Arthur Kroker's 2012 book, which Bob reads at length in dialogue 39 as "sociological poetry" of the dispersed, code-driven body — and as unwitting confirmation of his own Android Meme. Cameron places it beside Baudrillard: a vivid description of the cul-de-sac that never quite finds the way out.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the book Bob reads on air — Kroker's drift given a place beside the chart, valued as poetry of the dispersed body even as Bob folds it back into his own scheme
Bob reads Kroker's opening catalogue of the body — "circuited by all the flows of power," coded, virally invaded, its subjectivity "possessed individualism" — as the end of private identity rendered physical.
"It's circuited by all the flows of power, patterned by code works, shaped by norms of cultural intelligibility, an object of viral invasion, with its subjectivity increasingly taking the form of possessed individualism."
Bob seizes the book's pivot line, which carries the loss of private identity past the literate signature into the material body itself.
"nothing is as imaginary as the material body."
Its litany of "gender drifters" and "sex code drifters" Bob prizes as poetry naming figures who are "major figures today," even as Cameron holds it to be description of the cul-de-sac without an exit.
"but there are always gender drifters who remix, recombine, and re-splice the codes of gender performance."
Read at length and left unglossed — the 2012 book promoted from chart material to the session's closing text, held over for a correction Bob asks Cameron to supply next time
The line Bob takes as Kroker's centre — materiality itself as the fiction, which is the step past discarnation he credits the book with.
"nothing is as imaginary as the material body."
The book's own thesis lands on the sensus communis, which is why Bob can read a gender-theory text as continuous with the tactility argument the session spent an hour building.
"While the age of specialization resulted in the definitive separation of the senses, Body Drift begins with a grand unification of the human sensorium."
The passage is entered into the record unassimilated — Bob reads it whole and defers judgment, making it the one text of the night he will not fold into his own scheme on the spot.
"we're certainly going to have to have Cameron go over this and correct a lot of it."
Connections
Kroker's 2012 book on the post-imaginary body, a commentary on Butler, Hayles, and Haraway.
Bob takes the drifting, dispersed body as support for his Android Meme as afterimage.