Looking back at the last words I spoke as we wrapped up the artist talk with Nayoung Kang this past April at Pureun Jidae Creative Studio, they were not crystal clear in my memory, but I believe they went something like this: “It seems to me that Nayoung Kang is not solely focused on the materiality of the body itself, but is rather more interested in the complex psychology one feels when the body fails to function properly. She also reveals the thoughts and sensations evoked by the forms of mechanical devices used to replace bodily functions. In this sense, her interests intersect with my own research topics, and I think we will be able to have interesting conversations going forward.” Yes, I think I will take this space as an opportunity to continue that final remark.

Which means, oddly enough, I must confess upfront that this piece may well have an audience of only one—the artist Nayoung Kang herself. It may seem rather strange for a curator’s text, written as part of a critique program, to have only the artist as its sole intended reader. But that is precisely the case, because I am not writing this to explain Kang’s art—its forms, methods, value, or interpretation—to someone else. This text refuses to be the kind of discursive exercise that much art criticism tends to be: excavating the conceptual layers that a given work might double, overlap, or multiply in representation, to unearth the abstract beyond. Instead, this text is intended to weave together the artist’s body and the world she faces in a discourse–material manner. I will set aside the caution and carefulness one usually exercises when evaluating artworks. In their place, I will pursue unfiltered chains of association, crudely stitching together quotations and a noisy imagination, to the point where the tone may feel almost nagging—an insistent proposal.

These days I have been using Science and Technology Studies (STS) as a compass, focusing in particular on critical posthumanism among its many strands. As you might expect, scholars who speak of the “posthuman” or “posthumanism” are far from united in perspective or vision. My own intellectual identity as a posthuman researcher is being shaped on the foundation of critical posthumanism—one that seeks to dismantle and move beyond the Western modern concept of “the human,” in other words, “humanism” and “anthropocentrism.” When thinking about where to begin in talking about “the body” with Nayoung Kang, I decided it might be best to start with the concept of “enactivism” in the framework of embodied cognition, which is often referred to as second-generation cognitive science. In the mid- to late 20th century, cognitive science rapidly emerged as an interdisciplinary endeavor to study the mind and cognition empirically.

If you look at Gregory Bateson’s work, for example, you can quickly see how, at that time, research on the mind served as a pioneering model for interdisciplinary and integrative scholarship. Cognitive science was a discipline aimed at scientifically investigating the mind, an entity that is not directly visible. Researchers from various academic backgrounds sought to explain the mind through shared concepts such as representation and computation. For instance, they would argue that our thought processes are like formal logical systems, manipulating symbols according to syntactic rules in a computational process. Personally, I find this line of thought entirely unconvincing. This traditional approach is often called computationalist cognitive science. This way of thinking was also applied to artificial intelligence research: under the grand ambition of creating “thinking machines,” it claimed that our consciousness is fundamentally akin to computation and its mechanisms. The problem is that such thinking pushed cognitive science toward a disembodied orientation.

From the 1990s onward, dissenting voices began to emerge. Karen Barad, for example, criticized representationalism for assuming that the knowing subject and the world are separate, with representations mediating between them. She pointed out that, at the level of phenomena, the subject and the object-world are not separate, yet representationalism presupposes them as independently existing. I agree with the view that representationalism is problematic because it treats matter as a passive entity that can be inscribed by external factors like culture or history. Let us recall the arguments of Foucault and Butler. They captured, with sharp insight, the performativity of discourse—how discursive power produces bodies that matter, bodies that are recognizable and meaningful. However, such arguments risk overlooking the concrete processes of materialization or embodiment, leading to an understanding in which abstract discourse is “inscribed” or “imprinted” onto matter/body as if from the outside.

Barad’s critique is that Foucault and Butler fail to adequately address these concrete processes of materialization and therefore cannot fully explain the relationship between discourse and matter. In response, the concept proposed as an alternative—one that takes anti-representationalism as its central principle—is enactivism. When I think of this concept, I recall Francisco Varela and his collaborators’ book The Embodied Mind. Varela and his colleagues opposed the traditional computationalist and representationalist cognitive sciences, and they introduced the term enactive to emphasize their conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind, but rather the “enactment” of mind and world—grounded in the history of actions performed by a being situated in the world (Varela et al., 42).

So how is it that particular actions of an organism situated in an environment continuously bring about specific structural linkages among certain neurons? Neuroscience offers the concept of neuroplasticity to explain this mechanism. But if we pursue this thread too far, it will become overly complex, so I’ll rein in the discussion here. We don’t need to go deep into neuroscience to make the point I want to make. If we were speaking face to face right now, this is the moment I would take a sip of coffee. Aesthetician Asa Ito states that the bodily rules we acquire through experience are akin to an ultimate “local rule.” She adds that such bodily local rules constitute the locality—that is, the uniqueness—of a person’s body (Ito, 2020:15). Can the field of cognitive science, as I have discussed so far, fully account for such uniqueness? Studies such as “research on blind people” or “research on people who stutter” can certainly be addressed in the sciences through universal and rational methodologies.

