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DAVID ENG & DAVID KAZANIJIAN

Eng and Kazanijian’s introduction to the collection of essays, 'Loss', expresses the intention to configure absence as a potential presence. This aim derives from a Benjaminian evaluation of and attention to remains and traces - those material presences that indicate that the past is never fully absent, albeit neither fully present. They argue: 'if loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains - how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained.' (Eng/Kazanijian, 2003: ix)

For Eng and Kazanijian, the term 'loss' - and thus we might say, 'absence' - is a theoretical fiction. There is no thing, they imply, that vanishes without trace.


KATHERINE HAYLES

N. Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics that as soon as we enter the field of the Virtual ´questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage in this situation, for the avatar both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside the screen.´ (Hayles, 1999: 27) Instead, she proposes a paradigmatic shift, since the ´technologies of virtual reality, with their potential for full-body mediation, (…) foreground pattern and randomness and make presence and absence seem irrelevant.´ (ibid.: 26) Through the development of information technologies ´the interplay between pattern and randomness became a feature of everyday life.´ (ibid.: 25) In other words, information is ´pattern rather than presence, defined by the probability distribution of the coding elements composing the message. If information is pattern, then noninformation should be the absence of pattern, that is, randomness.´ (ibid.: 25)


JOHN WOOD

‘However, in referring to embodiment we must be cautious. The idea of privileging bodily presence in the static sense would be problematic if it were to reinforce the infamous mind and body dualism that has dogged the Western mindset for several centuries. This would be contrary to our intentions. Arguably, the word ‘body’ is more than a concrete noun, and when we speak of ‘embodying’ information we try to emphasis action and practice. We do so to acknowledge that the individual mind is not merely the internal workings of a small blob of matter known as the ‘brain’ but to suggest that it is – in scientific terms – part of the general continuum of space-time. We may understand the acquisition of knowledge or, more subjectively, ‘wisdom’, as an insight into what we are, in our ‘becoming’, as human beings. In this sense we could also think of individual embodiment as an aspect of our general predicament in the changing present.‘ (Wood, 1998: 1f)


JON ERICKSON

‘the tension between the image and object, between the actor and the role, is what gives performance in the theater its measure of power …. To go in the opposite direction, the tension between the body as object and the body as sign gives birth to an awareness of presence as the tension between basic corporeal being and the becoming of signification. The inevitable figuration that is at the center of theater practices challenges a literalizing consciousness through the incorrigible frisson of sign and body. “Presence” in the theater is a physicality in the present that at the same time is grounded in a form of absence. It is something that has unfolded, is read against what has been seen, and presently observed in expectation as to what will be seen. It means that the performer is presenting herself to the audience, but at the same time holding something back, creating expectation. (…) In other words, not only does the notion of presence in performance imply an absence, but that absence itself is the possibility of future movement; so paradoxically, presence is based not only in the present, but in our expectation of the future.’ (Erickson, 1998: 62)


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