health maintenance constitutes an intensive
form of ―care of the self,‖ as delineated by Michel Foucault; it is a
rigorous self-monitoring, which participates in a program directed at
reducing the aleatory element in a population.
49
It is in this way that
the rigorous and continuous documenting that mobile-imaging
(potentially) pursues serves broader biopolitical concerns, such that

49
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (1976; New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 58-73; Michel
Foucault, The Care of the Self. Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans.
Robert Hurley (1984; New York: Vintage Books, 1986); Michel Foucault, The
Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982,
ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (2001; New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2005). See also: Michel Foucault, ―About the Beginning of the
Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,‖ Political Theory 21:2
(May 1993) 198-227.
32

life itself (referring to biological processes as such) attains
fundamental importance. That is, mobile-imaging operates in
relation to a general complex of processes aimed at securing the
literal as well as figurative ―health and well-being‖ of the population.
In this way, mobile-imaging produces more than networking streams
of thumbnails, detailing the patterns and rhythms of individual lives;
mobile-imaging, in fact, participates in networks of regulatory
processes, which serve to manage and control social life.
The conclusion, entitled ―The Body-in-Relation: On Living One‘s
Vitalities,‖ introduces the body-in-relation in order to describe the
body as ongoing and living articulation of multiple vitalities—kinetic,
physiological and virtual. Based on what I refer to in chapter 4 as
the mobile-imaging body, i.e., a body whose streaming thumbnails
come to figure as vital to its ―healthful living,‖ this notion of the body
imagines the body to be something more than a fleshy body. It is
something other than a body comprised of organs as such. Drawing
upon the scholarship of Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb and
Nicolas Rose, I assert that the body-in-relation is a matter of
distributions and relays (as epitomized by neurochemical
processes).
50
In other words, the body as a body-in-relation cannot

50
Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, ―On the Subject of Neural and
Sensory Prostheses,‖ The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a
33

be understood according to a model of deep structures as posited by
disciplinary logic of anatomo-physiology. Rather, it must be
considered to be a matter of multi-directional flows, bio-logical lines
of living: a body multiplied across various intensities, impulses,
sign(als) of life. Such a body lives differently, for it lives in-relation.
Thus, it experiences its living differently. What I consider last, then,
is how one might respond differently to such a life, how one might
live the body-in-relation, and how the streaming of thumbnails might
figure within this mode of living.

Biocultural Future, eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2006) 125-154; Manuel DeLanda, ―Nonorganic Life,‖
Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone
Books, 1992) 129-167; Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine,
Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007).
34

CHAPTER 1: WHAT REMAINS: TACTILE VISION, SCREENIC SEEING AND
MOBILE-IMAGING AS CITATION

Thumbnail Remains:
As an image, the mobile-imaging thumbnail is a curious bit of
visible evidence.
51
For the most part, this is because mobile-imaging
thumbnails are the product of the ―camera‖ potentially always being
in hand. (For the purposes of this chapter ―camera‖ refers to camera
phone and, more generally, mobile-imaging device.) That a mobile-
imaging device, or what I have termed a mobile screenic device
(MSD),
52
might always be in hand means that mobile-imaging always
potentially proceeds as a persistent and continuous recording of
experiences, an ongoing practice of (self-)documentation. People who

51
―Visible evidence‖ is an allusion to both the annual international Visible
Evidence conference and the Visible Evidence book series, both of which
engage questions of documentary practice, aesthetics, politics and tradition.
52
Conveniently, the iPhone confers a greater validity to this term.
Introduced by Steve Jobs in his keynote address at MacWorld 2007
(January 9, 2007), the iPhone is entirely screen, a 3.5-inch, ―multi-touch‖
screen which supplants the standard mobile phone keypad (and eliminates
the iPod‘s iconic clickwheel). One touches the screen to make calls (and
view missed calls), navigate music files and the Internet, and ―pinch‖
images (which is how one zooms in and out of an image)—the epitome of a
tactilely screenic relation between hands and device. In fact, the
significance of the relation between hand and device is explicitly stated in
Jobs‘ keynote: ―We‘ve designed something wonderful for your hand…It fits
beautifully in the palm of your hand.‖ The keynote address is available for
viewing at Apple.com
(http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/j47d52oo/event); a fairly complete
transcript is available for review at Engadget
(http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-
jobs-keynote).
35

engage in mobile-imaging are propelled by further (and potentially
compulsory) imaging, out of which proliferate various but particular
images. Often in extreme close-up and canted framing, sometimes
blurred or lacking in resolution, mobile-imaging thumbnails are
suggestive of an immediacy of experience; they are traces of moments
of encounter with one‘s surroundings. Consequently, there is a
haphazardness to what is imaged: partial or bleeding views of
ordinary things; a predominance of textures, sheens and edges;
innumerable ―snaps‖ of bodies (typically incomplete or partial, e.g.,
appendages or faces—of friends and family primarily), urban
congestion and detritus (usually overlooked or ignored under other
circumstances). This recurrent privileging of ―glimpses‖ over
panoramic views or staged tableaux produces images that do not
readily adhere to protocols of photographic legibility. In which case,
they do not inform or explain—they do not narrativize—in a manner
expected of more traditional photographic images.
53
Neither are they
indicative of images that presume the conscious intention or

53
Mizuko Ito describes mobile-imaging as involving ―a new kind of personal
awareness,‖ which is responsible for a proliferation of images. Mizuko Ito,
―Camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy,‖ Japan Media
Review (29 August 2003), 14 September 2003
http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1062208524p.php.
36

reflection of a self-authoring subject and, as such, they are not
expressive by historically-embraced standards.
54

What is compelling about this lack of adherence to
photographic convention
55
in mobile-imaging practice is the fact that
it is indicative of a new mode of visuality. In fact, I contend that
mobile-imaging thumbnails are fragments (and by ―fragments‖ I do
not wish to suggest lack or failed whole) of once on-going interactions
with the world, interactions that seem to have exceeded both frame
(as defined by the images‘ edges) and label (as might be provided by
tagged captions or titles). As fragments, thumbnails are the remnants
of a particular relation between hand and device, an innervating

54
Although, I want to make clear that I am not asserting that
expressiveness is foreclosed. I simply think that the expressive undergoes a
shift, is relocated to the registers of attraction and intensity and impulse,
given that immediacy and spontaneity govern mobile-imaging. This will
become clear later in this chapter.
55
And yet, these images simultaneously speak to the emergence of different
convention of content and style. Early evidence of emerging convention was
―Identify Game,‖ formerly located at the Textamerica website
(http://www.textamerica.com). (Now that the camera phone moblog
community has become a subscription-only service, all previously free
accounts have been deleted.) During the time it was hosted by
TextAmerica.com, ―Identify Game‖ received a steady stream of illegible
thumbnail images, which were posted to the site in response to the
invocation to ―Send an abstract picture of a common object and see if
anyone can guess what it is.‖ As I suggest in my article, ―‗Identify-ing‘ a
New Way of Seeing: Amateurs, Moblogs and Mobile Imaging,‖ the site‘s
solicitation of particular kinds of images can be interpreted as an invitation
to be indoctrinated in a new mode of visuality. More directly, I assert that
―Identify Game‖ provided ―training in a new way of seeing‖ (74). Such
training most certainly would have contributed to the emergence of new
convention. See: Heidi Rae Cooley, ―‗Identify-ing‘ a New Way of Seeing:
Amateurs, Moblogs and Mobile Imaging,‖ Spectator 24.1 (Spring 2004) 65-
79.
37

relation which opens onto what I call ―tactile vision.‖ At the same
time, I argue, thumbnails are traces of a way of seeing, which I call
―screenic seeing.‖ Screenic seeing, or seeing that transpires in
relation to a screen in hand (and in contrapuntal relation to a
proliferation of scenes and screens across a field of vision), proceeds
according to what screen media historian and theorist Anne
Friedberg refers to as ―post-perspectival, post-cinematic, post-
televisual visuality.‖
56
But to the extent that they are fragments, they
are fragments that remain behind, so to speak; they are remains, the
remains of (tactile)visual encounters and, as such, I argue that they
have a secondary function as citation.

Tactile Vision:
57

In mobile-imaging, experience is articulated experience. It
begins as an experience of reciprocal relation which transpires in and

56
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006). Friedberg‘s work has been
formative to my development as a scholar. In particular, my description of
screenic seeing borrows from Friedberg in pronounced ways in order to
emphasize seeing that transpires as looking-at, as opposed to looking-
through. Not organized according to a visuality that privileges depth,
screenic seeing draws the viewer toward what exists on the screen (not
beyond it). Flatness, even if layered, is what typifies screenic seeing.
57
The core argument pursued in this section made its initial appearance in
my article, ―It‘s All about the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device, and
Tactile Vision,‖ The Journal of Visual Culture 3.2 (August 2004) 133-155.
38

through the soft and malleable meeting between hand and MSD.
58

This meeting between hand and MSD refuses the constricting tension
that a grasp or clutch forces upon its object, for the nature of
reciprocity inherent to this meeting denies the unidirectionality
implied by any such imposing contact. Rather, the articulation of
hand and MSD is a mutual contouring, a happening in which a hand
forms to a mobile screenic device and, reciprocally, a mobile screenic
device gives to the hand. I emphasize: I am not describing a
condition or quality, but rather a moment of acting in and through,
one which reveals the potential for dynamic and reciprocal
engagement. Moreover, this moment (which is not finite in its
unfolding) involves the release and expansion of acquaintance and,
subsequently, intervenes in the flat and flattening vision that has
become standard. Ultimately, the dynamic meeting of hand and
MSD, coinciding with the temporality of contour, opens onto
something else, which subsequently influences vision. It installs a

58
In the past, I have referred to this reciprocal relation, this dynamic
meeting as ―fit.‖ (And certainly, this term resonates with the recent
promotional discourse of Jobs‘s keynote address: ―[The iPhone] fits
beautifully in the palm of your hand.‖) But I have since reconsidered the
adequacy of this term. It seems to me that the word is limited by a
connotation of temporal finiteness, as well as a presumed stasis. That is,
the ways in which I theorize the relation between hand and MSD, as a
dynamic, ongoing, mutually-informing inter-relation, struggle against the
bluntness of the monosyllabic noun, which is further dulled by associations
to a verb which is suggestive of a single, contained and unidirectional event
(e.g., ―The device fits in the hand.‖).
39

person within what s/he is seeing and, thereby, allows him/her to
experience the transition, the interval that is seeing in its presencing
(as opposed to being faced with an aggregate of discrete images). I
am proposing a continuous merging, or becoming-one of hand and
MSD, out of which evolves an experience, a visual experience, that is
dynamic and always happening—tactile.
59

59
The relationship between hand and MSD, as I am proposing it, is very
unlike previous accounts of hands and technological devices, as provided
by such figures as Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes.
Such accounts reduce the hand (albeit differently), enter it into discussions
as a trace, a residue: the hand merely initiates a process that proceeds and
concludes in the device; technology dominates the transaction. For
example: In ―Some Motifs in Baudelaire,‖ Benjamin associates the
―utilitarian object,‖ i.e., the camera that permanently records events, with
―traces of the practised hand‖ (145). Similarly, Baudrillard, in The System
of Objects, refers to the human body, and by extension the hand, as leaving
only the ―signs of its presence to objects whose functioning, in any case, is
independent from now on‖ (53). In both instances, the hand relinquishes
its direct and material effect to mechanized processes that continue to
completion with only the slightest hint of the hand‘s involvement. In
Barthes‘ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, however, a substantive
albeit small portion of the hand remains: the finger ―is linked to the trigger
of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has
such things)‖ (15). It seems plausible to assert that this tendency—to
assume the relative insignificance of the hand in relation to the mechanism
it engages—speaks to a general underlying assumption of technological
progress, which bears the overtones of technological determinism. To the
degree that the hand appears in these accounts, it seems to demonstrate
the effectiveness of technology, which results in the technology
overshadowing the hand. And yet, the hand appears: in each case, the
hand emerges at the margins of the technological process under discussion.
It functions as a point of origin in a process that soon consumes it. On the
one hand, this speaks to the (muted) relevance of the hand, albeit a
particularly generic (and probably privileged) hand. On the other, it reveals
a habit of overlooking the potential dynamic and physical interaction that
might materialize between a hand and a device. Walter Benjamin, ―Some
Motifs in Baudelaire,‖ Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (1939; London: Verso, 1985), 109–54; Jean
Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (1968; London:
40

As a means of theorizing this particular and innervating
relation between hand and MSD, I draw upon the discourses of
biomechanics and industrial design.
60
I do so for two reasons: one,
each discipline uses a language which speaks in terms specific to its
object and this specificity is crucial for effectively articulating the
mechanics of relation between hand and device; and, two, in each
case, the rhetorical style of prose is most conducive to describing an
experience of mutual inter-relation. That is, biomechanics and
industrial design already speak (whether intentional or not) to a
philosophical notion of mutual accommodation. In biomechanical
terms, the meeting of hand and MSD can be described as a ―blending
of hand and wrist movements,‖ which allows ―the hand to mold itself
to the shape of an object being palpated or grasped.‖
61
The surfaces
of the palm and the MSD mold each to the other, they interpenetrate.

Verso, 2000); Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
60
Although Gray‟s Anatomy and Frank H. Netter‘s Atlas of Human Anatomy
inform my understanding of biomechanics in general, for the purposes of
this chapter I refer to work by Fad J. Bejjani and Johan M.F. Landsmeer, C.
Elaine Chapman, Francois Tremblay and Stacey A. Ageranioti-Bélanger,
and Cynthia C. Norkin and Pamela K. Levangie, and Frank R. Wilson. In
attending to matters concerning industrial design, I cite Paul Kunkel, Ellen
Lupton, Riccardo Montenegro, Donald A. Norman, and Victor Papanek. (In
many ways, design, in general, and the more specific categories of digital
design and industrial design are usefully thought in relation to each other; I
have chosen to do so here.)
61
Fad J. Bejjani and Johan M.F. Landsmeer, ―Biomechanics of the Hand,‖
Basic Biomechanics of the Musculoskeletal System, 2nd edn., ed. Margareta
Nordin and Victor H. Frankel (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1989) 277.
41

Thenar (thumb) and hypothenar (pinky) muscles cup the rounded
edges of the MSD, which in turn sidles into the cradle of semi-flexed
digits. The experience is tactilely pleasing, as hand and MSD fold
into each other. Or to cite Frank R. Wilson, the hand and the device
undergo a ―becoming one.‖
62
As Wilson explains in The Hand: How
Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, becoming-
one is an experience of bonding between the person (specifically,
his/her hand) and a tool or device.
63
This bonding produces a
―mystical feel‖ that arises out of a ―combination of a good mechanical
marriage and something in the nervous system.‖
64
Wilson describes
becoming-one as entailing a certain intimacy and communication,
65

which is reminiscent of Elizabeth Grosz‘s notion of acquaintance.
66

For Grosz, acquaintance emphasizes the importance of
intuition, intimate apprehension, and interconnectivity between
people and things. In ―The Thing,‖ she proposes: ―Instead of merely
understanding the thing and the technologies it induces through
intellect, perhaps we can also develop an acquaintance with things
through intuition, that Bergsonian internal and intimate

62
See: Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain,
Language, and Human Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1999) 63.
63
Wilson‘s work with musicians, puppeteers and machine operators
informs his comments on ―becoming one.‖
64
Wilson 63.
65
Wilson 94.
66
Elizabeth Grosz, ―The Thing,‖ Architecture from the Outside: Essays on
Virtual and Real Space, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) 167–83.
42

apprehension of the unique particularity of things, their constitutive
interconnections, and the time within which things exist.‖
67

Acquaintance, then, is not a pragmatic relationship, as far as it does
not aim for any objective or rational outcome; it does not separate as
discrete entities, for example, a hand and a device. Instead,
acquaintance is invested in a responsive relationship across
materialities and mechanisms. So while the hand-MSD relationship
is necessarily productive, i.e. of electronic communications or digital
operations, something supplemental to such production materializes
between the hand and tool or device. In other words, the reciprocity
of acquaintance produces ―a rich indeterminacy,‖ a dynamic
contingency.
68

67
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 183.
68
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 183. Adrian Mackenzie‘s notion of transduction also
conceptualizes the relation between human and non-human. Importantly,
he emphasizes bodies instead of the Cartesian/rational individual/subject
separate from his/her milieu (especially, his/her devices). As a way of
articulating the inter-relations between humans and things, he cites
Simondon‘s ‗transindividual‘, ―a way of conceptualizing experience without
either privileging a pregiven individual subject position or a structural
totality at the level of society…a relation to others which is…[determined] by
pre-individuated potentials only experienced as affect‖ (117, emphasis in
original). This entity is not a fully constituted being but a being in process
(toward individuation); s/he occupies the same liminal space of limbo as
Agamben‘s ―whatever [body].‖ And the body is always in relation to
technology. For example, a tool is not a static object but a sedimentation of
processes of transductive negotiation, i.e., between a body and a
device/thing. In other words, a tool is always the site of a becoming. (This
seems very similar to what Grosz is saying.) Likewise, the body must be
understood as a corporealization of technical mediation, in which iterative
engagements with technologies materialize surfaces, limits and matter of
43

In pursuing a notion of reciprocal relation, I hope to
problematize more traditional views regarding people and
technologies. Of course, the belief that technologies serve people who
act upon and through them comes to mind. But in the happening of
such inter-relation, intention of a person toward a MSD is not the
point. Rather, the contouring of a hand and a MSD transpires
immediately and without volition, for the hand to purposely engage
the MSD (or vice versa) presupposes a unidirectional, calculative
relationship, not one of interconnectivity and bonding, acquaintance.
In fact, it is the very involuntariness, if you will, of reciprocal relation
that enables such a dynamic happening between hand and MSD.
Interesting to consider in this regard is the fact that increased
transmission of haptic information occurs when tactile exploration is
not motivated.
69
In other words, tactile engagement that is not
directed by volitional movement tends to produce an increase in
somatosensory input.
70
Good design works to these ends, insofar as

the body. Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed
(London: Continuum, 2002).
69
C. Elaine Chapman, François Tremblay, and Stacey A. Ageranioti-
Bélanger, ―Role of Primary Somatosensory Cortex in Active and Passive
Touch,‖ Hand and Brain: The Neurophysiology and Psychology of Hand
Movements, ed. Alan M. Wing, Patrick Haggard and J. Randall Flanagan
(San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1996) 331.
70
Chapman, Treblay, and Ageranioti-Bélanger are quick to acknowledge the
paradox in the fact that active, or exploratory, touch involves ―highly refined
tactile abilities‖ (346), while ―voluntary movement‖ involves ―movement-
related gating of sensory transmission‖ (330). They explain that it may be
44

it aims at placing devices into hands in ways that do not require
conscious effort or thought. In effect, as Donald A. Norman
discusses in The Design of Everyday Things, good design should place
the hand; it should communicate through ―natural signals,‖
71
to
which the hand should respond easily and intuitively.
72
The Sony

that ―much of the feedback generated during tactile discrimination with
active touch may not contribute directly to sensory perception‖ (346).
Likewise, they remind,
the motor strategies employed during active touch may, in a variety
of ways, optimize sensory feedback by…reducing movement speed at
critical moments in an exploratory movement and so minimizing
gating influences (Chapman et al., 1988), or by optimally orienting
the digits so as to bring the most sensitive skin area into contact
with the object being explored. (347)
It seems that the design of MSDs, intended to fit neatly in the palm—a
position of increased sensory feedback, according to Cynthia C. Norkin and
Pamela K. Levangie—elicits a sort of active touch that does not require
active thinking but benefits from motor strategies involving manipulation of
job knobs, etc. Cynthia C. Norkin and Pamela K. Levangie, ―The Wrist and
Hand Complex,‖ Joint Structure and Function: A Comprehensive Analysis,
2nd edn. (Philadelphia, PA: F.A. Davis Company, 1992) 262–299.
71
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Doubleday,
1990) 4.
72
Industrial designers are eager to reveal that in their designs they seek
intuitive relationships between devices and hands. And yet, such intuitive
relationships are premised on notions of ―natural design‖ (4) or, as Victor
Papanek explains, a ―basic, underlying organic principle‖ (210), which find
source in ―natural biological pattern[s]‖ (26) as well as ergonomic studies.
Such an investment in (and promotion of) the naturalness of design
conceals the not-so-natural implications of a device that only functions
naturally for certain hands. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World:
Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd edn. (Chicago: Academy Chicago
Publishers, 2000).
Biomechanics, likewise, turns to nature to explain the performance
of the musculoskeletal system (belonging to an unmarked, generic body
abstracted into specific mathematical proportions). For example, the flexing
of the fingers is understood as operating according to the same logarithmic
spiral found in the accretive shell of the chambered nautilus (Bejjani and
Lansmeer 275). Thus, when industrial design turns to ergonomics and, by
extension biomechanics, it finds it predilection for the natural validated.
45

Design Center perhaps exemplifies this philosophy, insofar as it
pursues MSD designs that encourage ―unconscious ‗play‘,‖
73
in which
the digits continue to engage the surfaces and dials of the device well
after the desired function has been performed.
74
The fact that people
frequently retain MSDs in their hands well after they have finished
using them speaks to the success of handheld electronics designs,
but it also illustrates the bonding and acquaintance of reciprocal
relation.
75

On another note, it is important to acknowledge that with the
introduction of digital design, nature proper has lost some of its hold as a
source of inspiration and reference. The appealingly fluid and plastic forms
made possible by such design practices, e.g., vortex formations and blobs,
owe more to complex calculus and binary coding of computers than to the
simple (so-called) and naturally occurring geometries found in nature.
73
Paul Kunkel, Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center (New
York: Universe Publishing, 1999) 79.
74
Reference to a description of the Sony Discman, a relative to the MSDs
under consideration here, is appropriate to the discussion at hand. In
Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center, Kunkel indicates that
the relationship between the hand and the Sony Discman is one of
integration, fusion. Specifically, he differentiates between ―today‘s sports
and lifestyle designs‖ and those electronics of the 1980s, which ―were
conceived as high-tech prosthetic devices, artificial appendages that allowed
the user to greet the world as a champion‖ (149). In addition, he employs
verbs such as ―fuses‖ and ―are integrated,‖ while he refers to the older
devices, using the verb ―attached‖ (149). Certainly, the shift from prosthetic
attachment, which makes the device an extension of the person‘s body, to
fusion, a process which integrates the person and the device, is indicative of
a reconfigured relation between person and device which is relevant to what
I am theorizing here.
75
Incidentally, early names for MSD products themselves attest to this
dynamic exchange between hand and device. For example, both PalmPilot
and Handspring suggest integration (compound nouns that merge
hand/palm and device) and energy (latter portion of each word connoting
action, or potential action). Even the metonymical handheld functions in a
similar way, the compound word labeling the device but simultaneously
46

In other words, I am proposing the possibility of an innervating
exchange between hand and MSD. In articulating with the MSD, the
hand-wrist complex is engaged in precision handling, which is a
―dynamic function with relatively little static holding.‖
76
The MSD‘s
texturing, size, and ergonomic shape motivate the hand to execute
fine adjustments continuously as it engages in ―active touch.‖
77
The
introduction of digital design as well as new techno-polymers has
resulted in important developments in the material body of MSDs,
which make them more responsive. Not only do many MSDs come in
dynamic forms, e.g., soft curves and interesting contours, some
devices now boast textures that are ―softer, more giving to the
touch.‖
78
In some cases, surfaces called ―skins‖ can even ―sense the
location and pressure of human touch,‖ as Ellen Lupton mentions in
―Skin: New Design Organics.‖
79
Buttons themselves become
important, as Riccardo Montenegro indicates in his contribution to
Digital Design: New Frontiers for the Objects.
80
He explains that

indicating a direct and material(izing) relation with the subject engaging the
device. Similarly, personal digital assistant (PDA) and the communicator
connote relationships that are active and direct, interpersonal.
76
Norkin and Levangie 294.
77
Importantly, active touch coincides with the active work of the eye.
Wilson 334, footnote 10.
78
Ellen Lupton, ―Skin: New Design Organics,‖ Skin: Surface, Substance +
Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002) 39.
79
Lupton 40.
80
Paolo Martegani and Riccardo Montenegro, Digital Design: New Frontiers
for the Objects (Bäsel: Birkhauser, 2001).
47

buttons on mobile phones are ―isolated and emphasized‖ in order to
―[establish] a relationship of interactive stimulation with the user.‖
81

Of course, the requisite palm-size makes the MSD portable and,
therefore, facilitates mobility; but it also accounts for the particular
positioning, i.e., cradling, of the MSD in the hand, which augments
manipulative range and increases options for precision handling, as
Wilson indicates.
82

But importantly, this reciprocal relation between hand and
MSD produces a particular sort of visual experience, one which is
simultaneously distracted and sensual. Finger, hand and wrist

81
Martegani and Montenegro 86.
82
Wilson 130. It is also worth noting that MSD design pays particular
attention to the thumb, taking advantage of the thumb‘s ability to abduct
and rotate from the palm. In this position, the thumb is able to access and
actively engage the various buttons, e.g., jog knob and volume dial, that
appear at the side of the MSD. Kunkel specifies that the design of the jog
knob, as appears on mobile phones and PDAs, allows the thumb to operate
the device fully, freeing up the other hand for different tasks. But one-
handed operation tends to mean left-handed operation: right-handedness
being privileged in the placement of jog knobs and dials within easy reach
of the left thumb. Likewise, the often asymmetrical contouring of MSD
bodies, which best fits left hands, presupposes right-handedness. While
one-handed operation is indicative of reciprocal relation, insofar as it
presumes a more responsive interaction between hand and device, it runs
the risk of reinforcing the assumed transparency of the notion of
handedness. In addition to the normalizing assumption governing MSD
design, which seemingly favors right hand dominance, only those who can
afford the price have access to these devices. Also at play, the particular
subject positions available to MSD users, as constructed through marketing
discourses and popular conceptions surrounding technological devices, e.g.,
the on-the-go businessman, the organized mom, the popular and in-touch
teen, etc. Simply stated, mobile screenic devices are not positioned as all-
inclusive technologies. As such, any notion of reciprocal relation is vexed,
even as it is dynamic.
48

muscles synergistically flex and extend, abduct and adduct
accordingly in order to maintain the integrity of contour between the
hand and MSD, thereby, sustaining the reciprocity between the two.
But to the extent that this reciprocity happens without intention, and
without assistance from the eyes because the hand is familiar with
the MSD, the eyes are freed from the task at hand and can look on
surrounding scenes (as well as screens) and events. The
acquaintance materializing by means of the spreading of hand and
MSD into one another, expands and permeates the eyes‘ engagement
with their surroundings. In this way, vision is never really free of the
hand, insofar as it is always infused by the reciprocity between hand
and device, but also because of the analogous geometry of movement
between the eye and the shoulder. According to Wilson, the shoulder
and eye move synchronously in acts of pointing, with which it is
plausible to compare the wrist‘s positioning in screenic mode—
slightly extended and ulnarly deviated (in supination).
83
Because of
this correspondence between hand and eye, it is possible to read
vision as tactile in a double sense. First, the work executed by the

83
Wilson 328, note 4. Even though Wilson speaks about the shoulder, it is
important to recall that positioning of the hand requires the entire upper
extremity, including the shoulder. Perhaps also important to note here is
the comparative treatment by the brain of the sensitive portions of both the
digits and the retina (97-98), such that when an object is actively explored
tactilely and visually simultaneously, the brain is doubly engaged in like
processes.
49

hands in relation to the MSD screen, i.e., engagements with the
screenic content by way of jog knob, stylus or even finger, constitutes
a literal manifestation of tactile vision; the hand is directly and
actively involved in the seeing that the eyes practice, in relation to
screen and surroundings. A material experience of vision results as
hands, eyes, screen and surroundings interact and blend in
syncopated fashion.
But also, the automatic yet intimate
84
contouring between
hand and MSD that coincides and is integral with a seeing that is, as
a result, never fully concentrated, but rather tangential and diffuse,
likewise comprises a tactility of vision. Walter Benjamin‘s notion of
the tactile is relevant to consider here because it provides an account
of experience, ―a mode of participation,‖ that emerges as a result of
and in response to ―profound changes in apperception‖ wrought by
technology.
85
In the ―Work of Art‖ essay, Benjamin uses tactile to
refer to a type of experience that contrasts with the abstract but
auratic nature of contemplation. In one sense, tactile experience is
understood in terms of use and touch. In this case, the tactile is

84
Wilson cites Jeanne Bamberger who discusses a process called ―felt
path,‖ in which the internalizing of familiar activities is interpreted as ―our
most intimate way of knowing‖ (qtd. on 347, note 2). I contend that this
intimate knowing is a way of understanding the acquaintance between
hand and MSD.
85
Walter Benjamin, ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,‖ Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1935;
New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 239 and 240.
50

associated with distraction. Benjamin explains, ―Tactile
appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by
habit…The latter [optical reception], too, occurs much less through
rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion.‖
86

Here the tactile coincides with habit and, by extension, incidental
noticing, both of which are marks of distraction.
87
In a ―state of
distraction,‖ somatic work and optical work are casual, though not
disengaged, not passive. Instead, they are marked by an ―absent-
minded‖ engagement.
88
Benjamin‘s reference to the process of
appropriating architecture illustrates this: one experiences a
building, takes it in, without attending to the experience itself; the
experience merely happens—according to expectation, since one
already knows buildings. There is an intimacy, reminiscent of
Bamberger‘s concept of ―felt path‖ (see footnote 34). In this way,
habit and looking that happens in an incidental fashion are
indications of familiarity, which materializes in a bodily and
perceptual blending with the surroundings.
89
These ideas of habit

86
Benjamin, ―The Work of Art‖ 240.
87
Friedberg has suggested a correlation between multi-tasking and the
distracted engagement produced by habit that Benjamin describes.
88
Benjamin, ―The Work of Art‖ 241.
89
The notion of appropriation is a little problematic with respect to this
discussion, since it alludes to a unidirectional engagement between the
spectator and the building. However, the fact that appropriation is
accomplished through distraction, which connotes diffusion, returns the
engagement to a kind of balance. Therefore, it seems possible to proceed
51

and the incidental aspect of seeing are applicable to the (visual)
experience of reciprocal relation because such experience is never
focused, i.e., contemplative in the Benjaminian sense, but rather
spreads out, across various images (of landscape and screen), as a
result of and in tandem with the interpenetration of the hand and
MSD.
However, another facet of Benjamin‘s notion of the tactile
deserves attention here, precisely because it begins to resolve a
seeming antagonism between distraction, as described above, and the
noted experience of punctuated surprise which has been attributed to
mobile-imaging practice.
90
To some extent, distraction appears to
lack, and therefore be at odds with, the vitality of surprise as
produced through acquaintance and existent within duration (to
which acquaintance is related). And yet, there is a vitality to the
tactility of which Benjamin writes. As Benjamin explains, even as
tactility is a quality of distraction, it also ―happen[s]‖ to one ―like a
bullet‖ and, with respect to cinema, ―periodically assail[s] the
spectator.‖
91
Here distraction exists in coincidence with a volatilely
somatic sort of experience, one which is visually constituted. This

with the comparison between (visual) experience of reciprocal relation and
distraction.
90
According to cultural anthropologist, Mizuko Ito, a person engaged in
mobile-imaging tends to record ―more fleeting and unexpected moments of
surprise.‖ Ito, ―Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy.‖
91
Benjamin ―The Work of Art‖ 238.
52

tactility is a product of as well as produces ―shock.‖
92
Benjamin
employs ―shock‖ to explain a particular mode of living marked by its
being permeated by somatically visual stimuli.
93
It is a mode of living
that emerges as a result of technological advancement and finds
example in pedestrians having to ―[cast glances in all directions] in
order to keep abreast of traffic signals.‖
94
The camera (both
cinematic and photographic) answers to this shock by producing the
potential for another sort of shock, one which is experienced as
disjunction, which coincides with a flashing into recognition or
awareness. In this way, as Miriam Hansen indicates in ―Benjamin,
Cinema and Experience: ‗The Blue Flower in the Land of
Technology‘,‖ ―shock may assume a strategic significance—as an
artificial means of propelling the human body into moments of
recognition.‖
95
In its ability to expand space, extend motion and
enlarge a perspective, the camera reveals, in a somatic and visual
way, the unknown or unexpected that exists in the familiar.
96
The

92
Benjamin ―The Work of Art‖ 238.
93
Walter Benjamin, ―Some Motifs in Baudelaire,‖ Charles Baudelaire: A
Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso,
1985[1939]) 109-154.
94
Benjamin, ―Some Motifs in Baudelaire‖ 132.
95
Miriam Hansen, ―Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‗The Blue Flower in
the Land of Technology‘,‖ New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987) 211.
96
Walter Benjamin, ―The Work of Art‖ 236. Walter Benjamin, ―Little History
of Photography,‖ Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 2 1927–1934,
ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney
53

shock of such images, according to Benjamin in ―Little History of
Photography,‖ ―paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the
beholder,‖
97
impeding the narrativizing processes that tend toward
historicization.
98
Instead, the images happen to the beholder in such
a way that refuses narrativizing. As such, it bears a certain relation
to Hansen‘s discussion of Proustian remembrance:
―Remembrance…is incompatible with conscious remembering which
tends to historicize…not self-reflection, but an integral ‗actuality,‘ a
‗bodily,‘ to some degree absent-minded ‗presence of mind‘…‖
99

Remembrance is a happening that is experienced through the body
and in relation to vision.
100

To the degree that remembrance—but also the surprise
possible, even likely, in mobile-imaging—is an unconscious flash that

Livingstone (1931; Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University, 2001) 510.
97
Benjamin, ―Little History‖ 527.
98
It is important to acknowledge medium specificity here. While Benjamin
writes about photographic images in ―Little History of Photography,‖ I am
writing about MSD imaging. (The same applies to ―shock‖ produced by
cinematic images.) But I contend that an analogous stunning of the
associative mechanism can occur for the person with MSD. I address the
neurobiology of this phenomenon in the final section of this chapter.
99
Hansen 200.
100
Remembrance is distinct from reminiscence. As Celeste Olalquiaga
explains in The Artificial Kingdom, ―reminiscence is nostalgic and never
really leaves the past, while…remembrance must be anchored to the
present‖ (74). While remembrance manifests itself visually-somatically,
reminiscence is left to narrativization, distanced retrospection. Celeste
Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1998).
54

is experienced as ―integral ‗actuality‘,‖ it seems similar to the
―something lived‖ of Henri Bergson‘s duration.
101
Bergson‘s

101
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; New
York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1998) 10. (Emphasis in original.)
―Something lived‖ refers to the dynamic becoming of duration (durée), the
time in which things happen (e.g., his framing example is the dissolution, or
―melting,‖ of sugar in water). Ultimately, in Creative Evolution, Bergson
argues against a purely artificial and mechanistic view of life which, in its
determinism, refuses the creative vitality of the material world to which we
belong. Such a perspective assumes matter to be something inert,
something to be divided and used for instrumental purposes. It is an
understanding of life that negates of our own relation to the living world; it
causes us to abstract ourselves from the ―inner becoming of things‖ (306).
Instead, he explains that we need to return to a mode of sympathetic
communication with life/matter, such that we might re-engage with the
living principle and, thereby, experience more creative potential.
Philosophy, which for Bergson would account for the relation between mind
and matter but also the ways by which we (our intellect) have evolved
distinctly from other species, provides this opportunity.
But Benjamin was critical of Bergsonian duration; he found it
problematic that duration was ―estranged from history‖ (―Some Motifs in
Baudelair‖ 144), that it excised the weight and materiality of the past that
makes possible the immediacy and fullness of contingency that is the
experience of remembrance. (Jonathan Crary, too, comments on
Benjamin‘s reservations regarding Bergson in Suspensions of Perception.)
And yet, I propose that it is possible to reconcile Benjamin and Bergson (if
only momentarily) in order to understand the experience of reciprocity
between hand and MSD. Insofar as this experience occurs as a temporality
without linear, historical time, it is an experience of flowing and spreading,
not one of contemplative concentration, which results in abstraction. It
recalls Hansen‘s discussion of Benjamin‘s ―secularized, profane mode of
experience,‖ which she describes in terms of a ―purposeless purposeful
drifting into the past which turns the city into a ‗mnemotechnic device‘‖
(194). According to Hansen‘s account, the flaneur‘s drifting is the potential
for remembrance, the flashing of recognition. It seems plausible to assert
something analogous about the way in which the person, with MSD in
hand, drifts through his/her surroundings. The diffused, or distracted,
engagement of this person, likewise, has potential for a flashing of
recognition of sorts. For in the experience of tactile vision lies the potential
immediacy and contingency of the everyday. But unlike the flaneur for
whom the city as a whole is the potential for remembrance, the person with
MSD in hand has a potential for the immediacy of the everyday because she
sees in relation to the MSD. See: Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of
55

theorization of perception and its relation to temporality (of
movement and becoming of matter) define the body as integrally in-
relation to its material surroundings.
102
For example, Bergson
describes the body as an advancing boundary between the past and
the future; within the flux of time, the body is situated at the very
point where the past expires in action (i.e., of the body). Likewise, he
describes the body, in its being a matrix of neural synapses and
pathways, as a conductor that transmits or inhibits movement;
103
it
is a ―place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a
hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and
the things upon which I act.‖
104
More explicitly in terms of
perception, the body is an image among images, an image that affects
and is affected by ―the aggregate of images,‖ which constitutes the
material world.
105
In this regard, individual perception is a ―system

Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001).
102
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.
Scott Palmer (1908; New York: Zone Books, 1999).
103
Bergson, Matter and Memory 45 and 77.
104
Bergson, Matter and Memory 151-152. (Emphasis in original.)
105
Bergson, Matter and Memory page 22. But ―image‖ does not mean
picture or representation. Rather, an image is that which stands in for
matter, but in a manner which is neither a representing it or a being it.
The image, then, is ―a certain existence which is more than that which the
idealist calls a representation, but less than that which a realist calls a
thing‖ (9). In other words, ―image‖ acknowledges the impossibility of ever
really knowing an object as such, for in our relations with the material
world, we only ever have access to our perceptions of that which we find
there.
56

of images‖ which is ―conditioned‖ according to the particularities of ―a
certain privileged image—my body.‖
106
The word ―conditioned,‖ here,
is significant because it reveals that conscious perception is selective
(and, therefore, by Bergsonian standards, necessarily
impoverished
107
); for it merely has access to ―certain parts and
certain aspects of those parts‖ as dictated by our needs and
functions.
108
The fact that Bergson is not invested in an anchoring
consciousness which separates the person (mind) from the world
(matter) seems in line with the spreading of perception that marks
tactile perception—or more precisely, tactile vision. Here, D. N.
Rodowick‘s reading of Bergsonian perception as sampling is
particularly apt.
109
He writes:
In short, perception involves the formation of contingent and
partial picturings of matter, not as snapshots but as samplings
of a continuous flow. There is no essential discontinuity
between matter and our subjective prehensions; we neither
take pictures in consciousness nor illuminate an obscure world
from behind the window of consciousness.
110

106
Bergson, Matter and Memory 25. (Emphasis in original.)
107
For Bergson, we are mistaken to understand perception as ―a
photographic view of things‖ (Matter and Memory 38). Such an
interpretation presumes a ―fixed point,‖ separated off from the material
world, from which a picture is taken by ―that special apparatus which is
called an organ of perception‖ (Matter and Memory 38). This is precisely the
separation of (conscious) mind and (supposedly inert) matter that Bergson
is critical of.
108
Bergson, Matter and Memory 38.
109
R.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze‟s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997).
110
Rodowick 35. (My emphasis.)
57

Perception, here, is posited as a filtering rather than an abstracting
(into representation). Moreover, perception is not to be understood
as something we do or execute (intentionally or not); there is no
essential agency to be accorded to conscious being. Rather,
perception emerges—is ―cut‖ or ―isolated‖—out of an already dynamic
networking of images (which are without having to be perceived).
But while this perception is subtractive (to the extent that it is
a process of discernment, i.e., separating or distinguishing, as
Rodowick clarifies), the experience thereof is not necessarily deficient
or diminished. Rather, what Bergson makes clear is that perception
is an interactive and articulating engagement with a larger totality
and becoming of matter; perception is an instance of transaction with
―the totality of its [matter] elements and their actions of every
kind.‖
111
At the same time that ―our actual and so to speak
instantaneous perception effects this division of matter into
independent objects, our memory solidifies into sensible qualities the
continuous flow of things.‖
112
This dilation of memory (mind or soul),
which occurs at the point where the body is a point of passage within
the continuity of things, is a reply to action received. And it assumes
the rhythm and time of a present which is always becoming.

