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kallistiiNew Media & Society, Vol. 7, No. 5, 647-662 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1461444805056010
Hacking the body: code, performance and corporeality
Douglas Thomas
University of Southern California, USA, douglast@usc.edu
This article argues for a politics of code grounded in the performance of hacking as an activity that is able to deconstruct the longstanding binary of code and performance by centering on the relationship of each to the body. Through a reading of hacker responses to the state’s restriction on the export of cryptography, the article argues that interventions by hackers reveal to us the point at which the body becomes, literally, the limit of code, marking it as irreducibly transgressive, while rendering code impotent. It is this performance, it contends, that holds the most powerful possibility for hacktivism and resistance.
Key Words: code • corporeality • encryption • hackers • performance
DOI: 10.1177/1461444805056010
Hacking the body: code, performance and corporeality
Douglas Thomas
University of Southern California, USA, douglast@usc.edu
This article argues for a politics of code grounded in the performance of hacking as an activity that is able to deconstruct the longstanding binary of code and performance by centering on the relationship of each to the body. Through a reading of hacker responses to the state’s restriction on the export of cryptography, the article argues that interventions by hackers reveal to us the point at which the body becomes, literally, the limit of code, marking it as irreducibly transgressive, while rendering code impotent. It is this performance, it contends, that holds the most powerful possibility for hacktivism and resistance.
Key Words: code • corporeality • encryption • hackers • performance
