Josh Berson - Computable Bodies: Instrumented Life and the Human Somatic Niche

Computable Bodies

ADVANCES IN SEMIOTICS

Semiotics has complemented linguistics by expanding its scope beyond the phoneme and the sentence to include texts and discourse, and their rhetorical, performative, and ideological functions. It has brought into focus the multimodality of human communication. Advances in Semiotics publishes original works in the field demonstrating robust scholarship, intellectual creativity, and clarity of exposition. These works apply semiotic approaches to linguistics and nonverbal productions, social institutions and discourses, embodied cognition and communication, and the new virtual realities that have been ushered in by the Internet. It also is inclusive of publications in relevant domains such as socio-semiotics, evolutionary semiotics, game theory, cultural and literary studies, human-computer interactions, and the challenging new dimensions of human networking afforded by social websites.

Series Editor : Paul Bouissac is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto (Victoria College), Canada. He is a world renowned figure in semiotics and a pioneer of circus studies. He runs the SemiotiX Bulletin [ www.semioticon.com/semiotix ] which has a global readership.

Titles in the Series:

A Buddhist Theory of Semiotics , Fabio Rambelli

A Semiotics of Smiling , Marc Mehu

Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics , Tony Jappy

Semiotics of Drink and Drinking , Paul Manning

Semiotics of Happiness , Ashley Frawley

Semiotics of Religion , Robert Yelle

The Language of War Monuments , David Machin and Gill Abousnnouga

The Semiotics of Che Guevara , Maria-Carolina Cambre

The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning , Paul Bouissac

The Visual Language of Comics , Neil Cohn

In memory of Riki Kuklick

Computable Bodies

Instrumented life and the human somatic niche

JOSH BERSON

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Toward the end of winter in 2012 I broke my foot. This was a stress fracture, the cumulative effect of cyclic loading stress over a long season of running uphill on a treadmill three mornings a week. It had been a mild winter by Berlin standards, but the previous weeks had seen a cold snap, and I was scheduled to present a paper the following week, and my personal life had become needlessly baroque. It occurred to me that Friday morning, the second of March, that I should do something that required less concentration than running. When, at 3912 I had to stop with an unusual pain in my right foot, I viewed it as an annoyance. My foot was swollen and tender but not especially painful. I taped it, took arnica, gave my paper, and went to Paris for a short break, where I hobbled around pretending my foot was improving and practiced at a favorite yoga studio. It was seventeen days before I was diagnosed with an MTII stress fracture ( ).

At the time, on top of running, I was lifting weights three days a week and practicing yoga just about every day. In the face of an absurdly cerebral professional life, I invested a lot of effort in staying active. Two years earlier, I had gone through a major depression, my second. When I recovered, I found that the cyclic dimension of my mood had become more pronounced and more episodic. The manic periods lasted weeks and took on an erotic cast, leaving me depleted and irritated in a way reminiscent of erogenous stimulation that has gone on too long. Vigorous movement kept all this in check. It was my main strategy for keeping sane. The nine-plus weeks I would spend on crutches felt like a gaping hole opening up before me.

This was, lets be clear, a minor injury. No one had any doubt I would recover completely. But having my capacity for movement frustrated provoked a deep anxiety in me. More than that: it provoked a deep uncertainty about who I was and how I manifested in the world. Eleven years of practicing and occasionally teaching yoga had primed me to appreciate how kinesthesis, the awareness we have of movement in our own bodies and others, shapes us as phenomenal and social beings. But twelve weeks of enforced attention to how I distributed my weight as I stood, walked, and reached made kinesthesis salient in a way few experiences could. It was when I broke my foot that I started to think about the relationship between movement and awareness in a rigorous way.