111
Bergson, Matter and Memory 37-38.
112
Bergson, Matter and Memory 210.
58

To align mobile-imaging with this interpretation of perception is
to emphasize the fact that tactile vision is not a motivated and
intentional seeing. Instead, it is imbricated in an interplay of various
images (both literal images, but more importantly, images in the
Bergsonian sense of matter and recollection), which happen for and
to the person with MSD in hand. Perhaps in his/her distraction,
incidental encounter with the material world can flash into
contingency. Those things (including happenings and people) banal
and ordinary and trivial, which comprise the everyday, materialize
into contingency and immediacy at moments when the hand‘s
engagement with MSD allows for a resonance in seeing. At such
moments, the vibrancy and surprise of now bursts forth to shatter
the mundane, the routine. For example, it may be a matter of
catching a moment of the everyday that typically would go
unrecognized. Or, it may be a matter of activating a seeing that
enables one to glimpse the ordinary anew, perhaps as a result of a
chance glance of the thumb or finger across a particular surface of
the MSD at just the right moment. In such instances, the
particularity of the everyday emerges to fascinate or startle or shock
momentarily before dissipating into the experience of reciprocity of
hand and device. The thumbnail images that result are what remains
of this reciprocity.
59

Screenic Seeing:
113

Insofar as the device in hand is a mobile screenic device, seeing
often transpires in direct and explicit relation to the screen (LCD
screen, in the case of a camera phone). And so, mobile-imaging
thumbnails are evidence—of a particular mode of visuality. In other
words, not only are thumbnail images the remains of a particular
encounter as made possible by a reciprocal relation between hand
and device, they are traces or residue of a particular way of seeing;
they are themselves material indexes, in addition to their
representations being indexical. Which is to say, not only do
thumbnails point to the having-been-there of the objects/people
represented but also the having-been of a particular moment and
manner of seeing. They are not merely a product of a visual style
but, in fact, a material record of a visual process in its happening. As
such, they might be said to be records of a particular interaction with
space and a corresponding sense of the world, as art historian Erwin
Panofsky and others, including Norman Bryson, Martin Jay, W.J.T.
Mitchell and Michael Baxandall, have explained with respect to the
modern perspectival mode of seeing that emerged in Western Europe

113
The beginnings of this argument appeared in my article, ―‗Identify-ing‘ a
New Way of Seeing: Amateurs, Moblogs and Mobile Imaging,‖ Spectator 24.1
(Spring 2004) 65-79.
60

during the Renaissance (and which has persisted as the dominant
and colonizing mode of vision in the Anglo-West).
114

For Panosfky, modern perspective transforms
psychophysiological space into geometric space, which reduces the
texture and substance of reality to homogeneous and abstract
functionality; it coincides with a mathematical and supposedly
objective, rational seeing.
115
Seeing engendered by this systematic
construction of space propels positivistic accounts and
representations of the world. Such practices of seeing function
according to calculation and quantifiability. Panofsky makes clear
that perspectival seeing is not inherent to human perception of
space, which he supposes to be heterogeneous and rooted in the
phenomenological. Rather, as Panofsky explains, our modern vision
has undergone ―habituation—further reinforced by looking at
photographs‖—and I would argue, by taking photographs.
116
Our
way of seeing, having grown accustomed to linear perspective,
adheres to normalized cues or patterns, which standardize our

114
For example, Norman Bryson,Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) 87-131; Martin Jay, ―Scopic
Regimes of Modernity,‖ Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1988) 3-23; W.J.T. Mitchell, ―The Pictorial Turn,‖ Picture Theory
(Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1994) 11-34; and Michael Baxandall,
―The Period Eye,‖ Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988) 29-108.
115
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher
S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
116
Panofsky 34.
61

observations and abstract us from our seeing. As such, we attend to
but do not engage our surroundings—due in part to varying degrees
of haste and/or preoccupation (facilitated by processes of
standardization in other areas of our existence). We resort to words
such as ―objective‖ and ―logical‖—and ―normal‖—to describe this
relationship to the world. We snap images that chronicle or
narrativize events and scenes—which themselves comply with
predetermined, socially constructed assumptions regarding what is
proper to an event or a scene, and which are usually sustained
through discourses organizing practices ascribed to amateurs. We
frame and pose our subjects, so that the subsequent images
correspond to traditional photographic (and often commercial)
representations. This is precisely what (potentially) changes in the
mode of visuality fostered by mobile-imaging devices.
The thumbnails that accumulate and circulate as a result of
mobile-imaging register a shift in mode of perception, to the extent
that they counter the systematic, rectilinear organization of space
that informs and corresponds to a modern perspectival seeing. This
is not to say that modern perspective is suffering a definitive decline.
Rather, I mean to suggest that the mobile-imaging thumbnails
potentially provide evidence of an alternative way of seeing, one
which no longer privileges the frame and practices of framing but,
62

instead, ―crosscuts‖ between embedded frames (architectural,
vehicular, etc.), various screen/s (television, computer, mobile
screenic device, etc.) and surrounding scenes (urban, domestic,
etc.)—a proliferating syncopation.
117
In other words, vision is not a
practice of seeing through, i.e., a window, but looking at, i.e., the
screen. Quite literally, seeing with MSD such as camera phone never
transpires through anything (as one looks through a viewfinder of an
analog camera), since the screen of the device is never brought to eye,
but rather is nested within the field of vision in mis en abyme
fashion. And this shift from windowed seeing to screenic seeing
reconfigures one‘s relationship to that which is seen. Whereas a
window distances the looker from that which s/he looks at, the
screen draws the viewer toward that which exists on the screen (not
beyond it). In which case, windowed seeing institutes a detached
engagement,
118
while screenic seeing encourages an experience of

117
I borrow ―crosscuts‖ from Anne Friedberg, who uses it to describe a
―post-Cartesian, post-perspectival, post-cinematic, post-televisual‖ visuality,
which I will address shortly. (Interestingly, Bergson uses ―crosscuts‖ in
Matter and Memory to refer to the effect of perception on matter, its dividing
matter into independent objects.)
118
Here it is worth recalling Bergson, who in Creative Evolution warned of
the cinematographical nature of ordinary perception, insofar as it tends to
engage a string of fixed views of what might be called reality-in-passing
instead of the becoming of reality itself. Such perception is abstract and
produces abstraction—representations of seeing—in a manner which
bespeaks Martin Heidegger‘s standing reserve. In ―The Age of the World
Picture,‖ Martin Heidegger identifies an epistemic shift from apprehension
to representation, which instantiates the modern age. For Heidegger, the
63

shift to the modern age, or ―age of the world picture,‖ coincides with
Descartes‘ introduction of the subiectum, the moment wherein man thinks
himself (ego cogito ergo sum), i.e., represents himself to himself as the
measure against which all else is counted (e.g., science) and accounted for
(e.g., history). (―Represent‖ is a verb that means ―to set out before oneself
and to set forth in relation to oneself‖ (―World Picture‖ 132).) It is important
to note that at this moment, man no longer opens up to Being, i.e., that
which presences, and instead turns himself into ―standing-reserve.‖
Fundamental to this shift to representation is the way in which the subject
engages, or relates to, the world. According to Heidegger, the process of
engagement involves the world becoming picture. He is careful to qualify
this claim: the world as picture ―does not mean a picture of the world but
the world conceived and grasped as picture‖ (―World Picture‖ 129, my
emphasis)—or, the world ―seen‖ as picture. While ―sight‖ is not explicitly
mentioned by Heidegger, it is possible to understand ―conceiving‖ and
―grasping‖ as indicative of a historically-specific mode of visuality and, by
extension, a particular visual practice. The visual practice which might be
said to accompany the ―age of the world picture‖ is one that objectifies the
world, makes it visible to/for the subject—and, thereby, quantifies it,
making it something to be measured out, counted and mastered. This
process, which Heidegger refers to as representing, is informed by
Enframing [Gestell], a mode of ordering through which the world comes to
be understood—and ―seen‖—as ―standing-reserve.‖
Importantly, Heidegger associates Enframing, and subsequently
―standing-reserve,‖ with modern technologies. By modern technologies,
Heidegger is not referring to distinct technological instruments per se,
although he does cite ―modern machine-powered technology‖ and provides
several technological examples (―Technology‖ 13). Rather, he understands
modern technologies writ large as constituting a manner by which man is
―challenged-forth‖ to ―set-upon‖ the world around him, such that he
procures a ―maximum yield,‖ which can be stockpiled for later use
(―Technology‖ 15). (For example: the hydroelectric plant establishes the
Rhine as both water power supplier and tourist site; the airplane exists as
potential transportation. In neither instance does Heidegger consider the
specificities of the technologies themselves, i.e., what is particular to their
producing a ―standing-reserve.‖) In other words, modern technologies
become a way to assess how man relates to and ―sees‖ the world. In which
case, ―sight‖ in the modern age is, indeed, a function of technological
change—or at least speaks to the shift to modern technologies that
corresponds to the shift to representation. But Heidegger is inattentive to
medium specificity, at least as it pertains to technology (just as he refuses
to distinguish between various technologies, opting for the overly
generalized ―modern machine-powered technology‖). Despite this absence
in Heidegger‘s thinking about the modern age, he does provide an important
example for understanding cultural practice, e.g., representing—and by
extension sight, as being informed by and indicative of a particular
64

encounter. Vision, no longer a property of the window and its frame,
becomes an extension of the screen. Likewise, that which is being
viewed (and perhaps recorded) no longer exists separate from that
which is framing it. The object, formerly located on the other side of
the frame, converges or fuses with the screen, its physicality
becoming the physicality of the screen. In this way, vision involves
opacity, not transparency. Screenic seeing acquires a sort of
tangibility, a physicality of its own. In looking at the screen, the MSD
user engages the screen and, subsequently, enters into a relationship
with the screen.
119

historical moment. Martin Heidegger, ―The Question Concerning
Technology‖ and ―The Age of the World Picture,‖ The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 3-35
and 115-154 (respectively).
119
Appropriate to this discussion of screenic seeing as a ―looking-at‖ (not a
―looking –through‖) is Paul Virilio‘s notion of ―sightless vision‖ (59, emphasis
in original). In The Vision Machine, Virilio argues that vision has become
entirely dependent on technology—to grave effect. He provides a teleological
account of what Martin Jay has so famously called ―the denigration of
vision‖ as catalyzed by optical devices and other technological forms of
visual prosthesis. The culmination of this ―progression‖ is the visionics of
automated perception—which Virilio asserts instantiates ―sightless vision.‖
Aligned with computers and video-imaging, this ―synthetic vision‖ involves
―the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer)
and the virtual,‖ which results in the ―ascendancy of the ‗reality effect‘ over
a reality principle‖ (60). What we see—because ―sightless vision‖ is not
blind—on a screen, has no necessary indexical relation to some actuality,
i.e., a that-has-been (a la Roland Barthes). Rather, object/person and
its/his/her equivalent image are collapsed, indistinguishable one from the
other (simulacral a la Baudrillard). Virilio explains that this con/fusion of
object and image is at play in the logistics of stealth and tracking
attributable to contemporary military operations. Intercepting and
deploying images, and discriminating between plausible and implausible
images on a screen are the means by which dominance is attained and
65

This way of seeing belongs to what screen media historian and
theorist Anne Friedberg has referred to as ―post-perspectival, post-
cinematic, post-televisual visuality,‖ which proceeds in ―window‖-ed
and ―multi-tasked‖ fashion.
120
It is important not to confuse
windowed seeing (described above), which frames vision according to
depth, aligned with perspective, and Friedberg‘s theorization of
―windows,‖ which nest upon a computer screen and, as such,
correspond to vision that is flattened and spread across simultaneous
and adjacent layers. In her introduction to The Virtual Window: From
Alberti to Microsoft, Friedberg clarifies that the term ―window‖ as

secured militarily. The hallmark of these transactions is that they transpire
in relation to a screen—video, radar or computer. Ultimately then, sight is
always mediated, the eye never immediately or directly performing the act of
seeing; hence the adjective ―sightless.‖ While Virilio‘s theorization is
technophobic in its articulation, it emphasizes the fact that our (so-called)
originary and proximate relations with the world are altered by the very fact
of our seeing in relation to screens. For Virilio, this alteration is a
destruction, insofar as we only see instantaneous sections produced by
cameras, etc. (13), which necessarily (for Virilio) proceeds as distantiation.
But I contend that screenic seeing is a punctuated seeing, which does not
necessarily distance even as it establishes various orders of relation and
inter-relations across multiple planes of view. Paul Virilio, The Vision
Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1994).
120
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006). The string of posts, which
characterize ―our new mode of perception,‖ acquire insightful elaboration
when, later, Friedberg asserts that ―It is ‗postperspectival‘—no longer
framed in a single image with fixed centrality; ‗postcinematic‘—no longer
projected onto a screen surface as were the camera obscura or magic
lantern; ‗post-televisual‘—no longer unidirectional in the model of sender
and receiver‖ (Virtual Window 194). I contend, and I think Friedberg would
agree, that all instances of ―post-‖ just enumerated prepare for yet another
―no longer‖: no longer an immobile or tethered (by AC adapter, ethernet
cable, etc.) screenic engagement.
66

pertains to computer software refers not to ―the full expanse of the
computer screen, but rather a subset of its screen surface.‖
121
In
doing so, it ―shifts its metaphoric hold from the singular frame of
perspective to the multiplicity of windows within windows, frames
within frames, screens within screens.‖
122
The result: multiple points
of perspective—―Above, below, ahead, and behind‖—coexist in
simultaneity and adjacency on the computer screen.
123
Moreover,
―the fractured multiplicity of the multiple ‗windowed‘ screen‖ opens
onto a variety of applications, such as those ―for word-processing,
Web browsing, emailing, downloading,‖ which, she explains,
―transforms the surface of the screen into a page with deep virtual
reach.‖
124
This is a different sort of depth than that provided by the
single-point perspective of conventionally framed images. Not to

121
Friedberg, Virtual Window 1.
122
Friedberg, Virtual Window 1-2.
123
Friedberg, Virtual Window 2. In particular, Friedberg emphasizes the
coinciding perspectives enabled by the ―window‖-ed interface of the
computer ―desktop,‖ that is, the convergence or conflation or simultaneity
of an upright (perpendicular) view and a recumbent (overhead) view (Virtual
Window 231). But Friedberg is also careful to explain that multiple
perspectives, as produced by shifts in editing, are delivered via moving-
image screens, but are so ―sequentially and within a fixed frame‖ (Virtual
Window 2). That is, the shifts produced by moving images are ―held within
the fixed frame of a screen, a surface that holds its constancy regardless of
the continuous or radically disconti uous spatial and temporal relation
between shots‖ (Virtual Window 192). The single frame, single screen mode
of moving-image display has been the paradigm—that is, until the arrival of
the computer screen.
124
Friedberg, Virtual Window 19.
67

mention, a certain opacity is produced as a result of the triangulating
forces of adjacency, simultaneity and multiplicity.
But the panoply of applications available to the computer user,
and which provides for the multiplying stacking and nesting of
adjustable, moveable ―windows‖ on a computer screen, likewise
invites or, at least, facilitates mutli-tasked engagement and, by
extension, what Friedberg has called ―multi-tasking subjectivity.‖
125

Multi-tasking subjectivity corresponds to ―new laws of presence‖
made possible by the fracturing of the screen‘s surface into
―windows.‖ According to Friedberg, ―You can be multiply present,
and to multiple, different times and space.‖
126
For example, one can
be composing in Word in one ―window,‖ IM-ing in another, and web
browsing or checking email in a third, all the while music from
iTunes might be filtering through yet another. As Friedberg explains,
a proliferation of ―windows‖ as might appear on a computer screen
―produces a multiple set of presences,‖ a constellation of heres, theres
and elsewheres.
127
The computer user‘s attention is ―distributed‖
across these various ―windows,‖ as s/he ―crosscuts‖ between one or

125
While Friedberg introduces certain subjective effects in The Virtual
Window, it is in a recent interview with Octopus that she directly addresses
―multi-tasking subjectivity.‖ Anne Friedberg, ―From a ‗Windowed‘
Perspective: A Conversation with Anne Friedberg,‖ by Heidi Rae Cooley and
Nicole L. Woods, Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal 2 (Fall 2006) 39-54.
126
Cooley and Woods 45.
127
Cooley and Woods 45.
68

more applications ―in selective sequence.‖
128
The subjective affect is
one of ―overlay,‖ in which discrete tasks bleed into each other.
129
In
other words, while the processes of engagement are performed in
series, the impression is that they happen concurrently—―at the
same time.‖ And so, while screen time may be focused and engaged,
it is so diffusely, across the screen‘s multiply layered surface.
The ―looking-at‖ attributable to mobile-imaging proceeds in just
such a manner. Observations offered by cultural anthropologist
Mizuko Ito acknowledge this. According to Ito, camera phones invite
a ―persistent alertness.‖
130
This ―new kind of personal awareness,‖ as
Ito qualifies, results in images of the serendipitous.
131
She cites a
December 2002 IPSe Marketing survey, which reported that camera
phone users image ―things that they happened upon that were
interesting.‖
132
What is crucial to notice is the spontaneity—and,
therefore, seeming lack of intention—accorded to the process of
mobile-imaging. ―Persistent alertness,‖ then, is not an explicitly
intentional mode of seeing; it is not goal-oriented; it does not strive to
frame a subject according to the care and consideration attributable
to conventional photographic practice (including that of tourists).

128
Friedberg, The Virtual Window 235 and 233.
129
Cooley and Woods 47-48.
130
Ito uses the term to distinguish camera phones from traditional
cameras. Ito, ―Camera Phones.‖
131
Ito, ―Camera Phones.‖
132
Quoted in Ito, ―Camera Phones.‖ (My emphasis.)
69

Rather, it spreads across multiple planes of interest and focus. So
while ―persistent alertness‖ might involve a greater attentiveness,
attentiveness is not principally motivated by a particular and singular
intent to record images (of any specifically ―targeted‖ object, person or
place). This is not to preclude any intention underlying the purchase
of such imaging devices or certain acts of imaging; it is to suggest
that intentionality does not figure centrally, and perhaps not
consciously, in moments of imaging. Simply stated, one does not
think or plan before one images; mobile-imaging is spontaneous—
and coincident with one‘s encounter with what one images.
133

Thumbnail Citings:
Mobile-imaging thumbnails, unlike photographs proper (both
analog and digital), are not typically printed to photographic paper;
they do not inhabit photo albums, nor are they poised atop mantels
in frames. (In part, this has been due to issues of lens quality and
resolution—but, with improved technologies, this is becoming less
the case.) Rather, thumbnail images, which proliferate in streams,
live a considerably different kind of existence, a more transient one.

133
Of course, it matters who has access to this alternative mode of seeing
and under what circumstances, as well as how this mode of seeing is
deployed by those who have access—and to what extent access is
synonymous with power. Unfortunately, it is not within the scope of this
chapter to attend to these issues more directly.
70

They are MMS-ed or emailed to friends and family; they are posted to
weblog and moblog pages; they amass at various image-sharing
community sites, where they are either publicly or privately
accessible (for viewing, download, sharing); they are downloaded to
personal computer and perhaps archived (backed-up) to external
hard drives; and sometimes they are simply saved to MSD, until such
time as they are deleted (likely because of the limitations of the
device‘s storage capacity). And in the transience of their proliferation,
thumbnails accumulate.
Whether posted to moblog or downloaded and organized in
picture files, thumbnails annotate; they provide information, they
comment. This is even more the case when thumbnails are labeled,
captioned or ―tagged‖ with keywords (usually for facilitating
classification and searchability). Not to mention, the thumbnail itself
bears information (e.g., date/time stamp and location coordinates)
encoded at the moment of imaging.
134
Consider, for a moment, the
particular example of spatial annotation, as it has evolved in relation

134
The encoded information is called metadata and will be posited as the
―bio-logic‖ of the thumbnail in chapter 3. It is relevant to note, here, that
metadata, in addition to date/time stamp and location coordinates (among
other bytes of information), includes ―footprints,‖ the visits and comments,
or tracks, by others to a thumbnail.
71

to mobile telelphony, GPS technology
135
and, by extension, mobile-
imaging. Briefly, spatial annotation refers to the practice of
appending and accessing virtual notes or tags—often in the form of
SMS (text) or MMS (picture and/or video) messages, but also via
basic internet connection—to mappings of locations or to the sites
themselves (made possible by increasingly sophisticated ubiquitous
computing infrastructures). The effect is a merging of urban space
and information space. And while spatial annotation practice has not
become pervasive, various projects have been developed, which
provide insight into its conditions of possibility, but also are reflective
of the ways in which mobile-imaging thumbnails function as
mechanisms of annotation.
136
In several instances, the motivation
behind such projects is (has been) the preservation of personal and
cultural memory, and the intersections of these (Texting Glances,
GeoStickies, ASAP: Another Spatial Annotation Project), or the
claiming of urban space, not unlike tagging with paint cans (TAG:
Scripting Presence). In other instances, projects, more
touristic/consumeristic in orientation, have been interested in
transforming place (sometimes a particular place) into an information

135
GPS coordinates are not the only way to specify location. Several
projects rely on the triangulation of network cells, street names, zip codes,
or longitude/latitude.
136
A fairly comprehensive list of spatial annotation projects—past, present,
ongoing and ceased—is accessible at
http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/spatial-annotation.
72

rich landscape with which people can interact and to which they can
contribute (Geograffiti, Annotated Earth).
137

Indicative of spatial annotation is the ability to post and access
facts, details, insights, opinions, etc. via wireless and network-
enabled technologies such as MSDs. Mobile-imaging thumbnails,
whether or not expressly engaged in spatial annotation, demonstrate
investment in such enterprise; they are a response to the
(predominately unspoken) invitation to post, to leave a mark. In
which case, thumbnails are citational. If citations are those marks
which are ―cut off‖ from and ―produce effects beyond…‖ an originary
context of, e.g., writing, as Jacques Derrida explains, then

137
In addition to there being a fairly obvious relation between mobile-
imaging and touristic imaging practices with cameras and camcorders,
there is also the fact that mobile-imaging as an engagement with everyday
locations calls to mind the Situationists‘ psychogeography and de Certeau‘s
spatial practices—and, therefore, mapping as a mode of agency. Certainly,
an analysis of mobile-imaging in terms of the phenomenological effects of
and spatial tactics possible in moving through a city is applicable and
appropriate. And while I am interested in mapping, I am so, not for its
being a cartographic practice per se, but for its being a technique in a
program of tracking. The distinction to be made, here, is, in part, a matter
of purpose: cartography, it might be said, assesses where someone has
been, whereas tracking, in addition to assessing where-ness, attempts to
predict where someone might go. A difference between geography and
biopolitics, perhaps. For my purposes, mobile-imaging provides the
conditions of possibility for continuous tracking of bodies, since having a
MSD, specifically a camera phone, in hand is always being locate-able by a
wireless provider regardless of whether/not one is imaging. (In this regard
it is interesting to consider that, historically, electronic monitoring (EM) of
criminals has relied on the same cellular networks as wireless
technologies.) Chapters 2 and 4 will explore this idea of tracking from two
different but mutually informing perspectives: the practice of self-
documenting, or self-record, (chapter 2) within a systemic program of
monitoring (chapter 4).
73

thumbnails, in being citational, are likewise always already ―cut off‖
(from the instances of tactile vision, out of which they originate) and
―produce effects beyond‖ (their materialization through the reciprocal
relation between hand and device).
138
It is precisely in their
remaining—beyond the contrapuntal layerings of screenic seeing,
beyond the moment of imaging—that they perform their function as
citation. Streaming on moblogs, etc., thumbnails are accessible to
others, who can view them and post comments to them. They might
download or send them to others, thereby circulating them beyond
their initial site of posting. Or, they might be linked to other sites via
RSS feeds or hyperlinks, where they enter into diverse contexts, given
new life. This is their iterability: the possibility of ceaseless
extraction and grafting elsewhere.
139

But always at stake in citation is the mobilization of evidence of
personal presence. It is a matter of the trace, the trace as verification
of the actuality of one‘s meaning, one‘s living. Indeed, mobile-

138
Jacques Derrida, ―Signature, Event, Context,‖ Margins of Philosophy,
trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 307-330, 25
April 2007
http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Derrida_Sig
nature_Event.html.
139
Derrida explains that to write (graph) is always already an act of grafting
elsewhere, a transplantation. Given that thumbnails belong to a history and
tradition of photography, they, too, are always already a grafting elsewhere,
a transplantation. Precisely what this means is what I pursue in the
concluding paragraphs of this chapter. Jacques Derrida, ―Grafts, a Return
to Overcasting [Retour au surjet],‖ Dissemination, trans. and intro. Barbara
Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 355-358.
74

imaging thumbnails fulfill this condition; after all, they are about
leaving traces—proof of life. Thus, the thumbnail as citation gives
(digital) signature—auto-graph—to a having-been present at a
particular time, in a particular place. What is important, though, is
that the signature, the mark or sign of a particular presence, is
always and necessarily conditioned by a simultaneous absence; for it,
in fact, ―implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer‖—
and this ―nonpresence‖ is ultimately an absolute and fundamental
absence.
140
As Derrida has articulated, this is the paradox of the
signature.
141
And citation, in being a signature, likewise always
operates according to this paradox; it is fundamental to the citation‘s
iterability, its capacity to be cut from an originary context and re-
situated—to be grafted elsewhere. The thumbnail, then, must also be
a matter of life and death, i.e., sign—and, here, we might add,
signal—of life (at a particular place and time), which always, at the
same time, acknowledges, or registers some death. Actually, there is
a certain validity to this seeming contradiction as pertains to

140
Derrida, ―Signature, Event, Context‖ 328.
141
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995); Derrida, ―Signature Event Context.‖
Likewise, Andre Bazin and Roland Barthes identify this paradox as
functioning in photographic indexicality: the photographic image is the
visible evidence of a having-been present, i.e., an image of a presence and
an absence at once. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; Andre Bazin, ―The
Ontology of the Photographic Image,‖ What Is Cinema? Volume I (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967) 9-16.
75

thumbnails: for, I contend, the thumbnail is an auto-graph—a cutting
of/from the self—of a very vital sort.
142

And, here, we might consider the significance of the
homophony, which renders audibly indistinguishable the words ―cite‖
and ―sight.‖
143
This auditory blurring is suggestive of the coincidence
of vision and citation as happens in mobile-imaging. In which case,
the thumbnail, as what remains of a particular mode of visuality, is a
citing, i.e., a cutting, of sight. It is a graft of a neurobiological life in
its processing,
144
when the body as organism is affected by the
sensory stimulation—principally visual, in the case of mobile-
imaging—of an object and when that encounter is processed as a

142
This is an argument I pursue throughout the dissertation.
143
In addition to ―sight‖ and ―cite,‖ there is also ―site‖ and, consequently
perhaps, the idea that the remains of vision are given a place in, as well as
being placed by citation.
144
Consider, here, that ―cut‖ of citation, to which graph (of auto-graph)
refers, recalls in this visual context the ―crosscutting‖ of Bergsonian
perception and Friedberg‘s ―post-perspectival, post-cinematic, post-
televisual visuality.‖ Not unimportantly, Antonio Damasio contends, in
rather Bergsonian fashion, that ―the machinery [of core consciousness]
actually produces ‗pulses‘ of core consciousness, many singular units of
consciousness occurring one after the other from several consciousness
generators. The interval between the units is so small and the amount of
parallel pulses so abundant, that we only register a continuous, whirring
blur‖ (346, fn. 4). What Damasio adds to what Bergson considered the
―cinematographic‖ character attributable to consciousness is the notion of
parallel processing; the images (neural patterns which constitute
consciousness) that happen ―in parallel‖ include the ones perceived, as a
result of an interaction with an object, and the ones that are materialized as
the sense of the knowing experienced by the perceiving/knowing organism,
the core self. And the images are drawn from diverse regions and
structures of the brain. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens:
Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego: Harcourt,
Inc., 1999).
76

second-order neural pattern.
145
This body, which is not yet
subjectified, not yet made autobiographical, is the site of what
neurobiologist Antonio Damasio calls the ―core self.‖ In The Feeling of
What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness,
Damasio asserts that consciousness is of two kinds, a core
consciousness, that is, a sense of self in an always perpetual present,
minus any personal-historical context, and extended consciousness,
an elaborate sense of self, which orients a person with respect to a
personal historical time, complete with memory images of a lived past
and anticipated future. Core consciousness, which involves the
formation of neural patterns, is a simple biological phenomenon that
gives rise to an awareness of being. In doing so, it instantiates a core
self, which is fundamental to extended consciousness, the condition

145
First-order neural patterns belong to what Damasio calls the ―proto-self,‖
which is ―a coherent collection of neural patterns [distributed across the
brain and its structures] which map, moment by moment, the state of the
physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions‖ (154).
According to Damasio, there is no consciousness attributable to this self; it
―has no powers of perception and holds no knowledge‖ (154). It is simply
the ―first-order representation of current body states,‖ which provides ―the
roots for the self‖ (159). The proto-self is not singular, static or contained;
rather, it happens multiply, ―emerg[ing] dynamically and continuously out
of multifarious interacting signals that span varied orders of the nervous
system‖ (154). Any encounter with a stimulus ―provokes in the
organism…a collection of motor adjustments required to continue gathering
signals about the object as well as emotional responses to several aspects of
the object‖ (160). The moment at which these neurobiological responses to
stimuli resonate as something felt, there is a mapping (second order neural
patterns) of being in-relation, which marks the ―beginnings‖ of
consciousness.
77

of possibility for the autobiographical self (to be aligned with the
traditional Western notion of self). While the autobiographical self of
extended consciousness is bounded and continuous (a so-called
―unified whole‖), the core self is transient, a feeling which emerges at
―at the very threshold that separates being from knowing‖ (43).
146

The knowing onto which core consciousness opens is a nonverbal
knowing, an imaged knowing; it is a knowing that cannot yet be
spoken as ―I,‖ for it is without language, without reason, and is
anterior to processes of inference and interpretation.
147

146
Damasio distinguishes between emotion, i.e., emotive state of the
biological organism, and feeling. Whereas emotion refers to ―complicated
collections of chemical and neural responses, forming a pattern‖ (51),
feeling refers to ―the private, mental experience of an emotion‖ (42). Any
reaction, felt or not, understood or not, is biologically—emotively—informed.
For example, in response to some sensory stimulus, chemical molecules are
sent to the bloodstream, where they act on the receptors in the cells of
tissues, and electrochemical signals move along neuron pathways, acting
on other neurons and on muscular fibers or organs; the result is ―a global
change in the state of the organism‖ (67), whereby organs respond and
muscles move accordingly. But these changes to the overall state of the
organism are not consciously felt. In order for an emotion to be known,
imaging of the changes activated by the emotion (itself induced by, e.g., an
object processed visually or the visual representation of an object as
produced by neural patterns) must be imaged, and the core consciousness,
which produces the images which allow for a feeling of knowing, must
attend to the entire set of phenomena (see 68).
147
More specifically, in an encounter with an object, whether actual or
recalled, the brain forms images of the object and as those images affect the
state of the organism (which Damasio calls the proto-self), there is, at
another level of brain structure, a nonverbal accounting of the events
taking place. This second-order neural mapping effects a feeling or sense of
knowing; it is ―a feeling which arises in the re-representation of the
nonconscious proto-self in the process of being modified within an account
which establishes the cause of the modification‖ (172, emphasis in original).
Or, more simply put: ―the sense of self…informs the mind, nonverbally, of
78

Despite being without an articulable ―I,‖ the becoming
conscious of the core self emerges as an orientation and presence.
Originating in the proto-self, which functions as the point of reference
for being and living, the surfacing of core consciousness transpires
from ―the perspective of your organism.‖
148
Damasio explains that
this bodily or physiologically-informed perspective (not a subjective
perspective) ―draws on the modifications that your organism
undergoes during the events of hearing or touching [or seeing].‖
149

When those modifications of organism are mapped as second-order
neural patterns and experienced as a change, then the organism, as
point of reference, experiences the awareness of a here and now,
which is only ever here and now. This process is incessant,
reactivated for every object (actual or recalled) with which the brain
interacts. It is lived as a subtle flow, rather than discrete instances,
of knowing. Interestingly, Damasio cites T.S. Eliot‘s Four Quartets to
illustrate this subtle yet deeply sensed process: this sense of knowing

the very existence of the individual organism in which that mind is
unfolding and of the fact that the organism is engaged in interacting with
particular objects within itself or in its surroundings‖ (89). The knowing
that is core consciousness, and which inheres in this ―newly constructed
neural pattern that constitutes the nonverbal account,‖ is incessantly
repeated for every encounter with an object, whether the object is an actual
object or a thought object (172). Damasio, early on, describes this
nonverbal account in cinematic terms as a ―movie-in-the-brain‖ in which
the proto-self is the protagonist and for which the core self is the
observer/owner (11).
148
Damasio 148.
149
Damasio 148.
79

is like ―music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all.‖
150
The point
Damasio makes is that this ―feeling essence of our sense of self‖ is a
knowing which is not yet known as such, because we are not
separated or abstracted from it (because we are not yet
autobiographical, i.e., not yet rearticulated with the memory objects
comprising our autobiographical record).
151
Damasio quotes Eliot
again: ―you are the music while the music lasts.‖
152
For Damasio,
Eliot aptly communicates the ephemeral materiality of the moment in
which ―a deep knowledge can emerge—a union, or incarnation.‖
153

This aspect of core consciousness is a gentle and even persistent
awareness of being, not a concerted and definitive self-awareness.
But the continuous pulsing of ceaselessly emerging
consciousness can be focused to attention when a causative object
dominates core consciousness.
154
At such moments, the object is

150
Damasio, quoted on 172.
151
Damasio 171.
152
Damasio, quoted on page 172.
153
Damasio 172.
154
While the idea of a continuous pulsing brings to mind a single track of
images in sequence, Damasio explains that the continuity of consciousness
is likely to be a result of the processing of more than one image and,
likewise, more than one imaged account (string or mapping of neural
patterns generative of a sense of knowing) happening at once. Certainly, an
organism encounters more than one object at a time, so the processing of
images (neural patterns) for each object transpires simultaneously. But
also, Damasio states that there is likely to be more than one mapping, i.e.,
imaged account, for any single object and, therefore, the core consciousness
for that object is likely ―to result from a composite of second-order maps, an
integrated neural pattern‖ (180). Additionally, it is important to understand
80

―set out from less-fortunate objects‖; it is ―selected as a particular
occasion.‖
155
It is attended to. This more focused attention
engenders a more poignantly felt awareness, a deeper sense of
knowing. And in addition to ―greater alertness, sharper focus, [and]
higher quality image processing,‖ Damasio explains that this state of
increased knowing awareness ―forms the basis for simple nonverbal
inferences which strengthen the process of core consciousness.‖
156

These nonverbal inferences, the result of ―the close linkage between
the regulation of life and the processing of images,‖ initiate a sense of
personal perspective, which is the condition of possibility for
ownership, i.e., claiming one‘s images as one‘s own.
157
In being able
to ―own‖ one‘s images, one arrives at a sense of action and,
subsequently, a sense of agency; for if the core self can claim the

that second-order neural patterns are assembled across the brain regions
and structures. Specifically, Damasio hypothesizes that ―the superior
colliculi and the cingulate under the coordination of the thalamus‖ are
responsible for assembling second-order maps. (Note: the three structures
Damasio identifies are all located on the brain‘s midline. The superior
colliculi are multilayered structures that receive various sensory inputs
from an assortment of modalities, integrate signals across their layers and
communicate outputs to various brain-stem nuclei, the thalamus and the
cerebral cortex. The cingulate cortex is a vast portion of the cerebral cortex
and is a somatosensory structure, a motor structure and is involved in
processes of attention, emotion and consciousness. The thalamus receives
―first-hand‖ reports of sequential organism interactions and, Damasio
suggests, can produce neural patterns in the cingulate cortices and
somatosensory cortices. See pages 260-266.)
155
Damasio 171. (Emphasis in original.)
156
Damasio 183.
157
Damasio 183.
81

images being generated by its organism as its own, then it acquires
the ability to act upon the object that caused the images in the first
place.
It seems to me that it is precisely in this moment of an
intensified sense of knowing that the impulse to image arises in
mobile-imaging. Imaging, in other words, is a mode of enacting
increased attention, of responding to a causative object. But, here, I
want to emphasize two points mentioned above regarding the
nonverbal inferences responsible for activating the chain of events
leading to responsive action. First, these nonverbal inferences are
nonverbal; that is, they precede a spoken ―I.‖ Second, they are the
product of a complex articulation of neurobiological processes,
involving the changing biological state of the body (as catalyzed by a
causative object—internal or external to the organism) and the
―nonverbal vocabulary of body signals [neural patterns, images,
maps].‖
158
What this means, then, is that mobile-imaging transpires
in a moment just prior to the utterance of an autobiographical self,
when the organism as such predominates—when any responsive
action is a vital response. In emphasizing these two points, I am
foregrounding the biological and the ephemeral: that mobile-imaging
is a responsive action, not an intentional one, surfacing above the