However, a study framed as “research on Mr. A” alone would be insufficient (Ito, 17). Ito’s book is a collection of writings intended to talk about the overwhelming uniqueness of the body—uniqueness that cannot be sufficiently conveyed through the achievements of scientific fields like cognitive science. In this book, twelve people with disabilities recount memories of their unique bodies. They have conditions such as visual impairment, limb amputation, paralysis, stuttering, or spina bifida (CIDP). To reveal the bodily uniqueness of each individual, Ito narrates, in concrete detail, the bodily events shaped by their memories. For example, consider Nishijima Rena, one of the people Ito met. Although she is completely blind, she has a habit of taking notes during conversations. Having lost her sight later in life, she retained the note-taking habit from her sighted years even a decade after becoming blind. Ito describes the life of a person with an acquired disability who lives in a body imprinted with the memory of a non-disabled body, using the expression “multiple bodies” (Ito, 20) rather than “multiple personalities.” Such pluralization of the body can also be seen in the case of Genta Gambara, who was born with spina bifida. Genta’s upper body moves like that of a healthy person, but his lower body, lacking sensation, cannot move.

He thus lives with two entirely different kinds of bodies—another form of bodily pluralization (Ito, 21). Not long ago, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by SF novelist Choyeop Kim. That day, Kim briefly spoke about touch. She mentioned someone she knows whose mood is directly linked to tactile sensations: the texture of wood makes them feel drowsy, while the touch of glass sharpens their mood. This phenomenon also occurs during contact with another person’s body, meaning that physical touch with certain individuals can evoke unexpected emotions, intended or not. The idea that one’s mood can be so easily swayed by touch seems exhausting just to imagine. Fortunately, this person developed a unique way to manage their body: they made a pendant from a material whose texture always lifts their mood, and they wear it around their neck. Whenever abrupt mood shifts occur during everyday interactions, they can touch the pendant to maintain emotional balance.

Wouldn’t this, too, be another example of what Ito calls the ultimate local rule of the body? When I saw Nayoung Kang’s work for the fist bump, I also thought that the fist-bump greeting might be a process of forming a local rule unique to that particular body.

Just like the mood-lifting pendant, the body’s ultimate local rules can also be formed in conjunction with devices. In more technical terms, these are called prostheses. The word comes from Greek, and interestingly, its original meaning was “to add a syllable at the beginning of a word.” In English, the term evolved to be used in medicine, meaning “to replace a missing part of the body with an artificial substitute.” The metaphorical shift from “adding a syllable” to “adding to the body” is fascinating. Today, prosthesis discourse has expanded beyond the medical field into various interdisciplinary studies, producing research under keywords like prosthesis aesthetics and prosthesis subaltern (Jeon, 2015:17).

Whenever I think about prostheses, one story comes to mind: the “Riddle of the Sphinx.” In his remarkable work How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn re-poses the Sphinx’s famous question: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” As we know, Oedipus answered “human” and escaped peril. Kohn argues that if “human” is truly the correct answer, it forces us to fundamentally reconsider what it means to be human.

He writes: “It reminds us of our two inheritances—our quadrupedal animality and our bipedal humanity—and of all the ‘canes’ we create and integrate into ourselves to hobble through our finite lives.” (Kohn, 2018:19)

In modern thought, a cane was certainly an object, an instrument, something external. Yet in the Sphinx’s question and Oedipus’s answer, the humanity of the “three-legged human” already includes the cane. In the orbit of posthumanist thought, the cane can thus acquire an entirely different conceptual status. But rather than discussing this in purely discursive terms, I want to think about the relationship between prostheses and the body in another way. From the perspective of the enactive body mentioned earlier, how can the enactment of mind—formed through the materiality of the cane and the bodily experiences it shapes—be narrated?

Even if we were to analyze the mechanisms of neuroplasticity, I suspect it would still feel insufficient. Perhaps this very frustration is why Ito chose to meet people directly and listen to their most intimate, subtle stories. These days, I have become increasingly interested in what are called anthropological or ethnographic research methods. Instead of narratives that blur events, universalize memories, or abstract experiences, I want to vividly convey the local rules of the body as they are formed through experiences and events.

At the end of her prologue, Ito writes: “The process by which an event with a date gradually loses that date, eventually forming the body’s uniqueness through local rules; the process by which experiences both coexist with and do not coexist with memories—in other words, the eleven narratives through which the body is made—are what I will now unfold.” (Ito, 22)

I believe Nayoung Kang understands better than anyone what it means for an event with a date to gradually lose that date. When I reread this sentence while writing this text, I could not help but see Kang’s image overlapping with it—today, too, exchanging a fist bump somewhere. Now, let’s move on to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and disability studies. STS views science, technology, society, and culture not as separate domains, but as a totality of interconnected, complex contexts.

