the Female Body GOVERNING

Gender, Pathology, Spectacle 71
as a war against artifi ciality, and as a desire to reconstitute the “ideal
[natural] body” (p. 7).
Derrida (1993) argues that this “modern logic of technological
supplementarity” undergirds the addiction apparatus, as the main
positions in the drug addiction discourse (prohibitionist and “pro”
drugs) neglect to take into account what Derrida calls “the technological
condition.” (See Cole, 1998, for an extended discussion of Derrida’s
position and the cyborg.) Similar to Stone’s (1996) “technosociality,”
Derrida argues that in the context of the technological condition,
there is no natural, originary body. A modern logic of technological
supplementarity suggests that technology has:
simply added itself, from outside or after the fact, as a foreign body.
Certainly, this foreign or dangerous supplement is “originarily” at
work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the “body and
soul.” . . . Without being absolutely new, now takes on particular and
macroscopic forms, is this paradox of a “crisis,” as we superfi cially call
it, of naturalness. This alleged “crisis” also comes up, for example,
throughout the problems of biotechnology and throughout the new
and so-called artifi cial possibilities for dealing with life, from the
womb to the grave. . . . The recourse to dangerous experimentation
with what we call “drugs” may be guided by a desire to consider this
alleged boundary from both sides at once. (p. 15)
Similarly, Stone (1996) suggests that the crisis over naturalness, or
the War of Transformation, is:
about negotiating realities and demarcating experiences. For example,
questions arise over the organization of bodies and selves: many
persons in a single body (multiple personality); many persons outside
a single body (personae within cyberspace); a single person in/outside
many bodies (institutional social behavior). (p. 87)
And, it is signifi cant to emphasize that such reconfi gurations of presence
refer not only to a human-machine interface, but also to more specifi c
and situated presences such as those addressed here surrounding what
we might call “gendered presences” in a technosocial environment. If
Glenda’s “cautionary tale” is useful for how it reveals struggles over
multiplicity, over possibilities of technosociality in an age of limits, a
second case of Internet addiction also engages with larger reconfi gurations
and stabilizations surrounding presence, technosociality, bodies,
and selves—technologies of presence. As a situated and social technology