So it seems the four bodies are telegraph, radio, tv, and digital, and the mystery body is the interplay among them. Why no print body (which we are still experiencing as residue)… ?
I responded:
It’s an important question which I’ve been answering since the late 90s.
They go like this:
1. “telegraph,” – Chemical Body: telegraph and newspaper/printed book (Claude Bernard {19th C} and the beginning of modern science which dominates across the planet with the patriarchal/left-hemisphered Global Village, image/contents of the description of our “Physical Body”).
2. Astral Body – all cultures have one
3. “radio, tv,” – TV Body
4. “digital,” – Chip Body
5. “the mystery body” – iONdom
Our communication environments from the printing press on were layered over and through our older linguistic environments. Humans were inevitably servomechanisms of those massive “media” landscapes. The satellite technology, both an interior and external landscape, was the last of that kind. As digital communication environments developed, they gradually shrunk those massive techno-environments and inaugurated a new kind of autonomy for our Chemical Body in relation to the previous scapes. Now, radio-, TV-, newspaper-, bookscapes are inside your personal mobile – tiny and invisible. These older media become after-images (or memes) as well as huge bureaucracies to preserve the wealth they’d created. They don’t go away – just as ye olde speech never disappeared. They are as real and insistent as our own bodies. They must be fed and housed. However, what once were large corporate vestments now are small enough to be considered as organs, like lungs, that are new additions to our archetypal Chemical Body and Astral Body.
The Chemical Body is what most people consider to be their “physical body.” The dominant model for this is the product of Western science since the telegraph. The Astral Body is what pervades all cultures – the belief there is more to our makeup than the Chemical Body. It is a huge storehouse of religious and spiritual energy. The third organ is the TV Body – the repository of historical one-way analog broadcasting. The fourth is the Chip Body – the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media. The fifth is the Mystery Body – what we’re still excavating and whose lineaments we cannot fully assess yet, if ever. We now know it’s made up of the previous Four Bodies but we don’t know what more we will discover about its constituents, affects, and effects. The Android Meme is the resultant of the interplay, violent and ecstatic, of the first Four Bodies. I claim this Five-Body paradigm is a lot more useful or comprehensive when applied to our post-9/11 scene than Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” probe.
In the past 30 years the “media landscapes” have slowly transformed into additional miniaturized bodies attached to our original body, like barnacles. The original body was made by “first nature.” Our descriptions of that “first nature” constitute our human-made “second nature.” Some claim to be getting past our “second-nature” descriptions of “first nature” and are subsequently witnessing “first nature.” Others accept the organisms created by our “second-nature” descriptions and consider them to be improvements on our “first nature.” I say we don’t yet completely know what “first nature” is, so I wouldn’t say we no longer have “first-nature” bodies. But our Chemical Body (the dominant “second-nature” description of our “first-nature” body) is presently subsumed by the TV and Chip Bodies – our invisible barnacles.
6. “the interplay among them” – The building of the architecture of the Android Meme from 1960 to 2000 went through two phases.
THIS IS NOT HARD TO UNDERSTAND.
And it’s aesthetically coherent… and useful for the new paramedia ecology that all peoples are screaming for… on different cultural wavelengths.
It’s the new and relevant ESPERANTO for all classes, ages, genders, races, cultures, Gutenbergian specialties (“fields”), and anarchists.
“Now disregarding if you can whatever your political views may be (and mine are partly communist {TV BODY – Ed.} and partly fascist {CHEMICAL BODY}, with a distinct streak of monarchism {CHIP BODY} in my marxism {ASTRAL BODY}, but at bottom anarchist {MYSTERY BODY} with a healthy passion for order)… ” – Wyndham Lewis, THE ENEMY, Vol.3, p.70, 1929
Isn’t that BEAUTIFUL?! (“double-duty interrobang” – McLuhan and Watson, FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE, 1970, p.82)
