Bodies Under Erasure

Architectures of Embodiment and Mediation in Techno-Feminist and Psychoanalytic Thought

This paper revisits “body as a medium” by exploring how modernity reshapes the architectures that mediate embodiment through a paradox: the impulse to erase outdated forms is matched by a drive to preserve them. Modernity causes obsolescence but simultaneously generates the tools to maintain what it erases. I develop this through a historical-materialist account of the progressive decline of Japanese public bathhouses (sentō–銭湯) and the virtual reconstitution of Tokyo’s Daikokuyu (大黒湯) sentō in VRChat. Here, obsolescence becomes not disappearance but re-inscription, as the bathhouse—materially erased by infrastructural modernisation—persists through virtual immersion. This, I claim, is an ontological exemplification of Derrida’s sous rature: what is crossed out remains “legible” as symbolically necessary. To extend this logic from architecture to the body, I turn to Yoshinao Satoh’s PAPERS (1991), which I interpret as staging the human body as a fragmented choreography, disassembled and reassembled within accelerating media flows. Satoh’s animated collage anticipates the techno-social “information architectures” that reformat embodiment, marking a conceptual threshold where built environments collapse into symbolic systems and bodies are reorganised by modern technics. Drawing on Ferrari’s account of early modern anatomy theatres, I recover a genealogy of the body as fabbrica: a complex architectural production machine—remnants of Western Humanist and Renaissance visions. Following Picon’s claim that buildings orient behaviour in explicitly political ways, I argue that late-capitalist architectures increasingly orient bodies toward hyper-productivity, efficiency, and endurance. Within this regime, fleshly embodiment becomes “inaccurate”—obsolete—for contemporary modernity’s demands, yet persists as an anthropomorphic template through which machines are built. I conclude with a Lacanian techno-feminist twist: “the Machine” functions as modernity’s imago of ideal embodiment, through which an optimising symbolic order stabilises itself and reorients what bodies are expected to be(come).