158
Damasio 31.
82

continuous neurobiological processing of images; that mobile-imaging
is a vital response enacted in a here and now by a transient core self.
Given this context, the mobile-imaging thumbnail is a very particular
kind of citation. It is a citing of a once present but ongoing
neurobiological process of core consciousness and, simultaneously, it
is the mark of the absence of the specific pulse of core consciousness
which ignited the impulse to image (since the transaction of imaging
itself would have been carried out through the subsequent pulsings
of focused attention). Signatures of vitality—or rather, so many vital
signs, thumbnails stream an auto-graphy, graftings of (core) self
elsewhere. And their rhythmic proliferation, e.g., via MMS-ing,
mobilizes a persistence of a vision that once was lived, at the same
time that it signals the movements of body whose record ―lives‖ on in
various streams that document a past and an anticipate a future.
83

CHAPTER 2: LIVING CORPUS I: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL IMPULSE &
MEDIUM SPECIFICITY

―The End‖: Regarding Autobiography‘s Demise
In 1980, Elizabeth Bruss announced autobiography‘s almost
certain demise.
159
In ―Eye for I: Making and Unmaking
Autobiography in Film,‖ she argues that literary autobiography, i.e.,
autobiography as practiced in text form, is fated to disappear. She
attributes the eventual extinction of the autobiographical form to the
rise and success of film (and video
160
) as a mode of communication.
Her claim, then, is based on an assumption regarding the fact that
literary and linguistic practices are to be supplanted by film and
video. And since neither film nor video formats lends themselves to
autobiographical expression, Bruss argues that ―there is no real
cinematic equivalent for autobiography.‖ Consequently,
autobiographical practice meets its end in film and video.
161
Of
course, nearly 30 years later, we see that this is not the case. Quite

159
Elizabeth W. Bruss, ―Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in
Film,‖ Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 296-320.
160
It is important to note that Bruss conflates film and video in her
discussion of autobiography. In fact, video is really an absence, insofar as
it is only named at the beginning (first paragraph) and end (concluding
paragraph) of her essay. Interestingly, it is with the introduction of
affordable handheld video cameras that autobiographical practice became
more viable for greater numbers of people.
161
Bruss 296.
84

the contrary, as Michael Renov has demonstrated.
162
In fact, as
Renov explains, in The Subject of Documentary, ―16mm film,
consumer-grade video, and the Internet have provided unique and
increasing accessible platforms for self-expression‖ such that
―autobiography, far from being an endangered species, shows new
signs of life.‖
163
And with the introduction of new social-networking

162
Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004).
163
Renov Subject of Documentary xii and 111. Moreover, Renov views the
exploration of subjectivity as being ―the defining trend of ‗post-verité‘
documentary practice from 1970 to 1995‖ (Subject of Documentary xxiii). In
other words, autobiographical practice belongs to a larger tradition of
documentary film- and video-making. Certainly, this is not a surprising
claim. In fact, as Renov makes clear, the documentary film (and video)
tradition, of which practices of self-record are a part, seems to have borne
the trace effects of an autobiographical tendency, i.e., evidence of an
authoring self, since its inception. I am referring to the existence, no
matter how fleeting, of self-inscription in the documentary film image—as
apparent in, e.g., framing, composition, shot selection, editing, narrative,
etc. We might even begin with Grierson‘s inaugural definition of
documentary—―the creative treatment of actuality.‖ Particularly relevant is
his reference to ―creative treatment,‖ since it implies the presence of an
authoring, i.e., creative, subject whose work (or art) mediates the actuality
being recorded. As Michael Renov notes in ―Toward a Poetics of
Documentary,‖ this ―appears to be a kind of oxymoron, the site of an
irreconcilable union between invention on the one hand and mechanical
reproduction on the other,‖ which can have an ―explosive, often poetic [i.e.,
expressive] effect‖ (33). Even Bill Nichols, who has understood
documentary to be a ―discourse of sobriety,‖ has identified signs of the
expressive in early documentary projects, such as early Soviet cinema, the
avant-garde tradition, the ethnopoetics of Jean Rouch. Nichols‘s
schematically describes these projects as precursors to the ―performative
documentary,‖ which he appends to his taxonomy of modes in order to
account for the changes exhibited in documentary practice of the 1980s
and 90s. Specifically, the category is meant to address the increasingly
subjective character of documentary filmmaking—such as: poetic
evocations of the world; stress on duration, texture and experience;
emphasis on affective dimensions; attention to intensities of expression. In
The Subject of Documentary, Renov coins the term ―the new autobiography‖
85

platforms and mobile communications infrastructure and
technologies, autobiographical practice is indeed proliferating.
But before pursuing this line of thought, I want to return to
Bruss‘ assertion regarding the failure of film and video to meet the
requisite conditions of autobiographical expression. What is
interesting about her claim is her assumption regarding the
cinematic medium, that the veritable impossibility of filmic
autobiography is attributable to, indeed, inherent to the medium as
such: as she explains, ―It must instead be something in the medium
itself.‖
164
Film‘s inability to perform as an autobiographical signifying
practice is a matter of ―the circumstances under which autobiography
is told‖ in film.
165
While she allows that film can produce biography,
i.e., character and narrative sequence, she contends that ―it is
impossible to characterize and exhibit selfhood through film.‖
166
At
issue, then, is the autos, which proves not simply elusive but
impossible. She explains that autobiography as a genre is
conditioned by certain situational parameters, the most crucial of
which is identity-value—that is, the unity of author, narrator and

to describe this emerging mode of practice. Michael Renov, ed., ―Toward a
Poetics of Documentary,‖ Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge,
1993) 12-36; Bill Nichols, ―Performing Documentary,‖ Blurred Boundaries:
Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994) 92-106.
164
Bruss 297.
165
Bruss 299. (Emphasis in original.)
166
Bruss 298.
86

protagonist. Autobiography depends on the identity of the speaking
subject and the subject about whom the speaking subject speaks (or
reflects) in order that there might exist ―a purported continuity of
past and present, life and writing.‖
167
Film shatters ―the unity of
subjectivity and subject matter‖ upon which ―classical
autobiography‖ depends and, instead, dissolves it into an
insurmountable scission between ―the person filmed (entirely visible;
recorded and projected) and the person filming (entirely hidden;
behind the camera).‖
168

In proclaiming that ―the autobiographical ‗I‘ cannot survive‖ the
move to film, Bruss is actually arguing that its medium is word; that
is, the autobiographical ―I‖ is essentially and fundamentally textual
(and, by extension, literary) in its representational form. In doing so,
she ascribes a certain stability and certainty (and, therefore,
reliability—perhaps, authenticity) to language, which, in her
formulation, hinges on film‘s inadequacies and lack. For example,
film introduces the complication of ―the choice between staging ‗the
truth‘ or recording it directly‖ (302), whereas in the case of language,
there is no way to record without also staging. Of course, she fails to

167
Bruss 301.
168
Bruss 297. Bruss overlooks or forgets that there are ways for the filming
subject to be the filmed subject. For instance, as Renov reminds us, there
are ―those handy props, the mirror and the tripod‖ (Subject of Documentary
232).
87

think about the fact that filming involves the act of placing the
camera, which forecloses any ―direct‖ (immediate—and unmediated)
recording of the pro-filmic. And because words can place emphasis
where it is needed (which allows one to distinguish between subjects
and predicates), language is more focused than cinema, which is
burdened with the danger of mistaking something accidental (e.g., a
chance object or inadvertent movement in frame) for that which is
essential (e.g., the intended subject of framing). Furthermore, her
claim that ―the automatic undoes the autobiographic‖ assumes that
the technologies of film production supplant the subject, leaving all
possibility for self-expression to the word (which, we must remember,
has itself become more ―automatic,‖ what with the technological
developments of typewriters, word-processors, and computers—
although the latter two developments were not widely available to
Bruss at the time of her writing). Ultimately, for Bruss the
―perceiving subject,‖ as presented via film, is less substantial, less
distinctive than the ―speaking subject‖ of language and text. Which
means: the ―[camera] eye‖ produces a more precarious
autobiographical subject than does language, whose ―I‖ ensures, at
least retrospectively, the subject‘s integrity.
What Bruss fails to acknowledge is the necessary instability of
both medium and genre—as well as the instability of selfhood out of
88

which surfaces the autobiographical impulse. As such, she can only
react against the mutually informing relations among technology,
medium and practice. Considering another proclaimed ―end‖ will
clarify my point. Fast forward two decades to 2000, in which year
Anne Friedberg asserted the end of cinema.
169
But her assertion is
intended to foreground a particular ―moment of transformation,‖ a
moment of transition in which the ―‗film‘ as a discrete object becomes
more and more of an endangered species.‖
170
That is, as cinema ―has
become embedded in—or perhaps lost in—the new technologies that
surround it,‖ new modes of cinematic production and reception have
emerged, thereby changing what cinema is, how it can be understood
and mobilized.
171
So while cinema, television and computer screens
occupy distinct locations, the images that play upon these screens
―are losing their medium-based specificity.‖
172
This convergence of
media forms means that the presumed differences between ―the
media of movies, television, and computers are rapidly
diminishing.‖
173
In this regard, Friedberg reminds us of McLuhan‘s
insights regarding the interrelatedness of media (technologies and

169
Anne Friedberg, ―The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological
Change,‖ Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda
Williams (London: Arnold, 2000) 438-452.
170
Friedberg, ―End of Cinema‖ 448. (My emphasis.)
171
Friedberg, ―End of Cinema‖ 439. (My emphasis.)
172
Friedberg, ―End of Cinema‖ 439.
173
Friedberg ―End of Cinema‖ 439.
89

forms) and their interaction, thereby underscoring the ceaseless
evolution of media content and forms. Given the ―cross-purposed
interactions‖ of more recent media technologies (those of the latter
third of the 20
th
century), it becomes necessary to ―pose new
questions regarding their technological specificities.‖
174
In particular,
she argues that we must consider how digital technologies have
transformed cinematic, televisual and computer media, which, by
extension, requires that we recognize our changed relations to our
screens. It is with an eye to the specificities of and inter-relations
between technology and medium, that I consider the mobile micro
screen, mobile-imaging and the autobiographical impulse.

Medium, Specificity and Convergence
Friedberg makes clear the integral relation between medium
specificity and convergence, that the one is always a matter of the
other—a sort of ceaseless moebius looping of the two. That is, her
argument about cinema‘s end, the consequence of its convergence
with other (television, video and, later, computer) technologies, is
simultaneously an argument about specificity, i.e., the specificities to
which such convergence itself gives rise. In the case of cinema, the
waning specificity of the moving image as such (e.g., cinematic

174
Friedberg, ―End of Cinema‖ 439.
90

images playing upon television and/or computer screens) coincides
with the specificity that emerges with respect to technologies of
display (screen size and location—and degree of interaction). Insofar
as Friedberg expresses the importance of considering the
particularities of hybrid (rather than discrete) screens, she is positing
the relevance of a specificity of display technologies and medial
platforms—and the ways in which such specificity refracts onto
notions of image and histories of image production and exhibition.
Of course, her point is not new per se; there have been others before
her who have argued similarly (as she, herself, indicates via her
references to Marshal McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and Nicholas
Negroponte).
175

For example, McLuhan‘s oft-cited ―the ‗content‘ of any medium
is always another medium‖ speaks to the relationality of media
broadly speaking.
176
No medium exists in isolation; it always speaks
of and to ones that precede it. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin refer to

175
While her point about the convergence of media belongs to a well-known
tradition of thought regarding media change, her claim about the
convergence of film pre-dating the fiber-optic cable, digitalization of imagery
and the home computer is an important intervention. According to
Friedberg, the convergence of these technologies dates to the VCR, remote
control device and growth of cable television (―End of Cinema‖ 440).
176
Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, intro.
Lewis H. Lapham (1964; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001) 8.
91

this repurposing or refashioning of media as remediation.
177
One
way to think of remediation is in terms of hybridity; that any medium
is an instantiation of the coexistence of multiple media and their
respective articulations of techniques, forms and practices.
178
In
which case, older media (remediated in a more recent medium) are
never entirely effaced, their echoes persisting in and through a more
recent form. Thus, any medium is a sedimentation, a veritable
―living‖ genealogy, in which previous medial forms and relations lurk,

177
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New
Media (1999; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001). The first section,
entitled ―Theory,‖ is most relevant in this regard. While I find their term
―remediation‖ a useful shorthand for referring to the relations between
media—what might also be called intermediality or multimediality—I do find
their notions of immediacy and hypermediacy (as a both-and logic) to be
overly reductive of the ways in which media forms function, articulate and
engage user-viewers.
178
Here, it is worth noting Carolyn Marvin‘s point regarding the
recapitulation of practices which new technologies introduce into culture.
She argues the importance of acknowledging the fact that ―New practices do
not so much flow directly from technologies that inspire them as they are
improvised out of old practices that no longer work in new settings‖ (5). In
other words, media practices are remediated practices (to reference Bolter
and Grusin), insofar as they reproduce and simultaneously transform
earlier practices (221). In emphasizing media practice, Marvin rightly
asserts that our relations to technologies—and understanding of them—
transpire in conversation with and are informed by earlier relations to and
exchanges involving preceding technologies. Her intervention is to shift the
focus of discussion regarding new technologies from their typical emphasis
on the artifactual, i.e., the tendency to deploy an instrument-centered
analysis of electronic media history, to one which addresses issues of power
and access that necessarily coincide with (athough are not necessarily
determined by) technological development. Carolyn Marvin, When Old
Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late
Nineteenth Century (NY: Oxford University Press, 1988).
92

even as they may not be expressly tangible.
179
But even as new
media technologies (e.g., of representation or image production) do
not erase that which came before, they do, to allude to McLuhan but
also Walter Benjamin, alter our perceptions and, by extension, our
access to and engagement with the world.
180
As such, they transform
how we think and express ourselves.
I briefly survey these ―usual suspects‖ of media theory in order
to make a distinction between autobiography and the
autobiographical; which is to say, I distinguish between the genre
and a mode or modality.
181
Of course, genre refers to the category of

179
What‘s more, Friedrich Kittler implies that we can identify the
foreshadowing of media-yet-to-be in a current medium when he asserts,
―The book became both film and record around 1800—not as a media-
technological reality, but in the imaginary of readers‘ souls‖ (9). Of course,
this foreshadowing is recognizable only (seemingly) retrospectively.
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and intro. Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999).
180
Walter Benjamin, ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,‖ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and intro.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1955; New York: Schocken Books,
1969) 217-251. According to Benjamin, with the introduction of film, we
arrive at a moment wherein the mechanical mediation of reality reaches the
pinnacle of transparency (―precisely because of the thoroughgoing
permeation of reality with mechanical equipment‖ (234)), even as it opens
onto views impossible to the naked eye (an ―unconscious optics‖ (237)). As
a consequence, the nature of the work of art changes, particularly in the
way it engages its viewer-spectators. It is for this reason that Benjamin
criticizes those who have failed to ask ―the primary question‖ regarding
photography and, later, cinema, only to ask whether these are art (227).
181
Renov, too, acknowledges a distinction to be made between
autobiography (noun) and the autobiographical (adjective). For him, the
adjectival form encompasses ―the activity of self-inscription shared by
[diary, autobiography, and essay]‖ (Subject of Documentary 106).
93

literature, as well as its object, while mode and modality refer to a
form and manner of being. (Not unimportantly, both mode and
modality are suggestive of mood and its connotations of the
ephemerality and fluctuation attributable to temperament—and
pertinent to a notion of impulse as will be discussed later in this
chapter.) In making this distinction, I privilege a notion of the modal
(as form and manner, e.g., of engagement) and, thereby, emphasize
transformation, another transformation involving image production
(mobile-imaging) and display (posting and streaming of thumbnails).
To be sure, this transformation does not do away with or discount
autobiography as genre, as (discrete) object, but insists on its
malleability and rearticulation in the face of new technologies. In
particular, I am interested in the recontextualization of the
autobiographical mode in relation to location awareness technologies,
social-networking platforms and more sophisticated metadata-
encoding applications as these function through handheld mobile-
imaging devices (or, mobile screenic devices [MSDs], as previously
named). The autobiographical mode, insofar as it transpires
according to an immediacy and spontaneity facilitated by the device
potentially always being in hand, becomes a matter of impulse, an
autobiographical impulse.

94

―The New Autobiography‖: Remediation, Intermediality
I return to Renov‘s discussion of autobiographical practice as
materialized via film and video (as well as the electronic essay and
the webpage) in order to provide context for discussing the
autobiographical mode as pursued in mobile-imaging. In The Subject
of Documentary, Renov explains that autobiography is ―a still-
unfolding phenomenon,‖ one which is not easily confined to the
inflexible and finite status of genre of literary study (as Bruss would
seemingly have it). But while film and video provide ample examples
of autobiographical expression, he cautions against simply grafting
―one set of media practices (film/video/Internet) onto another
(literary).‖
182
To do so would be to ignore the complexities—debates,
social relations, technological and medial transformations—which are
―the very conditions of existence of these new forms of self-
inscription.‖
183
Additionally, he is not invested in ―(re)defining
autobiography‖ as such.
184
Rather, he is concerned with ―examining
a diversity of autobiographical practices that engage with and
perform subjectivity,‖ and which have been burgeoning since the
1980s and 90s.
185
Ultimately, he proposes ―the new autobiography‖

182
Renov, Subject of Documentary xi.
183
Renov, Subject of Documentary xii.
184
Renov, Subject of Documentary xii.
185
Renov, Subject of Documentary xii.
95

as a means of exemplifying the new modes of self-articulation
wrought by film, video and new media practices.
According to Renov, ―the new autobiography‖ is essayistic,
186

and demonstrates a ―writerly‖ approach to film- and video-making.
With the notion of the essayistic drawn from Montaigne and the
―writerly‖ from Barthes, Renov describes such an approach as double
or reflexive, insofar as it demonstrates a ―documentary-impulse‖
(which situates the subject within a historical, public, material, etc.,
context) at the same time that it performs or displays ―a forceful
reflex of self-interrogation‖ (which is private and associational,
marked by reverie, etc.).
187
In other words, film- and video-making of
this kind proceeds according to an outward gaze (onto the world)
articulated in relation to self-examination (of one‘s ―interior‖), a
coupling of descriptive and reflexive modalities, in which ―the
historical real is consciously filtered through the flux of

186
In ―Lost, Lost, Lost: Mekas as Essayist‖ (Subject of Documentary 69-89),
Renov addresses the essay film, which he understands as being both
engaged in an outward gaze in addition to being invested in self-
examination. He defines the essay form as being one inclined toward
complication, particularly in its refusal to conform to/be contained by
conventional taxonomies of genre. While it is derived from more readily
defined forms, such as the confessional, autobiography and chronicle, the
essay form tends to be heterogeneous and indeterminate or inexhaustible.
187
Renov Subject of Documentary 105. I am particularly interested in
Renov‘s use of ―impulse‖ and ―reflex,‖ insofar as both terms are suggestive
of the nonconscious functional aspects of the biological body. In other
words, there is something of the uncontainable or unintentional—nearly
automatic—about the act of self-documentation. It is this aspect of the
autobiographical that I intend to mobilize in thinking about mobile-imaging.
96

subjectivity.‖
188
There is a dynamic interpenetration of a writing self
and a written self—or, in the case of film and video, a filming self and
a filmed self (precisely the situation that Bruss concluded to be
impossible). The result is a subjectivity that, unlike Descartes‘s
anchored cogito, is ―a site of instability—flux, drift, perpetual
revision—rather than coherence.‖
189
Thus, knowledge (of self)
produced in such films and videos can be understood as provisional
rather than systematic.
190

The moving image medium contributes to the autobiographical
subject‘s provisionality. Whereas the diary or written autobiography
instantiates a perpetual present—generative of a unified subject who
writes his/her ―I,‖ the moving image form splits the subject between
the moment of filming (experience) and the moment of editing
(secondary revision).
191
This split, ―the temporal and epistemological
syncopation of selves,‖
192
is irreversible but, as Renov suggests, often
produces new and unexpected—expressive—results.
193
And not
unlike its literary predecessor, the autobiographically-inflected

188
Renov, Subject of Documentary 70.
189
Renov, Subject of Documentary 110.
190
Renov, Subject of Documentary 70.
191
Renov offers a different (because temporal) splitting of the subject than
does Bruss, who locates the irremediable and damning (to autobiography)
split between the subject who films and the subject who is filmed, wherein
the two cannot be the same.
192
Renov, Subject of Documentary 114.
193
Renov, Subject of Documentary 114.
97

moving image that emerges can neither be categorized as ―fiction nor
nonfiction—nor even a mixture of the two.‖
194
It is an open and
vibrant project and process of narrativization (provided
narrativization is not narrowly confined to a simplistic notion of
narrative, i.e., linear story-telling). Ultimately, Renov argues that this
development in autobiography is not a sign of its doom but rather its
revitalization.
Jonathan Caouette‘s Tarnation (2003) is exemplary of ―the new
autobiography‖ of which Renov speaks (a point Renov himself has
noted on several occasions).
195
The film is a visually frenetic and
sonically rich exploration (and evocation) of the articulating dynamics
of family, mental illness and interpersonal attachment, shot through
with a keen sensitivity and generosity. As a document, it attests to
the enduring and triangulating forces of love, devotion and deep
sadness. Compiled from 20 years of self-shot (home) video footage,
family photographs, answering machine and cassette recorder tapes,
and clips and excerpts from popular visual and music culture
(including image sequences and fragments from film and television,
as well as music tracks from predominately lesser known bands), and
threaded through with periodic and carefully distanced 3
rd
person

194
Renov, Subject of Documentary 110.
195
Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation (New York: Wellspring Media, Inc. and
Tarnation Films, 2003).
98

narrative titles, the film is a portrait of self as refracted through the
story of a mother‘s ―fall‖ into and struggle with mental illness.
196

Thus, it is a commentary on the fragilities of the mind (his mother‘s
but also his own, since Caouette himself suffered from
depersonalization as a teenager), evidence of the powers and burdens
of family (responsibilities to and for family members) and a reflection
on a childhood complicated (and, for a time, debilitated) by the
articulation of these. But also, it is a love song to an image of a
mother who is not, who could never be. In which case, it is
simultaneously an indictment (no matter how subtle) of those
(doctors, as well as her parents) who denied her herself, and denied
him her.
197

196
Quite literally, Caouette‘s mother, Renee LeBlanc, fell from the roof of
her family home when she was twelve. She was paralyzed. Six months
later, her parents, feeling her paralysis to be ―in her head,‖ heeded the
advice of a neighbor and took Renee for shock treatments. She underwent
shock therapy twice a week for two years. She was never the same again.
197
In this regard, it is interesting to consider Caouette‘s use of angels and
electricity as motifs in counterpoint throughout the film. Reference to
angels occurs when Renee appears dressed as an angel, Adolf (Renee‘s
father, Caouette‘s grandfather) speaks of angels touching the lips of unborn
children, and David (Caouette‘s boyfriend) plays at snow angels in New
York. As for electricity, Caouette includes film images of shock treatments,
makes use of iMovie‘s electricity button and includes amplifier feedback as
a sonic re-enactment of electrical shock. Both angels and electricity are
forces and/or emanations of light, of power, which upon touching the
human interfere with vision (the angel‘s touch makes the soon-to-be-born
infant blind to the world of God) and a vision of self (electrical shock
treatments dissociate Renee from herself, such that she feels that she has
evaporated). As visual and sonic images, then, angels and electricity are all
that‘s left of a vision of Renee—the angel, an after effect or after image of
99

More than being an example par excellence of ―the new
autobiography,‖ Tarnation is illustrative of a shift toward new medial
versionings of the autobiographical mode. First, there is the fact of
Caouette‘s nearly incessant filming of himself and his family over the
course of 20 years (Caouette began filming himself and his family at
age 11). And while he used super 8 film initially (eventually moving
to video and then digital video), his practice is quite akin to the ethos
of blogging and its indebtedness to a nearly obsessive recording of
one‘s personal life and opinions. Next, there is the overtness of the
new media screen as the film‘s site of post-production. Caouette
readily admits to having edited his film on his iMac, using Apple‘s
iMovie. The various manipulations to images (e.g., saturation of
color, mirroring, use of the negative effect, etc.), the multiple framings
which occupy, proliferate and shift upon the single screen, as well as
the extremes in editing (perhaps most notable in the contrasts in
pacing and rhythm of sequences and montages), are all
demonstrative of the capacities of widely available consumer editing
software, which allow a user to edit film clips according to a drag-
and-drop logic and offer a variety of rather sophisticated effects
options (both audio and visual) at the point and click of the mouse.

electricity‘s charge (as applied in medical ―treatment,‖ but also that which
propels or animates Caouette‘s film).
100

Given these aspects of Tarnation‘s mode of production and post-
production, it is possible to assert that the film, broadly speaking, is
a precursor to—or, at least, foreshadows—what has come to be
known as user-generated-content, one of the hallmarks of the culture
of Web 2.0.
198

The Autobiographical Impulse & New Media Forms: The Streaming of
Thumbnails
In the last essay of The Subject of Documentary, Renov makes
the important point that the adjective ―autobiographical‖ is
appropriate to certain 1990s Internet practices.
199
He considers the
personal webpage to be one such example. Not unexpectedly, the
personal webpage, in being a variation of the autobiographical form,
speaks to and modifies the practices introduced in film and video.
And just as film and video transformed autobiography as literary
form, Renov asserts that the personal webpage and its platform, the
Internet, ―have radically altered the culture of the autobiography,‖
especially the way in which the self-expression coincides with and is

198
Unlike other user-generated-content of Web 2.0, Tarnation, as a discrete
film, is not in conversation with the ongoing interactivity and social-
networking, the immediacy and proliferation of information, the gathering
and filtering of vast and dispersed content indicative of Web 2.0.
199
Michael Renov, ―The End of Autobiography or New Beginnings? (or,
Everything You Never Knew You Would Know about Someone You Will
Probably Never Meet), The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2004) 230-243.
101

propelled by entrepreneurialism and the larger market forces of
capitalism.
200
In particular, he notes that both speed and
accessibility (to potentially everything) circumscribe the mechanisms
of autobiographical expression in its electronic webpage form,
201

while ephemerality and unpredictability define its conditions of
possibility:
202
the influences of commodification and planned
obsolescence most assuredly informing how the self is positioned,
framed, articulated and received. And yet, in light of more recent
trends in Web 2.0, the personal webpage has become a rather
anachronistic example of the ways in which the autobiographical
mode is triggered and channeled.
In general terms, Web 2.0 refers to what some consider a
second phase or revitalization of the web, after its dot.com
moment.
203
Web 2.0 foregrounds participation; users are makers,

200
Renov, Subject of Documentary 232.
201
Renov, Subject of Documentary 238. Renov adds: ―…speed of
transmission and breadth of accessibility seem to be purchased at the price
of permanence and depth‖ (238).
202
Renov, Subject of Documentary 238.
203
Tim O‘Reilly admits that the term Web 2.0 is a disputed one. Its
opponents argue that it is simply a marketing buzzword. In counterpoint,
proponents of the term, O‘Reilly being one of these, have enumerated a
series of binaries, in which they illustrate the shift from Web 1.0 to Web
2.0. The principle example among these is the shift from Netscape, which
operates according to a software paradigm (offering a web browser with
desktop application, and periodic software releases), and Google, which is a
web navigation application (not a software package to be purchased,
installed and updated). What‘s more Google ―isn't just a collection of
software tools, it's a specialized database,‖ wherein the relation between
102

doers and contributors. Their myriad activities build community and
foster collaboration at the same time that they produce inordinate
amounts of content—to be accessed, gathered, filtered and remixed
(by other participants, as well as companies and organizations), in an
ongoing circuit. Thus, Lev Grossman writes of Time‘s Person of the
Year for 2006, the user-participant, referred to as ―You‖ in a sweeping
rhetorical gesture of all-inclusivity:
We didn‘t just watch [e.g., YouTube videos], we also worked.
Like crazy, we made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars
and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We
blogged about candidates losing and wrote songs about getting
dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-
source software.
204

The age of the passive spectator-viewer (but also the user,
unhyphenated, of Web 1.0) is now over (or so we are told, by Time
anyway). And in its place, an era of entertainer-toolmaker-gatherers
is upon us.
205
With participants actively generating ever greater

tools and data (management) are in symbiotic inter-relation. Neither is
Google a server nor a browser, but rather a network—―an enabler or
middleman‖—between the user and his/her online experience. Only those
Web 1.0 endeavors that ―embraced the power of the web to harness the
collective intelligence,‖ such as Amazon.com, Yahoo! and eBay, successfully
transitioned over to Web 2.0. Tim O‘Reilly, ―What is Web 2.0: Design
Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,‖
O‘Reilly, 30 September 2005, 24 April 2007
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-
web-20.html.
204
Lev Grossman, ―Time Person of the Year: You,‖ Time 168.26 (December
25, 2006/January 1, 2007) 41.
205
In ―Your Web, Your Way,‖ Jeff Howe taxonomizes user-participants
according to a tripartite schema: the entertainers, the toolmakers and the
103

quantities of content (of the sort enumerated above) comes greater
connectivity. This is because making happens via a social-
networking model, wherein content is uploaded or posted to website
communities, such as flickr or MySpace, at which point it becomes a
part of a web of interactions (linking, ranking, tags, trackbacks,
pinging and RSS feeds).
Perhaps the most known feature of Web 2.0 is blogging.
Derived from the word ―weblog,‖ coined by John Barger in 1997,
blogging refers to a form of online personal journaling, in which
entries accrue in reverse chronological order.
206
Blogs provide
commentary and personal opinion on a range of topics, from news
events, to politics, to hobbies and interests, to more personal matters
regarding family, friends and personal dilemmas.
207
While blogs tend

gatherers (60-61). The intersecting Boolean circles and the linked nodes
illustrating the networking of Web activities (from Google, to craigslist, to
blogger and flickr, to del.icio.us, to Netflix, YouTube and iTunes) indicate
that each categorical assignation is the other to some extent. That is, these
three categories are never discrete; they always exist in some combination.
Jeff Howe, ―Your Web, Your Way,‖ Time 168.26 (December 25,
2006/January 1, 2007) 60-61.
206
John Barger coined the term on December 17, 1997. It was shortened to
―blog‖ by Peter Merholz in April/May of 1999, when he ―broke the word
weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com.‖
―Blog,‖ Wikipedia, 24 April 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog. See
also: Rebecca Blood, ――Weblogs: A History and Perspective,‖ rebecca‘s
pocket, 7 September 2000, 25 April 2007
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html.
207
Wikipedia provides this definition of a blog: ―A weblog…is a type of
website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in
a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on
a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as
104

to be heavily text-oriented, many also include images (still and
moving) and links to other blogs, webpages and media-related
content. Blogging fits within a cultural-historical context
characterized by an emerging trend in compiling and analyzing—that
is, tracking—statistics in, for example, sports, but also the sort of
tracking of minutia comprising the lives of people, as exemplified by
the rise of the reality television show (especially MTV‘s The Real
World, which first aired in 1992). Essentially, a blog functions as a
mode of information management, insofar as it is an extension of
practices that strive to record the ―rhythms of ordinary life.‖
Likewise, as Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd indicate, it is
associated with what has been termed a ―culture of self-disclosure,‖
in which people willingly ―overshare.‖
208
In which case, the essayistic

more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and
links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most
blogs are primarily textual although many focus on photograph (photoblog),
videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting)‖ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog).
Rebecca Blood makes the important qualification regarding the first (and
―traditional‖) weblogs: they were ―link-driven sites.‖ They presented links
―both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles [their
editors] feel are worthy of note.‖ These links were almost always
accompanied by commentary, which might assess the accuracy of
information provided by a site/article or append additional facts or
perspectives. Ultimately, these first weblogs, and numerous subsequent
blogs, provide/d an important filtering function (―Weblogs: A History and
Perspective,‖ rebecca‘s pocket,
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html). Note: No
longer just a noun, ―blog‖ has come to function as a verb, ―meaning to
maintain or add content to a blog‖ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog).
208
Caronlyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd, ―Blogging as Social Action: A
Genre Analysis of the Weblog,‖ Into the Blogosphere (Rhetoric, Community,
105

mode of self-expression belonging to ―the new autobiography,‖ in its
videographic, filmic and early electronic instantiations, gives way to a
more straightforward (i.e., less reflexive) but intensive mode of self-
revelation, self-record.
For Geert Lovink, blogging is ―neither a project nor a proposal‖
but an a priori condition of existence.
209
A matter of the ―global
always-on, always-linked, always-immediate public conversation,‖
blogging produces a never-ending stream of confessions and ―a
cosmos of micro-opinions,‖ both of which function as tools of self-
management.
210
In this context, self-management refers not only to
(a supposed possibility of) structuring one's life, but also to
negotiating the immense flows of information (proliferated by various
media platforms), as well as to engaging in PR and promoting oneself.

and Culture of Weblogs), 25 April 2007
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action_a_genre_a
nalysis_of_the_weblog.html. Of course, Michel Foucault‘s ―care of the self‖
comes to mind here, and Miller and Dawn do cite him. I will be addressing
mobile-imaging‘s relation to Foucault‘s ―care of the self‖ in chapter 4.
209
Geert Lovink, ―Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse,‖ Eurozine, 2 January
2007, 24 April 2007 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-lovink-
en.html. There is an ambivalence underpinning this article. On one hand,
Lovink seems to want to assert that blogging is a ―micro-heroic[s]…of the
―pyjama people,‖ i.e., a (vaguely) self-aware response to the plurality of
meanings conditioning our post-political condition, rather than a general
but widespread pessimism. On the other hand, he seems desirous of (or
nostalgic for) the possibility of a radical freedom, which would completely
counter the ―over-identification and straight out addiction‖ induced by
blogging and thereby claim position outside the linked and ranked existence
of the blogosphere. Perhaps such a position—unlinked and unranked—
would likewise be the condition of possibility for renewing rhetorical
aesthetics, which Lovink notes is absent in blogging.
210
Lovink ―Nihilist Impulse.‖
106

But Lovink also asserts that blogging is a software effect, engendered
by automatic linking and perpetuated by ―procedures such as login,
link, edit, create, browse, read, submit, tag, and reply.‖
211
In two
senses, then, blogging is not a conscious choice, for one is always
already a function of blogging—even if one does not blog as such.
Put another way: blogging is not something one does, it is how one
becomes. It is in this way that we can speak of the autobiographical
impulse as being more than metaphorical. Not simply an allusion to
or a troping on the (quasi-)instinctual, the impetus to speak the self
is, indeed, the very essence of a certain nonconscious functionality—
reflex (in contradistinction to self-aware reflexivity).
212
With the

211
Lovink ―Nihilist Impulse.‖
212
Recall that in chapter 1, I discussed mobile-imaging as transpiring in a
moment just prior to the utterance of an autobiographical self, at the
threshold between being and knowing, when the organism as such
predominates. Citing Antonio Damasio, I asserted that mobile-imaging is a
responsive action, not an intentional one; it is an action that surfaces above
the continuous neurobiological processing of neural patterns, and is
anterior to any sense of agency and, by extension, intentionality.
But it is also worth noting what J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis say
regarding Freud‘s notion of instinct and the instinctual impulse. They
explain that the German word ―Trieb‖ (from ―Trieben,‖ ―to push‖), translated
as ―instinct‖ or ―drive,‖ refers to a ―dynamic process consisting in a pressure
(charge of energy, motricity factor) which directs the organism towards an
aim‖ (214, emphasis in original). This pressure, or instinct, has its source
in a bodily (biological) stimulus and, as such, is not yet a matter of
conscious response. Moreover, ―Trieb,‖ as opposed to ―Instinkt,‖
emphasizes ―the irresistible nature of the pressure‖ of instinct. In other
words, what is important about instinct is not the object toward which it is
directed but the very condition—―general orientation‖ (214)—of instinct as
such. And the turn to the instinctual impulse (―Triebregung‖), which
according to Laplanche and Pontalis is not so different than instinct
(―Trieb‖), allows for a further qualification. Laplanche and Pontalis explain
107

introduction of handheld mobile-imaging devices, specifically camera
phones, this becomes even more the case, insofar as the result of the
device (potentially) always being in hand is a seeming compulsion for
continuous imaging. In which case, mobile-imaging is less a matter
of a particular story of the self to be told or presented and more a
matter of the very act or process of telling.
Given that mobile-imaging devices, such as camera phones, are
(potentially) always in hand, self-documentation coincides with or is
articulated through what Mizuko Ito describes as ―a new kind of
personal awareness‖—an awareness of the person as organism, an
awareness that is not yet autobiographical.
213
It is a persistent and
continuous awareness, insofar as the person as organism persists
and is continuous, and it corresponds to the tendency toward
continuous imaging. People who engage in mobile-imaging are
mobilized and propelled by further (and compulsory) imaging,
imaging that transpires as a sort of pulsion or urge which arises
instantaneously. In other words, mobile-imaging is a matter of

that the addition of ―Regung,‖ as used by Freud, connotes internal
movement. In this light, the instinctual impulse is ―the instinct in action,‖
propelled by some internal, i.e., organic, change (223). My appreciation to
James Leo Cahill for suggesting I consider this line of thought. J.
Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith, intro. Daniel Lagache (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1973[1967]).
213
Mizuko Ito, ―Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy,‖
Japan Media Review, 29 August 2003, 14 September 2003
http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1062208524p.php.
108

immediacy and spontaneity; it happens on-the-go. As such, mobile-
imaging thumbnails are records of piqued attention or intensity of
experience. In which case, they are not expressive in a manner
indicative of images that presume a self-authoring subject who takes
pictures as a means of capturing (evidence of) his/her individuality.
In fact, it is possible to claim that mobile-imaging thumbnails do not
necessarily (intend to) provide narrative coherence for the mobile-
imaging subject.
Insofar as mobile-imaging thumbnails are constantly in motion,
they are not intended for contained and stable documentation of a
self—at least not in a conventional sense. Rarely, if ever, do
thumbnail images find permanent residence on the mobile device.
Which means: they are transferred from mobile-imaging device to
some other digital repository, such as a moblog,
214
blog, MySpace
page or computer file—otherwise, they are deleted. But uploading
them to a moblog—or even downloading them to a computer file—is
less a matter of safe-keeping than a habit of accumulating. Once
posted to moblog, thumbnails are automatically arranged in reverse

