近年來，在媒體研究的風潮下，許多我們視之為理所當然的事物從存在的隱匿狀態當中浮出，成為可能的研究對象——雲朵、火焰、 日曆與星辰。在這個框架下，該如何採取更基進的進路，分析身體作為生存的媒體結構?智人做為站立、以雙手維生的動物，為什麼總是忽略身體的存在?身體在經驗上的隱匿又對我們認識世界的方式造成什麼影響?以「身體作為媒體」的視角開展，就可以理解個別藝術如何透過選擇、調控身體特殊性而在論述場域上被固定下來，而身體又反過來決定了藝術的生產、傳播與接收關係。第一部分，「身體作為媒體:演化」將把時間軸拉遠，透過古人類學家勒華古漢(André Leroi-Gourhan)的論述討論千百萬年中，生物與環境的共生關係如何逐漸形構人類身體的「媒體特殊性」，而這些身體的特性如何成了諸般藝術與媒體的經驗基礎。第二部分，「身體作為媒體:現象」則討論身體為何在西方哲學當中常是隱匿的背景結構——不僅僅有笛卡兒以降的二元論，也是主體在世界上活動的基礎——討論演化和現象經驗之間的關係，再強調藝術如何調動、擾亂此般「具身經驗」。第三部分則以語言藝術(主要以文學為例)，討論文學與身體接軌的兩種可能:首先是身體如何做為語言(聲響)與文字(書寫)之間的轉化系統，接著再討論當身體成為語言符號再現的主題時，必然得召喚出來的肉身幽靈是怎麼成為定義文學特性的本體論述。此般種種，便是在不同的歷史時間軸上，討論「身體作為媒體」如何形塑嶄新的藝術媒體特殊性。

In recent years, media studies has revealed that many of the things taken for granted in their hidden states of existence—such as clouds, fires, calendars, and stars—should be considered possible research topics. The reason being, media are elemental and fundamental. In this theoretical vein, we should consider taking a more radical approach to consider the body as media, not simply something conditioned by media. How do we analyze the body as a mediating apparatus of techniques? Why do we, as bipedal and prehensile homo sapiens, tend to ignore the body? How does the hiddenness of the body influence our ways of knowing the world? Moreover, if modern humans communicate with words and images as well as spatial and digital media, how are our bodies enveloped by them? This perspective enables an understanding of how media accommodate the body as well as how the body dictates the terms of media. Drawing on Leroi-Gourhan’s work, the first section articulates the structure of the body from the paleontological, evolutionary perspective in that the human body processes information in specific directionalities. These “biases”— structural characteristics that emerge from evolution as means to better utilize resources—are the necessary and yet hidden foundation on which artistic experiences operate. The second section discusses how the body is habitually absent in Western philosophy since Descartes and his famed arguments about the mind-body dualism. However, this absence is not simply a long-standing philosophical distortion; in fact, corporeal absence is the basis of our unhindered actions in the world. This is the reason why we only notice the body when it is in pain, and such painful hindrance often characterizes the discourses around the body. Art provides ways in which that this embodiment can emerge or submerge in the consciousness. In particular, each new medium defines its novelty against how other media have mobilized the body in order to better elucidate how it could accentuate or spirit away one’s corporeal existence.

In the final section, I will discuss how linguistic arts are channeled and transformed by the body in two ways. First, since the days of post- structuralism, language has been understood as comprised of two parts: speech and written texts. I argue that their connecting articulation is the human body in all its medial specificities. More specifically, apostrophes—the landmark figure of English romanticism—are now read as a performance of literature’s living breath. The rounded lips and raised tongue create a vocal passage of the air that gives birth to, for example, Keats’s west wind. And in so doing, the rhetorical figure insists on a form of second orality. Second, the human body has long been an important representational issue in literature, but how does it condition writing in general and literature in particular? My answer is that the ghost of the body, once summoned by the textual inscription, is now appropriated by literary theorists as the ontology of the literary medium. The human body’s spectral status in language originates from a much deeper structure of its own medial specificities. On the one hand, the body as absence is touted as the defining characteristic of modernist fiction, exemplified by writers such as Samuel Beckett. On the other hand, the body’s inscrutability and fullness, seen in the works of Herman Melville, are mobilized as an overwhelming force to be reckoned within oneself as well as a dizzying metaphor for social totality. Only on these divergent temporal scales can we understand how the perspective of body as/in media can help formulate the emerging identities of artistic media.