In everyday conversation, we often use phrases like “That’s very scientific.” When differing opinions clash, ideas deemed “scientific” are often accorded higher value. This is likely because science is commonly regarded as objective, neutral, and context-free—akin to an absolute truth. But STS scholars break down these assumptions, exposing the power relations involved in the production of technological knowledge. At one time, I had the opportunity to read widely among feminist STS scholars. Immersing myself in feminist STS literature was a transformative experience—I can say my life, perspectives, and thinking changed entirely. Feminist STS researchers such as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Carolyn Merchant—and, as mentioned earlier, Karen Barad—along with Katherine Hayles, who reconstructed cybernetics theory while warning against the erasure of embodiment, all stand in this lineage of feminist STS.

In the beginning, their inquiries often started with questions like, “Why are there so many fewer women scientists than men?”—critiquing women’s social achievement within science. Over time, however, their work came to meticulously examine how gender hierarchies have influenced the formation of technological knowledge. Reading feminist STS naturally broadens one’s thinking to include issues of race, gender, and disability. From the perspective of disability studies, STS can question the medical history that has constructed knowledge about disability in ableist terms—in other words, viewing disability as a target for correction and cure. It can also imagine a disability-centered science and technology.

For example, in Technofeminism, Judy Wajcman points out that what we call “the social” has been shaped and constrained as much by the technological as by the social itself (Wajcman, 2009:66). This idea resonates with the work of STS scholars who argue that material objects and technological artifacts are socially constructed. I believe these two perspectives are mutually entangled: society is formed through material objects and technological artifacts, and those objects and artifacts are themselves socially constituted. We must avoid discussing the world solely on a discursive level or understanding it purely in terms of material agency. We need to consider the full range of complex agencies—human and nonhuman—that have shaped and been shaped by each other in the processes of formation and composition. So how can we simultaneously address the linguistic-discursive epistemologies that have shaped the concept of disability and the agency of nonhuman entities, including prostheses? Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory might offer some clues here.

In Becoming a Cyborg, co-authors Choyeop Kim and Wonyoung Kim introduce the concept of “crip technoscience.” Kim explains that the Korean equivalent of “crip” would be “bulgu” (literally “cripple”), a term historically used to disparage people with disabilities. The term is reclaimed here as an act of repossessing the power of naming (Kim, 2021:185). Crip technoscience resists the structure in which disabled people must passively accept the knowledge outputs produced by nondisabled experts (Kim, 186). Instead, it focuses on how disabled people, within the specificity of their own embodied experiences, can reconstruct everyday technologies and reconfigure the world (Kim, 188). Thus, their declarations are not merely discursive but grounded in concrete practices. They aim to reconceptualize the narratives of prosthetic technologies arising from the body of a specific person—not through an ableist, depoliticized lens, but as tools of disability politics.

Then, what role can visuality play in this? Vision is a sense endowed with immense power—perhaps more than any other sensory modality—and is overladen with humanity’s cultural heritage. If we were to make a leap, we could say that the hegemony of imagery is condensed into a nondisabled, male-centered literacy. How, then, can we reclaim that visual hegemony in a way that is anything but naïve? Immersed in this chain of thought, I can’t help but become industrious—there is so much work to do. I find myself literally shifting in my seat, spurring myself onward. This sense of urgency, too, stems from Nayoung Kang’s work and from the conversation we shared that day. So I ask for your understanding if my words here have spilled out like water from a broken dam. I did spend days worrying about whether my words might overwhelm you, but I hope you’ll be able to pick out a few meaningful threads from this tangled skein. I will end my proposal here, while looking forward to someday receiving your response—whether in the exhibition space or in a casual setting, and whether in the form of image, material, or words. And I hope that, in responding and replying in our own ways, we will form our own unique rule…


፠Texts cited in this piece are as follows:
Gregory Bateson, trans. Park Dae-sik, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chaek Sesang, 2006.
Choyeop Kim & Wonyoung Kim, Becoming a Cyborg, Saegaejeol, 2021.
Michel Foucault, trans. Jung Il-jun, Theories of Power, Saemulgyeol, 1994.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Korean trans. Human·Thing·Alliance), Ieum, 2010.
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think, Sawolui Chaek, 2018.
Asa Ito, trans. Kim Kyung-won, The Remembering Body, Hyunamsa, 2020.
Hye-sook Jeon, Art in the Posthuman Era, Acanet, 2015.
Judy Wajcman, trans. Park Jin-hee & Lee Hyun-sook, Technofeminism, Kungri, 2009.
Judith Butler, trans. Kim Yoon-sang, Bodies That Matter, Ingan Sarang, 2003.
Katherine Hayles, trans. Heo Jin, How We Became Posthuman, Open Books, 2013.
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch, trans. Seok Bong-rae, The Embodied Mind, Gimmyoung, 2013.
Karen Barad, “Agential Realism,” Meeting the Universe Halfway, Duke University Press, 2007.
 

1 I acknowledge my debt to Naso-yeong’s unpublished paper, Foregrounding the Process of Discursive Practice’s Materialization from a Neurocognitive Dimension – From the Perspective of Enactive Embodiment, for clarifying the context and differences between traditional computationalist cognitive science and second-generation cognitive science.

References

• [비평] 담론-물질적 신체에 관한 제언
  [Critique] A Proposal on the Discourse–Material Body)