____

Katherine Hayles’s “embodied” body is, like Haraway’s cyborg, an aesthetic-political persona - not a body as such, or an identity, or an essentialized 'self,' but a position “enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment.” (Hayles 1999, 196) Insofar as “bodily practices have a physical reality which can never be fully assimilated into discourse,” (ibid, 195)  information, or technology, the body entering the immersive or absorptive VR environment of dematerialized simulacra does not thereby automatically undergo identical dematerialization. What does occur, Hayles argues, is the constitution of a new subjectivity in and through this technologically provided experience: a subjectivity capable to hold the simulated and non-simulated together in a hybrid or cyborg simultaneity. It is not that the body disappears into the simulation, nor that the simulation invades the organic domain of the body. They simply coexist. Uneasily, perhaps—but the unease itself, and an aesthetic-political willingness to tolerate such unease, even to cultivate it, is a potent form of resistance to the global “technocratic context” of a deterministic information society. Embodiment—the resistant subject position, the body’s organic intervention in the machine—is “generated from the noise of difference.” (ibid, 196)