214
Moblogs are a mobile form of blogging. As with a blog, one can log
his/her thoughts, provide links to other sites, and (more frequently) upload
images to which others can respond and contribute. Importantly, moblogs
are not stable (fixed) receptacles for the organization of images. While
mobile-imaging thumbnails can be posted to other sites, such as the ones
listed in the paragraph proper, I will refer to moblogs from this point
forward.
109

chronology (according to the time at which they are uploaded, the
most recent thumbnail image always appearing at the head of the
stream); or, if they are downloaded, they are saved to folders (and the
download date is automatically appended to them along with other
metadata, including file type, dimensions and resolution). In this
sense, mobile-imaging thumbnails become, first and foremost, an
update to the moblog or other digital repository. Even moblogs, as a
particular example of a site for archiving thumbnail images, do not
stabilize incoming images but rather accommodate their transience.
Thumbnails posted to a moblog are migratory, moving across the
rows of moblog pages as newly uploaded thumbnails displace older
ones, and thereby shift the entire stream of thumbnails. And visitors
to moblogs often have the option of downloading or emailing—further
dispersing—posted thumbnails. Thus, even as moblogs seem to be
about accruing thumbnails that reflect whims and spontaneous
responses, they are not necessarily (and perhaps cannot be) invested
in orchestrating a more enduring (and consistent) sense of self.
215

215
Lovink refers to the ―liquid self‖ as produced through blogging. Because
blog providers are relatively unstable, given the millions of blogs they host
and archive, there is an inherent unreliability the blogging self faces, if
invested in blogging over a longer period of time. And if a blogger fails to
update his/her blog consistently, s/he runs the risk of his/her blog being
deleted. The moblogger faces similar uncertainty. See: Lovink ―Nihilist
Impulse.‖
110

The Recombinatory Logic of Self-Record: The Expressive Potential of
Thumbnails
The act of self-record I am attributing to mobile-imaging
produces thumbnail images which comprise an ever-expanding visual
statistical archive. Ongoing imaging implicates its practitioners in
the continuous process of imaging and subsequently a more
comprehensive participation in the circulation of thumbnail images.
In which case, emphasis is no longer placed on the images
themselves—how they are framed, what they depict and, therefore,
what they mean. Imaging itself is what matters, in this case. That
people are (potentially) always recording and transmitting thumbnail
images requires a shift in focus with respect to the inordinate
number of thumbnails produced. My contention is that the resulting
thumbnails are governed by an (un-/nonconscious, interiorized)
imperative to accumulate and disperse in streams. As such, the
thumbnails recorded during mobile-imaging are better approached
across series, instead of individually. They are better viewed
according to the various patterns of movement and transaction they
document (as well as their own continued movement and
transaction), not the distinct episodes in a personal story they might
be understood to frame.
111

The streams of thumbnails that accrue and circulate as a result
of mobile-imaging reveal intensities and trajectories of attention and
interest. The thumbnails, themselves, are manifestations of various
moments of attraction and engagement, their having been recorded at
the instant of encounter. It is relevant to reiterate that such
thumbnails do not have a particularly narrative function. While
vestiges of narrative convention motivating other modes of
autobiography surface in individual mobile-imaging thumbnails (and
perhaps across series of such thumbnails),
216
I maintain that mobile-
imaging in its autobiographical capacity proceeds according to a logic
governing catalogs and databases. Such a logic, as Marsha Kinder,
Lev Manovich and Tara McPherson have indicated, privileges
techniques of selection and combination (as well as recombination),
which do not operate according to cause-effect relations.
217
Instead,

216
It seems to me that the shear volume of images appearing in e-files and
posted to moblogs exceeds the conditions of possibility for narrative—or at
least, narrative coherence. However, if narrative residue surfaces in
(streams of) thumbnails, it is, in part, because of people‘s disciplined
relation to imaging: we have been trained to see the conventions of
photographic representation as natural and so are (pre)disposed to
performing/producing the same.
217
Marsha Kinder, ―Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games,‖
The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2002)
119-132; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002); Tara McPherson, ―Beyond Formalism: Thoughts on New Media
and Race in Post-World War II Culture,‖ unpublished conference paper,
Seattle, 14 February 2003. While Kinder and Manovich are names quite
readily associated with questions pertaining to the recombinatory logic of
the database and its aesthetic possibilities, I find McPherson‘s theorization
112

issues of incessant accumulation of data, as visible in and borne by
thumbnails, and the (seeming) arbitrariness and versatility of their
relations become central. Interpreting mobile image accumulation in
terms of the recombinatory logic of the database or catalog
underscores the fact that such thumbnail images, less invested in
conventional formal considerations (such as mise en scene, framing,
composition, lighting, etc.), have, in fact, become informational,
statistical. In which case, series, sequences, patterns and details
take precedence over various narrative elements; chronology governs
the organization of thumbnails, not the character arc of a person or
the development of a person‘s life through his/her
accomplishments.
218

But the informational character of thumbnail images does not
foreclose their potential for being expressive, although a notion of the

to be more appropriate to my interests. For one thing, she does not
privilege narrative‘s relation to the database as Kinder does. But neither
does she essentialize the computer (as well as software and the
programmatic list of the algorithm) a la Manovich. Certainly, I do not
dismiss the contributions made by Kinder and Manovich, but I do think it
important to move beyond the (now) conventional terms by which we think
the database.
218
Regarding the non-narrative character of mobile-imaging thumbnails,
two clarifications are worth noting: First, while organization is chronological
according to time of posting, there is the possibility of cataloging the images
by means of tags, as well as in files according to specified categories.
Second, even as moblogs are absent of an organizing narrative (i.e.,
comprised of beginning, middle and end), images are frequently titled,
seemingly as a means of identification and/or description (both of which are
significantly different than narrative).
113

expressive undergoes some revision.
219
Tara McPherson‘s discussion
of the work and archive of Charles and Ray Eames is productive for
thinking through the ways in which a recombinatory logic of the
database (as well as catalogue and archive) might effectively describe
a particular expressivity attributable to mobile-imaging
thumbnails.
220
According to McPherson, the Eames‘s work
demonstrates ―an emergent multimedia aesthetic‖ and, consequently, it
serves as ―a kind of prehistory to contemporary digital media.‖
221
Not

219
While my discussion will focus on the expressive as it plays out through
the inter-relations between thumbnails and across their streams, it seems to
me that the discussion might also be addressed in terms of the
computational aesthetic of metadata (the information, e.g., time/date
stamp, location coordinates, etc., encoded to a thumbnail at the moment of
imaging). Unfortunately, I am unable to pursue this line of thought here.
220
Tara McPherson, ―Beyond Formalism.‖ My thanks to Tara McPherson
for sharing this unpublished manuscript.
221
McPherson ―Beyond Formalism.‖ Even as McPherson emphasizes the
prescience of the Eames‘s work, she is also critical of the latent privileging
of whiteness inhabiting their formalism and, by extension, the formalism
(and technological determinism) embraced by new media theory. For
McPherson, questions of race are essential to thinking about digital media,
for race is always the ―ghost in the machine.‖ In the first half of her paper,
she introduces the lenticular lens as a means to think through the ways in
which technology, in its shaping of vision and knowledge, perpetuates a
racialized logic undergirding socio-cultural existence. The lenticular lens,
as a particular (albeit seemingly innocuous) technology, epitomizes the
partitioned logic at work in electronic culture. Typically used in the
production of 3D images, the lenticular lens grants visibility to two images
(her example: ―a young hoopskirted belle‖ and ―a grinning, portly Mammy‖)
but never in a simultaneous viewing: the two images are always and
necessarily (because of the mechanisms, which are simultaneously the
constraints, of the technological apparatus) bound together in their
separation. But, as McPherson explains, one image is always privileged
over the other. Thus, in their linkage, which is established technologically,
the two images are fixed to positions wherein their possible relational
connection is erased by the very device that instantiates a division—which
114

only did the Eameses engage with computer culture of the 1950s and
1960s, but ―the very form of their investigations into media design
predicts the multimedia forms which so characterize contemporary new
technologies.‖
222
Drawing upon a variety of the Eames‘s productions
(including films, photographs and exhibitions), McPherson enumerates
the characteristic features of their instantiation of a pre-digital
database logic, which arose out of a commitment to ―explor[ing] the
possibilities for meaningful communication despite (or perhaps
because of) what they termed ‗information overload‘.‖
223
Much of
their work pursues ―issues of speed, scale, relation, juxtaposition,
and variation.‖ Repeatedly, they demonstrate that linearity is not
unidirectional, but rather, through techniques of zooming in/out and
speeding up/down (in the case of film), is ―reversible, adjustable,
malleable.‖
224
Likewise, they rupture the stability and unity of the
still image, fracturing it into ―multiple, competing, non-resolve-able
points of view.‖
225
And their cut-and-paste aesthetic, as visible in
practices of repetition, chunking and recombination, showcase the

is racist but covertly so. According to McPherson, this mode of viewing
proceeds according to a ―logic of fragmentation,‖ which, in its distilling the
world into discrete elements, suppresses (ready acknowledgement of)
relation. McPherson points out that both the Civil Rights movement and
the birth of cybernetics coincide historically and, while not causally related,
―both represent a move toward fragmentary knowledges.‖
222
McPherson ―Beyond Formalism.‖ (Emphasis in original.)
223
McPherson ―Beyond Formalism.‖
224
McPherson ―Beyond Formalism.‖
225
McPherson ―Beyond Formalism.‖
115

―flexibility, mutability and malleability of data‖
226
—and the
recombinatory status of the image as discrete datum.
This description of the Eamesian aesthetic of the database
paves the way for beginning to interpret how mobile-imaging
thumbnails register expression. In this context, the streaming of
thumbnails, confined to the schematic view of rows and columns
upon a screen, might better be understood in terms of rhythm and
pacing, their seriality a matter of chunking and counterpoint. To
think the flow of thumbnail images in terms of linearity,
unidirectionality, is to mistake the normalized visual structuration of
a content management system for the expressive tempo of imaging.
It is to miss the pauses and repetitions, it is to overlook the nuances
of a steady or staccato pulsing of imaging or its soft, elongated
murmurings—all of which might communicate something about a
particular experience or a tendency in the way of experiencing. And
while thumbnail images as discrete objects within a string might
provide content to be parsed and rendered legible, it is perhaps more
relevant to think in terms of a dynamics of inflection as modulated
through the immediacy and/or force of attraction. This is to suggest
that the expressive character of a discrete thumbnail image is
perhaps a matter of how attraction is constellated across a stimulus

226
McPherson ―Beyond Formalism.‖
116

or stimuli, the neurobiological phenomenon of attention and a
technological device. In which case, it is necessary to think in terms
of how such constellation produces intensities of various kinds (e.g.,
degrees of attachment, interest, fancy, surprise, distaste, etc.). To
approach the thumbnail image as a one-dimensional representation,
then, reduces the complexity of articulated engagement, diminishing
it to surface details. And while what appears on the surface is
pertinent to assessing thumbnail images, focusing on, for example,
how many times a red object is the subject of imaging potentially
dismisses how red, in its varying shapes and hues, catalyzes affect,
in what ways and at what moments.
If the expressive register of mobile-imaging thumbnails is
articulated through the intensity and tempo of attraction, then (self-
)expression becomes interpretable according to tendencies and degree
of inclination, as observable across a stream of thumbnail images.
Rate and frequency of imaging, typical times and locations for
imaging, kinds of objects/people imaged, quantity of images for any
one (kind of) object/person, typical quality of imaging (amount of
blurring, suggestive of movement of different sorts), etc.: these are
the trappings of the expressive, made visible as patterns (series,
repetitions, combinations, chunkings, juxtapositions) across streams
of mobile-imaging thumbnails. Not to mention, the practice of
117

attaching tags (keywords) to thumbnail images foregrounds patterns
and their variations, as constituted by the recombinatory potential of
thumbnails.
227
Again, the registering of tendencies as persisting and
varying patterns is not narrative in function (although narrative can
be applied retrospectively). Rather, it is informational. And this
distinction becomes significant when considering the nature of
autobiographical practice.

The Measure of Autobiographical Intensities: Autobiometrical
Accountings of the Self
What becomes of autobiographical practice in the context of
mobile-imaging, when the autobiographical impulse supplants
autobiographical intent as the motivating force propelling the act of
self-documentation? When intensities—that is, ebbings and flows of
attention, peaks and valleys of interest or attraction—become the
mode of expression driving self-record? When patterns and

227
Tagging is a post-imaging practice (along the lines of but considerably
less deliberative than editing in film and video production), in which a
moblogger (for lack of a better term) organizes digital content according to
an overlapping system of categories. For example, a thumbnail of a red
object—a rounded edge of a tomato, let‘s say—might bear tags, such as
―red,‖ ―food‖ and ―OC [Orange County, CA],‖ thereby classifying it as
belonging to three groups of (like or unlike) thumbnails simultaneously.
This mode of classification is called folksonomy and is often distinguished
from the more classical notion of top-down taxonomy, in which items are
classified according to more rigidly defined and ―officially‖ recognized
categories.
118

variations, tendencies and inclinations, rather than narrative,
characterize the one who participates in a (potentially) ceaseless
accounting of him-/herself? In other words, what happens when the
proliferation of self-record exceeds the –graphy (not to be
misinterpreted simply as writing) underpinning autobiographical
practice? As one possible answer to this series of questions, I
propose the term ―autobiometry‖ and its derivative, ―autobiometrical.‖
That is, I introduce a shift from –graphy to –metry, wherein a writing
(broadly speaking) becomes reconstituted as a measuring of one‘s life,
as the morphemes, auto (self), bios (life) and –metry (measure) imply.
Autobiometry, then, might designate a mode of self-record or
catalogue; or more specifically, an account of one‘s life: mobile-
imaging as an autobiometrical accounting of (and accounting for) the
self in its living. Certainly, as a form of self-documentation, it speaks
(even if tangentially) to more conventional autobiographical
practices—although it‘s not to be confused with these. Moreover, it
emphasizes the metrical propensities proper to an ongoing registering
of sequences, series, and patterns.
In light of its quantitative character, its function as a metrics of
sorts, the term ―autobiometrical‖ also has an affiliation—and
certainly bears a graphical resemblance—to anthropometrics, and
more specifically, anthropometric photography. In fact, I suggest that
119

there is a certain genealogical relation to be considered between
these. As Allan Sekula has addressed in ―The Body and the Archive,‖
the “instrumental potential‖ of the photograph was acknowledged
early on.
228
Its instrumentality derived from ―the imperatives of the
medical and anatomical illustration‖ which sought to identify and
classify pathology and deviance.
229
Interestingly, the appearance of
the ―instrumental potential‖ of photography coincided with the ―birth
of the prison,‖ as Michel Foucault delineates it.
230
In a lengthy
footnote, Sekula recalls Foucault‘s optical metaphor for the prison,
Bentham‘s Panopticon. He explains that given this central metaphor,
it is logical to take photography into account when considering
processes of social regulation during the nineteenth century.

In its
policing capacity, the photograph is an optical-statistical instrument,
which isolates, individuates and makes visible the criminal body, e.g.,
facial features, their measure,
231
become the very demonstration of
criminality. In this way, the criminal photograph functions as an

228
Allan Sekula, ―The Body and the Archive,‖ October 39 (Winter 1986) 3-
64. John Tagg also addresses the correlation between the emergence of
photography and policing practices. John Tagg, ―A Means of Surveillance:
The Photograph as Evidence in Law,‖ The Burden of Representation: Essays
on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993) 66-102.
229
Sekula 7.
230
Sekula 9, footnote 13.
231
Sekula notes that in the mid-1850s, the camera was valued for its
―metrical accuracy‖: ―exact mathematical data could be extracted [from the
photographic image]‖ (17).
120

extension of the jail cell; it operates according to the same panoptic
principle that aims to regulate and contain (so-called) deviant bodies.
Now, the metrics operative in mobile-imaging thumbnails has
nothing to do with standardized physiognomic measures of the head,
face or body in their photographic representation. (Neither are they a
measure of the criminal nor the deviant, for that matter.) Rather, the
type of measure that thumbnail images produce is different. As
mentioned previously, the patterns (series, repetitions, combinations,
chunkings, juxtapositions) identifiable in the streaming of thumbnails
constitute a metrics of sorts, a metrics which makes possible
predictions regarding future tendencies. But also, the metadata
encoded to thumbnail images provide quantifiable measures, such as
date, time and location coordinates, which make a person locatable,
mappable. But this is not new. As Lovink explains, ―Today‘s
‗recordability‘ of situations is such that we are no longer upset that
computers ‗read‘ all our moves and expressions (sound, image, text)
and ‗write‘ them into strings of zeros and ones.‖
232
For decades now,
we have been transposing ourselves into metrical code through our
transactions using computers (e.g., online purchases). (Recall Mark
Poster‘s use of the term ―super-panopticon‖ to draw attention to the
mechanisms of surveillance operating through computerized

232
Lovink ―Nihilist Impulse.‖
121

databases.
233
) For Lovink, blogging fits into a broader trend in which
―all our movements and activities are being monitored and stored,‖
not by abstract authorities but by people themselves.
234
So, too,
mobile-imaging participates in an ongoing project of monitoring (and,

233
Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (1995; Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
1996). In ―Databases as Discourse, or Electronic Interpellations‖ (78-94),
Poster makes an important distinction between the panoptic model, as
described by Foucault, and his related concept of the super-panopticon.
Whereas the panopticon produced an interiorized subjectivity, through a
self-discipline and a self-scrutiny that enacted an always-present threat of
being observed, the super-panopticon disperses subjectivity, through the
subject‘s willingness to make visible as public record his/her private
transactions. Lovink‘s point, as is Poster‘s, is that people have grown
accustomed to this ―visibility.‖
234
In light of the current discussion regarding the metrics of monitoring,
and with an eye to chapter 4‘s discussion of healthfulness as a particular
instantiation of monitoring, it seems relevant to mention that there are a
number of bio-metrical devices, which quantify and evaluate one‘s physical
activity for the purposes of personal health management. Two examples are
of particular interest. First, BiM Active, a service available through Bones
in Motion, Inc. (http://www.bimactive.com/), is a software application,
which turns a GPS-enabled phone into a ―personal fitness monitor.‖ For
$9.99/month, BiM Active software ―records your speed [with audible alerts
for user-designated pace and distance boundaries], distance
[accumulatively according to week, month and year], route [including data
regarding elevation], and calories burned,‖ the results of which can be
downloaded to an online personal journal and shared as a blog. According
to the FAQs, the monitoring of physical activity does not interfere with and
is not impeded by mobile-imaging. In which case, the user can be tracked
along (at least) two data flows simultaneously. Second, BodyMedia, a
company in the business of providing ―continuous body monitoring
solutions‖ in an effort to motivate people ―to improve their overall health by
modifying their eating, exercise, and sleep behaviors,‖ offers wearable body
monitoring devices (http://www.bodymedia.com). Their BodyBugg device is
designed to be worn on the back of the upper arm and ―monitors an
individual's Total Energy Expenditure (TEE),‖ defined as ―the total number
of calories their body burns during the day while exercising, driving a car,
walking the dog, even sleeping.‖ What is notable is the fact that the body
and, subsequently, the possibility for its health are understood in terms of
a ceaseless process of energy expenditure. Ironically, the healthy body is
not a body that rests. I thank Omayra Cruz for alerting me to these two
personal health monitoring companies.
122

by extension, tracking, as I discuss in chapter 4), which serves to
produce and reproduce what Nikolas Rose calls the ―calculable
person.‖
235

In Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood,
Rose defines the ―calculable person‖ as a person ―whose individuality
is no longer ineffable, unique, and beyond knowledge, but can be
known, mapped, calibrated, evaluated, quantified, predicted, and
managed‖ by means of his/her commitment to processes of self-
understanding and self-improvement—both of which can be aligned
with the confessional nature attributable to autobiographical
practice.
236
Such processes involve producing (the) human being as
information. However, producing (the) human being as information
is not a process of abstraction, which is typically the argument (as in
the case of medical imaging, for example) but of stabilization (a
distinct but subtle difference). By committing to practices of self-
understanding and self-improvement, the individual delivers him-
/herself into two dimensions via personal details and history, which
make him-/herself legible, trackable, knowable and, ultimately,
manageable. In other words, through processes of inscription,

235
Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In fact, Nikolas Rose
explains that we live in ―the age of the calculable person‖ (88).
236
Rose, Inventing Ourselves 88. For Rose, processes of self-understanding
and self-improvement belong to the domain of the ―psy discourses,‖
including psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
123

―complexities of actuality‖ are (made) knowable and calculable—and,
subsequently, predictable.
237
As such, the ―intangible, changeable,
apparently free-willed conduct of people [is domesticated] into
manipulable, coded, materialized, mathematized, two-dimensional
traces.‖
238
Ultimately, calculability facilitates the ―government of
subjectivity‖ via the ―management of individual difference,‖ which is
achieved through the metrical transcoding of the person along with
his/her every move.
But calculability, as Rose indicates, simultaneously provides
for the ―calculated supervision and administration of collectivities.‖
239

Essentially, the calculable person is the condition of possibility for
the calculability of the social sphere, and this is even more the case
in the context of the proliferation of mobile-imaging thumbnails,
particularly since such images are not static and do not exist in
isolation. Thumbnail images proliferated via mobile-imaging stream—
and they do so in near real time, since the MMS-ing of thumbnail
images is quite nearly simultaneous with imaging.
240
This is their

237
Rose, Inventing Ourselves 106.
238
Rose, Inventing Ourselves 112.
239
Rose, Inventing Ourselves 112 and 91 (respectively).
240
In the case of my Motorola SLVR, MMS-ing a thumbnail image to a
moblog or friend involves selecting ―Store,‖ ―Send in Message‖ (which is the
very first option), ―Send To,‖ the name of a recipient and ―Send.‖ And while
the process is neither automatic nor immediate, it is quite efficient and,
therefore, quite timely, taking only seconds to complete the procedure. The
Garage Cinema Research Group (http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/) has
124

first instance of circulation. But also, they circulate according to a
logic of social networking: they are uploaded to computers and
personal webpages, they are MMS-ed and emailed to friends and
family, they are posted to moblogs/blogs as well as to personal
photo-sharing community site pages and MySpace pages—where they
can be accessed by others worldwide. And this streaming and,
subsequent, circulation can be tracked. That is, the streaming and
circulation of mobile-imaging thumbnails is subject to monitoring on
a systemic and systematic scale (by governments, corporations, news
organizations, site managers, etc.—which are, in fact, responsible for
the infrastructure and technologies that makes streaming and
circulation possible). Thus, not only do mobile-imaging thumbnails
provide information about—or, better yet, an accounting of—the
individual person, they do so within and in relation to a larger social
networking of people.
Perhaps, then, any autobiometrical accounting, such as that
motivated by the autobiographical impulse in mobile-imaging, is
always, to some degree, demometrical or sociometrical (and vice
versa). In which case, one might assert, yet again, the certain

recently piloted a mobile media sharing application (for the Nokia 7610),
which streamlines this process even more by providing a list of potential
recipients at the moment of capture (at the selection of ―Share,‖ instead of
―Store‖). The list is based upon Bluetooth-sensed co-presence and sharing
history.
125

demise, or impossibility, of autobiography. And yet, what is crucial to
acknowledge, and that which Bruss never addresses in ―Eye for I,‖ is
the very social character of the autobiographical pact itself: that the
guarantee of the unity of author, narrator and protagonist in
autobiographical writing is promised to someone, i.e., a reader (even
if that reader is the authoring subject him-/herself). Jacques Derrida
made this point about the sociality of autobiography clear by
replacing auto- with oto-: ―otobiography.‖
241
In The Ear of the Other:
Otobiography, Transference, Translation, Derrida asserts, ―it is the ear
of the other that signs. The ear of the other says me to me and
constitutes the autos of my autobiography.‖
242
Hence, it is the case
that autobiography cannot be separated from otobiography, insofar
as the autos- achieves its affirmation and, therefore, its
consummation in the otos-: autobiography necessarily requires an
other to receive—to hear and confirm—the life that is/was/will have
been written or recorded, i.e., taken into account and accounted for.
Ultimately, the life that one lives and tells him-/herself, one‘s
autobiography, does not belong to that one, except as ―the effect of a
secret contract, a credit account which has been both opened and

241
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference,
Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf, French ed. Claude
Levesque and Christie McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1988).
242
Derrida, Ear of the Other 51.
126

encrypted, an indebtedness, an alliance or annulus,‖ which can only
be honored by an other.
243
In the context of Web 2.0 architectures,
rankings, trackbacks, blogrolls and comment fields—the various
networking transactions constitutive of the blogosphere (broadly
speaking) and operable at various online sites, including those which
host streams of mobile-imaging thumbnails—are all modes of
crediting accounts, of giving life to sundried autobiometrical
accountings, which, dispersed through proliferating thumbnail
images, express the autobiographical intensities of living.

243
Derrida, Ear of the Other 9. Interestingly, this means that the bearer of
the name, s/he who is the autobiographer, is a supplement, a surplus
value—s/he who is in excess of the name that s/he signs. In which case, it
is perhaps possible to assert that life and its living, that is, the fact of its
vitality as accounted for via the streaming of thumbnail images—and not
subjectivity—is what counts, is accounted for and recounted in
autobiography.
127

CHAPTER 3: THE BIO-LOGICS OF THUMBNAILS: A BIOMEDIAL INTERVENTION
(HYPOTHESIS)

―Thumb-nail, n.‖:
In June 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary (online) included a
―draft addition‖ to its entry on ―thumb-nail, n.‖ It reads: ―A
miniaturized version of a document or part of a document;
(Computing) a small version of a digital image, freq. acting as a
hyperlink to a larger version.‖
244
Listed before this newly added
definition are two other definitions of note: ―1. The nail of the thumb.‖
and ―2. transf. A drawing or sketch of the size of the thumb-nail;
hence fig. a brief word-picture.‖
245
While the recently added
definition is certainly a warranted update, it still falls short of being
adequately current, particularly in light of the fact that handheld
mobile-imaging devices such as camera phones produce digital
images, which might likewise be called thumbnails, since their actual
(and original) size is nearly that of a thumbnail.
246
A thumbnail, in
this case, then, is not a miniaturized version; rather, it is almost ―of

244
OED Online (1989; Clarendon: Oxford University Press, March 2000),
http://www.oed.com/.
245
There is a third definition, for a compound word deriving from
―thumbnail,‖ but it is a term not relevant to the present discussion, so I do
not include it here. See: OED Online at http://www.oed.com/.
246
For example, in MMS mode, the Motorola SLVR produces thumbnail
images with resolution of 160X120 pixels (or, approximately 1½ in. X 1in.).
128

the size of a thumb-nail‖ (emphasis mine). I assert this qualification
in order to establish an initial equivalency between the thumbnail of
the thumb and the thumbnail image, whereby the latter is
approximately the size of the former. In which case, I am, in fact,
asserting an equivalence between the biological (a biological artifact)
and the technological (a digital artifact)—and by extension, a
corollary equivalence between the body and data.
But I am also introducing a provocation, which materializes
precisely because of the ontological ambiguity implicit in the
homonymic ―thumbnail.‖ The provocation is this: in asserting an
equivalence between the biological thumbnail and the mobile-imaging
thumbnail, I am not simply introducing an analogy. In fact, I argue
that we are not dealing with an analogy at all.
247
Instead, I am
claiming the existence of a ―mutually compensating [relation]‖ (from
―equivalent,‖ in OED
248
) between thumbnails, which transpires across

247
Analogy presumes a state of comparison existing between two otherwise
distinct entities. The comparison is premised on some similarity, which
allows for a corresponding act of substitution (metaphor) or displacement
(metonymy). But in speaking of an equivalence which might be possible
between biological and digital thumbnails, I am not proposing any
substitution whatsoever. In fact, I am interested in the impossibility of
substitution; the impossibility that the biological might replace or stand-in
for the digital (and vice versa). Rather, I am interested in arguing for the
necessity of both the biological and the digital—as complementary
processes, whose complementarity is made possible through an equivalence
which establishes a reciprocity between the two.
248
The OED offers several definitions for ―equivalent,‖ some of which
include the following: ―of things regarded as mutually compensating each
129

material substrates—a crossing of biological and digital. Such a
crossing is possible if we consider thumbnails to be bio-logical. My
use of ―bio-logical‖ is a direct citation and derivation of new media
theorist Eugene Thacker‘s term ―bio-logic,‖ which refers to the
―essential data‖ that ―inhere[s] in any organization of matter, any
relationship of matter and form.‖
249
Data,
250
here, is distinct from

other, or as exchangeable‖; ―Having equal or corresponding import,
meaning, or significance‖; ―That is virtually the same thing; identical in
effect‖; in biology, ―said of analogous or homologous structures.‖ See: OED
Online at http://www.oed.com/.
249
Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004) 16. In Biomedia, Thacker is concerned with the seeming (and
potentially widening) disconnect between assumptions motivating political,
ethical, policy, and research decisions regarding biotechnological endeavor
and notions of life, body and what it means to have a body. He points to
the fact that questions about whether/not certain biotech projects should
be allowed never meet up with, confront or contend with how such projects
necessarily influence how we think about biological life. In response to the
obvious problematics of this situation, Thacker argues that political
questions regarding biotechnology are necessarily philosophical and
technical. However, he also acknowledges a certain complexity in this
regard: that biotechnology involves the intersection of two disciplines,
molecular biology and computer science, each of which hold particular
views of the body. Ultimately, his various case studies (of bioinformatics,
biocomputing, MEMS research, nanomedicine and systems biology) are an
attempt to address philosophical and technical questions concerning the
―body, biological life and the body-technology boundary‖ (Biomedia 29).
I find Thacker‘s theorization of biomedia a compelling means of
attending to the philosophical and technical implications of biotechnological
enterprise, although the term is limited for what I pursue here, insofar as it
is specific to the biotech context. I want to problematize the specificity of
his use of the term (although I do not want to dismiss the specificity of its
original conceptualization). In light of the fact that biotechnology
reconstitutes the body as such, it seems possible to argue that any relation
we have with technologies might also be understood differently. That a
person‘s engagement with a technological device, such as mobile screenic
device, merely extends the body into prosthetic relation seems
anachronistic. In fact, Thacker actually suggests something of this sort in
his critique of ―the remediated body‖ (Biomedia 10) as postulated by Bolter
130

both matter and form, even as it is constitutive of both. As Thacker
explains, it is ―a quantifiable iteration, a persistence in spatialized
rhythm, a pattern of relationships—anything consistently peculiar
within the matter-form complex that is amenable to quantification
(bits, bytes, and data as objects).‖
251
Data, in the way that Thacker
defines and employs the term, affords processes of mediation and
intermediality, precisely because quantification (of that which is most
fundamental to a particular matter-form complex) allows for
correspondences across material substrates. In this way, data is a
third or, better yet, middle term which speaks to the substantial
(emphasis on substance, here) difference between matter and form, at
the same time that it mitigates this difference through its
materializations as and mobilizations of ―patterns of relations‖ across

and Grusin, who presume an ontological distinction between body and
technology. Bolter and Grusin, and the various theorists they cite,
understand technology as always external to the body, which means that it
is only ever applied to the body. In his corrective, Thacker proposes that we
ought to approach the body as a medium, as the biosciences do. According
to Thacker, to approach the body as medium (and not as remediated)
requires that we ―consider the components of the body, along with their
range of uses (that is, the relationships between components that constitute
the body‘s range of activity)‖ (Biomedia 10). That is, we must consider the
ways in which the body as such gives rise to its own techniques and
technicity, to its own possibilities for extension and remediation.
Ultimately, Thacker explains that the body‘s ―quality of being a medium
comes first and foremost from its internal organization and functioning‖
(Biomedia 10). What I argue here about an equivalence between biological
and mobile-imaging thumbnails is in conversation with this line of thinking.
250
While ―data‖ is plural in number, I use the singular form of the verb
here, since I am discussing data broadly speaking, i.e., as a concept, and
not any data in particular.
251
Thacker, Biomedia 17. (My emphasis.)
131

matter and form.
252
Thus: an instantiation of a mutually
compensating relation. But a mutually compensating relation is not
convergence, if such term means a blending or blurring of, e.g.,
biological and digital; nor is it a conversion, e.g., of biological into
digital (or vice versa). In other words, I am not positing any sort of
conflation of biological thumbnails and mobile-imaging thumbnails.
Rather, in proposing a mutually compensating relation, I intend to
acknowledge a complementarity, made possible by the very fact of
―patterns of relations‖—a complementarity which allows for a co-
existence of, i.e., an existence in-relation between, biological and
digital, between body and technology.
253

252
Here, I want to emphasize that it is not the case that a pattern is
necessarily a logic or that it is logical, but rather that ―patterns of relations‖
establish the existence of a fundamental principle particular to a substrate.
A fundamental principle specifies an originating tendency inherent to a
substrate, which, when isolated (through quantification and abstraction, as
Thacker explains), provides the conditions necessary for establishing an
equivalency with another substrate, regardless of medium. A bio-logic,
Thacker proposes, is just such a principle. Not unimportantly, the word,
―bio-logic,‖ retains something of both matter (bio) and form (logic), which
seems suggestive of the mutually compensating relation which makes
possible medial crossing and, yet, does not collapse medial specificities.
Several of Thacker‘s neologistic turns of words operate in similar fashion,
for example, ―in-formation‖ and ―biomedia.‖
253
It is helpful to consider that ―compensate‖ etymologically unites ―to
weigh‖ and ―together.‖ One way to interpret this weighing together is in
terms of a counterbalancing, wherein the ―compensation‖ to be enacted
occurs in the co-existence—the being ―together‖—of the two (or more)
entities to be ―weighed.‖ That is, the notion of compensation underpinning
the ―mutually compensating relation‖ I propose is complementary; both
domains, the biological and the digital, become necessary to the vitality of
the living organism.
132

I contend that thumbnails, be they bodily or mobile-imaging
thumbnails, are comprised of patterns of relationships—a distinct
bio-logic in each instance—which enable a mutually compensating
relation and, by extension, provide the condition of possibility for
inter-medial crossing.
254
Furthermore, this mutually compensating
relation, this substantial equivalence (which is neither sameness nor
identity), enables a recoding, a rematerialization of the body. In other
words, in the process of such inter-medial crossing, as I argue in this
chapter, the biological body becomes more than biological, it becomes
bio-logical—more fully an articulation of patterns of relations,
biological and digital. To speak of thumbnails, then, is to move
beyond the domain of analogy. It is to speak of a particular modality
of life itself, in which the bio-logics of thumbnails reveal processes of
formation and in-formation at work in and in combination across
biology and digital technologies. As such, the thumbnail, as a theory
object, becomes the site of a biomedial intervention, through which
the coincidence of body (its patterns of relations) and data (also
patterns of relations) can be asserted and a notion of vitalities can be
proposed.

