For Plessner, the living boundary is both a liminal zone that mediates between organism and the outer medium, itself being neither, and yet also an enactively self-defining and enforcing circumference and outer-limit. The organism moves outward in the expansion and assimilation of its liminal zone and moves inward, taking the outer within, re-establishing itself and reasserting its perimeter. The living boundary already introduces a subject-object status that prefigures for Plessner the overcoming of dualisms between inner and outer, interiority and exteriority. The living boundary is an on-going enactment of an exteriority that it defines and yet also reaches into and assimilates and of an interiority that is both sustained and transformed. The motive force of the dynamic living state is this double aspectivity of its existence and the dialectical tension which drives it forward.

The notion of agential separability is of fundamentalimportance, for in the absence of a classical ontological condition of ex-teriority between observer and observed it provides the condition for thepossibility of objectivity.

a personal computer to a server or onto theInternet. File distribution is the point of conjuncture between organismand machine and marks a technology of the self that does not begin withthe individual interior subject but rather with what Doyle calls “inhumanexteriority”

with the