254
We might have anticipated such crossing given the denotative crossing
that occurs at the site of definition 2 in the OED, wherein the nail of the
thumb and the digital image cross into each other by means of a qualifying
phrase: ―of the size of the thumbnail.‖
133

Thumbnails, digital:
Certainly, mobile-imaging thumbnails are compelling visual
artifacts.
255
And yet, while I find this to be the case, it seems to me
that what is most telling about them is not their status as visual
objects. That is, neither what the thumbnail image represents nor the
fact of its being an index of a particular mode of visuality is what
counts ultimately. In fact, I argue that the visual is excessive or
extraneous. What does count is the information encoded to mobile-
imaging thumbnails at the moment of (and after) imaging. What
matters is their metadata. In which case, the thumbnail itself is
merely a vehicle for the conveyance of encoded information.
Metadata are, literally, ―data about data.‖
256
Originating in
relation to libraries and library sciences, metadata provide the means
by which to organize and manage holdings, so as to enhance access
to information objects. As pertains to digital imaging, the term refers
to any information ―surrounding‖ an image, and which is attached to
the image. According to information technology researcher Risto
Sarvas, metadata are comprised of a ―standardized set of classified
information and rules of conduct [for determining how information

255
I speak to this in chapter 1.
256
Murtha Baca, ed., Introduction to Metadata: Pathways to Digital
Information (USA: Getty Information Institute, 1998) 1.
134

behave].‖
257
Its highly structured ontology
258
is comprised of
―facetted‖ hierarchies, which govern how information is organized in
relation to other information. Metadata are automatically (and can
be manually) appended to a thumbnail. Most current digital cameras
and camera phones store EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format)
metadata in an image file. Important to emphasize, here, is that
such encoding of information occurs at the time of capture—that is,
when the finger (or thumb, in the case of many camera phone
models) depresses the shutter button. In which case, we are dealing
with indexicality, an imprint, of another order: an imprint which
indexes an instant of an articulation of relations. Constitutive of this
instant and, therefore, included as EXIF metadata is technical
information about the photo capture, such as camera make and
model, date and time of capture, width and height of the image in
pixels, whether the flash was used, focal length used, exposure time,
aperture value, and metering mode.
259

But camera phones are also communications devices.
Therefore, they have access to contextual and social information, as

257
Risto Sarvas, Designing User-Centric Metadata for Digital Snapshot
Photography [Dissertation] (Espoo, Finland: Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology, 2006) 43, 3
Jan 2007
http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2006/isbn9512284448/isbn9512284448.pdf.
258
―Ontology‖ is a technical term here, not a philosophical one—although I
do play upon the ambiguity.
259
Sarvas 41.
135

well as network resources, which provide for different metadata.
Referencing the Merkitys-Meaning mobile phone application as an
example, Sarvas explains that camera phones can encode
information such as location information (including GPS coordinates,
if available, GSM cell information from network towers, as well as the
names of country and city). Additionally, they can encode
information regarding the Bluetooth environment, events from the
phone‘s calendar, as well as tags and descriptions added by the
camera phone user.
260
And increasingly, metadata are considered to
be integrally related to sharing. In fact, Garage Cinema Research at
UC Berkeley (in collaboration with Yahoo! Research) has recently
conducted studies in which this mutually reinforcing relation
between metadata and sharing has been explored.
261
Their Mobile
Media Metadata 2 application (compatible with Nokia 7610) uses
―metadata to support sharing (by automatically suggesting share
recipients based on sharing frequency and Bluetooth-sensed co-
presence.‖
262

260
Sarvas 44.
261
The Garage Cinema Research website is accessible at
http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/pub.cfm.
262
Marc Davis, Nancy Van House, Jeffrey Towle, Simon King, Shane Ahern,
Carrie Burgener, Dan Perkel, Megan Finn, Vijay Viswanathan and Matthew
Rothenberg, ―MM2: Mobile Media Metadata for Media Sharing,‖ CHI 2005,
April 2-7, 2005, Portland Oregon, USA, 13 April 2007
http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/pub.cfm.
136

As a structure—an ontology—of information, these metadata
comprise logic of the thumbnail image. That is, to the extent that
metadata manifest a structuring of information—an articulation of
facets, hierarchies, and inter-relations, metadata register distinct
―patterns of relationships.‖ And, here, I want to complicate what
constitutes the logic of the mobile-imaging thumbnail by referring to
the fact that in the not too distant future, mobile-imaging thumbnails
are likely to be encoded with metadata for environmental factors
(temperature and barometric pressure) and biological data (body
temperature, heart beat and pulse).
263
Of course, it‘s the latter detail
that I am most interested in: the inclusion of the body‘s vital signs.
In fact, devices like MicroSoft‘s SenseCam are suggestive of the types
of information to be borne by mobile-imaging thumbnails. In
particular, research designers for the SenseCam are exploring how to
record ―heart rate, galvonic skin response and other physiological
data‖ with the use of external recording devices.
264
Not to mention, e-

263
These issues were raised in a break-out session addressing metadata for
the PICS (Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing) workshop at Ubicomp
2005 in Tokyo. See session notes at
http://www.spasojevic.org/pics/session_3.htm.
264
Microsoft Research, ―Sensors and Devices,‖ ―Current Projects—
Sensecam,‖ 13 April 2007
http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/projects/sensecam/. ―A Digital
Life,‖ an article in the March 2007 issue of Scientific American, features
MyLifeBits, another Microsoft Research project, which aims ―to digitally
chronicle every aspect of a person‘s life‖ (Microsoft Research 58). The
project incorporates the SenseCam as a means of ―[obtaining] a visual
137

nutritional services, which offer health guidance based upon
thumbnails, are looking at ways to incorporate glucose and other
biological/physiological measures into camera phone applications.
What we have, then, is a ―bio-logic,‖ in which a computational
ontology is likely to be interlaced with the biological, such that
categories of statistical information regarding the status of mobile-
imaging device, the imaging context and its environmental conditions
will potentially be articulated with inscriptions of the body‘s vital
signs. In which case, the registering of a body‘s vital signs (might
always) coincide(s) with, be coterminous with the transmitting of its
vital signals.

record of his [Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell] day‖ (Microsoft Research
63). But what is worth noting is the attention to and interest in the
possibility of incorporating sensors as a means of increasing the capacity of
―digital memories,‖ particularly as pertains the body and its physiological
status. According to the article, ―Portable sensors can take readings of
things that are not even perceived by humans, such as oxygen levels in the
blood or the amount of carbon dioxide in the air‖ (Microsoft Research 58).
Additionally, they can ―log the three billion or so heartbeats in a person‘s
lifetime, along with other physiological indicators, and warn of possible
heart attack‖ (Microsoft Research 58). In particular, the article refers to the
SenseWear armband, which ―can calculate the number of calories burned
by measuring the skin‘s temperature, heat loss and impedance of electric
current‖ (Microsoft Research 65). Ultimately, such monitors, in ―constantly
record[ing] and archive[ing] an individual‘s vital signs,‖ can provide ―a
detailed, ongoing health record‖ useful to physicians (Microsoft Research 65
and 58, respectively). Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, ―A Digital Life,‖
Scientific American (March 2007) 58-65.
138

Thumbnails, biological:
But, here, I want to return to the ―thumbnail, [the] n[oun]‖ with
which I began, to reiterate the definition listed first: ―1. The nail of the
thumb.‖ Such thumbnails, too, are repositories for encoded data—
genetic data. Specifically, fingernails—but thumbnails, too
265
—are
considered a valid and effective source of DNA content; they provide
sufficient genetic material for purposes of analysis, including
enzymatic amplification (in which multiple copies of specified strands
of DNA are produced), genotyping and individual identification.
According to biomedical researchers, Toshihiko Kaneshige, et.al.,
DNA extracted from fingernails can produce higher amplification than
blood cells—and smaller samples are required.
266
(Not to mention,
DNA samples are more easily acquired from fingernails than from
blood, and they are fairly easily preserved. Plus, there is the
possibility of re-extraction of additional DNA from original fingernail
samples.
267
) In cases of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (for

265
One study explicitly specifies thumbnails as a source for DNA content.
Akinori Nakanishi, Fumio Moriya and Yoshiaki Hashimoto, ―Effects of
Environmental Conditions to which Nails Are Exposed on DNA Analysis of
Them‖ [abstract], Legal Medicine Vol. 5, Suppl. 1 (March 2003) S194-S197,
6 January 2007 http://www.sciencedirect.com.
266
Based on the studies I have read thus far (and which are cited in
footnotes), anywhere from 10mg to 30mg of fingernail clippings have been
used for DNA extraction.
267
In addition to Nakanishi, et. al., see: Lenka Krsková-Honzátková and
Zuzana Sieglová, ―Fingernail DNA: A Suitable Source of Constitutional DNA
in Leukemia,‖ Laboratory Hematology 6 (2000) 145-146.
139

treatment of leukemias, severe aplastic anemias, lymphomas,
immunodeficiencies, and genetic disorders of hemopoiesis),
fingernails provide needed constitutional (original) DNA, which allows
for early detection of disease relapse and graft rejection.
268
And
because fingernails demonstrate DNA constancy despite
environmental conditions, they are suitable for purposes of forensic
identification. In fact, DNA ―entrapped‖ in the keratin matrix shows
resiliency, despite post-mortem decomposition and periods of
underwater exposure.
269

To the extent that biological thumbnails are considered bearers
of genetic information, conveyors of bits of code, they are understood
atomistically.
270
That is, they are conceived in terms of parts in

268
S. Uchida, L. Wang, Y. Yahagi, K. Tokunaga, K. Tadokoro, T. Juji, ―Utility
of Fingernail DNA for Evaluation of Chimerism After Bone Marrow
Transplantation and for Diagnostic Testing for Transfusion-Associated
Graft-Versus-Host Disease,‖ Blood: Journal of the American Society of
Hematology 87.9 (1996) 4015-4016.
269
Charles Brenner, ―DNA from fingernails,‖ Tsunami Victims Identification
Consideration, 8 January-8 September 2005, 6 January 2007 http://dna-
view.com/tsunami.htm.
270
Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin notes that this atomistic view is
simultaneously mechanistic. He argues that our atomistic approach to
living things is a vestige of an analytic tradition that modern science has
pursued since the 17
th
century. It embraces a Cartesian mechanistic
interpretation—―clock model‖ view—of the world, in which organisms (and
Lewontin notes the analogy between ―organism‖ and the musical
instrument, the organ) can be reduced to their constituent and separate
parts. Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and
Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
This has been the tendency in genetic thinking since its inception,
with the invention* of the gene and, more particularly, the identification of
the DNA sequence. What is privileged in this sort of thinking is what might
140

relation to a whole. What is important about this schema is that it
reveals an architecture—or, as science historian Lily E. Kay
describes, ―a table of correlations‖
271
—which defines both structure

be called stable relations between parts, which are isolatable, i.e.,
extractable from their contexts. These parts and relations between parts
are then viewed causally as comprising a whole—the individual organism:
DNA makes RNA, which makes proteins, which make us. (Of course, the
sequencing of the human genome in April 2003 has revealed that the
human being is not a merely a product of its genetic parts.)
This is not to say, however, that such a view has been without
benefit. After all, efforts to determine the particularities of sequences of
base-pairs (and repetitions thereof), which have made DNA profiling
possible, as well as efforts to isolate certain markers within sequences,
which code for certain diseases or mutations, have influenced the lives of
many. Yet while this work, predominately the domain of molecular
genetics, has been impactful, it has likewise been reductive. In reducing
the organism to its component parts, it refuses—or, at the very least,
overlooks—the dynamism critical to understanding living systems. Of
course, a question emerges: am I not doing the same here? Yes, to be sure.
But in the broader scope of my project, I endeavor to resolve this tension by
considering inter-relations among various bio-processes, or what I call
vitalities. For me, biological and digital thumbnails are sign(al)s of such
vital processes. However, in order to consider them in relation, I have
found it necessary to establish their equivalence by means of establishing
the bio-logic of each.
*I use ―invention‖ as a means of alluding to the gene‘s rather mythic
beginnings—since it was an idea before it was a thing. The word, coined in
1909 by Wilhelm Johannsen, accounted for the assumption that there had
to be an inherently stable, immortal unit as an actual, structural entity of
biology. This assumption was based on an analogy at work across the
disciplines of biology, physics and chemistry: that of a fundamental unit of
explanation (gene, atom, molecule), which, through its own fixity (or the
fixity of its collective composition with other units), provided for
intergenerational stability. It wasn‘t until 1953 that James D. Watson and
Francis Crick announced that genes are real molecules and constituted of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
271
Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 3.
141

and function in an organism.
272
In other words, what is made visible
are patterns of relations, which function as the fundamental
principles governing life itself. In the most basic instance, DNA is
considered a sequence of nitrogenous bases—adenine (A), guanine
(G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). These bases combine with both a
phosphate and a sugar to form neucleotides, which, in turn, provide
the scaffolding for the double helical structure of the DNA molecule.
Additionally, this scaffolding abides by particular relations: repeating
sugar-phosphate groups comprising the ―sides‖ and horizontal
hydrogen bonds of adenine with thymine and cytosine with guanine
forming the ―steps.‖
What‘s more, the transactions responsible for biological
processes such as protein synthesis are facilitated by another highly
orchestrated series of patterns of relations. For example, the base-

272
It is important to note that structure and function are distinct from
processes of dynamic inter-relation, which include selective cellular
regeneration, biochemical metabolism, morphogenesis or embryological
development. Systems biology provides a corrective to traditional
approaches to biological phenomena. According to Eugene Thacker,
systems biology approaches biological phenomena in ―a nonlinear,
polydimensional manner‖ (Biomedia 158). It emphasizes relations
(biological pathways, metabolic networks) not things (individual genes),
perturbations rather than mechanisms, and patterns (systems-wide
behavior) instead of ―the differentiating process of identification‖ (see
Biomedia 155-156). It accomplishes this, in part, by ―versioning‖ its
systems, such that several versions of a system are run (each according to
its particular perturbations) ―in parallel.‖ This produces integrated data,
such that ―an overall picture of a [polydimensional] phenomenon‖
emerges—as opposed to a snapshot of a singular mechanism or component
(Biomedia 157).
142

pairs (A-T and C-G) of the DNA strand, when copied to mRNA by
transcribing enzymes, are paired to complementary neucleotides—
guanine (G) pairing with cytosine (C), cytosine (C) with guanine (G),
thymine (T) with adenine (A), and adenine(A) pairing with uracil (U).
Then during translation, the sequence of tripleted bases (codons) of
mRNA are bound to complexes of amino acids linked to tRNA to form
a polypeptide chain. Likewise, restriction enzyme behavior,
important for study of cellular defense against viruses in bacteria but
also used in the manufacture of recombinant DNA for biomedical
purposes, proceeds according to rules defined in terms of patterns of
relations. Such is the case with EcoRI endoneuclease, which
searches a strand of DNA for a predetermined sequence of bases
(GAATTC) and splices the DNA molecule at the designated site of the
sequence (at guanine, in the instance of EcoRI).
273

What is important, here, is the very fact of these patterns of
relations. In other words, base-pair complementarity, codon-amino
acid relationships, and restriction enzyme splicing are revealing, not
just for what they contribute to life (and our capacity to know about
life), but for the fact that they constitute a bio-logic. Certainly, a bio-
logic might be understood to be a diagram of sorts. More to the

273
EcoRI identifies the endonuclease as coming from the first enzyme
isolated on the RY13 strain of the Escherichia coli bacterium.
143

point, however: a bio-logic is a fundamental and essential principle
inhering in biological phenomena and materialized in and through
biological processes. A bio-logic is constitutive of life in formation; it
in-forms the organism. In other words, even as a bio-logic, of
thumbnails in this case, allows us to produce information about life,
it is always at the same time a matter of life in its forming. But I am
interested in this process of being in-formation as it transpires across
biological and digital registers of living. It seems to me that
thumbnails—biological thumbnails and mobile-imaging thumbnails—
invite such consideration.

Biomedial Intervention:
A simple and straightforward means of positing a relation
between biological and digital thumbnails would be to approach them
forensically, emphasizing the fact that the mobile-imaging thumbnail
as an index is a ―fingerprint‖ of sorts and that DNA profiling of bodily
traces, such as biological thumbnails, is also known as ―DNA
fingerprinting.‖ Both ―fingerprint‖ and its derivative ―fingerprinting‖
suggest the evidentiary status—a having-been [there]—attributable to
thumbnails. However, such a forensic framing runs the risk of
establishing the relation between biological and digital thumbnails
through and as analogy, a move which is really a squaring of the
144

distance between the two kinds of thumbnails. The digital
thumbnail‘s indexicality proceeding ―after the fashion of a fingerprint,‖
to cite Bazin,
274
becomes analogous to biological thumbnails, which
can be understood as being fundamentally and essentially unique
because, like fingerprints proper, no two DNA fingerprints are
alike.
275
But: this equation requires that two orders of analogy be
mobilized so as to arrive at equivalence. That is, it requires that each
type of thumbnail be like a fingerprint in order for them to be like
each other. This analogy forgets what is most essential to biological
and digital thumbnails alike: the bio-logic which inheres in and,
consequently, in-forms each—and which makes it possible to
establish a substantial equivalence, a mutually compensating
relation (at which point a forensics is possible without the
intervention of analogy).
To take the bio-logic of each the biological and the digital
thumbnail as the point of departure for asserting an equivalence

274
Again, in the case of mobile-imaging, it is not the pictured object, whose
―touch‖ is materialized via chemical processes on the photographic medium,
which becomes like a ―fingerprint,‖ but rather the process of imaging. Of
course, the fact that imaging is activated by a camera phone user
depressing the shutter button—often in reach of the thumb—is convenient
to the analogy. My appreciation to Akira Lippit for returning me to Bazin;
and to James Leo Cahill for reminding me to do so.
275
―DNA fingerprinting‖ emerged as an acceptable substitute for ―DNA
profiling‖ ―because of its powerful ability to discriminate between unrelated
individuals.‖ ―DNA fingerprinting‖ DNA.gov: Glossary, 18 May 2007
www.dna.gov.
145

between the two is to approach thumbnails biomedially. In proposing
a biomedial approach, I borrow, once again, from Eugene Thacker,
who introduces the term ―biomedia‖ as a means of asserting a
―fundamental equivalency‖ between biological and digital domains
specifically as pertains to biotechnological research and practice.
276

For him, biomedia are instances wherein no opposition between the
technical and the biological exists. What happens in the case of
biomedia is that there is a shift away from investments in discrete,

276
In Biomedia, Thacker draws attention to a ―twofold dynamic‖ (5)
emerging out of biotech‘s intersection of molecular biology and computer
science, in which, on the one hand, biology is computational and, on the
other hand, computation is biological. Thacker uses two examples to clarify
this: bioinformatics (or computational biology), in which DNA as
digital/code is fully computational, its processes generated on computer, is,
in a sense, the inverse of biocomputing (or biological computing), in which
DNA as fully biological performs computationally in a test tube. He
explains that in bioinformatics computer technology ―models‖ biology,
whereas in biocomputing biological DNA is ―repurposed as a computer in its
own right‖ (Biomedia 4). What‘s more, the output of bioinformatics is
biological, i.e., the point of reference of bioinformatics is always the
biological cell, DNA molecule, various proteins in the body, etc., while that
of biocomputing is computational (despite its medium), insofar as it fulfills
the principles of having, or putting into motion a storage device, a read
program and a write program. Importantly, this ―twofold dynamic‖—
mobilized through the inverted relation of bioinformatics and
biocomputing—opens onto a single assumption: ―that there exists some
fundamental equivalency between genetic ‗codes‘ and computer ‗codes,‘ or
between the biological and digital domains, such that they can be rendered
interchangeable in terms of materials and functions‖ (5, my emphasis). In
either case, Thacker explains that the emphasis of the procedure, the task,
or the project is ―less on ‗technology‘ as a tool, and more on the technical
reconditioning of the „biological‟‖ (Biomedia 5, my emphasis). It is this
integrally reciprocal relation between technology and biology, in which the
biological is never distinguishable from the technological, and the
technological always inheres in the biological, that underpins Thacker‘s
notion of biomedia and, by extension, my interest in pursuing a biomedial
intervention at the site of the thumbnail. See: Thacker, Biomedia; in
particular, chapter 1, ―What is Biomedia?‖
146

instrumentalizing boundaries (and binaries) between technology and
the body, informatics and biology, artificial and natural. There is no
juxtaposition of components, e.g., human and machine. For
Thacker,
Biomedia are particular mediations of the body, optimizations
of the biological in which ―technology‖ appears to disappear
altogether. With biomedia, the biological body is not hybridized
with the machine, as in the use of mechanical prosthetics or
artificial organs. Nor is it supplanted by the machine, as in the
many science-fictional fantasies of ―uploading‖ the mind into
the disembodied space of the computer.
277

Instead, ―biomedia‖ open onto a situation in which technology
intervenes in biology without making that biology (in particular, the
body) any less biological. Quite the contrary, in fact, as Thacker
indicates: in the case of biomedia, the ―‗bio‘ is transformatively
mediated by the ‗tech,‘ so that the „bio‟ reemerges more fully
biological.‖
278
―More fully,‖ here, means optimized or augmented; that
is, ―more fully‖ enabled to perform biologically. Or put another way,
―biomedia facilitates and establishes conditionalities, enables
operativities, encourages the biological-as-biological.‖
279

But—and this is key—this ―biological-as-biological‖ is always
already technological. Insofar as the biological and technological
inhere in each other, they are rendered indistinguishable, such that

277
Thacker, Biomedia 6.
278
Thacker, Biomedia 6. (My emphasis.)
279
Thacker, Biomedia 7.
147

what is substantively biological and substantively technological, in
turn, become ontologically indistinct: the biological and technological
(or digital) are fundamentally and essentially materializations of
patterns of relations. Thus, by means of their bio-logics, a mutually
compensating relation makes possible a particular type of
organization across material substrates, such that ―the biological
‗informs‘ the digital, just as the digital ‗corporealizes‘ the
biological.‖
280
Take, for example, the case of pharmacogenomics (also
called ―rational drug design‖), in which technology intervenes at the
level of genetic processes to supplement or otherwise mediate certain
biochemical processes.
281
In this situation, a human patient‘s
genome is profiled in order to design a therapy (not a synthetic drug),
a therapy which will integrate itself into the biomolecular body of the
patient over time. It is important to note that this approach does not
involve diagnosing and, then, curing an existing pathology, in which
case technology always remains separate from the body. Rather,
gene therapies follow a logic of prevention, in which the body (the
genome) is assessed and ―reprogrammed‖ (so to speak) such that it

280
Thacker, Biomedia 7.
281
Pharmacogenomics involves bioinformatics, in which genetic material
(DNA) is encoded as informatic code (computerized DNA sequences) where it
is manipulated in order to design novel compounds, which, when
synthesized by the body, recodes the biomolecular body, optimizing it. See:
Thacker, Biomedia; in particular, chapter two, ―Bioinformatics, BLAST,
BioPerl, and the Language of the Body‖ (32-62).
148

biologically produces, e.g., needed antibodies, itself. This means that
there is no body (biological entity) separate from its technological
mediation: the two—biology (genetic code) and technology (computer
code)—coincide and are coterminous at the site and in the instance of
a corporealization. What‘s more: the bio-logic of DNA is never lost; it
is always retained and maintained as essential data. In other words,
the basic biological principles inherent to biological processes remain
and persist across medial forms (genetic code, computer code), even
as they might produce ―a body that is more than biological.‖
282

Now, I am not claiming that thumbnails are biomedia—because
they are not. I am proposing, however, that thumbnails, biological
and digital together, provide the condition of possibility for thinking
biomedially. While biological thumbnails and mobile-imaging
thumbnails are of two substantially different orders materially, each
can be said to be comprised of a bio-logic, which is potentially
generative of a fundamental inter-medial equivalence. In each
instance, the thumbnail can be understood as a site of encoding,
wherein patterns of relationships become the means through which
to establish a mutually compensating relation between the biological
and the digital—body and data. This is not to equate metadata with
genetic information; it is not to claim any sort of identity. But it is to

282
Thacker, Biomedia 22.
149

introduce a different way of thinking (about) the body, its materiality
and its medial relations—a way of thinking which is ultimately
attuned to how biopolitical strategies, mechanisms and techniques
function to secure and maintain life as such.
283
It is to intervene in
assumptions regarding the biological.

Bio-logical Processes:
The point, then, is that thumbnails are evidence that bodies
generate or materialize bio-logical patterns of relationships along
multiple vectors, biological and digital alike. In the process, these
patterns of relationships, these essential data, in combination,
produce categories of information which account for the body.
284
I am
not arguing that thumbnails produce the body as information, as
data. It would be a mistake to interpret the bio-logic inherent in
thumbnails in terms of such dematerialization: the body is not
metrically abstracted (although this is one way to think about it). In
biotechnical terms, the body‘s being ―accounted for through data‖
necessarily (always-already) implies a ―return‖ to the body—albeit, as

283
Biopolitics, in particular the streaming of thumbnails as invested in a
biopolitical project of risk management, is the focus of chapter 4.
284
The notion of ―accounting‖ mentioned here pertains to what I have called
―autobiometrical‖ practice, which I develop in chapter 2.
150

Thacker explains, a biologically ―optimized‖ body.
285
The body, in
other words, is not a ―body‖ in any conventional—that is,
anthropomorphic, anatomical or mechanistic—sense; rather, the
body becomes a site of tension—of contingency—between patterns of
relationships and material substrates.
286
Accompanying this
(possibility and) condition of ―passage‖—or what Thacker also refers
to as ―mobility‖—across code is an assumption that there is an
essential relation between biological life and information, which
necessarily intervenes in notions of biological normativity, health and
medicine (as discourse, body of knowledge, and practice).
The point I am making, in this regard, is that the thumbnail
becomes the site of an integral correlation between the body and
information. The thumbnail is ―body-data,‖ body and data
simultaneously (and reciprocally)—a bio-digital trace of a life in
process. As such, the thumbnail can be considered a biomedial
artifact. In using ―biomedial artifact‖ I mean to acknowledge the

285
Thacker, Biomedia 27-28.
286
Thacker, Biomedia 26. Thacker describes this tension between patterns
of relationships and material substrates as a productive tension, one which
enables the passage between genetic code and computer code, such that
―code comes to account for the body (e.g., genetic profiling), just as the body
is biotechnically enabled through code practices (e.g., genetic drug therapy)‖
(Biomedia 26). In terms of mobile-imaging, this tension materializes in and
through the articulation of biological and digital vitalities—wherein vital
signs (of the body‘s physiological processes) coincide with, are conterminous
with vital signals (as transmitted as a result of the body‘s relation to a
cellular network and any movement within and across its cells).
151

materialization of a mutually compensating relation existing between
biological and digital thumbnails. Again, this is not to confuse
thumbnails, I do not want to conflate their particularities (even as I
rely, in this moment, on the homonymic ambiguity to refer to both
simultaneously). Rather, I am looking for a way to account for the
intricacy and robustness of inter-relation across biological and digital
domains, without disregarding medium/platform specificity. My aim
has been to re-articulate Eugene Thacker‘s appropriately and
compellingly conceptualized notion of biomedia beyond the sphere of
the biotech industry. If, as Thacker argues, biomedial transactions
involve regulating—without dismantling—difference in order that
translations across platforms (from molecules to bits, and vice versa)
be accomplished without transformation or distortion,
287
then I
contend that thumbnails as biomedial artifacts are a way to imagine
an inter-medial complexity of the body. Ultimately, then, I am
arguing that a body‘s virtual vitalities, as exemplified by the
streaming of mobile-imaging thumbnails, are equally material to what
that body is and what it is becoming in its materiality and form, as
are its vital processes, as evidenced in biological thumbnails. But

287
Thacker, Biomedia 44-45. For Thacker, thinking in terms of ―the cross-
platform conservation of specified patterns of relations‖ means that we no
longer render the object abstracted and merely (a function/product of)
representation (44). Working with ―biological data,‖ regardless of its
medium (biological or digital) or material substrate (carbon or silicon), is a
materially-based enterprise.
152

also, I am arguing that a body‘s virtual vitalities are equally material
to how it lives as are its vital processes. Vitality, then, is a matter of
both of these. And the body: the body is not only biological, but
becomes more fully bio-logical. By extension, the body‘s vital
processes are likewise bio-logical, their proliferation across various
domains of living—kinetic, physiological and virtual—reconstitute the
body as a body-in-relation.
288

Perhaps, then, it is appropriate to consider what it means that
a body‘s biological processes are simultaneously bio-logical
processes—or that the two are no longer necessarily and always
distinguishable (despite the necessity of my writing them apart). This
requires being attentive to the fact of hyphenation: that there is a
difference to be made between ―biological‖ and ―bio-logical,‖ at the
same time that the two must be understood as engaged in a mutually
compensating relation such that they become veritably indiscernible.
Certainly, the hyphenated form speaks to biological function as
conventionally understood, i.e., the body‘s nonconscious
physiological functions. Likewise, the word refers to the condition of
being comprised of ―patterns of relationships‖ (as discussed herein).
But it is also worth noting that the hyphenation draws out and into

288
I introduce the body-in-relation at the end of chapter 4 and address it
more fully in the conclusion.
153

view the fact that we are dealing with bio-, that is, life and its living
broadly speaking. And it is this life and its living which are
simultaneously biological and bio-logical, which is to say, in a state of
in-relation. This is life, indeed, the process of living, which is more
than biological because of the very fact of its being in-relation across
its vitalities (a word, which comes to refer to biological and bio-logical
processes alike).
***
A Divergence: About Vitality
Vitality of the living being is the vitality—vital force—of life
itself. More specifically, it is the vital impulsion (élan vital), of which
Henri Bergson writes in Creative Evolution: not simply the ―essence of
life,‖ but ―the impetus of life,‖ an original impulse generative of
evolution.
289
As Bergson describes, life ―is movement,‖ a current
―traversing bodies it has organized one after another, passing from
generation to generation.‖
290
But it is movement, which should not
be conceptualized spatially as movement along an arc or a line,
divisible into so many stable points or steps, e.g., of progress or
development (although this is how we are inclined or predisposed to

289
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; New
York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1998) 251.
290
Bergson, Creative Evolution 249 and 26 (respectively).
154

visualize and conceptualize it).
291
Rather, it is a movement of
undivided flux, of duration, an ongoing ripening of action and
variability—of becoming. It is an impulsion, ―an immensity of
potentiality, a mutual encroachment of thousands and thousands of
tendencies,‖ tendencies which open onto elaboration and change.
Elizabeth Grosz addresses this point in The Nick of Time: Politics,
Evolution, and the Untimely: ―élan vital, vital force or impetus,‖ is the
name Bergson gives to ―this force that generates life always forward,

291
In The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Elizabeth Grosz
explains that Bergson is committed to a Darwinian conception of life, even
as he makes profound modification to Darwinism. She points out that for
Darwin, neither life nor the environment is static and unchanging; rather,
―each is subjected both to inner transformation and to a dynamic
interchange that perpetually modifies them both‖ (Nick of Time 200). It is
this open-ended dynamism of life which Bergson embraces for its
nonteleological orientation. Not surprisingly, then, he opposes the
approaches taken by those in the sciences who follow Darwin, rendering his
work ―more and more precise through more detailed measurement and
quantification‖ (Nick of Time 200). Bergson criticizes a neo-Darwinist
position, which ―considers ontogeny to be the combined result of genetic
mutation and natural selection‖ (Nick of Time 204). His critique, based on
Darwin, is that ―if biological or evolutionary change is broken down into its
units, parts, elements, or stages, what is fundamentally changing about
evolution, its mobility and dynamism, is lost‖ (Nick of Time 204). (Of
course, this recalls his theory of perception, which ―cuts‖ stabilities out of
the flow of duration.) What happens in this instance is that the part is
taken for the process itself. Additionally, to understand evolution in terms
of a step-by-step process (indeed, progression) is to already be thinking
retrospectively—to have missed duration completely. Instead, what needs
to be considered is the ―pattern of relations‖—and not the ―possible
moves‖—which constitute development (see Nick of Time 205-206).
Ultimately, for Bergson, emphasizing intuition over automatism is crucial to
understanding the variation of evolution. As Grosz explains, Bergson
proposes philosophical intuition as pertinent to the task of ―seek[ing] access
to the whole rather than an analysis of the component parts‖ (Nick of Time
209). Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
155

that projects it to ever greater complexity‖; it is ―the capacity for
immense—indeed excessive—development, elaboration, and
complication.‖
292

Key to an understanding of élan vital as a force, and
particularly a creative force, is the verb ―actualize.‖ That is, the
bifurcating lines of life, which are the result of evolution‘s ever
pushing forward, are actualized not realized. Which means: élan vital
is about potentiality (being actualized), not possibility (being realized).
As Gilles Deleuze explains in Bergsonism, élan vital ―is always a case
of a virtuality in the process of being actualized, a simplicity in the
process of differentiating, a totality in the process of dividing up.‖
293

It is a matter of moving ―from a virtual term to the heterogeneous
terms that actualize it along a ramified series.‖
294
But, importantly,
―what coexisted in the virtual [and diverged through actualization]
ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that
cannot be summed up, each one retaining the whole, except from a
certain perspective, from a certain point of view.‖
295
Whereas

292
Grosz, Nick of Time 201 and 200 (respectively).
293
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 94.
294
Deleuze, Bergsonism 100.
295
Deleuze, Bergsonism 101. Grosz explains that for Bergson, life devised
only alternatives, breaking apart initially according to a sedentary form
(plants) and a mobile form (animal). As tendencies, both a becoming-plant
and a becoming-animal ―remain virtual in all living beings and testify to
their common ancestry‖ (Nick of Time 218). Thus, there is still a becoming-
156

realization of possibilities proceeds according to resemblance (which
produces the real in likeness to a possible) and limitation (one
possible is realized out of a number of possibles), actualization is
invention (wherein the sum of the parts never re-achieves the whole).
And while the actual never emerges from pre-given options, the real
is always already pre-given, ready-made. In other words, the real is
really a retrospective view, wherein any possible available for
realization only exists retrospectively, after the real already exists.
Ultimately, that which is possible is merely an abstraction of the real.
As such, there is no way of understanding ―anything either of the
mechanism of difference or of the mechanism of creation‖ which is
mobilized in and through élan vital.
296

Importantly, for Bergson, ―creative evolution‖ is not the result
of a passive or chance occurrence that produces variation; complexity
is not attributable to accident. Rather, it is, as Grosz describes, ―an
active, excessive, and inventive response‖ to the rhythms of the
world, and, more specifically, to the problem of how to live in the

plant latent in any animal (and vice versa), which ―makes torpor and
consciousness both complementary and mutually exclusive: they are
‗options‘ that come from the same source yet are divergent paths where
participation in one more or less excludes the other‖ (Grosz, Nick of Time
218, my emphasis).
296
Deleuze, Bergsonism 98.
157

material world.
297
Moreover, complexity inheres in the movement of
vitality as potentiality and is actualized as individuation and
differentiation. Life mobilized as vitality evolves, Bergson explains,
according to ―the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth,
divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.‖
298
Bergson
provides a lengthier description for the purposes of illustration:
evolutionary movement, the motive force of life itself, ―proceeds rather
like a shell [e.g., an artillery shell], which suddenly bursts into
fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their
turn into fragments destined to burst again.‖
299
Simultaneously
propelled by explosive vital force and deterred by inert matter, life
proliferates along divergent pathways, thereby, breaking life up into
species, individuals, etc. Thus, the current of life, in its evolution, is
not a singular thread of progress. Rather, the tendency to diverge as
the fundamental ―way of living‖ produces life as utter contingency—

297
Grosz, Nick of Time 200. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze describes Bergsonian
élan vital as being a response: ―Each line of life is related to a type of matter
that is not merely an external environment, but in terms of which the living
being manufactures a body, a form, for itself. This is why the living being,
in relation to matter, appears primarily as the stating of a problem, and the
capacity to solve problems‖ (Bergsonism 103). In which case, differentiation
is not simply the instantiation of negation (plant is not animal) or
opposition (plant vs. animal), but rather that which is ―essentially positive
and creative‖ (Deleuze, Bergsonism 103)—hence, ―creative evolution.‖
298
Bergson, Creative Evolution 99.
299
Bergson, Creative Evolution 98.
158

and, consequently, utterly unpredictable but always completely
creative.
300

It is worth noting the prescience of Bergson‘s theorization of
élan vital as duration, as becoming, especially in light of more
contemporary theories of self-organizing processes and systems. For
example, Manuel DeLanda in ―Nonorganic Life‖ attributes a creativity
and expressivity to the oscillations and bifurcations constitutive of
so-called inert matter.
301
According to DeLanda, ―even rocks flow.‖
302

300
Grosz describes the ―alternative directions and orientations‖ constitutive
of life‘s vital tendencies as being a matter of ―ways of living,‖ as opposed to
being ―a primitive mode of choice‖ (Nick of Time 217). Thus, if there is an
agency at work, it is one with vitality as such.
301
Manuel DeLanda, ―Nonorganic Life,‖ Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary
and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992) 129-167. Thank you to
James Leo Cahill for suggesting this article to me.
There is, however, an important distinction to be made between
Bergsonian and DeLandian models of vital force. For Bergson, life and
matter form a continuum, merging into each other according to two
tendencies, descent and ascent. In this way, as Grosz explains, ―Matter in
its totality participates in duration‖ (Nick of Time 198), as does life extend
itself temporally. Thus, the coincidence of life and matter—the needs of life
and the properties of matter—involves a shared duration, an overlapping of
temporalities. Ultimately, ―Life introduces a force that, on the one hand,
makes us coincide and work in rhythm with the duration(s) of the world
and the objects and relations that constitute it and, on the other, enables
us to conceptualize it and thus to separate ourselves from it‖ (Grosz, Nick of
Time 199).
For DeLanda, on the other hand, the vital force operating in and
through ―nonorganic life‖ is based on a mathematical model of self-
organization, which can be mapped onto, by way of analogy, various
physical processes, including physiological processes (biological and
neurological, in particular). So while he uses ―machinic phylum‖ to
―designate a single phylogenetic line cutting through all matter, ‗living‘ or
‗nonliving,‘ a single source of spontaneous order for all of reality‖ (DeLanda
138, emphasis in original), the term always references the ―startling
universality of the mathematics of self-organization‖ (DeLanda 135) at the
159

Not unlike Bergson, then, who asserted that matter, in its unfolding,
―[occupies] a duration like our own,‖ DeLanda understands the
material world to be mobile, in flux.
303
Geological, chemical,
hydrological, atmospheric and organic strata can all be understood
as ―complexes of matter and energy flows that are stratified to
different degrees.‖
304
They are all instances of ―nonorganic life‖; that
is, phenomena—living and nonliving alike—that emerge and evolve as
dynamic articulations of spatial and temporal patterns. Rhythms,
foldings, flows, sedimentations, stratifications, bifurcations, these are
the forces—indeed, the vitalities—generating the various physical
systems which give order to reality. What‘s more, these forces are
virtual in a very Bergsonian sense. That is, they are not pre-given
mechanisms, ―waiting to be realized‖; rather, they are ―virtual or
abstract mechanisms that are ‗incarnated‘ in different concrete
physical mechanisms.‖
305
In particular, DeLanda identifies attractors
and bifurcations as the tendencies, or virtualities, which are
actualized (―incarnated‖) as the nonlinear flows of matter and energy
vitalizing phenomena as distinct from—and yet, similar to—each

same time that it privileges the mechanistic and the machinic. In making
this aside, I certainly do not intend to dismiss significance of the argument
he makes regarding the dynamism of life and matter.
302
DeLanda 143.
303
Bergson, Creative Evolution 9.
304
DeLanda 143.
305
DeLanda 138. (Emphasis in original.)
160

other as the beating of hearts, earthquakes, flames, clouds, tsunamis
and amoebas.
306

It is interesting to consider the body in all of this. Not
surprisingly, the body, in the context of self-organizing systems, is
considered a living system, ―inhabited by processes of nonorganic
life,‖ metabolism, RNA translation and synthesis, protein synthesis,
embryogenesis and cell differentiation, as well as the various internal
physiological (circadian) rhythms, to name just a few.
307
In other
words, the body is comprised of flows, stratifications and
bifurcations, which produce the body as a networking of viscosities,
rigidities and fluidities. Similarly, Bergson holds that the body is a
site of instabilities and mobilities, insofar as it undergoes ceaseless
change, ―changing form at every moment.‖
308
Its seeming consistency
of form is simply the ―snapshot view of a transition‖; the reality,
however, is movement.
309
Thus, the living body is always source and
object of tendencies, potentialities, even as perception manages to
arrest and solidify it.

306
This list is articulated slightly differently by DeLanda: ―Yet, attractors
and bifurcations do constitute an abstract reservoir of resources available
to nonlinear flows of matter and energy—a condition that applies as much
to the beating of hearts as to earthquakes, flames and clouds, tsunamis
and amoebas‖ (138).
307
DeLanda 153.
308
Bergson, Creative Evolution 302.
309
Bergson, Creative Evolution 302.
161

DeLanda, too, notes that the multiplicity of self-organizing
processes that we ―carry around in our bodies‖ are ―of a definite
physical and mathematical nature—a set of bifurcations and
attractors that could be determined empirically, at least in
principle.‖
310
The purely technical (empirical) character of isolating
and assessing these perturbations of the body leads DeLanda to ask
a poignant question: ―is there any way to experience this nonorganic
life traversing us…?‖
311
In an allusion to Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), he suggests meditation techniques
or psychedelic chemicals as a means of ―‗destratify[ing] ourselves.‖
312

But the parenthetical remark functions as a transition to a more
material concern: that of an ethics, one attentive to the fact that ―we
too are flows of matter and energy.‖
313
His proposal for such an
ethics hovers somewhere between the metaphorical and the
physiological, as it argues for a dynamic equilibrium across registers
of living. I quote DeLanda here:

310
DeLanda 153. Perhaps a note regarding terminology is appropriate here.
Both ―bifurcation‖ and ―attractor‖ are mathematical terms. The former
refers to a mutation that occurs ―at critical points in the ‗balance of power‘
between physical forces‖ (DeLanda 135). The latter: a ―point‖ (which may,
in fact, be a closed loop) in a system toward which trajectories drift
(DeLanda 137). In this context, the body as a living system becomes a site
for mapping; its vitalities made into abstractions.
311
DeLanda 153. (Emphasis in original.)
312
DeLanda 153.
313
DeLanda 153.
162

An ethics of everyday life, in these terms, would involve finding
the relative viscosities of our flows, and giving some fluidity to
hardened habits and making some fleeting ideas more
viscous—in short, finding, through experimentation, the ―right‖
consistency for our flows (the ―right‖ mixture of rigid
structures, supple structures and self-organizing processes).
314

For Delanda, an ethics of dynamic equilibrium (for lack of a better
term) is certainly individual and personal, but it is also social,
political, economic and ecological. And it embraces ―strategies of life‖
that advocate for a responsiveness to the flows of life, out of which
might emerge the possibility of resiliency (as opposed to stability).
315

Thus, an ethics of dynamic equilibrium is a call for placing ourselves
in the flows of life, adopting their movement—becoming responsive to
the becoming that is, in overtly Bergsonian terms, élan vital. In
which case, it is a matter of returning the ―faculty of seeing‖ (intellect)
to an immanence with ―the faculty of acting‖ (the vitality of life itself),
in order to intuit, no matter how fleetingly, the inter-relationalities
between the flows—that is, the vitalities—of things. And perhaps,
there is a corollary to be appended, informed by DeLanda‘s
―nonorganic living‖: that responsiveness and resiliency require an
understanding that the body is vital not simply because of its
biological processes but also because of the bio-logical capacities of

314
DeLanda 153.
315
DeLanda 159. Technically speaking, resiliency refers to ―existing at the
border of a basin of attraction,‖ as opposed to being ―locked into an
attractor‖ (159).
163

its virtual vitalities, such that their bifurcating streams come to
matter in our determining ―the ‗right‘ consistency of our flows.‖

Vitalities: In Living and Streaming
In thinking biomedially and pursuing a notion of vitalities, I am
engaging in a project considerably different that those interrogating
the relation between the biological and technology in terms of
machinic or informatic life, what Richard Doyle discusses as the
―postvital‖ existence of networks, alife (artificial life) and intervals of
cryonic nonliving.
316
According to Doyle, the ―localization of life onto
genetic actors‖ has resulted in the ―distribution of vitality,‖ such that
―life is no longer confined to the operation of DNA but is instead
linked to the informatics events associated with nucleic acids:
operations of coding, replication, and mutation.‖
317
Given this

316
Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 19. See also: Richard Doyle, On
Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997).
317
Doyle, Wetwares 19-20. Of course, what makes these biological events
informatics is the metaphorical register by which science explains life. Part
of Doyle‘s project, of which Wetwares is a continuation, is to interrogate the
―rhetorical software‖ used by the sciences (especially with the emergence of
molecular biology) to construct a notion of life. In On Beyond Living, Doyle
explains (as others have done, in following Foucault‘s lead) that life is a 19
th

century construction, coinciding with the move away from natural history
to biology, at which point biological knowledge introduced a depth, an
interiority, where there had only been surfaces. ―Life‖ became ―an unseen
unity [a secret] that traversed all the differences and discontinuities of living
beings‖ (Beyond Living 11). In other words, life became a ―concept beyond
164

historical context, Doyle explains that we can speak of ―artificial life.‖
Speaking in such terms instantiates a transformation of the scientific
concept of life itself. According to Doyle, this transformation involves
―a shift from an understanding of organisms as localized agents to an
articulation of living systems as distributed events.‖
318
Certainly, an
emphasis on systems recalls DeLanda‘s ―nonorganic life‖; and yet,
Doyle‘s proposition of ―postvitality‖ takes the idea in a very different
direction.
According to Doyle, the object of study for biologists is no
longer life as such but living systems, an assertion made by
molecular biologist Francois Jacob. (It is in light of this assertion,
that Doyle proposes his formulation of ―‗postvital‘ biology.‖)
Contemporary biological sciences are less interested in living
organisms, i.e., the nature and function of their living, and more
invested in ―sequences of molecules and their effects,‖ which are then
―articulable through databases and networks‖—hence life‘s
distributive character.
319
Life as system or, more precisely, as
network, is an event of multiplicity, and the important fact is that
such multiplicity can only be lived as in-between, on the edges not at

the particularities and practices of living organisms‖ (Beyond Living 12); it
became an abstraction.
318
Doyle, Wetwares 20. (Emphasis in original)
319
Doyle, Wetwares 21.
165

the nodes (to use network terms). Or, as Doyle writes: ―articulations
of life involve a multiplicity—multiple nodes—whose ‗liveness‘
emerges between locations.‖
320
For Doyle, this notion of life depends
on ―a rigorous capacity for connection, orderly ensembles
representable only as transformations, flickering patterns unfolding
in space and time.‖
321
This is analogous, he explains, to Marcello
Barbieri‘s claim that ―organisms have always already been networks,‖
tripartite ensembles of genotype, ribotype and phenotype—with an
emphasis on ribotype, the ―translational actant‖ that ―transform[s]
the immortal syntax of nucleic acids into the somatic semantics of
living systems.‖
322
It is the ―translational‖ or ―transitional‖ which
constitutes that which counts as ―lively‖ (liveliness). But it is
precisely the moment or event of the transition—generative of signs of
vitality—which refuses or precludes the possibility of narrative
(representation).
323
The case of alife reveals this situation as the

320
Doyle, Wetwares 22-23.
321
Doyle, Wetwares 23.
322
Doyle, Wetwares 23.
323
Doyle provides as an example Stuart Kaufman‘s Boolean networks,
which, in being a model for understanding life as system, attributes an ―all-
at-once-ness‖ to the event of life, i.e., the idea that life happened all of a
sudden, rendering the exclamation ―It‘s alive!‖ the only rhetorical possibility
(Wetwares 22). The complication that Doyle introduces, here, is that there
is no language for describing the in-between of translation or
transformation which is constitutive of life—because the process of
describing is narrative and only happens sequentially, thus only the
exclamatory mode is possible. In other words, vitality cannot be expressed,
it must be experienced.
166

crisis of vitality, wherein ―life disappears, as the ‗life effect‘ becomes
representable through the flicker of networks rather than articulable
and definable locales [i.e., rhetorical structures of narrative].‖
324
The
interval, then, is the site and instantiation of the postvital, rather
than the vital impulsion of which Bergson speaks. That is, instead of
being the locus of vitality, i.e., movements of living as such, the
interval merely provides for a ―life effect.‖
325

Certainly, notions of the postvital are productive for thinking
about the ways in which rhetorical shifts in discursive practices
refract onto life itself. As Doyle points out, the turn to ―living
systems‖ in the biological sciences raises the question, not so much
of life but liveness. Moreover, it opens onto the idea that liveness
may not in fact be a matter of living at all, or it is the evacuation
thereof: artificial life. Despite its intervention, ―postvital‖ seems
problematic, for it seems to refuse living as such; or, it imposes a

324
Doyle, Wetwares 24.
325
The ―effect‖ of liveliness or vitality in alife is the instantiation of a
situation whereby ―one simply cannot look away‖ (Doyle, Wetwares 30;
emphasis in original); it is the very condition of being caught—seduced. In
other words, alife‘s seeming liveliness produces an interval, wherein a
becoming-human of simulation necessarily coincides with a becoming-alife
of the human. In the case of cryonic nonliving, the interval produces a
substantially different effect. Doyle describes a cryonics experiment, in
which a dog, Lazarus, is suspended in a cryonic ―intermezzo.‖ He explains
that Lazarus exists in an interval ―between‖ moments of Lazarus, i.e., an
interval between living. As such, ―Lazarus forms a Möibus body‖ (Wetwares
98), neither inside nor outside life—and yet, in the moment or moments of
cryonization, he is not quite living (and, in fact, probably appears dead,
although Doyle never says so).
167

disjunction between vitality and its being lived. As such, Doyle
seems to emphasize the impossibilities of the living body, whereas I
prefer to attend to its potentialities. Language and its materializing
effects aside, I maintain that the living body, even as proliferated via
streaming thumbnails, is still a matter of vitality, a matter of vital
processes. To resort to notions of the postvital is to suggest that we
are somehow ―beyond‖ vitality—or at least, at its edges. And even if
―edges‖ are the intervals wherein things happen, e.g., ribotypic
actualizations, the ―post‖ that informs vitality (as Doyle posits it,
anyway) is derived from non-vital operations, operations that inject
crisis into vitality (the seduction of alife, the cryonic nonliving state).
Thus, instead of the postvital, I prefer to think in terms of
multiplicities, a proliferation of vitality (or a proliferating vitality). As
such, I have proposed vitalities: virtual vitalities, in addition to
kinetic, physiological and biological vitalities. To my mind, the term
best expresses living, best articulates the bio-logical. Even as bio-
logical processes themselves may not all be instances of the force of
life Bergson posits, they do demonstrate the workings of such vital
force, of life in its living. Moreover, they emphasize that life as such
is not lived according to a singular trajectory but rather along
multiple bifurcating vectors. Proliferating streams of mobile-imaging
168

thumbnails, then, are simply one of the lines of life a body proliferates
as it lives.
169

LIVING CORPUS II: LIFE-CACHING AND THE BIOPOLITICS OF “HEALTHFUL
LIVING”

―Life-Caching‖: Mobile-Imaging as Life Process
In 2004, trendwatching.com introduced a trend they termed
―life-caching.‖ Made possible by an ―onslaught of new technologies
and tools, from blogging software to memory sticks to high definition
camera phones with lots of storage space and other ‗life capturing and
storing devices‘,‖ life-caching refers to ―collecting, storing and
displaying one's entire life.‖
326
And while life-caching might have
genealogical ties to collecting, it is substantially and qualitatively
different than collecting. Subsequent descriptions and examples
provided by trendwatching.com speak to this difference. But the fact
that ―life‖ is ―cached‖—with the word‘s denotative association to
storage—serves to reveal the insufficiency of the term ―collecting.‖ In
fact, the caching of life, or more to the point, caching ―every second of
[one‘s] existence,‖ is at odds with the selectiveness, the
particularity—the care and investment—attributable to a practice of

326
―Life-Caching,‖ trendwatching.com, 13 June 2007
http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/LIFE_CACHING.htm. (My
emphasis.) The definition of life-caching in full reads: ―collecting, storing
and displaying one‘s entire life for private use, or for friends, family, even
the entire world to peruse.‖ I have abbreviated the definition so as to
emphasize the use of ―life.‖
170

collecting.
327
Instead, caching is a project in amassing: accumulation
is the defining principle—and outcome.

327
In The Artificial Kingdom, Celeste Olalquiaga explains that the ―art of
collecting,‖ which emerged in the nineteenth century with the introduction
of mechanical reproduction, involves selection and organization, forms of
interaction or dynamic engagement, which ―allow collectors to establish a
particular relation with their objects‖ (17). She describes this ―particular
relation‖ as a ―feeling of uniqueness‖ (Olalquiaga 18), which is not derived
from an object‘s authenticity or rareness, but rather from the personal
meaning invested in it by the one who collects. Not surprisingly, Olalquiaga
is heavily indebted to Walter Benjamin, for whom the collector was an
archetypal figure of modernity. Benjamin, himself a collector, to which his
Arcades Project attests, explained that collecting has significance because it
is a personal endeavor. It is not the collection itself which has meaning;
rather, meaning happens through the collector‘s investment in bringing
together that which belongs together and, in so doing, bringing order to the
―scatter, in which the things of the world are found‖ (Benjamin, ―The
Collector‖ [H4, 4]). For Benjamin, collecting is a matter (and materiality, in
the phenomenological sense) of intimacy; it is a project of intimate relations,
which requires time for pause and careful attention. Mobile-imaging
thumbnails, in their proliferation, do not invite such engagement (at least,
not readily—and not typically). And while ―tagging‖ (attaching keywords to)
thumbnails seems similar to the considered selection and organization
associated with collecting, it really speaks to a search-and-find
functionality. What might be said to be absent—or perhaps, subdued or
curtailed, here, is the desire that drives collecting. According to Susan
Stewart, collecting is invested in creating a ―new whole,‖ but it is a whole
whose wholeness (completeness) can never be fully experienced. For one
thing, collecting is predicated on the play between display and hiding,
which necessarily makes the collection a site (and sight) of impossibility:
―While we can ‗see‘ the entire collection [its seriality and sameness], we
cannot possibly ‗see‘ each of its elements [its differences]‖ (Stewart 155). At
the same time, collecting involves a certain danger, that of the subsumption
of the collector into his/her collection. The collection‘s defining term is the
―self‖ (of the collector), whose integrity is founded in and by the act of
collecting (Stewart 163). But the self can be saturated and overwhelmed by
its collecting. This is a threat of an excess of meaning. I contend that the
streams of thumbnails proliferated by mobile-imaging are less about the
fullness promised by meaning-making (e.g., narrative) and more about the
stability made possible through the circulation of information. Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999);
Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of Kitsch Experience
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); and Susan Stewart, On Longing:
171

Mobile-imaging, in being a function of life-caching, proceeds
according to a logic of accumulation. With device potentially always
in hand, mobile-imaging becomes the possibility for persistent and
continuous recording of one‘s life.
328
Such rigor suggests that
mobile-imaging exceeds practice. Mobile-imaging, in being ongoing,
is a process, by which I mean a process that is incorporated into a
living system, becomes one with the living of that system.
329
More
explicitly, then, I contend that mobile-imaging is a life process, a bio-
process. Two examples are helpful in framing the argument I make
in this chapter regarding mobile-imaging being a bio-process, its
being incorporated as one of the body‘s vitalities.
Nokia‘s Lifeblog software, an image-managing software
application for Nokia mobile camera phones and PCs which debuted
in spring 2004, provides an example of the logic to be accorded to
life-caching broadly speaking, and mobile-imaging in particular.
Described by BBC technology writer, Mark Ward, as turning the

Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
328
Whether or not mobile-imaging is, in fact, persistent and continuous is
not the point here; rather, what matters is that the possibility exists. This
condition of possibility is what I am interested in interrogating.
329
Whereas we might understand practice as being more an accessory to
living.
172

mobile phone into a "life recorder,"
330
Lifeblog becomes more than a
simple repository for a presupposed stream of thumbnails. The
thumbnails amassed on the device are incorporated into a ―living
timeline‖ (my emphasis) qua multimedia diary by means of Bluetooth
signal or USB connection, where they (along with incoming and
outgoing text and multi-media messages, and recorded audio files)
are arranged chronologically and annotated with information
regarding ―when and where something was done, with help from
codes that uniquely identify cell phone base stations.‖
331
Of
particular interest is the application‘s inaugural commercial text,
which reads, ―Your automatic multimedia diary—just add life‖ (my
emphasis).
332
Although imperatives are central to advertising
discourse, I want to underscore the imperative mode of Lifeblog‘s
address to the camera phone user: the directive to ―just add life‖ is,

330
Quoted in Mark Ward, ―Log Your Life via Your Phone,‖ BBC News
(online), 10 March 2004, 31 August 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3497596.stm.
331
trendwatching.com provides this detail about Nokia Lifeblog. Users are
able to add annotation, or metadata, to each thumbnail in the stream.
332
See the Nokia website
(http://europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,71739,00.html), as well as Lifeblog 1.6
software description downloaded to PC and Nokia handset. Currently, the
website for Lifeblog 2.0 (2006) encourages prospective users to ―Grow an
organic timeline‖ and affirms that ―Your Life is Lifeblog Able.‖ (It might be
interesting to consider the implications of the shift from ―living‖ to ―organic‖
as modifiers for the timeline, as Lifeblog imagines it. For example, ―organic‖
carries with it associations to certain investments in and notions of health
and well-being, as well as ethical and political positions regarding the
growing, harvesting and distributing of foods.)
173

in effect, a charge to animate. In identifying life with the streaming of
images to be managed by Lifeblog, Nokia establishes mobile-imaging
(with camera phone) as the force, a vital force, which animates—that
is, breathes life into—this flow which constitutes living. In what
follows, I take this metaphorical claim seriously to argue that
thumbnails become material traces of life in process.
A more extreme example of mobile-imaging as life-caching is
Microsoft‘s SenseCam (2004). Described as a personal Black Box,
SenseCam is a badge-sized camera worn about the neck. Unlike
typical imaging devices, it automatically records up to 2,000 images
per 12-hour period, according to movement and changes in light
conditions and temperature.
333
(And it is expected that future
SenseCam models will capture ―heart rate or other physiological
data.‖
334
) While Microsoft researchers explain the benefits of
SenseCam in terms of its providing access to memory (What if one
forgets where one has placed one‘s car key?) and details regarding
accidents (which will allow emergency technicians to attend to
injuries more effectively), I am interested in the underlying, albeit
unacknowledged, motivation for such persistent and rigorous

333
Microsoft Research, ―Sensors and Devices,‖ ―Current Projects—
Sensecam.‖ 13 April 2007
http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/projects/sensecam/.
334
Microsoft Research ―Sensecam.‖
174

imaging. Certainly the prospect that images triggered by changes in
heart rate might, in fact, ―lead to greater understanding of ones self
and one's motivations.‖
335
But what about the consequent and
integral relation instantiated between physiology and mobile-
imaging? What does it mean that an image becomes an index for, not
simply a having-been of a person, but rather a having-been of a
physiological process, in which a moment of a body‘s living coincides
with, is coterminous with its imaging? What constitutes life as such,
when the body‘s biological processes become one with its mobile-
imaging processes (and vice versa)? And what are the implications of
this convergence of mobile-imaging and various bio-processes
propelling life itself?
In order to begin to address these questions, it becomes
necessary to move beyond an interpretation of mobile-imaging as
simply a discrete act of periodic, or even frequent recordings or
accounts of life. That is, mobile-imaging is not just a practice but a
way of life, a mode (modality) of living as such. Insofar as mobile-
imaging is integral to an ongoing articulation of living, it is in
symbiosis with the body‘s other vitalities. The body instantiated by
such symbiosis is a mobile-imaging body, or what I will later (in the

335
―SenseCam—the Black Box Flight Recorder for human beings,‖ Gizmag,
31 August 2006 http://www.gizmag.com/go/2694/.
175

conclusion) refer to as a body-in-relation, whose life process is
synonymous with (and ensured by) its life-caching, as pursued
through its mobile-imaging. Under these conditions, the mobile-
imaging body, its well-being, depends upon the continuous
engagement in (and attending to) its bio-processes. At the same time,
mobile-imaging becomes the condition of possibility for such well-
being, but only to the extent that a ―fit‖ articulation of bio-processes,
or vitalities—the physical mobility of the material body, that body‘s
automatic (micro)biological processes, and the virtual streaming of
thumbnails, statistics, etc., generated by and about that body—is
maintained. I propose ―healthful living‖ as a means for theorizing
this particular form of well-being, which I argue is dependent upon
the immanent and mutually supporting relation of the mobile-
imaging body‘s vitalities. In which case, an accounting of life itself—
health and well-being, in particular—becomes a matter of vital signs
and vital signals: the ensured registering of bio-logical processes.

Biopolitics and Processes of Living: Managing ―Life Itself‖
To consider mobile-imaging as a function of ―healthful living‖
necessitates re-orienting the discussion. For once understood in
terms of life itself, mobile-imaging becomes the site of a much more
important critique regarding the strategies, mechanisms and
176

techniques for securing and maintaining life writ large. If mobile-
imaging is a bio-process among bio-processes (a vitality among
vitalities), then it is, likewise, the object of a particular and intensive
scrutiny. It is always already implicated in a pervasive yet subtle
(and supple) power dynamics. Therefore, before turning to the
specificities of ―healthful living,‖ it becomes relevant to address the
broader project of biopolitics.
Most fully theorized by Michel Foucault, biopolitics refers to an
articulation of power directed at the life processes of a population,
e.g., birth, death, illness, etc. It employs various mechanisms, such
as ―forecasts, statistical estimates and overall measures,‖ in order to
regulate the ―aleatory‖ element within a population of living beings.
336

Its ultimate aim: to ―optimize a state of life.‖
337
In The History of
Sexuality, Foucault explains that the 18
th
century saw the emergence
of the political and economic problem of ―population.‖
338
And with
the newly defined problem came new mechanisms of power, which
―took charge of men‘s existence, men as living bodies.‖
339
Moreover,
they sought to ensure ―the welfare of the population, the

336
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1975-1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans.
David Macey (1997; New York: Picador, 2003) 246.
337
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” 246.
338
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (1976; New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 89.
339
Foucault, History of Sexuality 89.
177

improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity,
health, etc.‖
340
In many ways, the wealth (and, by extension,
stability) of a nation was seen to be manifested in the health and
well-being of its population, and the proper functioning of its
biological processes an extension of its labor. This new articulation
of power, which operated according to new logics of technique,
normalization and control, then, no longer viewed the individual body
as the object of its subjugation; instead, power‘s object became the
more dispersed—less containable—biological and biosociological
processes of a population.

340
Michel Foucault, ―Governmentality,‖ The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel
Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991) 100. It seems relevant to note that I am
quoting from a text which is theorizing governmentality, not biopolitics as
such. And although the two are mutually informing and integrally related
on many levels (e.g., their turn to the ways statistics function to instantiate
the predictability of populations), there seems to be a subtle difference at
work. Certainly, the concepts seem to share a historical proximity (the
―governmentality‖ essay first appearing in 1978, and biopolitcs addressed in
The History of Sexuality in 1978, as well as in ―The Politics of Health in the
18
th
Century,‖ originally published in 1979) and they seek to account for a
shifting away from disciplinary power, with its focus on the individual (and
the family unit as site of ideological training). However, governmentality is
inclined to locate this shifting in the economic domain of sociality and its
regulation, while biopolitics emphasizes the medical-scientific domain.
Although, a biopolitical analysis does not exclude or dismiss economics.
For example, ―The Politics of Health in the 18
th
Century‖ does identify the
emergence of an investment in the health of the population as a function of
economic concerns, to the extent that there was a concerted effort to ―make
poverty useful‖ by ensuring that the able-bodied poor were self-financing of
their sickness and incapacitations (93). See: Michel Foucault, ―The Politics
of Health in the Eighteenth Century,‖ Power: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994)
90-105.
178

Eugene Thacker observes that this shift in focus from the
individual body to the biological and biosocial processes of the
population is precisely indicative of a shift in Foucault‘s discourse
from biopower to biopolitics.
341
In shifting from biopower to
biopolitics, Foucault‘s sites of analysis shift: from the disciplinary
institutions and techniques of biopower, best exemplified by the
prison, the hospital, the factory and the home, to the biopolitical
strategies (or ―art‖) of governance (also called governmentality), which
articulate various numerical, statistical and informatic means of
accounting for bodies en masse. Put another way, the disciplinary
work of discrete (but related) institutions, which trains and surveils

341
Eugene Thacker, ―Nomos, Nosos and Bios in the Body Politic,‖ Culture
Machine 7 (2005), 19 Oct 2005 http://www.culturemachine.net/. Nikolas
Rose provides a slightly different interpretation of what Thacker describes
as a shift from biopower to biopolitics. In The Politics of Life Itself:
Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), Rose posits anatomo-politics
(discipline: the management of individual bodies) and biopolitics
(regulation: the management of the collective body of the population) as
coexisting processes constitutive of biopower, which, at some point circa the
19
th
century, begin to blur as ―different authorities seek to act upon the one
through action upon the other‖ (53). While these two accounts are not
completely dissimilar, there is a notable distinction to contend with: the
difference between a blurring within a logic of biopower and a transitioning
from biopower to biopolitics (which incorporates the logic of biopower into
itself). For my part, I prefer to think in terms of transition (to biopolitics)
rather than blurring (of anatomo-politics and biopolitics within biopower)
because I am interested in foregrounding the role of bio. Besides, the
pluralized singular (or simultaneously singular and plural) noun that is
―biopolitics‖ better speaks to the proliferation of authorities invested in
managing life itself than does biopower (which is rather monolithic in the
connotations of its grammatical status as singular noun). Even Rose
himself turns to ―biopolitics,‖ thereby suggesting the limitations of the term
―biopower‖ (see Politics of Life Itself 54).
179

the individual body to produce (and reproduce) a docile body,
becomes insufficient to the task—and business—of population.
Therefore, new governmental strategies of ―the state‖
342
are
instituted, which assume the less concrete forms of ―complex systems
of coordination and centralization.‖
343

But this is not to say that the transition to biopolitics renders
the disciplinary mechanism and, for example, its existence as a
physical site and particular instruments and techniques obsolete. In
fact, as Foucault indicates in “Society Must Be Defended,” biopolitics
―does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it,
integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of
infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques,‖
344

342
Of course, the concept of ―the state‖ suggests certain assumptions about
how power is understood to operate, i.e., as deployed by a singular entity of
authority. However, it is used here for the sake of clarity, in order to bring
together a disparate but inter-related system and bureaucracy of programs,
mechanisms and institutions. This is not to say that something called a
―state‖ does not exist. Rather, as Bratich, Packer and McCarthy explain,
within a condition of governmentality, the state benefits from, or more to
the point, is possible insofar as, techniques of management and
coordination emanate from multiple sites and sources, and through the
distribution of people/bodies. In other words, the state is the state to the
extent to which it extends its reach through the articulation of ―disparate
technologies of governing‖ (5). Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and
Cameron McCarthy, ―Governing the Present,‖ Foucault, Cultural Studies,
and Governmentality, ed. Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron
McCarthy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003) 3-21.
343
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” 250.
344
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” 242. Foucault continues: ―This
new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique,
because it exists at a different level, on a different scale, and because it has
180

such that discipline‘s institutions assume a different function. They
become nodes within an ensemble of techniques and, as such, open
onto and, in fact, make possible the articulation of biopolitical
processes of power, which function ―to establish an equilibrium,
maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and
compensate for variations‖ occurring within the population.
345
What
is at issue, then, is the viability of a logic. In the case of biopower,
the disciplinary logic underpinning the system of discrete but parallel
institutions and techniques proves unsustainable in its own right,
because it cannot attend to, negotiate the concept of and problems
introduced by ―population.‖ A new logic of power is necessary to
address the random and, therefore, unpredictable element posed by
the multiplicity of a population.
Foucault speaks to this situation:
Power must, I think, be analyzed as something that circulates,
or rather as something that functions only when it is part of a
chain. It is never localized here or there, it is never in the hands
of some, and it is never appropriated in the way that wealth or
a commodity can be appropriated. Power functions. Power is
exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply
circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit
to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or
consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other

a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments‖
(“Society Must Be Defended” 242).
345
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” 246.
181

words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to
them.
346

Ultimately, power is not located in a place or a mode of governance as
such, but occurs as a complex of forces and relations which
constitute these. In other words, power is not a thing, not something
to be acquired and wielded. Rather, power crystallizes in particular
sites and as various forms of regulation; it does not arise out of, i.e.,
originate in, these. And in the case of the latter half of the 18
th

century, power is multiplied across various authorities (e.g.,
scientists, physicians, other medical experts) and mechanisms of
management (e.g., instruments, policies, programs), but also through
the complicity of people in general. As a result, it operates
differently.
One way to understand the distinction (which, again, is not
necessarily an opposition) between biopower‘s disciplinary logic and
the logic of biopolitics is to consider the relation between surveillance
and tracking. On one hand, surveillance as a disciplinary technique
intended to isolate and train individual bodies might be said to
provide the conditions of possibility for tracking, to be understood as
a more rigorously continuous regulation and management of bodies.
On the other hand, it is also possible to argue that tracking, while

346
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” 29. (My emphasis.)
182

assumed to be a mode of surveillance, is, in fact, something quite
distinct (albeit not unrelated). For the purposes of my argument, I
propose that surveillance (as disciplinary technique) locates the body
as an object to be watched and trained (potentially punished),
whereas, with relation to tracking, the body assumes a symbiotic
relation to (its own) tracking.
347
What is to be noted, here, is the
degree to which the body is (or becomes) complicit with power. For
example, the body, with mobile-imaging device (e.g., camera phone)
in hand, is trackable. Whether or not one is mobile-imaging (or
texting or IMing, etc.), the device in ―on‖ mode sends-receives a
network signal, which makes the user locate-able. (Of course, GPS
technologies make location-detection much more specific, not simply
providing information regarding the cell through which a device and
its body are traversing, but rather identifying, within feet, the

347
The trackback function performed in blogging provides some insight into
the nature of tracking, it seems to me—especially in light of the operating
root word, ―track.‖ The trackback establishes an inter-relation between a
blog post and a subsequent response. It is both the moment and the
documentation of a transaction, an exchange, in which a citation of a blog
in a second blog is acknowledged and notification is posted to the blog
cited. As a process, the trackback mechanism proliferates a sub-
networking of sociality, which always and simultaneously makes readily
available a mapping of said transactions. My thought is that mobile-
imaging analogously makes available a certain mapping of one‘s vitalities, a
mapping which articulates with the mappings produced by others who
likewise participate in mobile-imaging. An easy example of this is Kris
Krug‘s The FlickrVerse, April 2005, a visual ―graph‖ of the social-networking
of 2367 Flickr users. Kris King, The FlickrVerse, April 2005, 13 June 2007
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=9708628&size=o.
183

coordinates of a particular device-body ensemble.) But even if the
device is not ―on,‖ it is still the instance and insurance of our
implication in power, its logic borne through the device and our
relation to the device. That is to say, the logic of risk management at
work in biopolitics is ―designed in‖ the mobile-imaging device no
matter how the device is put to use (or not).
348
It is the very condition
of possibility—the possibility for tracking (and not surveillance per
se)—made possible by the device being in hand that mobilizes power
in this case.
But also, surveillance bears the historico-philosophical burden
of being tied to the architectural model of the panopticon, and
Foucault‘s discussion thereof. In which case, surveillance is doubly
bound—to a particular and institutionally-organized relation to the
atomized body and to a series of like (and, certainly, affiliated) but
delimited sites for the exercise of power. What tracking allows for is

348
Raiford Guins has addressed how the logic of control is ―designed in‖
home entertainment technologies, which provide user-viewers with options
for controlling their viewing-using experience. In particular, he discusses
the v-chip, Internet filtering and blocking software, as well as sanitized and
clean versions of CDs and DVDs. His principle point regarding the
―designed in‖ character of control is this: ―In the condition of ‗not being
used‘, control devices still resonate with the workings of disciplinary logic‖
(Guins 54). Furthermore: ―…‗tools‘ may be actively used, or passively used,
or never used, but their ubiquitous presence cannot be construed as
ineffective. The defense that one does not have to ‗use‘ control technologies
yields little critical insight when their presence redesigns and redefines
media technology and our social relations to it‖ (Guins 55). Raiford Guins,
C***n Edited Version (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press,
forthcoming).
184

the re-articulation of power by freeing it from its territorialized
disciplinary practices and mechanisms and distributing it via its
multiplication and generalization. It proceeds according to what
might be called a networking model.
349
Furthermore, surveillance
seeks to render the body docile, it works to ensure that the body‘s
movements, gestures and behaviors are normalized; it desires to
locate and fix the body‘s dynamism by means and measures of
analysis and taxonomy. Tracking, on the other hand, can be said to
follow and anticipate (rather than contain) the proliferating
articulations, inter-relations and transactions that transpire at and

349
In referring to networking (not networks), I want to emphasize the
relational character of the transactions which distribute power. What
becomes important is that tracking is made possible through the multiply
generated interconnections between nodes within a complex system. These
terms—―interconnections,‖ ―nodes,‖ ―complex system‖—are particularly
important, insofar as they pertain to systems biology and its study of living
systems. However, there is a danger in making this association. Given the
status of information theory and its attendant metaphors of the web and
the network in the discourses of and about communications systems and
computer science, there is a risk of reducing a dynamic articulation of
processes to a static and contained mapping of these processes. As Evelyn
Fox Keller indicates, the information metaphor has overwhelmed our
understanding of the biological, inciting us to think that, for example, the
genome sequence, as the bearer of genetic information, defines life itself.
However, as Keller also explains, the introduction of new technologies
likewise has made it possible to study in vivo processes (e.g., transcription,
protein synthesis, intracellular signaling). Such developments necessarily
complicate conceptions of life, in which the determining factor of the living
organism is the atomism of code. In a similar manner, thinking power in
terms of a networking model intends to emphasize its durational,
processual properties of inter-relations and flows. See: Evelyn Fox Keller,
Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995); and, Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of
Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and
Machines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
185

through the site of the body. It is invested in assessing and
managing the trajectories of dynamism comprising the body,
mobilizing those processes‘ further processing but doing so to its own
ends (e.g., purposes of prediction, etc.).
It becomes important to consider the status of the body in all of
this. Whereas the surveilled body is a physical and finite organism,
which performs behaviors ordained to be either appropriate or
deviant, the tracked body is a relay, a vital site of constellating
patterns (e.g., codes), forces and processes. That is, a body
circulating within a system of tracking—and according to a logic and
logistics of tracking—is a body through which power circulates and is
circulated. In this way, it is substantially different from the anatomo-
physical body of disciplinary logic, whose organization is known by
means of its immobilization and disassembly. In other words, the
tracked body is a body-in-relation, and it is so across disparate but
potentially intersecting and tiered registers and domains of living.
Maintaining, ensuring but also securing these vitalities, as I will be
calling them, of the body becomes absolutely essential for the smooth
and continuous functioning of the system.
Giorgio Agamben‘s theorization of ―bare life‖ is helpful in
fleshing out how the biological body, its vitalities, mobilizes and
ensures processes of governance. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power
186

and Bare Life, Agamben clarifies how it is that ―life itself‖—the living
body, or what he will call ―bare life‖—has become integral to the
modern political order, such that biopolitics is definitive of our state
of existence.
350
Not surprisingly, Foucault serves as a point of
departure for him.
351
Citing Foucault, he identifies the fundamental
characteristic of the modern era as being the inclusion of natural life

350
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995).
351
Agamben is invested in a critique of Foucault, which serves as an
opportunity to ―complete‖ the Foucauldian thesis regarding the character of
and motivation for the increasing ―irreducible indistinction‖ (Homo Sacer 9)
between the biological and the political in contemporary structures and
mechanisms of State. His explicitly articulated criticism addresses
Foucault‘s failure to address the biopolitical character of concentration
camps and 20
th
-century totalitarian states. Agamben‘s project, then, is to
provide this corrective, while also engaging in a genealogical analysis of how
it comes to be that ―bare life‖ (zoē) moves out of the margins to coincide
with the political order (bios). He argues, ultimately, that biological life, in
becoming the ―politically decisive fact‖ (Homo Sacer 122) is the mechanism
by means of which parliamentary democracies became totalitarian states so
rapidly (and vice versa) in the 20
th
century.
Katia Genel has noted that Agamben‘s thesis regarding biopolitics—
that there is an integral correlation of sovereign power and ―bare life,‖ in
which sovereign power is established and exercised precisely in producing a
biopolitical body—runs counter to that of Foucault‘s—which delineates
between sovereignty and biopower. At present I am less concerned about
their opposition. Rather, I want to incorporate Agamben‘s account of bare
life, into Foucault, thereby making Foucault speak to the body as a
biological entity. In other words, Agamben makes it possible to return the
body to Foucault. (I want to offer one qualification here: While I am arguing
that Agamben ―returns‖ the body to Foucault, I am also aware that much of
the time this body is biological only in concept. Which is to say, bare life,
but also natural/functional life, remains a body in abstraction, and only a
body of medical science or even public health tangentially. I will address
this point more fully later in the section.) Katia Genel, ―The Question of
Biopower: Foucault and Agamben,‖ Rethinking Marxism 18.1 (January
2006) 43-62.
187

in ―the mechanisms and calculations of State power,‖
352
such that
―the species and the individual as a simple living body become what
is at stake in society‘s political strategies.‖
353
This increased
investment in the nation‘s health and biological life designates a
significant development in the political conceptualization of the state:
in the modern era, the ―territorial state‖ is supplanted by the ―State of
population.‖
354
What becomes the ―decisive fact‖ of modern politics is
―life itself.‖ And this is what distinguishes modern democracy from
classical democracy, that ―modern democracy presents itself from the
beginning as the vindication and liberation of zoē, and that it is
constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and
to find, so to speak, the bios of zoē.‖
355

According to Agamben, at work within this formulation of
contemporary biopolitical existence is the collapse of a distinction
whose origins are to be found in classical Greek thought. Classical
Greek thought and, consequently, classical democracy distinguish
between zoē, referring to the fact of living common to all living beings,
and bios, referring to the way of living specific or proper to an
individual or group. In other words, it is a distinction between

352
Agamben, Homo Sacer, quoted on page 3.
353
Agamben, Homo Sacer, quoted on page 3.
354
Agamben, Homo Sacer 3.
355
Agamben, Homo Sacer 9.
188

―simple natural life‖ and ―[politically] qualified life.‖
356
For the
Greeks, zoē was the particular domain of the home, whereas bios
belonged to the polis; zoē was not to be confused or conflated with
bios. In the case of contemporary biopolitics, however, zoē and bios
are no longer separate. On the contrary, biopolitics involves an
―intimate symbiosis‖ between the two, between bare life and politics,
such that the rights secured by individuals ―always simultaneously
prepare[s] a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals‘ lives within
the state order.‖
357
The central question emerging out of what
Agamben calls the ―politicization of life‖ asks ―which form of
organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care,
control, and use of bare life.‖
358
In other words, politicization is a
matter of instrumentalization, such that life itself is made functional
and, thereby, secured and ensured.
359

356
Agamben, Homo Sacer 1.
357
Agamben, Homo Sacer 120 and 121.
358
Agamben, Homo Sacer 122.
359
In ―Form-of-Life,‖ Agamben describes this politicization, or
instrumentalization, of life in terms of abstracting ―possibilities of life‖ from
living, such that the ways, acts, and processes of life become simply facts
(4). Under these conditions, living is always separated from its form, or
what might be called the technē of living—or even, the durée of élan vital (as
posited by Bergson). In this essay, Agamben offers thought as a means of
re-accessing a ―life of power‖ (―Form-of-Life‖ 9, emphasis in original), in
which one ―is affected by one‘s own receptiveness and experience in each
and every thing that is thought‖ (―Form-of-Life‖ 9). Essentially, Agamben is
asserting that there is a way to re-install ourselves in what, in The Open, he
refers to as ―relational‖ life, a qualitative rather than functional living (see
Open 13-16). I will be returning to this notion of qualitative living in the
189

But what is important, here, is Agamben‘s assertion, indirect
as it is, that the concept of life itself must be understood as
historically informed by the particularities of the technologies that
allow us to understand/know, conceptualize and treat the body.
That is, life itself is always revised in relation to the technologies that
extend, enhance, and/or maintain it, whether those technologies are
juridical documents/treatises/tracts, medical/scientific apparatuses
or political strategies/techniques.
360
Ultimately, what becomes
apparent during the course of his analysis is that life itself assumes
an increasingly medicalized and biologized valence, and becomes so
in direct relation to actual scientific instruments and apparatuses
(not just socio-political techniques). A brief overview of his
discussion will make this clear.
According to Agamben, the inception of bare life as new
political subject is dated to 1679, with the writ of habeaus corpus. In

concluding chapter of the dissertation. Giorgio Agamben, ―Form-of-Life,‖
Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000) 3-12; and, Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
360
Certainly, I think, Foucault would not disagree. However, he never
directly addresses the specificities of technologies themselves. While
Agamben does not explicitly argue the importance of technological
specificity, the structure of his argument about the development of ―bare
life‖ implies this point. Broadly speaking, Agamben‘s discussion of the
sovereign and sovereign power points to the fact that the exclusion of bare
life from politics is the instance of its inclusion. What is of interest, in this
regard, is how exclusion/inclusion of bare life, or life itself, materializes in
particular ways over time and in terms made possible by particular
technologies.
190

requiring that the ―pure and simple‖ corpus of the (accused)
individual be present before the court, the writ of habeaus corpus
made the body—not the free man or the citizen—the central figure of
political interest.
361
Bare life is specifically equated with the body in
this instance. Next, Agamben turns to declarations of rights, like
those established in France and the United States in the 18
th

century, which he explains designate the ―originary inscription of
natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state.‖
362
Such
declarations assert ―bare natural life,‖ i.e., ―the pure fact of birth,‖ as
the ―source and bearer of rights.‖
363
That birth becomes the identifier
of ―citizen,‖ and not his being a ―free and conscious political subject,‖
means that ―bare natural life as such‖ is the immediate bearer of
sovereignty, or what becomes national sovereignty.
364
The point to be
noted, here, is the absence of an interval of separation between birth
(zoē) and nation (qualified life, bios).
365

361
Agamben, Homo Sacer 123.
362
Agamben, Homo Sacer 127.
363
Agamben, Homo Sacer 127.
364
Agamben, Homo Sacer 128.
365
It is at the point when this condition becomes ―lasting crisis,‖ after World
War I, that Nazism and fascism appear. Ultimately, Agamben argues, that
what became an explicitly political investment in ―essential Germanness,‖
as founded in the conflation of the notions of blood and soil, i.e., bare life
and qualified life, really has origins in the declarations of man and, in
particular, the French Revolution, when ―citizenship names the new status
of life as origin and ground of sovereignty‖ (Homo Sacer 129). In other
words, Agamben asserts that we can only arrive at an understanding of
Nazism and fascism if we locate them ―in the biopolitical context
191

And, then, Agamben turns to the ―fundamental biopolitical
structure of modernity‖: the decision regarding the value or nonvalue
of life as such.
366
This valuation is first addressed in juridical terms
in 1920 in a ―well-intentioned pamphlet in favor of euthanasia.‖
367

The argument for euthanasia is grounded in the fact that man has
sovereignty over his own life and, therefore, his suicide cannot be
punished as homicide. The ―unpunishability of suicide‖ provides for
a corollary: that certain lives are no longer worth being lived and,
therefore, warrant termination, especially as determined by a
physician or authorized official. Here, ―no longer worth being lived‖
applies to those lives that have ―lost the quality of legal good‖ because
they are ―incurably lost‖ due to illness or accident or are ―absolutely
without purpose,‖ essentially because they are without rational,
productive faculties.
368
In this instance, bare life, as the site of
indeterminacy between zoē and bios, ―dwells in the biological body of

inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights‖ (Homo Sacer
130).
366
Agamben, Homo Sacer 137.
367
Agamben, Homo Sacer 137.
368
Agamben, Homo Sacer 138-139. Of interest to me is the fact that what
constitutes the nonvalue of (a) life is articulated in terms of ―quality.‖ While
the pamphlet Agamben quotes refers to quality as a degree of ―legal good,‖ I
think it plausible to consider ―quality‖ more broadly, in terms of quality of
life and efforts to ―maximize‖ one‘s quality of life (discussed by Nikolas
Rose). Quality, then, becomes an important site of investment—both
personal and cultural. To the extent that certain cultural practices strive to
ensure (or, at least, demonstrate) quality of life, they might be understood
as serving biopolitical aims.
192

every living being.‖
369
And as the object of euthanasia, bare life
reveals the relation between ―the sovereign decision on life that may
be killed and the assumption of the care of the nation‘s biological
body.‖
370
In making human value a matter of quality of life, the aim
becomes a matter of ―fortify[ing] the health of the people as a whole
and [eliminating] the influences that harm the biological growth of
the nation.‖
371
Very easily, ―care of life‖ of the nation becomes
inflected with eugenic concerns.
With the invention of life support technologies (but also, the
historically coincident development of transplant technologies), the
status of life undergoes revision once again. Insofar as the vital signs
for determining (time of) death, i.e., stopping of the heartbeat and
cessation of breathing, no longer designate death as such, they
consequently no longer guarantee life. Agamben notes the inception
of ―brain death‖ (death of both the neocortex and the brain stem) as
the new criterion for declaring death. But paradoxically, brain death
is not completely decisive in and of itself, since systematic (somatic)
death is still posited separately—and frequently after the declared
death of the brain.
372
Ultimately, a declaration of death finds validity

369
Agamben, Homo Sacer 140.
370
Agamben, Homo Sacer 142.
371
Agamben, Homo Sacer 147.
372
Agamben, Homo Sacer 162-163.
193

(only) in the impossibility of transplantation: brain death constitutes
an accurate and appropriate (i.e., legal) determination of death as
such because the brain is an organ which cannot be transplanted
and, as such, there is no possibility for replacement and subsequent
recovery of life.
373
What Agamben emphasizes, in this regard, is that
life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political
concepts, and the border between the two is a biopolitical border
whose determination by means of a ―decision‖ regarding what
qualifies as life constitutes sovereign power.
374
Of course, in our

373
Agamben, Homo Sacer 163.
374
For Agamben, the concentration camp epitomizes our biopolitical
condition, in which biological life is the decisive fact upon which politics
plays out. And while not central to the project here, it is relevant to provide
a brief account of Agamben‘s principle points regarding the concentration
camp. In the Nazi context, the concentration camp emerged as
―preventative police measure‖ of ―protective custody,‖ which functioned to
ensure the ―security of the state‖ (Homo Sacer 167), and in the absence of
what might constitute a factual state of exception, state of exception
became ―confused with juridical rule itself‖ (Homo Sacer 168). Agamben
explains: ―Insofar as the state of exception [was] ‗willed,‘ it inaugurate[d] a
new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm [became]
indistinguishable from the exception‖ (Homo Sacer 168). Law and fact
became indistinguishable (Homo Sacer 170). Now, the camp
is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern
nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a
determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State)
and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or
nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume
directly the care of the nation‘s biological life as one of its proper
tasks.‖ (Homo Sacer 174-175)
A notion of ―people‖ provides a means to do this.
According to Agamben ―people‖ always already bears the ―the
fundamental biopolitical fracture within itself‖: bare life (people) versus
political existence (People), i.e., zoē and bios (Homo Sacer 177-178). In
generalized terms, bare life makes possible the People, which subsequently
194

historical present, the question regarding the status of life re-emerges
forcefully in light of genetic engineering of tissues and organs, as well
as pharmacogenomic interventions into psycho/bio-processes.
While Agamben draws attention to the ever-increasing
tendency toward the instrumentalization of life itself, his account
foregrounds the broader socio-political aspects of, e.g., ―the state‘s‖
investment in, biopolitical strategies and, as such, does not address
the individual‘s participation in biopolitics. Which is to say, it is not
enough to make apparent the fact that the development of
technologies have located and continue to locate bare life in ever
more refined, more complex processes of blind or unconscious
(nonconscious) functions of living, including the macro processes of
circulation of blood or respiration, but also micro or nano processes

(and necessarily) instantiates an inverse iteration: the People becomes bare
life, such that a biological body—of the population broadly speaking, but
also the individual bodies of the people—becomes the site of processes of
purification, in which ―disease‖ is eradicated. A current example to which
Agamben refers is the ―democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor
classes,‖ which not only reproduces within itself the people it excluded but
also ―transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life‖
(Homo Sacer 180).
It is worth noting Nikolas Rose‘s critique of Agamben in The Politics of
Life Itself. While Rose agrees with Agamben that the thanatopolitics, its
rationalities and strategies, of the 20
th
century was simply a reiteration—or
―reactivation,‖ as Rose puts it at one point (The Politics of Life Itself 58)—of
an earlier political configuration, he does disagree that the present diagram
of biopolitics is the camp. Rose does not see that exclusion and elimination
serve as guarantees of contemporary biopolitics, primarily because life is
not judged by a state managing the population en masse; hence the four
principle terms underpinning eugenics (and the principle logic of the
camp)—population, quality, territory, nation—do not characterize molecular
biopolitics.
195

of RNA transcription, etc. It is also necessary to consider how the
individual is complicit in the process of his/her own instantiation as
biopolitical subject.
Nikolas Rose provides some context for just such a discussion.
In ―The Politics of Life Itself,‖ he describes the circumstances of our
current biopolitical existence as both a state interest in and
individual complicity in ensuring health and well-being across the
population.
375
He argues that while there is an underlying

375
Nikolas Rose, ―The Politics of Life Itself,‖ Theory, Culture & Society 18.6
(2001) 1-30. Like Thacker, Rose historically positions biopolitics as being
―inextricably bound up with the rise of the life sciences, the human
sciences, clinical medicine‖ (―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 1). Likewise, he is
interested in the particular character it assumes in our current historical
moment. Whereas Thacker theorizes a contemporary biopolitics in terms of
the biologics of terrorism, Rose proposes to think through a triangulation of
risk politics, molecular politics and ethopolitics. Rose provides a more
theorized account of the ―politics of life itself‖ (which he distinguishes from
Foucault‘s ―politics of health‖) in his recently published The Politics of Life
Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century.
One caveat is in order, here, regarding Rose‘s theorization of the
―vital politics‖ of the 21
st
century. In both essay and book project, Rose
argues that the transition to a ―politics of life itself‖ requires that we
acknowledge a new mode of subjectivity and being, an ―emergent form of
life.‖ He proposes the term ―somatic‖ to describe this way of being. I am
not inclined to agree with Rose‘s use of the ―somatic body‖ or ―somatic
individual,‖ for I am not convinced that the body (or our understanding of
it) becomes more ―somatic‖—corporeal—in the process of its
molecularization—and the technicity involved in that process. That is, I am
not convinced that the terms, technologies and practices of biomedicine
(and biotechnology) open onto the fleshy body, which ―somatic‖ seems to
connote, at least for those in the humanities (who may not be familiar with
the fact that as a neurobiological term, the word refers to the complex
networking of signals transmitted to the brain regarding the state of
different aspects of the body). Certainly biomedicine speaks to and about
the body, but in terms that do not readily translate to flesh—and the haptic
register of the flesh. Of course, Rose‘s assertion about the ―flattening‖ effect
196

commitment by ―the state‖ to provide for the ―general conditions for
health,‖ equal emphasis is placed on individual (including family and,
by extension, community) responsibility for achieving and
maintaining personal health: ―Every citizen must now become an
active partner in the drive for health, accepting their responsibility for
securing their own well-being.‖
376
He calls this particular
instantiation of care for the health and well-being of the population a
new ―will to health,‖ which is mobilized and governed ―‗at a distance‘,
by shaping the ways [people] understand and enact their own
freedom.‖
377
People are invited to view their well-being as a personal
project; in particular, they are encouraged to take an interest in their
health.
378

of contemporary biology suggests the impossibility of the depth and
materiality of fleshiness. But still, his turn to the somatic—that is, without
any qualification regarding its connoting something other than the fleshy,
the corporeal—seems a regressive or retrospective move, already out-dated.
On the other hand, his concept of the ―neurochemical self,‖ which emerges
out of a consideration of microprocesses—seems more appropriate and
current, perhaps in what might be considered an excessive—or better yet,
augmented or amplified—modality, wherein the biological is all the more
biological. In which case, a notion of the flesh cannot simply remain a
matter of soma, i.e., body as material entity.
376
Rose, ―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 6. For Rose, ―the state‖ refers to a
complex of legislative provision, state-funded research organizations and
national committees of enquiry‖ (―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 9); the notion of
an ―omni-competent social state‖ is no longer viable (―The Politics of Life
Itself‖ 5).
377
Rose, ―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 6.
378
The increasing interest in personal health corresponds, it seems to me,
to an over-arching do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos, as perhaps exemplified (but
also invoked) by Home Depot and Martha Stewart. Taking interest in one‘s
health is ultimately a lifestyle choice, which is a form of ―active compliance.‖
197

But what we see in the latter half of the 20
th
century (and now,
at the start of the 21
st
century), is the emergence of advanced liberal
modes of rationality, which introduce a ―variety of strategies that try
to identify, treat, manage or administer those individuals, groups or
localities where risk is seen to be high.‖
379
The governance of risk,
i.e., ―high-risk groups‖ and ―risky individuals,‖ becomes the central

According to Guins, ―active compliance‖ refers to the ―practice of choice‖ as
a mode of ―disciplined freedom‖ operating in control societies. It is an
―enabling action,‖ which is predicated on a ―mentality…of ‗self-reliance‘ and
‗self-help‘‖—and we can add, do-it-yourself—that ensures that regulatory
strategies of control are experienced as ―autonomous, non-restrictive, non-
governmental, [and] de-regulatory…‖ In this way, choice is not a matter of
freedom, unqualified, but of ―licensed freedom‖ (Guins 43).
379
Rose, ―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 7. Rose explains that the political
rationalities informing the relations between the biological life of the
individual and the well-being of the collective in the first half of the 20
th

century were both neo-hygienic and eugenic. In the first place, the neo-
hygienist program of the early 20
th
century deployed health as a means of
attending to ―political concerns for the fitness of the nation‖ and,
consequently, ―personal techniques for the care of the self‖ (―The Politics of
Life Itself‖ 3). Secondly, there was a theme of eugenics underlying attempts
at controlling personal reproductive decisions through notions of public
health and preventive medicine (e.g., compulsory or coerced sterilization as
―practiced‖ in mental hospitals in the 1920s and 30s). For Rose, what is
important, here, is that in the first half of the 20
th
century, ―Health was
understood as fitness, and the problem was framed in terms of the political
importance attached to the fitness of the national population considered en
masse, as it competed with other national populations‖ (―The Politics of Life
Itself‖ 5). This is no longer the case, since, as he elaborates in The Politics
of Life Itself, the current form of citizenship project in the West is not
territorialized according to race and nation. Rather, the political interest in
health is posed in ―economic terms, the costs of ill health in terms of days
lost from work or rising insurance contributions, or moral terms, the
imperative to reduce inequalities in health‖ (The Politics of Life Itself 63). In
fact, national health indicators do not assess the fitness of a population
but, instead, ―function as aggregates of the health status of individual
citizens and families‖ (The Politics of Life Itself 63).
198

logic of biopolitics.
380
According to Rose in The Politics of Life Itself,
processes involving the identification, treatment, management, or
administration of individuals, groups or localities where risk is seen
to be high have supplanted those that classify, identify, and eliminate
or constrain individuals seen to be of defective constitution or that
promote reproduction for those who possess a more desirable (for the
collective, be it population, nation, race) biological characteristics.
Moreover, risk-oriented strategies aim to intervene in the present
where calculations regarding probable futures indicate risk in order
to control that potential future.
Risk profiling is a key strategy for determining degree of risk,
and those identified as being ―at-risk,‖ e.g., of heart attack, etc., are
―enabled‖ to better manage their own health and, thereby, secure an
increased ―quality of life‖ (for themselves—and potentially for their
offspring). But along with the evaluation or assessment (which is
substantially different from diagnosis) of riskiness, as well as the
introduction of new categories (―high risk,‖ ―risky‖ and ―at risk‖) such
evaluation entails, comes the blurring of the binary between
normality and pathology. For being designated ―at risk‖ never
necessarily corresponds with pathology as such: every person is
always potentially and to some extent already a risk factor. This is

380
Rose, ―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 7.
199

even more the case in light of recent advances in genomics, wherein
―risk‖ can be attributed at the level of the genetic code. In fact, Rose
notes that genomics seems to have revised the terms by which
regulatory strategies are directed at a population. Individual
susceptibility becomes the new focus, such that risk management
shifts toward asymptomatic or presymptomatic securitization of
individuals.
381
One of the consequences of an emphasis on
susceptibility is that ―quality of life‖ acquires value differently for
―differently composed human beings.‖
382

Importantly, Rose explains that what testing for susceptibility
produces is probabilities and uncertainties—not certainty of any
kind. While presymptomatic genomic diagnosis does not produce
information qualitatively different in predictive power from

381
Rose, ―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 11. In The Politics of Life Itself, Rose
provides a revised articulation of risk and susceptibility. He claims that
susceptibility, not risk, functions as a third term between the normal and
the pathological and, as such, introduces the concepts of ―protodisease(s)‖
and the ―pre-patient.‖ Susceptibility has a historical relation to 17
th
century
notions of ―predisposition,‖ having to do with inherited constitution and its
potential weakening, e.g., by means of bad habits or vice or excitation
(hence the call for living in moderation). Ultimately, in the ―age of
genomics‖ (The Politics of Life Itself 87), susceptibility promises ―more than
risk assessment and risk management—more, that is to say, than
intervention based on a correlation between factors such age, weight, or
diet whose link to the disease process may be unknown or distant.
Susceptibility, it is claimed, is something that can be defined at the level of
the individual body itself—a variation within the sequence of DNA bases in
an individual‘s genome that predispose that person to the development of a
particular disease or disorder‖ (The Politics of Life Itself 87).
382
Rose, ―The Politics of Life Itself‖ 22.
200

probabilities assessed from family history, it is likely to incite the
emergence of the ―responsible presymptomatic individual,‖ who
becomes implicated in a ―life sentence‖ of tests, drugs, self-
examination and ―self-definition as a ‗prepatient‘ suffering from a
‗protosickness.‘‖
383
(It is precisely this emphasis on working toward
potential healthful futures that nutritional mobile-imaging plays to.
But also, mobile-imaging in general is an investment in such a
project of securing potential futures, as I will argue presently.) By
extension, once identified (―diagnosed‖), the presymptomatic
individual may very well be held accountable to an obligatory
responsibility to his/her susceptibility.
I want to emphasize, here, by way of Thacker, the fact that
biopolitics refers to a technology of power aimed at ―public health‖
specifically.
384
That is, health and medicine are not and have not

383
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 94.
384
Thacker cites Foucault and asserts that from its inception (in its
antecedent form as biopower), biopolitics has always been integrally bound
to medical science. The article to which he refers is ―The Politics of Health
in the Eighteenth Century,‖ which was initially published in Les machines à
guérir (‗Curing Machines‘) in 1979. In this essay, Foucault argues that the
18
th
century saw the introduction of ―noso-politics,‖ which coincided with a
shift in the function of the police. Policing, according to Foucault, under
―noso-politics,‖ began to aim at ensuring the ―physical well-being, health,
and optimal longevity‖ of the population, which was done, ultimately, in
order to preserve and maintain the labor force (―Politics of Health‖ 95). Of
importance to such a project are two fundamental principles. One, the
family became a pedagogical apparatus and the ―most constant agent of
medicalization [of the individual]‖ (Foucault, ―Politics of Health‖ 97), which
established the expectation for the ―‗private‘ ethic of good health‖ (Foucault,
201

been secondary sites for the retrospective or ancillary mapping of
power and its techniques. It is helpful to consider Thacker‘s critique
of what he sees as a current tendency to interpret biopolitics in overly
generalized terms. The problem, as he sees it, lies in the convenient
practice of placing under the rubric of biopolitics ―any situation in
which political issues impact social life as a whole.‖
385
And those
theorists and philosophers who fail to acknowledge the centrality of
medicine, i.e., medical science, to biopolitics fail to provide an
accurate account of what‘s at stake in biopolitics—biological life as
such.
386
It is worth quoting Thacker at length, in this regard:

―Politics of Health‖ 98). Two, there emerged an emphasis on hygiene and
the deployment of medicine as a means of social control. In light of these
two developments, the hospital became a ―curing machine‖ (Foucault,
―Politics of Health‖ 103); that is, a site of therapeutic action, not assistance,
wherein threat of contagion was eliminated (ventilation and laundering of
linens) and a system of observation, notation and record-keeping
accompanied the presence and hierarchical prerogatives of doctors
(privileging of expertise). Michel Foucault, ―The Politics of Health in the
Eighteenth Century,‖ Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994) 90-105.
Of course, what is interesting to consider is the nature of the
transformations this model undergoes during the course of the 20
th
and
early 21
st
centuries. Part of the purpose of this chapter is precisely this, to
think through these developments—that health as a project for policing
people comes to overflow the confines of the home and the ideology of family
(as a contained unit); that the notion of expertise gets mapped onto the
individual in his/her relation to his/her health and well-being; that health,
itself, shifts from a concern regarding symptoms and pathology to a vigilant
relation to risk-prevention and susceptibility—in order to demonstrate how
mobile-imaging becomes part of a larger biopolitical project.
385
Thacker, ―Nomos, Nosos and Bios.‖
386
Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are the identified
targets of Thacker‘s critique. While Hardt and Negri‘s collaborative and
individual political economic theoriziations construe life itself in the
202

In these interpretations [in which the role of medicine/medical
science is marginalized or completely unaddressed], one cannot
account for the way that a hegemonic science articulates ―life
itself‖; one cannot account for the character of the bio- part in

absence of an explicit relation to medicine, Agamben‘s critical philosophy
acknowledges medicine in rather incidental terms. In both cases, life as
such becomes a ―generalized social production of life as subjectivity‖
(Thacker, ―Nomos, Nosos, and Bios‖). While my argument might seem to
produce a similar generalization of life itself, its turn to medicine and
healthcare intends to address the work of the biological in and through
mobile-imaging. If anything becomes generalized, here, it is perhaps
medicine, as it is distributed broadly across a population, i.e., infiltrates a
population, who come to understand themselves in (compulsory) relation to
their health—the well-being of their vital processes—as a function of
continuous and pervasive consideration (no longer concern per se). I‘m
thinking of the numerous commercials and advertisements that invite one
to ―ask your doctor about [name a drug]‖; I‘m thinking of the increase in
information appended to packaged foods on grocery store shelves, as well as
the number of healthy food options available in markets, restaurants and
fast food joints, not to mention the rise in popularity of organic foods; but
also I‘m thinking of the ongoing debates over medical insurance and
consequences of privatization (e.g., hospitalization and general medical care
as big business—making not just the body‘s physical labor but also its
biology a source of financial gain).
Samantha J. King‘s discussion of Race for the Cure in ―Doing Good
by Running Well: Breast Cancer, the Race for the Cure, and New
Technologies of Ethical Citizenship‖ provides some insight into this
condition of health consciousness. She contextualizes the Race within a
broader historical moment of the 1980s, which saw the proliferation and
cultural valence of ―thons,‖ including marathons, walkathons, etc.
(although thons were introduced in the 1950s). As such, King argues that
the Race must be understood in relation to the ―fitness boom‖ and the
appearance of various health and fitness products in US markets—but also
Reaganism, in which economic and social conditions were attributed to
individual inadequacies and the breakdown of the family (308). During
these years, images of the disciplined, well-cared for body coincided with
a(n) ―[national] ethos of [biological] self-betterment and quality-of-life” (King
309), which was grounded in a normative logic of consumption. Not only
this, but in a time of rising health costs (and, therefore, governmental
initiatives to reduce such costs), individuals were encouraged to take the
body as a ―locus of pleasure, self-expression, and personal fulfillment‖ (King
309). Samantha J. King, ―Doing Good by Running Well: Breast Cancer, the
Race for the Cure, and New Technologies of Ethical Citizenship,‖ Foucault,
Cultural Studies, and Governmentality, ed. Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer,
and Cameron McCarthy (New York: State University of New York Press,
2003) 295-216.
203

biopolitics. Recall that, for Foucault, it was precisely the role
and historically-changing meanings of medicine that mediated
between politics and life. It was Foucault‘s general claim that
biopolitics does not happen without the requisite medical,
biological, and scientific infrastructure to identify the possible
threats to the population, or, indeed, to identify ―population‖
itself as a biological and medical concern. ―Medicine is a
power-knowledge that can be applied to both the body and the
population, both the organism and biological processes, and it
will therefore have both disciplinary effects and regulatory
effects‖ (Foucault, 2003: 252). This is not simply a doctrine of
―medicalization,‖ but a recognition of a condition in which
medical and political concerns always fold in upon each
other.
387

What becomes clear, given Thacker‘s critique, is that medical science
is central to the very condition of possibility—and sustainability—of
politics (which, in turn, underpins continued medical-scientific
endeavor). How life itself, and the body as its locus, is vested with
political capacities and value depends upon how it is defined by
medical science, through study, procedure and designation (of
course, as funded by those with particular political and ideological
inclinations).
388
Medical-science determines the ways by which the

387
Thacker, ―Nomos, Nosos and Bios.‖ (My emphasis.)
388
Take as an example, the pharmaceutical industry‘s attempts to influence
how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) frame disease. Recently, it has
lobbied for establishing metabolic syndrome as a disease. By conventional
standards, metabolic syndrome is actually a condition, characterized by five
risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides, low
HDL cholesterol and obesity. Typically, then, it would be considered a
personal health concern or a lifestyle condition, not a public-health issue.
However, the medicalization of metabolic syndrome would serve to
guarantee the fiscal feasibility of continued development of as well as
ensure a market for the drugs to ―treat‖ it. According to Thomas Goetz, in
an article in the October 2006 issue of Wired, naming metabolic syndrome a
204

body can be disciplined and biological processes regulated because it
is in the privileged position to know the body first and most
completely. Life itself, in all its parts and processes, comes to be
discernable—and, therefore, political (politicized)—as biological,
microbiological, genomic, etc., through medical-scientific observation,
experimentation and manipulation—and now, fabrication.
From Thacker‘s perspective, our contemporary iteration of the
inter-relation (imbrication) of medical-science and politics—an inter-
relation which is historico-philosophically derived from the
triangulation of nomos (law)-nosos (disease/health)-bios (life)—is one
in which biology, information (code but also systems of transmission)
and security (which Thacker explicitly defines as a condition of war)
intersect. He cites the concurrence of bioterrorism and emerging
infectious diseases (mad cow, West Nile, monkey pox, bird flu, and
SARS
389
) as an example of the way in which there has come to be a
blurring of curing (guérir) and combat (guerre), such that these can

disease will instantiate a causal chain beneficial to the pharmaceutical
industry: if the NIH and, likewise, the American Heart Association recognize
metabolic syndrome as a disease, then the FDA is likely to create an
indication designating it a disease; then, HMOs will be more likely to cover
metabolic syndrome medications prescribed by doctors. Thomas Goetz,
―The Thin Pill,‖ Wired 14.10 (October 2006) 150-157.
389
Of particular interest to Thacker with respect to SARS is the ―tight
relationship between contagion, transportation, and transmission,‖ insofar
as WHO (World Health Organization) ―made use of information networks to
counteract an epidemic network, information transmission to counteract
biological contagion and technological transportation.‖ See: ―Nomos, Nosos
and Bios.‖
205

no longer exist in metaphorical relation—one for another—because,
in fact, the metaphor has become literal: we can only understand one
in terms of the other (and vice versa); that is, war transpires through
contagion, and infectious disease really is a matter of war. Certainly,
as Thacker explains, the turn to ―biothreat‖ and ―biodefense‖
390
in US
discourse surrounding homeland security speaks to the conflation of
the two, or at least the effacement of their differences.
In what follows, I will relocate the discussion of biopolitics.
Essentially, I will argue that the triangulation of biology, information
and security that Thacker ascribes to our biopolitical present plays
out through mobile-imaging as well. (And I am not simply taking

390
While ―biodefense‖ is, indeed, integrally associated with efforts to stave
off bioterrorism (see the NIAID—National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases—website, which details government initiated/sponsored
biodefense efforts,
http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/biodefense/about/default.htm), it also exists as
a ―Topic List‖ link on the US Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) website (http://www.hhs.gov/about/index.html). Clicking on the
link, one arrives at the Office of Public Health and Science (OPHS) website,
where information regarding chronic disease prevention, health promotion,
and health-oriented consumer-provider information services—and national
efforts to support these, e.g., Steps to a HealthierUS Program, Healthy
People 2010, and the healthfinder gateway website—is made accessible via
additional links. Also linked to the OPHS site is the website for the Office of
Global Health Affairs, whose mission statement reads, ―To promote the
health of the people of the world by advancing the Department of Health
and Human Services global strategies and partnerships, thus serving the
health and well-being of the people of the United States‖ (my emphasis).
Interestingly, though not necessarily surprisingly, the health and welfare of
the US population is further ensured by securing global health. (Note:
Neither ―biodefense,‖ nor ―biothreat,‖ has an entry in the OED as of yet.
Although, ―bioterrorism [1987]‖ and ―bioterrorist [1987]‖ are listed under
―Draft Additions September 2006‖ for ―bio-.‖ OED Online,
http://www.oed.com.)
206

advantage of the convenience of analogy, I mean this literally.) In
brief: Mobile-imaging proliferates thumbnails, which serve actual
medical (and more generally, health-oriented) purposes; but also, in
their streaming, mobile-imaging thumbnails in general must be
understood as virtual vitalities, life-ensuring vitalities, counterpart to
biological, microbiological and genomic processes. Streaming
thumbnails are vehicles bearing (transmitting) information—
metadata, or what I call body-data (see chapter 3). This information
is always biomedial, i.e., code, which is simulaneously informatic and
biological (because the two can no longer be distinguished, as seen in
chapter 3). And it is the very fact of their streaming, i.e., their
vitality, that mobile-imaging thumbnails provide for statistical
measures (as accumulated through tracking) which can secure a
population. In this way, mobile-imaging participates in a project of
risk management, in which the health and well-being of the
population are crucial. In pursuing this line of argument, I intend to:
return the body (though not the anatamo-physical body) to Foucault,
who tended to abstract the body, its vital processes and its living, in
his efforts to theorize the machinations of power, i.e., power‘s
dispositif. At the same time, I will insert biology back into Agamben‘s
―bare life,‖ not allowing the medical-scientific to remain merely one of
the forms assumed by biopolitics but rather insisting that the
207

medical-scientific always figures in biopolitics. And I want to
complicate the bio- in biopolitics, such that it accounts for emerging
biomedial vitalities, in which the mobile-imaging body constitutes
just one articulation of the body as such.

Mobile-Imaging in Medicine and Health Care: ―Healthful Living‖ and
the ―Strategic Enterprise‖ of Life Itself
To discuss mobile-imaging with regard to medical science is not
out of place. Indeed, mobile-imaging is quite suited to medical
practice. Most often in the medical context mobile-imaging is second
order medical imaging; that is, camera phones in the clinical context
function to transmit images of already existing medical images such
as MRIs, Xrays and CAT scans, etc., in order to increase efficiency in
diagnosis and recovery.
391
And when mobile-imaging images the
body directly, it typically proceeds according to medical imaging
convention, which is informed by the logic of what has been called a
scientific or medical gaze.
392
According to Lisa Cartwright in

391
Heather Catchpole, ―Mobile Phone Cameras Lend Doctors a Hand,‖ ABC
Science Online, 7 July 2004, 22 April 2005
http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1147994.htm; Anya Litvak, ―Now
You Know: Phones for health,‖ Columbia Missourian, 3 February 2005, 22
April 2005 http://columbiamissourian.com/utown/print.php?ID=11885.
392
Public release, ―Use of Cell Phone Images Appears Feasible for
Visualizing Leg Wounds,‖ EurekAlert!, 21 February 2005, 26 September
2005 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/jaaj-
uoc021705.php.
208

Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine‟s Visual Culture, the
scientific/medical gaze of the (mid- to late-) 19
th
and 20
th
centuries
subjected the body to the dematerializing effects of technological
imaging.
393
Scientific/medical imaging practices, pursued for the
purposes of classification, diagnosis and control, flattened and
―flayed,‖ dismembered the body and, in some cases, rendered it
lifeless.
394
Thus, Cartwright comments that in its transition to the

393
Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine‟s Visual Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Cartwright interrogates
the epistemological category of ―life‖ as it was constituted and
reconstituted—made representable—by means of the optical technology of
the cinema in the early and mid- 20
th
century. She focuses on the
disciplines of science and medicine in order to demonstrate the ways in
which techniques and devices for viewing (principally the cinema, in
combination with and as extension of the microscope and X-ray, etc.)
functioned to dismantle and decompose the body in order to render it, and
life as such, visible, legible—knowable. Her point is that scientific endeavor
pursued through visual apparatuses and technologies intended to ―see‖
(and represent) living bodies/life as ―dynamic fields of action in need of
regulation and control‖ (Cartwright xi). Of importance to Cartwright is the
fact that the body (life) so often exceeded the conditions and technologies of
its framing and viewing, and of its contextualization. Likewise, Cartwright
makes apparent the fact that imaging the diseased body did/does not
―treat‖ (cure) that body. Which is to say, the violence of dematerializing the
body through its imaging (a process which simultaneously makes it a
fetishized visual object) did/does not do the same, for example, to a
cancerous tumor residing within the body being imaged. (And certainly, we
must remember, too, that detection does not equate with prevention.) Not
surprisingly, this violence without curative effect has been heavily gendered
and racialized, especially in the case of mammography and TB imaging.
394
Given the present context, it should not be forgotten that the X-ray as a
therapeutic imaging technology simultaneously damages the body, with its
capacity to afflict the body with burns, hair and nail loss, and cancer. Both
Cartwright and Akira Mizuta Lippit address the chiasmatic coincidence of
life and death operating through the X-ray. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic
Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2005).
209

epistemological category of ―life,‖
395
the body became ―af/fixed‖ (e.g.,
to images, files/records, etc.) by the distanced analytic viewing of the
medical expert. Such ―surveillant looking‖ and ―physiological
analysis‖ are disciplinary and invasive; under their purview, the body
is subject to the violence and invasion of various modes of imaging,
testing and cutting, which strive to make it knowable as a living
network.
396
The body rendered knowable—or, bio-graphed—is a body
easily (supposedly) contained and managed.
In recent developments in medical imaging, we see the same
logic of a distant (objective) analytical gaze at work. In his discussion
of positron emission tomography (PET), Joseph Dumit makes this
clear and, in doing so, provides important historical continuity with
respect to Cartwright‘s argument concerning early and mid- 20
th

century imaging of the body.
397
Insofar as PET seeks to map the

395
Cartwright cites Foucault in dating ―the emergence of something called
life‖ to the 19
th
century.
396
Cartwright 5.
397
Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Dumit extends the
discussion (critique) of medical imaging, e.g., as constructed by Cartwright,
to address how such imaging and accompanying medical files influence
subjectivity. Not only is Dumit invested in considering how PET is
understood in the scientific community, and how this understanding affects
the ways PET technology is deployed and presented to the public, but also
he addresses how assumptions regarding PET affect notions of what it is to
be human. In this regard, Dumit addresses the ways in which positron
emission tomography (PET) has emerged and been deployed in the practices
of neuroscience and psychiatry, and how it plays into practices of ―objective
self-fashioning‖ (Dumit 34), a term which refers to our active and continual
210

brain according to various functional regions (morality, reasoning,
anxiety, social skills, sexuality, intelligence, learning, language, kinds
of memory, etc.), it can be understood as having a genealogical
relation to the eighteenth-century theory and practice of phrenology,
which sought to map the topography of the cranium according to a
taxonomy of human faculties or dispositions (e.g., combativeness,
secretiveness, constructiveness, self-esteem, cautiousness,
benevolence, hope, with among numerous other traits). And it is not
unimportant that phrenology has an association with anthropometric
photography, whose genealogical ties to policing and disciplinary
practice have been well-documented by Allan Sekula and John
Tagg.
398
For like anthropometric photography and phrenology, PET

participation in processes of self-definition, in which we take facts about
ourselves (about our minds, bodies, dispositions, capacities, limitations,
propensities, etc.) and incorporate them into our lives. He wants to
understand processes of ―objective self-fashioning‖ as involving the work of
both (1) cultural presuppositions built into concepts and practices and (2)
the social and disciplinary production of selves.
Of particular interest is Dumit‘s discussion of how patients (subjects
of PET scanning) relate to their biological bodies. Apparently, the
reconfiguration that mental illness undergoes via PET scanning involves a
redistribution of the relation between the biological self and the (so-called)
personal self. Through this process, the diseased brain (for example), as
part of the biological body, is experienced phenomenologically but comes to
be understood as distinct from personhood, even as the two selves continue
to coexist (Dumit 166). Likewise, Dumit explains, locating illness in biology
(the biological body) raises the question of one‘s responsibility for one‘s
illness and the ways in which this responsibility, e.g., to self-monitor,
transpires in coordination with the work of prescription medications and
ongoing clinical assessment (including further PET scanning).
398
This connection between anthropometric photography and disciplinarity
is addressed in chapter 2.
211

images often work to categorize people, usually according to a
normal-abnormal binary. Ultimately, the brain, in being made legible
via PET, reveals itself as corresponding to an identifiable—and
locatable–type. And in this move, the brain becomes synechdocal for
the person; in addition to suffering a particular brain-type, one is the
brain-type. The point of PET, in some of its uses at least, is to
diagnose and treat deviance, i.e., deviant brains.
399
The mobile-
imaging thumbnail as medical image, whether a first or second order
medical image, continues this tradition of diagnosis and treatment.
But I want to suggest that something more is at stake when it
comes to medical thumbnails, that is, in addition to their having an
abstracting diagnostic function (which is arguably the case). To my
mind, the viability of mobile-imaging in the medical context is not
primarily derived from improved medicine per se. (Perhaps this is to
be expected in light of image quality and infrequent but occurring
failed or untimely transmission of thumbnails.) So even as mobile-
imaging works in the service of medical diagnosis or confirming such
diagnosis, it does not change or intervene in the quality of medicine

399
An important point that Dumit raises with regard to biological
medications, such as Prozac, is the desire to determine and the difficulty of
determining what constitutes the ―real‖ or ―authentic‖ self: is it the self
before Prozac, i.e., the self suffering psychophysiological disease, or is it the
Prozac self, i.e., the self whose psychophysiologcial processes are mediated
by pharmaceuticals? Also at issue in this situation is the question of the
―normal‖ self—and how the ―real‖/‖authentic‖ self is or is not a ―normal‖
self (and under what conditions or circumstances).
212

per se. Rather, what mobile-imaging brings to the medical context is
a greater efficiency in delivering health care more broadly. A number
of feasibility studies have been conducted inquiring into the
incorporation of camera phones in clinical practice.
400
The published
findings refer to precisely this: mobile-imaging‘s value as a means to
provide improved care to patients is measured by its capacity for
efficiency. But this efficiency simultaneously promises fiscal
feasibility, that is, for the health care system. Mobile-imaging as an
extension of health care (and not medicine per se) addresses a
particular concern to provide medical services to a greater number of
patients (including those in remote locations)—and at reasonable

400
Ralph Peter Braun, Jean L. Vecchietti, Luc Thomas, Christa Prins, Lars
E. French, Aron J. Gewirtzman, Jean-Hilaire Saurat, and Denis Salomon,
―Telemedical Wound Care: Using a New Generation of Mobile Telephones,‖
Archives of Dermatology 141 (Feb 2005) 254-258, 28 April 2006
www.archdermatol.com; Garehatty Rudrappa Kanthraj and, in reply, Ralph
Peter Braun, ―The Integration of the Internet, Mobile Phones, Digital
Photography, and Computer-Aided Design Software to Achieve Telemedical
Wound Measurement and Care,‖ Archives of Dermatology 141 (Nov 2005)
1470-1472, 28 April 2006 www.archdermatol.com; Tai Khoa Lam, Angelo
Preketes, and Robert Gates, ―Mobile Phone Photo Messaging Assisted
Communication in the Assessment of Hand Trauma,‖ ANZ Journal of
Surgery 74 (2004) 598-602; Cesare Massone, Gian Piero Lozzi, Elisabeth
Wurm, Rainer Hofmann-Wellenhof, Renate Schoellnast, Iris Zalaudek,
Gerald Gabler, Alessandro Di Stefani, Helmut Kerl, and H. Peter Soyer,
―Cellular Phones in Clinical Teledermatology,‖ Archives of Dermatology 141
(Oct 2005), 1319-1320, 28 April 2006 www.archdermatol.com; Katsuhiko
Ogasawara, ―Movie Transmission Systems Using Move Cellular Phone,‖
Telemedicine Information Exchange (July/August 2004), 28 April 2006
http://tie.telemed.org.
213

costs.
401
This articulates well with an over all ―official‖ (State)
402

interest in the maintenance of health for the general population, as
demonstrated in various health-oriented public policies and public
health boards/organizations.
403

401
For example, mobile-imaging requires fewer specialists on site, leaving a
majority of on-site labor in the hands of lesser paid orderlies and
technicians. See: Heather Catchpole, ―Mobile Phone Cameras Lend Doctors
a Hand,‖ ABC Science Online (7 July 2004), 22 April 2005
http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1147994.htm.
402
Again, ―official‖ and ―State‖ are both used loosely here to refer to what is
really a complex of institutions, programs, initiatives, mechanisms, etc.
403
In the US, The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the
principal agency for ―protecting the health of all Americans and [for]
providing essential human services.‖ (See the HHS website at
http://www.hhs.gov/.) Established in 1980, the HHS locates its historical
roots to 1798 with the passage of an act for the relief of sick and disabled
seamen. This history continues with the 1870 organization of the Marine
Hospital Services, which became responsible for quarantine functions and,
later, the examination of immigrants arriving in the US. The Marine
Hospital Service was renamed the Public Health and Marine Hospital
Service in 1902 to acknowledge its growing investment in the field of public
health. This name was shortened to the Public Health Service in 1912,
thereby eclipsing the military-oriented interests in public health. In 1939,
matters concerning health, education and social services became the
domain of the Federal Security Agency (which introduces notions of
―security‖ into interests concerning public health). These services came to
be administered by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare
(HEW) in 1953. Currently, the HHS oversees more than 300 programs,
whose aims range from prevention services (disease, child abuse and
domestic violence, drug abuse), to health and social services (food and drug
safety, Medicare and Medical, assistance for the elderly and low-income
families as well as Native Americans, support for faith-based and
community initiatives as well as Head Start), to health and social science
research, to medical preparedness for emergencies (including potential
terrorism). Affiliated with the HHS are the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), Indian Health Service (IHS), the Health
Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services (SAMHS), the Agency for Healthcare Research and
Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS), the
Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the Administration on
214

While I am convinced that mobile-imaging as a medical
technique will continue and, therefore, warrants further theoretical
inquiry, I am compelled to consider mobile-imaging as an emerging
trend in health and fitness. The general public is being invited to use
camera phones to attend to their well-being. Two internet-based
nutrition services, Nutrax and MyFoodPhone, have appeared during
the past year and a half.
404
Nutrax, in particular, identifies itself as a
―health and wellness company,‖ one of whose head nutritionists,
Leslie Bonci, has a background in ―public health [with] a focus on
health promotion, wellness and disease prevention.‖
405
I pause
momentarily in order to draw your attention to a number of words
used to describe the company and the nutritionist‘s expertise:
―health,‖ ―public health,‖ ―wellness,‖ ―health promotion.‖ It seems to
me that this series of words is suggestive of a growing emphasis on

Aging (AoA), and the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, headed
by the US Surgeon General. The HHS also works closely with the Social
Security Administration (particularly in matters dealing with Medicare). I
have provided this rather detailed enumeration of historical and
organizational facts in order to remind us of the deeply imbricated relations
between an over all interest in (public) health, the military and notions of
security, particularly as these inform notions of and concerns about
―homeland security‖ in our historical present.
404
For an article that succinctly details both services, see ―Dieting by
Camera Phone,‖ Red Herring: The Business of Technology, 3 August 2005,
26 September 2005 http://redherring.com. For information provided by
the services themselves, visit http://www.nutrax.com/welcome.shtml and
https://www.myfoodphone.com/home.aspx.
405
―Camera Phone to Help You Slim Down,‖ ByteCamera.com (24 April
2005), 24 April 2005 http://www.bytecamera.com/content/view/253/2/.
215

and circulation of the notion of health in the public sphere. Likewise,
it points to the emerging interest and investment in health
management, which involves a move toward the individual assuming
responsibility for an ―improved quality of life‖ by becoming ―expert‖ in
his/her health. With this in mind, I return to an overview of Nutrax
and MyFoodPhone.
Both sites offer nutritional guidance to health conscious people
who are willing to image (and post thumbnails of) the foods they eat.
In other words, the service provided in both instances is assisted self-
monitoring, or self-tracking (as the root, ―trax,‖ in Nutrax makes
apparent). Users log and account for their patterns in eating and
exercise via mobile-imaging. And, in the case of Nutrax, users also
―tag‖ their posted thumbnails with detailed nutritional statistics,
including food category, serving size, calories per serving, and daily
values for vitamins and minerals. Likewise, users can track their
progress by means of graphs and charts, which are compiled
according to user-selected ―goal options,‖ such as ―Live Healthier‖
and ―Condition Mgmt (diabetes, hypertension, etc.).‖ The language of
these pre-constituted ―options‖ provides insight into the logic
underlying nutritional tracking: a dual interest in wellness broadly
speaking and an administrative mode of attending to pathology (lack
of fitness being quasi-pathological, in this case). So while a user can
216

obtain ―meal-by-meal‖ feedback from a Nutrax dietician, if s/he
subscribes to Nutrax Select for $12.95/month, the aim of online
nutritional services, is widely practiced, self-administered health
maintenance.
The thumbnail images proliferated and posted to online food
logs operate substantially differently than those generated through
medical mobile-imaging. Principally, personal nutritional mobile-
imaging does not image the body as such. (They do not resemble first
or second order medical images.) Although, the body‘s presence is
encoded in the metadata borne by the thumbnails of food items: At
the very least, the date and time-stamp indicate presence of a body at
the time of imaging and subsequent posting (and, as discussed in
chapter 3 and mentioned at the start of this chapter, it is anticipated
that certain of the body‘s bioprocesses, e.g., heart rate and
temperature, will likewise become encoded to thumbnails in the near
future). The food items recorded and posted to a user‘s online food
log are metonymical for the body‘s vital processes; that is, both
ingestion and digestion are implied as being (soon to be) in process.
In this way, the thumbnails of food items materialized during mobile-
imaging index the living body, a body whose alimentary processes are
functioning, i.e., proceeding through an ever-recurring cycle of
imaging-ingesting-digesting, in which imaging anticipates ingesting
217

and digesting. And insofar as the thumbnails evidence—or, in fact,
initiate—the intake of healthy food choices (presumably in
accordance with an over all regime of healthful living), the living
body, invested in mobile-imaging, performs healthfulness through
self-monitoring. In other words, mobile-imaging must be understood
as a function of the process of healthfulness, wherein the streaming
of particular thumbnails (of food and drink) in combination with
ingestion and digestion comprises one aspect of the living process
broadly speaking. To the extent that mobile-imaging participates in
an alimentary process which is invested in health and well-being as
instituted and promoted by a program of health management, it is
simultaneously incorporated into a mode of ―healthful living.‖
Perhaps a comment regarding my use of ―healthful‖ is in order
here.
406
Ultimately, my purpose in using ―healthful‖ instead of
―healthy‖ is to underscore the fact that health as such may not be the
principle aim or goal of a system of health management. (Or, and I
contend this is also the case, ―health‖ requires significant
reformulation, particularly in relation to how the body‘s vitalities are

406
―Healthful‖ is not a neologism, since the word has been around (albeit
perhaps not in frequent circulation) since the mid- 14
th
century. My use of
it here plays upon its dissonant or discordant effect—that it sounds wrong
to the ear—in order to trouble assumptions about health and health care,
and the body that is subject of and to both.
218

understood.
407
) Instead, I am interested in the possibility (likelihood
even) that health management, insofar as it is an extension of a
broader biopolitical project of risk management, intends to manage
that which is most unpredictable in society, the life (bio-) processes—
vitalities—of populations. Mobile-imaging as a mobile mode of self-
monitoring provides the conditions of possibility for administering
these vitalities—at both the macro (social) and micro (individual)
levels of living. And what I want to argue is that mobile-imaging as
practiced in the nutritional context (as the Nutrax and MyFoodPhone
examples illustrate) becomes a lens through which to consider
mobile-imaging broadly speaking. In other words, mobile-imaging in
general—not just as occurs in the medical or nutritional context—
functions to ensure an ―optimized‖ state of life, or well-being, across
an entire population. ―Healthful living‖ is a way to begin to think
through this condition of monitoring and regulation in terms that
reveal both the aims (optimized functioning of the social body) and
the object (biological processes) of these techniques.
To the extent that ―healthful living‖ is a matter of maximizing
the vital forces and potentialities of the living body (the body in its

407
As the OED indicates, ―health‖ is a matter of the body, ―the condition in
which its functions are duly and efficiently discharged.‖ In the present
context, mobile-imaging broadly speaking constitutes one such function.
OED Online, http://www.oed.com/.
219

living), it configures life as a ―strategic enterprise,‖ to borrow a term
from Nikolas Rose.
408
In The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power
and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Rose explains that in
advanced liberal democracies, individuals are ―increasingly obligated
to formulate life strategies, to seek to maximize their life chances, to
take actions or refrain from actions in order to increase the quality of
their lives, and to act prudently in relation to themselves and to
others.‖
409
In particular, the categories of health and illness have
become vehicles for self-production and the exercise of subjectivity,
wherein condition-determining factors, such as high blood pressure,
abnormal heart rhythm, and raised blood cholesterol, have entered

408
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 107.
409
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 107. Rose introduces the term ―biological
citizen‖ to describe the individual‘s new ethical responsibility to self and
others in advanced liberal democracies. On one hand, Rose asserts,
―making up the biological citizen‖ involves reshaping how people are
understood by authorities through the constitution of new taxonomical
categories, such as ―the child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
the woman with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or the person who is
presymptomatically ill because of genetic susceptibilities‖ (The Politics of Life
Itself 140). On the other hand, biological citizens become constituted
through new forms of self-relation as practiced by people who ―use
biologically colored languages to describe aspects of themselves or their
identities, and to articulate their feelings of unhappiness, ailments, or
predicaments‖ (The Politics of Life Itself 140). Furthermore, biological
citizenship requires active participation (not the passivity and compliance of
previous forms of patienthood), which emerge out of one‘s developing
awareness of and working on his/her health status/condition, including
participation in collective efforts, projects, etc., and other biosocial
interactions (such as electronic discussion groups and websites) which
endeavor to manage conditions and disorders. But also, as Rose indicates,
these protocols simultaneously produce new kinds of ―problematic
persons—those who refuse to identify themselves with this responsible
community of biological citizens‖ (The Politics of Life Itself 147).
220

into common discourse, such that individuals use them in daily
practices of self-description and self-assessment. And increasingly,
questions of susceptibility and enhancement are beginning to
recalibrate life strategies and notions of ethical responsibility.
Considering life itself a strategic enterprise means understanding the
individual as being responsible for acquiring information concerning
his/her current condition of being, as well as any predispositions and
susceptibilities to which s/he may be prone. And in response, s/he
must take appropriate action, adjusting his/her lifestyle, diet, habits
(and we might read ―lifestyle‖ and ―habits‖ broadly here), etc., in order
to minimize illness and maximize health. Moreover, s/he is expected
to make decisions, e.g., regarding job, relationships and family, with
an eye to both his/her present and future biomedical soundness. In
other words, the ―strategic enterprise‖ of life itself—or, what I am
calling ―healthful living‖—is committed to living ―through acts of
calculation and choice,‖ such that one more fully maximizes his/her
life chances and improves his/her quality of life.
410

But Rose is careful to explain that approaching life itself as a
project—in this particular instance, a project of ―healthful living‖—is
indicative of a particular style of thought informed by new

410
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 147.
221

developments in biomedicine.
411
As such, it intervenes in how people
conceptualize themselves, how they perform the work of the self
through, for example, ―the values of autonomy, self-actualization,
prudence, responsibility, and choice.‖
412
In which case, health is
articulated through a broader complex of interconnections including
biomedical health and genetic connectedness (to personal and family
history and potential futures), to be sure, but also (and this is
significant) life activities and investments coordinated according to
networks of behaviors, interpersonal relationships and community
affiliations. It is my contention that mobile-imaging constitutes a life
activity, comprised of various networkings of the kinds just
mentioned, and whose managing is essential to a fully realized mode
of ―healthful living.‖

411
Rose defines ―style of thought‖ as a particular way of thinking, seeing
and practicing which determines what it is to explain and what there is to
explain‖ (The Politics of Life Itself 12). The style of thought Rose sees at
work in our historical present is informed by a ―postgenomic emphasis on
complexities, interactions, developmental sequences, and cascades of
regulation interacting back and forth at various points in the metabolic
pathways that lead to the synthesis of enzymes and proteins‖ (The Politics of
Life Itself 47).
412
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 125.
222

Care for the The Mobile-Imaging Body: (Self-)Monitoring and the
Articulation of Vitalities
The strategic enterprise of ―healthful living,‖ as pursued and
embodied by mobile-imaging, is a form of ―care of the self,‖ a concept
whose historical-philosophical genealogy Michel Foucault develops in
great detail in his 1981-82 lectures at the Collège de France (later
published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject) as well as The Care of
the Self.
413
―Care of oneself,‖ as Foucault indicates, is from the Greek
epimeleia heautou. ―Care of oneself, attending to oneself, being
concerned about oneself,‖ all of these are quite different from,
although not unrelated to, another Greek precept, ―know yourself,‖

413
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self. Volume 3 of The History of
Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (1984; New York: Vintage Books, 1986) and
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de
France 1981-1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (2001; New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). See also: Michel Foucault, ―About the
Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,‖
Political Theory 21:2 (May 1993) 198-227. For Foucault‘s analysis of
confession‘s (confession being an articulation of ―care of the self‖) role in
producing the truth of sex, see The History of Sexuality.
In his series of lectures, Foucault focuses on parsing through the
―unconsidered‖ or traditionally unacknowledged historical antecedents to
Western philosophy‘s concern for the relation between the subject and
truth. Ultimately, he seeks to pursue a genealogy, in which he recovers
epimeleia heautou—―care for oneself‖—as a fundamental and constitutive
precursor to gnōthi seauton—―know yourself‖—which has structured
philosophical thinking on what determines the subject‘s access to truth (as
well as where truth is to be located). What Foucault draws out is that in
dismissing epimeleia heautou, and essentializing gnōthi seauton, Western
thought has privileged the act of knowing, in and of itself. In so doing, it
has eclipsed a particular and important relation which existed in Antiquity
with epimeleia heautou; that is, a fulfilling ontological relation between
philosophy and spirituality.
223

which traditionally informs philosophical questions regarding the
subject, in particular the relation between the subject and truth.
414

Foucault traces a historico-philosophical genealogy of epimeleia
heautou, from Socrates to Epicurus to Seneca. In Antiquity, ―care of
the self‖ pursued a profound consideration of one‘s reason and truth
and the constant improvement of one‘s soul.
415
―Care of oneself,‖ as
tekhnē or artful living, was ―of continuous concern throughout
life.‖
416
It was practiced as a ―number of actions exercised on the self
by the self, actions by which one takes responsibility for oneself and
by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures
oneself.‖
417
Such actions include ―techniques of meditation, of
memorization of the past, of examination of conscience, of checking
representations which appear in the mind, and so on.‖
418
And with
Epicurus, ―care of oneself‖ acquired an administrative character, and
began to refer to medical care or therapy, the service rendered by a
servant to his master, as well as worship offered to a deity.
419
All of
these acts with respect to the self are positive, self-affirming, and
while rigorous, were assumed to transform the subject—a point

414
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 2 and 3.
415
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 6.
416
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 8.
417
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 11.
418
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 11.
419
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 9.
224

which becomes important to conceptualizing the form ―care of the
self‖ takes once it is infused through ―know yourself.‖
Foucault attributes the ―obliteration‖ of this ancient principle of
epimeleia heautou to what he calls the ―Cartesian moment,‖ which
philosophically requalified gnōthi seauton (―know thyself‖) and
discredited the epimeleia heautou (―care of the self‖).
420
The Cartesian
approach to philosophical thought identifies self-evidence, i.e.,
knowledge of self by the self, as the point of departure for accessing
truth.
421
What‘s more, the ―Cartesian moment‖ marks the beginning
of the modern age of the history of truth, wherein ―knowledge itself
and knowledge alone gives access to the truth.‖
422
No longer is there
a tie between knowledge (truth) and the ontological effects
materialized through the process of working on, elaborating, the self
essential to attaining knowledge, as was the case in Antiquity. In
this way, concrete existence, and not being as such—the
transformation thereof, is sufficient for gaining access to truth. The
consequence of this shift, Foucault explains, is that enlightenment
and fulfillment ―can no longer exist.‖
423
But also, ―Knowledge will
simply open out onto the indefinite dimension of progress, the end of

420
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 14.
421
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 14.
422
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 17.
423
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 18.
225

which is unknown and the advantage of which will only ever be
realized in the course of history by the institutional accumulation of
bodies of knowledge…‖
424

Of particular interest for me is the relation that developed
between ―care of the self‖ and confession, when, at the beginning of
the Christian era, ―know yourself‖ became a matter of confessing
oneself completely to a spiritual guide.
425
This transition initiated
what Foucault calls ―the hermeneutics of the self,‖ in which the
subject began to engage in deciphering hidden subjective data; when
he (and Foucault uses ―he‖), when he, the subject, became committed
to uncovering some truth located deep in the unconscious or soul.
Foucault explains that this tendency toward and investment in the
―analytical exploration‖ of oneself is indicative of modernity. In fact,
as Foucault asserts, ―We have since become a singularly confessing
society…one confesses one‘s crimes, one‘s sins, one‘s thoughts and
desires, one‘s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the
greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell.‖
426
And while
confession seems freeing, i.e., associated with or a function of
freedom, its production is implicated in power.
427
Confession is the

424
Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject 19.
425
Foucault, ―About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self‖ 204.
426
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 59.
427
Foucault, History of Sexuality 60.
226

―formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what
one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and
what one thinks he is not thinking.‖
428
To my mind, mobile-imaging,
likewise, responds to such an injunction to ―speak the self.‖
In the case of mobile-imaging, a modern form of ―care of the
self‖—a secularized confession of sorts—is reconstituted. No longer
just a hermeneutics, or analytical interpretation, of the self, mobile-
imaging materializes as a concerted and more intensive—because
more pervasive—attention to one‘s health and healthfulness. As part
of a project of ―healthful living,‖ mobile-imaging functions as a mode
of ―care for‖ what I have been calling the mobile-imaging body—which
is different from ―care of the self.‖ Certainly, ―caring for‖ is meant
literally, as illustrated by the examples of medical and nutritional
uses of mobile-imaging, wherein the physical body, still
conventionally (and, therefore, reductively) understood in terms of the
anatamo-physical body, is the site for the giving of care (by oneself or
another). In this regard, we might think of the anatomo-physical
body as a fleshy body, a body of the flesh. In which case, we might
also consider how, according to Foucault, the principle of the ―care of
the self‖ informing subjectivity during the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries

428
Foucault, History of Sexuality 60.
227

required that the flesh ―be mastered.‖
429
The flesh (here, understood
metonymically) was the site of contest, whereby techniques of self
and mechanisms of power worked upon the body to make it docile,
compliant. But it is not necessarily this body—of flesh, but also
organs—that is at issue in relation to the proliferation of thumbnails.
The situation has intensified: flesh is no longer a boundary; it no
longer contains the body as such. It is more appropriate, perhaps, to
liken flesh to an interface or a diaphanous membrane, both of which
suggest permeability—such that power might be said to flow in both
directions. Or, maybe we need to move beyond even a notion of the
flesh in order to provide a more effective and generative
conceptualization of how the mobile-imaging body‘s complicity with
power is maintained and ensured.
In which case, it is possible to assert that the mobile-imaging
body, mobilized to cache life and vitalized through its life-caching,
coincides with (not just makes possible) its own tracking across its
multiple and simultaneous registers of living. The flows of kinetic,
physiological and virtual vitalities generated through its bio-
processes exceed and disperse but, in so doing, also make multiply
visible the body that lives. Power‘s effects become multiplied and
generalized under these circumstances. If, as Foucault asserts, the

429
Foucault, History of Sexuality 98.
228

18
th
and 19
th
centuries saw confession become involved in speaking
―of bodies and life processes,‖ perhaps now it is a matter of bodies
and their life processes ―speaking‖ themselves.
430
And in speaking,
they reveal, not secrets per se but routines, patterns and sequences
of biological life in process. In this way, they make possible the
prediction of future trends across populations. And the possibility for
such prediction provides the means for assessing risk and, thereby,
securing ―wellness‖ for a people. The various trajectories of intensity
and force which comprise the mobile-imaging body (or, what I will
refer to as the body-in-relation) are what mobilize it as a relay in the
circulation of power. This is ―healthful living.‖ And these vitalities are
the very instance of—our thumbnails (digital images and biological
material) providing the means for—an ongoing triangulation between
biology, information and security.

430
Foucault, History of Sexuality 64. (My emphasis.)
229

CONCLUSION: THE BODY-IN-RELATION: ON LIVING ONE’S VITALITIES

Mobile-imaging and its proliferation of thumbnails invite us to
think (and think about) the body differently. But beyond thinking the
body differently, the ceaseless and bifurcating streaming of
thumbnails, and all that this entails and implies, necessitates that we
begin to live the body differently. But what is this body? And how is
it to be understood and recognized? How is it to be lived? The body
of which I write is another body, a biomolecular, neurochemical and
biotechnical body: it is a body-in-relation. By ―body-in-relation,‖ I
mean a body whose biological processes are immanent to, in
symbiosis with its bio-logical processes. Moreover, I mean a body as
ongoing and living articulation, across various linkages,
transactions—that is, vitalities, which exceed, i.e., overflow, the body
as such. It is a body never stilled, a body whose ―parts‖ never cohere
into a discrete whole. Thinking in such terms, i.e., of bio-processes,
of vitalities, of articulating trajectories of living, allows for a
consideration of, not only how the body-in-relation is constituted, but
also how it circulates (in and through) power. More importantly,
though, it invites thinking that looks beyond the workings and
trappings of power and moves toward, or rather, becomes a way of
living.
230

Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb are helpful in beginning to
conceptualize the body-in-relation in its plasticity and malleability as
a dynamic articulation.
431
In their essay, ―On the Subject of Neural
and Sensory Prostheses,‖ they consider the reorganization (or what
might better be termed de-organization) of the body as made possible
by new notions of the nervous system (emerging in the 1980s and
1990s) and new technologies (neural prostheses), which intervene in
the functions of the body at the level of the nerves—not the organs.
Taking Deleuze and Guattari‘s ―body without organs‖
432
as a point of
departure (and return), they provide an account of the intrasubjective
changes sustained by neural prostheses, changes which map the
body differently. They argue that the body, within the context of
neural prostheses, becomes understood as nervous system—no
longer a body constituted by organs as such. They give the example

431
Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, ―On the Subject of Neural and
Sensory Prostheses,‖ The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a
Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006) 125-154.
432
Deleuze and Guattari‘s ―body without organs‖ is a seductive model for
conceptualizing the body-in-relation. Their invocation of ―conjugated flows‖
(161), ―passages and distributions of intensities‖ (160) and, more generally,
―lines of flight‖ (161) speaks to what I refer to as vitalities, dynamic flows
which articulate across various transactions and linkages of living. And,
too, their assertion that the ―body without organs‖ is not opposed to bodily
organs as such but to ―that organization of the organs called the organism‖
(158) is precisely what I am interested in pursuing, for I am convinced that
the body comprised of bounded organs is a limited conception of the body.
See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002).
231

of sight being relocated to the tongue and distributed across a system
of camera, computer and brain, by means of cross-sensory service
networking. Given this (re)distribution of the sensory apparatus, the
body becomes a synesthetic body, its sites of sensory experience
might very well be relocated to and/or dispersed across unexpected
locations of the body. As illustrative of the body-in-relation,
Cartwright and Goldfarb‘s neurally organized body emphasizes the
interconstitutive character of living. Not simply a body that lives, but
a body that lives only through the reciprocally (inter-) constituted
networking of its appendages (or organs), its nervous system and the
technologies with which it engages.
In related fashion, Rose explains the body in terms of
contemporary biological thinking, as exemplified by systems biology
and synthetic biology, which understands the body as a matter of a
―field of open circuits.‖
433
Such thinking does not re-institute and
reify a logic of depth but, instead, plays out through a model of
flatness. Whereas the 19
th
century biology of depth sought to
understand the ―deep structure that causes or determines‖ life as
such, contemporary biological endeavor considers life itself in terms
of surfaces constituted by relays and nonhierarchical, ramifying

433
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and
Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007) 15.
232

processes, which articulate through networks, filiations and
connections.
434
(It is not mere coincidence that Rose also cites
Deleuze.) As such, the body becomes the site of an ontological shift
in which vitality becomes a matter of surfaces and associations, not
depths and determinations. Rose‘s principle example of this
happening is what he calls the ―neurochemical self,‖ which emerges
as a result of a convergence of psychological function and organic
structure. Here, the functional (mind) is very much a matter of the
structural (brain): ―Mind is simply what the brain, does [sic].‖
435

Rose refers to this convergence of function and structure as a
―flattening out‖ of what was once considered a ―deep psychological
space.‖
436
What has transpired in this ―flattening‖ is that behavior,
once thought to inhabit ―inaccessible interiors and dark or hidden
recesses‖ of the body (the brain, to be exact), and which required
―excavation‖ (by means of dissection and visual microscopy—or
psychoanalysis, etc.), is now attributable to neurochemistry, i.e.,
―neurons, synapses, membranes, receptors, ion channels,
neurotransmitters, enzymes.‖
437
Under these circumstances, the
body is really a body-in-relation, that is, a manifestation of its bio-

434
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 130.
435
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 192.
436
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 192.
437
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself 220.
233

processes, not deeply structured interiors comprised of organs and
neatly delineated architectures.
In re-imagining of the body in terms of the nervous system and
bio-processes (simultaneously biological and bio-logical), that is, in
shifting the terms by which the body is known—from fleshy folds and
interiors to distributions and relays, Cartwright/Goldfarb and Rose
release the body (so to speak) from a constrictive model of the
anatomo-physical body. It is just such a move I want to suggest in
proposing the body-in-relation. What the case of mobile-imaging
invites us to recognize is that the body-in-relation is a body
comprised of a number of vitalities—kinetic, physiological, virtual—
which multiply the body across different domains of living. It is a
material body, one which moves through physical space and is in
direct contact with a mobile-imaging device (or what I have also
termed mobile screenic device, or MSD); it is a biological body,
comprised of various automatic (nonconscious) vital processes, many
of which (heart rate, pulse, body temperature) may eventually be
encoded on thumbnails; it is a virtual body, an ever-expanding
articulated corpus of images (including thumbnails), statistics and
information whose various trajectories proliferate and disperse the
body. Ultimately, the body-in-relation is a living system, a complex
articulation of flows, vitalities which proliferate beyond the body as
234

such. In other words, the body-in-relation is a ―body‖ that spreads
out along a flat plane of multiple and diverse trajectories.
The body-in-relation, in being a living system of articulating
vitalities—and not a fleshy body of organs in contact—means that it
is no longer possible to think power separately from the body and its
living. And asserting the body‘s complicity, while certainly the case,
does not adequately specify how power and the body engage and are
mutually amplified through their engagement. If the body is a body-
in-relation, then power transpires in and through the bio-processes—
processes which are simultaneously, that is, symbiotically, biological
and bio-logical—that constitute the body-in-relation in its living.
This is not a matter of internalization. It is not the case that an
external force of power (a surveillant gaze) is turned inward and made
subjective (and manifest as a vigilant self-scrutiny). Instead, power is
made part of, made one with the body-in-relation: power is
incorporated. And being so, it is dispersed across various modalities
of living. The material-kinetic, biological body, with mobile-imaging
device in hand, epitomizes this condition of existence.
But while it is certainly important to acknowledge the shifting
terms by which the body as the body-in-relation is implicated in and
participates in power, it is likewise crucial to consider how such a
body lives, how it might inhabit its vitality and its vitalities. Here, I
235

(re)turn to Karen Barad and her notion of intra-action in order to
suggest that the body-in-relation live its vitalities intra-actively.
438
In
other words, living is not conveniently separable into a body
(comprised of determinate form and animating functions attributable
to various organs or combinations thereof) and the life that body
lives; the living lived by the body-in-relation does not transpire in
grammatical fashion as a body [that] lives, a subject and predicate.
Rather, from a perspective informed by intra-action, the body-in-
relation lives its living in and as process, as phenomenon. Recall
that a phenomenon, as Barad defines it, is ―the ontological
inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‗components,‘‖ wherein ―intra-
acting‖ indicates that there is no ―prior existence of independent
entities‖ but, instead, separability into determinate entities is enacted
locally and at each moment.
439
Always, then, the body-in-relation is
an ongoing enacting, a living which is instantiated through various
vitalities which come to be particular trajectories of force or pulsion
in the moment, at each moment, of living. They, themselves, are
articulating phenomena, their particularities as vital signs (and vital

438
Karen Barad, ―Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter,‖ Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 28.3 (2003) 801-831.
439
Barad 815.
236

signals) only materialized intra-actively, i.e., through the ―doing‖ that
is living.
At this point, I want to call attention to my use of the
subjunctive mode in the preceding paragraph, i.e., my suggesting
that the body-in-relation live (without an ―s‖) intra-actively. I do so in
order to emphasize that I am not simply attempting to describe the
body-in-relation in its living but am urging that the body-in-relation
assume a particular (intra-)relation to its living. The modal tense,
then, strives to make a recommendation regarding how the body-in-
relation ought to live, how it ought to install itself in its living.
Essentially, this is to assert that intra-action, as a mode of living,
constitutes an ethics, a way of being. Certainly, the ethical has been
implied throughout the dissertation as a potentiality. The various
references to Barad, Elizabeth Grosz and Henri Bergson have borne
with them overtones of the ethical, to the extent that each
philosopher posits her/his project in ethical terms. Barad‘s
advocating for an onto-epistem-ology, i.e., knowing in being, for
example, is a recognition of the fact that ―‗we‘ are of the world‖ and,
therefore, our practices of knowledge and our being are mutually
implicated; and they are so in the differential becoming that is the
237

world.
440
To position ourselves outside dynamic intra-action (to
assume that such an outside exists or is possible—an arrogance, to
be sure) is to effect a violent severing of ourselves from what is most
material, i.e. what matters most, to our being. Similarly, Grosz‘s call
for ―developing an acquaintance with things,‖ which draws from
Bergson‘s notion of intuition,
441
is a matter of refusing an intellect
which cannot or does not attend to ―the unique particularity of
things, their constitutive interconnections, and the time within which
things exist.‖
442
In other words, acquaintance and intuition, like
intra-action, insist that we return ourselves to the fullness and

440
Barad 829. (Emphasis in original.)
441
For Bergson, intuition is a particular kind of knowledge which ―leads‖
toward ―the very inwardness of life‖ (176); it is a particular mode of
intelligence, a philosophy, which ―[turns] the mind homeward,‖ such that
human consciousness coincides with ―the living principle whence it
emanates‖ (369-370). It accomplishes this by establishing a ―sympathetic
communication‖ between ―us and the rest of the living‖ and, thereby, invites
an expansion of our consciousness such that we are introduced ―into life‘s
own domain, which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued
creation‖ (178). In other words, intuition is the capacity to ―[break] down‖
the barrier—the space between observer and observed, subject and object—
instantiated by intellect. It is that which ―[enables] us to grasp what it is
that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate the means of supplementing
it‖ (177). According to Grosz, intuition is ―Akin to an
aesthetic…understanding,‖ a ―close, intimate, internal comprehension of
and immersion in the durational qualities of life‖ (Nick of Time 234). See:
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1998[1911]); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time:
Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
442
Grosz, ―The Thing,‖ Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and
Real Space, foreward Peter Eisenman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2001) 183.
238

interconnectedness of the world, and a living in-relation which this
enables.
The question of how to live—how one ought to live—finds
response in the immanent potential to live in-relation. Gilles
Deleuze‘s Spinozist ethology allows for elaboration: ―how to live‖ is a
matter of ―slip[ping] in among things.‖
443
In ―Ethology: Spinoza and
Us,‖ Deleuze explains that ―The important thing is to understand life,
each living individuality…as a complex relation between differential
velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles.‖
444
It is
speed and slowness, i.e., the mode by which one ―takes up or lays
down rhythms,‖ which installs one in the midst of living.
445
This is
because velocities, i.e., acceleration and deceleration, are constitutive
of the body and thought; but so, too, are affectivities constitutive of
the body and thought. It is ―the arrangements of motions and
affects‖ into which a body (a thing) enters—and not its form or
functions—which define it as a body (a thing).
446
Thus, how to live is
a matter of being attuned to these arrangements of velocities and
affectivities, for it is in the combination—or, composition (a word
Deleuze uses in reference to music)—of relations, capacities,

443
Gilles Deleuze, ―Ethology: Spinoza and US,‖ Incorporations, eds.
Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992) 626.
444
Deleuze, ―Ethology‖ 626.
445
Deleuze, ―Ethology‖ 626.
446
Deleuze, ―Ethology‖ 627.
239

thresholds, amplitudes, variations and transformations that one
comes to know the body. But this knowing is not a knowing
beforehand (as in a rational-empirical knowing); rather, it is a
knowing in its becoming, in its being lived. Knowing, in this case, in
its being an attunement with (a la Grosz
447
), can only proceed as an
intuitive awareness of the body in its being lived as an articulation of
metabolisms, perceptions, actions and reactions, impulses,
intensities and attractions.
448
Which is to say, the modality of
attunement always transpires as a living in-relation to the kinetics
and dynamics of the body as a body-in-relation.
Shifting the terms just slightly, attunement might also be
understood as an engaged attentiveness to the multiplicity of
vitalities generative and supportive (i.e., sustaining) of life itself.
Being attuned, then, involves developing an intuitive awareness to
the speeds and slowness of the kinetic body, the acceleration and
decelerations vivifying the physiological body, but also the ebbing and
flowing corpus of thumbnails proliferated via mobile-imaging. In
which case, the work that the thumbnail image does is significantly
changed. Not only do thumbnail images, in their bifurcating streams,

447
Grosz, ―Thing‖ 183.
448
I have taken liberties with what Deleuze actually writes: ―The speed or
slowness of metabolisms, perceptions, actions and reactions link together to
constitute a particular individual in the world‖ (―Ethology‖ 628).
240

reveal patterns, sequences and rhythms in living, and not only might
they indicate velocities (heart rate, pulse, temperature, etc.)
propelling the body as such, but also they open onto affectivities, i.e.,
capacities to affect and be affected, whose range vastly extends
beyond the kinetic, biological body. For streaming thumbnails are
dispersed widely, across a variety of networking lines of circulation.
Thus, an ethics of attunement must likewise distribute itself in order
to reach beyond the body‘s more proximate vitalities. An ethics of
attunement as potentiated via the thumbnail image must pursue an
acquaintance with the various bio-logical lines of life initially
proliferated as a result of the body‘s being in-relation to technology,
e.g., mobile screenic device, and whose continued dynamism—in time
and space—is enabled by the articulatory forces of social-networking.
Such an acquaintance or attunement emerges out of and is sustained
by means of a mode of living which transpires in-relation to a global
array of virtual vitalities which have the potential to ―live‖ on toward
(if not into) the future. Memory, history, potentiality are all bound up
in the bio-logical, its kinetics, its dynamism, but also its
ephemerality. The body-in-relation will need to orient its living in
response to this condition; it will need to attune itself—and its
thumbnails—accordingly.
241

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Asset Metadata

Creator Cooley, Heidi Rae (author)

Core Title The body and its "thumbnails": the work of the image in mobile-imaging

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 06/27/2007

Defense Date 05/25/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag autobiographical impulse,biopolitics,body-in-relation,mobile screenic device,OAI-PMH Harvest,philosophy of new media and technology,vitalities

Language English

Advisor Friedberg, Anne (committee chair), Balsamo, Anne (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email hcooley@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m554

Unique identifier UC1162043

Identifier etd-Cooley-20070627 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-511216 (legacy record id),usctheses-m554 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Cooley-20070627.pdf

Dmrecord 511216

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cooley, Heidi Rae

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu